All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 29, 2021 - Epoch Times
48:53
Understanding “All Men Are Created Equal”—Dr. Matthew Spalding on Rejecting Revisionist History | American Thought Leaders
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The question which we want to put to the American people is what kind of education do they want for their children?
When considering the founding of America, some suggest, quote, all men are created equal, was a lie, written by hypocrites in the time of slavery.
When the New York Times controversial 1619 project was first published, its introduction stated that it aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.
How should we understand America's founding and its promise that, quote, all men are created equal?
Today we sit down with Dr.
Matthew Spaulding, a professor of constitutional government and dean of the Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College.
He was the executive director of the 1776 Commission, created by executive order by former President Trump, which published a report defending America's founding aspirations.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr.
Matthew Spaulding, so great to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Great to be with you.
You are the executive director of the 1776 Commission, commissioned by former President Trump.
Tell me about what problem this group was charged with exactly in dealing with.
The commission was created by an executive order.
It really kind of comes out of a conversation in September, the anniversary of the Constitution.
They did a conference.
An executive order is written in November.
I took leave from my job at Hillsdale College to go over and be executive director.
Executive Order really calls for advice.
It's an advisory commission for the president, written for one president, but it's written in general terms, which says it advises any president, about the importance of 1776, the principles of 1776, the ideas of 1776.
And how those principles inform American history.
It's not all American history, but how those principles have shaped it and what that might mean.
Why is that important?
What significance does it have for where we are right now, given the fact that we are soon approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, which was also more of an urgent push towards looking towards that anniversary in the future.
And what implications does this have for the federal government?
How should it do its operations?
What concerns should it have?
How should this play out in other aspects of government?
So what the 1776 report was really the first of what should be many reports, it's a two-year commission, to do several things to help advise a president preparing for the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Well, so what exactly is the core concept or promise of the Declaration of Independence as you outline it?
First of all, that's a great question.
That's actually the question we think that Americans should be thinking about.
Not only what is the core promise, but is that still the core promise of what America means?
What the Declaration of Independence did was it really changed the grounding of politics, both in terms of its legitimacy and its promise.
As Lincoln said, it was applicable to all men in all times.
Martin Luther King called it a promissory note.
Well, what is it?
It's a claim that we are all equal.
No one is born king.
No one is born subject.
Also, no one is born a slave.
And no one is born a master.
That's a fundamental, inherent, deep moral truth at the core of America.
That doesn't mean we always lived up to it, or we weren't flawed, or we're not perfect, or we are imperfect.
But that's our aspiration.
That's the principle.
That's the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
That's why our politics have always been about living up to our principles.
That's what we want to remind Americans about.
We are all equal.
You can understand equal by nature, equal in the eyes of God, equal before the law.
But that notion that none of us have more rights than someone else, we all have the same opportunity.
We all have the same humanity that demands respect.
That is the core of what America means, and we think departures from that are both flawed intellectually, but wrong historically, but also get us onto very unstable moral grounds as we move ahead.
You lay out a whole suite of challenges facing the nation.
In this report, you outline several.
Tell me a little bit about what the challenges are.
Well, I'd probably start with pointing out the general structure of the report.
It really does begin, you know, noting its authority.
It really begins with a long discussion of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the two documents which were the founding documents of the American regime.
What it does do, and some critics have pointed this out, which I actually think is somewhat ironic, but a badge of respect, I suppose, is we present those arguments as a claim that they are true.
That is, it's not merely an assertion, but as the Declaration says, these are understood to be the self-evident truths at the heart of the American nation.
We take that as our starting point.
That's how the founders understood it.
That's how Lincoln understood it.
That's how Martin Luther King understood it.
And the report was released on Martin Luther King Day, which is to say that it's those ideas that we look back to and always define ourselves in light of.
So we approach this question about challenges to those things, not in a comprehensive sense of covering every possible basis, but what are the key things that challenge the heart of the matter, that really go after those principles?
And here the principle really being the idea that all men are created equal, the heart of the Declaration.
One of the obvious ones is slavery.
So we discuss slavery at some length.
