Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

Dr. Larry P. Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues to continue a series on The Second World War, Churchill’s sprawling memoir and history of World War II in six volumes.

Release date: 15 May 2026

Read more about Sir Winston Churchill including the official biography of Churchill by Martin Gilbert at the Hillsdale Official Store.

Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio.00:31S2

Morning glory. Good evening, Grace America, I’m Hugh Hewitt. That music means the Hillsdale dialogue is underway. Doctor Larry Arnn is my guest this week as we plunge into this book, which is the Finest Hour volume two of Winston Churchill’s memoir of the Second World War. And I have the modern paperback edition. There are many, many different editions. So the pages that I reference may not be the pages that you reference. But doctor, aren’t we read every page of the Gathering Storm because it was so apropos of the time we live in. I don’t know if we’ll do every page in the finest hour. I’m not sure. We’ll do volume three, four, five and six. But why is the finest hour different and unique and important among the other five volumes of memoirs?01:18S3

Well, it’s the peak. It’s one of the turning points. Solzhenitsyn has written a series of, of, uh, history books, one of which still in the translation process. Uh, and he wrote about what he called nots. Uh, that is to say, places where history comes together and everything changes. And those, those nots tend to form around events that are very narrowly run, right? That it could have gone the other way. And so one of those happened in May through September of 1940. Uh, and the finest hour is that period of time. It actually extends until the middle of 1941. Because beginning on May the 10th, the Second World War broke out on September 3rd, 1939, when Hitler and the Soviet Union attacked Poland and they worked on Poland from September until May of the next year, 1940. And they destroyed it also Finland. And, uh, right toward the end we talked about this. Hitler attacked Norway. So the war was spreading. But May the 10th was the big day. Uh, that’s when the Wehrmacht turned its blitzkrieg machine west, and they attacked Belgium and France, and they did it in an innovative way, somewhat alike, but mostly different from the way they did the same thing in 1914 to start the First World War.02:53S2

But without the French. This time, the theme of the book. And I want to tell people that because it’s on the first page, Churchill wrote it. Theme of the volume how the British people held the fort alone till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready. He’s still not going to let anyone forget that they were not ready when he was called upon to to save the world.03:18S3

Yeah, they were not. Britain was not ready and France was really not ready. And we were not ready. And we of course, didn’t get into it for quite some time. But the way they came to be alone was that against every expectation. There’s no modern equivalent of this. Hitler conquered France in six weeks and destroyed a 3 or 4 million man army in that amount of time and drove the British off the continent. They got most of their soldiers away. Many French soldiers to almost none of their equipment, and that was the only army Britain had. And so when Churchill says alone, that’s what he means. At that moment, Hitler was master of Western Europe, into Central Europe, bordering Eastern Europe and over into Poland. And he was allies with the Soviet Union, the other great remaining independent power in Europe. And between them they had complete control of the continent, where most of the power and people in the world lived at that time.04:25S2

Now, the first three chapters are on the government, but the chapter two and three, which I think will probably spend the most time on, is about the collapse of the French. As Churchill puts it, 4 or 5 millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept. I think we do have. Bill Bennett used to say we have trouble with numbers in this age. That’s a lot of soldiers fighting, a lot of soldiers. That’s a lot of tanks and airplanes in the air. That’s an immense undertaking that we see in movies by little bits, and we read books about it. But the idea of 4 or 5 million men and all the tanks in the army clashing across Europe is really something. I hope we never see it again. Kind of extraordinary to have had to have lived through.05:17S3

Yeah. It it it was the Second World War was, uh, much bigger. I mean, the First World War was unprecedented. And the cost of it and the fighting conditions were unprecedentedly bad. The Second World War was much bigger, much bigger, and went on longer. And, uh, casualties were much higher, although not, uh, British casualties. They, their casualties were about half what they were in the First World War. And that was partly because technology was which war was fought had changed very much. Maneuver and tanks instead of trenches, and partly because Churchill was in charge and he was always looking for a way to spare life. Uh, but it was a terrible thing. And of course, it was a complete astonishment because Britain, you know, first of all, it was a controversial decision. It was controversial to Churchill to ally with France and send an expeditionary force onto the continent. They’d done that before in the world, in the wars of Marlborough and others, but they were always reluctant to do it because they’re a great naval power and they have the channel to protect them. But now it’s the airplane time, right? And that means, you know, Britain can get bombed soon. It would be. And the Navy might not even be able to operate safely in the channel with air power, as proved to be true until they got air superiority.06:49S2

