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April 11, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:01
GLOBAL RIGHT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep809
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Coming up, I just learned from Debbie that O.J. Simpson died.
Not that I plan to talk about O.J. per se.
It did cross my mind.
I wonder where O.J. is now.
And I suspect he's having a lengthy conversation with his maker.
What I am going to talk about, I'm going to outline the emergence for the first time of a global right across the world to counter the baleful influence of the global left.
So very good news.
Brazilian journalist Paulo Figueiredo joins me.
We're going to talk about how Brazil has essentially become a dictatorship under the guise of democracy and how this process was aided and abetted by a globalist elite.
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I've been covering this showdown between...
Brazil, the Supreme Court justice in Brazil, Morais, and his battles with Elon Musk and with X. And a prominent journalist named Paulo Figueiredo Filho, Filho of course just meaning junior, reached out to me. And he's like, wow, you're...
Your coverage of Brazil is really appreciated and people in Brazil are paying attention to it.
And he said, if I can ever be of help.
And I was like, yes, you can.
Because this is an important topic in its own right.
But it's also an important topic because of its implications for the United States.
There are some startling, almost eerie parallels between Brazil and the United States.
And so I have Paulo Figueiredo.
He is in Florida.
And he's going to be joining me for a conversation after this segment.
But as I was thinking about Brazil, I was thinking about Jair Bolsonaro and the Brazilian election.
coming about in the world. There is of course the global left. We often talk about the globalist, the global elite. But this global left is very old and its ideology is very old. There may be modifications to it. The global left 30 or 40 years ago was focused on building bigger welfare states. It was also focused on revolutionary left-wing activism, very often against United States involvement in foreign
countries. So we can put the Vietnam War in that bracket. And this was the left.
But there was a global left.
And if you went to different countries, all across Latin, South America, for example, you'd see it.
What there was not at that time was a global right.
Now, there was a right in America.
This was the Reagan right.
And it was mirrored to a large degree in Great Britain, where, of course, there was Margaret Thatcher and Thatcher was essentially a female version of Reagan.
No wonder the two of them got along fabulous because they were cut from the same cloth.
They had both kind of come up in the world from very middle, lower middle class origins.
They had both had a very similar view of the world, anti-communist and foreign policy.
Pro-market or capitalist and economic policy, certain kind of a no-nonsense approach to social issues like crime and so on.
Both of them are against the hippies.
And so the American right was matched by the English right.
But if you went anywhere else in the continent, you found that the right was completely different.
Now, yeah, there was and is kind of an old French right, but the idea of an old French right-winger is something like a count.
You know, some guy who has lost his aristocratic power, believes that democracy is a sham, believes that markets are a joke...
Doesn't like capitalists or merchants, considers them to be the very people who usurp the prerogatives of the aristocracy.
So this is the kind of guy who wears white gloves and doesn't like to talk to people and is, quite frankly, in the modern world, a bit of a weirdo.
And this is and was the European right.
And you'd find these kinds of guys all across Central America, people who claim to be descended from the Habsburg Empire.
I remember one guy who kept showing up at the Heritage Foundation, who claimed to speak like seven languages, and And in fact, he couldn't even have a conversation without going from one language to another and he'd be like, pardon me, I've broken into Slavic or pardon me, I'm accidentally speaking German without knowing it.
And we would be like, this guy doesn't fit in in any way with the American right.
But, and then if you went to Central and South America, the choice was either the left-wing revolutionaries, the Marxists, or on the other side you would have these, well, they were sort of tin-pot dictators.
these cardio dictatorships run by people like Pinochet, who were in no American sense right wingers. These were just thugs. These were military guys.
They'd taken power by force, often by overthrowing some elected or purportedly elected leader, and they would run the country as if it was their own private possession. So this was only right wing in the left's imagination, but not right wing in a sense that William F. Buckley or Reagan or anybody else would meaningfully recognize. Today, however, let's survey the global landscape.
We have in the United States, of course, we have Trump.
In Argentina, we have Javier Millet.
Now Millet is a lot like Trump, a lot like Trump in ideology, but he's a lot like Trump in personality.
He's over the top, he's outrageous, he will give it to the media.