Not only in and of itself and how the founders understood slavery and how they dealt with this barbaric institution and the challenge to the American founding, but we raised the question about John C. Calhoun, the great defender of slavery, who in the defense of slavery attacked the Declaration of Independence and introduced this idea of group rights,
which we'll come back to We talk about progressivism, not in a sense that it is all-encompassing on this one point, but the point we emphasized amongst various elements is the intellectual element, which is progressivism really does take as its heart A rejection, if you will, of the idea that there can be truth, simply.
Karl Becker, one of the great progressive historians, the great progressive historian of the Declaration, said to ask if the Declaration is true or not is a meaningless question.
That's an intellectual challenge, not as barbaric, not as violent, but it's clearly an intellectual challenge.
Same thing, we talk about fascism and communism abroad, very much denying humanity of all men, violent in a very different way, but still the same intellectual challenge.
And then we carry that through to today, we talk about race, meaning both the challenges of race after the Civil War and Jim Crow in the South and the problems inherent in all that, which was It was terrible.
But then the rise of the early Civil Rights Movement, which was an attempt to go back to the principles of the Declaration.
That's what Martin Luther King did.
But more recently, it's kind of gotten off on the wrong foot, moved in the wrong direction, rejected that grounding in the Declaration of Independence, moving towards an argument that we should look at each other in light of our group definition, our identity, or what we call today identity politics.
Which we noted, intellectually, is also a challenge to the principles that all men are created equal and is also oddly akin, not as barbaric as slavery, but it's akin to Calhoun's intellectual argument that rather than looking to all men being created equal as the principle, which was Martin Luther King's principle, Lincoln's principle, the founder's principle, It looks to group rights.
You have rights because of your group, your ethnicity, your race, some other category.
That we see as an intellectual challenge that's a problem.
And historically, once we start going down the road of group rights, that tends to be problematic because One group might have rights today, but they might not have them tomorrow, and it might change.
We'd prefer it to be grounded in an intellectually and kind of a morally firmer ground in an idea that is just inherent in human nature.
That's what the founders did.
That's the great advantage they gave us in our inheritance, and that's why the report keeps coming back to that core principle.
So, of course, one of the big criticisms of this idea, both with respect to slavery and with respect to, frankly, the realities of the opportunities that people have across America, they're certainly not equal.
And with respect to slavery, the argument has been that basically that America was kind of founded on a lie.
This institution was Active at the time when the Declaration of Independence was written.
So how do you square that exactly?
I think that's a very legitimate question, and it's a question we should all grapple with.
I think the way to answer that is how can we come to understand—it's a general question about how to think about history.
Today we tend to be dominated by kind of two extreme positions, if you will.
Either everything has to be perfect and without flaw, or we look back and see flaws and we see and we resolve that everything is flawed and bad and not worth studying.
But history is more complicated than that, and I think we all kind of know that.
Can we hold something to be true, a principle, an aspiration, but also simultaneously have something that is a deep flaw, indeed to the point of being a rejection, in the case of many people, a rejection of that principle?
I think that's what happens at the time of the American founding.
Slavery clearly existed.
They were arguing about it at the time.
Jefferson held slaves at the same time he wrote a condemnation of the slave trade in the draft of the Declaration of Independence.
George Washington owns slaves, but by the time he writes his final will and he frees them, those that are in his estate, because he has come to detest slavery.
The American founding occurs at a particular time in history in which there's a transformation going on.
It has something to do with the Enlightenment.
It has something to do with the rise of moral sentiments.
A change.
And actually, the American founding has something to do with that.
They're right on that cusp, if you will.
And I think we need to look at it that way.
Now, slavery comes to be later When you defend it in a more robust way, it becomes to be much more embedded economically, say with the invention of the cotton gin.
We have the expansion of the Southern argument, which ultimately is John C. Calhoun's argument of the positive good of slavery, and that's to be condemned.
But that's not necessarily growing out of the founding itself.
At the time of the founding, I think one can safely say that the principle had been established, this was Lincoln's argument, the principle had been established so they could then carry it out at the appropriate time.
They made compromises, but we have to understand that they were compromises.
Compromises in light of what?
Compromises in light of the Declaration of Independence.
That's the only way to understand it.
