Coming up, did Laura Ingraham have a gotcha on Trump with regard to mail-in ballots?
I'll tell you why she didn't.
I will look at a new survey on how contemporary historians rank the presidents.
Be on your guard. Author and defense strategist Rebecca Koffler joins me.
We're going to talk about Putin, about the cult of Navalny, and the effort on the part of Democrats and others to exploit Navalny's death to shove this Ukraine military aid package through the House of Representatives.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
My theme for today is the cult of Navalny.
And I want to say a few things about Navalny.
I also have an excellent guest, Rebecca Koffler, Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and author, born in Russia, someone who knows the situation really well.
And she's going to come on and talk about Navalny and Putin and Ukraine and the Ukraine aid package.
But before I get there, I want to comment on a couple of other things going on.
The first one is I was watching Trump in the town hall yesterday with Laura, my friend Laura from Dartmouth, and the issue turned to mail-in ballots.
And Trump goes, mail-in ballots are inherently susceptible to fraud.
Now, Laura, in doing her job, admittedly, and sort of challenging Trump, getting him to account for himself, says, well, there were mail-in ballots in Florida, and you won Florida by a big margin.
And Trump says, right.
That's all Trump says.
And a lot of people on social media and in the media are, you know, they're, ha ha ha, look at Trump, she, this was a gotcha, because if mail-in ballots are so bad, then how is it that Trump won Florida?
And somebody else went on to point out that Trump himself voted in 2020 by mail-in ballot.
Again, this is sort of a second attempt at a gotcha.
How can mail-in ballots be vulnerable to fraud because Trump himself participated in the mail-in ballot operation?
Now, I want to address this because I think that Trump is completely right and that this gotcha is no gotcha at all.
And let me illustrate the point by putting it this way.
Let's say I were to say to you that When people are not home, their homes are more vulnerable to being robbed.
Now, this statement is manifestly true because if you're not home, the job of the criminals is easier.
And so, in general, it is more likely that homes will be robbed when the criminals know or have reason to believe that the occupant or the resident is not home.
Now, think of it. Would it be an effective rebuttal to say to me, well, Dinesh, wait a minute.
You were gone last week, you weren't home, and your home wasn't robbed.
My point is, that is not a refutation of my general point.
Why? Because, hey listen, maybe I got lucky.
Maybe the criminals didn't know I wasn't home.
Maybe if I kept not being home and was gone all the time, my home would be more likely to be robbed.
So, the point being that this refutation of Trump doesn't really work.
Mail-in ballots are more vulnerable.
Now there, Trump even gave the reason for it, but I'll spell it out even more dramatically.
The simple reason is that mail-in ballots have no supervision.
When you go behind a curtain to vote in person, you're supervised from the time you show up.
You're supervised with regard to your identity.
Here's your ID.
You can't tamper with the ballot.
You can't bring ballots with you.
You can't take your ballot away.
The whole thing is under, you may say, human eyes.
And the opportunity to cheat there in that location is very small.
Now, with mail-in ballots, where's the supervision with regard to who opens the envelope?
Who reviews the ballot?
Who fills out the ballot?
Who signs the ballot?
Who delivers the ballot?
It's quite obvious that when you just scrutinize the process that one is manifestly more vulnerable than the other.
Now, this doesn't mean that you and I We shouldn't use a mail-in ballot because we're not claiming that our votes are fraudulent.
We're simply saying that the system as is allows a lot of opportunities for fraud.
So Trump is not going to say, well, I don't want to use a mail-in ballot because Trump is saying, well, I'm filling out the ballot.
I'm signing the ballot.
So obviously, I know my vote is valid.
But Trump is making an observation about the system of mail-in ballots.
So That's the first point I want to make.
I also want to offer a brief comment on this really comical survey by American Political Science Association.
It's just so pathetically predictable.
And it ranks basically pretty much all the Democratic presidents above all the Republican presidents.
It even exaggerates the top end.
Abraham Lincoln is first, so there is a Republican in there.
FDR is second.
FDR is even ahead of George Washington.
Laughable. FDR actually was a very mixed bag.
