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April 10, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:19
LIFE AFTER DOBBS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep808
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Coming up I'll explore the Arizona Supreme Court's decision to basically eliminate abortion in the state.
And I'm also going to dive into this issue because it could be a critical issue in 2024.
How should Republicans deal with this pro-life or abortion issue?
I also draw on a new article by Richard Dawkins, the biologist, to resolve the question of how many sexes there are in biology.
I think you know the answer, but I'll give you a scientific foundation for it.
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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.
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I want to focus today on an issue that is going to be an important issue in the 2024 election and one that seems to be a little bit of a dangerous issue for our side and that of course is the issue of abortion.
and I'll see you next time.
Now, there is already a series of skirmishes going on among Republicans right of center on this issue.
And there are prominent pro-life figures.
I think of Lila Rose.
I think of Marjorie Dannenfelser, who have been very critical of Trump.
Trump's latest statement on abortion.
Lindsey Graham lashed out at Trump on this issue.
Trump then fired back at Lindsey Graham.
So, there is a big issue here because there is an awareness among some Republicans, including it seems Trump, that this could be a big liability for the Republicans.
In fact, that's the way Democrats are acting.
They are campaigning heavily on the pro-abortion or pro-choice side.
I know that in Texas, in fact, typically when I'm watching these days, press matches on YouTube and there's a world tournament underway and I'll see this call in all redfellow who's running against Ted Cruz.
And all this guy seems to talk about is abortion.
He seems to think that's the magic bullet that's going to get him across the finish line in Texas.
So there is an awareness, or at least a belief, that this is a politically loaded and maybe a politically risky issue for the right.
But then on the other hand, you've got pro-lifers who think, wow, our own team is selling us out on principle, and this is not a principle that can be compromised.
Here's a very striking statement that I've seen from someone who says, well, here's Matt Walsh, the Matt Walsh blog.
I wouldn't compromise on abortion with a gun to my head.
That's how pro-lifers feel and it will never change.
Killing children is always wrong in all circumstances, no matter what, always and forever, period.
I'd rather be dead than move an inch on this.
So, there you have, as clear as you can, a full-throated articulation of the no-compromise position.
I'm gonna get into all that.
I thought I would begin by talking about a rather surprising decision that has come out of the Supreme Court in Arizona.
This is kind of our big news of the day that pertains to the abortion issue.
Essentially, the Supreme Court has outlawed abortion in Arizona.
And this means that Arizona is now, like Texas, a state that will have no abortions.
There are, in fact, no exceptions except to save the life of the mother.
So, no exception for rape, no exception for incest, any of that.
Unless the mother's life is itself endangered, in which case you can almost look at it as a self-defense type of an issue, there is a near-total abortion ban in effect as right now in Arizona.
Now, to make the situation more complex, the Attorney General, a left-winger, Chris Mays, has already come out and said, I'm not enforcing that law.
Wow. So the Supreme Court says there's a law on the books that needs to be enforced, and you've got the Attorney General of Arizona basically saying, I'm not going to go after any doctors or any women who have abortions in Arizona.
So we will now have, it seems, a peculiar situation in which abortion is illegal in Arizona, but going forward, no one seemingly is going to be prosecuted because the chief of Officer in charge with enforcing the law refuses to do so.
Right there you can see there is a problem.
Let's go into it further.
The law in question that the Supreme Court has affirmed is actually an extremely old law.
In fact, it is 160 years old.
It's an 1864 law.
Now, this law was passed in 1864.
Think about it, passed really at the end of the Civil War.
It was affirmed in 1901, codified again in 1913 when Arizona became a state.
That's when they added the exception to save a woman's life.
And that law has been on the books, although invalidated by Roe v. Wade.
So when Roe versus Wade was passed in 1973, not passed, but when it was, when the decision came down from the Supreme Court, 7 to 2, if I'm not mistaken, basically the court struck down the abortion laws in all the 50 states, including this ancient Arizona law.
