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April 23, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HAMAS ON CAMPUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep817
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Coming up, I want to talk about Hamas on campus, these explosive protests that are going on both on the West Coast and the East Coast, and the dilemma of progressive Jews that have supported these resistance movements in the past.
I'll review the opening statements in Trump's criminal...
Hush money case in New York.
And author and podcaster Jeremy Slate joins me.
We're going to talk about whether we're witnessing, as with Rome, the decline and fall of America.
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What are we to make of these protests on campus that appear to have a node center, which is Columbia University? And I'm not really surprised it's this node center because if you've been to Columbia, it is in the part of New York that sort of runs right into Harlem. Columbia has always had a seedy aspect to it. I don't
just mean the surroundings, I mean Columbia itself. I remember years ago taking Danielle when she was kind of college prospecting and we went to Columbia and I felt kind of uneasy at Columbia and I'm like this is my first time really walking around the campus.
There is an eerie quality to Columbia.
It's a creepy place. And now we see why.
Not only is it ensconced in a creepy environment, But they have let a whole bunch of creepy people into the university as students and as faculty.
And they've done it really in the name of diversity.
Now, this is all very interesting because Colombia just looks like a third world country.
And you've got students from all over the place, lots of Muslim students, lots of radical students of color.
And these are people who wear hijabs and they wear Arafat-style towels and they wear all kinds of garments and so on.
And they're doing kind of Palestinian dances and playing Palestinian music.
Some of them are shouting in Arabic.
And you just have to look at it and say, you know...
Are we in a foreign country?
And the answer is yes.
Colombia, to that degree, has become a foreign country, at least foreign to many of us.
And by the way, I'm not making some kind of an ethnic or racial point.
I feel like a foreigner at Colombia.
Even though you have a lot of brown-skinned people who look like me, the point is these are people with a deep hatred, not just of Israel, but of America.
A deep hatred for the founding, a deep hatred for traditional institutions.
They are trying to make a radical revolution at Columbia.
And not just at Columbia, but at Yale, at Berkeley, many other places.
The college is very reluctant to call the cops.
Even though, imagine if this had been some sort of a white supremacist group.
There would be cops all over the place.
But because these people are persons of color, they're leftists, the decision to call the cops is like some massive moral conundrum.
Oh, guys, don't you remember Kent State?
You can't really call the cops.
Well, finally, the university does call the cops.
And guess what?
You have a faculty walkout to protest the calling of the cops.
And then you have a staff walkout to protest the calling of the cops.
So you can begin to see here where the power lies.
The power lies with the left.
And the university is in with the left, but not just the university, also the media.
Also the Biden administration.
In other words, these protests are coordinated.
There's funding for them.
There's organization. This is an elaborate, this is not a spontaneous eruption of students who just decide, oh, we're going to protest the genocide in Gaza.
And by the way, what genocide?
There is no genocide.
This is, well, I don't want to make light of it by calling it genocide light, but genocide refers to the intentional destruction of an ethnic population.
That's the meaning of it.
Here's the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Now, is Israel trying to destroy the Palestinians and wipe them out?
No. Israel is trying to destroy a terrorist organization called Hamas that admittedly is embedded in those civilian populations and in fact uses the civilian populations as human shields.
But there's no intention to wipe out a civilian population, so it's not genocide.
Besides, if you look at history, people act as if, you know, oh, there were only a thousand people killed in the original Hamas attacks.
Israel has already killed 20,000 people.
All right. Well, how many people were killed in Pearl Harbor compared to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
A lot more civilians died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed at Pearl Harbor.
How many Americans were killed at 9-11?
3,000. How many people were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of that?
Some 400,000.
Did anyone accuse the United States of genocide?
Well, I suppose a few people did.
But in general, no.
Why? Because it's fully understood as a rule of warfare that if some other guy attacks first, you have the right to retaliate.
And if the consequences of that retaliation exceed the consequences of the original attack, so be it.
