Latest / rationally BASED / Episode 29 | The Constitution, Slavery, and Patriotism

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Episode 29 | The Constitution, Slavery, and Patriotism · rationally BASED

0:00
SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to Rationally Based, a podcast about law and politics on the edge.
0:04
SPEAKER_02: Josh, Catherine, what's on deck?
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, today our episode is among a series that we'll do on the American founding in honor of the semi-quincentennial and in honor of Elon's new book, The Constitution of 1789, which you can get on Amazon as of this month.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: A lot of our episodes are uh responding to current events, but this one is meant to be evergreen.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: First, we'll talk about the most difficult of all the questions of the founding.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh, that's the founders in slavery and what they wrote about slavery in the Constitution.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: Second, we'll talk about the 1619 project and the left's view of America, as long as along with progressive indoctrination.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: Third, we'll talk about patriotism.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: We on the Rationally Based Podcast love this country, but being rational and based means loving America while answering the tough questions about its past and present.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: And at the end, we'll ask each other the biggest question of all.
0:51
SPEAKER_01: Why do you you love this country?
0:54
SPEAKER_02: Lots to talk about.
0:55
SPEAKER_02: Let's dive in.
1:09
SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Elon Werman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm Catherine Johnson with Center of the American Experiment.
1:15
SPEAKER_01: And I'm Joshua Kleinfeld, Rouse Professor of Law at Scalia Law School, George Mason University.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: As always, hit that like and subscribe button.
1:22
SPEAKER_02: You can follow us also on Substack Rationally Based.substack.com, and we can stay in touch with you directly.
1:27
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:28
SPEAKER_02: As we said, lots to talk about.
1:29
SPEAKER_02: Josh, Catherine, where should we begin today?
1:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's start with history.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: The 1619 project launched by the New York Times in 2019, and it was part of that whole apex woke George Floyd Biden moment of obsession with racism and condemnation of this country on the basis of its history of slavery and its history and present, as they alleged, of racism.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: So that view is itself a view of history.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: There's a narrative created by leftist academics and spread throughout the country by K-12 teachers and journalists, a narrative that pictures the United States as dedicated from the moment of its birth to slavery and not just any slavery.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Slavery is as old as human civilization.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: It has largely been in the past peoples conquered in war, but a particular kind of slavery, racial slavery.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: And the left critique is that the founders practiced racial slavery.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: They supported or at least accepted racial slavery, and they wrote that acceptance into the Constitution, which left an indelible stain that is still part of America today.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: It's the original sin of the country, which has never really left the country.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: And that view is the historical underpinning of the left-wing critique of America.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: So let's take it on.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: It's fitting at this moment, just before July 4th, America's 250th birthday, for those of us on the right to respond.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: What did the founders think about slavery?
2:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, you mentioned the 250th birthday, and I'd just like to point out that at the start of this episode, I did say semi-quincentennial without missing a beat.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: So I just would like to give myself some props there.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: But moving into what did the founders think about slavery?
3:10
SPEAKER_00: You quote the founders in your book, Elon.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: So let me read some of those quotes here to everyone, starting with George Washington.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: He said, There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: John Adams held the practice of slavery an abhorrence and thought every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery in the US.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: Benjamin Franklin called slavery an atrocious debasement of human nature.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: Jefferson said the whole commerce between master and slave is the most unremitting despotism.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: I do have like a follow-up question about that one because my understanding is he owned slaves and then maybe maybe then some.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: He definitely owned slaves.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: So maybe we can follow up on that point.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: But one more.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: Alexander Hamilton said, because slaves were men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: All of these things to me sound very definitive on what the founders really thought about slavery.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: Can I just put that in context for a second?
4:08
SPEAKER_01: Um when the Spanish conquistadors were conquering the New World and they were pillaging and looting and enslaving the Native Americans, um, there's a group of law professors back in Spain that thought this was a violation of human rights before there was even a term for it, before it was called human rights, but they would have called it natural rights uh in the founders' era.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: But this was earlier than that.
4:32
SPEAKER_01: This was in the 1500s.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: And uh this group of Salamancan scholars made the argument that the Native Americans are made in the image of God, the Imago Dei argument, and are therefore rights-buried.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: And uh that was always the argument against slavery.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: It was the argument in the 1500s, and now we see it again with the founders in the 1700s.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: So we have a series of questions here about the founders and slavery.
4:58
SPEAKER_02: And I thought I would open this up um by talking about the first thing that Josh you actually said this idea that there was something unique about American slavery, and that it was racial slavery.
5:10
SPEAKER_02: And I should caveat this, though it should be obvious to our audience that nothing I'm about to say is a justification for slavery at all or racial slavery at all.
5:18
SPEAKER_02: It's almost obvious and it shouldn't have to be said, but this idea that racial slavery was unique, in one sense, the point is interesting because it seems to concede that slavery has been universal.
5:29
SPEAKER_02: Slavery has existed since Greek and Roman times, if presumably not before, but you know, presumably before recorded human history, written recorded human history, there was also slavery.
5:39
SPEAKER_02: But the idea that there wasn't racial slavery or that somehow racial slavery was unique to Americans is also kind of insane.
5:44
SPEAKER_02: So you go back to the Spartans and the Helots, that was a whole ethnic group, right, on the Peloponnese that was enslaved, uh hereditary um enslavement based on the their difference in ethnicity.
5:55
SPEAKER_02: Um, did you know that estimates put it between the year about 1500 to 1800 that Arab slave traders carried 1.25 million white Europeans into slavery?
6:07
SPEAKER_02: 1.25 million, the Ottoman Empire enslaved a million or plus Eastern Europeans uh at the height uh of the Ottoman Empire.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: Can you compare that to the US?
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Do you know offhand?
6:17
SPEAKER_02: Uh yes, actually.
6:19
SPEAKER_02: There were uh at the as of 1808, um, when the slave trade was abolished in the United States, there were 1.2 million uh enslaved African people in the United States.
6:31
SPEAKER_02: 1.2 million.
6:32
SPEAKER_02: And a lot of that was also a natural increase uh from before.
6:35
SPEAKER_02: But but the slave trade between 1789 and when the constitution was adopted and 1808 did lead to a doubling, uh, but a lot of it was also natural increase.
6:44
SPEAKER_02: So 1.2 million versus 1.25 million over a multi-hundred sort of um year period.
6:50
SPEAKER_02: Uh the Japanese enslaved on the order of 100,000 Koreans in the late 16th century.
6:56
SPEAKER_02: So this idea that racial slavery is unique to America is of course preposterous.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: There was also the Arab slave trade of Africans and the Arab slave trade from the beginning of the Muslim conquest, by the way, the the moderate estimates that I researched before uh doing this show today, 18 million Africans were supposedly uh enslaved by the Arab slave trade over a millennia and a half, uh, with something like 12 million, a substantial um part of it, um, being in like the year uh 1500 to 1800 or so.
7:29
SPEAKER_02: So this idea, and and of course, you know, there's the African tribes often enslaved other tribes based on ethnic um uh composition or or what have you.
7:37
SPEAKER_02: So this idea that it's this original sin to America is absolutely uh preposterous.
7:42
SPEAKER_02: And I think what we have to do.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: No, let me interject there.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: Um the idea that slavery or racial slavery is unique to America, a special, distinctive part of American history, not true of other places, that's the part that's preposterous.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: The possibility that it's an original sin, that it stays with us today, that's an argument to be taken seriously.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: We have responses, but it's an argument to be taken seriously.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: It's it's the mischaracterization of history, the thought that this is somehow unique to America that's preposterous.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: Right.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: And that is absolutely relevant because if Americans did had done something uniquely evil, that would be a more terrible original sin for the following reason.
8:25
SPEAKER_02: We don't celebrate most people for features and characteristics that they shared in common with all of mankind at the time, right?
8:32
SPEAKER_02: This is when remember the whole tearing down of statues.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: Now, this it might be controversial.
8:37
SPEAKER_02: Maybe this isn't base enough for Catherine, so you're gonna have to tell me what you think about this.
8:40
SPEAKER_02: But I was okay actually tearing down statues, not quite tearing down statues, of some Confederates who are particularly egregious.
8:46
SPEAKER_02: Why?
8:47
SPEAKER_02: Because the only thing that we celebrate them for is for trying to perpetuate an evil institution.
8:53
SPEAKER_02: But then to go from that to tearing down statues of Ulysses S.
8:56
SPEAKER_02: Grant or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, we don't celebrate them because they had slaves.
9:02
SPEAKER_02: They didn't try to perpetuate slavery in any way.
9:05
SPEAKER_02: We celebrate them from what they overcame as relative to the background, universal background of slavery.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: So did you know, and this I guess I should speak to the audience here, that in 1776, the the year of American independence, when the American founders, the first American founders, wrote down that all men are created equal for the first time in a foundational national document that all 13 states had slavery.
9:29
SPEAKER_02: All 13 states.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: And the period between 1776 and 1789 was the greatest abolition in world history up until I would say 1833, four decades later, when the British Empire finally abolished slavery and uh in the rest of the empire.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: Slavery had always been abolished in England, okay, but they never were able to abolish it in the rest of the empire, which is kind of interesting.
9:51
SPEAKER_02: Talk about hypocrisy, talk about economic self-interest.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: Like, oh, we're too good for slavery in England, but are the West Indies, are you know, in the British Empire, they were gonna have slavery.