Now, more recently, in October of 2022, the legislature in Arizona got together and they passed a law in which abortion is banned after 15 weeks.
So, they passed a new law in 2022 outlying abortion after 15 weeks.
So, abortion allowed for the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
And Debbie and I were talking about this. Debbie's like, well...
That's a little bit late because it still allows, I mean, at 22 weeks, the sex of the child.
Did you say the sex of the child?
At 14 weeks, you can know the sex of the child.
There's already considerable development by this stage.
But nevertheless, this swing state, Arizona, which is moderate politically, I would say, leaning slightly center-right, passes this law in 2022, which doesn't ban, but restricts abortion after a certain period, namely 15 weeks.
Now, when this went to court, as these days, whenever you pass a law, the law gets challenged, and it goes before the court.
It went before the Court of Appeals, and the Court of Appeals basically ruled that the new law, 2022, supersedes the old law, 1864, and therefore, in Arizona, we need to have abortion allowed for the first 15 weeks and not allowed after that.
But that was then appealed to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court steps in and makes a decision which, as I say, surprised many people because what the Supreme Court basically decided is no.
Both laws are in effect.
In other words, the Supreme Court noted that the legislature in Arizona in 2022 did not repeal the old law.
They simply passed a new law.
Now, so let's think about it. You have a law in the books and then you pass another law Is the old law somehow automatically cancelled out?
Well, not necessarily. Let's say there's an old law in the books that says, for example, that all speeders will be stopped and made to take a driving class.
And then you pass a new law saying that if someone speeds at a certain speed, they're going to be fined $50 or $100.
Well... The old law is still there, so it doesn't mean that you no longer have to take a class.
It seems now that you have two laws on the books, one that says you've got to take a class, and the other that says you've got to pay $50.
And that's basically what the Supreme Court decided.
It said, yeah, since the old law hasn't been repealed, and since Roe v.
Wade, which is what canceled out the old law, is no longer valid constitutional law, it's been overturned by the Supreme Court in the Dobbs decision, Essentially, we now have a situation in which the old law is now operational.
Now, the old law, it's probably fair to say, is a little bit too extreme for the people of Arizona.
In other words, Arizona is not a strongly pro-life state.
In Texas, you could say that the abortion ban that we have in effect is actually something that is pretty mainstream in Texas.
In other words, there's not a lot of dissent about it.
It seems to be a reflection of the moral sense of the people of Texas.
But in Arizona, that may not be the case.
And I say this because even Carrie Lake, who is pro-life, has come out with a statement saying, quote, I oppose today's ruling.
Wow. And some of the pro-lifers are like, what?
You oppose the ruling? What do you mean?
Are you not in favor of restricting abortion?
But that's not really what Carrie Lake is saying.
Here's what Carrie Lake is saying.
She's saying, look... The meaning of dispersing abortion, the issue of abortion to the states, is that each state should now make abortion laws for itself.
So, notice I've been talking in my Lincoln series about popular sovereignty.
In a sense, we are in popular sovereignty with regard to abortion because the issue is now in the hands of states and states collectively have, quote, Now, From the point of view of the pro-life movement, it's really obvious.
States should always choose life.
And I don't think that Carrie Lake really disagrees, but I think here's what she's saying.
What she's saying is that we have an ancient law that was made really 150 or more years ago.
And so if we are, as a state, to choose how we are going to decide this issue, we should decide that now.
In a sense, you could argue that the Arizona legislature did decide that in 2022 when they made the law with the 15 week ban.
That is probably far more reflective of the actual opinions of the people in Arizona.
So now the question for the pro-life movement is that, look, what is it that we are trying to accomplish?
Are we trying to say that the federal government should override the choices of the people of Arizona?
First of all, even if you think that, there is simply no federal consensus to do that.
Does anybody reasonably think that we can get a law now through the Republican House?