Because who started it?
In this case, it was Hamas that launched the original terrorist attacks.
Now, there's a very interesting video on social media of Professor Shai Davidei, this Jewish guy.
He's a professor at Columbia, and they've locked him out of the gates of Columbia.
They've kind of invalidated his faculty ID. He can't get in.
They're like, you've got to use a different entrance.
You can't go by the protesters.
And he's like, well, I I'm a professor.
Why not? And so, a lot of people, including many conservatives, are now cheering this guy on, and they're like, oh, go, Professor Davida, expose the anti-Semitism, and so on, and me too.
I mean, I agree. I'm on his side on this.
But here's something very interesting, and that is that, as you might expect, Professor Shai Davida is a leftist.
He's a progressive, and he's not alone.
There are a number of Jewish progressives on campus who are now saying, I feel threatened, I feel encircled, I'm facing all this anti-Semitism.
But we've got to remember, and it's not unkind to point this out, that these are the same progressives, by the way, Professor David, I included, who if you just go back a few years, 2020, They had the black square as their little handle or marker.
They were BLM, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd.
We support the riders.
We're part of the resistance.
We need to overthrow white supremacy.
Now, many of these Jewish progressives did that in the belief that they were part of the minority faction.
In other words, they thought, yeah, racism's bad, sexism's bad, homophobia's bad, anti-Semitism is bad, and so this way we get to ally with all these resistance movements against, if you will, the kind of white power structure, which we're not part of.
Now they discover their dismay that the left wants none of it.
The left doesn't want them.
The left is like, no, you're a colonialist.
Israel is an occupying power.
You are part of the white supremacy that we want to overthrow.
So the only point I want to make is I don't want to fault hypocrisy.
I'm simply saying, isn't it tragic that Jewish progressives have built...
Help to build this resistance and thought of themselves as a part of it.
And now this resistance, like a python, turns on them and begins to encircle them.
And now they perhaps belatedly...
And this is, I think, the good that I think can come out of this.
Because we as conservatives need to realize that this is a wedge issue for the left.
And what we need to do, by and large, is now peel off...
All the former resistance guys like Davide and say to them, you know what?
You actually don't belong on that side.
You might have thought at one time that those were your friends, those were your allies.
Actually, those are the people who hate you.
And if they had their way, they would get rid of you.
They wouldn't just get rid of Israel.
They would get rid of you.
So you need to think through that.
You need to find your real allies.
And your real allies are not on the left, but now only on the right.
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I want to talk about the Trump case in New York.
This is the so-called Hush Money case.
But there is a brief update on the other Trump case in New York.
And this is the case with Judge Engeron.
This is the civil case.
That was brought at the instigation of Letitia James, the New York Attorney General.
And as you know, Judge Engeron imposed this preposterous fine on Trump.
He had to put up a bond.
The bond was then appealed to the appellate court.
The appellate court lowered the bond to $175 million.
Still a preposterous and absurd number.
But guess what? Trump found a company that was willing to float the bond.
Now, Letitia James went to Judge Ngaran and said, you should decline this bond because the company hasn't provided adequate paperwork.
We're not sure it has adequate liquidity.
So this was an effort to try to cancel the bond to put Trump back in a desperate situation where he'd have to go find another bond or, failing that, have his properties one by one confiscated by the Attorney General.
But this is a case where I think even Judge Ngaran realized that this is taking things beyond the beyond.
So he looked at the bond and he recognized that it is coming from a legitimate insurance company.
And so he rejected the plea by the Attorney General to invalidate the bond.
So what that means is that Trump's properties are basically secure.
This appeal is going to take forever before we hear it.
In other words, something like two to three years.
So it's now off the docket, off the table, not something that we're going to be talking about.
But I want to say just a word about the other case.
And the other case is, this is the Stormy Daniels case, the Michael Cohen case.