So there’s a curious part, Larry, at the beginning of the book, I got to ask you this question very beginning of volume two. Churchill almost breaks the fourth plane and is talking to the millions of Americans. This book comes out in 48 or 49. It’s a huge bestseller. Everybody wants to read about the war in which they have been involved, or their family’s been touched. And he spends the first few pages making sure that at least the American reader and certainly the British reader understand who did what. And he writes he doesn’t want to insult the United States, but he writes, it is in the combined interest of the English speaking world, and that would include Australia and New Zealand and Canada, that the magnitude of the British war making effort should be known and realized. And he goes on to point out that until July of 1944, which is five years after this thing gets started, Britain and her empire had a substantially larger number of divisions in contact with the enemy than the United States. And then he goes through the casualties. The British lost 303,000 men, the dominions the Empire lost 109,000 men. They lost 60,500 civilians in the air raids in the Battle of Britain. They lost 30,000 merchant and fisherman. And he says, compare that to the United States, which lost all over the world, 322,000. Why does he do that?08:14S3

Well, by the time he’s writing this book, uh, and indeed, before the Second World War, we had become the greatest reserve of power in the world. And he. And we rescued them. It took the British standing alone for us to get a chance to do that, but we rescued them. He wants to make the point that they are serious partners, and also he wants to honour his country, which he got. Victor Hanson in his very good book, The Second World Wars, he calls it, because there were such huge theatres all over the world and they operated independently, somewhat. He makes the point that pound for pound, the British got the most out of themselves of any nation. They sacrificed so much, you know. And Churchill was just really good at organizing a war and fighting one, fighting it to win, fighting it as cheaply as possible. But here he simply outnumbered. And and so he’s got to fight by every hook and crook to try to keep the nation alive. And, you know, we have to talk about the politics of this some, because there are deep things evident in the parts of this early book about what Churchill figured out over the course of his life about politics, because one of the things.09:34S2

There, because he’s in our last segment, in the last chapter of Gathering Storm, Chamberlain steps down. Churchill steps up after playing his cards very nicely. He’s now in charge of the whole thing. He has to keep the Conservative Party. He’s got to keep Chamberlain in the government. He’s got to keep Halifax a couple of other Appeasers, Simon and Hoare. And he’s got to bring in the other party. It’s a balancing act. It’s a juggling act that, uh, we don’t really know much about. That’s not how we do our governments. But what a.10:11S3

Yeah. Well, he could, so he could he didn’t have a term. Right. He could lose his job on any day in a vote of the House of Commons. And the conservatives had a majority of 120. And they were loyal to Chamberlain and Halifax, who had led them for a long time, and. And they were cool to Churchill.10:33S2

And remember that he could lose his job on any day, lose his job on any day. So I had to walk a very fine line. More on their finest hour with Doctor Larry Arnn. All things [email protected]. All the [email protected]. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hugh with Doctor Larry Arnn. We’re talking about the finest hour by Winston Churchill and his command by speech of the House of Commons, even though it wasn’t with him. Doctor arm.10:58S3