Because otherwise you must condemn the whole thing.
And I think that's just not good history and that's not fair to them.
Let's try to understand what they were doing.
Imperfect, flawed, not the way we would do it, but we have to understand the circumstances in which they found themselves.
They were trying to found a nation, to start a nation.
The more radical thing, the more miraculous thing, if you will, is that in a nation where slavery existed, They all agreed to put at its very core, at its center, a principle that all men are created equal.
That's the great thing they did.
That's the seed that was laid there that Lincoln, among others, saw, but also did Frederick Douglass.
So did Martin Luther King look back to that.
That's the thing that they put there that put slavery on, as Lincoln said, the road to ultimate extinction, which is where the founders wanted it in the first place.
And he replaced it there.
But it was by going back to the principle that they embedded in the founding that allowed that to happen.
So the idea that this was merely hypocritical and that it was all about slavery and racism at the core of the founding I think that's just not historically correct.
But also it doesn't take them at their word.
We should at least give them the opportunity to explain what they are doing.
And one can do that if you look at the historical record.
See what they wrote and what they said and how they thought about it and how they argued about it.
And how they came to their conclusions.
And that's what the report is trying to do.
It's not comprehensive, but it puts a marker down.
It puts enough there to remind us that that's the story that we should go back and learn and think about and take that into consideration.
And I think that's the history that has been the dominant history until relatively recently when we decided to kind of just throw the whole thing out.
And I don't think that's where the American people are.
So we were writing it really for them.
Okay.
So that's very interesting.
In the report, you describe a kind of, you know, the dispute about the ultimate meaning of America.
Right.
And so, you know, you've started alluding to that.
So tell me about that.
What is the dispute exactly now?
Well, I think there are a lot of disputes now, I suppose.
There's a general dispute, which is kind of the backdrop to all this, which is how do we understand our own history?
The claim of the American founding, and really the claim of history growing out of the American founding, is that we are a people united around these principles.
And this form, this constitution, which is a form to uphold those principles, and that forms a nation.
And really, American history is a playing out of that principle as we aspire to live up to it.
And that was the principle that informed not only abolition, and the movement against slavery begins in this country.
That it later informs women's suffrage, the early civil rights movement, the pro-life movement today, anti-communism.
It's all informed by a look back to the principle.
And that really is the driving force of American history, which led to our great success.
The dominant view today, really, more is that in general, that history doesn't matter as much.
Because the idea that you can have an idea that is true, or as Lincoln said, applicable to all men at all times, that can kind of transcend history, that's broadly denied in the modern academy and among elite thinkers.
And so as a result, they just don't see this argument at all.
Instead, they see a flawed past that's not worth studying.
And I think in doing that, they are unfair to their students in the sense that they don't.
They don't allow them to see the flaws, see the problems, but also see what they actually accomplished by putting those principles there, by trying to live up to them.
There's also a greatness and nobility in American history Even with those flaws, and the overcoming of slavery is part of that history as well.
We'd like to see a more complete history, a fuller history, a more accurate history, and then let people realize that despite all these flaws, there's something about American history and America that is lovable.
That's what we mean by patriotic education.
It doesn't mean America, no matter what, it's always right, it's always true, it's always perfect.
It means that despite its flaws, despite its imperfections, despite the messiness of history, there is something actually lovable.
And what's lovable are its principles, its ideas, what it means.
And we can still appeal to that.
And Americans can all appeal to that and that unifies us.
And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
It's something that we can be patriotic about.
When I hear the term patriotic education, I often think of, for example, what they have as, quote, patriotic education in communist China, which is basically the Chinese Communist Party is always right, and these are the evil aggressors, and so on and so forth, a very specific narrative.
You're saying that patriotic education is actually something quite different than that.
I agree with your point.
You think of patriotic education, like North Korea or China or Soviet Union.
Where the regime actually imposes one's beliefs, and you were told to believe that, and that's your patriotic duty.
No, absolutely.
That's not at all what we have in mind.
Probably the best advocates of patriotic education were the founders themselves.
And they begin with the premise that you must know something.
You must know it in order to love it.
And you must come to know your own history.