And I find it interesting that Michael Avenatti, this is the Michael Avenatti, the guy who was once trumpeted by CNN for president, a dubious character.
But guess what?
I mean, look at this case.
Are there any undubious characters?
I mean, you got Stormy Daniels.
Dubious. Michael Cohen, dubious.
Michael Avenatti, dubious.
So they're all dubious characters.
But Avenatti says, and this is a very interesting theory, that he's speaking from personal knowledge.
Let's remember, Michael Avenatti was Stormy Daniels' attorney.
So he actually knows what's going on.
He gets the scoop from his own client.
And what Michael Avenatti says is that this whole deal was from the beginning a shakedown scheme concocted by Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels to get money out of Trump.
So think of how diabolical this is because Michael Cohen is the inside man.
He goes to Trump and he goes, guess what?
We're being shaken down for this money.
I think we better pay.
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Oh yes, I think you really better pay because otherwise, you know, we just don't need the scandal.
And so Trump decides, okay, well, I didn't do anything, but I'll go along with this because I just want, let's maybe just get this whole hassle to go away.
And a key point is that this happens all the time.
This happens all the time if your affluent people and companies are all the time hit up for money by people, often on completely preposterous claims.
Debbie knows that we're facing something like this on a small scale.
Not involving Stormy Daniels, I hasten to point out.
But no, it's just a...
This actually involves...
Involves a media company.
I did a contract for them.
They asked me to do some stuff.
I did it. I got paid. We signed a contract.
No big deal. It turns out that there was an investor in that company who has gone bankrupt.
And so the bankruptcy court is now suing me to get that money back Even though I've never heard of this guy, this investor, I had no dealings with him.
I've only been dealing with a legitimate media company that's still functioning, by the way.
But what is this all about?
Well, it's an old-fashioned shakedown.
It's basically an attempt to say to Dinesh, listen, you're a busy guy.
You don't need this kind of hassle.
You don't have to pay us the full amount.
Why don't you just agree to pay us part of it?
We're just trying to essentially claw some money back out of the as much as we can for the bankruptcy court.
And so all the time people are dealing with these kinds of situations where you have to weigh the cost of fighting it out, going through litigation, hiring a bankruptcy lawyer, dealing with it.
It is nothing more than a scam.
And that's Avenatti's point.
This was a scam.
Now Avenatti's willing to testify.
Boy, it would give the whole trial a whole new swing if that were in fact to happen.
And I would love to see it happen.
But the point I want to stress here is that we should not assume, I think we know that the case by and large is bogus, but we should not even assume that anything happened between Trump and Stormy Daniels absent evidence that suggests it did.
The very fact that Trump made the payments proves by itself nothing at all.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Jeremy Slate.
He's an author. He's a podcaster.
He's host of the Create Your Own Life podcast.
He studied literature at Oxford University.
He has a master's in the early Roman Empire from Seton Hall University.
He's written a number of books.
The most recent, Command Your Brand.
You can follow him on X at Jeremy Ryan Slate.
Jeremy, welcome. Thank you for joining me.
I appreciate it.
I thought I'd start by talking to you about what you studied, which is to say the Roman Empire.
I guess it was maybe the 17th century or maybe the 18th century when Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he sought to Trace why this great empire that was the largest of its kind in the world at the time collapsed and seemed to collapse to some degree of its own weight.
Now, do you think that America can be compared to Rome?
Are we in decline?
Do you see some of the same signs that were present when Rome began to disintegrate?
Well, I think there's a few different things here.
Decline of Fall of the Roman Empire, it's funny, 1776 was a very interesting year because it was a great year for America and it was also the year that Decline of Fall of the Roman Empire was written.
And I think there's a few terms that people get really confused on that I think are important to handle before we get into this.
And when people talk about Rome, Rome actually has three eras in time.
It's founded in 753 BC, but it's initially a kingdom.
And it has seven traditional kings, the first of which is Romulus.
The kings fall in 509 to a guy named Brutus.
