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April 9, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:06
ECLIPSED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep807
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Coming up, Debbie and I tried to watch the eclipse, but we didn't have very much luck.
However, I do have a theology of the eclipse I want to share with you, and that's forthcoming.
I also want to talk about Trump's newly stated position on abortion.
Conservative influencer Jack Posobiec joined me, senior editor of Human Events.
He's going to offer his take on Brazil's crackdown on free speech.
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I want to talk about two things in this opening segment.
The eclipse and Trump's new statement on abortion.
Bye.
Now, the eclipse, I have to admit that, well, we missed it.
Debbie and I are in a part of Texas where it was cloudy, the rain started coming down, we looked up at the sky and we could see precisely nothing.
Lightning. Now, just a few hours...
From us, Danielle and Brandon in Dallas, apparently they got a beautiful view of the eclipse and of course there were many places in the world and I saw some people commenting about it and saying that this was like almost like a mystical experience.
So, alas, we will have to experience it vicariously.
I've seen images of it, and of course, fascinating, and a rare event.
So that by itself, I think, makes it interesting.
But interesting in what respect?
Well, on The View, Sonny Hostin...
Claims that, see, this is now evidence of climate change.
And even the other guests on The View were like, we are dealing with a complete ignoramus.
So they did their best to sort of cover for her, but they had to point out that eclipses occur not only periodically, but they occur in predictable times.
They're like comets.
I mean, when Haley discovered so-called Haley's Comet, he predicted when the comet would return.
Haley was dead when that happened, but the comet did return pretty much exactly when he said it would. And so climate change has nothing to do with this. I was eight years old or six years old when I saw one in Caracas. Yeah, you saw it in Caracas, yeah, in Venezuela. Now, I want to raise a little different point, which is to ask the question, is there a theological significance to the eclipse?
And I noticed from the time that I was a kid that if you look up at the sun, And you look up at the Moon, they appear to us as the same size.
They look, the size of the ball is about the same.
And this is actually what makes eclipses so beautiful.
Why? Because it looks like one ball, the Sun, is being completely covered by another ball, the Moon, that shuts out completely the light of the Sun.
That's how you get the rings around the eclipse, the corona, the whole thing is based on the fact that you've got two balls of roughly equal size that are covering each other. Now, very interestingly, the Sun and the Moon are in fact not the same size.
The Sun is much, much bigger than the Moon.
And the Sun is also much, much further away.
Well, how much further away?
If you measure things in the speed of light, which is the only way to measure things out in space...
The moon is one and a half light second away from us, which means it takes light one and a half second to get to the moon.
Now, light goes very, very fast, so the moon is pretty far away, but the sun is It's eight light minutes away from the earth.
It takes light eight full minutes to get to the sun, or more accurately, to get from the sun to us.
So when we see a ray of the sun, we're actually seeing a flash of light as it left the sun eight minutes ago.
Now, here's the remarkable thing in And this was pointed out somewhat mathematically in an article written by my buddy Eric Metaxas.
He said if you take the diameter of the Sun, you measure the diameter of the Sun, which is known, and you divide it by the distance of the Sun to the Earth.
You divide those two numbers and you preserve the answer.
And then you take the diameter of the Moon.
And you divide it to the distance, divide it with the distance from the moon to here.
And then you get a number.
He says those two numbers, those two answers are almost identical.
This actually explains why from the human perspective, or let's call it from the Earth's perspective, The sun and the moon appear to be the same size.
The whole beauty of the eclipse is due to this very remarkable fact of nature.
And again, Eric pushes this a little further than I would.
He goes, well, here we have it.
This is proof of the existence of God.
I'm not sure by itself it is, but I do think this, and Debbie and I were talking about this, we both agree on this, that it is further evidence of the elaborate orchestration or choreography or design that goes into the universe, and that also goes into our corner of the universe, which is to say the Milky Way, and specifically our planet Earth.
If you look at the universe, and you could give many examples of this, You see harmony.