10:01
SPEAKER_02: So just this idea that it was this uh original sin, yes, it is an original sin that everybody shared though.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Everybody shared though.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: One thing that we're gonna kind of come back to, okay, let me let me uh wrap this up, I guess, with two things, and then I'll throw it back to you guys um for um reactions.
10:18
SPEAKER_02: The first thing is to say we must be wary.
10:20
SPEAKER_02: I'm not usually, I don't usually uh quote socialist historians, but there is a socialist historian.
10:25
SPEAKER_02: I know I'm losing all my base bona fides uh today.
10:30
SPEAKER_02: What in the world?
10:31
SPEAKER_00: What podcast am I on?
10:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know this is this is kind of a weird day.
10:35
SPEAKER_02: But the socialist historian E.P.
10:37
SPEAKER_02: Thompson famously cautioned against the enormous condescension of posterity.
10:42
SPEAKER_02: It's easy to condescend about George Washington and oh, he was terrible, he had slaves.
10:47
SPEAKER_02: Everybody had slaves.
10:48
SPEAKER_02: Everybody back then had slaves.
10:50
SPEAKER_02: Slavery had actually been universal, it wasn't even unique to America, so we must be wary of that.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: The second thing goes to Catherine, your point about Jefferson had slaves, like what the heck?
10:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he was a hypocrite.
11:01
SPEAKER_02: But you know what?
11:02
SPEAKER_02: Being a hypocrite is better than not having principles, right?
11:05
SPEAKER_02: There's a famous saying that I think started with Josh seems skeptical, but uh let me just make the point.
11:10
SPEAKER_02: Uh I think it was the uh Rouche Foucault uh in the 1600s said uh that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
11:19
SPEAKER_02: In other words, you can only accuse somebody of hypocrisy if there are certain fixed and established standards of good conduct, right?
11:26
SPEAKER_02: If there are certain principles.
11:27
SPEAKER_02: If all men aren't created equal, then Thomas Jefferson isn't a hypocrite.
11:30
SPEAKER_02: But we can call him a hypocrite because at least they advance that principle.
11:33
SPEAKER_02: So hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
11:36
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
11:36
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: Can I ask a hard question about this?
11:38
SPEAKER_01: I I struggle with the hypocrisy uh of particularly Thomas Jefferson, uh, in owning slaves while declaring it to be, I mean, not just the general proposition uh that all men are created equal, which is totally contrary to slavery, but also um the quote that you had earlier about you know what he in particular thought about slavery while owning slaves and I I i why not just say, well, that diminishes my respect for him?
12:08
SPEAKER_01: It does not eliminate it because he did many other great things for the country and wrote great things that I'm grateful that he wrote, but it does, and it's appropriate that it should diminish my respect for him.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: Anything wrong with that reaction?
12:22
SPEAKER_01: Should I be sort of unmoved by the fact that he owned slaves?
12:26
SPEAKER_02: I do think it diminishes the respect for him, and I think that's okay, in the same sense that George Washington owned slaves, which we could diminish the respect uh in the sense that they owned uh that they they owned up to the fact that they could not make this a reality on the ground.
12:41
SPEAKER_02: I don't think it diminishes the principle that they wrote, and I don't think it diminishes the sincerity.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: I do think we can diminish, you know, our estimation for them because they were unable to overcome their sort of immediate economic interest.
12:55
SPEAKER_02: I don't think it diminishes the accomplishment of saying for the first time in a foundational national document that we're all men are created equal, and yes, slavery is inconsistent with that.
13:03
SPEAKER_02: The problem with Jefferson is he's the most flagrant hypocrite of the lot.
13:10
SPEAKER_02: At least George Washington freed his slaves in his will.
13:13
SPEAKER_02: Jefferson never freed any of his slaves, right?
13:15
SPEAKER_02: Even after death, he didn't do that.
13:17
SPEAKER_02: The thing that annoys me about Thomas Jefferson is he built up this image that still persists today in the American mind of being this like small landowner, this agrarian Republican, a man of the people contra John Adams' monarchism.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: John Adams was a farmer who trained himself to be a lawyer, never owned a slave in his life.
13:38
SPEAKER_02: Thomas Jefferson, did he ever work the land on his own?
13:41
SPEAKER_02: He literally sat in Monticello atop a plantation of enslaved labor, right?
13:46
SPEAKER_02: And everybody thinks he's a man of the people.
13:49
SPEAKER_02: He's the great Republican.
13:50
SPEAKER_02: And John Adams is this, and he was in fact an aristocrat who had like$7,000 in debt when he died in wine debt because he bought too much French wine.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it could be relatable, huh?
14:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's true.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: That is the most relatable.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: Was it on a credit card?
14:05
SPEAKER_02: It was on credit, right?
14:06
SPEAKER_02: Uh it was on credit at the time, you know, pieces of paper.
14:09
SPEAKER_02: Um, but John Adams, of course, was not actually a monarchist, was actually a farmer, actually worked the land by himself, actually rose up uh by his own sort of skill and and hard work, and he's somehow labeled a monarchist.
14:23
SPEAKER_02: So you know, that's so that's why that's why I dislike Jefferson.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: So putting a pin in our discussion so far, um, I I think that's the wrong way to use the phrase, putting a pin.
14:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but uh wrapping up our discussion thus far, yeah.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: I think what we could say is the slavery, including the racial slavery into which America was born, was not unique to America.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: It was in fact very widespread.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: As to the founders' view of it, they were a diverse bunch.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: Some never owned slaves, some did own slaves, some owned slaves and freed them after their death, but weren't willing to do it in their life, and some weren't willing to free them even after they, that is, the founder's own death.
15:05
SPEAKER_01: They wrote principles into the Declaration, for example, and made public statements that were opposed to slavery and that explained exactly why it contradicts the idea that, you know, God's image is imprinted on man.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, and I think there's two ways you can look at it either that they were kind of cowards for kicking the can down the road and saying, well, I think future generations shouldn't have slavery, but I'm okay to do it myself.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Or they realized it as a practical necessity in some ways of the time and said, however, we hope that this country becomes better, but at this point, we're not in a place where it's practical to not have them.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I I got that from your book, too, Elon, that they seem to have this idea that other people should abolish slavery, not them.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: Like they really wanted Congress to get involved and abolish slavery, but not so much in the Constitution.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
15:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, maybe we should start with the Constitution.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: What does it say in the Constitution about slavery?
16:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a that's a great question.
16:05
SPEAKER_02: I'll just add one last point to the to the really beautiful summary that you just provided, uh, which is don't forget that the states themselves, between 1776 and 1789, half the states abolished slavery or set a timetable for abolition.
16:16
SPEAKER_02: Again, the greatest emancipation in world history up until that point.
16:21
SPEAKER_02: So we can't go from zero to 60.
16:23
SPEAKER_02: We went from zero to actually quite a lot, 45, 50, maybe not 60.
16:27
SPEAKER_02: And part of the missing piece, of course, is the constitution itself did not abolish slavery.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: So, what does the constitution say about slavery?
16:33
SPEAKER_02: Is it a pro-slavery document?
16:35
SPEAKER_02: And as you suggest in my book, I try to argue that it's complicated, but generally it is not a pro-slavery document.
16:41
SPEAKER_02: I do think there was one clause in particular that had an unintended effect that they couldn't anticipate at the time, which is the three-fifths clause, which I'll explain because it increased the political power of the South.
16:51
SPEAKER_02: But relative to what came before, again, that's kind of a theme of this conversation, avoid the enormous condescension of posterity, right?
16:58
SPEAKER_02: You judge people by what they achieved above the baseline of the time, right?
17:01
SPEAKER_02: Above what was already sort of a universal condition at the time.
17:05
SPEAKER_02: So relative to the state of the world in 1789 when the constitution was adopted, the constitution empowered Congress to abolish the international slave trade.
17:14
SPEAKER_02: It took 20 years, but they did it as soon as it was allowed in 1808, which stopped the flow of slavery into the United States.
17:20
SPEAKER_02: The Constitution empowered Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories.
17:25
SPEAKER_02: And so Congress, which it did in the Northwest Territory, in the Missouri Compromise, it would abolish slavery from going outward.
17:32
SPEAKER_02: The Constitution, through its federalist structure, also allowed the states to preserve uh abolition in the states that had abolished slavery, right?
17:40
SPEAKER_02: If slavery was a national issue at the time, well, you could have had a southern slaveracy that sort of imposed slavery upon all the states.
17:46
SPEAKER_02: So it stopped slaves from coming in, it stopped slavery from expanding in most of the territories, it preserved abolitionist gains.
17:54
SPEAKER_02: It allowed, and I know we'll talk a little bit about this, but to create what the northerners and the Republicans in the late 1800s, they wanted to create this cordon of freedom around the southern states.
18:03
SPEAKER_02: And they thought that slavery would sort of be smothered out of existence over time if you couldn't replenish the slaves and you couldn't expand out.
18:11
SPEAKER_02: But there were two clauses, I think, that had unanticipated effects, but were important at the time.
18:16
SPEAKER_02: So the first is let me just say that, and then I'll get reactions, the fugitive slave clause.
18:20
SPEAKER_02: Terribly, terribly odious.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: But this was the price South Carolina wanted.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: South Carolina was a hugely powerful Southern state.
18:27
SPEAKER_02: If the fugitive slave clause weren't in there, right, where we have to return Fugitive the North, we, the North had to return fugitive slaves, escaped slaves, uh, to the Southern owners, if that hadn't been in there, South Carolina was threatening to walk.