So when you see Millet, you're like, wow, that guy, with a little bit of fixing for his English, that guy could run for office in the United States.
Then you listen to Giorgio Maloney in Italy, another person with a kind of obviously strongly anchored in Italy itself, but that's what it means to be an Italian nationalist.
Gert Wilders.
There is an Australian right that is emerging, and it's now recognizable.
These are the people who don't want to take the COVID vaccine, and these are people who don't like the Australian government's inclination towards censoring, quote, misinformation and disinformation.
I'm actually talking to some guys in Australia.
Debbie and I might be doing a tour in Australia to talk further about some of these things, but again, with a recognizably similar agenda.
Nigel Farage in Great Britain.
Let's look at Nagui Bukele in El Salvador.
Look at that guy. He suddenly emerges.
His agenda is very simple.
Defeat and destroy the gangs and let's make El Salvador the kind of most peaceful place in the world.
And he did it. He's done it.
Now, initially it looked like Bukele was just doing that.
That was his agenda. He's a single-issue guy.
He deserves credit for what he's done, but there is no broader ideological significance to it.
But no, Bukele then starts talking about God and family and patriotism and the idea of the individual.
I saw recently he's put out a notice that El Salvador is offering all kinds of incentives For really smart and capable people, distinguished scientists, entrepreneurs, people in all leading walks of life, even in the arts, to move to El Salvador to enrich the country.
And Bukele goes, we're not going to take people randomly who just kind of wander into our country, but we do have room.
But we're going to make sure we get the best people, people who will not only flourish in El Salvador, but they will be good for the other people who are in the country.
And notice how this is one of the great missing elements of our immigration policy.
We never ask, what are the immigrants going to do for us?
How are they going to make our country better?
Bukele is asking that kind of question.
So he, I would count as part of the global right.
Bolsonaro, of course, in Brazil.
Now, Bolsonaro is out of power.
But I noticed that since I've been talking about Brazil, I look at my ex, my Twitter, and when I click on followers, I see all these Brazilian names, one after the other after the other.
So they're now following me.
Why? Because I'm linking the issues that are going on in Brazil with issues that are going on in the United States and elsewhere.
Look at Pierre Polivere in Canada. Who's Pierre Polivere? I don't know if you've seen the social media clip of the guy eating the apple. This is the Canadian leader, he's eating an apple and some journalist comes up to him and starts asking him questions like, you know, well, aren't you really a Trump guy? And he's like, well, what have I said that makes me a Trump guy.
Well you're kinda like Trump.
How am I like Trump?
So the apple-eating guy who with plain-spoken, simple kind of counter-questions reduces this journalist to absolute idiocy and garbled pulp.
This is the conservative who is going to be running against Justin Trudeau and is in fact leading in the polls.
So the good news, and we have a lot of bad news these days, bad news in America, but also elsewhere.
The good news is that there is a counter-movement, a countervailing force, and it's a powerful force.
And it's picking up steam all around the world.
And what I think is really fascinating is that the global right is now linking up with itself across national borders.
This may seem a little paradoxical.
How can the guys who want to make El Salvador great again, and the guy who wants to make Argentina great again, and the guy who wants to make Great Britain great again, And the guy who wants to make America great again, it would seem like, well, they've got four different agendas.
They're all working in the interest of four different countries.
No, they're all working in the interest of patriotism, they're working in the interest of the individual, of the family, of the church, of the local community, and very exhilaratingly, also of freedom.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
Someone I've followed on social media.
His name is Paulo Figueiredo.
He is from Brazil and, in fact, joining us from Brazil.
He's an award-winning journalist.
He's been censored by the Brazilian Supreme Court.
He's an expert on Brazil, on Latin American projects.
He's also appeared on a bunch of programs, including PragerU and Tucker Carlson.
You can follow him on x at realp.com.
Figueredo, F-I-G-U-E-I-R-E-D-O. Paulo, thank you for joining me.
Really appreciate it.
And this stuff that is happening in Brazil, I think, is fascinating in its own right, but also has a larger significance for the United States and for the West.
I'd like to begin by just talking about what is going on In Brazil, we hear about this censorship of opposition journalists, dissidents, leading figures in the opposition party, I'm assuming in the Bolsonaro orbit.
