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Jan. 30, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
56:15
Dr Matthew Spalding
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
I think this is going to be a fascinating hour or so.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
I think this is going to be a fascinating hour or so.
I have got Dr. Matthew Spaulding of Hillsdale College, which is my favourite university in America.
It's the only one that hasn't been corrupted by the kind of dumbing down sort of cultural Marxism things.
And I'm very good friends with a guy called Scott, who's a fundraiser for Hillsdale, and I've had many, many adventures.
I don't know whether I have time to relate them on this occasion, but many adventures.
And anyway, I was really pleased.
I wrote a piece the other day for Breitbart about the 1776 report, of which more in a moment.
And I didn't know that the guy who'd written it was Matthew Spaulding.
Were you the sole author or the co-author, Matthew?
I'd probably say I was the main pin in the work, but we had other contributors, obviously the other commissioners, and had some outside people contribute some pieces as well, but as the executive director, I put it all together and made it into what it is.
Right, okay.
So let's talk first about what this thing is that I got so excited about, because just before he got cheated out of the election, President Trump put together this sort of committee.
How would you describe it?
Well, so I don't know how it works over there, but over here, there are commissions and you can have, Congress can create a commission or the executive can create commissions.
So this was a commission created in November by the president at an advisory commission.
And he issued an executive order back in November.
We got together, I went over there, took a leave at Hillsdale in December.
And we produced a report which came out on January 19th or 18th, Martin Luther King Day, a few days before the inauguration.
And it was then abolished by executive order.
It was, wasn't it?
I mean, it's been airbrushed in true Stalin style.
I was never quite sure whether I should be.
I was shocked, which is an honest reaction.
Shocked that someone, a president, could abolish a commission created to advise the president And recall that it was created by one president, but we meant to advise that president or the next president, right?
It's a general advisory commission.
Yeah.
But a president would abolish a commission about 1776, which is about the founding documents.
So I was shocked by that, but I have to say that it was also, I was actually kind of honored, or at least Pretty amazed and took it as a badge of distinction that the commission was abolished within moments of the inauguration of the new president.
So it really struck a nerve or hit something that caused them to strike it down and remove it from the website and try as they can to erase it completely, to disappear.
I guess that you probably haven't considered yourself before as a dangerous radical.
You probably thought you were quite straight down the line.
No, as a matter of fact, I'm struck by the fact that a lot of the history in this work, as the other commissioners I have talked about, I mean, this is the kind of thing we've been writing for the last 30, 40 years of our lives, about American history and the founding, the founding principles in Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass.
And the notion that somehow those things, which heretofore were not radical at all, these are mainstream arguments in this country.
Now they're radical to the point that the press has immediately labeled them as being either extremely questionable, hateful, and potentially just on their face racist.
Yeah, I say I was rather shocked by that.
The quickness with which it went directly to the jugular in that way, and there really was no substantive debate, and then it's immediately abolished and removed from the website.
I was shocked, but again, there's something noteworthy to have that, you know, for the President of the United States to think that somehow in his first moments of office, In his top dozen or so executive orders, he needs to get rid of this thing.
That's pretty amazing.
Well, I think he did us all a favor, President Biden, and I think he's, or rather his fraudulence, President Biden, because I think that actually he is doing the Lord's work by showing just how dangerous
And un-American, the liberal left has become recently, to the point where they effectively airbrush from history the foundational texts of the American Republic.
And what I liked about you, you know, like a lot of English people, I have an idea about checks and balances.
I've heard of some of the founding fathers and stuff.
But it's quite complicated, American politics and the Constitution and stuff.
So it's a bit like, you know, Sanskrit, you know, to me.
My working knowledge of Sanskrit is really quite limited.
And it's the same with this.
But what I loved about your report, the 1776 report, was that it explained in an intelligent but not too complicated way Why your constitution matters.
Why the Declaration of Independence matters.
And having read your document, I ended up feeling envious of you Americans, because I'd always thought that you Americans were like, you know, I love America and I love Americans, but kind of, you weren't, you didn't win the lottery in life.
You weren't born British.
And I thought, I kind of thought our system was better because we had Magna Carta, we had Parliament, we've got English Common Law and all this stuff which, just as you Americans have been brought up to admire your constitution, we in our country feel slightly superior about our way, you know, we don't need a written constitution unlike those upstart Americans.