The Brutai family, or the Brutus family, is often credited with being the destroyer of kings, because if we go in the future, it's a Brutus that kills Caesar.
So in 509, we have the rise of the Roman Republic, and the Republic lasts till 31 years.
Which, after the Battle of Actium, Augustus declares himself to be not emperor, but first citizen, because Romans did not like this idea of royalty since they had dealt with traditional kings.
So from 31 until the late 400s, we have the Western Roman Empire, right?
We have, and then in the East, we have the Eastern Roman Empire, which goes till 1453.
So those are kind of your three eras, ending in 476 in the West, ending in 1453 in the East.
And that's the confusion people look at first and foremost.
The other thing is, which Rome actually fell?
Because if you ask the people in the East, they thought they were Romans, right?
So some people will say 1453 is the fall, others will say 476.
So those are the things to get out of the way initially.
Now I think the thing that Time Magazine just did a thing about this last month...
People are going way too hard on this Trump is Caesar thing because they really want to take somebody like Julius Caesar and compare it to Trump and make it look like Donald Trump is this terrible person.
And the Roman Revolution, which lasts from 130 until 31, is the time period that Caesar is towards the tail end of.
I believe, and in my research I've seen this, that we're well past that.
I look at Rome's late 3rd century, and I often say, Dinesh, that history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
So if you look at the late 3rd century, I'm looking from about 230 until 285.
Rome's dealing with things that it should have fallen at that point in time.
Number one, 15,000% inflation.
It's also dealing with a massive immigration crisis.
And it's dealing with a central power issue.
And interestingly enough, our founders were smart enough to handle the central power issue by the 10th Amendment, which we currently aren't applying.
So if you want to look at where we are...
That's where I put us.
And at the same time, there's this reformer that comes in at this time period.
His name is Diocletian. And he does a few different things, which actually give the empire almost another 150 years until 476.
One of the negative things that he does is he does persecute Christians.
But the things that he does that really help the empire at this point in time is he standardizes currency.
He handles the military, and he takes the Empire and splits it into an East and West because this giant thing is much easier to control.
So if you want to place us, that's where I put us.
I think it can be handled, but if we go too much further, I don't think we can fix it.
This is fascinating, Jeremy, and I want to highlight a couple of the critical points that you made.
The first one is that Rome had this almost half-millennium republican phase in which Rome was a republic, and that's the republic that Brutus wanted to conserve when he conspired with Cassius to get rid of Julius Caesar.
A second point you made is that the Roman Empire split into two.
There was an Eastern and a Western Roman Empire, and typically when we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, what Gibbon was talking about was the fall of the Western Roman Empire, because the Eastern Roman Empire continued until Constantinople was overrun by the Turks in 1453.
So it lasted a thousand years beyond the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
And you mentioned some critical factors.
You mentioned currency.
You mentioned immigration. What about the idea of just a kind of endemic moral corruption that seems to have seeped into Rome?
I mean, I don't know if this is just the fruit of hereditary power or the fruit of the fact that the Romans had mass slavery, so they were able to do what they wished with people from really so many different continents, because ultimately the Roman Empire collapsed by force, right? In other words, barbarian hordes came in from the north, the Huns, the Lombards.
Absolutely. So not exactly, because once again, we have to remember that history is written by the victors, and most of what we know about late Rome comes from Eastern Rome.
And in the late 5th century, the Emperor Justinian wants to reunite East Rome and West Rome so he could be the emperor of all the Romans.
And in an attempt to...
Basically, save Rome, he destroys what's left of it.
At that point in time, in the late 5th century, the emperor had just become a figurehead.
And that figurehead was already ruled by barbarian kings.
So, in 476 is when the barbarian king, Odoacer, says, okay, we're done with this whole thing of having...
We've been ruling you guys for a hundred years.
We're already in charge.
So it wasn't really by force.
It was something that had gradually become the situation, and it kind of all falls apart when Justinian says, I'm going to bring this thing back together.