He was in many ways a bigot.
He promoted segregation.
He refused to sign laws against lynching.
This was a bit of a gangster, really.
And yet, from the point of view of historians, because he did the New Deal, because he opened the door to the Great Society, he is way up there.
Trump, of course, is rated last.
And again, if you ask these historians, they could say things like, well, he was impeached twice, and you know, well, but that doesn't really do anything for the simple reason.
Why was he impeached twice?
What was the basis of these impeachments?
So, you know, what you're getting here is nothing to do with the actual value of these presidents, what they actually did for the economy or for the presidency or for the American people.
This is a reflection of On the historians.
It's actually a window into them.
I'm reminded of a sort of an anecdote about the Louvre, the great museum in Paris.
And you have a guy standing there in front of all these great paintings, the Mona Lisa and so on.
And he's making really funny faces like, whoa, I don't know.
I don't know about that one. Oh, yeah.
You know, and the sort of curator happens to walk by and he goes up to the man and taps him on the shoulder and he goes, Sir, the paintings are not on trial.
In other words, you don't need to act like your approbation here is a measure of the value of the paintings.
It's really a reflection on your own artistic taste or lack of taste.
If you can't see what the value is, let's say, for example, in the Mona Lisa, well, That tells us more about you than it does about Leonardo da Vinci.
Now, before I get to bring on Rebecca, I want to say a couple of things about Navalny, because it's quite obvious to me that the Navalny death, which is tragic and is a reflection of the thuggishness and brutishness of the Putin regime,
but I think the striking thing is that you've got so many people who are up in arms about Navalny, but they would never say that Well,
isn't it true that exactly what Putin did to Navalny, basically made him die in prison, is what Biden and the Democrats want to do to Trump?
And same strategy.
They would love to have Trump locked up.
Trump is already in his late 70s, so this would mean that he would be locked up until his death.
So Trump would die in prison.
Similarly, you've got all kinds of people in Rubio's own district in Florida who have been the victim of jailing for their political opposition.
Even the defenders of locking up these January 6th defendants, I just saw Jonah Goldberg made the observation, he goes, these people were fools, they had foolish opinions.
Well, locking up a person for having the wrong opinion with regard to the existing regime is the very definition of being a political prisoner.
And then Jonah went on to write an article in the LA Times, and it's a pretty good article.
No, Donald Trump does not equal Alexei Navalny.
I consider this however to be knocking over a straw man.
Nobody is saying that Trump is the same as Navalny.
No analogy is an attempt to say, well, let's look at the character of Navalny compared to the character of Trump.
We're not talking about that.
I wouldn't even make the point that somehow life in America is worse than life in Russia or even equivalent.
I think it's pretty clear that even though there's political gangsterization in America, that the ordinary Russian citizen is far more vulnerable to corruption, to being arrested without cause, to being thrown into prison without being heard from again.
So if I'm looking even at the simple issue of my personal, my rights, my freedoms, my safety, yeah, I think I'm much better off in America, notwithstanding the fact that people like me are in the crosshairs of the police agencies of government, all material covered in my film Police State.
So Donald Trump does not equal Alexei Navalny, but that is really not the point, is it?
Because the point is not that Biden is just as bad for us as Putin is for them.
And the Democrats pose a greater danger to our rights and liberties than Putin does.
We are rightfully more incensed at abuses when our own government inflicts them on us.
And so, on the one hand, we sympathize with Navalny, but on the other hand, we've got to notice that disturbing things of that ilk are going on in this country.
The dividing line between us as the good guys and them as the bad guys is not so clear.
And one doesn't have to make a pure equation of America equals Russia or us equals them in order to say that what happened What happened in Russia is bad, but very bad things are also happening in our country.
And guess what? Here's an important difference.
In this case, we are in a position to do something about them.
Lots of global instability out there.
Elections in Taiwan, Ukraine, North Korea on the brink, Iran increasing its aggression.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome back to the podcast Rebecca Koffler.
She is a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer.
She is the author of an important book called Putin's Playbook.
She's also the managing editor of CutToTheNews.com.