You probably, you might be able to get it through with one vote.
And that is assuming that every Republican votes for it.
And you and I know from experience that this isn't always the case.
But then what happens in the Senate?
It's dead on arrival in the Senate.
And even if by some miracle it were to pass the Senate, Biden would veto it.
So the possibility of having a federal law that would somehow override the sentiments of the people of Arizona is beyond impractical, it seems to me.
Now, I think what the pro-life activists are saying here, which is understandable, is that we're not talking about what can be achieved.
We're talking about what we should want in principle.
And so what you have here is a clash between, let's call it, ideal principle and what can be achieved in practice.
And when we come back, I'm going to get into this distinction between principle and practice and how we should think, not just in the abortion context, in any context, where your principle says X, but what you can achieve and practice in a given situation is less than X.
How should you operate in that situation?
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Here is a syllogism from Seth Dillon, the publisher of The Babylon Bee, whom I've had on this podcast.
Number one, it is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
Unless you live in a state that says it's fine.
A little bit of sarcasm there.
But the premise here, it's wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being, cannot be argued with.
It's true. Two, abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being.
That's also true.
And three, therefore, this is the punchline of the syllogism, abortion is wrong unless you live in a state that says it's fine.
So, this is Babylon B-style rhetoric, but the syllogism itself is intact, and that is, there is no justification for abortion.
And that is really the pro-life position in its most clear, its most consistent, and it's very difficult to argue with it.
It's true.
It's valid. And yet...
We have a problem. The problem is quite simply this.
The pro-life movement, whose job it is to carry this message to the American people and to convince them, not just with argumentation, but also with the extremely valuable assistance of the ultrasound, where people don't have to argue, they can just see for themselves.
This same pro-life movement has apparently not Penetrated into the mind and the heart and the soul of enough Americans.
Why? Because we have had abortion referendums now recently in several Republican states.
I mentioned Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio.
Red states, all of them.
And yet, the abortion issue has gone against the pro-life movement.
So the voters, and these are not left-wing voters, we're not talking about referendums in Portland, Oregon or Berkeley, we're talking about in red states, you have a voting down of pro-life legislation, or to put it somewhat differently, you have an affirmation of a so-called right to an abortion issue.
In fact, a fairly radical right to an abortion, very similar to what the court had held before in Roe v.
Wade. So the reality, the political reality is is that voters in red states are rejecting these ballot measures banning abortion.
And certainly banning all abortions, there seems to be only a small minority of the country that agrees that this position outlined by Seth Dillon should be, in other words, no abortion Period.
End of story. Or the Matt Waltz position that I articulated earlier, which is that there's essentially, quote, there's zero tolerance for the issue of abortion.
So this is the This is the dilemma.
There's also a further practical dilemma.
And the practical dilemma was outlined by none other than Donald Trump in his first post.
He has three lengthy posts on this topic.
And some of it is worth going through and worth analyzing because we can...
We can test what Trump is saying.
Quote, people forget fighting Roe versus Wade was right from the beginning all about bringing the issue back to the states.
It wasn't about anything else.
And then he says, Trump says, after we won, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Lindsey Graham started saying, no, let's go back to the federal government.
And he says, and when they got nowhere, they upped it to six weeks.
And more recently, they upped it to 15 weeks and were obviously willing to take the number upward, upward, upward, because they were getting nowhere with the Democrats.
And they never will, because the Democrats would never give up on this issue.
no matter how many weeks the Republicans...
So, Trump is basically saying, look, we fought a great battle.
It's a battle that the pro-life movement was mobilized to fight for a long time.
We sent it back to the states thanks to three Supreme Court justices appointed by me.
And so Trump's point is, let's now fight it out in the states.
That's what the pro-life movement wanted.
That's what they got.
And it's a little difficult to now backpedal and say, oh no, we actually always wanted something else.
Or the sending it back to the states is a way station for a larger agenda.
