Correcting the Liberal Myths of George Washington | Presidents Series | Andrew Klavan
Andrew Klavan and Dave Rubin reframe George Washington’s slavery as a moral compromise of his era, noting his gradual abolition plan and 1799 emancipation of his slaves. Klavan praises his 1783 surrender of power—rejecting an empire—as history’s greatest political act, while dismissing modern hypocrisy in critiques like statue-toppling. Washington unified Jefferson (radical) and Adams (conservative) through virtue, not ideology, and warned against behaviors undermining liberty. Klavan predicts Washington would condemn today’s high taxes, speech restrictions, media bias, and polarization, stressing his belief that freedom demands both constitutional order and moral discipline—something modern America risks losing. [Automatically generated summary]
We've heard so much garbage from the people who hate this country and the people who think this country shouldn't exist or think it's stolen land or think it should be better or think it, you know, it's not the most brilliant political idea in the history of mankind because that is what America is.
It is the best political idea anybody ever had.
And they'll say, well, George Washington held slaves.
And if you understand that he's a better person than you are, then you understand that if you had been in his position, you would have done something much worse.
Because of course, he knew that slavery was wrong.
He wanted it to be gradually gotten rid of.
And alone among the slave-holding founders, which was not all of the founders, but alone among the slave-holding founders, he freed his slaves upon his death.
And in honor of President's Week, we're talking about a different president of the United States every day this week.
And joining me today to talk about our first president, George Washington, is the host of the Andrew Clavin Show, Andrew Clavin, who I'm told, I'm told, also has wooden teeth.
I love having you on to talk about all the craziness of the day.
But I really thought for President's Week this week, we could just talk about some guys who aren't with us anymore who maybe were better.
Maybe we're a little better than you and me.
Maybe we're a little better than the politicians of the day and everything else.
And of course, George Washington, who lived an extraordinary life for many, many reasons.
So why don't I just let you kind of take it away, what you think sort of the main takeaways or wherever you want to start with his life, and then we can dive into some of the specifics because there's wooden teeth aside.
You know, you just hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned, because first of all, you can't understand the founding without George Washington, because there would be no founding without George Washington.
And you can't understand George Washington unless you understand exactly what you just said, which is that George Washington was a better man than you are.
By which I don't mean than Dave Rubin, because that would be damning with faint praise.
But I mean, he was a better man than everyone.
And like, I think the reason that's so important and the reason it helps you understand things, and it's a very hard thing to grasp, you know, because all of us want to think we're good people and we're really not that great, but Washington was.
And the reason is that means that when you look back on the past and you think, well, George Washington did something wrong, you realize what you would have done something worse.
If he did something great, you realize, whoa, wait a minute, this guy has done something that no one else has done.
Key among them, and if you have to start, you have to start somewhere, it's handing over his sword to the civilian authorities after the war.
And look, the guy just won a revolution against an empire, right?
I mean, and he is the most admired man in the country.
And it's pretty clear right away that the country is going to expand and expand.
He's giving away an empire.
And they compare this to Cincinnatus, who was a Roman statesman back in the day, was called away from his farm to fight a tribe.
First of all, they're compared to a guy who lived 500 years before Jesus.
So it's like, look, you've got to go back a long way.
And secondly, he won a battle and he went home to his farm.
And that's great.
This guy gave away an empire.
He gave it away because he believed in the principle for which he was fighting and was even uncomfortable when they called him back to be president, was kind of uncomfortable.
He worried about his own inner life, whether he was succumbing to ambition.
And the king is said, the King George is said to have said, if he does that, he will have been the greatest man in the world, whether he said that or not.
It's literally true.
And the reason I start there, the reason I start with this, is because we've heard so much garbage from the people who hate this country and the people who think this country shouldn't exist or think it's stolen land or think it should be better or think it, you know, it's not the most brilliant political idea in the history of mankind because that is what America is.
It is the best political idea anybody ever had.
And they'll say, well, George Washington held slaves.
And if you understand that he's a better person than you are, then you understand that if you had been in his position, you would have done something much worse.
Because, of course, he knew that slavery was wrong.
He wanted it to be gradually gotten rid of.
And alone among the slave-holding founders, which was not all of the founders, but alone among the slave-holding founders, he freed his slaves upon his debt.
And the thing that always fascinates me about this, knew it was wrong, freed the slaves in the set, did things that there were times when he would complain about why the slaves on his land didn't work as hard as he worked.
There were times when a slave would escape and he would hire people to go find them because he couldn't understand why they would do that.
And that is revelatory because a better man than you are couldn't see outside of his time.
So all the people who tear down statues, all the people who burn the flag, don't understand how bad they are and what they would have been like in this situation.
George Washington was possibly the greatest political human being who ever lived.
And the thing is, the country's always been a crazy place.
You go back in history, it's kind of reassuring when you're reading the newspaper.