18:40
SPEAKER_02: If South Carolina had walked, okay, and there had been an independent Southern Confederacy rather than a union, there would be an independent Southern Confederacy over which the North had no control whatsoever.
18:50
SPEAKER_02: Would slavery have been abolished anytime sooner?
18:52
SPEAKER_02: Would that have been better for slavery in human history?
18:55
SPEAKER_02: You think America was weak in the 1790s and we had to avoid excessive foreign entanglements, and European powers were trying to take advantage of us?
19:02
SPEAKER_02: Imagine if we had two confederacies constantly bickering among themselves over territory, over commerce, over foreign policy, and the European powers would have tried to play us one against the other.
19:13
SPEAKER_02: Would the world have been better without the Fugitive Slave Clause in light of what was possible at the time?
19:18
SPEAKER_02: I am dubious.
19:20
SPEAKER_02: The second, and then I'll stop here, the three-fifths clause.
19:23
SPEAKER_02: The three-fifths clause, I always get in trouble.
19:25
SPEAKER_02: I've talked about this on the podcast before, actually, Catherine, you may remember.
19:28
SPEAKER_02: I always get in trouble because I say this point in class, and then someone always leaves me a review that says Professor Worman said the three-fifths clause was good.
19:33
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, you know, you were not listening to a word that I was actually saying, or you were listening but didn't understand, which is probably uh, you know, the more accurate.
19:41
SPEAKER_02: The three-fifths clause was bad, but not for the reason everybody thinks.
19:44
SPEAKER_02: Right?
19:45
SPEAKER_02: The three-fifths clause was uh from the South perspective, they wanted a five-fifths clause.
19:50
SPEAKER_02: Why?
19:50
SPEAKER_02: Because for every five slaves, they wanted five additional people for purposes of representation in the Electoral College and the House of Representatives.
19:59
SPEAKER_02: So three-fifths was the North saying, no, no, no, we're not giving you representation for slaves who can't vote.
20:05
SPEAKER_02: We'll only give you a little bit of representation for your slave property.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: And in exchange, we'll tax them as well at the rate of three-fifths.
20:12
SPEAKER_02: This was supposed to be a compromise.
20:13
SPEAKER_02: The South wanted five-fifths of a person for purposes of representation, because it gives them more power in the House and so on.
20:19
SPEAKER_02: But it turned out that because of this three-fifths bonus, the slavery bonus, this three-fifths bump, the South had far more political power than they would have had, right?
20:28
SPEAKER_02: If only free people could vote.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: And it seems to be agreed among historians that Thomas Jefferson would not have won the election of 1800, ushering in the era of good feelings for 24 years, this Democratic-Republican rule, if only free people could vote and have representation, or only free people could vote, but if representation was allotted only on the basis of free people, as opposed to giving representation for slaves.
20:52
SPEAKER_02: John Adams would have won the election of 1800.
20:54
SPEAKER_02: And can you imagine how history sort of uh would have been uh different?
20:57
SPEAKER_02: So I do think that the three Fifths Clause uh had this unanticipated effect of increasing the power of the South in the national uh political apparatus for decades longer than they expected.
21:09
SPEAKER_02: And part of it has to do with the cotton gin, of course, what came after uh the Constitution, which made slavery profitable.
21:15
SPEAKER_02: And as a result, instead of slavery going away, you know, slavery became economically profitable and politically profitable because now they would get more political power for their slaves.
21:24
SPEAKER_02: So it's complicated.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: But it is it's funny if you keep the three-fifths compromise in in uh mind for later when we talk about kind of like the educational indoctrination that exists, especially on this issue, because all you learn about is how terrible the three-fifths clause is and how it, you know, made slaves lesser than a full human.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: Never that it was either that or the self had more power to keep slavery in place for longer.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: I just think that's such a good example of what we're gonna talk about.
21:49
SPEAKER_01: The theme of it all is compromise, right?
21:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they were determined, the founders were determined to create a union.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: For that, they needed all the states to agree or move.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Most of the states to agree, not actually all.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: And um they made a lot of compromises with slavery, like the Fugitive Slave Clause, uh, or like giving them as much as three-fifths of a person per slave, uh, in order to keep the South on board for union instead of forming a separate Confederacy in s in the 1700s instead of the 1800s.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: Um I always find myself looking back and thinking, did they compromise too much?
22:31
SPEAKER_01: Could they have could they have provided for the abolition of slavery in the Constitution itself?
22:37
SPEAKER_01: Did they make the right to compromise?
22:39
SPEAKER_01: And was it right to make any compromise whatsoever?
22:42
SPEAKER_01: You could imagine saying we are just not going to slow our hands with slavery.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: If the South wants to walk, walk will create a good United States of America that won't include these states that are so dedicated to slavery.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: Go your separate ways.
22:56
SPEAKER_01: What do you what do you think about that?
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Seriously.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, projecting yourself backwards, was the union worth the price?
23:03
SPEAKER_02: I think the answer is yes.
23:05
SPEAKER_02: Because again, we have to put them in their time and place, and we have to figure out what was possible at the time.
23:10
SPEAKER_02: This was before the cotton gin.
23:12
SPEAKER_02: Before the cotton gin, people thought slavery was out the door anyway.
23:16
SPEAKER_02: People thought it was on its way to ultimate extinction.
23:18
SPEAKER_02: They really did believe that.
23:20
SPEAKER_02: And the Southerners, yeah, they they wanted slavery, but they wanted it because they were at the top of their s oligarchic societies in South Carolina and they didn't want to do away with their slaves.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: And so they wanted to make sure they could get their fugitive slaves back.
23:33
SPEAKER_02: They wanted to make sure that they could protect their interests in the halls of Congress and so on.
23:38
SPEAKER_02: But I, I mean, you know, I have not carefully studied everything these south Southerners and the Pink the Pinckneys, you know, wrote about this.
23:46
SPEAKER_02: But I would wager that they did not, they they themselves did not think slavery was long for the world, and that they were just trying to maintain their status in society and their economic benefit and interest.
23:56
SPEAKER_02: And the cotton gin, I think, changed everything and made it now much more profitable.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: And what do you think, Catherine?
24:02
SPEAKER_01: Compromise worth the price?
24:04
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think so.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: But I I I think it's hard to know.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, does anyone really know for sure?
24:09
SPEAKER_00: I guess you know, you talk about the South threatening South Carolina, I think you said in particular threatening to walk.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, how much, how serious was that threat, I guess is kind of the question.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: And does anyone know?
24:19
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
24:20
SPEAKER_02: That's true.
24:20
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's a good point.
24:21
SPEAKER_02: Um, there were two states who didn't ratify the Constitution initially, uh, North Carolina.
24:26
SPEAKER_02: So actually, one did kind of walk, but that was a ratification problem, right?
24:29
SPEAKER_02: That wasn't a convention problem.
24:30
SPEAKER_02: That was the people didn't ratify it in North Carolina.
24:32
SPEAKER_02: They did eventually, though, precisely because, well, it got 10 states.
24:36
SPEAKER_02: Are we gonna be the only ones out?
24:38
SPEAKER_02: So there's a question, you know, if South Carolina had walked, how many else others would have really walked?
24:42
SPEAKER_02: So that's a really astute observation.
24:44
SPEAKER_02: You know, how real was the threat?
24:46
SPEAKER_02: I think it was real enough that they didn't want to take the chance.
24:49
SPEAKER_02: And again, because they thought slavery was on its way out anyway.
24:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
24:52
SPEAKER_02: Right?
24:52
SPEAKER_02: They that a lot of this is historically contingent, right?
24:55
SPEAKER_02: Now, I would to be clear, I do think the Constitution ultimately created the tools that would allow for the abolition of slavery for this cordon of freedom.
25:03
SPEAKER_02: You know, we were talking a bit before the show, and Josh, when we were talking about this, you call it containment, right?
25:07
SPEAKER_02: Like is it containment theory?
25:09
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll just I'll just say that real quick for the audience.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, as I read your book and as I think about your thesis, um, I come away thinking this is just like containment theory with communism.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: It's like, okay, we've got something um that we think is really evil, and um, but we also think it's not long for this world.
25:28
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to take it on directly because the fight's just too big.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: So uh what we'll do is we'll we'll contain it, we'll prevent it from spreading, and then we'll let it wither and die on its own.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: And that was the theory of um the West with respect to Soviet communism, and it was the theory of the abolitionists, the early abolitionists, when they wrote the constitution and tried to fence in slavery without fighting the fight to the death.
25:54
SPEAKER_02: And the other comp oh I'm sorry, the other comparison was that the Southerners themselves believed that containment would work to get rid of slavery, just like the communists you mentioned, Josh, uh uh wanted to thought they had to expand to survive, which is interesting.
26:09
SPEAKER_02: Like, why did the South secede?
26:11
SPEAKER_02: Why did the South secede because Abraham Lincoln won an election?
26:15
SPEAKER_02: The Republican Party was not advocating abolition in the individual states.
26:20
SPEAKER_02: It was obvious that they hoped eventually the states would abolish slavery, but no, they said no slavery in the District of Columbia, no slavery in the territories.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: It was this containment policy.
26:28
SPEAKER_01: For whatever reason That is to say, the South seceded because they wanted to expand slavery to the West.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: And what Lincoln was going to prevent was the expansion of slavery to the West.
26:38
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: They thought for whatever reason, slavery to survive had to expand.
26:43
SPEAKER_02: The Republicans believed it, and the Southerners believed it too, which is why civil war sort of ended up happening.