And again, Trump's point again with the larger agenda is, what is the practicality of trying to achieve that agenda?
agenda. Let's continue with Trump here.
He says, by allowing the states to make their own decision, and hoping that most Republicans running for office will have the sense, although they must always follow their heart, to require the exceptions, in all caps, for rape, incest, and life of the mother, we have taken the abortion issue largely out of play.
And that alone is worth reflecting on a little bit, because...
It goes against logic, or it goes against the logic that I outlined when I quoted Seth Dillon.
If abortion is, in fact, intentional killing, why allow any exceptions at all?
Logically, you can't argue with that, because even though someone may say, well, rape is a very great evil, Dinesh, and a child conceived in incest, that's a very great offense— The answer to that is, well, why put one offense on top of another?
In other words, why compound the offense by now killing the kid that is the product of that rape?
The kid didn't cause the problem, so why make the child take the burden of that choice?
And Trump's only answer, I think, to that is going to be this.
And that is that, look, we have an issue that is very divisive in the country.
We have not established anything resembling a moral consensus.
People are all over the spectrum on this issue.
You have from the one end people who are You have vociferously pro-abortion.
You have others who are somewhat more reluctantly pro-choice.
You have people in the middle who are against...
Or you have people who say, I don't want partial birth abortion.
Others who want a 15-week ban and think late-term abortion is bad, although earlier it's okay.
And then, of course, you've got pro-lifers who think that it should not be allowed at all in any circumstances whatsoever.
And I think what Trump is saying is that...
That this issue can be met and the vast majority of abortions stopped by having the states pass laws that are viable laws and can win majorities.
Not in every state.
It would be very difficult to get a majority in California, for example, even for a 15-week ban.
But you could probably get that majority in a number of other more moderate states.
And there are other states like Texas where you can get much stronger pro-life laws.
So Trump is not saying what the state should do.
He is saying or he is advising that candidates who are running on this issue be willing to go along with certain exceptions.
That doesn't mean abortion is right in those circumstances, but it means it's not something that would be restricted by law in those extreme circumstances.
In other words, politically, the question is this.
Why do you want to fight an issue on the weakest point when you can win in the majority of cases?
Most abortions have nothing to do with rape.
They have nothing to do with incest.
They're abortions for convenience.
People just like, I'd rather not have a kid.
I've got two. I don't want three.
Or, I don't want to be pregnant right now.
So, those are entirely different justifications from someone who is in extreme trauma, because let's say they were just raped, and now they're like, am I going to be carrying the rapist kid and keeping it for the rest of my life?
Or, on the other hand, do I bear a child and then have to give it up for adoption?
So, the point is, that is the hard case.
Just as the life of the mother is a hard case.
By the way, there are some in the pro-life camp who don't even think that should be an exception because their reason is that, look, if the mother's life is endangered, it's endangered kind of by nature.
In other words, it's endangered by some complication that is accidental in the sense that nobody caused it and the mother's life is in danger.
Why should the child be intentionally killed to prevent something that is, after all, an accident?
The intentional killing of the child is a more serious offense, so let the mother die.
That's not, by the way, my view, but I'm saying that is a view.
And I think the logic of Trump's position here, the political logic of it, is let's try to fight the abortion issue where we are strongest.
Let's not let the Democrats demagogue this issue.
They are the true radicals on this.
In fact, Trump put out the old Ralph Northam video where he's talking about, hey, if a child is born and...
You know, we don't really want it.
We have a, quote, conversation about it, even though it's there on the table, alive, born, and decide essentially if we should snuff out its life.
So this is the way the Democrats are on this issue.
And Trump is trying to say, let's not us come across as the radicals here.
Those are the true radicals.
And let's focus the abortion debate on their radicalism, not ours.
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Over the years, I have had a kind of an oscillating relationship with the biologist and public intellectual Richard Dawkins.
Now, some of you, many of you probably know who Dawkins is, but for those who don't, he's a masterful explainer Welcome to my show!
