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US system of government 'ENSURES' checks on power · DEEP INSIGHT

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  Speaker 1: Welcome back to America. We had with us the man
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  Speaker 1: I call America's wise man, Victor Davis Hanson, a great
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  Speaker 1: historian and philosopher, just a great person, and he's got
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  Speaker 1: a great podcast, Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. So, Victor,
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  Speaker 1: the question I'm posing is why is America great? What
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  Speaker 1: makes America and Americans great? Because I don't feel like,
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  Speaker 1: given the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration
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  Speaker 1: coming up literally in days that we're spending enough time
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  Speaker 1: talking about us. We hear the Islamis and the Marxist
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  Speaker 1: and the wok Right just trashing the hell out of us,
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  Speaker 1: and so forth and song. But we are a great
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  Speaker 1: country and a great people. Why is that?
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  Speaker 2: Well? We have it. Very early on. We developed an ethos,
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  Speaker 2: a popular, I don't know, a popular belief that we
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  Speaker 2: were going to have an equality of opportunity in class
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  Speaker 2: considerations wouldn't matter. It would be mericratic. So we don't
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  Speaker 2: have titles marked like sir or baron, none of that.
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  Speaker 2: And when you see an American, you never ask him
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  Speaker 2: do your own land, or where were your parents born?
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  Speaker 2: Or what zip code? Some of us do, but that's
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  Speaker 2: not the American way, so we don't let class impede us,
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  Speaker 2: and that makes it's an equal opportunity and we can
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  Speaker 2: have You can be born very poor and end up
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  Speaker 2: very middle class or very rich. It can be very rich,
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  Speaker 2: and I know a lot of people who are very
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  Speaker 2: well off whose children ended up very poor. So we're
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  Speaker 2: a very fluid society, very unlike both institutionally and practically
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  Speaker 2: like Europe. Every time I go to Europe, people say,
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  Speaker 2: what your parents do, where do you have land who?
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  Speaker 2: They try to locate you in time and space without
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  Speaker 2: looking at you the person. The other thing is we
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  Speaker 2: developed an fous about envy that's very different than most
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  Speaker 2: of the world. Americans were always told that there was
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  Speaker 2: a good envy, and that's emulation. You see somebody with
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  Speaker 2: a very nice car, a nice house, the American says,
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  Speaker 2: how did you get that? That's nice? I admire you.
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  Speaker 2: How do you finance it. Most of the parts of
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  Speaker 2: the world they'll say that's not fair, you shouldn't have that,
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  Speaker 2: and they want to destroy that, the bad envy, and
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  Speaker 2: then institutionally mark this constitution is very unusual, this tripartite
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  Speaker 2: system of judicial, executive, and legislative and then reserving power
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  Speaker 2: to these states that's not enumerated in the constitution. Federalism.
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  Speaker 2: Every time somebody creates a new democracy or we nation build,
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  Speaker 2: nobody can replicate it because it requires a lot of
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  Speaker 2: deep thought and it ensures more or less a two
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  Speaker 2: party system, so you don't have these fragmented parties that
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  Speaker 2: make these ad hoc coalitions and then in time of
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  Speaker 2: duress they can remove a prime minister without a vote
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  Speaker 2: of the public. The party gets in a back room
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  Speaker 2: and anytime that we approximate that, like we saw in
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  Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, where a candidate was we moved by
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  Speaker 2: a back room route, we vaulted against it. So our
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  Speaker 2: system ensures that at every step of the way there's
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  Speaker 2: a check and a check and a recheck on power,
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  Speaker 2: and the people have some say either at the local,
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  Speaker 2: the state level, or the national level, and there's no
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  Speaker 2: it's very hard to make a back room candidate and
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  Speaker 2: just put him in power, as many of the parliamentary
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  Speaker 2: democracies do.
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  Speaker 1: Wasn't that one of the core reasons for the revolution
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  Speaker 1: the consent of the government. The monarchy was imposing its will,
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  Speaker 1: including taxes, stamp act, all these other things, and the
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  Speaker 1: people kept talking about, and Thomas Payne talked about, and
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  Speaker 1: others talked about the consent of the government. We want
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  Speaker 1: to say in this system what you talked about our ethos,
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  Speaker 1: where does that come from? Uh, we talked to it
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  Speaker 1: about the declaration of the Constitution. I want you to
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  Speaker 1: do the same if you're inspired to do so. But
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  Speaker 1: where do these ideas come from? And why were they
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  Speaker 1: successful in what would become the United States.
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  Speaker 2: Well, the actual doctrinaire system of representative government free speech
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  Speaker 2: has a long trajectory from Greece and Rome, through the
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  Speaker 2: European Renaissance and Enlightenment, the British and Scottish Enlightenment, and
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  Speaker 2: then the Founders. But that was the formality of it.
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  Speaker 2: But you know, when you look at contemporary observers in
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  Speaker 2: the eighteen thirties, like Alexis Date Copeville, he said it
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  Speaker 2: was very different in America because there was land, and
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  Speaker 2: there was this idea that property and small farming. Ninety
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  Speaker 2: five percent of the original population were farmers. Jefferson even
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  Speaker 2: he moderated his views later in life, but he said,
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  Speaker 2: I fear that one day we'll all be piled up
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  Speaker 2: in cities and we won't have this autonomous, independent, critical voice,
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  Speaker 2: which was the majority of the population. So there was
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  Speaker 2: land and there was this idea that a man with
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  Speaker 2: twenty forty acres would be independent economically, socially, politically, culturally,
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  Speaker 2: nuclear family, and then he would be a skeptic of
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  Speaker 2: big government. And that was very important to the founders,
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  Speaker 2: with this idea of consent of the government, because Europe
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  Speaker 2: had a peasantry and a serf system in eastern Europe
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  Speaker 2: in Russia, and they said they really felt that that
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  Speaker 2: type of population would not produce independent thinkers, and the
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  Speaker 2: rich would then collaborate with government with their power of wealth,
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  Speaker 2: and the war would always be a rabble who would
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  Speaker 2: want free steff from the government. But you had to
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  Speaker 2: have a middle independent, autonomous class to avoid both those extremes.
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  Speaker 2: And that was found at least in the early Republic
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  Speaker 2: from the agrarian idea of an independent farm family.
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  Speaker 1: You know, relatively in the same time period there was
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  Speaker 1: the French Revolution and there was the American Revolution. You
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  Speaker 1: have Edmund Burke who's Member Parliament with an Irish background,
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  Speaker 1: and he denounces the French Revolution and he supports the
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  Speaker 1: American Revolution. When we come back, Victor Davis Hanson, What
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  Speaker 1: was it about the American Revolution that was so different
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  Speaker 1: from the French Revolution. I think that's very important. We'll
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  Speaker 1: pursue that in a moment. We'll be right back.
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• 6:21
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• 6:24
  Speaker 2: on Fox One.