You're like, this place is crazy.
Read a little history because this place has always been a crazy place.
Well, one of the ways it's always been crazy is there's always been severe divisions in the way people saw the country from the very beginning.
So you've got, you know, a guy who's really a revolutionary, a radical like Thomas Jefferson on the one hand.
And then you've got a guy like John Adams who really is thinking maybe, you know, we're going to need a king or, you know, somebody.
He wants to call George Washington your excellency.
And only, only a man like George Washington could bring these people together because of what he embodied, not because of what he believed, but because of what he embodied because they could both see the future of the country in him.
So, you know, I live in a place near D.C. where you can walk down Washington Street in Georgetown, past George Washington University to the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
And that tells you something about the way people saw him.
And it wasn't a lie, you know, because just think of all the other revolutionary leaders, whether a semi-benign one like Napoleon or the non-benign ones like, you know, like Mao.
They never give up power.
They never let it go.
It's the revolution.
We're all going to be free.
Oh, yeah, but now, you know, I'm going to be king forever.
You know, only George Washington said, we won.
You're free.
Here's my sword.
I'm going home.
That, to me, makes him as great a man as history provides.
And I think when you start to see that, you start to understand what a gift this country is.
I would tell you it's a gift from God.
I don't do not think a man like that just appears.
I don't think he appears at the same time as minds like Adams and Jefferson.
I think when you see that, to me, it just, it doesn't exclude people on the left.
It doesn't exclude people on the right.
It excludes everyone who thinks this country shouldn't be here.
It just excludes everyone who thinks the country itself is a bad thing.
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You know, it's funny, as I'm listening to you, it's almost, and I've been, I've been to his home where, by the way, they spend, I would say, if you take the tour there, which I'm sure you've done probably many times, you know, they spend a wildly disproportionate amount of time talking about slavery as if that was the most important thing.
But as you were talking there, I was thinking, man, it's almost impossible to imagine the idea that someone was going to lead a country, win a revolutionary war, but the country didn't even exist in essence at that point.
That then he was going to go survey the land, figure out what the borders of the states were going to be, have to debate between the other founders who had wildly different views on what a democracy and the system was going to look like.
And that he was, I would say, for at least as I understand it, like he was pretty well liked for the most part in his time where a lot of these guys, a lot of these guys were, a lot of these guys were hated.
I mean, they would say, you know, this guy's got syphilis and this guy's got gonorrhea.
You know, there's a lot of money in, you know, rejiggering history and saying, oh, I've got, you know, I've got the skinny on this.
I've got the scandal on this.
They can't do it with Washington.
They keep trying, but it comes down to the fact that he was a good man.
And he was a good man for a really specific reason.
And this is also incredibly important, I think, in understanding him.
He was a good man because he wanted to be.
And this is something, as an ancient man at this point, I tell young people all the time, you know, figure out what you want, because a lot of times in life, barring tragedy, barring really bad luck, people get what they want.
And the thing is, if you don't get it, maybe you didn't really want it.
And that's a clue.
George Washington starts out as a young man because his father dies, he doesn't get to go to an English school.
He doesn't get to be schooled in what was then essentially the epitome of class was to be an Englishman.
His brothers get that, but he doesn't get it.
And he makes himself into that anyway.
In his study book, he starts to copy down rules for behavior out of a book that gave rules for how a gentleman behaved.
And he dedicated himself to becoming that man, to becoming a man who was, you know, when he walked into the room, he was very tall.
He was taller than everybody else.
And some people would joke, well, that's why everybody pays attention.
But it wasn't.
It was because he taught himself with this iron discipline how to behave like a gentleman.
There's a hilarious story.
And I don't know if this story is true.
I'm not sure.
It's kind of a half true story, I think.
Governor Morris, that was his actual first name.
And Alexander Hamilton made a bet.
And Morris said, you know, I'm going to go treat Washington just like an ordinary guy and walked up to him and slapped him on the shoulder and said, you know, George, it's great to see you looking so good.
You just look in perfect health.
And Washington gave him such a look that Morris returned to Hamilton and said, well, I did it, but I wouldn't do it again for anything on earth.
So speaking of virtue, so he was obviously also a man of faith.
And it's well documented that he really felt that the system, and he wasn't the only founder to feel this, but that the system that they were creating, a system of individual rights and liberty, could only work for a moral people.
That's sort of something we have no idea how to grapple with in a modern sense now.
You know, this is a really, it's a really good point.
I mean, he would talk, you know, again, historians, some historians have tried to prove it wasn't true, but it obviously was.
He was a typical Anglican at the time.
They became the Episcopalians who have now become something that has nothing to do with Christianity, but there are still Anglicans like me who's different show, Claven, different show.
He would go to church, you know, once a month, which was pretty normal for the time.
He would pray.