Now, who is the guy who is doing this and based upon what authority?
It's a very interesting question.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
I've been following you for so long.
Such a big fan. You do such an amazing work.
Believe it or not, your documentary, The 2000 News, had a huge impact in Brazil.
We watched it closely as we have different but very serious concerns with our elections as well.
It had a very big impact.
In fact, I'm speaking to you from South Florida, because if I was in Brazil, I would be in prison right now.
That's how bad things are.
Until 2022, I was on regular TV, cable TV, on the number one show in the news TV in Brazil.
We had very high ratings in viewership.
I made this joke laughing with Tucker Carlson saying that I used to beat him most days.
So we used to have more viewers than him.
So that's how big our show was.
And that was until December 2022, when this justice that now became famous, thanks to Elon Musk, he ordered the block of all my social media in Brazil.
And we're talking about roughly 5 million people that used to follow me.
He ordered my bank accounts and financial assets to be frozen.
And he also issued a fine every time I said something, a few thousand dollars every time I said anything that it agrees.
And the last and not least serious measure was to cancel my Brazilian passport.
The reason he did that is that he couldn't arrest me since I was here in the U.S. I've been living here for a long time now.
Both of my daughters are American.
I'm an immigrant like you.
And now it's becoming public, something that has been ongoing in Brazil since 2019.
So immediately after Jair Bolsonaro, our Donald Trump, the Brazilian Donald Trump, as people often call him, as soon as he took office, the Supreme Court of Brazil decided to do a very weird thing.
So just to give you context, Brazil has been on the hands of the left for many, many years, at least since 1994, 1995.
Lula was present for two terms, then his successor Dilma Rousseff was present as well.
She was impeached for defrauding public accounts.
And then we had her vice president for a short period, and then we elected finally our first conservative since my grandfather.
My grandfather was also president of Brazil from 1979 to 1985, so he was the last conservative.
Until Johnny Bolsonaro.
Then we had Johnny Bolsonaro immediately after he got elected, the Supreme Court, which is composed by 11 judges, 11 justices.
Out of these 11 justices, 9 of them were appointed by Lula or his allies.
Okay, just to give you an idea on how bad that is.
And so they decided to open an investigation against fake news.
So that might sound weird for a lot of reasons.
The first reason is, well, what the hell is fake news?
Is there anything on Brazilian law about fake news?
Defining fake news?
No, there's nothing about that.
But the other thing...
That's very weird.
Usually, in the Western world, where the accusatory system prevails, courts don't open investigations.
Department of Justice, the accusators, the prosecutors, they open investigations.
And in Brazil, it's the same way.
We follow a very similar structure of government.
It's a republic with a presidential republic with three branches, independence, Congress, two houses in the Congress.
It's very similar. And in Brazil, yes, by the Brazilian law, only prosecutors can open investigations.
But there's an exception, and this exception exists in the U.S. as well.
When a crime is committed within the premises of the court, the court can't open an internal investigation.
And you've seen that happen in the U.S. when the Roe v.
Wade overturn was leaked and they open an investigation internally.
So in Brazil, they were very creative, as the left usually is, with the law.
They decided to say, well, people are slandering Supreme Court justices, meaning criticizing Supreme Court justices.
Some of the critics were truthful, some were not, and that's life, that's how democracy works.
And they decided to, instead of like, they couldn't file a lawsuit in regular court for anyone surrendering them, surrendering is included in Brazilian law, but they decided to do something different.
They decided that they could...
They said, well, this is being done on the internet.
So if it's done on the internet, it's done everywhere.
So if it's everywhere, it's in the court as well.
So therefore, we have the authority to open this investigation.
Wow. The first thing they did when they've done it was to censor an article published on a mainstream media magazine about how one of the justices were involved in corruption.
So that story was censored.
But then they used this as a vehicle to persecute and not exactly prosecute, but persecute Any conservative.
And what we, I can better explain it, but what we have been seeing for these past years are journalists like myself being persecuted.
We have at least five journalists, Brazilian big journalists here and next side of the U.S., comedians.
We have several businessmen, some of them billionaires, that had their homes raided.
All supporters of Jared Bolsonaro.
