| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| In fact, how it became an issue is actually very curious. | ||
| I got more detail on this in my research. | ||
| James Madison. | ||
| So Madison was dealing with a legacy in Virginia about whether or not the taxpayers should pay for pastors and for the maintenance of church. | ||
| They were. | ||
| And Madison said, we're going to have to get out of this business. | ||
| Now that we're talking about breaking from England, we shouldn't be paying the pastors and we should get that. | ||
| So it's interesting what happened. | ||
| They actually, they did this. | ||
| They had a religious toleration bill. | ||
| But what Madison learned, he flipped on a key principle based on his experiences in Virginia. | ||
| What he learned is that the Anglicans, who, you know, that's the Church of England, of course, they wanted to keep going in that direction. | ||
| But there were multiple factions. | ||
| And he was able to, he initially disagreed with David Hume, who was one of the philosophers who believed the best way to deal with faction is to have a whole bunch of factions. | ||
| And then, you know, they'll cancel each other out and they'll check each other. | ||
| That's eventually what we get with ambition to counteract ambition. | ||
| But that was actually contra to the council of the wise since time out of memory. | ||
| But what's interesting about what happened in Virginia is what Madison says, I'll be darned. | ||
| Maybe Hume is on to something. | ||
| Because what he found is with the multiple of factions, they actually outvoted the people who wanted to keep paying. | ||
| But the larger point is he wanted religious freedom. | ||
| So when the left says that, you know, they meant to keep God out, that's just not true. | ||
| I mean, the founders deeply believed in God, and they wanted to be reverent in that way. | ||
| Now, Jefferson was a deist, so he was not in any one of the particular denominations. | ||
| But the point is, is you can find examples. | ||
| And John Adams literally says, when he writes to Jefferson, he says, yeah, I know you love the French. | ||
| He goes, just explain to me how 20 million atheists are going to be able to govern themselves. | ||
| He doesn't believe it's possible. | ||
| He believes that you need a core set of values to be able to make a republic work. | ||
| Now, so it's conflicted, right? | ||
| But the point is we weren't trying to keep God out, but we did set up a constitutional system that we were going to follow through with. | ||
| Now, what I would say is, with regards, one last point on education, because I listened to your last segment before I came on. | ||
| I really appreciated the gentleman who called in and said culture matters. | ||
| And he said, look, the reality is we're dealing with indoctrination. | ||
| And he made some comments about Howard's Inn. | ||
| Look, with regard to the Trump administration's view on education, look, I think the record is a little mixed, but I have to say the arc of what they're trying to do, which is really to teach history in a way that is constructive so that we recognize we have warts and challenges, but we are a great and a good nation. | ||
| They're different. | ||
| Great because we achieve, but we're a good nation because we're basically a good force in the world. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| We won World War II, saved the world from a dark age of fascism, and then we dedicated 5% of our gross domestic product to rebuild those nations. | ||
| That was our money. | ||
| And we did it, yes, for our own interests, but also for theirs. | ||
| So we are a good nation with flaws. | ||
| No question about that. | ||
| But, you know, the arc, so for example, the one place where I did disagree with the caller, and again, I thought he was well communicative and had important points, is, I mean, I'm a believer in American exceptionalism to such a degree. | ||
| The first term of the Trump administration, they published, their group that was working on that issue published a paper called the 1776 Project. | ||
| I like it a lot. | ||
| I like it so much that I don't have any problem debating it. | ||
| So in my class, I had my students read both. | ||
| They read the 1619 project and the 1776 project. | ||
| The primary documents there, along with all the founding documents, what the founders were influenced by. | ||
| And then we read secondary sources widely. | ||
| So I assigned both Howard Zinn and Bill McClay. | ||
| The previous caller talked about Howard's Inn, the people's history of the United States. | ||
| Bill McClay writes a book called Land of Hope. | ||
| I believe it's pretty balanced. | ||
| But the bottom line is that I wasn't there to indoctrinate my students. | ||
| I wanted them to read primary sources and then read secondary sources widely and make their own call. | ||
| So I'm not for banning books. | ||
| I think you should, if you feel strongly, I do, about 1776 projects, you should be not afraid. | ||
| But what I did insist upon was a debate. | ||
| And in the book, I explain. | ||
| I explain that I insist upon a debate because, you know, the fact is, and this is data, a lot of academia today is of the left. | ||
| So I think it's important that there be a balance on that. | ||
| Less than 10 minutes left with Congressman Chris Gibson. | ||
| The book is The Spirit of Philadelphia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Several colors waiting to chat with you. | |
| Will, Virginia Beach Independent, go ahead. | ||
| Yes, good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Just want to say, sounds like a very interesting book. | ||
| I'm planning on adding it to my summary list here for sure. | ||
| And I do want to preface this statement just to sort of agree with the concept that certainly faiths of all kinds should, and almost inevitably will, bring their ideas into policy and legislative derivation and creation, but certainly shouldn't be the source, right? | ||
| Exclusively. | ||
