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Jan. 30, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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APPOINTMENT TEHRAN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep758
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Coming up, I'll discuss the deaths of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan and whether and how Iran should be held accountable for its aggression.
Former Texas GOP chair and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Allen West joins me.
We're going to talk about U.S. options in the Middle East and how to thwart Biden's nefarious border schemes.
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Just a few months ago in September, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, said, I'm quoting, The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.
Yeah. And contrast that statement with what the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said yesterday, quote, the situation in the Middle East is the most dangerous since at least 1973.
Yeah. So, what a difference a few months makes.
And more importantly, what a group of unserious people we have running the country.
They don't know what's going on.
They don't have a clue. It's the quietest.
It's the most dangerous. It was ridiculous when you said it was the most quiet.
And I think it's equally ridiculous to say it's the most dangerous since at least 1973.
And there's a kind of recklessness to the way these people speak and act or, in some cases, don't act.
Now, equally unserious, and this will come as no surprise, the press secretary, KGP, talking about the three soldiers, U.S. soldiers, who died.
By the way, I was noting, I was telling Debbie that all are black, one's a woman or two.
You know what? I think there are two women, honey.
And One guy.
Sergeant William Jerome Rivers, Kennedy LaDawn Sanders, and Breonna Alexandria Moffat.
Those are the three. And here's KJP Jean-Pierre talking about...
Corinne Jean-Pierre talking about...
Our deepest condolences go out to those three folks, not soldiers, but folks, who are military folks, who are brave and who are always fighting.
What? Always fighting?
Military people aren't always fighting.
In fact, they're usually not fighting.
But every now and then they get drawn, who are fighting on behalf of this administration!
That's my favorite line.
They're not fighting for the country, apparently.
They're not fighting out of patriotism.
They're not fighting for a cause.
They're fighting on behalf of this administration.
So what you see here is this absolutely, not just arrogant, but deeply perverted equation of the state or the country with the Biden administration.
The whole point about politics is that those two things are not the same.
The one may be representing the people and defending the other, but for...
For KJP, it's probably for Biden.
He's fighting for me. These three guys were fighting for me and my ideas, my policies.
Wow. Now, Biden and Blinken and Jake Sullivan and also the Pentagon spokesman Kirby have been repeatedly asked...
What is your message to Iran in the wake of all this hostility?
There have been several attacks already, and the attacks are in lots of different places.
You've got the Houthi rebels in the areas of Yemen.
You've got attacks in Syria, in now Jordan, of course the ongoing conflict in Israel.
Which is being stoked by Iran.
What is your message to the Iranians?
And Biden and Jake Sullivan and Blinken have all pretty much said the same answer.
Don't do it.
That's it. Don't do it.
We've already warned them.
Don't think about it.
Don't do it. Evidently, the Iranians have been undeterred by these kinds of warnings, and they keep doing it.
They keep going ahead and launching these attacks.
Now, Biden reportedly is supposedly considering some kind of retaliatory action.
It was supposed to be announced, I believe, yesterday, as of...
Today it hasn't been announced yet.
We'll see. But a very interesting detail in a New York Times article that says that one senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the United States did not believe Iran was intending to start a wider war, but he cautioned that analysts were still gathering and evaluating information to determine whether Iran ordered a more aggressive attack or a militia group decided to do so on its own.
Now, these are Iran-backed militias, but evidently Biden has been holding off and dealing with Iran for the simple reason that he's like, I don't want to believe it's Iran.
Maybe it's not Iran.
I don't think Iran really wants a wider conflict, so maybe the militia group is doing this on its own.
Now, again, this is foolishness.
I don't believe the Biden people, though, genuinely are fooled.
They're not saying this because they think that these independent groups are independent.
No, the independent groups are acting at the behest of Iran.
They are... It's like Iran is the chess player and these are the bishops and knights on the board.
So bishops and knights don't move themselves.
Iran moves the bishops.
Iran moves the knights.
And I believe the Biden people know this.
They're trying to get Iran off the hook.
This is part of a larger pattern of the United States subsidizing Iran.
And this is really why I don't fully agree with the idea that Biden is merely weak.
Yes, he is weak. I mean, look at him.
He's just a pathetic, you know, kind of a hollow man.
