Aug. 29, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Let me also explain to you and your audience how the Founding Fathers as a whole understood the issue of slavery. | ||
| Because it's simply not true that all Founding Fathers were slaveholders. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| Reminder, guys, to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that pesky notification bell. | ||
| And joining me today is a professor of political philosophy at Clemson University and author of the new book, America's Revolutionary Mind, A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It, C. Bradley Thompson. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
| Great to see you again. | ||
| Good to have you, Brad. | ||
| Well, we have to do what we legally have to do first, which is I have to ask you how you're coping with COVID. | ||
| How's it going down at the university? | ||
| How's life? | ||
| What's going on with the school and the rest of that stuff? | ||
| Before we get into the book. | ||
| Sure, everything's fine here. | ||
| The university's been closed now for about two months. | ||
| We finished the last month of the semester or so online, which was new and different, but it actually worked pretty well. | ||
| I teach a seminar with 10 students. | ||
| And we did it by Zoom and that was fine. | ||
| But otherwise, I've been sitting every day, all day in my, what I call my redneck office, which is outside here in warm South Carolina and working on writing my next book. | ||
| You're a capitalist. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| You teach about capitalism. | ||
| You're a free market guy. | ||
| How do you feel about the state of capitalism and the free markets in the midst of this lockdown? | ||
| Well, I don't feel very good about it. | ||
| I'm actually genuinely worried about where this country is headed. | ||
| And I don't mean just the current economic crisis. | ||
| I mean, it is ironic to me that China passed along this coronavirus to the United States, and in response, our government is turning more into the Chinese government. | ||
| We're becoming considerably more authoritarian. | ||
| than we ever have been before. | ||
| And I'm genuinely concerned about the freedoms and rights of ordinary everyday people to go about their business, to work and to live their lives. | ||
| So I've had a bunch of different senators and economists on talking about, you know, what to do with stimulus and all this stuff from Marco Rubio and Rand Paul and a couple other people. | ||
| What would be the sort of pure capitalist approach? | ||
| We've got, you know, something creeping up to now 40 million unemployed people. | ||
| We're not letting enough people go back to work. | ||
| Some of the states are doing things a little bit differently, but as you know, I'm here in California. | ||
| We're still in lockdown. | ||
| Now they're telling us till August, even though we flattened the curve, we did what they asked, yet they seem to still roll out these draconian measures. | ||
| What's the right policy if you believe in free markets, if you believe in capitalism and you believe in human ingenuity? | ||
| Yeah, I think the simplest and the first and foremost thing is you, government, I think probably has an appropriate role to protect those who are most vulnerable, to protect the elderly. | ||
| And I think veterans facilities and old folks homes could have been on lockdown. | ||
| But I don't think that the rest of the country should have been on lockdown. | ||
| And we are free, rational individuals and we have rights. | ||
| And each of us has to assess the risks ourselves and we have to take the appropriate actions that we think will protect ourselves, our families, our co-workers. | ||
| And the members of our community and I think Americans have by and large done exactly that I mean, it's been remarkable What what ordinary everyday free people can do? | ||
| To protect themselves. | ||
| I mean nobody wants the coronavirus and I think the Americans without the government have done an extraordinary job in taking the necessary steps to prevent getting it and So what do you think the role of the government then is, at the state level and the federal level? | ||
| What do you think the role is when they're not letting people go to work? | ||
| Is it to bail out everybody? | ||
| Is it to help small business, big business, some combination thereof? | ||
| Is there a role at all? | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that there's really very much rule, certainly for for pay for paying the American people not to work and for all of the bailouts. | ||
| I mean, because I would have had a lockdown that would have been much, much less draconian. | ||
| And so therefore, the economy would have would have not been burdened by this. | ||
| And ordinary everyday Americans would have just continued working. | ||
| All right, so let's shift to your book, because some of the things that you talk about in the book, actually, probably everything you talk about in the book, we can frame around sort of what's going on with us right now. | ||
| And as I was reading it, I thought, man, this guy hits every buzzword that has any meaning to me, but I'm just gonna read the first couple sentences of the inner flap, because I think that really can almost set us off for the whole rest of the conversation, because you're really trying to do two things in this book that I think you do quite well. | ||