| But aside from that, then I just wanted to sort of point out an idea that I come from where sort of with a scientific viewpoint that when you sort of create, say, something like a chemical, right, it requires some sort of catalyst and reaction. | ||
| And in that process of creation, you create the thing you're looking to create a target of some kind. | ||
| However, there's always inevitably a byproduct, something that is not part of the target, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that consequence, unfortunately, can be very toxic sometimes, almost deadly. | ||
| And then sometimes it can just be certainly benign. | ||
| So in the creation of an idea, such as a policy or even legislation, to the idea of the consequences of ideas, there is inevitably going to be some sort of aspect of it that isn't necessarily the point of the creation of that policy. | ||
| So I just wanted to see if there was any sort of idea from that that could be derived in context to your writing. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| Let me just say a couple things on that is Madison actually addresses this point when he's arguing for the Constitution. | ||
| I mean, he says that among all the things they considered, they were trying to figure out how to deal with faction, right? | ||
| And of course, I mentioned just moments ago what his experience was in Virginia. | ||
| He actually saw it could be a good thing. | ||
| But he said, look, we considered just extirpation, which is basically, you know, banning it. | ||
| The idea of factions and everything like that. | ||
| He said that. | ||
| He said the cure would be worse than the disease. | ||
| So he's getting into this enterprise that you're talking about, that you have to think about ideas and their consequences. | ||
| Consequence is now broadly defined. | ||
| Consequence can be a good consequence or a bad consequence. | ||
| So you couldn't be more right. | ||
| And the founders, again, had this dilemma, right? | ||
| They knew that the articles were failing. | ||
| And it was failing because there was not enough energy in the national government. | ||
| States had the taxing power. | ||
| I went through all that earlier in the segment. | ||
| So they understood they were trying to get it right. | ||
| This was not about, it wasn't about like some idea of progress, which is a 19th century German idealism. | ||
| It was about a classical idea from antiquity, which is the idea of judgment about getting it right. | ||
| Recognizing that, yeah, you're going to create externalities. | ||
| You're going to create, the question is, do you have a system that actually can be malleable to deal with those? | ||
| And knowing that there are sometimes what I call in the book, optimal decisions, not ideal, but optimal. | ||
| Now, I want to say one last thing, well, thank you for your commitment to read the book. | ||
| Want to say to what I'm really trying to do is get all Americans engaged in this. | ||
| It's a renewal of citizenship. | ||
| Here's what I would love to do. | ||
| When you finish reading the book, and perhaps you inspire some of your neighbors to read it as well, I recommend that you get together, maybe a book club, three sessions. | ||
| The first session with introduction in section one. | ||
| As you know, I mean, this is about philosophy and history. | ||
| Then section two would be the subject of your second meeting with your colleagues, with your fellow neighbors. | ||
| And then the third session would be the third section and the conclusion. | ||
| You get through all that, Will. | ||
| Reach out to me. | ||
| I've got a website. | ||
| It's easy to remember, thespiritofphiladelphia.com. | ||
| Thespiritofphiladelphia.com. | ||
| You can contact me. | ||
| I'll zoom with your group. | ||
| I'll take your questions. | ||
| I'll interact with you. | ||
| But what I would love to see is across this great country that we would actually take a second to actually put our partisan swords down, just take a step back and say, you know, where have we been? | ||
| And, you know, what were the reasons? | ||
| What were the reasons behind the initial choices that we made, which were not perfect? | ||
| Obviously, we had slavery. | ||
| That was a huge error. | ||
| And we had trouble recovering from it. | ||
| We ended up fighting over it. | ||
| But the point is, is, you know, what did they do? | ||
| Why did they do what they did? | ||
| And that we've walked away from some of that. | ||
| What has been the consequence? | ||
| And I'm hoping that we can get a real revitalization in our citizenship to consider these things. | ||
| I give a whole series of reforms, but you've got to get to the way to the end of the book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me get in. | |
| Joanna waiting, Germantown, Maryland, line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just a couple minutes left here. | |
| Joanna, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| There's two things that I think that are going on now. | ||
| I actually agree with a lot of what you're saying, and I intend to order your book as soon as I'm done on the phone. | ||
| But two things that I think that are going now that go against everything you're talking about. | ||
| The first thing is the death of expertise and experts. | ||
| This administration is banishing experts in their field, whether it's science, medicine, education, health, it doesn't matter, national security, they're being banished. | ||
| And what happens when you do that and there's no expertise anymore is it destabilizes the country, destabilizes the society. | ||
| The second thing is, and I'm going to be honest about this here, is you've got a group of congresspeople on the Republican side that are so afraid of being primaried that the exchange of ideas, the debate, they're not willing, they're not bold enough to do anything different than go along to get along because, I mean, they'll sell their integrity and their honor to stay in office. | ||
| And I think that is not what the founders were all about. | ||