But that's not the full explanation of what's going on.
because going back to Obama, the United States has been subsidizing Iran, encouraging radical elements in the Middle East more generally. Obama, for example, was encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood.
He was stoking the so-called Arab Spring to overthrow US allies in the region. Of course, he sent money to Iran. He wanted to revive the Iran deal, which would essentially protect Iran while it was trying to build a move closer to building a nuclear weapon.
So all of this is very bad stuff that is going on from Biden.
In a way, encouraging America's adversaries.
I think part of the Obama project continued.
Now, Lindsey Graham understands that Biden's a failure.
who wouldn't, and Lindsey Graham says, interestingly, that our forces in Jordan and Syria are there to protect the American homeland and to provide stability in a troubled region.
Now, there are two things said here that are not equivalent, and in fact one of them is not true.
How are our forces in Jordan and Syria protecting the American homeland?
Well, I guess the reasoning goes something like this.
The terrorists are striking over there, and if we didn't fight them over there, they would strike over here.
I think this is a non sequitur.
It's not obvious that the Houthis would be fighting over here.
Now, it could be that as this battle goes on back and forth, the United States gets involved in wars over there, that they say, alright, well now let's send some people through the southern border to the United States and give them a taste of what these attacks feel like inside of their own shores.
That could very well happen, and that too is being enabled by the Biden administration.
But Lindsey Graham goes into a kind of paroxysm of excitement here.
He says, we've got to strike targets of significance inside Iran.
He goes on to say that, hit Iran now, hit them hard.
And if you just look at the reaction to Lindsey Graham's post about this, it is, I would say, 95% negative.
You filthy, big-faced hypocrite!
Stop trying to start wars!
You're really bad at it!
A black guy.
Nigga. N-I-G-G-A. Shut up!
Isn't this encouraging violence on X? Is that you or John McCain speaking?
Declaring war on X? This is a first?
Why do you have a boner for attacking Iran all the time?
How many members of Congress are...
Hit them with what? They-them pronouns?
So on and on like this it goes.
And this reflects, I think, a debate on the Republican side about how to respond in these situations.
And very often people look at this debate, I think, in simplistic terms.
They go, either it is the U.S. goes to war, and of course here is Lindsey Graham unfortunately using the kind of rhetoric that would suggest a war.
I mean, if the United States attacks Tehran, starts blowing up, let's just say, facilities, communication centers, and so on in Tehran, that's a declaration of war whether it's declared or not, whether or not congressional approval is secured or not.
Basically, we're at war with Iran.
And so that's one end of the spectrum.
The other end of the spectrum is, essentially, let's just stay out of it.
Why are our troops even there?
Why do we have 3,000 troops in Jordan?
We didn't have 3,000 at the end, even in Afghanistan.
So, why are these US troops targets, or sitting ducks if you will, in so many places in the world and then somebody attacks them, usually out of their own local motives, they're fighting over some piece of land or they're fighting over some disputed treaty and we are on the receiving end and then we're like, okay, let's go hit Tehran.
And so, the other point of view, it's not isolationist, but it's in that direction, let's take care of our own problems.
And the question I want to raise, and I'm going to be talking to Lieutenant Colonel Allen West a little bit later in the, well, coming up next in the podcast, I'm going to ask him, is there kind of a, maybe a middle position between this kind of isolationism on the one hand and going to war with Iran on the other?
Elections in Taiwan, North Korea on the brink, Iran increasing its aggression.
There's a lot of global instability as we plunge into primary season.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast our friend Alan West, Lieutenant Colonel, retired candidate for chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party, former chairman of the Texas GOP, former congressman from Florida.
And you can follow him on x at Alan West, A-L-L-E-N-W-E-S-T, or website alanwest.substack.com.
Alan, thanks for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
A little bit of stormy skies abroad.
Three US servicemen killed in Jordan as a result of a strike, if not directly launched by Iran, then seemingly by a kind of Iran surrogate.
And we hear that Biden, after some initial dithering, is planning to take some retaliatory action.
What's your analysis of how we got here and what should be done now?
Well, Dinesh, it's a pleasure and honor to be with you, and I appreciate you having me on.
And what brought us to this point was the weakness of the policies of this Biden administration.
If you go back, you remember during the Trump administration, when Donald Trump talked about moving the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
You had all the Islamic jihadist groups, you know, rattling their savers.