I'm a big fan of that book.
It's an almost irresistible read.
It's all based upon a single argument.
It's expounding a certain way in which we can understand evolution.
We tend to understand evolution from the point of view of...
Creatures. So evolution from the point of view of dogs or cats or amoebas.
But Dawkins says the best way to understand evolution is from the point of view of the gene.
And this is such a kind of counterintuitive and a strange idea that one can look at the unfolding of a scientific theory from the gene's point of view.
But nevertheless, it's a tour de force and Dawkins carries it off beautifully.
When I first encountered Dawkins, I was, well, a big fan.
I felt like, wow, this is really deepening my understanding of biology, and it's written in such a captivating style with riveting examples taken partly from the plant and the animal kingdom, some of the examples from early hominids and human nature.
All of this is Dawkins kind of at his best.
And then Dawkins began to move more in a sort of anti-God direction with his book The Blind Watchmaker.
The Blind Watchmaker was essentially an attack on creationism, on the idea that evolution requires a creator to And Dawkins basically said, no, evolution is the blind watchmaker.
So if the question is, how do you make a watch?
And normally you would think in order to make a watch, you would need a watchmaker.
So the appearance of design is explained by the presence of a designer.
And Dawkins went on to say, I can show you how design can be created, but not created in the sense of externally by God, not by an omnipotent deity, but design can be put into place, let's call it, by the simple mechanistic workings of evolution.
So you could see here, many people didn't really notice it or focus on it, but Dawkins very much avowing a kind of bold atheism.
And he even, I think, had the line in that book, Darwin makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
So now I'm not a fan of Dawkins.
In fact, I am in the awkward position, not being as knowledgeable about biology as he is, and having learned a lot of biology from him, of, in a sense, taking a different position, the opposite position, on the question of design in nature and whether or not The design in nature requires or points to an omnipotent and a transcendent designer.
But now Dawkins has pivoted into a different direction, away from the atheism.
I talked several segments ago, several episodes ago, about how he now calls himself a cultural Christian.
He appears to be allying more with the Christians against the radical Muslims.
And he has also come out in a very bold way against trans ideology.
This is what I want to talk about today.
And I want to talk specifically about an article that he published along with another guy, Alan Sokol, in the Boston Globe.
And the article is about sex and gender.
And it's subtitled, The Medical Establishment's Reluctance to Speak Honestly About Biological Realities.
This is something very important because the leading medical organizations have been ideologically corrupted.
Here is the American Medical Association, the AMA. It says the word sex is problematic.
We should now use the phrase, quote, sex assigned at birth.
Because that is, quote, more precise.
Wow. Sex assigned at birth.
Almost like you have a doctor, and it's like, oh, we have a baby, let me assign a sex to it.
This is the American Medical Association.
I mean, what... Look at the situation.
Yeah, Debbie's like, God aside, the sex.
Yeah. Here's the American Psychological Association on the same.
They go, terms like birth sex and natal sex are disparaging and imply, quote, that sex is an immutable characteristic.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, same thing.
Sex is, quote, an assignment made at birth.
Center for Disease Control, pretty much the same.
So these organizations are moving in tandem and putting ideology first and sort of biological reality second.
So Dawkins, very patiently in this article, kind of goes through the biological reality, and that's really what I want to focus on by reading some key sentences and commenting on them.
Quote, As well as many plants reproduce sexually.
In all sexually reproducing species, this occurs by combining a large gamete, called an ovum or egg, with a small gamete called a sperm.
So the large gametes are the eggs, the small gametes are the sperm.
And it says, though there are some hermaphrodite plants and animals that produce both ova and sperm...
There are no mammalian species that do.
So human beings are mammals.
There are no mammalian species that produce sperm and ova.
That happens with certain other plants and creatures, but not with any mammals.
In mammals, each individual produces only one kind of gamete, and we know all about the X and Y chromosomes.