So I think that is one misconception people have about the ending.
Interesting. What about the factor that I mentioned a moment ago, just about the fact that, I mean, I remember, and I'm getting admittedly some of this as much from Shakespeare as I am from direct Roman sources themselves, but this idea that the Roman Republic was sustained by a kind of Republican virtue, if you will, by a civic virtue.
Later, Montesquieu makes the same point.
Civic virtue is essential to a republic.
Montesquieu's implication being that when you then go to monarchical institutions, there's no accountability.
The king is making all the decisions.
Nothing depends upon what you do.
So you can do pretty much whatever you want.
And so there's a kind of cultural and moral decay that sets in.
Was that a factor in the erosion of kind of the old Republican Roman virtues?
Well, I think when you look at it, so Rome didn't have a written constitution.
It was just it was enforced by the group saying, okay, this is how we do things and we don't change them.
And Augustus understood that when he became the first emperor.
And that is why he didn't call himself an emperor.
He didn't call himself a king.
He called himself the princeps or the first citizen.
So they still continued many of the republican things.
The senate was there. The offices were there of the Corsus Sanorum.
But when you look at it, he just put himself ahead of these things and he tried to respect what was called the Republic as much as he could.
So he was this guy ruling with the Republic.
And when you look at the Empire, the Empire had two parts to it.
It had the first part until the late 200s, which is called the Principate.
That's where we got our word Prince from.
And that's really what rules in the way Augustus ruled.
After that, we have what's called the Dominate.
And that's really what goes to the end.
And that's these dominating despotic rulers.
So, though the Republic doesn't continue, you know, we do have a bad ruler here and there, but there are some pretty decent emperors in that first, you know, several hundred years.
We have in 93, the Emperor Nerva is the first of what's known as the five good emperors.
The last of those five good emperors that dies in 180 is Marcus Aurelius.
And the thing that they had done differently is they started this process of not giving their son the next job as emperor, but actually adopting the best qualified adult closest And you could adopt a full adult at that point in time and give them your money, your titles, and everything else.
So they do this for five emperors.
Marcus Aurelius changes that and he names his Corrupt spoiled son Commodus Emperor at the age of 16 and that's really the thing that changes how emperors function and we we have After Commodus we have what are known as the Barak Emperor So these are emperors that are raising armies and saying I'm the guy in charge and because I have the most power I'm gonna be the person that's Emperor and toward the end of this we have
You mentioned the moral decay. We have this guy named Ella Gabel us and Ella Gabel us is He was a priest of the cult of Elagabal.
He had the entire city of Rome worship a black rock.
He had them attend a wedding of his black rock to another rock.
He named his hairdresser the person in charge of the grain supply.
And he was carried around in a chariot by prostitutes.
So things weren't going really so well in kind of the mid to late 3rd century.
That does get better with Diocletian and Constantine, but it is one of the major things that causes that decay.
I mean, I realize, of course, looking over the vast history of Rome, there are good emperors, there are bad emperors.
I mean, what you said a little earlier fascinates me, namely that Rome did not cast aside completely the trappings of being a republic, but rather...
Power moved away from the Roman Senate toward the, quote, first citizen who was functioning as a monarch, and yet they were putting on a show as if to say we're still a republic.
And I say that because, to some degree, I think that's happening in the United States now.
Namely, the fact that we've got all these institutions...
And they are functioning according to various codes and decorum.
Look at the Trump case that's going on right now in New York.
It has all the outward decorum of being a normal case.
Until you begin to look a little more closely and you're like, what are they going after this guy exactly for?
You know, some woman put a shakedown on him and, you know, he decided for whatever reason, okay, I'm gonna pay her off and he did it through his lawyer.
He didn't even use campaign funds, but it's like, no, he was trying to interfere in the 2016 election by doing that.
I mean, what could be more nuts?