Uh, in the very great speech, which is in this volume when it’s in the in the last volume, he says, uh, I will say to my this house, as I’ve said to my colleagues in the cabinet, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Well, the first paragraph of that, it’s a very short speech, but the first pair is only two paragraphs long. The first paragraph is not so famous. And in the first paragraph he says, uh, I’ve reorganized the cabinet over the weekend, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get to talk to some of the people who have been fired. And then he goes into that, as I’ve said to them, I say to you, nothing but blood. He completely reorganized the cabinet in three days, And he had learned how to do that. First of all, there’s a part of the American Constitution that he always admired unreservedly. He admired the whole thing. He usually subordinated to the British, but sometimes not the provision that there’s a commander in chief, and that commander in chief is appointed by the people of the United States. And that means in America, war policy can be uniform. It can be united, can be unidirectional. And Britain did not achieve that in the Second World War, the First World War. In the Second World War. Churchill organised that over the weekend and he thought about it for decades. And he mentions in this book where he learned the importance of that. He learned that in the First World War when he was advocating the Dardanelles, but he didn’t have the authority to see it through. And he believed that if it had just been prosecuted consistently, it would have succeeded. Instead, the people who did have the authority abandoned it when it got tough and he suffered the consequences. And so he sets up his cabinet. So there’s a small war cabinet. Uh, he appoints himself Minister of Defence, and that makes him in charge of the war ministries, all of them. And it makes him the chairman of the, uh, Chiefs of Staff Committee. That’s all. The service heads, the serving officers, the supreme generals and admirals. And that meant that there were these three bodies. There’s the the War Cabinet and there’s the defence civilian establishment, and there’s the United War Services. And Churchill is the only member of all three.13:45S2

It’s kind of astonishing that he would sit there and ask not only ask, but demand more and more power. He is going to run this war, and it’s an overwhelming amount of power that he’s gathering into his hands. But he’s doing it, as you pointed out, quite conscientiously. And they’re down to five in the War Cabinet about the War Cabinet. He writes, they were the only ones who would have the right to have their heads cut off on Tower Hill if we did not win. So there are five people. But then about those five people, he writes a little bit later it was understood and accepted that I, Churchill, should assume the general direction of the war, subject to the support of the War Cabinet in the House of Commons. The key change which occurred on my taking over was, of course, the supervision and direction of the Chiefs of Staff Committee by a Minister of Defence with undefined powers. So it’s all new in British history. He’s doing something new for a new exigency.14:47S3

Yeah. And he but also, by the way, something he had thought through for 25 years. Uh, you know, he suffered the absence of that to his cost in the First World War. And so he, he had reached a place in his life that he was the one who could do this. And of course, there’s something controversial, controversial today about all of this and controversial. And that is he comes into power on the 10th of May 1940, the same day Hitler attacks to the West. And it’s very important to to people to understand the drama of these days. He’s writing about these days in this book. And the drama is that on the eighth and 9th of May, 1940, there is a debate over a motion of no confidence against Neville, Chamberlain and Churchill, and it was likely to succeed. And Churchill could surmise that if Chamberlain fell, he would be one of the two people who would be picked. Halifax the other one, Churchill spent those two days defending Neville Chamberlain the most fiercely and taking personal responsibility for the failures of the Chamber of Administration on his own shoulders. And that was, first of all, noble, right. And effective. And I think it bore fruit because from that time until Neville Chamberlain died in November of that year, he had cancer. He didn’t live very much longer than he had cancer on the eighth or 9th or 10th of May. Um, a friendship was born. And that friendship was important because on the 27th of May. See. So you’re talking about May the 10th. The German attack starts and Churchill takes power. And 17 days later, Lexi. 13 days later, it starts on the 23rd of May. It becomes apparent that France is going to fall and Britain is going to be alone and might not get its army back. And my wife’s father was in that army and left Dunkirk Beach the last day anybody did. And I remember my wife was born after that I might not have ever met. Um, so these dramas are going on. And Mussolini not yet in the war, but Hitler henchman, a former British ally in the First World War and before, is appealing to open a peace conference. And, uh, if I remember correctly, Mussolini’s son in law or nephew, I can’t remember is the Italian ambassador, and he’s talking to Halifax, the foreign minister. And remember, in the cabinet they are there because they have a constituency of their own and they have some force. And so on the 23rd of May, 13 days later, Halifax begins bringing these appeals for a peace conference to the cabinet war cabinet to the War Cabinet, the whole cabinet. 25 others don’t know that this is going on. And so the first day Churchill Temporizes find out what they say. Second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day. It gets to be the 28th. And Halifax is becoming insistent. Now, if Halifax or Chamberlain or both of them had resigned from the War Cabinet and the cabinet, then probably Churchill’s government would have fallen. So he couldn’t make them right. And, you know, remember, there are people writing today that it would have been better to have made a piece at that time, because Britain did lose its pre-eminence in the war through the course of this war. Probably going to lose it anyway because we’re a much bigger country. But never mind.18:59S2