This is a newsletter for independent thinkers.
You can follow her on X at Rebecca0132.
Rebecca, thanks for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
It seems like there has been quite a convulsion over the death of this guy, Alexei Navalny.
Now, A lot of people may not have a good idea of who this Navalny guy is.
I mean, we've heard his name, and I see kind of two rival portraits of him, at least in social media.
One of them is, I'm going to call it, Navalny the Saint, Navalny the new Martin Luther King, Navalny the new Sakharov.
On the other hand, I see a sort of derisive, Navalny was an extreme nationalist, he was a neo-Nazi, he hated Muslims, and so you know this territory very well.
Can you tell us who was Alexei Navalny?
Sure. Alexei Navalny was a very complicated person, and most, if not all of those things that you just mentioned are correct.
So Navalny was a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and the leader of the opposition movement.
But Navalny also was a person whose philosophy was rooted in Russian nationalism, imperialism.
He was sort of of the same philosophy as Dugin, Alexander Dugin.
And yes, when it comes to imperialism and nationalism, there's a crossover with xenophobia and a crossover with Nazism.
He sort of tried to distance himself from all those other things when he was actually became popular in the West.
He was hailed in the West pretty much, you know, as a hero, freedom fighter, but it's not unusual for Western media and for American media to glamorize, you know, anyone who really hates Putin, right?
Who's Putin's opponent. We've done the same thing with Zelensky.
I mean, Western media would glamorize anybody, including the devil himself, as long as the devil hates Putin.
Rebecca, it seems to me that Navalny's death is...
It's tragic unto itself, but it's being used as a political weapon.
Maybe it's rude to call him a useful corpse, but all kinds of people seem to say, Mike Johnson, you now absolutely have to pass the Ukraine package.
So on the one hand, you've got the Navalny death, and I'm assuming that Putin had something to do with it, whether directly or indirectly.
But on the other hand, it is as if to say that this creates a moral imperative that For this giant aid package now to go to Ukraine.
A, do you agree that that is the line that is now being pushed by the Democrats?
But second of all, what is your assessment of this idea of sending another big batch of money to Ukraine?
So, first of all, yes, definitely.
The Democrats are politicizing this very tragic and untimely death of Alexei Navalny to gin up support for additional billions of For the corrupt Zelensky regime, for Ukraine, for effectively an unwinnable war.
It is indeed a tragedy.
And yes, my assessment is that Putin and his intelligence services...
It may have something to do with that.
There's a motive. Putin benefits from it.
And certainly, Putin has a long track record of similar targeted assassination.
And there's an entire doctrine in Russian intelligence services called wet affairs.
It basically connotes this spilling of blood, right?
But Zelensky also had a motive in non-violent death.
So I don't have a conclusive analysis.
I would state more likely that Russian intelligence services have something to do with that.
But the SBU, the Ukrainian intelligence services, also have conducted an assassination.
Daria Dugina was assassinated on Zelensky's orders.
The U.S. journalist, Gonzalo Zira, was dead in the hands of Ukrainian intelligence services.
So let's just have a full picture here.
And absolutely, this whole frenzy that is unraveling around this death...
The Democrats are using it to politicize the issue to continue sucking the U.S. taxpayer dry for additional billions.
And I would even mention, in addition to Michael Johnson that you just mentioned, Mike Turner, that recently decided to call for the declassification of highly sensitive intelligence.
And it is my assessment that all of this is connected.
So, you mentioned the word unwinnable, an unwinnable war.
I want you to expound on that.
But I will note that when they were pushing this package, it was, you got to do this.
We can't abandon Ukraine.
We can't be on Putin's side.
Anybody who doesn't vote for this is a puppet of Putin.
And there was a lot of that kind of rhetoric.
What I was looking for was, Some kind of an argument, some kind of a claim that this additional packet of money is going to make the difference.
In other words, what is this buying you?
And I never really saw that.
I never saw anybody say, well, listen, if...
Zelensky gets this money.
These are the four territories that he should have a reasonable chance of recapturing.
We think that this will tip the balance and convince Putin that this whole expedition is a bad idea.