| So I'd like you to address those two things, please. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Chris Gibson, final two and a half minutes. | ||
| Yeah, so let me just say, Joanna, thank you for the sentiments. | ||
| I'm going to make the same offer to you that I made to Will is when you're done reading it, if you find other folks in your neighborhood, and hopefully regardless of ideology, but if they read this book and you do these sessions, I'm willing to zoom in with you and have this conversation. | ||
| To your two specific points on expertise, I mean, look, here's the reality. | ||
| We're living in a moment where Americans across the partisan landscape, let's remember that this movement, in some ways, Trump gets in front of Bernie Sanders. | ||
| I mean, a lot of what Trump was talking about, systems rigged, you can't trust these institutions. | ||
| A lot of that actually started with populism, left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders. | ||
| Trump gets out in front of it, and he starts moving in this direction. | ||
| And so, I mean, it didn't come out of nowhere. | ||
| I mean, the fact of the matter is, is the Wall Street crash, Americans looked and said, we trusted, I mean, these were the experts. | ||
| They knew so much about finance. | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| And then you look at the wars that seem to be endless and pointless to many. | ||
| They're like, what's up with that? | ||
| We got that from the experts. | ||
| And even now, when you look at education, they look at the fact that we pay so much for it. | ||
| We don't seem to be doing well with regard to standards across the world. | ||
| And people think that it's moved against some of our culture. | ||
| And so people start to say, on both ends of the ideological spectrum, saying, who do we trust now? | ||
| Now, I mean, obviously, we need knowledge. | ||
| We can't live as a species without knowledge. | ||
| And that's a whole chapter in the book. | ||
| So I want to affirm your point that we need to get back in the space where expertise matters. | ||
| But let's recognize that we are a republic formed on constitutional and democratic principles. | ||
| And, you know, half the country really is concerned and moving in that direction. | ||
| The last point on Congress being afraid, this is where you can make a difference, Joanna, and Will, is they're responding to, they're like anybody else. | ||
| I was a member. | ||
| I mean, they don't want to lose. | ||
| Nobody wants to lose. | ||
| Who wants to lose? | ||
| You know, so they're thinking, well, the best way for me to win is to hug Trump. | ||
| If they hear from you, and I'm talking about Will and I'm talking about Bob from Texas, who seems to have conservative sentiments like me, if everybody reaches out to their representatives and say, look, we get it. | ||
| We understand that there's widespread disaffection, but what we really want is this anchor. | ||
| We know what the founders did. | ||
| We don't believe we should centralize power. | ||
| We don't believe we should spend beyond our means. | ||
| And I believe that's happening right now. | ||
| I think there's a burgeoning split in the right wing right now about these deficits. | ||
| And you're going to see it in the Senate. | ||
| So, Joanna, I'd say don't lose faith. | ||
| I'd say that to Bob, the conservative from Texas. | ||
| And I would say that to Will, independent from Virginia. | ||
| We can do this. | ||
| We are a republic. | ||
| We can change. | ||
| But we have to get involved in this. | ||
| It's not all the leaders. | ||
| We need to look at all those dimensions of balance and ask those hard questions. | ||
| How are we doing on that? | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| And I look forward to hearing from you. | ||
| I look forward to hearing your reactions to the entire book. | ||
| Final question before you go. | ||
| You've been a college professor, served in the U.S. Army, member of Congress, author now. | ||
| What job have you found most, not enjoyable, but fulfilling? | ||
| Yeah, I get this question. | ||
| It may not make people happy, but soldiers. | ||
| I mean, I love them all. | ||
| It's a great privilege. | ||
| I mean, to be a representative, I thought about it one day. | ||
| I was a working class kid. | ||
| Nobody had ever gone to college in my family. | ||
| You know, my dad spent most of the 70s. | ||
| They were all working class Irish Democrats. | ||
| And I was the first Republican ever in my family. | ||
| I remember sitting on the floor one day and going, oh my gosh, there's only been 12,000 people in the history of our country that sat where I sat. | ||
| So it was an enormous privilege. | ||
| Frustrating too, if I'm going to be candid. | ||
| I love academia. | ||
| I love learning. | ||
| I love being in the classroom. | ||
| I don't love grading, to be honest. | ||
| But I have to say, on a scale of one to 10, being a representative was probably like 7. | ||
| Being a professor is probably 7, 7, or 8. | ||
| Being a soldier was like 9 on an average day, 10 on many days, 8 on, or maybe even less on some hard days like in combat. | ||
| So, but, you know, there's the thing about being a soldier is, is it doesn't matter your background of any kind. | ||
| You know, we're there for the team. | ||
| And I've actually got a section on that because I think it's illustrative and encouraging for the country to see that section. | ||
| So thank you for that question. | ||
| The book, again, is The Spirit of Philadelphia, A Call to Recover the Founding Principles, the author, former Congressman Chris Gibson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Always appreciate your time. | |
| Yeah, thanks, John. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On Wednesday, conservative political commentator Victor Davis Hansen will talk about the importance of national borders. | |
| Hosted by the Heritage Foundation, watch live at Noon Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins in a town where partisan fighting prevails. |