Nothing happened. When you look at how the Trump administration was tough on Iran as far as enforcing those sanctions, you had driven many of these Islamic jihadist groups, which are clients of Iran, to try to raise money by having lemonade stands and bake sales.
But now you get the Biden administration comes in.
Number one, they undermine our own energy independence, our oil and gas industry.
They go and try to bolster everyone else's to include Iran's.
They ease up on the sanctions on Iran.
And then on top of that, they try to enter into the Iranian nuclear agreement.
They give them $6 billion of cash.
And so this is what you get.
You have caused Iran now to be flush with revenues to support all of these different various groups.
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the groups that attacked our troops there in Jordan.
So number one thing has to change.
We've got to go back to a tougher policy and a tougher stance.
And when you listen to the Biden administration, they continue to start off by saying what they're not willing to do.
We don't want to escalate things.
Well, 160 different attacks against U.S. military forces, that's pretty much so an escalation that has to be responded to.
Not just in a like manner, but in a tougher manner.
And now we have three soldiers who have been killed, 34 that have been wounded.
So there are a lot of things that have to be done, but this president was off to do a fundraiser instead.
So I think that he has enabled, he has emboldened, he has encouraged the number one state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, that is Iran, with the policies, the weakness, the biggest thing.
Alan, I'd like you to think about this issue of toughness versus weakness, because we're very accustomed to assessing Republican and Democratic policies using that kind of framework.
And this goes back, really, a generation.
Jimmy Carter was weak.
Reagan was tough. But a couple of things you said...
Raise a doubt in my mind as to whether we're dealing with classic weakness here.
And I say that because weakness would be I underestimate my adversary.
I'm not properly prepared.
I perhaps expect they have more goodwill than they in fact have.
and that would be the classic kind of signature of weakness.
But now imagine that I'm Obama and I'm fomenting a kind of revolution in the Middle East.
I'm going against traditional US allies like Mubarak, and then I'm trying to approve an Iran deal to funnel money to Iran, and then in some ways open the doors to Iran moving closer to a nuclear weapon.
Now to me, that is not, say, weakness.
What that suggests is something a little more nefarious, which is to say that the strengthening of Iran appears to be a policy objective of the Biden administration, as perhaps it was for Obama.
Do you think that that is carrying things too far?
Or do you think there's some truth to that?
No, you're not carrying things too far in any way, shape, form, or fashion.
It's a combination of both.
I mean, when they look at Joe Biden, they see the weakness, but then also you see the nefarious return of the policies of the Obama administration.
Let us remember, it was Barack Obama who, when he went to speak at our university, he asked for members of the Muslim Brotherhood to sit right up there up front.
And when you think about the plane of cash, undisclosed, blacked out, flying in the middle of the night to Iran, And again, the policies of the Obama administration, which are carried over into the Biden administration as well.
So yes, there is some of the various activities.
And so that's why when you came in with the Trump administration, you saw the Abraham Accords.
You saw the brokering of peace because Saudi Arabia was very concerned.
But now we see the bolstering of Iran and that we know that China and Russia are part of that new cabal, that new axis of evil, if you want to call it that.
But I think that that combination of the policies and the exuding of the weakness, you know, we served in the Reagan administration.
And you remember that Ronald Reagan had a mantra with his foreign policy that applies to his national security policy of peace through strength.
So when you look at how this Biden administration is undermining our national security posture, I mean, we can go and maybe coach the Iranians on proper pronouns and how to implement a DEI program in the Revolutionary Guard Force.
But when they know that we are not meeting our recruitment goals, and oh, by the way, if you haven't paid attention, the Navy and the Army are lowering their recruitment standards to try to make numbers.
These are the indicators or warnings that people are seeing.
So, no, you are absolutely right.
It's the policies that are out there in our foreign policy, the national security policy is undermining our military readiness and capability, and then the abject weakness on top of that.
Where do you think, Alan, how should conservatives think about a response in this kind of a situation?
Because on the one hand, you seem to have now a strong strain in the Republican Party.
It's not our problem.
Sort of stay out of it.
We don't want to be getting involved in foreign wars.
We have too many problems here at home.
Let's secure our own border.