We never really got that.
We never got a reasonable kind of cost-benefit analysis of what is it that this money is supposed to do.
I'll tell you, Dinesh, what it's buying for the Biden regime and the Europeans, that they would never have the guts to admit.
It's buying more Ukrainian dads.
That's what it's buying. And it's depleting the Russian military.
At least that's what the Biden regime thinks.
Look, Joe Biden has Ukrainian blood on his hands.
Why is that? It's because he knew up front that Ukrainian victory is mathematically impossible.
And I will explain it in a minute how.
But the reason I know that Biden knew that is because I personally briefed Obama's White House multiple times on Putin's plans, his war fighting strategy, Russia's modernization efforts. Putin was preparing for this war for 20 years, right? Biden knew up front that he would never, and he told us, the reason we know this, he told us that he would never deploy US forces into the theater.
The reason he knew he wasn't going to deploy is because Putin developed a highly sophisticated strategy to deter the United States from what the Russians perceive as interfering in their strategic security perimeter. And if we continue doing that, they would bring the war home here, to America.
And I'm describing it in many of my pieces.
So instead, the Europeans, who never bothered to contribute in the right way towards their own defense, Still, to this day, only 11 out of 31 NATO members contribute 2%.
And Germany, the richest country in Europe, doesn't even contribute 2%.
So they concluded that they're going to throw Ukrainians into Putin's meat grinder.
Because they never bothered to beef out their own security.
And so it's buying them time.
The more this continues, the more Ukrainian men are going to die.
They're killing the entire generation of young, child-bearing age European men.
Right? And they're hoping to bleed out Russia, but instead they're bleeding Ukraine out because it's on the verge of collapse.
And they are bleeding our own military because they're depleting our own weapons arsenal to extremely dangerous levels.
And the time when we have Iran and China threat really rising.
We'll be right back with Rebecca Koffler to talk more about the war in Ukraine.
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I'm back with author and analyst Rebecca Koffler, former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, author of Putin's Playbook.
We're talking about Putin and Zelensky and Navalny and Ukraine.
Rebecca, let's pursue further the notion of the unwinnable war.
Do you think that it was unwinnable from the outset for the simple reason that an ant cannot defeat an elephant?
I mean, in other words, you have little Ukraine And the notion that a little Ukraine could somehow, you know, whop the Soviet Union is on the face a bit absurd.
I mean, all you have to do is look at a map of the world and draw big and small circles.
This would be somewhat like saying that Bangladesh or Sri Lanka is going to whip India.
I mean, that's just not going to happen.
Now, are you saying that the Europeans and the Americans, this is the Biden regime, They knew this at the outset, but they figured that there's something in it for them.
And I think you're trying to spell out what that something is, both from the European side and from the Biden side.
Talk about the Biden side.
What does the Biden regime hope to get out of this?
Was it a scheme to deplete the Russian military?
Exactly. And they didn't exactly make it a secret.
The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, who, by the way, the Russians joke about him right now that he's commanding U.S. forces out of a hospital bed.
So he announced himself that the goal is to defeat Russia or to weaken, I quote, to weaken Russia militarily and economically and to strategically defeat Russia.
Well, let's look at that.
The Pentagon itself Consideres Russia, and I quote, a media peer competitor.
What does that mean? It means that Russian military is on par both in terms of its warfighting capability, its weaponry, It's perhaps not training, right?
But overall, holistic national security strategy to U.S. military.
There's a reason why NATO and the United States fear a direct threat Conflict, kinetic conflict war between Russia and the United States.
This is why they want to bleed out Russia.
Okay? So, I love the analogies that you used, and for the life of me, I don't understand how...
Other people don't see it that way.
So much more meat to throw into the meat grinder.
Russia's population is three times more than Ukrainian.
The Russians have 143 million, Ukrainian 43.
And Putin is prepared to fight until the last Ukrainian.
Russia also has a disproportionate advantage, an overwhelming advantage, both economically and militarily over Ukraine.
And so Ukrainian economy is basically collapsing and Russian economy is actually growing thanks to US and European sanctions because what happened was that the military industrial complex is contributing to the economic growth and Putin He's not an idiot.