But actually, I thought your constitution, your declaration, is a thing of beauty.
And just before I give you a chance to speak, what I really liked about your report, this is a bit...
You said at the end, you said, to be an American means something noble and good.
It means treasuring freedom and embracing the vitality of self-government.
We are shaped by the beauty, bounty and wildness of our continent.
You've got freedom at the heart of everything that America stands for.
I simply cannot imagine any... Say Boris Johnson put together a committee now to try and decide where Britain's future lay.
It would come up with hogwash like diversity and sustainability and all manner of crap.
Whereas you guys can go back to what the founding fathers said in the late 18th century, And this is what America still stands for, or ought to stand for.
Right.
So to go back to your general theme here, I loved your piece.
The reason I loved it was in the same way you could say right now where Britain is, you're ashamed to be British.
I can say right now, especially by just the way you pointed it out, I'm very proud to have many of America's ideas had their origins in the long development There's a great overlap here, which I think we're both recognizing in a sense, which is there's a greater question about what are the roots?
What are the deep philosophical roots of Western civilization?
And in America that comes out through the American Revolution or that controversy that we had in the past.
um explained in the declaration and develops and becomes the constitution but you know there's a there's a sense here that um well actually uh there there is uh the argument here that in writing the declaration um it doesn't come out as much in the report but i would say that the the arguments of the declaration were really appealing if you will um uh kind of behind the immediate arguments of
of 18th century British understandings at the time to these deeper roots of the common law and Magna Carta and really the higher law tradition that I think we continue.
But having said that, I think the The real question here, the one that you allude to in your article, and that we worry about here, is what are the things that particular regimes hold to be true?
What are their principles behind them?
What we worry about is the extent to which America becomes just kind of a popular fad of the moment and loses its self-understanding of rights grounded in nature, that is something beyond the regime, that rights are not merely the gift of government.
Whether it's the Supreme Court or whatever it might be, or merely tradition, but that the American tradition really reaches back to a deeper understanding that gives you a true mooring for your politics.
And I think that's something that modern liberalism, both here and I think abroad as well, has kind of severed that relationship.
And as a result, we start looking for sources of rights elsewhere.
We start looking to popular movements for importance.
And next thing you know, our values are whatever is the popular issue of the day, whether it's the environment or these ideas of equity and equal outcomes.
Those are all political questions we can argue and debate about, but you've really lost the heart of the matter, which is what is the legitimate grounding of rights, which is to say, what's the legitimate grounding of your freedom?
Because if you lose that grounding, then freedom really is controlled by different groups.
And then the question is, what group is in control?
And that's something that our report gets at a lot and has kind of caused some controversy, I suppose.
But once you start talking about group rights, there are more and less barbaric versions of that.
But group rights usually lead to outcomes, which some groups win and some groups lose.
And we think that's not That's not American to put in our context.
More generally, that's not a way of living, a way of governing a regime principle in which all equally share in that liberty.
And that's a great concern of ours.
I think there's no question that if America can find a way of recovering or cleaving to the principles established in the Declaration of Independence and then later in the in the Constitution, it will be prosperous, happy, successful.
I mean, it would be the magic bullet, would it not?
Now, do you think.
Do you think that.
One of the reasons that America became so great that it was very, very lucky in having these principles established at almost exactly the right time in history, I mean, we're talking about the peak of the Enlightenment, aren't we?
And we're talking about, you had some really clever guys framing the Constitution, who also, they came from the sort of European intellectual tradition, didn't they?
I mean, were any of them born in Europe, or are they all Americans?
Some of them were born in Europe.
Most of them, almost all of them, were born here at that point.
But it's very clear that the one distinction I'll make here, especially for this conversation, is We need to recognize the extent to which the Enlightenment as it comes to America, it's not the French Enlightenment.
We've got to make a clear distinction here.
It really is that Enlightenment that goes through England, right?
It's the modern Enlightenment.
It's the Enlightenment of John Locke and Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, right?
It's a different kind of Enlightenment.
And then you add to that, I think, the unique attributes in the American colonies, and there's an appendix in the report that talks about this, of this question about reason and revelation, right?
That this was a major theme, the rise of religious liberty.