You see signature.
You see intelligence. You see design.
Debbie was talking about music and she's like, listen, musical harmony is something that is crafted.
It's not random.
You can't just have random notes that by themselves produce harmony.
They won't. They would produce a jumble.
They would produce, well, noise.
And similarly, if things were just random in the universe, there would just be a lot of noise.
But there is so much evidence at so many levels, and this one, the eclipse being only one, that I think we are justified in letting these events show us the handiwork of God working not only in the world, but on the world, in the creation of the world, in the design of the world.
Now, Let me turn to Trump's statement about abortion.
And I'll be discussing this with Jack Posobiec.
He's going to be my guest.
And we'll talk about this in some more detail.
But I want to make a single point that I think I haven't seen anyone else really make.
And I'm going to make it in reference to Lincoln.
In fact, this ties my podcast sort of tightly together because I'll be talking later also about Harry Jaffa and the crisis of the House divided and the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
So let me put it this way.
Lincoln was asked when he was campaigning for president, do you support intermarriage between blacks and whites?
And Lincoln said, no.
And they asked him, do you support full civil equality for blacks and whites, which would include the right to vote, the right to serve on juries?
And Lincoln said, no.
Now, these are slightly shocking answers coming from Lincoln, and as we get to know Lincoln better, and as you begin to look at Lincoln, the man, Lincoln's private correspondence, you realize right away that Lincoln, in fact, had no moral objection to intermarriage between blacks and whites, nor did Lincoln think there was any problem at Ultimately, in blacks having civil rights or the rights to vote, not at all.
So why then does Lincoln deny that he wants to do something that he clearly does want to do?
And the answer is this.
The job of a statesman, in some cases, is to deny an intention to do that which he cannot in any case do.
And what I'm getting at is Lincoln was having a hard enough time building a consensus in the North and in the Republican Party and in the country against not even slavery, but against the extension of slavery.
And so Lincoln realized, if I start claiming that miscegenation or intermarriage between blacks and whites is something I want, that is the complete and immediate end of my career.
I couldn't get elected in Illinois, let alone Mississippi.
And so Lincoln's point was, that's not even on the table.
That's not even a practical reality.
So why should I waste my time in fruitless speculation?
Oh yes, I think under these circumstances we should have intermarriage between blacks and whites.
Why should I blow up my own career and blow up the chance that I have To restrict the expansion of slavery, ultimately to write the Emancipation Proclamation, to bring slavery to an end, all of that progress would be jeopardized if I try to get more.
So in other words, if I try to get more, I will fail to be able to get even the part that I can get.
I think this is key to understanding where Trump is coming from here.
What Trump is basically saying is, I am denying my intention to do Something that I could not in any case do.
You want a federal law banning or restricting abortion?
For that, we would need a solid Republican House, a solid Republican Senate, and the presidency.
Do we have those three things?
Actually, we have none of them.
We have a Republican House, but it's not solid.
We don't have a Republican Senate, and we don't have a Republican presidency.
So at this point, it is just nonsensical to be pushing for a federal ban that is a practical, but implausibility, not unlikelihood, but a total impossibility.
In this sense, I think what Trump is doing is a statesman-like move that is in the Lincoln mode or in the Lincoln path.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast our friend Jack Posobiec.
He's senior editor of Human Events.
He does a podcast, Human Events Daily, with Jack Posobiec.
You can follow him on X, at Jack Posobiec, and his forthcoming book, which you can pre-order now, Unhumans.
Jack, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
We're going to talk about the book and kind of preview its themes, but before we do, I thought I'd ask you about This whole business that's going on in Brazil with X, the platform formerly called Twitter, are you surprised at the way in which they are cracking down on X,
using their governmental muscle to not only threaten X with confiscatory fines, but now Elon Musk reports maybe arrest X employees in Brazil?
And all of this seemingly at the behest of one man.
This judge who seems to have untrammeled, unlimited authority to do these kinds of things.
I want to ask you, what do you think is going on over there?