But it's also recognizing that the essential quality of American history, which is why America is unlike all those other regimes, especially the ones we just referred to, like China and the Soviet Union and North Korea, America's different.
Why?
Because it's a regime in which we have this freedom to govern ourselves, but the one thing that unifies us is not the party government, it's not the national apparatus of the administrative state, it's not the Supreme Court telling us what to do.
The thing that unifies us is that we are all in common, dedicated to this idea, this principle.
So part of knowing our history is knowing that part of the story.
The founding, what they meant by the Declaration, how the Constitution tries to embody a creative framework to bring about the Declaration, how we fought a war to correct the record, if you will, and prevent the splitting of our country, but also to free these enslaved people.
That's all part of our history.
And so a patriotic education for Americans is learning the actual history accurately.
But when you do that, you realize that at the center of that history is this idea, this claim, this self-evident truth.
Well, we think that's actually a truth.
And that that is something that we can be in love with.
Not in the sense that we love our family, but it actually is a love because that idea is really the heart of human freedom.
And so you can love this country despite its flaws because it has done so much to advance that cause.
And that's what makes it a great and wonderful, successful nation.
You mentioned how education is a key element and also a challenge here, and that the Academy has taken on a very different approach than what you just described in terms of how to view America.
How did that happen exactly?
What are you imagining as a solution to change that, to shift that?
Well, there's a much longer discussion there, I suppose.
The way we approach it, I think the short answer is some of these challenges themselves brought about some problems in our educational system.
And at least within education, it has a lot to do with what we call modern progressivism.
And the idea that education is no longer about transferring knowledge, this old-fashioned, quaint idea that history and classical learning and literature has something to tell us, and that a teacher's obligation is to pass that down so that the student can come to know them themselves and make their own decisions.
That's no longer what we think of as education anymore.
Education has become, to use their own term, progressive.
It's really about looking at this notion of where is it going and what's the most up-to-date current thinking.
There aren't truths in the past that we can go back to.
Education itself is historical.
Or historicist, in the sense that there aren't permanent things.
There's not a truth that we somehow are seeking, which is the old notion of educating in terms of liberating the mind to seek that truth.
It really is about teaching what history tells us.
Which, unfortunately, oftentimes becomes a certain kind of indoctrination, or at least an ideologically, you know, has a lot of ideological baggage associated with it, because now it's not history itself, but it's kind of history backwards.
We look back at history, and if we want to see evils, then history is evil.
If we want to see a trajectory that leads to where we are today, we'll see our trajectory.
It's not history in itself anymore.
We tend to use it as a tool in order to get to where we want to get to.
And there's a lot more there and it's a lot more problematic and there's a lot more going on and this report doesn't It doesn't suggest that we answer that full question completely.
But there's something going on in our educational system that we think an honest history would be a large corrective to.
But also we need to rethink what we mean by education.
What is a genuine education?
And what the report is especially concerned about is what is an education about civics?
What does one need to know to be a good citizen?
And there, I think the report really has some very particular things it wants to at least place on our table of our conversation here, that in America,
to be a citizen means you actually need to know something about American history, how American government works, the debates over what the Declaration means, alternatives, great figures in history, those kinds of things.
And that's not the way civics is taught much anymore.
And we think a recovery of that would be a large step in the right direction.
One of the things that you mentioned in here, I just thought of this as you're talking about the influence of progressivism.
You suggest in the report that progressivism is what actually gave rise to larger bureaucracy or the administrative state, as you described.
I thought that was a pretty curious, interesting observation.
Yeah, we kind of note that in passing.
One of the things that's interesting about the progressive movement is there's, and there are different elements of progressivism and things that happened at the time, and we can't put them all into one big category, I suppose.
But having said that, there's a large intellectual point they make and a large practical point they make.
And the intellectual point they make is that The idea that there are truths isn't true.
There are only historical truths, or truths that progress with time.
Well, that kind of undercuts intellectually the claim of the American founding.
But instead, what they turn to, at least the early progressives, turn to science, expertise, or the idea of bureaucrats, people that have been specially trained to run things, whether that's in the academy or, say, in government.
And this is how they reshaped and rethought government.