26:49
SPEAKER_02: Now, in you know, it did end up taking a civil war to abolish slavery.
26:52
SPEAKER_02: Like, would slavery really have been abolished if they had uh abolished it in all the territories?
26:57
SPEAKER_02: It might have persisted a long time longer.
26:59
SPEAKER_02: I do have a slightly controversial thing uh in my book where I say that um uh Congress under the interstate commerce power would have actually had the power uh to prohibit the interstate shipment of goods made with slave labor.
27:11
SPEAKER_02: And that would have been a death knell.
27:13
SPEAKER_02: Now, this is controversial because I think a lot of originalists today think that the Supreme Court case holding that Congress had the power um to uh to prohibit the interstate shipment of goods made with child labor.
27:24
SPEAKER_02: They think that was wrong.
27:25
SPEAKER_02: They think Congress doesn't have that power, it undermines federalism, undermines the role of the states.
27:29
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, I think it's just right as a matter of the text.
27:32
SPEAKER_02: I think that's commerce, interstate commerce.
27:34
SPEAKER_02: Like that's interstate commerce.
27:35
SPEAKER_02: The power can be abused, it can be used to affect the policies of the states, and and that is what it is.
27:40
SPEAKER_02: It is a power given to Congress.
27:42
SPEAKER_02: I happen to like it normatively because it answers the question of could Congress have had a tool in its arsenal to finally snuff out slavery um without directly abolishing it.
27:52
SPEAKER_02: And I think prohibiting the interstate shipment of goods.
27:54
SPEAKER_02: But some people think I'm too radical and that's too much federal power.
27:57
SPEAKER_02: Um but anyway, so it's complicated, right?
27:59
SPEAKER_02: It's complicated.
28:00
SPEAKER_02: Is that the answer?
28:01
SPEAKER_02: But not but it's not pro-slavery.
28:03
SPEAKER_02: I do not think it was pro-slavery.
28:05
SPEAKER_02: I think that's fair.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: It is it is a some people who were pro-slavery, some people who were anti-slavery forming a compromise.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: And some people who were ready to accept slavery for other goods.
28:21
SPEAKER_01: And they formed a compromise, and it's a complicated political story.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't think they could have predicted what happened next, which is that their theory of containment couldn't succeed because of the invention of the cotton gin, right?
28:34
SPEAKER_00: So now all of a sudden, slavery has become much more profitable um than it was before.
28:39
SPEAKER_00: And it seems like that was the impetus for a lot of people on the South sort of changing their argument.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Now all of a sudden they're really pro-slavery in a way that is like kind of sick and weird.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: Um, we have some quotes here that you mentioned in your book.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: Um and and within these quotes, they admit that the founders had been anti-slavery.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: And now the Southerners are going against that.
29:04
SPEAKER_02: So in other words, if you don't believe George Washington was being sincere or Thomas Jefferson was being sincere, well, take it from the Southerners themselves, right?
29:11
SPEAKER_02: What did they say about the founders?
29:13
SPEAKER_00: So here's Virginia Senator Robert Hunter.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: We in Virginia have changed our ground.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: We do not stand where we stood anciently.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: We do not stand where our father stood upon the slavery question.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: We do not believe that what Washington believed and Jefferson believed and Madison believed and Monroe believed, and all the leading men of Virginia for the first 50 years of our existence under the Constitution believed.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: We have changed our opinions in Virginia.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: And instead of now admitting that slavery is an evil to be restricted and discouraged, and which we may hope and pray may someday entirely removed from the republic, we now take the ground that it is a blessing to be fostered, encouraged, and extended as a benefit to the black man and a benefit to the white.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: There's also this infamous um cornerstone speech, which basically was the Confederacy declaring that Jefferson was correct when he anticipated that slavery would be the rock upon which the old Union would split.
30:05
SPEAKER_02: But he was wrong to be upset about slavery or to think that slavery was bad.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: But he was wrong to think it was evil.
30:11
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you shouldn't have worried about your hypocrisy, Jefferson.
30:13
SPEAKER_02: You were right to own slaves, is what Alexander Stevens went on to say.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: And then he talks about how this is like a new science.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: He says the truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
30:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so our new government is founded, the Confederacy, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
30:36
SPEAKER_02: This is the cornerstone of our government.
30:37
SPEAKER_02: And he says, um, this our new government is the first in the history of the world to be based upon this physical, philosophical moral truth, right?
30:46
SPEAKER_02: So also a physical truth.
30:48
SPEAKER_02: This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: He's doing a trust the science.
30:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
30:55
SPEAKER_02: No, that that no, that's exactly right, though.
30:57
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people say that it's the Christianity of the South, that Christianity somehow perpetuates slavery, was an argument for slavery.
31:05
SPEAKER_02: But it was actually science.
31:08
SPEAKER_02: It was actually ethnology.
31:10
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was not quite Darwin.
31:11
SPEAKER_02: Darwin was writing in the 1830s and 40s.
31:14
SPEAKER_02: His origins of species, I don't think, was published until 1859 or so, around the Dred Scott decision, uh, around when the Civil War actually happened.
31:22
SPEAKER_02: But there were all sorts of this new this new science of ethno, I don't know even how you say it, like ethnography, ethnography.
31:28
SPEAKER_02: Is that how you say it, Josh?
31:29
SPEAKER_02: Ethnography?
31:30
SPEAKER_02: Ethnology.
31:31
SPEAKER_02: Oh, ethnology.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: Oh, excuse me.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: I should have written this down.
31:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, and they had things like, you know, there was a famous book called Crania, Crania Americana or something, where again it looked like it at skull sizes, and this was all scientific.
31:44
SPEAKER_02: And so it was actually science, not religion, that led to this sort of degradation of um Southern thinking.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: You're talking about skull sizes between different races?
31:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
31:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
31:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like phrenology is sort of uh something that they sometimes uh talk about.
31:58
SPEAKER_02: But the point is it I just find this fascinating because you know, you always have um uh I don't know, I wouldn't call the South progressive in this respect, but it's amazing uh how you could wrap up really backwards view under the guise of science.
32:11
SPEAKER_02: And though I just want to make the point because a lot of people blame religion for this, but it actually wasn't religion.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: Actually, religion was used on the other side.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, exactly the I I made reference earlier to the school of Salamanca opposing the Spanish conquistadors.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: It was explicitly based on the Imago Day argument.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: Man is made in the image of God.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you can't enslave someone because they're rights-bearing because they're made in the image of God.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: And that argument reappears in the 1700s at the founding in the opposition to slavery.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: It appears in the abolition of slavery in the states between 1789 and 1860.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it reappears uh in Uncle Tom's Cabin in the abolition of the time.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Christianity, I'm sure Christianity can be put to every imaginable use uh by people who corrupt it, but it was opposed to slavery.
32:57
SPEAKER_02: In other words, like it's certainly true that white people in America, presumably at the time, believed in the superiority of the white race.
33:05
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna presume that that's true.
33:07
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna presume that it's correct, that Abraham Lincoln did not want, say, social equality, but it doesn't matter.
33:13
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter what one race is superior from the other race, because they're all equal in the most important respect, which is they're all equal in their natural rights.
33:22
SPEAKER_02: They're all entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they are equal in that sort of important element of the foundation of a free society, even if they're not equal all the way through.
33:32
SPEAKER_02: That's not a scientific idea.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: That's a philosophical, moral, religious idea, isn't it?
33:36
SPEAKER_01: So there's there's a fascinating story here in the nuances of this very complicated history.
33:42
SPEAKER_01: At the founding, there was near universal uh belief that slavery was wrong and varying degrees of willingness to compromise with it or live in accord with your um opposition to slavery, right?
33:58
SPEAKER_01: But there was this sort of consensus, including among many of the Southern representatives, Jefferson among them, Madison among them, Washington among them, that slavery was wrong.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: And then between 1789 and 1860, when the Civil War broke out, the South changed its view.
34:15
SPEAKER_01: And there's this sort of moral and intellectual descent of the South as they came to think slavery is actively right, and they said it's the foundation of our society and we believe in it and we support it and we think it's right.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: What changed?
34:28
SPEAKER_01: Why did it change?
34:29
SPEAKER_01: And I have sort of a theory of this.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a basic fact of political psychology that people cannot live with the idea that their own way of life, their own practices, their own behaviors are wrongful or unjust.
34:46
SPEAKER_01: They can't bear the cognitive burden.
34:48
SPEAKER_01: Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: It's the observation that the um that your actions are inconsistent with your beliefs, and that creates a certain kind of cognitive burden or emotional burden.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: People relieve it by changing their views.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: And they change their views to accord with their beliefs, excuse me, to accord with their actions, as opposed to changing their actions to accord with their beliefs.
35:09
SPEAKER_01: If, you know, if they make money gambling, they will eventually come to justify gambling.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: People at scale cannot live with the idea that the way their life is based is wrong.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: And so I think I think this was the founder's error at the founding in thinking that slavery would just wither.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: As long as there were generations of Southerners who were living with slavery, they would find a way to justify it.
35:36
SPEAKER_01: And there's a second thing, which is just more pragmatic and less psychological.
35:39
SPEAKER_01: Once you have an institution, you create interest groups.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: And the interest groups, like the plantation owners, are an interest group, right?
35:46
SPEAKER_01: The people who make money serving the plantation owners are an interest group.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: And these interest groups start to defend the way of life they've established.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: And so there's this, you know, temporary political arrangements are never as temporary as people think.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: They have this tremendous staying power.
36:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and playing games with race has always had that effect.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you see it with the history of affirmative action.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: When you have the early era of affirmative action just after the Civil Rights Act was passed, after 1964, um, you had cases like Weber and Bachy uh in 1978.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: And favoring people on the basis of race was not seen as right.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: It was seen as a compromise to get the races to the same starting point so that we could get rid of all distinctions based on race.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: But what happens as time goes on?
36:36
SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's justified by social justice, it's justified by systemic racism, it's justified by the interest in diversity.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: And people come to defend it as an affirmative right.
36:44
SPEAKER_01: And we see the same pattern, right?
36:46
SPEAKER_01: We see on the one hand, a group of people who are saying this is, you know, to divide people up into races and favor some and disfavor others or necessarily disfavor others because you're favoring some, is actively right, not just a compromise with the wrong or a temporary arrangement.
37:01
SPEAKER_01: And you see the emergence of political interest groups that have a vested stake in this sort of arrangement.
37:07
SPEAKER_02: And can I ask, does that mean that the progressives are right and that Marx was right and everything is economic interests, but the problem is it's actually the progressives that are always acting under their economic interests but pretending to be doing it for ideological reasons?
37:20
SPEAKER_01: I I have my explanation.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, I I I don't think of it as people being driven by their economic interests.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think they're they're behaving in certain ways because they find it expedient for economic reasons or otherwise, and they adjust their ideology accordingly.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: Well, like have you guys ever been kind of like screeched at by a leftist?
37:40
SPEAKER_00: Like you, you know, you're more conservatives.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't know, in college I was a very conservative activist and I was yelled at by, you know, in some very evil ways, right?
37:48
SPEAKER_00: You see the the tactics the left use.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: And then they would post on social media as if they were, you know, saving the world.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: They are Mother Mary.
37:56
SPEAKER_00: And you think of it, it reminds me of that.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: You you have to justify this behavior.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: But the original reason why I think they were screeching at me and freaking out was more so to fit in.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: It was kind of like the narrative of the time, but they have to justify it in a way that's better than that, to make themselves seem uh better and to be happier with themselves.
38:12
SPEAKER_02: I actually think you're identifying a different phenomenon, which is that the cognitive dissonance that most rational people experience and therefore try to adjust does not seem to affect liberals.
38:22
SPEAKER_02: In other words, they seem to be exempt from cognitive dissonance.
38:24
SPEAKER_02: Like their actions constantly are inconsistent with the words and you know the.
38:29
SPEAKER_01: Well, not exactly.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the way I think that works is uh way to bring it down to the earth, Catherine, by the way.
38:34
SPEAKER_02: Like modern day progressives that have like, okay, go ahead.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, social ostracism, uh interpersonal punishment for political reasons is a very familiar uh leftist tactic.
38:46
SPEAKER_01: And it's been, you know, um quite visible.
38:50
SPEAKER_01: Whittaker Chambers talks about it in his 1930s chronicle of uh breaking away from the communist party.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: And um This is the book Witness?
39:00
SPEAKER_01: The Book Witness, yeah, it's a wonderful book.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh and it's it's it's just sort of a constant.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: I think the reason that fits into the the cognitive dissonance kind of narrative is that when you treat people like that, you have a choice.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: You can either see yourself as a bad person because you're trying to inflict harm on another human being, or you can change your view and say, well, I'm fighting for justice.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: They're awful, they're wicked bad people.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so my behavior is justified.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: And you double down on that so that you can just can I give you an example?
39:35
SPEAKER_01: I um uh had these friends in Chicago, very, very progressive couple, very progressive family.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: And um Josh has progressive friends, just wanted on the record.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how you how you live like that.
39:48
SPEAKER_02: Older generation before the great sort, right?
39:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're not allowed to have friends.
39:52
SPEAKER_02: Friends on both sides.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: I am pleased to have friends on both sides.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: Okay, go ahead.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: So I went over to their their place for dinner with my family.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: And when we arrived, dad was there, the two kids were there, mom was not there.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Where is she?
40:05
SPEAKER_01: And uh he's like, Oh, she'll be here in a minute.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: She comes bounding downstairs, and just to set the scene, she's this very like sort of buoyant, bouncy, sort of blonde-haired woman.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: She always has a smile on her face and a kind word for everyone, right?
40:17
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Oh, what were you up to?
40:18
SPEAKER_01: She's like trying to accept the kind word.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: Just kidding.
40:21
SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
40:22
SPEAKER_01: Keep going.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: And she she comes downstairs and she's like, Oh, well, there was this person.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: I won't say I don't want to identify the people, so I won't say exactly who, but there was this person in my my institution who was accused of sexual harassment, and I was organizing a letter writing campaign to get him fired.
40:41
SPEAKER_01: And uh she was like, Isn't that great?
40:43
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, he was accused?
40:46
SPEAKER_01: Has he been convicted?
40:47
SPEAKER_01: Has there been a process or anything?
40:48
SPEAKER_01: No, no, but I mean he was this is good.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: Credibly accused.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: I have I didn't she didn't say credibly accused, she said accused.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: And I remember looking at this.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: You know, I've never tried to get someone fired in my life.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: Like I've never tried to inflict that scale of harm on a concrete other individual.
41:09
SPEAKER_01: She did.
41:10
SPEAKER_01: She did.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: But you know what she'd say?
41:12
SPEAKER_00: She would say, I just believe women.
41:14
unknown: Yeah.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: I believe women.
41:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's the dissonance.
41:16
SPEAKER_01: So that's the that's the cognitive dissonance adjustment, right?
41:20
SPEAKER_01: Is that what you do is what you're doing is inflicting harm on another human being at a scale like I haven't actually done that.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: It's not like everyone has done that.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: I've never tried to do that.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: I suspect you guys have never tried to do that.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: She did that, and she justified herself by saying, well, he was accused of sexual harassment, and we should believe women.
41:41
SPEAKER_01: Why believe accusations without going through the process to verify them?
41:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, you have to if what you're trying to do is get people fired on the basis of the city.
41:49
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I have a meta point then.
41:51
SPEAKER_02: So my first kind of sub-meta point is I think this proves my point that liberals don't suffer from cognitive dissonance, right?
41:57
SPEAKER_02: Because it's believe all women until it's women accusing Graham Plattiner.
42:01
SPEAKER_02: It's believe all women unless it's women accusing Joe Biden.
42:04
SPEAKER_02: So, in one respect, they clearly don't suffer cognitive dissonance unless this is totally just an inapt proposition because their whole action is about obtaining power.
42:14
SPEAKER_02: So they experience no cognitive dissonance for that reason.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: Did you hear what he said literally yesterday?
42:18
SPEAKER_00: Our reporter was like, wait, but you say believe all women, but you're not believing this woman who's accusing you?
42:23
SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Well, she's lying.
42:24
SPEAKER_02: That's crazy.
42:26
SPEAKER_02: You know, so so there is a cognitive dissonance point.
42:28
SPEAKER_02: But to bring it back to my book, okay?
42:31
SPEAKER_02: That's what this is about the books.
42:33
SPEAKER_02: The Constitution of 1789, a new introduction,$29 on Amazon.com or at Cambridge.
42:39
SPEAKER_02: Um, so so the thing I why this cognitive dissonance conversation emerged is because a lot of people impugn the founders.
42:47
SPEAKER_02: But it's actually the Southerners themselves that dissented into this through this positive good theory.
42:52
SPEAKER_02: And this plays into the Dred Scott right decision, which I know uh we wanted to talk about because Chief Justice Tani uh in the Dred Scott decision basically said, Oh, we're enlightened today, but it's actually the founders uh require uh that our particular view um in this case of whether free blacks could be citizens and so on.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: But no, it was actually them, right?
43:09
SPEAKER_02: It was the South's descent uh into this positive good theory, into this oligarchy uh that is what led uh to the emergence of this you know view um that free black persons couldn't be citizens and so on.
43:21
SPEAKER_02: And so I think that's what led to the Dred Scott.
43:23
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and positive good, just positive good is that it's good for slavery is good for black people, and for white people that it's good rather than evil.
43:30
SPEAKER_02: That's a positive good theory.
43:31
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
43:31
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:31
SPEAKER_02: And so I think that takes us to the Dred Scott, right?
43:33
SPEAKER_01: So tell us about Dred Scott.
43:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's talk about the case.
43:36
SPEAKER_01: It's it's um a case that uh just by way of setup, um that just bef before the uh Civil War, it was a case about the status of um uh expansion of slavery to the West and about the citizenship status of black people, and it helped um Inflame the country in the in the years leading to the Civil War.
44:04
SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
44:05
SPEAKER_02: And the most important thing in terms of the Civil War, like the historical contingency leading up to the Civil War, not as interesting for our purposes today, but it's the it invalidated the Missouri Compromise.
44:14
SPEAKER_02: Remember how we talked about how a big re part of the Republican strategy was this containment policy, that if you could just abolish it in the territories and you can contain slavery where it existed, slavery would eventually be snuffed out.
44:25
SPEAKER_02: The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was the synchrosanct compromise.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: And in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court held that Congress did not have power to abolish slavery, to prohibit slavery in the territories, which meant that the whole strategy of the abolitionists blew apart if Dred Scott was correct.
44:40
SPEAKER_02: And this is what led uh to the Civil War.
44:42
SPEAKER_02: The thing that we like talking about today is this question of whether a Dred Scott could even sue uh in federal court, because under the Constitution, to sue in federal court, you would have to be a citizen.