| So it says, the purpose of this book is twofold, to elucidate the logic, "principles and significance | ||
| "of the Declaration of Independence "as the embodiment of the American mind | ||
| "and to shed light on what John Adams once called "the real American revolution, | ||
| "that is the moral revolution that occurred "in the minds of the people in the 15 years before 1776." | ||
| So that's the part that I'm super interested in right now, because it seems to me in 2020 with Corona | ||
| and everything else that we are in some sort of idea churning state right now | ||
| that maybe could 15 years from now, we'll go back and go, whoa, | ||
| this is where a lot of these ideas actually started. | ||
| So let's start with the first part, though. | ||
| The Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So in 1825, just before he died, Thomas Jefferson wrote a famous letter in which he described the object of the Declaration of Independence as an expression of the American mind. | ||
| And that statement has always struck me. | ||
| So that indicates that the Declaration of Independence is a kind of summing up. | ||
| It tells us what Americans were thinking in 1776. | ||
| It tells us what they thought Their moral and political principles were and and the Declaration lays out for self-evident truths And I think those for self-evident truths are at the heart and soul of what the American Revolution was all about And and subsequently what the United States of America has always been so it is the Declaration is the heart and soul of of the United States it is it provides the moral foundation, so it's | ||
| On the one hand, it's a summing up of the principles of the revolution, but it's more than that. | ||
| It's also a statement of who and what we are as a people. | ||
| It's at the heart and soul of the philosophy that I call Americanism. | ||
| So you mentioned those self-evident truths, and we hold these truths to be self-evident. | ||
| That's what it says in the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| Why is, in and of itself, is that so important? | ||
| This, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that we don't have to relitigate that some things are because they are. | ||
| Yeah, so I think the first and most important thing to note, Dave, is that the revolutionary generation, actually believed in the concept of truth. | ||
| They believed that there are certain moral principles that are objectively, absolutely, permanently, and universally true. | ||
| And that is very different from the world in which we live today. | ||
| Can you lay out some of those principles just so we can put them in contrast to kind of where we're at right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, the first thing to say is we live in a postmodern age. | ||
| And in 2016, the Oxford Dictionary described its word of the year as post-truth. | ||
| And Time magazine ran a cover asking the question, is truth dead? | ||
| So in 21st century America, we no longer believe in the very concept truth. | ||
| And that is dramatically different from what the revolutionary generation believed. | ||
| As I said, they believed in the concept truth, that there are absolute, certain, morally universal principles. | ||
| And the particular principles that they believed in, the four self-evident truths of the Declaration, which are contained in the second paragraph, I think each one of them can be summed up in one word. | ||
| And they would be, first, equality. | ||
| Second, rights. | ||
| Third, consent. | ||
| And fourth, revolution. | ||
| Now you have to read the second paragraph to get the full flavor of those four self-evident truths, but that is the core of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as, in my view, the American mind. | ||
| So let's preempt the haters who will say, wait a minute, how could equality be in there? | ||
| Because not everyone was created equal. | ||
| We know men and women were not equal. | ||
| We know these were slave owners, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| We've talked about this a little bit before when you were on the show last time, but can you unpack that for us a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, so it's both a complicated and obviously now a controversial subject, particularly in the light of the New York Times' 1619 Project. | ||
| So I'm sure your audience and you, of course, you're very familiar with the 1619 Project, the purpose of which is to argue that America was founded not in 1776, but rather in 1619 when the first slaves were brought to the United States. | ||
| And what that means, of course, is that the United States is founded on slavery, which therefore means that it is by definition immoral and evil. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is in sum what the 1619 Project is all about. | ||
| But America's revolutionary founders in 1776 rejected the idea of slavery. | ||
| But let me unpack that because it's obviously complicated. | ||
| So the first thing to note is that in 1776 Slavery was the norm around the world. | ||
| There had always been slavery through all time over all continents. | ||
| Slavery had universally been accepted around the world. | ||
| The second thing to note is that in 1776, no founding father supported slavery as an institution. | ||
| They regarded it as what they called a necessary evil. | ||
| And the emphasis has to be put on the word evil. | ||
| Now take Thomas Jefferson, for instance. | ||