Brazil is supposed to be a democracy.
And is this a little bit of a warning for us here in the United States about what may be headed in our direction?
Well, Dinesh, thanks so much for having me on again and for plugging the book there for us.
Look, what we're seeing going on in Brazil is actually the culmination of a five-year, even six, seven-year plan in Brazil that the communists have had for quite some time.
And by the way, they've been doing this working hand-in-glove with certain elements of the United States State Department and certain elements We saw this originally during COVID-19.
Because it was Bolsonaro who stood against the vaccine mandates, he stood against the lockdowns, but the Supreme Court Justice, oh, what was his name?
That's right, the same guy, Alexandre de Marais.
And Alexandre de Marais said that Brazil was going to have lockdowns.
And then Bolsonaro went to the military and said, I... We should not comply with this.
The military refused to back Bolsonaro and went with De Mares.
So De Mares effectively has been in control of Brazil since that time.
Then in the following election, with the full backing of the State Department and Biden's CIA director, Bill Burns, We're good to go.
And de Marais was the same one who allowed Lula, the former communist leader, socialist leader, to come out of prison.
They wiped his entire, he had been in prison at the time, wiped his entire criminal record, brought him out, and said now he's eligible to run for the presidency again.
They essentially installed him as president.
But what's really going on there is that Lula is on, and Elon has actually tweeted this this morning, that it seems that Lula is on the leash of Damaris.
That's exactly correct.
Because we, and over at Human Events, we reported so much of this in real time, and I get it.
It's kind of, it's south of the border, right?
South of the equator. Not everyone's picking up on this all along.
But what you really have is, and I can make it very simple for folks, They are trying to turn Brazil into the next Venezuela.
They attempted prior to this, Bolsonaro and the conservatives and the populists and the nationalists fought them back.
Now the communists have the upper hand through this Supreme Court Justice de Marais and he is effectively ruling Brazil as an unelected dictator at this point.
So what you have in South America, then, is that the two largest and most exemplary countries are pulling, it seems, in completely opposite directions.
You have Malay in Argentina.
You now have Lula and the Lula cohort in Brazil.
And this, it seems...
I mean, it's one thing to say, all right, we have the popular will of the people and the will of the people should govern what happens in Brazil.
But... This one guy seems to have the power.
And my question is, is that power coming from some interpretation of the Constitution?
What gives Morais the authority to be able to...
I mean, he doesn't just censor people.
He arrests them. He arrests opposition party members.
He locks them up without evidently a trial.
And all of this sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies in part because I then flash back to what the left wants to do in this country with the Supreme Court.
Because it seems to me that we have a lot of people in this country who have, let's call it the personality of this guy mores, right?
I mean, think of somebody like Letitia James.
Think about Fannie Willis.
This is the same breed of people.
So if you put these guys and give them that kind of power, I mean, do you have one moment's doubt that they would exercise it with the same dictatorial abandon?
Oh, certainly not. And in fact, in Damerace's case, there's similarities to Fannie Willis because we actually know That de Marais, at one point, there was an investigation into him for receiving millions and millions of dollars as part of an investigation that the federal police was looking into, an investigation that he himself was presiding over, the same way that Fannie Willis seems to have...
Financially benefited from investigations of President Trump that she presides over.
So we see the same thing again and again.
Actually, this is something we cover in the book, that it's the same playbook.
Dinesh, they only have one playbook, and you know this better than anyone else.
They only have one playbook.
The only thing that changes are the names and the details of the strategies and what we said what we called in the military tactics techniques and procedures TTPs the TTPs are always exactly the same you claim that you're standing for justice you claim that you're standing for Democracy we're fighting for our democracy. We have to protect our Democracy and in doing so we are locking up people who are he's locked up bloggers
He locked up people remember in the United States either They're a bit more progressed than we were in the United States You would just be censored on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram for sharing information about Kovat 19 that that went against the official guidelines well in Brazil He was locking people up for spreading what he called fake news about the I've got a quote right here the daily divulgent of
on the COVID-19 pandemic.