44:53
SPEAKER_02: And the question was, oh, he's black.
44:55
SPEAKER_02: Can he be a citizen?
44:56
SPEAKER_02: And the Supreme Court held in this infamous decision with by Chief Justice Tawney writing that free black persons of African descent could never be citizens of the Constitution, uh, in the sense of the constitution.
45:07
SPEAKER_02: And they said, to go back to the points we made earlier, that the founders did not intend them to be included in the declaration because he said the founders would have been gross hypocrites if they had intended him to be included.
45:17
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, no, no, the hypocrisy, as I said before, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
45:24
SPEAKER_02: Right.
45:24
SPEAKER_02: They understood that they were being hypocritical and that they couldn't align the practice sort of uh with the principle.
45:30
SPEAKER_02: But Chief Justice Tawney took it a lot farther and said, oh no, they they're not hypocrites, they're demigods.
45:35
SPEAKER_02: They can't be hypocrites, and therefore, free black persons could not have been part of the political community.
45:40
SPEAKER_02: And the point that I want to make is that this was not the founder's view.
45:43
SPEAKER_02: Tawny was purporting to be an originalist.
45:46
SPEAKER_02: It was not originalist.
45:47
SPEAKER_02: He was adopting the views and prejudices of his own time and place under the guise of originalism.
45:53
SPEAKER_02: Maybe that's a lesson for originalism, sort of generally, but but it is not uh, you know, a calumny against the founders, right?
46:00
SPEAKER_02: This was Tawney's view.
46:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
46:02
SPEAKER_02: And the last thing I'll say about this is people forget that Benjamin Curtis, Justice Curtis, had a blistering descent.
46:08
SPEAKER_02: He had a blistering descent.
46:09
SPEAKER_02: And he said as follows He said free black persons were citizens of at least five states before the adoption of the Constitution.
46:16
SPEAKER_02: They were part of the political community that debated the constitution, that sent delegates to constitutional conventions.
46:22
SPEAKER_02: Nothing in the constitution strips them of their citizenship, right?
46:25
SPEAKER_02: There's no, look, I challenge my readers or uh listeners, um, go to the constitution.
46:30
SPEAKER_02: Where did where's the clause that says previously free black citizens are no longer citizens?
46:34
SPEAKER_02: There's no such clause.
46:36
SPEAKER_02: Congress has a naturalization power, which is the power to make new citizens of like aliens or foreigners.
46:40
SPEAKER_02: But free black persons in the United States aren't aliens.
46:43
SPEAKER_02: They're not foreigners.
46:44
SPEAKER_02: They were born and raised in the United States.
46:46
SPEAKER_02: There's the natural-born citizenship requirement for president, which presumes that their descendants were citizens.
46:52
SPEAKER_02: So, as a textual matter, I think Justice Curtis absolutely obliterated Chief Justice Tawney's argument.
46:57
SPEAKER_02: But for purposes of our discussion, the point is Tawney was purporting to channel the founders, but he wasn't.
47:03
SPEAKER_02: He was channeling the positive good theory of his own sort of time and place, his own intellectual milieu.
47:09
SPEAKER_02: He was not actually channeling the founders themselves.
47:12
SPEAKER_02: Did you know?
47:12
SPEAKER_02: Did you pick this up?
47:13
SPEAKER_02: This was in the book chapter.
47:14
SPEAKER_02: I'm going to test my um Josh and Catherine to see how closely they read my chapter on slavery.
47:18
SPEAKER_02: Tawny manumented his own slaves in the early 18s or in the late 18 teens.
47:24
SPEAKER_02: He manumented his own slaves.
47:26
SPEAKER_02: And that was still a time and place where even in the South, slavery was thought of to be this evil to be overcome.
47:32
SPEAKER_02: And then something changed in the 1820s.
47:34
SPEAKER_02: That's when George Fitzhu were writing.
47:35
SPEAKER_02: That's when John Calhoun was writing, this positive good theory.
47:38
SPEAKER_02: And then all of a sudden in the 1850s, there's no sign of the tawny of the 18 teens that manumented his slaves.
47:44
SPEAKER_02: Isn't that crazy?
47:45
SPEAKER_02: To show you how your uh your view uh as to what the founders actually thought totally can be warped uh based on your own sort of intellectual ideological environment.
47:55
SPEAKER_02: So that is my spiel um Andret Scott.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: Well, so okay, so your argument, right, is that the the constitution is not uh grounds for slavery.
48:05
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, the constitution is not racist, but what Tawny seems to point to are the clauses we talked about earlier, like the uh, oh man, what do you call it?
48:15
SPEAKER_00: Freed slave clause.
48:16
SPEAKER_00: What is that called?
48:17
SPEAKER_02: Um there's the Atlantic Slave Trade Clause, there's the Territories Clause, there's the Three Fifths Clause, the Fugitive Slave Clause.
48:21
SPEAKER_00: Fugitive Slave Clause.
48:22
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
48:22
SPEAKER_00: That's what I had in mind.
48:23
SPEAKER_00: But he seems to cite these things as evidence against your opinion, right?
48:28
SPEAKER_00: What do you say about that?
48:30
SPEAKER_02: First, you'll note that he doesn't cite the three-fifths clause, which is interesting because he's trying to show that the constitution was pro-slavery.
48:37
SPEAKER_02: That's what Tani's trying to do, right?
48:38
SPEAKER_02: He's already said all the founders were pro-slavery.
48:40
SPEAKER_02: And it's like, actually, that's not true, right?
48:42
SPEAKER_02: He said they were hit, they would have been hypocrites if they actually believed the things they wrote.
48:45
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
48:46
SPEAKER_02: So that was his accusation against the founders.
48:48
SPEAKER_02: But he also tried to show that the constitution was pro-slavery, right?
48:52
SPEAKER_02: But he didn't cite the three-fifths clause.
48:54
SPEAKER_02: Right.
48:54
SPEAKER_02: Because he knew that actually the three-fifths clause was supposed to be uh an anti-slavery compromise that turned out to be pro-slavery because of the invention of the cotton gin and the three-fifths bump.
49:03
SPEAKER_02: But he didn't mention it because he understood that the South wanted five-fifths, the South didn't want to be taxed on their slaves and so forth.
49:10
SPEAKER_02: He did mention principally the Fugitive Slave Clause and the Atlantic Slave Trade Clause.
49:15
SPEAKER_02: And the Fugitive Slave Clause, it's true, you know, as for reasons we discussed, really was the most odious provision of the original Constitution.
49:22
SPEAKER_02: But think about if life would have been different, if South Carolina had gone its own way, there would have been a different Confederacy, would that have actually been better?
49:28
SPEAKER_02: The Atlantic Slave Trade Clause, he neglects to kind of emphasize that, no, it permitted the abolition of the slave trade after 20 years.
49:35
SPEAKER_02: And he's but he says, look, for 20 years, it allowed, don't get me wrong, like the population doubled in the United States, the enslaved population, some due to natural increase, but also because of the Atlantic slave trade cloud.
49:46
SPEAKER_02: But when you look at how the Northerners justified it, how James Wilson justified it, he said this is a great advancement for humanity because it will finally allow us to do something we had never been able to do.
49:56
SPEAKER_02: The British Empire did not allow the abolition of the slave trade.
49:58
SPEAKER_02: The British Empire kept the slave trade going.
50:01
SPEAKER_02: The states under the Articles of Confederation, the Articles, did not, the Confederated government did not have the power to abolish the interstate international slave trade.
50:07
SPEAKER_02: For the first time, you would have a body that could abolish the international slave trade, and they did it the day that they could in uh 1808.
50:15
SPEAKER_02: So I just think Tani was absolutely wrong to paint the Constitution as a pro-slavery document.
50:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but is your view not quite originalist?
50:23
SPEAKER_00: Because to me, it seems like your view is like originalist, but you need the context, which is there were some political trade-offs that had to be made that eventually led to you know the abolition of slavery.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: But but if you had an originalist point of view, maybe you would have Tawny's point of view?
50:41
SPEAKER_02: No, for the following reason.
50:43
SPEAKER_02: As an originalist, textualist, I would just do Justice Curtis's argument, right?
50:46
SPEAKER_02: Justice Curtis's argument was there were free uh citizens in five states who were part of the political community, they were therefore citizens of the United States, because nothing in the constitution strips them of that citizenship.
50:56
SPEAKER_02: A naturalization clause, of course, doesn't give the power to strip uh natural-born citizens of citizenship.
51:01
SPEAKER_02: I would just make that argument and look, textualist originalist argument.
51:04
SPEAKER_02: To the extent you want to go to the sort of the broader picture that the constitution's various provisions, again, what did Dred Scott have to do with the Fugitive Slave Clause?
51:12
SPEAKER_02: Nothing.
51:13
SPEAKER_02: What did it have to do with the Atlantic Slave Trade Clause?
51:15
SPEAKER_02: Nothing.
51:15
SPEAKER_02: It was all for color.
51:16
SPEAKER_02: Tani was trying to create this impression about the Constitution in order to color the result in a certain way.
51:22
SPEAKER_02: Whereas Justice Curtis had a very meticulous, um, uh uh strict, uh rigorous textual analysis.
51:30
SPEAKER_02: And then he says, and look, if you want to talk about the founders, I'm happy to talk about it.
51:34
SPEAKER_02: It is not the day, he said, or the place to vindicate their memory, but I would vindicate their memory.