And if you add that to their understanding of the Enlightenment, you get a very moderate sense of the Enlightenment, a la John Locke, But you also get a very robust moral grounding, if you will, in kind of the revelatory tradition, the biblical Christian tradition, but also in a kind of a classical reasoning sense.
And it was seen that these things were compatible, and you put those together, and that created this unique environment for the American founding.
I think the other thing I'd be interested in your thoughts on this as well.
You raised this question about what does this mean for where America is as opposed to where Britain is right now and how they are going to relate to their particular regimes.
There is something particular about America, which is why a 1776 commission can be created in the first place, And why it's controversial is that everything about American politics, the way it's constructed, the Constitution, our first law is our highest law, everything points back to our beginnings in a way.
So this country really always is looking back.
So American politics On the left and the right, there's always debates about that.
So, you know, Barack Obama talks about, has talked about the Declaration of Independence.
You know, FDR and the New Deal looks back to the founding.
Obviously, Ronald Reagan, this commission, the 1619 Project.
We're always arguing about our beginning.
Yeah.
And so there's something, the structural design of America also points back to those things, which is why our politics really circles, turns on, on these questions.
And we keep coming back to them.
Well, I think the cynical British answer would be, yeah, well, of course you keep looking back because you're desperate to have some history, given that you've got so little of it.
I mean, you know, I've been to your oldest town.
I think it's St Augustine in Florida, something like that.
And, you know, we're talking 16th century and it's pathetic.
You know, we've got Stonehenge.
But I think The less cynical answer is actually, we too, until recently, looked back on our past.
We're proud of our past.
And it was very interesting.
I don't know whether you were aware of this terrible speech.
Tony Blair, I think, was one of the worst things.
He was our equivalent, I think, to Barack Obama.
Much, much more dangerous than has ever been properly acknowledged.
And I think future historians are going to look back and say, They really were a big evil.
They really did more damage to their country than almost anybody.
Tony Blair made a famous speech in which he said, Britain is a young country.
In other words, he was trying to create a kind of year zero in which all our traditions, all our heritage, to create this sort of social justice, equality, Sustainability, diversity, morass that the left would like to impose on us, given half the chance.
And I think, as I said in my article, I envy you Americans being able to go back to your constitution and saying, look, this is who we are.
Whereas we could do that with Magna Carta, and we try occasionally.
And we try and put English common law, isn't it great?
You know, case law, it's an evolving process and, you know, a combination of sort of custom and progress.
But actually, what we've both found in your country, and in my country, is that In your country, the checks and balances only work, and in my country this kind of living constitution, this unwritten constitution, only work if people act with integrity according to their particular roles within it.
So, for example, you've got your Supreme Court.
There was a time when the Supreme Court was actually a thing worth being elevated to.
But look at what it's just done with Trump.
It went and washed its hands of its obvious responsibilities to answer these questions.
It was clearly an issue involving the states, because some states had been cheated out of their votes by this corrupt voting machine and so on.
It was obvious that the SCOTUS should have intervened.
It didn't, because it was corrupt.
We've seen the states washing their hands of their responsibilities towards ensuring that the election was conducted fairly.
We've seen... Well, the media is not part of your checks and balances, but we've seen the media fail as well.
Same in my country.
I cannot now trust our courts to dispense justice.
I cannot trust our politicians to be uncorrupt.
And okay, in the 18th century, the rotten boroughs...
MPs were deeply corrupt then, but I don't think that we've ever had a time in our history, certainly in modern history, where our politicians have failed to this degree.
I've got more hope for America than I have for my country, precisely because of your written constitution.
Do you think that's a reasonable point to make for an Englishman?
No, I think it is, but I think the It really is, in America, it's the combination of having that written constitution, which, I mean, for the record is, you know, large segments of our written constitution really are inherited from British constitutionalism.
Yeah.
I'll be the first to admit that.
But I think what the Americans did really was twofold.
One is we wanted a written constitution, which turns out it's probably a good thing that we have that.
Yeah.
We insisted on that.
Damn right.
But the American constitutional system, the written constitution, what allows us to continue having this debate to prevent our constitution from merely becoming a living constitution, Which is really what modern liberalism is wanting to do, right?
Whether it was, and this has been going on for some time, right?
The idea of a living constitution, deconstructing the constitution, finding things in various numbers and emanations and whatever it might be.