He's actually a highly intelligent man.
He has a PhD in economics.
He's a trained attorney. So he transitioned the Russian military and economy on the wartime footing back in 2015 when he was preparing for this war.
And so this is the disproportionate imbalance that we have And it's absurd, as you said, to think that it's possible for Ukraine to win.
So they're annihilating Ukraine.
You know, the Biden administration, Putin obviously, but the Biden administration is financing this war.
Rebecca, Trump yesterday in his interview with Laura on Fox News in that town hall equated himself, at least tangentially, with Navalny.
And I think what he was saying is that, look, everyone is expressing this outrage that Putin jails his political opponents.
Navalny died in prison, potentially at Putin's hands.
But either way, that's what happened to him.
And isn't it interesting that this is sort of the Biden administration strategy for Trump?
In other words, the Biden and the Democrats, what do they want to do to Trump?
Well, if they had their way, they would put him in prison.
And given his age, he would most likely die in prison.
And he is the leading opponent without question of the Biden administration.
So bottom line, there is a chilling similarity between something that we think, oh, it's awful, it's going on over there.
Something not entirely dissimilar is going on over here.
Now, I know that there are a bunch of neocons and a bunch of other people who have expressed outrage at this seeming equation of Navalny and Trump.
I'd like to get your thoughts on the validity of this analogy.
It's 100% valid.
In fact, I wrote a piece in 2023 in April that is titled that the Democrats are using Putin's playbook to defeat Trump in 2024, where I exactly described that analogy.
It's exactly how the Russians do business.
Putin, that's how he eliminates his political opponents.
He has done it not only to Navalny, but also to Khodorkovsky and a few more people.
So the way that he does it is he first charges them with some crimes.
Looks at the Russian law and tries to figure out, okay, it's extremism, it's treason, it's this and that, and then she throws them in jail and then, you know, tries all the different things, exactly how and what I call American Bolsheviks, right? The Letitia Jameses and the Elvin Braggs of the world, they are American Bolsheviks.
That's how they're hunting down Trump.
So, the collusion, Russia collusion hoax, that they themselves, the U.S. spy agencies concocted, didn't work.
One impeachment didn't work, second impeachment didn't work.
Now they're trying to throw him to prison for 700 years.
I mean, that's even more than Navalny had to serve.
Putin gave him 30 years, and now after...
If all of this fails, right?
And now they're also trying to rob, to destroy his business, his lifelong, you know, big empire that he built, right?
Not just him, but just his family.
They're trying to destroy his family, his sons.
And so, and what's next?
President Trump's popularity is still skyrocketing and these people are maniacally hunting him down.
And so I am sincerely fearing for President Trump's life because what is next after they exhaust the tools in their devilish toolbox?
What is next? I mean, already you seem to have people who are putting out insinuations about Trump being not around or Trump.
And I think, in a way, I don't know if this is an intentional code language to kooks because, of course, in any political side, you have kooks on both sides.
Yeah. What you're saying, I think, is really interesting, which is that in authoritarian societies, what you do is you go after your political opponents, but you do it under the guise of law.
Yes. You know, it's not like perhaps in the Stalinist days where they just put a bunch of people on the list.
They come and grab you at the train station.
No questions, no answers given.
They don't have to explain themselves.
Putin's point is that he wants to maintain the idea that Russia follows laws.
And so when he wants to go after an opponent, it's like you didn't pay your taxes or you did this or you committed treason because one of your operatives met with this guy over in Europe and so on.
And then The law is manipulated in such a way as to create a show trial, in effect.
The guy is then locked up, and that's the last you hear of him.
And what you're saying is that that playbook, what you call Putin's playbook in your last book, is being executed by authoritarian-minded people in the United States against Trump.
I mean, that's a frightening thought, isn't it?
Exactly. So what you described is correct.
Putin approved the law in 2006 on extremism.
And guess what qualifies as extremism?
It's criticism of Putin himself.
And any government leader, any kind of government official, Russian military, anything like that.