They themselves invented this term administrative state.
Government is about administering things.
It's no longer about the fundamental ends of government.
It's about the process.
And so, yes, they very much introduced in its place, in the place of a constitution granted on the principles as understood by the founders, Having unmoored it from the principles, they now kind of reinvented this new way of thinking about how to run things.
And they write at great length, Woodrow Wilson in particular, but other progressives write at great length about this notion of what administration means and what bureaucratic or expert rule means.
And I think that's something that has We're stuck in American history and politics and we continue to have as a kind of a troublesome problem in our politics is the fights over bureaucracy, the so-called fourth branch of government.
So that's really interesting.
One of the things that I caught in reading the report, which isn't necessarily obvious to everybody, certainly to people that aren't American.
I'm a Canadian, for example, and it was really interesting reading the report and learning a number of things about the American founding and the vision.
One of the things I read was, The idea that the government needs to be strong enough to have the power to secure rights, but not have so much power so as to infringe on rights.
There's some kind of medium to be found there, and that's the ideal.
That's really fascinating to me.
Really, in many ways, there are so many things that the report brings up that are fundamentally important that sometimes we take for granted.
So it's always good to hear someone point these things out.
But when you really think about it, what's so unique about the American government is the extent to which these two documents, the Declaration and the Constitution, are also kind of a back and forth on these great questions, right?
The Declaration is about the rights that we all have inherent in our nature.
To be secured.
Legitimate government is to secure these rights, it says.
But then, of course, the Constitution creates the actual government.
Well, it's a relationship between those things that really matters.
So yes, you want the government strong enough to secure the rights, which includes national defense, but also a justice system to make sure that your actual rights aren't taken away.
But it can't be so strong that it overwhelms those rights.
And so a lot of American history is also about a back and forth between that.
I mean, the questions we've been talking about here, obviously slavery is the most obvious and the most barbaric example of that.
I mean, a whole group of people whose rights are taken away.
But we could talk about, the report also talks about religious liberty.
There's a whole appendix about the role of faith.
And the importance of the right of religious liberty as being a core right, all of those things become really fundamentally important in that relationship between securing rights but not having government overwhelm them.
One thing I would point out is that in the American understanding of these questions, it should always default not to government, But to the rights themselves.
As if there's any question here, I think the right, the claim of the right, should garner the most respect and protection.
That's always how we've resolved these questions.
And I think especially now, when government is getting bigger and more complicated and doing more and more things, we need to be especially cognizant of that.
Let's talk about this question of religious liberty.
Of course, that's in the First Amendment and also freedom of speech in the First Amendment.
Something that struck me—and this is actually referenced in the report earlier—but again, as I've been learning about American founding and those principles, there was a A number of different religious groups that had their own ideas about the relationship with God and how to enact that.
Some of them were actually quite different.
Part of the founding is actually trying to figure out how to be able to Allow all these different, quite strongly thinking people and approaches to work together on the backdrop of religious persecution in Europe.
Great point and actually extremely important.
We wanted to have an appendix dedicated specifically to this question.
The establishment of religious liberty was, for the American founding, probably one of the most important questions.
The idea that civil and religious liberty actually went together.
They were kind of part and parcel of the same thing.
You couldn't have true civil freedom without religious freedom.
And you couldn't have religious freedom if you didn't have civil liberty.
And so, coming to understand that is really crucially important to understanding the founding.
And part of this has to do with their understanding of history, especially in Europe, with religious persecution and establishments that led to religious wars.
They were very cognizant of that.
But also, it's important to understand one of the reasons why we wanted to have that appendix is one of the common notions is that when they established religious liberty, they were kind of pushing religion to the side.
Well, that's not quite true either.
They did have a sense of the separation of church and state as a formality.
There would be no established religion in America.
There would be religious liberty.
That is true.
But they did have a very robust sense of what religious liberty meant.
It meant free exercise in the sense that religious people would participate in American politics, and they actually welcomed their participation in American politics.
But also it's a recognition that religion, the revealed tradition, itself is a source of truth and deep understanding about the human condition.