But the thing that prevents that, which is why this report is so quote-unquote controversial, is that American constitutionalism The idea that you're equal before the law, that you have due process, that the structure of the Constitution matters, all of that turns philosophically on the Declaration.
The Declaration says, as a matter of principle, not as a matter of mere claim or tradition or something that happened in the 18th century, the Declaration says that as a matter of principle, grounded in the laws of nature and nature's God, Say, it's a self-evident truth.
All men are created equal.
So you have a philosophical mooring to keep that constitutional system rooted that prevents it from floating down the path.
And that's why we emphasize so much the importance of, look, friends, if you're interested in Limited constitutionalism, checks and balances, getting the legislative, judicial, and executive branch back to some sort of norm as they should act properly.
The key here, really, is getting back to a proper understanding of 1776, the philosophical grounding.
Which is also why the debate right now in American history, the American progressive movement, but also John C. Calhoun, the great defender of human slavery, all of them saw that they needed to attack the Constitution, but more importantly, they needed to attack the Declaration of Independence.
They had to go after the philosophical grounding of the American founding.
That's what they all have in common.
They all led to different things.
Human slavery is much more barbaric than the current debate over identity politics and what's going on in terms of equity politics and whatnot.
But having said that, they all share the philosophical point Which is they must question the claim of human equality.
That is that we all possess the same rights by nature.
And we all have the equal status before the law.
It's based on our consent.
None has more rights than the other.
and they have to attack that.
So the grounding behind constitutionalism, I think, is the key to why America has had this great success, but also right now, how that keeps the constitutional system rooted, and why that is the controversial how that keeps the constitutional system rooted, and why that is You notice that in the debate over the report, it's centered around the Question about slavery.
But it's also this claim.
A lot of the criticisms could not relate to this claim.
The report approaches these questions, as one of the critics said, as if they were true.
That is, the American proposition is either true or it's not true.
And it's not true that human equality and liberty and consent and all that is out the window.
Yeah.
Well, either that is the case or it's not the case.
Let's start at that substantive question.
But instead, they want to talk about other things.
The report reminds Americans that 1776 is what we nowadays call truth claims, but it's a philosophical claim, not something the Americans made up.
We can go back to Blackstone and other thinkers, a long tradition going back to the ancients even.
But the American regime is based on that truth.
Either that's true or it's not true.
Tell me about... I mean, I wish we had three hours because I'm finding this conversation, this subject, very interesting.
In fact, I kind of like my kids to go to Hillsdale to have this experience.
I think it'd be very interesting.
Because it's like, you do offer the kind of rigorous education that has been pretty much written off by the academic mainstream, do you not think?
Absolutely.
Behind all this, of course, is a great debate about what is history.
The modern liberalism, the modern project, the modern radical project, which you suffer from just as much as we suffer from, is that history is not about knowledge.
Right?
History and education is not a search for the truth.
It's not us looking at great things like, you know, political history, but also great literature like Shakespeare, or great political thinkers going back to the ancients, right?
That's not what education is about, because that stuff's not worth studying.
The question, it's always the current, the most recent.
What do we think now?
There's no looking back to what what experiences taught us, but more importantly, what the great course of human events, as it says in the beginning of our declaration, the course of human events, has learned about the truths of the human condition.
That's not what modern education is about, which is why they've attacked this report, because it has nothing to do with history in their sense.
We think that's a complete destruction and denial of what history actually is.
We think history is about facts.
It's about learning the good, the bad, the ugly.
But when you do that is when you see that
In our history, as I would suggest in British history or whatever history we look at, there are clearly flaws and problems and characters that are despicable, but we also realize that there's a great nobility in the history because there are great noble figures in history who are trying to live up to the particular principles and the ideals of that regime in terms of
In our case, founding a country based on human equality, bringing it into actual existence, making these abstract principles, as Lincoln called them, actual A reality in an actual country.
And when you look at it that way, American history looks very different as opposed to modern historians, which all they want to do is look back, they see bad things, they see things like slavery, and so they want to throw it all out and start over again.
Kind of coming back to, you know, starting history at zero, as you earlier said.
Yeah.
That's the problem we have today.
Yeah, we've got a similar movement in the UK.
Actually, I think probably the phrase comes from America, doesn't it?
Decolonize the curriculum.
It probably does.
We're probably feeding bad things back to you now.