And we've seen that resistance come up, not just against in the Ukraine situation, but also with regard to military aid to Israel, with regard to now, should Biden take military action?
On the other hand, you have sort of the Lindsey Grahams of the world, which is, don't just worry about Iranian surrogates, Tehran should be the target, to quote Lindsey Graham, hit Tehran hard, which...
Is a little bit of a risky move because to hit Tehran, the capital of Iran, is a...
I don't know if it's a declaration of war, but it would come pretty close, wouldn't it?
No, it would absolutely come pretty close.
I think the most important thing, if you go back again and look at the Trump administration, you know, when General Soleimani was operating outside of Iran, we targeted him.
And here was a person that really was on the terrorist list.
He was the head of a terrorist organization, the Fuse Force, and Iran got that understanding.
So you look at the capability and capacity for them to be able to export their terrorist exploits outside of Iran.
You look at the capabilities and capacities that are there that enable them to interdict the sea lanes of commerce and supply lanes, how they are able to get this equipment out there.
I would go after Iranian groups that are operating Outside of Iran, in Syria, in Iraq, that type of leadership, I would look at these respective different groups and look at how Iran is supporting them and going after them as well.
So it's about going, and if you look at concentric circles, I think that we want to start reducing some of those outer circles.
In World War II, we didn't start out by going right at Berlin.
We didn't start out trying to go right into Tokyo.
I mean, we did have the Doolittle bombing raid.
That was more of sending out a message and an encouragement to ourselves.
But we looked at the periphery and we started to shrink their sphere of influence.
And I think that's what we need to do.
We've got to get back to our oil and natural gas industry and building up our energy independence once again and enforcing the sanctions against Iran.
Economically, that's what you want to look to do.
But when you hear people like Lindsey Graham, that's just a lot of globiating and a lot of tough talk.
But I think that right now we should have a military strike package that should look at those capabilities and capacities that preclude Iran from extending themselves outside of their border.
I take you to be saying, Alan, that there is a reasonable kind of middle position between not getting involved at all and just acting as if we've got problems at home, let's just focus on those, pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist on the one hand, and on the other hand...
A kind of reckless interventionism that has caused us some serious problems, at least in the last 20 years.
And what you're recommending is a prudential strategy that says, all right, look, they launched an attack on U.S. troops in Jordan.
They're using surrogates.
They're doing this, obviously, outside of Iranian shores.
It would be different if they fired missiles at us from Iran than it would be normal to retaliate.
And I think you're also calling for Not the U.S. to initiate aggression, which we did in some cases in the past, but rather to respond when other people attack us or attack our allies or attack our soldiers.
Then we should not let that go unchecked.
You're absolutely right.
That's what has to be done, and I think you can explain that, and American people will get it.
Look, you cannot bury your hand in the sand.
If you bury your hand in the sand, you expose a certain part of your anatomy, and we don't want to do that.
But 160 different attacks against the United States military in that region.
When you look at the attacks against the sea lanes of commerce there in the Gulf of Aden, That's going to affect the everyday American citizen because now all of a sudden these ships are looking at transiting, you know, completely around, you know, the Horn of Africa instead of looking at going through the Suez Canal.
So that ties up the supply chain for the world and therefore the supply chain for the United States of America.
So it is an economic issue that we have to be concerned about.
But right now, I think that the American people are looking for a strong response.
And, you know, Iran has been at war with us for quite some time, Dinesh.
I mean, you go back to the 1983 Beirut barrage bomb.
That was Hezbollah. Hezbollah was supported by Iran.
You look at what just recently happened on October the 7th.
We had Hamas, who killed Americans and still have Americans-held hostage.
Hamas is supported by Iran.
So at some point in time, we have to say, You know, let's go after them trying to extend themselves outside of the borders of their country and preclude them and separate that tie that they have with these Islamic terrorist groups, these client groups that they're supporting.
When we come back, Alan, I want to ask you, I want to change topics to our, well, not entirely, but I want to talk to you about Texas and about the border.
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I'm back with Lieutenant Colonel Alan West, who's running for chairman of the Dallas County Republican Party.
He is a former Texas GOP chair.
He's also written several books, Hold Texas, Hold the Nation, We Can Overcome, Guardian of the Republic.
His website, alanwest.substack.com.
Alan, let's talk about the border.