| He clearly and explicitly states that slavery is an evil, immoral institution. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it violates the doctrine of rights. | ||
| He also believed that slavery was an inherently corrupting institution. | ||
| So that's what's important to say at the outset. | ||
| Now, let me also explain to you and your audience how the Founding Fathers as a whole understood the issue of slavery because it's simply not true that all Founding Fathers were slaveholders. | ||
| That's just not true. | ||
| And so you can divide the revolutionary generation, I would say, into four camps. | ||
| So first, there were Founding Fathers like John Adams, for instance, Samuel Adams, who never owned a slave and were morally opposed to slavery. | ||
| And then there's a second camp, people like Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, who created the first anti-slavery organizations in the United States, but earlier in their lives they had been slaveholders, but certainly they came to condemn slavery. | ||
| And then you get people in the third category like George Washington, who, yes, was a slaveholder his whole life, but upon his death freed his slaves in his will. | ||
| And then finally there's the hard category, consisting of people like Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| who own slaves and who did not abolish or did not free their slaves upon their deaths. | ||
| So, how are we to evaluate that? | ||
| I think the first thing to say is that both, say, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, | ||
| as I've already indicated with Jefferson, were adamantly opposed to the institution of slavery. | ||
| They, if you read their private correspondence, they lamented slavery. | ||
| They saw themselves as morally culpable. | ||
| But they didn't abolish their slaves and the institution of slavery, I think, for two primary reasons. | ||
| Actually, I'd say three reasons. | ||
| The first is that they thought slavery would eventually die a natural death. | ||
| About that, they were mistaken. | ||
| They could not have imagined in 1776 the invention of the cotton gin. | ||
| Secondly, both Henry and Thomas Jefferson were deeply concerned about what I call the post-emancipation problem. | ||
| And by the post-emancipation problem, what I mean is, it's the question of All right, so we free the slaves today, which is the morally right thing to do, but then what? | ||
| And Jefferson himself was deeply concerned about the possibility, the very real possibility, of a race war in the southern, particularly in the slave majority states. | ||
| So the question is, how do you free your slaves without creating any kind of Race war between whites and blacks. | ||
| So these were the big issues. | ||
| And then the last thing I would say, Dave, is it is important, and I try to do this in my book, and that is to hold someone like Thomas Jefferson morally culpable. | ||
| He was a slave owner. | ||
| He didn't free his slaves. | ||
| And part of the reason he didn't free his slaves is because of his own personal habits, his lifestyle. | ||
| Jefferson lived high. | ||
| And when he died, he died in debt. | ||
| And as a result of living the lifestyle that he did, He didn't have the resources he thought to free his slave. | ||
| So we have to judge someone like Thomas Jefferson as morally culpable. | ||
| Of that there can be no question. | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting, we talked about this last time, but when you visit Monticello, which I've been to probably five or six times, which was his estate in Virginia, they spend, when you go on the tour, they spend what I would say is almost a disproportionate amount of time talking about slavery, which in a weird way, It's positive, even though it feels disproportionate, it's sort of like, we're not shying away from this. | ||
| I mean, they are very open about it and it does go to the complexity that they're not saying he's not culpable or anything like that. | ||
| Are you ever concerned that when you write a book like this and when you talk about these great minds that founded the country, that so much of the conversation gets funneled to the slavery issue, not to diminish The importance of discussing it, obviously, but that so much of it seems to go in that direction because of the way we look through a racial lens in 2020, or at least the media does, or many of us do? | ||
| I am concerned about it because it's not what defined the American Revolution, and it's not what defined the American founding. | ||
| In fact, I would argue just the opposite. | ||
| So rather than actually lamenting the fact that it always comes up, I take it as an opportunity To tell people that the Declaration of Independence, authored by Thomas Jefferson, is the single greatest document in human history that led to the abolition of slavery. | ||
| And in the decades immediately after the publication of the Declaration, the northern states, in fact every single northern state between 1776 and 1803, passed manumission laws where they put in place laws that would lead to the gradual emancipation of slavery. | ||
| And then at the federal level, the federal government in 1787 passed the Northwest Ordinance, which prevented the extension of slavery into the Northwest Territory, which is that with the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. | ||
| through Ohio and Indiana. | ||
| And then secondly, there was the prohibition in the Constitution of the Atlantic slave trade ending in 1808. | ||