So you've got universities like Oxford and Cambridge, which you may have heard of.
I mean, they used to have quite a reputation.
I'm not sure why.
I mean, honestly, given the choice between Oxford, Cambridge and Hillsdale, I think you get a much better education at Hillsdale.
And I think it's sad that that is the case.
But there it is.
It's very sad.
It's patently obvious.
It's the truth, however.
Yeah, it really is, isn't it?
And it's not because we somehow discovered something that wasn't known.
It's just that so much of modern universities and the modern educational system has rejected its own great accomplishments.
And places like Hillsdale and a few others-- we're not the only ones, but we're up front and forward about it-- have maintained these older traditions and how to study things.
We actually think it's still worth reading great literature and great books and studying history and political thought.
And that that is actually liberating, as in the meaning of the word liberal education.
We actually are liberal in that sense.
Yes.
That frees the mind to come to learn things.
You can still disagree.
You can still dislike things in America's past.
You can still, as we do, condemn slavery.
Frederick Douglass spoke on our campus twice.
I mean, you know, Hillsdale College was an abolitionist college in the 19th century.
That is all true, but the way you teach these things, the way you study these things, is you approach them on these, that you might learn something from them, and they have something to teach you about the truth.
The truth of the human condition, its flaws, its imperfections, but also its ability to achieve great things, to learn, to see great things, to see beauty and wisdom.
And that's how we approach it.
And that's, I would say, how all of your great educational institutes used to approach it.
Yeah.
So I got distracted then because your voice is frozen and you disappeared.
But maybe it'll come back.
Oh, dear.
I hate my Wi-Fi so much.
Oh, hello.
Are you there, Matthew?
Can you hear me?
I can hear you fine.
Oh, good.
Excellent.
Anyway, I think one of the sneaky things the Founding Fathers did, in fact, just before we go on, give me an idiot's guide to the Founding Fathers.
I've read, I'm a big fan of Jefferson's second, what's it called, inauguration speech.
Fantastic.
I love the way he sets out.
How to avoid tyranny, how to get a prosperous economy.
Who were the really cool guys among your founding fathers?
Who should I worship?
Well, that's always a hard question.
I actually think the greatest of the founders was... Can I close it up again?
No, I can hear you.
Okay.
I actually think the greatest of the founders was George Washington.
For a couple of reasons.
One is he was always the adult in the room.
His disposition was always very conservative in that sense.
But he understood the principles as well as anybody else.
And he made the thing happen.
So there's, you know, he really embodies the principles of the founding, but he's the great statesman.
Right?
He is the classical sense of the founder.
I like a lot about Jefferson, but Jefferson can get kind of squirrely in a lot of his ideas.
What is that?
Madison is great.
Well, he's a beautiful writer.
These are the axioms of free society, as Lincoln called them.
But he can be too enamored by the Enlightenment sometimes.
Okay, right.
And kind of get carried away by it.
And so it's always good to have Jefferson, but then offset by, say, a John Adams, or the way in which Madison was, even though he was on the same party as Jefferson, offset Jefferson as well.
So it's the mix of them really is the miraculous thing.
I think they came together.
And in that sense, Washington's great because he really embodied the range of the founders, and yet he was the practical statesman who actually brought it into existence.
Do you know that Washington's family home is 15 miles from where I live?
Solgrave Manor.
And in my church, there are the stained glass windows of the Washington family, taken from Solgrave Manor, and that says Washington and light with an E. And you can also see the origins of the stars and striped flags, which I think were inspired by Washington's family crest.
Anyway, that's just a digression for you.
I thought you'd be interested.
Yeah, I am.
That's great.
I know what I was going to say.
One of the sneaky things that the Founding Fathers did was, and I think that modern governments who tend to be authoritarian and constricting don't like this at all, they made liberty a very key part of your essence, if you like.
Tell me a bit about that.
Well, I don't know if it was sneaky.
Although I like sneaky things, I suppose.
You're absolutely right, and remember what the objective here.
So, in broad terms, the Enlightenment is bringing more tolerance to the rule of law, constitutionalism.
This is all kind of being carried over, especially through the English tradition, into America.
What's the purpose of that tradition?
It is to expand human liberty, which also means expanding economic opportunity, decreasing repression, especially religious repression, allowing for the spread of wealth as opposed to keeping it in particular families and aristocracy.