We have a We have a member of the Brazilian Congress in prison for 90 years for recording a video, like very harsh video against this Justice Demorais.
And during the elections, We got to the point, and I can better explain, but this is like the airplane view of that.
During the elections, before I got into my show, I used to get court orders saying, you can't say that about Lula, you can't say that about Lula, you can't say, like, for example, Lula was convicted for corruption, okay?
He was convicted for corruption for two levels of the justice, the first degree and the second degree.
By a panel of judges on the second degree.
Then he was convicted by a third degree, which is the superior of courts of justice.
Brazil has a four-tier system.
So he was convicted by several judges for corruption and bribery and money laundering.
The same nine Supreme Court justices that he appointed and his friends appointed decided to nullify his conviction because of a procedural reason.
And to be fair here, I think they had a good point.
But that was not...
They just found an excuse to make him able to run again.
So... And I couldn't call him, so instead of saying that he was found not guilty, I used to say that he was unconvicted.
So you used to call him unconvicted.
Of course, it's a way of playing with words, but I couldn't say that.
I got a court order saying, you can't say that.
Really? Like, what? Really?
It's true? Well, yes, it's true, but it's truthful information that may mislead the public.
I was like, wow, I've never heard of that.
The public is smart enough to decide what...
And I couldn't say that he was an ally of Nicolai Maduro.
I couldn't say that he was an ally of Ortega.
I couldn't say that he had a very harsh position against Christians.
I couldn't say that he was very lenient with the drug cartels.
And all that proved... Since he took office, all that happened.
First thing he did was receive Maduro, a narco-terrorist, sought by the Department of Justice of the United States.
He got him and received him in Brazil.
So, that's the level of the censorship that has been ongoing in Brazil for quite some time.
And the weird part, and I think you're going to find this very interesting, is that The United States government went out of their way to empower the morons during the elections.
Meaning, that's a public fact, it's not a conspiracy theory.
Don't worry, that was on the Financial Times.
The Department of Justice sent the CIA director, the Secretary of Defense, the Advisor for Foreign Affairs of Biden.
They all went to Brazil to exert pressure On Brazilian military leaders and officials to not challenge the election results in case Lula won.
And we can also talk about it.
But that's the case in a nutshell.
But now everyone knows what's happening because of Elon Musk.
Hey, let's take a pause.
Sorry if I talk too much. It's a big story.
Not at all, Paulo. Let's take a short pause.
When we come back, let's delve into it in more detail and trace out some of the implications for us here in the United States.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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I'm back with journalist Paulo Figueiredo.
You can follow him on x at RealPFigueiredo.
He's an award-winning journalist.
He's been censored by the Brazilian Supreme Court.
I erroneously said he was joining us from Brazil.
He's actually joining us from Florida.
Paulo, you know, when I think about what's happening in Brazil and in the United States, there seem to be eerie parallels because, as you mentioned, Bolsonaro is a figure who in his charisma and in some of his ideas, his agenda resembles Trump.
Lula has been a sort of solid leftist and is supported by leftists in the United States.
There was controversy over the presidential election.
Not only that, but Brazil appeared to have its own January 6th, which I guess was January 7th.
Was it January 8th?
Yes. We're good to go.
They are locking up people for misinformation and disinformation or on various other pretexts.
And as you say, they're defining misinformation so broadly that they're not just talking about whether you made an error in saying that Lula was convicted or unconvicted, but you're making truthful statements about his allies and they don't want you to say that not because it is false, but because it's true.
You're absolutely right. You listed some parallels.
When we see the Twitter files Brazil, we see that everything that was happening in the US, meaning you had government officials putting pressure on social media companies, To mold the social discourse and the debate on the society.
So they wanted some stories to be shadow banned, some people to be shadow banned, some people to be removed.
That in the U.S. was done informally by the deep states.
In Brazil, it was done officially by the Supreme Court.
And that's the way I put it, Dinesh, is that we got the same virus.
We just have different immune systems.
The U.S. is like that guy that used to be an athlete in high school or in college.
Now he's been drinking too much beer and maybe he's not in the best shape, a little bit of belly, but still, he's a strong guy.
Brazil is an old lady with nine years old, all underlying conditions you can imagine.