So it also raises the question or presents the point that to really understand the principles of the Declaration, that all men are created equal, It's not absolutely necessary, it's not conditional, but there's a profound way in which revelation, especially Christianity, sees all as equal in the eyes of God.
That somehow contributes to our understanding of all men being created equal.
And so the founding is also a great way in which the traditions of reason I mean, the Enlightenment and thinking going back to the Romans and the Greeks and that whole grand tradition of the rule of law coming through British Constitution.
But also the revelatory tradition.
And these great traditions of the great revealed religions really come together in a way that can come to this solution, at least this practical solution.
And that's how the American founders understood it.
So we actually thought that that component of this argument was crucially important for us to also come to understand because among other things that gives us an added way to appeal to and recover these deeper truths of the Declaration of Independence.
You also have an appendix about identity politics in the report.
Why did you think it was so important to include that?
We definitely wanted to include something about identity politics.
I don't think we intended it to be final or comprehensive or conclusive, but we wanted to put on the table that there's this idea out there that's problematic.
And it's problematic in the same way these earlier challenges were.
It's not clear where it's going.
It's not clear what ultimately it means or what form it will take.
But the general notion that we should divide people into groups According to their racial identities, but also then combine that with an understanding of the past that has to do with oppressors and the oppressed, and we should categorize people and somehow that has something to do with the extent to which they do or do not have political rights or standing.
We found all that to be very problematic and disturbing and misguided.
We think the better argument Is to appeal back to the principles of the founding itself, for the principle of human equality, but the idea that we are equal before the law and that our civics and our citizenship should be understood in that sense.
And so it's not a definitive answer to that question, but really it is intended to juxtapose, if you will, this modern sense of identity politics with The principles and ideas, these foundational principles of the American regime itself.
And I'm sure you noted that, Chap, that appendix is actually a question mark.
You know, created equal or identity politics.
We actually do see those things as being really juxtaposed.
Fascinating.
So why do you think the report was removed from the White House website when the new administration stepped in?
Well, I think a couple of reasons.
I think the main one is there is a divide.
There's an argument in America right now.
It has something to do with all of the things we've been talking about, history, The status of the principles of the founding.
But the more immediate debate has to do with this question about how to bring about equal justice or equity, as the modern term is used.
And it is tied then back to these questions of identity politics, critical race theory, and it's all kind of a mishmash of these ideas.
And we'd like that to be an open conversation, a discussion about What are the nature of those rights?
How should we understand them?
I think the new administration wanted to go in a different direction when it came to policy matters in terms of, say, equity within the federal government.
Which I believe is what the executive order was really about.
But in order to get there, they had to kind of separate out and kind of cut off at the knees, if you will, this other argument, which is the commission's report and the commission itself.
So I think that because of the nature of the argument that was made in the report, because of the laying out of this alternative way of looking at our history, And reminding people that there is this broader history that includes a defense of those principles,
reminding Americans that really the claims of justice that we see throughout our histories, in particular most recently with Martin Luther King, the claim of civil rights, was actually the claim of the Declaration, which is that all men are created equal.
I think that was too much in the current policy environment for those things to coexist, which underscores why this is a fundamental debate that the American people really need to come to think through and understand, and why we wrote this really primarily for the American people.
To realize that there is a better way of understanding their own history that's more accurate and kind of opening the door to that and reminding them that the principles of this regime are not only defendable in and of themselves,
but even within the context of a very kind of flawed History, something that is quite noble and something that you can be patriotic about.
It's a long answer to my short answer, which is that I think that there's a divide and that the report really kind of struck a nerve right at that point, such that they had to, I think incorrectly and astonishingly, abolish A commission writing a report on 1776.
So you mentioned equity.
There's a lot of discussion about what equity actually means vis-a-vis equality and that they're actually not the same thing.
Can you clarify that, please?
Yeah, I think I'll give you a short answer.
But I mean, equality, both these are claims of justice.
And the claim of equality is that we begin with some sort of equal status inherent in our nature.
That's the most important thing, that we are equal in our possession of rights.
Despite lots of inequalities, whether we're handsome or not, or tall or short, or What it might be.
We're obviously unequal in many ways, but we are fundamentally equal in terms of our humanity, and that gives rise to certain rights, but also duties and responsibilities.