And so, The central question.
So, the Declaration speaks of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Well, what's the short term for all of that, right?
It really is liberty.
Yeah.
And the other thing I'd like to point out is in the Americans, they, in America, have two words in English.
We have two words for this, which is liberty and freedom.
Yeah.
Freedom is a much more modern word.
It's actually Germanic in its origins.
Liberty, which is the word the founders actually used almost exclusively, is an old Latin word.
And, you know, it has some implications when you say liberty is that liberty which is appropriate for man.
Right?
As opposed to freedom, which could be anything.
Something like waving in the wind is free.
Yeah.
It's free of constraint.
That's an aspect of it.
But liberty is a much more robust word.
And that's how they understood it, which is there's something appropriate for the human person, which is a full flourishing of the human person requires liberty, so that you can have your own life, your own property, pursue your own interests and opportunities, but also have and express your religious liberty.
There's a whole range of things that are appropriate for human beings, And they use the term liberty to describe them.
It's really in that sense the end of what they're trying to accomplish.
Yeah.
I suppose the reason I'm dwelling on this sort of nostalgically and slightly mournfully is that we live in times where no one talks about... I've never heard anyone in our government in the UK talk about liberty.
Not the Conservatives.
It ought to be in their DNA and they don't talk about it at all.
It's extraordinary.
So I read your piece, which I thought was delightful.
But that was one thing that really struck me, because of course, you know, here that's still an important term of much of our politics, is this idea of liberty.
But you're right, it's, you know, with the lockdowns and different things, the rise of the modern government and administration, it's become less so.
But you really kind of pointed that out in the British context, which I think should give us some pause.
To think about, you know, where is this all going?
Is liberty still the end of all this, or is merely more efficient government, better administration?
You know, what is it?
And that's what kind of the American progressive left sees as the objective.
And I think on that front, you guys are much farther ahead of us than where we are.
Yeah, I know.
Get all our bad ideas from you.
And it now seems like it's the role is reversed.
We are now the Fonzette Origo of all manner of tyrannical stupidity.
But I think, you know, I think, look, I think God used to be an Englishman.
I think probably he is American now.
And I just, I don't know about you, Matthew, I'm feeling, Oddly optimistic about things.
I mean, I see, for example, America is not accepting the Stolen Presidency at all.
They're not buying it.
He's kind of a dead man walking, I think.
I mean, in the metaphorical sense, I'm not suggesting he's going to get, well, he's probably going to succumb to Alzheimer's sooner or later.
But I mean, I don't get the sense that this is the end of America.
I'm sensing a kind of rebirth.
Do you feel any of that optimism?
Well, I think the answer to that is yes.
And I think it actually has less to do with the immediate events of last, you know, few months.
And it has to do with something even deeper and more profound, which gives me perhaps even more optimism, which is, look, if the American founders were right, or put it more broadly, if the long train of Western civilization is correct, then there are certain inherent truths in human nature.
And one of those truths is that the human beings really don't like to be ruled, especially ruled against their will.
The British tradition recognized that, which is why when they went around the world, they spread the rule of law as opposed to the rule of men.
The Americans put that in principled form and embedded it in their constitution.
But if that's a truth of human nature, then there's always an optimistic core there.
And I think in the American context, setting aside current office holders or the particulars of this election or that election, you can really go back throughout our history, especially in the 20th century with the rise of this thing called conservatism, with the movements especially in the 20th century with the rise of this thing called conservatism, with the movements like the Tea Party, with this
There's a lot of uncomfortableness with the rise of modern administrative politics.
And I think a lot of Americans, in both political parties and across the spectrum, don't see that as being the true expression of American liberty.
How that plays out, I don't know.
But I think that this question will continue for some time.
And I think that about American politics, it's really grounded in the fact that there's something about American politics, again going back to its founding and these principles, that can't merely be erased.
Yeah.
Try as they will, try as they will for the last hundred years, they can't get rid of them.
And I think Americans still kind of have a sense of that, and the question is how they understand that, to what extent do they understand it, how they're going to teach it to their children, And how that plays out in our politics.
Yeah.
Do you sense that there is a starting to be a backlash in academia?
I mean, your Ivy League universities are just as prey to this social justice, snowflakery, et cetera, that has afflicted our universities.