So the immune systems react differently, but the idea is the same.
What is the idea?
So the way I see is that after the...
Populist, you can call it national populist, conservative populist movement started in the 2010s.
You've seen Bolsonaro, you've seen Orban, you've seen even Macri in Argentina, it was kind of like the same thing.
You've seen Trump, of course, the Brexit.
You saw the conservatives gaining strength and the separation between that old type of like center establishment Republicans being dominated and going away to give place to these actually patriotic, more excited and more conservative electoral base.
So the left noticed that, well, they lost the monopoly of the facts because of social media, and they blame the rise of these guys on social media.
So that's what they did.
And you could see that in the US was ridiculous, right?
First they said, well, it's Russian misinformation.
Then, well, it was all because of social media.
And then you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal and all that.
You saw that.
And you can trace...
To 2021, the first time you saw even Democrat politicians talking about combating disinformation to protect democracy.
You can track that.
And you start seeing the first profiles being removed back then from social media.
And you saw all the networks, the platforms updating their terms of service.
That wasn't heard of before 2020, 2019.
That wasn't heard of. And So that's the virus spreading.
Because until then, I would say that in the Western world, free speech was like a settled matter.
I was like, well, we settled that.
Everyone has a right of free speech.
We started this 250 years ago, and we finally settled in the mid-20th century with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all that.
So that was the idea, right?
And then we started seeing these changes.
And in the U.S., you have the Democrats using the same language, the same terms.
The legislation is different.
The First Amendment is so well-written and so strong.
And American society protects the First Amendment so well.
Boldly, that they couldn't do what they wanted.
But if they could, they would.
They would do the exact same thing.
So, a question that I ask you today, what do you think it would happen if you had five out of your nine Supreme Court justices appointed by the left?
They would do the same thing that's happening in Brazil.
So, sometimes Americans think, well, this is a banana republic that's so distant from us.
We are not. We're very culturally similar.
Of course, we're different, but we're very culturally similar.
We have a very similar structure of government, and we both caught the same virus, which is they found a way around the democracy system, the democratic system.
And one of these ways is through the judiciary.
Because think about, if you're a billionaire, and you have two ways to...
Let's say you want to make the society more open, okay?
It's like, you get it?
You want to make the society more open?
You have two ways. Well, one, you can...
Fund campaigns for congressmen, and you have to elect a lot of members of Congress, and then there's the Senate, and then there's the check and balance, and then there's the judiciary on top of it with the judicial review.
This is very tedious and hard.
Lots of checks and balance.
Exactly what the founding fathers learned.
But then, if you have judges and the judiciary, and they have the judicial, they have the final work, and they're not They don't have to follow the law by the letter anymore or by its original meaning.
The law can be a living constitution, a living body.
So what's a living body?
Well, times change and we want progress.
Okay, so all you need is to control the people that are on top with judicial review, and then you control the world.
And that's called aristocracy, and that's happening in America as well.
Well, that's why Soros is funding campaigns for DAs and judges more than for candidates for the parliament.
So and like I said, very similar.
I live in the middle of both worlds, so I can see what's going on.
I mean, I think Brazil is a cautionary tale.
Yeah, I mean, to italicize what you're saying and really support it, I found it really interesting that when this guy, DeMoraes, writes, when he communicates or his office communicates with X, with Twitter, it would be one thing if they were to say, hey, listen, there's all this false information.
We have declared it to be false.
We take credit for banning all these people.
So please announce that by my decree, we're going to get all these guys kicked off of Twitter.
No. It's very interesting that he said, listen, I'm telling you to kick all these people off of X, but it should appear like you, Twitter, have made the decision.
In other words, it should appear like they have violated your regulations.
Now, what does that tell you?
What it tells me is that in Brazil, as in America, this is a little bit of a secret operation.
And by secret, it cannot openly state its goals.
Because if it did, it would make it too obvious to the Brazilian people, as to the American people, that, well, we're living under a kind of a dictatorship.
If we have a committee that is an arbiter of truth and they can not only ban but in some cases lock up or go after, persecute as you say, people who are going against them, then the whole meaning of democracy is a sham.