Equity is a much more modern term that somehow is that equality can only be understood as equality of outcomes and conditions, and somehow it has to be brought about.
And it kind of rejects the inherent quality, or at least overlooks that, and it's less important.
And it's really more about creating equities.
And so it's much more focused on outcomes, overcoming things, changing things, in which someone else on the outside determines and tries to bring about some understanding of equality That more fundamental idea of quality I already explained.
Given these realities, what is the future of this report or work in this direction?
Obviously, this is a summary of a summary in a sense, right?
A very, very succinct document.
What happens next now?
Well, I think by abolishing the commission and removing the report, they actually drew more attention to it.
Thank you very much.
And it's available.
Other institutions have posted.
Hillsdale College has posted it, as have several other members of the commission and outlets.
And so it'll be available.
And I encourage the American people to read it for themselves.
I can say that the Commission, in some form, will carry on, mostly because the members of the Commission, especially speaking for the Chairman, the Vice Chair, and myself, but also several other members of the Commission, we have spent large periods of our adult careers writing about and thinking about these questions.
They're not going to go away.
You can abolish a Commission.
Which in Washington, D.C., that's what we kind of do in politics.
If you abolish something, it supposedly goes away.
But you can abolish a commission, but you can't erase history.
You can get rid of these principles.
That's what we're dedicated to, and that's what we will continue teaching and working to defend.
There are some things out there.
There aren't a lot.
I recognize the problem which you point to there.
But I think the question which we want to put to the American people is what kind of education do they want for their children?
Do they want their children to be educated in this way of thinking about American history or that way of thinking about American history?
Do they want them to hear the whole story?
So at that level, I think we must understand the problem.
Yes, the academy and the modern educational system is deeply problematic and has become increasingly flawed because of recent trends in popular education.
But the question here is actually to the American people themselves.
Because at the end of the day, they are the legitimate source of authority.
They themselves are the ones who vote people into office.
They control school boards and state curricula, the places that do make these decisions.
And so we really put the question to them.
There are alternatives out there, and we hope there will be more.
But one thing we need to do is remind them and kind of awaken, if you will, the American mind, as Jefferson said, to the importance of these ideas.
And I think that's what the report especially did and pointed us in that direction.
Any final thoughts before we finish up?
One thing that's important to keep in mind here is the extent to which the claims of the American founding themselves were revolutionary.
It was a revolution, after all.
Not in the sense we think of the French Revolution, that it kind of tore everything down and started from scratch.
It inherited a lot of these arguments and ideas, but it did overthrow its mother country and started its own nation.
But these were radical ideas.
The question is, what is radical about them?
And why is that thing still important for us to study?
Right?
We've heard this a million times.
Every time, every Fourth of July when there are ads go up on TVs about mattress sales, we hear about the declaration.
Why is this still important to us?
Well, that of course begs the question, are these things true or not?
The claim of the American founding is that, not that it invented it, but it was the first nation to begin its life saying that we're going to found our nation on the claim of a truth that all men are great equal.
Some are not less equal and more equal.
Different groups don't have rights and others don't.
It doesn't matter the color of your skin.
It's a simple truth.
All are created equal and out of that comes consent, which is the basis for legitimacy of government.
Well, if that was true in 1776, it's still true today.
If it wasn't true in 1776, then I guess it's not true.
And where does that leave us?
The question is, is that true?
And what I find shocking is that that's actually not the question that the academy, the modern academy, the professionals in the academy, that's not the question they think is important.
Because from their point of view, education is not about seeking the truth.
And so they look back at this history and merely see dusty old documents.
And that's not how we want to look at it.
That's not how we think that Lincoln looked at it.
That's not how Martin Luther King looked at it.
That's not how the founders looked at it themselves at the time.
It's a claim or a proposition, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, that all men are created equal.
Is that true?
Is that true?
We think it is.
We ask the American people, is that true?
Because if it is, then we should be guided by that and not be frittering around at the latest claim of rights somehow emanating from something else that's artificial.
Are all men create equal?
That's the question.
Matthew Spaulding, such a pleasure to have you on.
▲
Export Selection