| So given the time, given the reality on the ground, they did, I think, as much as was possible given the circumstances, right? | ||
| So it's a hard question. | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| But in my view, in the end, the Founding Fathers are vindicated by the principles that they enunciated which led And the United States is, in many ways, I mean, its history of anti-slavery is simply one of the great stories of American history through the 19th century. | ||
| And so, yes, we need to tell the story of slavery, but we also need to tell the equally important story of how and why slavery was ended in the United States. | ||
| So I wanna back up to those self-evident truths because it's one of the topics that I'm actually most interested in right now and I write a little bit about in my book that there has to be something outside of us to organize a society. | ||
| Do you know how much sort of internal arguing they had as to what those self-evident truths were actually and how they all arrived at what they were? | ||
| Yeah, that's a great question. | ||
| So I would say that the principal division amongst colonial Americans in the 1760s and in the 1770s was between American patriots and the so-called loyalists or American Tories. | ||
| That's the great division and in the end they had really very different conceptions of what America ought to be and they had very different conceptions of the underlying moral principles of the United States. | ||
| But once the Declaration of Independence was passed, that disagreement became moot. | ||
| And I think what's most important and the story that I try to tell in my book is the story of how and why American patriots came to search for Discover and develop the principles that would ultimately be elucidated in the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| And so, you know, going back to your first question and the twofold purpose of my book. | ||
| So on the one hand, yes, the book is about the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| It's a close textual analysis of the Declaration, particularly of the four self-evident truths. | ||
| But the book actually, in the end, Dave, is about a lot more than just the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| It's about the American mind, and it's about the deepest causes and meaning of the American Revolution. | ||
| So, as I said, the Declaration is a summing up of those principles. | ||
| But the real question, the really fascinating part of the story, is how the Americans came to those principles. | ||
| Because they didn't hold them necessarily in, say, 1760. | ||
| Right? | ||
| These were principles. | ||
| And let's take any one of the four self-evident truths. | ||
| Equality, rights, consent, and revolution. | ||
| These were principles that the revolutionaries discovered and developed. | ||
| So, for me, the key year is 1765. | ||
| And 1765 is the year in which the Stamp Act was passed. | ||
| And that's the moment when everything in America changes. | ||
| Now, the second quotation that really drives my interpretation of the revolution as a whole, in addition to the one by Thomas Jefferson describing the Declaration of Independence, is one by John Adams. | ||
| And John Adams, late in life, in trying to describe to a friend what the causes of the revolution were, He says that the revolution was not the war for independence. | ||
| The true American revolution, he says, was put into effect in the 15 years before a shot was ever fired at Concord and Lexington. | ||
| And the revolution, the true American revolution, he says, was a moral revolution in the minds of the people. | ||
| So that's what my book is really about, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the American people. | ||
| And Adams's statement is supported by Thomas Paine, who at that time also, in describing the causes and meaning of the American Revolution, said that because of the American Revolution, The American people, he said, hear with new ears, see with new eyes, and think new thoughts. | ||
| And the new thoughts, he said, had to do with the doctrine of individual rights. | ||
| It's the discovery of the doctrine of natural rights. | ||
| By the Americans, that really is the most important, I think, revolutionary moment. | ||
| And so what my book then does is it takes each one of the four self-evident truths, equality, rights, consent, and revolution, and it gives a kind of intellectual history over, I devote two chapters to each of the four self-evident truths. | ||
| And I trace a kind of intellectual history of let's say the idea of equality or rights from the late 17th century from the English philosopher John Locke up through the early 18th century, but then really I spend most of the time in the book discussing How the Americans developed these ideas during the 1760s and during the 1770s. | ||
| And that's really how the book is framed. | ||
| And that's really the story that it's telling. | ||
| How the Americans discovered these principles. | ||
| So we did equality. | ||
| I wanna hit on the other three more. | ||
| But first, as they were debating these things, You know, one of the things that I talk about all the time is they were saying there are truths outside of us, and then they're saying these are God-given rights, and then also we're separating church and state. | ||
| That concept is pretty profound, at least in our modern times, that men could do something like that. | ||