I mean remember we've had lots of sham democracies in history, the German Democratic Republic which was communism in the old Soviet orbit, it called itself the GDR, it used the name democracy but it wasn't a democracy in any meaningful sense.
Do you think, Paolo, that there is a move led by globalist elites occurring across the world to convert democracy from what it used to be, civil liberties, checks and balances, power to the people, into something very different, which is to say a certain type of tyranny imposed from the top, but using the fig leaf or the
rhetoric or the camouflage of democracy to impose in various countries across the world a kind of new form of autocracy or dictatorship?
But an autocracy that pretends to be the guardian of democracy.
You're absolutely right.
And most dictatorships, they pretend they're democracies.
Most people don't know, but the Constitution of China protects free speech.
China has elections.
Cuba has elections. Venezuela supposedly has elections.
They all pretend they're democracy.
You're absolutely right.
Most dictatorships in the 20th century used to have the name democratic.
And on the name of the country to pretend they were a democracy.
So the war, it doesn't mean anything to them.
It's just a pretty war that can allow them to do whatever they want.
And what we are seeing is exactly what you describe it.
It's a global or a globalist alliance to At least and free speech.
And we saw that very, very intensively during the pandemic.
That was very intensive, but it's happening all over the world.
Germany has passed legislation regulating free speech.
Canada, let's not even start with Canada.
Canada is a mess.
Ireland, even the European Parliament.
And you've been seeing more and more of that all over the world.
The Democrats tried to pass something similar in the U.S., but they couldn't.
If they could, they would.
And that's what I keep telling people.
Wait. If Donald Trump loses the election and loses the House, the Senate as well, you go the same way.
I have no question about it.
It's a matter of how and what speed, in what pace, but you definitely end up in the same place as we are.
Look, Dinesh, five years ago, if you told me five years ago this was happening, I would say, nah, get out of here.
In Brazil, I would say, get out of here.
Nah, Brazil has a very long tradition with free speech and all that.
It's never going to happen.
And now it's happening, and a large chunk of the population, it's the minority, like one-third, still supports Morais for what he's doing.
So... The cultural aspect, as you know very well, has a strong weight on this.
Yeah, I mean, we have to concede, and this may come as a surprise to many people, that tyranny is appealing because, you know, it's appealing to be able to use arbitrary power against your political opponents.
So if somebody else is doing it and you happen to be on that side, you're going to cheer.
So, for example, lots of people in the United States will cheer the idea that Donald Trump is going to prison.
And even if you push them and say, let's say that you can't really get him for something...
Are you in favor of, like, just using any pretext to just lock the guy up so he can't be on the ballot?
Oh, yeah, I support that.
So that tells you that tyranny has a constituency.
Guys, I've been talking to Paulo Figueiredo, award-winning journalist who's been censored by the Brazilian Supreme Court.
Follow him on x at Real P Figueiredo.
Paulo, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me to Nation Brazil.
People really appreciate it.
I'm continuing my discussion of Abraham Lincoln, the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
My book of reference that I'm drawing on but also responding to is Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided.
And at the heart of Lincoln's political philosophy is the Declaration of Independence.
And not merely the phrase in the Declaration that is all men are created equal.
That was very important to Lincoln that you can see the direct bearing of that idea on the slavery debate.
But also consent of the governed.
Consent of the governed. Because Lincoln realized that you have a problem when the governed do not consent to all men are created equal.
So in other words, there is the potential inside the Declaration itself.
For some conflict or tension between the beginning and the end.
Now, it's been an interesting question for a lot of people who go to law school and who study political or legal philosophy.
What is the relationship of the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution?
When was the Declaration of Independence adopted?
1776. It was the charter of emancipation, you might say.
We know about the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln, but the Declaration of Independence was a kind of emancipation proclamation for America from Great Britain.
And it was written, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, then approved, and then issued.
Now, the Constitution came much later.
1787 to 1789 was the constitutional debates.
So, over really a decade later, more than a decade later, we have the Constitution, and there are some people who argue that these two documents are unrelated.
They are for different purposes, and And they are different kinds of things.
But that's it.
It's a revolutionary statement and important in that respect, but it's completely different from the Constitution, which is a legal manual.