And I think if I were the parent of an American parent, of a university-aged child, I would feel no more enthusiastic about Ivy Leagues than I do about Oxbridge.
Do you get any sense that, I mean, places like Hillsdale, and you say there are others, or that there's going to be a backlash?
Well, I think you're right in the sense that so much of this really grows out of the universities.
Universities I suppose I'm less optimistic about than politics.
Because at least in politics, people can still vote and participate in elections and be actively involved in things, at least thus far.
But the Academy, with tenured professors and large endowments, it really is hard to push back against this.
But, you know, I am struck and I have a little bit of optimism, perhaps, that there are historians that have come out and criticized some of this.
You know, they've criticized the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn and some of the radical elements of the kind of ideological historicism.
It's hard to see, but it's there.
But at the end of the day, I think To the extent that there's going to be an American renewal, it's going to come from families teaching their children, and it's going to come up through politics.
State politics, local politics, and eventually national politics as well.
Here is where the American people are on this question.
Remember, America right now is closely divided.
The Republicans picked up more seats in the House.
The Senate is 50-50.
This was actually a pretty close presidential election.
Uh, in which, you know, what, over 70 million people voted for each, each of the two candidates.
This is not, this is not, does not suggest a, a, a people, a voting people who have settled this question, uh, one way or the other.
other.
And so now we're going to have a discussion, which I'm optimistic, we'll have to go back and rethink and reconsider who we are in light of our core principles.
And that's what the report was meant to do, put a marker down that in this conversation, this is the other way of thinking about it.
Where do we stand?
And I think we're now going to have to have that conversation. - Yeah.
Do you think, can you, I mean, I think I'm slightly more sceptical of that sort of 50-50 divide than you claim to be.
Fair enough.
In fact, I believe that Trump won an overwhelming number of votes and that this has been suppressed by your incredibly corrupt, disgustingly corrupt system.
If I'm right, and of course I am, can you see the possibility that the red states will secede, that there will be a new division in America?
I mean, I could see Texas, Florida, a few of those states saying, well, if they persist with this corrupt liberal left hegemony, we want no part of it, and we're going to have to cut loose in our own way.
Is that possible?
Well, I mean, I suppose in a general way, all things are possible.
Yeah, right.
Given where things have been going in politics, I make no predictions because I can't.
But as I said that, I think we need to look back, take a broader perspective here.
I mean, I think we're divided intellectually.
There are very deep divisions, which clearly now go back to these core principles.
But I don't think we've kind of crossed a Rubicon where the only option is to break up.
I pray that we haven't.
I don't think that's happened.
I think it's, you know, these things come up.
People like to talk about these kinds of scenarios.
But I think another aspect that we have going for us, in addition to these core principles, which we always go back to, is the strong sense, both on the left and the right, that we are one nation.
We actually do, despite our having a brief history, as you have made imminently clear in the school of things, we do have a history of being a union.
And I think that the American people, even the division about these principles, especially in intelligentsia, I think the vast majority of the American people, if framed correctly, support these principles.
But I also think the vast majority of the American people love their country and love this union.
And it would be Um, a terrible loss to kind of go down that path without thinking, uh, thinking this through.
So you, so my hope is that there will be a, okay, let's, let's, we don't want to go there.
Let's back up.
Let's think about this.
But in doing that, you guys should go back and, and to address, uh, these core principles.
And there you've got to actually, we've got to allow for the ability for, uh, these principles to express themselves in our politics.
I think there is a majority that would want to save this country based upon its most fundamental principles.
And how that gets expressed, when, how long does it take, that's another question, I suppose.
But I think that things like this report, the abolition of which has caused a lot of interest They've done by trying to erase it suggests that there are still lots of American people out there.
I think overwhelming numbers of American people who have not accepted the radical claim that we should merely throw these away and start over again.
Matthew, I totally agree with you on the bit about most Americans want America to be united and believe in the Constitution and believe in all the principles outlined therein in the Declaration of Independence.
That's a given.
That is absolutely a given.
But at the risk of calling you Pollyanna, I can Yeah, you only have to look around the world now or in recent history.
You think about what happened in Rwanda with the Hutus and the Tutsis, where you had this minority tribe which was yet the ruling class.
You think of the, what's the ruling tribe in Nigeria?
There's one kind of governing tribe, the Hutus I think.