And in doing so, he would actually lock up people for posts.
Posts on Twitter, posts on Instagram, posts on other places, and to the point where they're...
It's funny, I was actually at CPAC recently here in D.C., and I had some Brazilian activists reach out to me.
They said, you know, it's...
They said, you can only read our Twitter accounts in the United States or outside the world.
So they have Twitter, right?
They have their Twitter, their X accounts.
And this is a couple of weeks prior to...
This is, what, February... We're good to go.
I'm not just going to block this because they realized that, you know, it's very easy to get a VPN. It's just a piece of software.
You just download another app and you've got a VPN and there you go.
Now you're spoofing your location from wherever you want.
And so Dame Race realized that there were too many people using VPNs to get around his censorship.
So now he's putting the screws directly to Elon himself.
I mean, I thought it's interesting that Elon Musk revealed that Demorace has been, this has been going on, but apparently without public knowledge, demanding that X take down the posts of opposition leaders, activists in Brazil.
But then he prohibits X... From revealing that it's at his order.
In other words, he says you have to pretend like it's the rules of Twitter that are causing these people to be banned and not my edict.
And so what you have here is not only censorship but the accompanying camouflage and deceit In which people then wrongly think, oh man, what did I do wrong where X is now banning me when it's not X at all.
X is being forced to act at the behest of more X. And I think that this is something that the EU, there are lots of people in the United States, I mean, they all would almost look at this as a model.
If they could pull this off in Europe and the United States, they would look at that as a way of, quote, protecting democracy.
And we already know that the EU is pushing regulations that would provide for censorship, not only in terms of Twitter, but across all social media, because they're talking about doing it in terms of pandemic treaties that the WHO is putting out.
And in fact, this most recent WEF conference that was held, World Economic Forum in Davos, just in January, just another couple of months ago, the entire conference was about the threat of misinformation.
And apparently, misinformation, if you go and look at the summit, the Davos summit this year, was even greater than the threat of climate change.
Wow, we've defeated climate change, everyone!
Who knew? Misinformation has cured climate change.
But what it really is, It's about control of the narrative.
And of course, they know, and this is why it's key that Damaris was trying to require that Elon not post these things publicly.
Now, that's been completely destroyed at this point, obviously.
But the communist and the Marxist always fears being identified.
They always fear being found out.
That's why they hide themselves in the trappings of the color of law.
That's why they hide themselves in the trappings of these phrases, social reform and democracy.
And they've been doing this since the French Revolution and since the Russian Revolution.
It's always about the justice.
It's always about the greater good.
But then when you realize that what they're doing is actually a direct...
I mean, think about how hard it was to...
And how many lawsuits have had to been filed just to get the emails directly of what Dr.
Fauci and the CDC were up to?
It's years. We're now almost four years out.
We're actually in the next election just finding out what they were doing behind the scenes in the previous election.
This is why they put so many...
It's Russian nesting dolls.
Of government layer upon layer upon layer to prevent the public from knowing what they're doing.
And they'll go on TV and say it's all about the public good, it's all about the public good.
But they know that people out there, just normal, the normal average person watching that has this nagging feeling in the back of their head that something is amiss.
That the person who's talking to me is doing so because of some agenda and it doesn't feel like they're actually putting the needs of the public forward.
Well, fast forward, it turns out when we get the emails or when Elon Musk tells us specifically what's going on, it's worse than that, folks.
Not only are all of our fears confirmed, but in fact, they don't have the good of the public at heart, and what they have at heart is a grasp for power and a grasp for total control.
Jack, when we come back, let's unravel a little bit this playbook that you mentioned a moment ago, how it works, and as outlined in your forthcoming book on humans.
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I'm back with the one and only Jack Pasobic.
Follow him on X at Jack Pasobic.
He does a podcast, Human Events Daily, with Jack Pasobic.
The book, Unhumans.