And that's why I disagree with people trying to do the whole Trump is Caesar thing, because I think if you look at it, a lot of people might disagree with me on this, but I think we stopped to be a functional republic in 1913, because if you look at it, that was the year that the Federal Reserve Act passes.
That's the year that We're good to go.
What we know is the Republic to be dying.
So that's why we haven't been a Republican a long time, but we like to tell people we are, Dinesh.
It's been an interesting, you know, 100 years.
I mean, for me, it's interesting that right about that time, you also have the first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, and he becomes the first president to openly attack the American founding.
In other words, he attacks the Constitutional Republic.
He inaugurates a progressivism that even to this day defines itself as moving away from the founding.
I mean, why would you say the founders are bigots, they're racist, we need to take their statues down, unless you thought that progressivism means getting away from all that, keeping our distance from all that.
So this is a very interesting point.
Jeremy, before we go, I want you to talk about your current work you've been doing.
You've been studying in your recent books, including Command Your Brand.
You've been studying high performers in our society, presumably maybe in all societies.
Talk a little bit about what the distinctive characteristics are of these high performers.
What makes them successful?
I think the number one thing that I found in every single one of them is adversity.
They embrace things that are difficult and they want to become the best at what they are.
And if you look at somebody like a great example is Tom Brady, right?
Tom Brady, you know, he barely started in high school.
He barely starts at Michigan.
He's drafted in the sixth round.
And all of those things actually put him in a position where he has to work harder.
He has to study harder. And if you look at it, Adversity is really a crucible.
It's something that you come through and by the time you come out the other side, you're different.
And I think that's what's very interesting about high performers.
They embrace it. They don't run away from it because they know that process is going to make them who they should become.
The other thing as well...
And this is really what I've talked about in the book, Command Your Brand, is they embrace their message.
They're somebody that says, I know that everybody might not agree with this, but I know it's important and I know I need to get it out there and I'm going to make an impact about this.
I'm not going to rely on others to get my story out.
Because I think far too often, if you rely on others to get your story out, They're going to get out the wrong story.
They're not going to get it out at all.
You have to be the one that tells your story.
So when you look at high performers, there are people that take full responsibility.
They don't say it's someone else's responsibility.
They take full responsibility.
And frankly, if you look at some of the high performers I've looked at, A lot of them are entrepreneurs because I think entrepreneurship is the best performance sport you can look at.
Because every person that, if you talk to people about the different businesses they've started, they've started so many.
And those early ones, they don't look so great.
But they continue to work.
They continue to become the person they need to be.
They continue to tell their story.
And that's where those incredible stories are written.
I mean, I remember following Jeff Bezos from the early days of Amazon in part because I'm a bibliophile and I kind of followed the book market.
I've also been obviously an author and so on.
But what I didn't realize is that the guy started numerous businesses before that with very mixed success.
And then finally, he found a groove.
He found a kind of home run.
And I think part of his genius was to just run with that and recognize that you not only have the world's best bookstore, but you can now, there's no reason that you can't sell cars and other things.
And so you become essentially this consumer behemoth, but all starting out with being an online bookstore.
And I think that's what's important too, because I think our society tells people, you know, it's better to not try than fail.
And I think when you look at it, failure has a ton of value, Dinesh.
If you can take that failure and learn from it.
You know, I started five businesses that did not go well before I started Command Your Brand back in 2016.
And each one of those things has taught me a skill I still use to this day.
So if you can take losing As a way to gain a skill or never lose again, there is so much value in that.
Very good stuff, Jeremy. Very inspiring.
Thank you for joining me, guys.
I've been talking to Jeremy Slate, his most recent book, Command Your Brand.
You can follow him on x at Jeremy Ryan Slate.
Jeremy, a real pleasure. Thanks.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. We are now in the concluding section of Harry Jaffa's book Crisis of the House Divided.
And this is going to give us the opportunity to sum up some of the key themes that we've covered now over, well, quite a few weeks.