So anyone who says, I could be designated, and in fact, for that reason, I would never set my foot up.
Back in Russia, as you know, I was born and raised in Russia, and I survived the totalitarian regime.
And so this is exactly where I see our country, my adopted homeland, going, right?
With all the censorship, the cancel culture, the hunting down...
And it's not just Trump.
Remember, the spy agencies...
They were surveying U.S. citizens, you know, in the Trump circle.
And the way that they did that, they outsourced the surveillance to the Five Eyes, right?
The Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain.
And so this is what I see here.
It's exactly what I lived under in the USSR. I think I called them the American Bolsheviks, right?
They're trying to transform USA into USSR 2.0.
And when I was watching Letitia James' speech...
Recently, I thought this is how Putin speaks.
When he accuses the traitors, he tries to gin up the sentiment to hunt down people who he perceives as traitors who don't support him.
I thought Letitia James, she's just like Putin.
She was devilish.
I just couldn't believe it. It's like she was possessed.
This is what they're doing here in this country.
Guys, check out Rebecca Koffler's book.
It's called Putin's Playbook.
And there's a new one coming out in October that is called American Bolsheviks.
Can't wait to read that.
And Rebecca, we're going to have to have you back on to talk about it as we get closer.
Cuttothenews.com is the website.
Cuttothenews.com. Rebecca Koffler, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh, and God bless you.
I'm continuing my expression of the case for Douglas.
This is the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Harry Jaffa's book, Crisis of the House Divided.
And I want to begin with the point that the Missouri Compromise, although it was seen as a good deal for the South, We're good to go.
in 1820, which by the way, the balance of power in 1820 was pretty much the same as it was in 1789 when the Constitution was first adopted.
A kind of equi-balance you could say between the free states and the slave states.
And this was something that both sides could sort of grumpily live with.
The free states obviously would prefer all freedom.
The slave states would probably prefer to extend the reach of slavery.
Or if not to extend the reach of slavery, to extend the rights of slave owners to, for example, take their slaves into the free states and get them back.
In other words, that a slave doesn't become free by physically leaving a slave state and so on.
So, Harry Jaffa makes the point that It is almost inconceivable that the South would have given it the support it did, the Missouri Compromise, had they known that in the next 30 years, another half-dozen free states would join the Union upstate.
the 3630 line, the Mason-Dixon line, and that really what was happening is that the coalition of free states was now becoming politically considerably more powerful than the slave states.
And now, after the Missouri Compromise, there was another compromise.
This is called the Compromise of 1850.
The Compromise of 1850 was a kind of a complex business because what it did was it made a kind of new bargain.
between the North and the South, not by jettisoning or dumping the Missouri compromise line, but by making sort of plus and minus adjustments.
It's sort of like if we were to do a divide between your property and mine and draw a line And then things happen in which, let's just say I'm planting certain crops and they go into your side and you're doing certain things, certain home improvements, but it needs to give you access to the road and so you need to come over to my side.
And so what do we do? We do a series of adjustments.
I'll be like, all right, I'll take over here and you take over there.
This was the compromise of 1850.
And like all compromises, it holds.
It's made by a bunch of people, but it's made by a bunch of people for a particular time and for a particular reason.
And it could quite be the case that as time passes, the underlying balance of power shifts, or the politics shifts, or the reason why you supported something is no longer valid.
And this is what happens sometimes with Douglas.
He's seen as contradicting himself, but he's not really contradicting himself from his point of view.
The circumstances have changed.
Here's a line from Abraham Lincoln where he says of the Declaration of Independence, the founders declared the right so that the enforcement could follow when the circumstances permitted.
And what is Lincoln saying here?
He's saying, look, when the founders said all men are created equal, It's no refutation of the founders to tell them at that time, hey, listen, we have slavery.
There are some men who are clearly not equal compared to others.
The founders knew that. What the founders were doing is stating a principle that is better than the contemporary practice.
The founders are saying, even though we know That all men are not treated equally.
What we're doing is we're stating as a moral precept, and in fact as a kind of legal precept, the concept of human equality.