Jack, before we get to Unhumans and the left's communist playbook, I want to ask you about the position that has been now spelled out clearly by Trump about how he thinks about and what his sort of policy approach is.
Yeah.
Yeah. What do you make both of the sort of internal consistency but also the political wisdom of Trump's stance?
Well, Dinesh, it's interesting because, you know, I remember going to March for Life in Marches for Life back in the 1990s, and I've always been part of the pro-life movement.
And the political positions of the life movement against Roe v.
Wade, as well as the Republican Party, by and large, Have always been to return it to the states.
This has been a long-standing policy of presidential candidate after presidential candidate, back to Reagan and others, to say that should be a states' rights issue.
Different states are going to come down different ways on that, and it's just the way it is.
It's, by the way, a system that our founders gave us called federalism.
And any power that is not delineated to the federal government is intended to be under the 10th Amendment.
It is maintained by the states and by the people.
And there's been a lot of pushback on President Trump's statement, but I take it as a strategy position more than anything else, is to say, from a strategy perspective, I think this is the best way to move forward as of right now.
Because it had always been From 2016, people said, oh, Donald Trump, you know, he's this former Democrat, and he had said he was pro-choice in the past, just like Ronald Reagan, by the way, a former Democrat who had been pro-choice.
And Trump said Trump's response to that was the shortlist of Supreme Court justices.
And he said, this will be my shortlist, and I will approve conservative justices to the bench.
He kept up his end of the bargain on that.
And he said, I'm going to appoint justices.
We didn't know he was going to do three appointments.
I don't think anybody could have. I don't think even he could have predicted he'd get three.
That is extremely rare.
And I don't think people point that out as much.
But he did three. He got three conservative justices.
And he took ones that were handed to him that were actually recommended to him.
Put them up there. Roe v.
Wade is no more. And so it's sort of an ultimate irony that it was the brash New York real estate developer that actually defeated Roe v.
Wade, as opposed to sort of what you would normally think of had been the original way.
This is not a guy who had been participating in the pro-life movement, I think, in any way, shape, or form prior to 2016.
It just is what it is. History works in strange ways sometimes, but...
Penny Nance, the CEO of Concerned Women for America, had a statement this morning that I really appreciated.
She said, We want to protect as many babies as possible, and supporting President Trump does that.
I live in the real world.
I don't have a magic wand that will give me 60 votes in the Senate.
And as much as I would hope that that would happen in the next election, that's a pretty high hill to climb.
Look, Dinesh, and I come from this perspective as well.
I'm devout Catholic. My family's always been Catholic.
Polish, who pretty much only come in one flavor that way.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I think what you're saying is very important because I interpret it sort of this way, that the pro-life movement for many, many years had taken the view, look, it doesn't matter how much we organize, it doesn't matter how many hearts and minds we change, as long as the Supreme Court declares preemptively, this is a constitutional right, it's the end of the story.
In fact, it's the end of democracy already.
On that issue, because people's point of view becomes irrelevant, the court decides for all of us, the abortion restrictions of all 50 states are invalidated, and this is now presumed to be something that is inherent in the Constitution.
That is now, with the overturning of Roe v.
Wade and the Dobbs decision, basically what the court is saying is democracy now resumes.
And on this issue, like many other issues, If you want to see a change, you need to go convince people in your state to make abortion restricted or illegal or have a ban against it.
And it seems to me that the pro-life movement was maybe not quite ready for that.
It's almost like they were surprised by the overturning of Roe versus Wade.
They have not gotten their act together, even in states that are red-leaning states with Republican majorities.
And so they've lost a couple of big referendums at the state level.
Yes. Do the hard work of it and don't try to pursue, at this point, a federal remedy.
I mean, first of all, it looks really weird.
You've just sent abortion back to the states and almost on the heels of that you're declaring, oh, now we're going to go for a federal law which would move in the complete opposite direction of decentralizing the issue.
So, do you think that this is the correct Emphasis for the pro-life movement to win some battles in the states, make progress there, reduce the number of abortions.