| Were they all sort of on board that? | ||
| Was there any pushback that we can't, well, church and state certainly there was pushback, | ||
| but that we can't say that there are truths outside of us, it will lead to anarchy or something like that. | ||
| Well, I think it's true to say that every single American revolution believed | ||
| in the idea, as I said earlier, of truth, of absolute objective, certain permanent universal truths. | ||
| But the question is, what is the source of those truths? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the really, that's the key question. | ||
| I can also tell you that virtually every single American founding father believed that, for instance, the concept of rights was grounded in nature. | ||
| And by nature, I mean nature out there, right? | ||
| You look out into the world and you see nature. | ||
| And one of the really important things that the Founding Fathers did was they adapted the ideas of 17th century English scientists and philosophers like Francis Bacon and his Novum Organum. | ||
| Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica and John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. | ||
| And they took the Enlightenment's ideas of the laws of nature, the scientific laws of nature, and they attempted to apply them to man, right? | ||
| And they asked the question, are there moral laws of nature? | ||
| Which means laws that are absolute, permanent, and universal, right? | ||
| That you can look out into the world and you can identify. | ||
| And so in order to discover those moral laws and rights of nature, then you have to study human nature. | ||
| And so all of America's Founding Fathers were students of the Enlightenment. | ||
| They believed that there were moral laws and rights of nature that could be discovered by examining human nature. | ||
| The more difficult question, and where you do see some division, is I think it's true to say that most of the Founding Fathers were practicing Christians, and so therefore they believed that the laws and rights of nature were grounded in an ultimate source, and that ultimate source, of course, was the Supreme Being, as he's called in the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| Now, but it's also the case that not all of the Revolutionary Founders were practicing Christians. | ||
| And so they discovered the laws and rights of nature in nature. | ||
| And they just they didn't go the next step. | ||
| But the most important thing to remember is that they all believed in the moral laws and rights of nature. | ||
| And nature is the key term there. | ||
| So, with all of this in mind, you're, you know, talking about the Enlightenment and how they were incorporating these ideas and, you know, had traveled, you know, literally across the world to form this new nation. | ||
| In a weird way, was this sort of timing is everything that made America so great? | ||
| That it was sort of following the Enlightenment, finding a new land, like there was the opportunity, and in many ways, Had the timing been a little bit different, and they wouldn't have been able to find this new land right then, that these ideas really never would have taken root the way they have. | ||
| No, I think that's right, right? | ||
| So these ideas never really quite took root, at least socially and politically, in the old world where those ideas came from. | ||
| Right, so there is something about the American experience. | ||
| The American experience of leaving Europe and discarding all of the old world manners and mores and institutions, ideas, and starting de novo. | ||
| Starting in a new place and they were able to put into effect ideas that they never really could have put into practice in the old world. | ||
| Now, eventually, you know, beginning with the French Revolution and then over the course of the following century, many of these ideas were eventually put into practice in the old world. | ||
| But you should view America as a laboratory, right? | ||
| A laboratory where free men and women come And they are able to experiment socially and politically and they are able to put into practice ideas that they simply would they would not have been able to put into practice in Europe. | ||
| And so I think it's a combination of these ideas coming to the new world and then the fact that that they have a blank slate. | ||
| They get to begin with a tabula rasa that is America, which was not possible in Europe. | ||
| And so it is a kind of fortuitous meeting. | ||
| And that's one of the ways I think about it. | ||
| When I think about what America is, there was kind of a fortuitous meeting of the ideas of the Declaration of | ||
| Independence, which passed through the Cumberland Gap after the | ||
| revolution, and where American pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel | ||
| Boone We're able to implement those ideas in a place that had no institutions. | ||
| So it was an extraordinarily fortuitous meeting of both ideas and a place that had no heritable institutions. | ||
| It's funny because it almost sounds like a miracle in a lot of ways that all of these things came together as these people are traversing the new world and they're having this awakening. | ||
| And that's why at the beginning of this conversation I sort of likened it to what I think is happening right now. | ||
| I sense, although it feels very authoritarian right now and draconian and kind of scary, especially if you're in California where I am, It's like, there are people waking up. | ||