51:39
SPEAKER_02: I do not think Tani accurately describes them, but this is neither here nor there to this particular decision.
51:43
SPEAKER_02: But Catherine, I do think it shows the risk of originalism.
51:46
SPEAKER_02: One of the accusations about originalists is that actually we're just conservatives in disguise of originalism, that we're just masking our modern day preferences under the guise of originalism.
51:57
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
51:58
SPEAKER_02: This is, you know, maybe not what we were going to talk about necessarily on this episode.
52:02
SPEAKER_02: Joshua, you're not even an originalist, are you?
52:03
SPEAKER_02: Or am I outing you a little too early on this podcast?
52:07
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I don't know.
52:08
SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
52:09
SPEAKER_01: I I describe myself as original-ish, right?
52:12
SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of like Jewish.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm uh Jewish, just a little Jewish Jewish, yeah.
52:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm intensely concerned with uncovering the original meaning, but I don't think that's sufficient to resolve most legal questions.
52:29
SPEAKER_01: And I am light speed against major changes in the way the country operates or major restrictions on our democracy in the in the um uh for the sake of of what some scholars take to be the original meaning.
52:42
SPEAKER_02: So Josh and I are not doppelgangers.
52:44
SPEAKER_02: We don't think exactly the same way.
52:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh what do you think about birthright citizenship?
52:48
SPEAKER_01: I think birthright citizenship, I mean, the the text is open-ended.
52:54
SPEAKER_01: And the view that would restrict the democracy is the traditional view that no matter what we're experiencing on the ground, no matter what the American people vote for, we are stuck with every child born on the soil being a citizen.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: What I want to do is maximize the reach of uh the democracy that is for the the voters.
53:13
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
53:14
SPEAKER_02: So let me say one more thing in defense of originalism, then, uh, in this case, which is I don't think it's simply a uh a disguise or a mask for conservative, modern-day conservative outcomes.
53:24
SPEAKER_02: But I do think it has a connection to conservatism.
53:27
SPEAKER_02: And we should be open about that and we should be proud of that connection.
53:30
SPEAKER_02: Because what does conservatism seek to conserve, right?
53:32
SPEAKER_02: It's sort of an empty concept.
53:34
SPEAKER_02: I mean, yes, there are traditionalists, Burkeans, well, let's conserve whatever happens to exist.
53:38
SPEAKER_02: I don't think that's quite what American conservatives are about.
53:41
SPEAKER_02: There is some Burkean conservatism to us, but we want to conserve the founding.
53:44
SPEAKER_02: We want to conserve the principles of the founding.
53:46
SPEAKER_02: Well, the constitution gives effect to the principles of the founding.
53:49
SPEAKER_02: So if a conservative means, you know, we want to preserve the founding and originalism gives legal effect to the principles that the founders are enacted or encapsulated, then of course that they're going to be consistent.
53:59
SPEAKER_02: Does it mean that every particular modern-day Republican Party preference is going to be required by the Constitution?
54:05
SPEAKER_02: No, of course not.
54:06
SPEAKER_02: That would be preposterous.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: But there is a deep connection, I think, between conservatism and originalism.
54:10
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, a point of say of saying this is that Tawney was not being a proper originalist.
54:15
SPEAKER_02: Okay, we have about 15 minutes left, and I really want to get Catherine's take on the political stuff.
54:19
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so I really love talking about my book.
54:22
SPEAKER_02: And again, the Constitution of 1789, a new introduction.
54:26
SPEAKER_02: It is a New York Times bestseller.
54:27
SPEAKER_02: No, I'm just kidding.
54:28
SPEAKER_02: Uh, but you might help it become a New York Times uh bestseller.
54:31
SPEAKER_02: But okay, Catherine, we just talked about the the my book and the what it shows you about the actual constitution.
54:37
SPEAKER_02: You know, what did you learn in A Push, dare I say?
54:40
SPEAKER_02: Or, or, you know, you work at a think tank and you work in this education policy space as well.
54:45
SPEAKER_02: Like, what are you seeing in the 1619 project?
54:48
SPEAKER_02: Is that still alive and well here in Minnesota?
54:50
SPEAKER_02: Probably is.
54:51
SPEAKER_02: Well, why don't you tell us what's going on?
54:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, the 1619 project, which I think a lot of people are familiar with, but this idea that uh okay, I actually quoted it.
54:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh, what they say about themselves, they seek to reframe America's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the nation's narrative.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: Now, one thing conservatives have done a pretty good job of is making the 1619 project and terms like critical race theory kind of toxic.
55:16
SPEAKER_00: So now people know to look out for these things.
55:18
SPEAKER_00: You will see moms at school board meetings doing a great job, you know, going against these kind of programs.
55:24
SPEAKER_00: However, they still do exist, especially under different names.
55:27
SPEAKER_00: Like I really do credit Chris Rufo with with making critical race theory a toxic idea.
55:33
SPEAKER_00: But the problem is the left is not just going to give up when someone dismisses, you know, well, we're obviously not going to have critical race theory.
55:39
SPEAKER_00: They're just gonna call it something else, right?
55:41
SPEAKER_00: So here in Minnesota, they've decided to call it ethnic studies, which I think is kind of funny because it sounds kind of nice.
55:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, ethnic studies, like this sounds uncontroversial anyway.
55:50
SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell So is that like a culinary class, like ethnic cooking?
55:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, actually, it does have to apply.
55:55
SPEAKER_02: But that's appropriation, if right?
55:57
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you gotta be careful.
55:58
SPEAKER_02: So you can study, but you can't appropriate.
56:00
SPEAKER_02: So what's the line there?
56:02
SPEAKER_02: Anyway, I was so I was just so confused about all of this.
56:04
SPEAKER_00: So in Minnesota, that we have this new ethnic studies law where uh every child in grades K through 12, this is starting this year when kids go to school this year, uh, will learn, quote, primarily through a lens of power-centric race-based social struggles.
56:19
SPEAKER_00: And to be clear, this does not only apply to social studies classes.
56:22
SPEAKER_00: Of course, it does apply there, but it also applies to gym class and art class.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: They have these standards in every single class.
56:29
SPEAKER_00: Ethnic studies is not just a class, it's a strand that has to apply to every single thing you do, which is obviously insane.
56:36
SPEAKER_00: How do you learn about like oppression in gym class?
56:40
SPEAKER_01: And it's the total death of death of critical thought.
56:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can't engage, you're trying to create in the youngest children a totalizing framework for thinking about every subject in terms of power struggles among the races or among other forms of identity.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: And that's um I think that's a false and toxic way of looking at human history, but it's also like when you trap people in it, they can't think their way out of it.
57:04
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
57:04
SPEAKER_00: So some of the recommended curriculum includes a Black Lives Matter coloring book for the younger kids.
57:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, for the older kids, there's an assignment to create your own protest mural that is recommended.
57:15
SPEAKER_00: And all of this was constructed by someone Walls appointed to craft this new policy, who is on tape as saying the United States, as constructed, is irreversibly racist and it must be overthrown.
57:26
SPEAKER_00: So I've that's all in Minnesota.
57:29
SPEAKER_00: Um, if you are in another state, though, I encourage you, don't just look out for the 1619 project.
57:35
SPEAKER_00: Look out for the other ways this is coming into your kids' classrooms, look in their backpack, look at what they're doing.
57:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, and don't assume it's all good just because you don't see the buzzwords that we hear about a lot, because this is absolutely still alive and well.
57:48
SPEAKER_00: And as you've noted, Josh, has been going on for a long time.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: So I think obviously what we need to consider is like what's our response.
57:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've already in this conversation added so much nuance to uh the discussion of slavery and the history of America.
58:04
SPEAKER_00: It seems like that should be in the conversation, and yet the left wants it to be like this super easy black and white thing.
58:10
SPEAKER_00: You're either an oppressor or oppressed.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: And they will literally divide kids up into those classes in elementary schools here in Minnesota.
58:17
SPEAKER_02: So can I ask, you know, the policy person and the sort of philosopher a question about this?
58:22
SPEAKER_02: How is it that the left can take these ideas that are really insipid and insidious?
58:28
SPEAKER_02: And it has such a totalizing effect on culture?
58:31
SPEAKER_02: Like these ideas, you know, uh it's one thing to have an academic write an article about intersectionality.
58:38
SPEAKER_02: How is it that 20 years later it's infected every K through 12 school, it's infected every law firm hiring department, it's affected Hollywood, it's affected absolutely everything.
58:49
SPEAKER_02: And what kind of power does the right exercise?
58:52
SPEAKER_02: Like, so in our in our response, you know, my response is some rich dude has to buy a lot of copies of my book and give it to high school kids or something like that.
59:02
SPEAKER_02: No, but in all seriousness, like how do we translate what I say about the Constitution?
59:06
SPEAKER_02: Do I need to write a children's book?
59:08
SPEAKER_02: Do I need to write a high school textbook?
59:09
SPEAKER_02: Like, who's doing this work?
59:11
SPEAKER_02: What can be how is it how is the left so totalizing?
59:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, one thing we say is it's a bait and switch.
59:16
SPEAKER_00: And it's like the ethnic studies word in and of itself.
59:19
SPEAKER_00: Because when you heard this law being passed on the floor of the Minnesota legislature, what the legislators would say were, this is just teaching kids about other cultures.
59:28
SPEAKER_00: Kids are going to do better in the workforce because they're going to have to work with people from other cultures.