Come to me in a moment.
It's the Yoruba, the Igbo, and what's the other one?
The Hausa.
The Hausa tend to be the ones that dominate the military.
You think of Syria, you know, you think of the Ba'athists and the Assad family.
Again, the Alawites are a minority, and yet they have the political power.
It seems to me that you have something similar going on in America right now.
You have a narrow elite which has been trained in woke and submitted to all these kind of sinister rituals with skull and bones and stuff.
You've got this kind of effete, corrupt, political class which has completely lost touch with the principles of the constitution and stuff.
Your judiciary are bent as a nine bob note as far as I can see.
I see very little sign you've got a functioning judiciary.
They're deeply corrupt.
Your politicians, a lot of them are in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party.
I mean, I find this extraordinary.
It is an orgy in stables at the political level.
I do not see how this can have a happy conclusion.
I do not.
Because the people, we the people, do not share their values.
And yet it seems to me they've got the power, this corrupt class.
So explain that.
No, fair enough.
And I don't necessarily disagree.
I mean, the notion of a corrupt elite, I think that's absolutely right.
And I think that's what the last, you know, 30, 40, You know, 50 years really has been a slow but growing boil on the part of the American people to object to that kind of rule.
I'm just putting it in a broader context.
I think the debate in America really is between the elite, which exists in both political parties for sure, and has a lot of corruptions within it, and the American people.
My point is that the American people, I don't think, have divided into tribes, to use your historical examples of other countries, to the extent that they're no longer capable of living together.
They have deep divisions.
Don't misunderstand me there.
But I don't think we have become tribes in the sense that we are incapable of being one nation.
And I think, to go back to your point, which we agreed on, is that it's precisely because the American people
Despite those disagreements, the overwhelming majority setting aside the elite university... My point is, I'm in agreement with you that there's... America's problem, its crisis, if you will, is it's being ruled by an elite coming out of the universities, within our politics, controlling media, all the things you described earlier, and there are a lot of corruptions in it.
What gives me some optimism is I think there are also a lot of signs that the American people, whether we're narrowly divided or more broadly divided, however you want to put it politically, I think there's an overwhelming majority of them who still believe this is a good country, that it should remain a union, and that when it comes down to it, the principles upon which we're founded were in 1776.
It's flawed, it's imperfect, but it's got a noble history of trying to live up to them.
There's this disjunct, almost two regimes, if you will.
There's this elite regime that we dislike and I think it's being fought over and currently is really dominant and in control.
There's plenty of signs out there that the American people have not settled their opinions on this question.
And I think the right response to that is, well, how do they express those opinions in a way that will save this country?
The other great tradition we have, now granted we've had a civil war and we had a fight over secession, I would say the stronger tradition in America, the tradition you see in all the great reform movements, whether it's Martin Luther King's civil rights movement, women's suffrage, abolition, is a movement to save America by going back to its beginnings.
And in that sense, that's the kind of populist movement I think we need here.
And I would argue that we see, we've seen in Trumpism, but before the Tea Party movement and really going back to Reaganism in the 1980s, that is by no means gone as much as its critics want to erase that.
There's still, you know, 70 plus million people Who did not choose the current direction we're going in.
And that tells me something about where they are, given the fact that I would say that recent politicians in both political parties, even though I like Mr. Trump's positions a lot better, it's not that they were perfect in their way either.
And yet despite that, tens of millions of American people voted for him a second time To continue the direction of the country.
That doesn't strike me as we're about to break up and become multiple unions and have secession.
That strikes me as we're in a period of time in which we're going to have to decide which direction we want to go in.
And I want to appeal to that, as a populist matter, against the elites which are dominant.
And the way to do that, in our own history, the way it's always happened is by looking back to what are our core principles appealing to those things.
That's the source of American unity, not the kind of enforced unity coming from government.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we can agree on that.
We can agree on that.
Okay, Matthew, it's been great talking to you.
I'm sorry about the appalling internet.
Everyone, if you've enjoyed this podcast, do please sponsor me on Patreon or Subscribestar.
And thank you very much, Professor Matthew Spaulding.
I hope to meet you in the flesh sometime, if we're allowed out of the flesh.
I'd love to, and I enjoyed it.
I had a great time, James, and any time, love to join you.
Great.
Thanks a lot.
Bye-bye.
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