| I think people are suddenly realizing what individual rights are, what personal responsibility is. | ||
| We may not see the fruits of that in the next election, but, you know, if this all goes according to plan, I suppose you would say, well, we'll see the fruits of that in about 15 years. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's probably right. | ||
| I certainly hope it's right. | ||
| I still believe, and I do write about this a lot in the book, so one of the key concepts in the book is this idea of the spirit of liberty. | ||
| And that's one of the key moral concepts, I think, of the American Revolution was that what I call the American spirit of liberty. | ||
| And I don't think any people in any place At any time, anywhere in the world has had what I call this spirit of liberty. | ||
| I mean, there's no other way to explain the American reaction to the Stamp Act in 1765 without understanding what this spirit of liberty was. | ||
| I mean, if you think about what the Stamp Act or the Sugar Act or the Townsend Acts were, I mean, certainly compared to today, these were relatively small taxes on the American people, but it wasn't just the taxes. | ||
| And this is actually directly comparable to the United States of today. | ||
| So you can think about what the British government was doing to the colonists in the 1760s and the 1770s. | ||
| As something akin to the British Deep State, the British Deep State, not only taxing and regulating the colonists, but imposing draconian regulations enforced by the military. | ||
| on the American people. | ||
| And so it's not just, you know, it's not just the rallying cry, | ||
| no taxation without representation. | ||
| No, the American people really saw a much larger sort of web of laws and regulations | ||
| that were being imposed by this kind of British deep state. | ||
| And it ignited in them. | ||
| I mean the Americans in during this period they were they were. | ||
| sort of overwhelmed by this kind of and Edmund Burke, the British statesman, speaks of the | ||
| American spirit of liberty. He had never seen anything like it. And so the Stamp Act was like | ||
| a tripwire that the Americans stepped over and it ignited the spirit of liberty. And the spirit | ||
| of liberty is first and foremost a recognition of power and what power can do to ruin the lives of | ||
| So the American revolutionaries understood, I mean, their basic operating premise is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. | ||
| They understood that principle to the core of their being. | ||
| And the second they saw even the slightest intrusion of political power on their lives, either in the form of taxes, Or regulations or British troops. | ||
| The tripwire was hit and they reacted immediately. | ||
| And I do not believe that the American spirit of liberty in 2020 is dead. | ||
| I think we are seeing the American spirit of liberty being enacted by all kinds of Americans all across the country, particularly those Americans who have been forced by the government to not work. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So in many ways, you could say that our situation in May of 2020 is considerably worse in terms of our rights and liberties than it was in 1765. | ||
| And I do think ordinary everyday Americans are ready to stand up for their freedom. | ||
| Yeah, well, I love that. | ||
| I love that you're seeing it too, and it's not just rattling around in my brain, but I keep telling people, I'm seeing it in Los Angeles. | ||
| When I walk around now, and I'm walking my dog, and neighbors come up to me, and they know who I am, and they'll say, you know, Dave, I'm starting to think about things a little differently. | ||
| And you know, this is the bastion of LA progressivism over here. | ||
| So I do think there are some good things happening. | ||
| So let's go back to those four things. | ||
| So we talked about equality, we talked about rights. | ||
| Let's talk about consent. | ||
| Yeah, so consent was also one of the early rallying cries of the revolution. | ||
| So the most famous rallying cry in 1765, no taxation without representation. | ||
| Representation is the idea that our government officials have received the consent of ordinary everyday people to make laws for them. | ||
| But the purpose of these laws is to protect the rights of individuals. | ||
| So the third self-evident truth of the Declaration, what I call the so-called consent truth, | ||
| says that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. | ||
| So it says that the purpose of government, the sole purpose of government, | ||
| is to protect the rights of individuals. | ||
| It does not say that the purpose of government, unlike certain conservatives today, | ||
| it does not say that the purpose of government is to promote, let's say, virtue. | ||
| It says it's to protect rights. | ||
| That is to say, to create spheres of freedom for individuals. | ||
| But the key, though, is that at the heart of the principle of consent is the idea of self-ownership. | ||
| It says that each and every man and woman owns himself. We are self-sovereign. We are self-owning and | ||
| therefore self-governing. | ||
| And because we are self-governing, a legitimate government only receives its legitimacy if it | ||
| is based on the consent of each and every individual. | ||
| Now, it doesn't mean unanimous consent, but in the context of the United States, it's majority consent. | ||