But he wouldn't talk about, he wouldn't use Christian language.
So he wouldn't say, you know, Jesus Christ wants us to do this.
He would say providence all the time.
And he talked a lot about how you have to deserve providence.
Providence is God's will on your country, and you have to deserve it.
And he talked as others, John Adams looked at the Constitution, said this is a constitution for immoral people.
And Washington was essentially saying the same thing and warning the people that the providence that they had, the good things that had happened, chief among them winning the war against an empire that would have killed them all had they not won.
You know, he warned them that this arises out of goodness.
And this is the reason that conservative people, or at least people who want to conserve freedom, which is what I am, I'm somebody who wants to conserve American freedom, start to feel a little bit moralistic because you realize, you know, you can't have both.
You cannot have the wild freedoms that enslave you.
You know, anything goes sex lives, drug lives, all that stuff.
Those things enslave you.
And once you're enslaved, you've got to crawl to the government for help.
And once you can't control yourself, and once you become a criminal, the government has to put you down.
So the most freedom comes to the people who are the most moral, the people who say, okay, you know, I've got all these desires, all these urges, but I'm going to channel them into things that are helpful to mankind.
You know, I'm going to channel them into my work.
I'm going to channel them into my marriage, into my children.
And that's the man who is built for freedom.
And so if it sometimes seems like conservatives are shaking their finger, wagging their finger at people, it's really because they're connecting the dots, as Washington did, how you deserve the providence of freedom.
Why, to whom does God give freedom?
And he gives it to people who behave in a moral way.
I will now ask you an impossible question because you don't have a crystal ball or a magic ball or a flux capacitor, as far as I know, or any of those things.
We're rolling into our 250th anniversary.
It's pretty good.
I mean, we're pretty young, but 250, that's pretty solid.
What do you think through his writings and what we know about George Washington, he would think of the state of this country?
I think he would be, I mean, remember, again, the country was crazy when he was president.
The country's been crazy from the start.
You have a free people.
You've got a crazy country.
Still, I think there are things that would deeply, deeply worry him.
I think the, first of all, these guys, they raised the tax on tea a couple of pennies and they're all country apart.
I think a country in which people are paying the kind of taxes they pay now would be upsetting to all of the founders.
I think what happened, not to make this too political, but I think under the Biden administration, the attacks on free speech, I think, would have been appalling to him.
And the fact, you know, our press, which I think is corrupt, is not as bad as the press was then.
And the press was just an instrument of actual vileness, which would say anything about anybody, then, which is less true now.
But I think it would be disturbing to him that it is so monocultural that all of the press is really on one side.
All of the media is on one side.
I think the extreme, the extreme nature of our parties would be disturbing.
You know, we're not dealing.
When I was a kid, we were dealing, as Barack Obama once said, dishonestly, I think.
We were fighting over the 50-yard line.
We had people who wanted a little bit more welfare and people who wanted a little bit more freedom.
That was the argument.
Now, I think we have people who are basically declaring that the country shouldn't be here, like the singers who got off at the Grammys and said, this is stolen land, so therefore no one can be illegal.
I think that that would be troubling to him.
I think the intolerance on the right, on some people in the far right would be as troubling to him as the absolute moronic ignorance and radicalism of the people on the left.
I sometimes joke, you were talking about Mount Vernon, where I go off and then his tomb is above ground.
I told my wife that was because he wanted to be able to watch him spinning in his grave.
I think the country right at this minute, I mean, look, when he was president, the country was fragile as it could be.
It was just getting started.
Nobody even knew what it was and what it was going to look like.
But I think the country is in a fragile state right now.
And what's sad to me is that it's unnecessary.
I think that 70% of the people in this country could agree on 70% of the issues or at least compromise on 70% of the issues.
And I think we're kept apart by communicators who make us look more divided than we are.
And so I think that that would worry him.
I mean, when Ronald Reagan said every generation has to relearn freedom, I think he was absolutely right.
And I think Washington would have agreed with that.
This is not what most countries are like.
Most countries do not have this level of freedom.
You can't explain.
I lived in England for seven years.
You can't explain bottom-down, bottom-up government to a European.
They nod, they smile, they think they get it, but they just think we're crazy.
They think that's nuts.
You can't do that.
There's got to be somebody at the top telling everybody what to do.
But do you think that the true magic of all of those people who signed the Declaration of Independence, who wrote the Federalist Papers, who came up with the Constitution, that they actually were all born in a revolutionary state?
And that was the only way that documents like this could have been written.
So when you see in modernity, people being like, oh, well, it was just written 250 years ago by a bunch of old white people.
Can't even begin to fathom that these were not old white people, meaning they were just these rich people who had all the wonders of the universe in their pocket, but they were fighting for the most basic thing, which is obviously individual freedom.
I mean, if you read the Federalist papers, you think like, oh, these guys knew everything about politics there is to know.