Maybe there will be a future time to look at the possibility of a federal law.
There's certainly nothing that prohibits one from trying for a federal law, but it seems to me the political chance of doing that right now is close to zero.
I think that the issue...
So there's an infrastructure question here too, right?
Because the March for Life and a lot of the pro-life movement right now is nationalized because the issue under Roe v.
Wade was nationalized.
Instead, and that's not to say that there aren't local chapters, and there certainly are fantastic, fantastic pro-life groups in state after state after state.
Those are the groups that need to become empowered now.
So the next phase of this, after Roe v.
Wade is gone, is, as you say, stepping up in state after state and working this on the state level.
That means going to churches.
That means going to school associations.
That means going to everyone, working to find alternatives to this.
On the IVF question, people have said, how could he be for IVF when IVF includes embryonic destruction?
This is the main issue for the pro-life movement and something that I've advocated and I said this when that Alabama decision came down is, well, there is such a thing as embryonic adoption as well.
There are couples out there who pray and pray and pray and aren't able to conceive for a variety of reasons.
Embryonic adoption is something that I don't see that pro-lifers would have any issue with.
And in fact, I think it is a pro-life decision because just as pro-lifers always have supported adoption over abortion, that embryonic adoption is just sort of the 21st century phase of that and saying we can have embryonic adoption centers, places where someone could go if they're praying for a child.
And then can go to one of these embryos and say, instead of having this embryo be destroyed, these viable embryos are frozen and kind of put into that whole system, that it could become perhaps a miracle for someone who was praying for a child.
Again, there's many ways that the pro-life movement, I think, can actually grow from this point right now.
And I don't think there's going...
But to your, as you say, to your point...
I don't think there's going to be any easy shortcut out of this.
And, you know, no shortcuts. I think that's what Trump is saying as well.
We have to eat our vegetables, and that means doing the hard work, digging in, finding creative solutions, and doing the work of turning the national pro-life movement into a 50-state pro-life movement.
I mean, in some ways, it seems to me that the pro-life movement has the overwhelming advantage, not just in a generic sense of being right, but of having this kind of crushing weapon called the ultrasound, right?
I mean, if we were having this debate in 1973, in the wake of Roe versus Wade, you had to bring in a scientific expert who's going to say, well, you know, life begins at conception, and then there would be arguments about what the different stages of fetal development are.
Right. But the beauty now is that every woman who is pregnant can go to a doctor and look and see what is inside the womb, what size it is, what it's doing, how it's developing, how there are the fingers, the heartbeat.
You can call the gender after a few weeks.
So all of this is physically manifest to us.
And so for the pro-life movement not to take that weapon and say, all right, Let's deliver this information in an emotionally and visually and intellectually powerful way to people.
I mean, that seems to me to be quite clearly the next step.
Which will reduce abortion, right?
It will reduce abortions.
And to your point, without even a legislative fix, that will just reduce abortions in the aggregate all on its own.
That's also the way we're trending right now.
But I think that—and technology has been an incredible driver of this, and that's another thing that doesn't get enough credit— In this debate, but one thing that I guess I would step back and sort of looking at the Twitter war that we saw when this statement came down is to say, look, guys, we also have to remember that we're in a fight right now currently with some of the most radical leftists that the United States has ever seen.
You'll never see Joe Biden put out a statement that says he opposes late-term abortion, by the way, which is actual barbarism.
A child that has made it all the way to term.
That could come out and be born or a cesarean section.
And that date, by the way, also because of technology, is also residing.
That's becoming earlier and earlier.
They will take a child that's at 38 weeks.
They will take a child that's at 32 weeks.
They will take a shot at any point of this, and I'm not saying that happens that frequently, but I am saying that from a policy perspective, the quote-unquote fake Catholic Joe Biden, Catholic in name only, will never put this up because he's terrified of his left flank, which he's already losing over Israel-Gaza as is.