And I want to begin with the core of Lincoln's refutation of popular sovereignty.
Popular sovereignty was the heart of Douglass's position.
It was the principle that guided the law that Douglass engineered or brought to fruition, ensured its passage.
The law was the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
And popular sovereignty simply is the right of majorities.
In territories and states to make up their own mind about the issue of slavery, to vote it up or to vote it down.
And Douglass liked to call this the doctrine of self-government.
And you can see the tremendous appeal of this idea because the idea seems to say nothing more than that people are the rulers of themselves and should make their own decisions.
And how can Lincoln, like, disagree with this?
So here's Lincoln.
This is from his Peoria speech.
And this is Lincoln's refutation.
The doctrine of self-government, says Lincoln, is right.
But it has no just application as here attempted.
What's Lincoln saying?
Yeah, the principle is true.
But it doesn't apply in this situation at all.
Why not? Or perhaps I should say, this is Lincoln continuing, that whether it has such an application depends upon whether or not the Negro is a man.
Boom. Lincoln is saying, alright, whether or not you can decide up or down on slavery depends on a further question.
Is the black man, in fact, a man?
Here's Lincoln, continuing in his very clear syllogistic style, very lawyer-like.
If he is not a man, why, in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him.
So, if the black man is not a man, then sure, a white man or any other man has the right to rule him.
To rule him in the same way that, for example, a man might rule over a dog, or over a horse, or to use Lincoln's own favorite analogy, hogs.
But, says Lincoln, but if the Negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern himself?
Oh, yeah. You want to govern yourself, but if I am a man, I have the right to govern myself.
I have that same right.
Why? Because I, like you, enjoy the same status of being a man.
And by man here, Lincoln means a human being, an adult human being who is in possession of these natural rights.
Here's Lincoln. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government.
But when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government.
That is despotism.
So, Lincoln is saying that the right to choose makes no sense if you are going to exercise it to enslave other people.
They too have the right to choose.
So Lincoln is right back now to the Declaration of Independence.
And quoting it, Lincoln says, and I'm going to go to the end of the passage, what I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
And isn't that just a beautiful summary of what the Declaration itself says?
No man has the right to rule another man without consent.
Now, we often hear Lincoln quoted from the Gettysburg Address that our government is a government of the people, for the people and by the people.
And it's important for us to realize, given all that we've now studied and learned and thought about, that that is actually an incomplete description of the American government.
Because if the American government was nothing more than a government of, by, and for the people, as reflected in majority rule, then Douglass' position would be valid.
Because then the people...
Meaning, acting through a majority could choose to enslave a minority or a bunch of minorities.
And frankly, if the majority has the right to enslave minorities using force, the question then arises, why shouldn't minorities, if they have the power, also enslave majorities if they can pull it off?
And that would put you right back to monarchy or aristocracy, ancient forms of government.
Freud's point is that the American system is government of, by, and for the people, but dedicated to a certain proposition, that proposition being that all men are created equal.
So in other words, democracy by itself is insufficient.
Democracy itself relies upon a moral framework of right and wrong that precedes democracy, that is in fact the foundation for democracy, and that if you deny that foundation, democracy itself loses its validity.
This is what Lincoln is getting at.
So majorities do not have the right to do whatever they want.
The power of majorities is constrained.
And by the way, the founders also knew this.
That's why we have the phrase limited government.
What does limited government mean?
It means the power of the majority goes this far and no further.
At least that's the way it ought to be.
Now, limited government has been greatly eroded in our time.
This began almost 100 years ago with the progressive movement.
It began with FDR. It continued with LBJ. We have gone a long way away from the limited government envisioned by the founders.
A second point I want to make is that part of the genius of Lincoln in these debates is to cut off Douglass from his own natural allies in the South.
What I mean is that the power of Douglass was that he was holding together two separate coalitions that were linked but not the same.
The Northern Democrats and the Southern Democrats.