They knew all the basics about who people are, what they're like.
The insight into humanity on any page of the Federalist Papers is so much deeper than anything you'll read over 50 days in our press.
But here's the thing.
They were all different.
They all had different points of view.
Like I said, Jefferson was far more radical than Adams, and they were, you know, all were looking at different things.
But Washington, who was not by any stretch, the greatest thinker among them, embodied them all.
That is the thing.
He embodied the American man.
And that's unique.
There was no one else like that.
And the fact that they were all brought together, all these feisty, arguing geniuses who wanted to scream at each other and pound the table and do this law or that law, all of them stopped when Washington came into the room.
And some of them resented it, but most of them just kind of thought, no, he's George Washington.
Without him, he's the necessary man.
Without him, the rest of the country is not going to happen.
And think about that for a minute.
The guy embodied something that they all admired and all wanted to, and all knew was a vision of the country walking, you know.
And he genuinely lived it because, as you pointed out, I mean, not only did he see, okay, so they wanted him to be president and in charge of the army at the exact same time of a nascent country.
He also stepped down after two terms and he didn't have to.
Which is another thing that, you know, Trump's always joking about running again and this, turn and another, but we have, you know, Congress people that have been there for 40 years making a gajillion dollars.
And in essence, you know, that ultimately becomes what the deep state is, these people who are just in positions of power forever doing things for themselves rather than for the people.
In what other country, now it's a law that you have to step down after two terms.
But people stepped down until Franklin Roosevelt.
They all did that because Washington did it.
Why are we so sure of our army in this country?
We love our soldiers.
We love them because we know they're not going to turn against us and dominate us and take away our rights.
They're going to defend our rights.
Why?
Because George Washington handed his sword over to Annapolis.
That's why they're like they are.
He set that standard and it became part of our zeitgeist, part of our blood that that's the way we behave.
And even the way he managed the war, which was remarkable, another thing they compared to a Roman general because they couldn't find a good comparison, which was by kind of not fighting.
He was like, he couldn't fight the British.
He just kept, he fought a guerrilla war against them, essentially, avoiding that.
But think about it for this.
He's in New York.
He loses New York.
He realizes he's got to escape.
And a fog rolls in, and he escapes in the fog.
He's pressed back into the country.
And he turns and he crosses the Delaware.
This is another thing we think, oh, yeah, crossing the Delaware, I've seen the picture, know about it, but people don't realize what that was.
The incredible, you know, he had three generals, I believe, two other generals who were supposed to go with him and just copped out.
They just didn't go.
He crosses just to get a victory because he knows the people need a victory and he gets a remarkable victory after crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day.
All of that stuff is kind of built into our system.
All of that stuff becomes what we think of as virtue.
You know, you could have said, well, that was dangerous.
You could have said that was really stepping out of line.
If he'd lost, it would have been everything.
That would have been the whole country down the drain.
But all of that stuff is just part of us.
And one of the things that to me, I think might above all trouble Washington.
It certainly troubles me, is that we've now been schooled in ignorance about who we are, where we came from, why these people are great.
I'm not against, you know, there's a story my friend Jeff Anderson has been writing about in City Journal and in the Wall Street Journal.
There's the house, before there was a White House in Philadelphia, there was the house where the president lived.
It's called the president's house now.
And Washington and Adams were, I think Adams went to the White House later.
I think they were both there.
There was an exhibit.
And of, I believe, 30 plaques, 25 of them were about slavery and accused Washington of being a bad guy and tricking people and being deceptive.
And so because of Jeff's writing and because of the administration, they took this stuff out.
They brought it down to a place where it was reasonable.
We want to hear.
I want to hear about the slaves.
I think that's a part of our history.
But I don't want to only hear about that.
I want to hear about this miraculous thing that happened that made even people who are descended from slaves glad they live here.
And that's a fact.
And the governor, Josh Lapiro, complains, oh, they're whitewashing American history.
You know, it's not whitewashing American history.
We understand there were bad things.
People do bad things.
All people do bad things.
All countries do bad things.
But what is unique about this country is the freedom that they, the system of freedom that they created and the feeling of freedom, because they all said the Constitution is just a piece of parchment.
It won't protect us if that freedom isn't written on our hearts.
The guy who wrote it on our hearts is George Washington because of the way he behaved, because what he turned himself into, right?
Nobody is naturally like a gentleman.
Nobody is naturally virtuous.
He made himself that.
And that just left this stamp on the country, you know?
And yes, as I said, you go there and they do, I think, spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about slavery.
And really, if you go to Monticello, which I'm sure you've been to, which was Jefferson's home, I mean, the tour there is, I would say, at least last time I've done it, I think three or four times.
Last time I was there, it was probably about 60 or 70% about slavery, which is the height of irony considering he was writing the laws to free the slaves and was also inventing things.