And so, what we need to understand is that all of these debates mean nothing if we do not take political power.
And then once they have power, that's when the policies start rolling out and they'll say whatever they want to get power.
So I guess my point to the conservatives out there, and this is to speak to pro-lifers and every angle of the conservative movement, is we spend a lot of time arguing over various strategies and various positions and should someone have said this and should someone have said that and all these litmus tests, whereas the left is just focused on maintaining power.
Power all day long.
And I think that we need to remember that, that all of these debates are ultimately meaningless if our opponents are the ones that control all the levers of power, which, by the way, right now they're doing a pretty good job of.
And Trump's goal seems really simple, which is essentially neutralize this bomb that the left thinks that they can drop on our heads.
And Trump goes, I'm going to try to dismantle the bomb so that we can actually campaign and win the election and then make progress on a whole set of issues, including this one.
Jack, thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it, guys.
Jack Posobiec, the book, Unhumans.
Check it out. And follow him on x at Jack Posobiec.
Jack, as always, thank you.
God bless. We are now in the absolute core of the argument for Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the argument that drove those debates and ultimately led to the Civil War.
And there's a very intriguing line in Harry Jaffa's book, Crisis of the House Divided, In which he says something that I quoted at the beginning of my discussion, but it was a little mystical when I quoted it because its meaning was not apparent.
So I'm going to read it again because I think its meaning now becomes much more clear.
Here's Jaffa.
He says,"...the crisis of the house divided was not meant to be a book about American history except incidentally." It is in the form of a disputed question, itself a form of the Socratic dialogue.
And then, this is the line I want to focus on.
It was born in my mind when I discovered, at a time when I was studying the Republic with Leo Strauss, that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was in substance, and very nearly in form, identical with the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus.
Now, Let me try to expound this enigmatic sentence.
Socrates and Thrasymachus are having a big argument in the beginning of the Republic.
It goes on for several chapters, and here is the main issue.
The main issue is, is there something, is there a fundamental difference between right and wrong, or is right and wrong simply a matter of the interest of the stronger party?
So, Thrasymachus, who is the sophist, and the sophists were known for their clever argumentation.
Basically, Socrates is trying to show that there is such a thing as justice.
There is such a thing as truth.
There is right and there is wrong.
And that these are objectively true and they are objectively knowable.
This is Socrates' position.
Thrasymachus goes, Socrates, stop wasting our time.
Stop talking nonsense about justice.
He goes, look, strong people in the law of nature dominate weak people.
And that's for the same reason that the lion dominates the lamb.
And the lion doesn't have to give excuses to the lamb.
That's what makes us humans different.
We sort of have to cast everything in the light of morality.
So the strong guy pretends like there's some good reason why he's in charge and the poor guy is not in charge.
But really, there is no reason.
It's just because one guy is stronger than the other.
So, says Thrasymachus, justice is nothing more than a big word and kind of a meaningless word.
What it really means is the interest of the stronger party.
So this is the burning issue at the heart of maybe the greatest philosophical work ever composed, which is, is there such a thing as right and wrong independent of human interests?
Now, says Harry Jaffa, and this is the kind of, I think, profound insight that guides this entire book, you have Lincoln arguing against Douglass.
And what is Douglass saying?
Douglass is saying that we should let, in a democratic society, the people at the local level, states, territories, communities, decide whether they want slavery or not.
Now, the main definition of democracy is that just as in a monarchy, the stronger is the king— We're good to go.
The majority. The majority has the power.
Why? Because there are more of them than there are of us.
So if there are ten people, why do we let the majority decide?
Well, part of it is that if we didn't, the majority would decide anyway.
The six people on the one side would wrestle down the four people on the other and go, hey, there are more of us than there are of you.
So, in a sense, majority rule is a deference to the superior power of the many over the few.
And so, says Jaffa, in this issue between Lincoln and Douglas, Douglas is basically saying, let the stronger party win.
In other words, if a majority of people wants to have slavery, let them have it.