There is seemingly now in committee and about to be voted on, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been pushing this, an impeachment campaign.
Resolution against Mayorkas.
So you got that going on.
You've got Dallas putting up wires and fences in Eagle Pass and a seeming showdown with the Biden administration over whether Texas has the right to continue to do that.
And then you have this backdoor, backroom type of deal that the Biden administration seems to be trying to work out with the cooperation of some Senate Republicans to get Biden off the hook on the border where Biden can say, okay, guys, we've made a bipartisan deal and you can stop blaming me for the border.
As you look at all this going on, Do you think that this is really...
Well, first of all, with regard to Mayorkas, let's start there.
Debbie's point is, hey, you know, they want to impeach Mayorkas and he deserves to be impeached, but isn't it true that Mayorkas himself is a vessel?
He's a mouthpiece.
He's carrying out the policies of Biden.
So it's not as if getting rid of Mayorkas will solve anything, will it?
No, it is not, because he'll be replaced by another sycophant and mindless lemming of the Biden administration that will continue to carry out their unconstitutional actions down along the border.
Look, this all goes back to January of 2021, February of 2021.
Joe Biden made the decision that he would violate the Constitution of the United States of America, the Guarantee Clause, Article 4, Section 4, which says that the federal government is supposed to guarantee to every state protection from invasion.
He changed all the policies of the Trump administration.
He said that our border was wide open, and now we're at the point, what, six, seven, eight, who knows how many millions.
And then on top of that, the millions of gotaways that we don't even know, single military males, which is very, very disconcerting.
So I think the thing that we are looking at, Dinesh, is an incredible constitutional crisis in the United States of America, where why?
Number one, the executive branch says we're not going to abide by and follow the constitutional enumerated duty and responsibility that we have.
Number two, we have a Supreme Court that says that the federal government does not have to follow the enumerated duty and responsibility that they have, and furthermore, that a state Under Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, which gives them that enumerated power, if the federal government abdicates it, they're not allowed to do anything and have no recourse.
So basically, we have everyone saying that the United States of America is wide open with this administration.
And shame on these Senate Republicans and all of these people that are sitting around talking about, we need to have a new law.
No, we don't need to have any new laws.
We just need to enforce the laws that are already there, and we need to have Joe Biden go back to the policies that worked previously.
And he is responsible for this.
He made this decision willfully, purposefully, and intentionally.
And I have never seen the case, and I know a little bit about Title X and federalized National Guard troops, but I have never seen a case where a president is threatening to federalize National Guard troops to aid and abet Drug trafficking, human and sex trafficking, and terrorist trafficking.
In other words, he wants them to go against the constitutional oath that they took to become uniformed service members of the country.
So this is an incredible constitutional crisis.
It seems to me that the Biden people know that a showdown with Texas is very dangerous and risky for them.
It's risky on two counts.
One of them is, first of all, Texas is not alone.
You've got 25 plus states that are backing Texas.
Number two, imagine that Biden sends in federal troops or federalizes the Texas National Guard for the purpose of keeping the border open.
That's something that would be front and center before the American people.
And I think it's quite conceivable that the election becomes impossible for the Democrats to win under those kinds of circumstances.
Now, I think that the Biden people know that.
And so what they're doing is they're trying to essentially change the law without having to change the law, which is they're going to the Republicans and saying, let's make a deal.
We're going to let no more than 5,000 people in a day And once the number goes over 5,000, whoa, we snap into action.
And this is supposed to be some, quote, new authority that Biden is seeking.
As you said, this is laughable.
He already has the authority to close the border right now.
He doesn't need a new law.
What he's trying to do is to, without...
Having a normal debate over immigration get Republicans to bend and change the law, essentially to move the law in his direction.
And isn't it just sort of a characteristic mark of stupidity that Republicans are even talking to him about this?
Absolutely so. And I think that that is why you have seen the Oklahoma State GOP come out and censure Senator Lightfoot for what he is doing.
I mean, basically, Republicans are trying to come in and give Joe Biden a get-out-of-jail-free car when they should be standing strong and saying, you created this.
And so you have a responsibility for this, and it is very clear of that responsibility in the Constitution.
It is very clear that the Supremacy Clause does not work in this case, Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution, over the state of Texas, because three very important words, in pursuance thereof.