Then, says Dawkins, in short, sex in all animals is defined by gamete size, sex in all mammals is determined by sex chromosomes, and there are only two sexes, male and female.
And Dawkins goes on to point out, along with his co-author, quote, it has been known for over a century, it is basic stuff in any high school biology course, and...
He says, yes, you might have some quirks of mutation or prenatal development, so some individuals don't produce any gametes at all, but he goes, if an individual is infertile, he still has Y chromosomes.
And he says, just like if you have a person with one leg, he's still a person.
He's still a human being. He's deficient in not having a leg or in the absence of a leg.
But the absence of a leg doesn't mean that he suddenly becomes a different kind of being.
It's he's still a human being and human beings still have two legs of which this guy is simply missing one.
So... Then Dawkins goes on to say, he goes, yeah, there are some kind of weird quirks, chromosomal patterns other than XY. So you have sort of the, there's something called Klinefelter syndrome where somebody has XXY. He goes, that occurs in 0.01% of live births.
There's a rare condition called De La Chapelle syndrome, Swire syndrome.
He goes, these are sort of odd intermediaries between the male-female binary, but he goes, but that doesn't mean that you get a third sex.
No, there still are only two sexes, just like there is day and there is night.
There's day or there's night.
Now, the fact of twilight does not invalidate the basic binary or difference between day and night, and that's what Dawkins is saying here.
Can we turn to this business about sex assigned at birth?
Here's Dawkins.
A baby's name is assigned at birth.
Yeah, I'm going to assign you the name Marigold, our granddaughter.
No one doubts that.
But he goes, but a baby's sex is not assigned.
It is determined at conception and observed at birth.
This is the key point.
How does the doctor decide if it's male or female?
He doesn't assign.
He looks, he sees, and then he writes down what he observes.
So, in other words, he writes down what is already there.
And he goes, you know, over the years, if you look at historical medical records, there are cases where doctors have been wrong.
It could be that the size of the genitalia is so small that the doctor makes a mistake, etc.
And he goes, you know, the trans sort of activists make a lot about all this.
Look at this doctor.
He got it wrong. And Dawkins goes, come on.
He goes, the fallibility of observation does not change the fact that what is being observed, a person's sex, is an objective biological reality just like the blood group or fingerprint pattern.
So there you go. You can run a blood test on me.
I could be positive or be negative and you get it wrong.
Well, if you get it wrong, it doesn't mean that I don't have a blood group.
It just means that you are incorrect in recording your observation about it.
Similarly, my fingerprint is my fingerprint.
If you smudge it up, it's still my fingerprint.
There's an objective reality to it, and that's what Dawkins is getting at.
Sex is an objective reality.
Now, gender is a little bit of a fluid word because gender can refer to Patterns of speech or behavior.
We all know historically there have been girls who have been more boyish.
They're tomboys. Maybe they have a deeper voice at least at a certain stage of development or they cut their hair short.
No big deal. No one denies that there's this kind of variability in human behavior and obviously human cultural patterns and so on.
But even in the cultural patterns, there are stable differences.
And this is Dawkins' point.
I think what he's saying is that even culture is to a large degree dictated by nature.
Worldwide, he says, men commit the vast majority of homicides.
It's just not even close.
He says, No one is saying that physical sex differences and kind of their gender manifestation, no one's saying that that's identical.
But what Dawkins is saying is the one does help you to understand the other.
Just like, for example, human consciousness is understood in part by the neurons in our brain.
If you damage certain neurons in my brain, it could affect certain ways in which I respond.
So, for example, I might not be able to I might respond cognitively or I might lose my emotions if a certain part of my brain is damaged.
So there's a connection, a correlation, and perhaps a causal relationship between the physicality, the physical neurons in the brain, and then the conduct or the behavior or the feelings that come out of that.
So Dawkins' conclusion is a very simple one, and that is that, look, Why are our prominent scientific organizations that have developed so much credibility over the years lying to us?