And what Lincoln is saying is no.
Even the majority doesn't get to decide certain things.
The majority does get to decide and there is a permitted space, things like tax rates and zoning laws and there are many other things that majorities get to decide, including important things like whether a society goes to war, But, says Lincoln, a majority doesn't get to decide about the basic fundamental dignity of the human person.
The majority doesn't get to decide that you or I can be grabbed at will and forced to work for somebody else for free for the rest of our lives.
The majority doesn't get to decide that you have the right to own me or I have the right to own you.
In other words, says Lincoln, there are issues of right and wrong that transcend democracy, that transcend majority rule, and in fact are the necessary foundation for democracy, for constitutional democracy to work, and not only to work, but to have a valid moral basis.
So Lincoln is saying that if we have a democracy and this democracy is not based upon a prior agreed upon doctrine that all men are created equal.
That all humans have certain basic dignity.
That all human beings have certain rights.
That the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness belongs to everyone.
If we don't agree on those things, our whole democracy is a waste of time.
It's a sham. There's really no point even having it.
This is Lincoln's view. It's a very startling view because it...
Even today, there's a common point of view that democracy is like a procedure.
And by procedure, we mean, you know what?
We can't decide a question.
Let's all get together in a room.
Let's all pick straws or let's all cast our votes.
And this procedure will dictate the right outcome.
Lincoln's view is that no, the procedure by itself is insufficient.
In fact, the only reason the procedure even is meaningful is because there are certain prior assumptions.
So let's take, for example, the simple idea of one man, one vote.
Well, if all men are not created equal, why should there be one man, one vote?
Why not give one guy three votes and another guy one vote?
Why don't we give the important people more votes than the less important people?
So, what Lincoln is getting at is that even the notion of one man, one vote...
Is dependent upon the idea that each human being created in the eyes of the Creator, in the eyes of God, and having equal moral worth, therefore has the right to the same vote that is counted at the same weight As any other vote.
And so this is really what this debate is all about.
For Lincoln, it's not simply a matter of...
Because, I mean, you can listen to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and if you're taking a narrow view of it, you'll think, well, they're actually fighting about whether or not there should be slavery in Kansas.
That appears to be what they're arguing about, but no.
Kansas here, for Lincoln, is only a representative.
It could be anywhere else.
Here's Lincoln, I'm quoting him now.
He says, if Kansas should sink today and leave a great vacant space in the earth's surface, he says, this vexed question would still be among us.
What's Lincoln saying?
He's saying, yes, we're fighting about it in Kansas, but it's not really about Kansas.
We're really asking a fundamental moral question.
Now, the moral question in Lincoln's time had a very specific application, and the application was the Missouri Compromise.
Lincoln based his whole philosophy on the idea that the Missouri Compromise is a compromise, to be sure, but it also reflects an uncompromising moral principle.
So let's notice that you can have an uncompromising moral principle even though the situation involves a compromise.
And so, the uncompromising principle here is simply this.
Slavery is wrong in all cases, even though we permit it in some cases.
So, slavery is a necessary evil, and a necessary evil is always an evil, even though sometimes you may think that it is necessary.
So Lincoln is willing to concede that there are times when slavery has got to be allowed to continue, allowed to exist.
But Lincoln's point is, even where we allow it to exist, we recognize that it is wrong.
Let's say, for example, that I had a tumor and that you could cut the tumor out, but if you cut the tumor out, there's a high probability that I would die.
And so I decide, I'm not going to cut it out.
I recognize that it's a tumor, but I'm going to let it be.
Why? Because the operation to take the tumor out is going to pose more risk to my life than having the tumor in in the first place.
So think of the tumor as slavery.
And now Lincoln's position makes more sense.
Lincoln is saying, alright, slavery is a tumor.
It is bad. There's nothing good about it.
However, there are cases where it may be that to try to extract the tumor is to kill the patient.
And what is the patient?
The patient, in our analogy, is the constitution.
It's the very system that holds the country together.
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