The Constitution is a set of not just general affirmations or declarations, but rather the Constitution is a set of codes, of rules.
It lays out a structure of government.
It assigns responsibilities and powers to Congress and to the executive branch and to the judiciary.
So, according to this school of thought, the Constitution tells us how we should live now.
It is our guiding manual.
It is our supreme law of the land.
And the Declaration, well, it historically precedes the Constitution, but it doesn't really do anything for or with the Constitution.
Now, it should be emphasized that nothing...
Could be further from Lincoln's own view.
Why? Because Lincoln's view is that a constitution is a letter of the law.
But a letter of the law, by the nature of it, is going to, number one, create ambiguities.
In other words, you have general terms that need to be interpreted.
The constitution, in other words, is not self-interpreting.
Somebody else has to interpret it.
But interpret it how?
Interpret it in what light?
Moreover, there are many questions that come up that might touch upon constitutional principles, but the founders didn't have anything like this in mind.
And so the question then becomes, how does a constitution, a general document, in fact relatively short, how does it illuminate the massively complex set of questions that could come up, some of which would be completely unanticipated by the people who drafted that document?
Now, for some people, there is no answer to this question.
You just have to kind of, well, do your best.
Do your best and take the Constitution, try to excavate certain general principles out of it, and apply them to new situations with as much creative fidelity as you can.
But you can see that this can become an extremely...
It's a troublesome and fraught process.
Why? Because we all have our own ideological assumptions, prejudices, biases.
So it's very tempting for judges to say, well, the Constitution kind of means what I think it should mean.
I wasn't a founder, but if I had been, I would have put, you know, an abortion right in there.
So even though it's not really in there, I'm going to sort of read it into that.
Now, what Lincoln had to say about all this is that with law, you have the letter of the law.
But you also have what could be called the spirit of the law, or to put it differently, the conscience of the law.
Montesquieu wrote a book called The Spirit of the Laws, and in that book Montesquieu tries to show that laws don't just have a wording, they also have a spirit.
And what the spirit of the law tells you is, what was the motivation of the law?
What was its kind of guiding idea?
What was its animating spirit?
And for Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence is the animating spirit of the Constitution.
Or to put it differently, the Constitution is the letter and the Declaration is the spirit.
The Declaration is kind of the conscience of the Constitution.
How? Well, the Declaration is going to tell you where the Constitution wants the country to go.
So let's take, for example, this question of slavery.
The Founders, says Lincoln, allow slavery.
But not because they like it.
They allow it because they have to.
So there's a difference between the principles of the Constitution and the compromises of the Constitution.
A principle is where you...
Actually want to be.
This is what I believe.
A compromise is this is where I don't want to be, but at the same time I do want to get a union, so I will provisionally agree to this, but my goal is for this not to last very long.
So it's kind of like, you know, your 30-year-old kid, your 30-year-old son wants to come and live with you.
And you're like, well, this is probably not the best arrangement, but guess what?
You're out of work, so I'll let you do it.
But you need to be looking for a job.
So what's the principle?
The principle is that this is my house.
This is Debbie's in my house.
We're going to allow our grown children to occupy it for a while.
But let's be very clear that that's a compromise.
That is an adjustment to an unfortunate situation.
In reality, what we're aiming for is ejection, freedom, emancipation, living on your own, proving that you can support yourself.
So that's the goal.
That's really what the job of a parent is, is to prepare their children to be independent, in a sense, in life.
Well, I only use that by way of analogy.
So for Lincoln...
The purpose of the Constitution is to realize the principles of the Declaration.
For Lincoln, it's understood that the founders will have to make compromises, but Lincoln's view is, over time, there's going to be change.
Now, not random change. We don't have a living Constitution.
You don't steer the document wherever you want.
There are certain provisions, like amendments to the Constitution, for the Constitution to change in line with modern developments, but for Lincoln, the real forward way for the Constitution is, you might say, backward.
And what I mean by that is the way for the Constitution to know where it's going, where the country is going, is to constantly look back to the Declaration 10 years earlier and see what is it that we are really trying to achieve here, answer,
We are trying to fully realize a vision for a society where you've got citizens of equal moral worth and equal rights striving in an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity to realizing what we all call the American dream.
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