What Joe Biden and this administration is doing is not a persuasive thereof to the rule of law, to our Constitution.
He is violating, and truthfully, he's committing an act of treason against the United States of America.
That's what Republicans should be talking about, especially right now when you know that the border is the number one issue.
That was the number one issue for voters coming out of the New Hampshire primary.
And for whatever reason, Joe Biden has picked a very, very bad fight with the state of Texas.
It's the wrong hill for him to choose to die on.
But again, as you just articulated, when you can go to the useful idiots, that's what Lenin called them, of the Republican Party, and get them to buy into bailing you out, this is why he can act arrogant.
This is why he can take off with all the things that are happening in this country and just go and have a couple of fundraisers in Florida right now.
Let's try to understand the psychology of a guy like Langford.
I mean, there are different ways to look at it.
One way is that America is run by a uniparty and you don't really even have two legitimate parties.
Another way is to look at Langford and others like him as being sort of rhinos or Republicans in name only.
I've sort of resisted both those explanations because I think that there are legitimate differences between the parties.
Even if they act sometimes in the same way, they're not acting in the same way for the same reason.
Like the Republican may be doing it out of timidity of fear, which is not a good reason to act, but it doesn't mean you're doing it for the same corrupt motives as the other side.
So giving a guy like Lankford the benefit of the doubt, I'm just trying to look at the world as he sees it because I saw a brief clip of him and he was saying something to the effect of, well, you know, we shouldn't just try to make the border into an election issue Almost implying that Republicans want the border to be as bad as possible so they have the best chance of winning in November.
And Lankford said, you know, we Republicans are here to govern.
We're here to make policy.
So he was kind of acting like he's the policy guy.
And Republicans who oppose the deal with Biden don't really care about the border and are simply using it as a whipping boy for election propaganda.
How do you assess this counter-argument by Lankford?
Well, you know, James Lightburn and I were elected to the United States Salvador to represent the same time, back in 2010.
I don't understand his logic.
I don't understand where he's trying to explain.
This is not a political issue.
This is a national sovereignty issue.
This is a constitutional issue.
This is not about anyone coming along and saying that we're going to create something new that will alleviate this issue and this situation, which is of the doing, unconstitutional, as I said, of President Biden.
This is where this responsibility, this is where this challenge came from.
This is the open borders agenda of the progressive socialist Marxist left, and why would we want to stand up and try to give them a pass on it?
So I think that if you are truly standing up as a constitutional conservative, if you are truly standing up as a loyal opposition in the Republican Party to the Democrat Party, you'll be articulating these things and not sitting around the eye closed doors and try to come up and develop this new policy or this new law, this new agreement. We don't need anything.
Like I said, just go by the laws that we had.
Go back to, you know, what we saw.
Remain in Mexico. Go back to saying that, gee, don't get to come into this country illegally.
There's a front door, and we want you to come through the front door.
But when you look at the situation that's been exacerbated now, because the cartels are a transnational narco-equivalent terrorist organization.
They're going to work with Iran.
They're going to work with anybody. That will get people into this country illegally to include terrorists themselves.
And everyone is focused on what's happening in Eagle Ass or Del Rio.
But no one's talking about out of West Texas, the Big Bend Mountains, where you have these single military-aged males that don't want to be detected.
They're wearing carpeting on their shoes so they can't be tracked.
Where are those people? So I would just, you know, once again say to Senator Lightburn, if he was sitting right in front of me, I don't understand what you're trying to say.
I don't understand why you're bringing out the fact that we have a forest border.
It's undermining our national security, our national sovereignty, our domestic security, our economic security, our health care security, our educational security.
And it's a slap in the face of the people that did the right thing to come to the United States and where it's illegal.
Absolutely. Lieutenant Colonel Alan West, thank you for joining me.
I really appreciate it, guys.
Follow him, alanwest.substack.com.
Thank you, Dinesh, for having me.
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I'm continuing my introduction to Harry Jaffa's great work.
It's called Crisis of the House Divided.
The subtitle is An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
This is a book that is very deep because it is Anchored in not only American history, a detailed understanding of American history and the things going on in the middle of the 19th century leading up to the Civil War, but it's also anchored in a study of the American founding, which is what Lincoln and Douglass were arguing about.
What does the Constitution say?