Why? Because we hope that the concept itself, the principle itself, will erode the support For a hierarchical society, for a society based upon enslavement.
And we hope that a time will come when this principle can be maybe initially partially and eventually fully realized.
So this is Lincoln's meaning when he says when the circumstances permit.
And Lincoln's point was that those circumstances did permit in 1860.
So Lincoln's view was that the founders were to be commended.
They gloriously introduced the principle, and this was almost not quite a hundred years prior, but the principle was coming to, you may say, marvelous fruition in 1860.
Now, When the Compromise of 1850 was put together, it was one of these weird things where different parties supported it for different reasons.
So if you tried to get people to agree on the reason for it, it would never work.
In fact, the Compromise of 1850 was a sort of a beautiful political patchwork where Daniel Webster and others would lobby particular elements in the North and then others would lobby elements in the South and say, the Compromise gives us this.
Let's vote for it for that reason.
And then in the North, they say the Compromise gives us something to the opposite.
Let's vote for it for that reason.
So I'm now going to read Jaffa.
This bargain was accepted by the different parties for different reasons and understood in different terms.
If any attempt had been made to reach agreement on the reasons for the compromise, there could have been no compromise.
Now, Douglass invokes this in order to say, so he says eight years later in 1858 while debating Lincoln, we need to do something better than this kind of patchwork compromise.
Now, here Douglass is on a little bit of...
Questionable ground. Why?
Because if you have a compromise, and the compromise is holding, the question then becomes, why would you want to kick it out and replace it with something else?
Yeah, it might be a patchwork.
Yeah, people might have different motives.
It's kind of like you and I have a contract.
It's very complex.
Well, we've made a contract to go into a business venture together.
You maybe got certain things out of it and that's why you signed.
I got other things out of it, so I signed.
Our motives are actually quite different for signing and the contract itself is a little precarious because you and I aren't exactly friends, but nevertheless we're doing this deal together.
And then along comes Douglas and he goes, well, this is obviously not something that can hold.
We need to toss it aside and introduce a single principle that we can all agree on.
So this is what Douglas is really saying.
Now, Now, why is Douglass so big on this single principle that he thinks is a solution to this kind of compromised patchwork?
Well, the simple answer is that Douglass here is very much in the Tocquevillian tradition.
I'm now going to read...
A few lines from Democracy in America by Tocqueville, written, by the way, in the 1820s and early 30s.
The former federal government of the United States was the last to be adopted, and is in fact nothing more than a summary of those Republican principles which were current in the whole community.
The great political principles which now govern American society undoubtedly took their origin and their growth in the state.
What is Tocqueville saying?
That Americans learn democracy not by creating a federal, a national government.
They practice democracy at the state and local level.
Tocqueville continues, So Tocqueville is saying that true democracy...
occurs really at the local level.
It's not simply a matter of having a national election.
Tocqueville loved the New England town meeting.
It's a small town.
It's got a few thousand residents.
You have a problem, an issue.
Guess what? The citizens of the town show up.
They debate it in a town hall.
What could be more participatory than to have this exercise of democracy at the local level?
So, obviously, if the local level is best, the next best is the state level.
The state isn't quite A state is obviously bigger than a community or a town.
But nevertheless, there's more accountability at the state level.
And again, the key point for Tocqueville is you are the one who is going to be living under these laws.
So you're going to make laws that are good for you, good for the people in the district, and good for the people in the state.
So Douglass draws an important lesson from this, and that is, listen, This slavery issue creates fanatical fervor on both sides.
On the one side, you've got the Calhoun people who think slavery is amazing, slavery is wonderful, slavery is even good for the slave.
And Douglass goes, basically, that's your opinion.
And then he looks to the north and he sees abolitionists, slavery is evil, slavery is horrible, we've got to force everybody to stop having slavery.
And Douglass goes, that's your opinion.
And Douglass says, look, If we're going to have a country in which all these kinds of people want to live under, quote, the same roof, there's only one way to do it.
Let's accept the principle that each state and community gets to decide these questions for itself.
That is the true meaning, and that is, in fact, the true moral basis for popular sovereignty.
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