Why are they putting ideology ahead of science?
They should stop doing that.
They're welcome to subscribe to whatever ideology they want, but science is about the search for truth, and that should take first place.
We are now at the critical time in our discussion of the Lincoln-Douglas debates where we're trying to probe the meaning of these debates, the fundamental clash between the two sides at its deepest level.
And at its deepest level, the clash is not merely over whether slavery should be a matter of choice or whether the extension of slavery should be something that can be restricted by Congress.
That is the policy question that is before Douglass and Lincoln.
But there is a philosophical question behind that, and for Lincoln, that question can be expressed this way.
Does democratic government rely simply on, let's call it, the morality of choice?
Does choice by itself have some moral significance?
Or does choice itself depend upon some immutable or unalterable principles of right and wrong that give choice itself and give democracy itself its moral undergirding, its moral foundation, its moral backing?
Now, traditionally, philosophers have argued or many have argued that monarchy is the best form of government because monarchy is based on wisdom.
The idea here, which finds its roots in Plato, is simply the notion that When you have a group of people, you're going to have all kinds of different opinions, but if you have a truly wise ruler that knows all the facts of the situation, in other words, that has wisdom, then why not have decisions made at that level?
It's almost like a replica of the divine government of the universe.
The divine government of the universe is a monarchy.
What kind of system of government do you think there is in heaven?
Well, it happens to be a monarchy.
So this is something that a number of leading thinkers have believed monarchy is best because it at its best is a system based upon virtue.
A monarchy has all kinds of flaws, hereditary monarchy, what if your descendant is an idiot and so on.
We're not going to get into that, but we're talking about just in principle.
Now, starting with Aristotle, they became a tradition in philosophy that argues that no, the best form of government is not best based on wisdom, but it's based on virtue.
And therefore, the best form of government is aristocracy.
It's aristocracy because obviously virtue is not equally distributed among people all over the place.
There is a sort of an elite group that's the virtuous.
I mean, certainly in Calvin's vocabulary, those are the saved.
Those are the elect. So, since the elect or the saved or the virtuous are, by definition, few, the idea is, what if you could have a system in which those guys, the best people, Are in charge of society.
Wouldn't that be the best society?
It may not be the wisest, but it would be the most virtuous.
And democracy has always been considered, or has been long considered, certainly before the modern era, as an inferior form of government because the best it can do is appeal to liberty or freedom.
And what is freedom other than inaction?
Freedom means the government will do little or nothing, and you do what you want.
So, for Plato, that is like a degraded, low, almost disgusting form of government.
Plato says, I can imagine a society where essentially nobody listens to anybody else.
Children don't listen to parents.
Animals don't even respect their masters.
Why? Because they're equal too.
They do have rights.
So, Plato is sort of caricaturing democracy here, but...
It has long been believed, even by the defenders of democracy, that democracy is a sort of a lower form of government.
It doesn't aspire as high as aristocracy or monarchy, but its foundations are low but firm.
If you read Tocqueville's Democracy in America, he goes down this road.
He basically says, look, in aristocratic societies in Europe, you have certain refined and elevated virtues, virtues of contemplation, virtues of people who devote their whole lives to study because they have leisure to do it, the virtues of elaborate forms of courtesy and gentility and magnanimity.
And he goes, you're not going to find those in America.
Why? Because America doesn't have those aristocratic virtues.
America is going to be a different kind of society which will have democratic virtues that are low, but that are somehow also on a firm foundation.
This is Tocqueville.
Now, Lincoln seems to be arguing here that, no, democracy too, at its best, we're talking about constitutional democracy, not just the democracy of ancient Athens, not the democracy of mob rule, but democracy under a constitution and under a rule of law, that type of democracy, the democracy of the American founding, does have a moral basis.
And the moral basis is in the Natural right.
What is natural right?
Principles of right and wrong that are not subjective.