| But we all consent to live by the rule of the majority, which of course has its problems because majorities can often be tyrannical. | ||
| This is precisely the point that James Madison makes in the 10th Federalist Essay. | ||
| So there's always a delicate balance between between consent and the protection of rights. | ||
| But consent really is one of the one of the core principles of the revolution and it's one of the core principles of American civic life. | ||
| So you mentioned something that's like bouncing around a lot on Twitter over the last couple of months, that a certain set of conservatives think that it really is to protect virtue or a certain sense of morality, something like that. | ||
| What would you say to those guys when they say, well, if we don't protect Now, of course, now that becomes an amorphous term | ||
| depending on how they see virtue, but if we don't defend virtue or morality, | ||
| which they usually tie very close to religion, that then individual rights ultimately | ||
| will be trampled upon anyway, that you sort of need that as a precursor. | ||
| Yeah, when did government ever make men moral? | ||
| Right, you need freedom to be moral. | ||
| The best inculcator, in my view, of virtue. | ||
| And believe me, there is no greater proponent of the importance and necessity of moral virtue in society than myself. | ||
| I mean, in my view, to have a free society, you have to have a nation of moral men and women. | ||
| You cannot have a nation made up of moral reprobates. | ||
| That goes without saying. | ||
| So I stand, no man stands- Do you think we sometimes need them? | ||
| Do you think we sometimes need some morally corrupt people? | ||
| So the, I mean, we've made it somehow 40 minutes without mentioning the T word, but in many ways, Trump, to me is something like that. | ||
| Like this is obviously no great moral virtuous person, but in many ways he was the hammer that we needed | ||
| to sort of shake up the system, to break a lot of bad things | ||
| that had been sort of calcified. | ||
| But didn't do it out of, no one's looking, I don't even think the biggest MAGA supporter | ||
| is looking at Trump thinking, "Oh, this is the greatest moral man on earth." | ||
| But in a weird way, he was the necessary tool. | ||
| Do you think that, is that possible? | ||
| To bridge that divide? | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| I mean, I do think it is just a, it's a fact. | ||
| Two facts that you've mentioned. | ||
| First, Donald Trump is not a paragon of personal moral virtue. | ||
| But on the other hand, no politician in my lifetime, in fact, I would say of the last 70 years, has done a more important job of going after the deep state. | ||
| The deep state is something I think that is real. | ||
| And the deep state also includes the mainstream media. | ||
| Trump has launched a three and a half year assault on all of the certitudes and platitudes of the deep state. | ||
| And I do think that's been an extraordinarily important development in American political life. | ||
| So do you sort of separate that from morality in a traditional sense or is that a type of morality actually? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's a type of morality if it's directed at breaking down tyrannical power, right? | ||
| So, sure, the defenders of freedom, and I'm not suggesting that Trump is necessarily a defender of freedom because he's certainly passed, I think, a lot of laws that have been antithetical to freedom, but In the macro picture, he's done many things. | ||
| Reducing taxes. | ||
| Massively cutting regulations. | ||
| But most importantly, you know, is its identity. | ||
| I would say the single most important thing that he has done is to is literally just simply to have identified the deep state. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then to be attacking it on a daily basis, which, as I've said, includes the media that that has that itself has been, one might say, a kind of revolutionary act. | ||
| Yeah, well, it feels like we're kinda in one right now. | ||
| So revolution, since you're talking about revolutionary acts, that's the fourth one that they found to be self-evident. | ||
| That's probably the scariest one for most people, and especially in a weird time like this. | ||
| Let's talk about that a little bit. | ||
| Sure, so I think the most important thing to remember, Dave, is that America is a revolutionary nation. | ||
| And what I mean by that is we were founded by a revolution. | ||
| We were we created a new nation de novo out of nothing on a tabula rasa. | ||
| But built into the principles of the declaration is the idea that whenever any form of government | ||
| becomes destructive of those ends or purposes, which is the protection of rights, | ||
| the declaration says that the people have the right to alter or abolish that government. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And that Truth, and it was meant to be a truth, not a truth specific to 1776, but a universal, permanent truth. | ||
| So it applied in 1840, it applied in 1940, and it will apply again in 2040. | ||
| America is a revolutionary nation. | ||
| However, it's also important to note That in the Declaration of Independence, the first word that appears after the fourth self-evident truth, the revolution truth, is the word prudent. | ||
| And what that means, the importance of that, is that you can't have some crazy guy living out in the woods of Idaho declaring war on the American government, right? | ||