59:32
SPEAKER_00: They're just learning about things like, you know, other countries and other places around the world.
59:37
SPEAKER_00: But what's actually in the law is not at all what they're saying.
59:41
SPEAKER_00: So we call it a bait and switch, but maybe it's also like uh a simplification or something like that.
59:46
SPEAKER_00: They do do populism pretty well in some ways.
59:50
SPEAKER_00: Like if we only have academics and we only have, you know, esteemed law professors like we do on this podcast, you're only gonna get so far.
59:57
SPEAKER_00: And hopefully something we do also do on this podcast is make information more accessible to more people.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_00: But in some ways, we do have to be able to bring down our beliefs onto another level.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_00: And I think that the left does a really good job of that.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_02: This relates to something Josh said on the last uh one of our previous episodes, uh, which is the left really does use language in a very interesting way to like mask really radical ideas.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_02: Um, so one is also the way they don't use language, Josh.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_02: You said, oh, if it's a snooze fest or whatever, like, oh, nothing to see here.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_02: That itself is commanding language and communication in a very politically powerful way.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_02: On another recent episode that I did with the Manhattan Institute folks, um, you may recall, we were talking about how homeless people, we started calling them unsheltered homeless versus sheltered homeless, but then you move from unsheltered homeless to unhoused.
1:00:46
SPEAKER_02: They were unhoused, which implies what?
1:00:48
SPEAKER_02: That they have the right to be housed.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_02: So it's just amazing how the left can you package really crazy ideas in language that in principle, who could be opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion?
1:00:58
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_02: So it's it's it's super crazy and totalizing.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, it isn't what it appears.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the opposite of diversity isn't uniformity.
1:01:06
unknown: Yeah.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_01: The opposite of equity is.
1:01:08
SPEAKER_01: Right, exactly.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_01: The opposite of inclusion isn't exclusion.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: It's just it's just like these terms don't mean what they appear to mean.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_01: Beyond the language, I mean, to answer your question, I th I think um fundamentally it has to do with control over universities.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_01: We there's this quote that's so popular, especially among conservatives, that um university politics are so um are so nasty because the stakes are so small.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: But the stakes aren't small.
1:01:35
SPEAKER_01: It's the dumbest quote in history.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh the Kissinger quote, isn't it?
1:01:39
SPEAKER_02: Or attributed to Kissinger uh I don't know exactly academic disputes so badly.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_02: So little is at stake interesting.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_02: We'll call it apocryphal.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: But uh whoever first uttered it, it's gotten tremendous currency.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: It's a total lie, it's completely false.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh university politics are utmost stakes.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_01: You know what every K through 12 teacher has in common?
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: They went to college.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: They got a degree from a school of education.
1:02:02
SPEAKER_01: You know what every lawyer has in common?
1:02:04
SPEAKER_01: They went to college and law school.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: You go into these total, and I I teach undergraduates sometimes because I moonlight in philosophy departments and I get to teach 19-year-olds.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_01: And you know what's true of 19-year-olds?
1:02:14
SPEAKER_01: They are incredibly young.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: They are incredibly young.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: You give them a book and it changes their life, right?
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: And what you do is you take now, and I'll tell you one more thing.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: What does every leader of almost every institution in the country have in common?
1:02:32
SPEAKER_01: They went to college, right?
1:02:34
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter if you're on Wall Street or if you're in, you know, you're, I don't know, you're running a museum, or you're running a pen company, or you're making cups.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: Like basically the people who run institutions in America, with exceptions to be sure, but basically the people who run institutions are people who went to college.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_01: And so you get control of the institutions that uh educate people at the most formative time in their intellectual development, these critical years of their early adulthood, their formative professional experiences, and you get them for four years minimum, and maybe seven or more if it's medical school or more if it's uh PhD programs.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: And you exact, you put them in a totalizing environment intellectually, and an environment whereas you experienced, if you dissent, uh, it'll carry all sorts of social costs that you just have to have the wherewithal to endure.
1:03:23
SPEAKER_01: I think about my own daughters and like wondering if they would have the wherewithal to endure the social consequences of being a heterodox thinker in a homogenous environment.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_01: And what you do is most of the people who are college educated come on board.
1:03:37
SPEAKER_01: And that's why today we have like a fundamental split in our politics between um the progressive movement, which is a highly educated movement, correlates very closely with education, and a non-progressive movement that goes the other way with education.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: It really has to do with control over the university environment, first and foremost.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_00: Okay, but what about Josh?
1:03:59
SPEAKER_00: And I've told this story on the podcast before, so I won't tell the whole story, but in the fourth grade, I had to create a plan for how I personally was going to do my part to stop climate change.
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but the teacher and every teacher at that school, without exception, and every institution got a sort of set of views that they were that they imbibed in their college experience.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: So K through 12 is a projection of the university experience.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, ideas get originated among scholars in universities and projected out into KK12.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_02: Catherine, Catherine had a little act of protest, right?
1:04:32
SPEAKER_02: I mean, how did you answer that?
1:04:34
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't know, my parents my parents coached me through some answers that involved like, I will not take my private jet as often as Leo DiCaprio.
1:04:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_02: That's fine.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_02: Well, listen, we are almost out of time.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_02: I did want to talk about one last thing, and maybe Josh will give you the last word here because we were talking uh before the show today, you had actually some really interesting things to say about patriotism, and I know you wanted to talk about it.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_02: So the left, this idea of this original racial slavery sin, this idea is like we they people people, the left wants us to hate this country.
1:05:06
SPEAKER_02: And you think that we should be patriotic toward the country and that we should love the country in a certain way.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_02: Uh can you tell our audience what you mean by that?
1:05:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think that um the the left's view of American history is both an intellectual and an emotional view.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_01: And on the intellectual side, it's this weird combination of total obsession with history, a very simplified version of history, and no belief in historical change.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_01: So the countries founded in racial slavery, as as they portray it, there was no opposition to that slavery at the founding.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_01: It infected the whole all of the founders and the Constitution.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_01: It didn't change with the Civil War, it didn't change with the Civil Rights Revolution.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_01: It's just one bell that kept on ringing forever and ever and ever.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_01: And on the emotional side, you know, sometimes they present themselves as a as having a demanding love, right?
1:05:59
SPEAKER_01: There is such A thing as demanding love.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_01: Like I criticize you so that you can change.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_01: That's a kind of demanding love.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_01: But the criticism is so vituperative and so incessant and so unbalanced that at some point you're like, meh, that's not love at all, right?
1:06:14
SPEAKER_01: If a parent said to his child, you know, get just sort of nothing but incessant attacks on that child's uh character, um, or a spouse said it to another spouse, it would be, you know, anyone could see that that isn't love.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: And that's and that's what we see from the left.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: What I think is we need to have for a rationally based podcast, what we need is a rational kind of patriotism.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_01: And a rational kind of patriotism is like the kind of love an adult feels for another adult.
1:06:43
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's not a naive love.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_01: It takes into account flaws and shortcomings, and every person has flaws and shortcomings in their character and in their history, but it also counterbalances those against the full complexities of their of their particular humanity and story and comes up with a way of cherishing and valorizing that person at the end, right?
1:07:05
SPEAKER_01: So, how should we respond directly to the left sort of um anti-American narrative of American history?
1:07:11
SPEAKER_01: What we say is this most of the founders recognize that slavery is evil.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_01: But they thought if they tried to outlaw it, it would cost them the country, and if they tried to contain it, it would die on its own.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_01: In the end, their prediction didn't quite turn out that way.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_01: It took a civil war and a civil rights revolution to beat it.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_01: But we fought the civil war and it cost 600,000 lives, which was 2% of the country at the time, and we did beat it.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_01: And we had a civil rights revolution, and it was one of the major events in the history of the world, really, of this country, certainly, and we beat it.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_01: So it took Lincoln to beat it, and it took Martin Luther King Jr.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: to beat it, but we did beat it, and it's not a story of no historical change, it's a story of massive historical change, an arc of overcoming.
1:07:56
SPEAKER_01: And that history, including its complexities, to justify love for the country, not hate for it, uh, including the complexities of the founders' compromise, the sacrifices of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Revolution, it's all part of a redemptive story of America's greatness.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at that not as a naive love or a jingoistic love, but as a mature love of the kind that an adult would feel for another adult, there's a something in there to uh, you know, treasure in America as we look with maturity at its cinquentennial.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_01: Semi-senquentennial.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_01: I can't say it now, you have to say it.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_00: Semi-senquinnial.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_00: Wait, is it semi-sinquentential?
1:08:32
unknown: Sorry, you're getting confused.
1:08:33
SPEAKER_02: You could call it the quarter millennial or America 250 250 or the semi-quincentennial.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_00: Semi-quincentennial.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_00: And in honor of that, I don't go, I don't know if you guys have noticed, but the Americana aesthetic is like very in right now.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_00: Has this come across your feeds?
1:08:48
SPEAKER_02: Um a little bit, because I'm well watch the right things and uh the old J.
1:08:53
SPEAKER_00: Crew sweaters with the American flag on them, things like that.
1:08:57
SPEAKER_00: They're in vogue.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: They're cool again.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_00: So on an optimistic note, I think patriotism is making a comeback.
1:09:04
SPEAKER_02: Well, Josh, that was really beautifully uh said, and uh I couldn't agree more.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_02: Um that's all we have time for today.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_02: Uh thank you for your attention.
1:09:13
SPEAKER_02: Don't forget to hit that like and subscribe button, and we'll see you next time.