They're not right or wrong because you say so or because it appears that way to me.
It's because they're right and wrong, period.
This is the core meaning for Lincoln of the Declaration of Independence.
The core meaning of the Declaration of Independence can be expressed in a phrase that Lincoln once used that has become famous,"...as I would not be a slave." So I would not be a master.
Now, this is a very interesting phrase if you think about it, because Lincoln doesn't want to be a slave.
Well, I mean, who does? You don't want to be a slave.
I don't want to be a slave. That's actually totally understandable.
What is less obvious is why Lincoln doesn't want to be a master either.
And that's because he believes in this fundamental kind of moral equality of human beings, a moral equality that derives from the Creator of Although, even though it derives from the Creator, it is an equality of moral worth that can be observed in normal life.
In other words, it is not a theological proposition.
You don't have to go to the book of Leviticus or the Gospel of Matthew to see that all men are created equal.
The reason you can recognize it is that you simply have to say, alright...
Look, this is the way nature is.
The god of nature has made it like this.
And the reason we know that is that although there are differences among human beings, for example, one guy is smarter than another guy, but these differences between normal adults are not that great.
The difference between say normal adults and let's say the angels is huge.
The difference between let's say normal adults and let's say a pig or a dog is huge.
So the fact is that human beings are clustered together in a certain you may say narrow bandwidth where the differences between them from a moral point of view are not all that significant.
Not in moral behavior but from the point of view of moral worth.
Now, there's a critical section that I just want to read from the Peoria debate.
This is one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and I'm gonna read Lincoln commenting, and he's responding to something that Douglas just said.
In the course of my main argument, Judge Douglas, Douglas had been a judge, Judge Douglas interrupted me to say that the principle of the Nebraska bill was very old, and that it originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make.
So note here the cunning of Douglas.
Douglass goes, listen, my principle of popular sovereignty, my principle of free choice, is kind of the principle of the Garden of Eden.
Just like God gave human beings freedom from the beginning, and he said, I'm not going to force you to do this, I'm going to let you choose.
Here is an apple.
I'm saying not to eat it, but it is your decision whether you eat it or not.
And so, moral freedom, says Douglass, this is the core meaning of democracy.
And Douglass interrupted Lincoln to say this.
So here's Lincoln continuing.
Lincoln says, At the time I thought this was merely playful and I answered it accordingly, but in his reply to me now, he renewed it as a serious argument.
And now comes Lincoln's answer.
In seriousness then, the facts of this proposition are not true as stated.
God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice.
On the contrary, he did tell him that there was one tree of the fruit of which he should not eat upon pain of certain death.
Boom.
So right here, you begin to see the core difference between Lincoln and Douglass.
For Douglass, it's all about choice.
It's all about freedom. Let people make up their own mind.
That's democracy. For Lincoln, no.
Even choice is dependent upon certain moral precepts that undergird the choice.
And so, even though Lincoln's not denying that there's choice, human beings do choose.
And in the end, America will have to choose what it wants to do about slavery.
People will have to choose whether to vote for the Republican Party or not.
Congress will have to choose whether to outlaw slavery in the territories or not.
So, Lincoln is not trying to get around choice.
But Lincoln is saying, let's go back to the Garden of Eden.
Even though God gave man and woman choice, God told them what to choose.
God told them, here's a tree, you choose, but guess what?
You choose not to eat it, because if you do, you're going to die.
And so, Lincoln is saying, by implication, but very clear implication, I don't think this would be missed by any of his listeners at the time, Lincoln is saying, if America...
Chooses to go with Douglass, with popular sovereignty, chooses the idea of affirming slavery, at least on certain occasions where it's deemed profitable or it's deemed desirable, then America itself is killing.
The core meaning of the Declaration of Independence is undermining the moral principle that all men are created equal.
You could almost say that America is committing, at least from a sort of philosophical or moral point of view, A certain kind of suicide.
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