| Revolutions are dangerous things. | ||
| And America's revolutionary founders, they understood that. | ||
| It's a dangerous thing. | ||
| And you can't try to overturn your government for, as the Declaration says, light and transient Causes, right? | ||
| So Jefferson never would have said that that with the passage of the Stamp Act that would be appropriate to overthrow the British government. | ||
| But according to Jefferson, when you get the Sugar Act in 1764, the Stamp Act in 1765, | ||
| the Declaratory Act in '66, and then the Townsend Acts in 1767, the Tea Act in '73, | ||
| and then most importantly, the Coercive and Prohibitory Acts in 1774 and '75, | ||
| Jefferson says, "Look, there is clearly, self-evidently, a design." And that's a word | ||
| that you see in the Declaration, and you see it in the revolutionary literature. | ||
| There is a design on the part of British imperial officials. | ||
| to enslave us, to deny us our freedoms and rights. | ||
| So if each of those laws had been passed by the British government, separated by 50 years each, there probably would have been no cause for revolution. | ||
| But when compacted in an 11 or just really it was a 10 year period, Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington even said, oh, look, These are not just passing acts. | ||
| These are not mistakes on the part of the British Parliament or George III. | ||
| We can clearly discern a pattern, and that pattern leads in one direction, and that direction is slavery. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's pretty chilling because listening to that, it sounds alive today. | ||
| I mean, again, I'm here in California. | ||
| We flatten the curve and now they tell us August 1st. | ||
| And on July 30th, I sense that they'll tell us November 8th. | ||
| And, you know, it's like, so what do you do in a modern sense? | ||
| What do you think the founders would have us do? | ||
| As we watch governments that aren't transparent, that don't really tell us why they're doing things that are keeping us locked in our homes and not letting us go to work. | ||
| I mean, what does that type of revolution look like in a modern sense? | ||
| Because as you said, if these laws had taken 50 years in between, well then you don't kind of realize it, it's not as self-evident. | ||
| But as we find, every few months there's a new odd law. | ||
| Law, or it's not, they're not even laws, I mean they're edicts basically being placed. | ||
| Yeah, so I think it begins, as we're seeing now across the country, it begins with small acts of disobedience, right? | ||
| We see a barber in Detroit who refuses to be shut down and is cutting hair and is prepared to go to jail. | ||
| We see the operator of a gym in New Jersey reopening against the governor's orders and willing being willing to to go to jail as a result of reopening. | ||
| And we see Americans starting, you know, GoFundMe campaigns to support these people. | ||
| So it begins with small acts of disobedience. | ||
| Now, there are, of course, formal things that we can do. | ||
| We can petition our government. | ||
| We can assemble. | ||
| We can peaceably assemble and we can protest. | ||
| But in the end, Dave, the single most important thing is we have to vote with our feet. | ||
| We have to vote with our feet here and now, and then we have to vote with our feet on election day. | ||
| And we always have to remember that our government officials are really nothing more than a representation of who and what we are as a people. | ||
| And so therefore, if you think your government is corrupt, what you're really saying is that on some level, in some way, we, the people, are corrupt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| There are moments in our political lives when the spirit of liberty, the revolutionary spirit of liberty, is reawakened in us. | ||
| And I think you're right. | ||
| I think this is one of those moments in our national history when that spirit of liberty, which has been sleeping for many decades, I think it has been reawakened. | ||
| And the American people, I don't think, I don't think a majority of American people, I don't think we've crossed that threshold where a majority of American people are willing to roll over and just take it. | ||
| Our work is cut out for us. | ||
| It's a great book, and I love the fact that we were able to link it to so many other things happening today. | ||
| So stay safe, and I hope, are they telling you you're gonna open up? | ||
| Are you gonna be in classes in the fall? | ||
| Apparently we will be. | ||
| We will be back in the fall, but it won't be face-to-face necessarily. | ||
| Some teaching will be online, some classes you teach Face to face one day and then you're online the next day. | ||
| So there's a whole spectrum of ways that they're going to reopen. | ||
| But of course, as you can well imagine at Clemson University, the single biggest question is, will there be football? | ||
| I saw it coming. | ||
| All right, Brad, it was great seeing you. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| We're going to link to the book right down below. | ||
| Wonderful, Dave. | ||
| Great to see you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about academia instead of nonstop yelling, check out our academia playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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