Now, the Northern Democrats lived in free states.
They were not pro-slavery.
But on the other hand, the Northern Democrats were kind of soft on the issue.
They were very susceptible to Douglass' argument.
Hey, listen, why don't we let the states decide for themselves?
We don't have to decide on slavery, but let them have it if they want it.
And if it goes into the new territories, if Kansas wants it, if Nebraska wants it, let them have it.
And the Northern Democrats were like, sure, why not?
And... But the Southern Democrats were more hardcore on the issue of slavery because not only did they want choice, but they also wanted some further things.
They wanted, for example, the right of slave owners to take their slaves into territories without the fear that these territories would decide, we're going to be free territories, and so we're going to confiscate these slaves.
Or they can just declare themselves free because they're now in the free state of Kansas.
No. The slave owner said, if we take our property over there, it remains our property no different than if we took our horses into Kansas.
Nobody could confiscate them and say, hey, listen, you know, these horses are now free.
No, it's my horse.
Give it back to me. I own it.
That's basically what the southerners wanted.
And so what Lincoln did constantly was he drove a wedge and forced Douglass to choose.
Are you saying that you want slave owners to be able to go to free territories and maybe even free states?
Can a guy take a bunch of slaves to Maine and Maine can do nothing about it even though they're living in Maine?
Because the guy goes, this is my property.
It's like I brought my horses to Maine.
Now, even the Northern Democrats were not okay with that.
The Northern Democrats believed that in the free states, they should be able to enact laws that restricted slavery, and that in fact, if slaves were in those areas, that they could become free citizens, not citizens, but become free men in those Northern states.
So, Douglass was forced to say, If Douglas agreed with the South that the slave owner had unlimited rights across the whole country, then Douglas would lose the support of the Northern Democrats.
So what Douglas did was he tried to fudge, he tried to go in the middle, he tried to keep the Northern Democrats and the Southern Democrats, but Lincoln just kept pressing him on the issue.
So in a famous exchange, Lincoln says to Douglas, Let's say the Supreme Court makes a ruling after Dred Scott and says that no state can exclude slaves from coming into that state and living in that state and being slaves in a free state.
What would your position on that be?
Let's say the Supreme Court decided that.
And Douglass would reply and say, that's ridiculous.
That's absurd. There's no way the Supreme Court would decide that.
But Lincoln's point was, wait a minute.
The Supreme Court just decided the Dred Scott decision, which basically said the same thing about a territories.
So all I'm doing is asking you, if the Supreme Court now takes up the same question and extends the same principle from the territories to the state, namely, that any slaveholder can take a slave into a territory, and that person remains a slave in that territory, why don't we extend that same principle to states?
What if the Supreme Court decides that?
What's your position on it?
Now, if Douglass said, I agree with the Supreme Court on that, he would destroy his own base of support in the North.
But Douglass went the other way.
He goes, no, that's absurd.
The Supreme Court would be violating the Constitution.
The Supreme Court cannot force free states to have slaves.
Free states could make their own laws about this.
And the moment that Douglass said that...
The Southern Democrats were like, we're done with that guy.
We need to find a pro-slavery candidate that's going to more accurately reflect our views.
And now we fast forward to the 1860 election.
There are three candidates in that election.
Two Democrats and one Republican.
The Republican, of course, is Lincoln.
The Northern Democrat is Douglas.
And the Southern Democrat is a guy named Breckinridge.
So the Democratic Party is now split right in two.
And this is actually, I think, Lincoln's, maybe, I don't know if it's his conscious aim, but it is the genius effect of Lincoln's rhetoric.
By discovering the weak point of Douglas's position, he forces Douglas to go one way or go the other, cutting himself off from From the other group, and thus, in a sense, clearing the space that Lincoln himself is going to occupy in 1860, where even though he lost the 1858 election for the Senate to Douglas, he ended up two years later beating Douglas and Breckinridge and winning the presidency of the United States.
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