What does it mean? What's the relationship of the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution?
And then behind that, something even...
I would say deeper, which is classical political philosophy.
In other words, the basic questions of what does it mean to be human?
What does it mean to come together in a political community?
What is the relationship of morality, standards of right and wrong, to political conduct?
This is really what was going on in these debates, and Jaffa masterfully shows this.
Now, what makes all of this quite amazing, the debates themselves, is that these were public debates.
They were debates held typically in open arenas without microphones, Lincoln and Douglas speaking to large crowds.
Douglas was the more accomplished orator, but Lincoln too had a very distinctive voice, a very distinctive way of speaking, and so people would stand riveted for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, two and a half hours.
Opening statements were lengthy, and they would do this even though the topics being discussed were of the utmost depth and gravity.
So that's one thing to keep in mind.
It's a very rich topic, the debates themselves.
And then we have here a very rich book that is a commentary, an analysis of the debates, That adopts the debating or Socratic style of argument.
The book itself does that.
So in other words, normally when you write a book about a debate, you go, well, this is what Lincoln said, this is what Douglas said.
But this is not what Jaffa does here.
He adopts the position of Douglas for the first half of the book.
He becomes Douglas. He tells you why Douglas basically is right.
He blasts Lincoln.
He lays it out the way Douglas would...
Taking Douglass' side and advocating for Douglass.
And in the second half of the book, he turns around and he argues for Lincoln, against Douglass.
And he becomes, in that case, he becomes Lincoln.
So this is a very interesting approach, and an approach that's become almost extinct in our own day.
And one of the reasons for this is given by Jaffa himself in his introduction, where he says, one of the problems we have today is we look back at history And we sort of look at the way things turned out and based upon that we go, well that guy was wrong.
Well that guy was a fool.
And he goes, this is super dumb.
Because first of all, he says, the people who lived at that time didn't know how it was going to turn out.
Douglass didn't know that there would be a civil war.
Douglass didn't know that the North would win the civil war.
And so for us to come around later and go, obviously Lincoln was right, obviously Douglass was wrong, obviously slavery is bad, blah, blah, blah...
According to Jaffa, this does complete injustice to Douglas.
Douglas himself was an extremely sophisticated man.
Pretty much all the nonsense that people would say today, he has already thought of.
He would have answers for all those things.
He is operating in a given place and time.
He has to operate with the information available to him.
So Jaffa knows all this.
And Jaffa says if we're going to make a real study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, we've got to get rid of this kind of, you could call it the arrogance of hindsight.
And we have to adopt the position of the debaters themselves.
And this is what Jaffa is going to call the Socratic style.
Now the exemplar of the Socratic method, oddly enough for Jaffa, isn't Socrates himself, although Jaffa could easily have done that, but Thomas Aquinas.
And Jaffa says that he's going to adopt a sort of Aquinas approach, and I'm going to read a couple things that he says about Aquinas.
In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas asks a question, proposes an answer, and then gives both the objections to that answer and the replies to the objections.
And he says, In other words,
Thomas Aquinas is so generous to the opponent that he states his view so forcefully that someone may go, well, once I look at both sides, I think that the opponent has the better of it and not Thomas Aquinas himself.
And, says Jaffa, at any rate, I found in this procedure an openness to conflicting opinions for which I could find few, if any, analogs in our own more liberal age.
And then Jaffa goes on to say another thing about Aquinas, but Thomas Aquinas' differed from contemporary authorities not only in the habit of stating the arguments on both sides, he did so in the conviction that there was a possibility of reaching reasonable opinions as to where the truth lay in most cases if the arguments, on the contrary, were set forth with sufficient fullness and perspicacity.
It was, above all, the belief in the power of reason to guide judgment, and therefore to guide human life, not only concerning the true and false, but concerning the good and the bad and the just and the unjust that distinguished his scholarship from, he goes on to say, modern-day scholarship. So, the second element here is that Lincoln and Douglass were not relativists.
They didn't believe, oh, I'm just stating my opinion.
I have a right to my opinion.
No, Lincoln is saying, I am putting forward my arguments as a claim to truth.
And I understand your arguments are also a rival claim to truth.
Now, there is only one truth.
Both our arguments can't be right.
And so the point of the debate isn't merely a show of force, or who's the better speaker,
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