Never mind. Don’t go anywhere, America. Much more coming up. All things Hillsdale [email protected], including Erika Kirk’s commencement address at the state, including all their video courses, hillsdale.edu, and of course, all the prior [email protected]. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt talking with doctor about all the internal debate debates that go on, really about whether or not Churchill ought to have made a separate peace.19:27S3

So remember, there’s second guessing about this going on to this day. Well, Churchill doesn’t say much for days. And then he gets to the 28th and Halifax is pressing and threatening slightly. We have the record of these conversations, by the way, and they’re not candidly recited in this book that we’re reading. Churchill does a remarkable thing. He calls on the at the moment, on the 28th of May, a meeting of the entire cabinet. And they don’t know what’s going on, and they don’t really know the war situation. And Churchill gives them a speech of an hour. It’s a rare speech that he did not write out in advance, but two guys were in the room and took detailed notes. Um, the best one, a labour minister, a left wing crazy named Hugh Dalton, who I always loved, Winston Churchill. And he wrote down copious notes. Right. And we know that Churchill for an hour described the war situation and said that it’s very serious, said that we might have to try to get our army off France. And we don’t know if we can do it. We still have a navy. The airplane problem will be the next battle. And then he says these words, which are more or less exact. He said, I’ve been thinking in these last few days whether it is part of my duty to open negotiations with that man, meaning Hitler, and I believe that if I were for a moment to consider parley or surrender, every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place. If this island story is to end at last, let it end. When each of us in this room lies choking in his own blood upon the ground. He finished with that. And then they leaped up and cheered him, and there was a huge burst of feeling. Churchill calls it uncommon in the story of the of the cabinet. And then they get the War Cabinet back together, and Halifax says, yes, I think if we open negotiations at this stage, we’ll be on a slippery slope. Well on that day. That remarkable maneuver in those tremendous words are what kept Great Britain in the war, which is the reason.21:52S2

By the slimmest of threads. Meanwhile, I want to make sure in our ten minutes we tell people, I’m not going to cover much of chapters two and three because the collapse of the French army, it’s very technical. It’s full of good maps. Churchill knows his maps. He knows his war. What I take away is a civilian who’s not very good with maps. They literally fell apart. They couldn’t communicate. The French had millions of men strung out over all of Europe, and they had no reserve. In fact, Churchill writes at one point, rather startlingly, that he’s almost physically knocked over by the fact that the French don’t have a strategic reserve. I find that I understand what a strategic reserve is. I’m astonished that they didn’t have one. Are you?22:42S3

Well, the chairman, first of all, the French French army wasn’t in good nick at this time. But what the Germans did, the French and the British expected the attack to come up through Belgium, and that it could not come through a place, uh, south and west of the Maginot. Let me get my numbers right. Yeah. South and west of the Maginot Line. Because they built these big entrenchments, you know, to keep the Germans from coming again. And, uh. And they couldn’t get in. What? South and west of that line is the Ardennes forest. And they held the view that the Germans couldn’t come through that. Well, the Germans did. Uh, they were actually reinforced in that view because, uh, some, some imaginative people thought they might get tanks over those mountain roads, but they could never get enough fuel. And they forgot that they had gas stations all over France. And so the Germans did. Rommel and Guderian got a major tank army behind the French army and between the French army and Paris and its lines of supply. And they cut those lines of supply, and everything was confusion.24:01S2

And very bad to have forgotten the gas stations. We got to come back to that. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. I’m often amazed by Churchill’s memoirs, really sometimes just surprised the amazing part. Larry the Winston Churchill. I cannot imagine anything like this today flew back and forth, I think at least three times into the teeth of the battle so that he could talk to the French who were there, stunned and forlorn and paralyzed to a large extent. They don’t have a plant, but their bullets flying around. He’s got ten hurricanes, but but he flies back and forth. What do you make of that? That would be considered foolish in this day and age? It would be Yamamoto, right? You’re you’re bait for the Intel services to shoot you down.24:51S3

Yeah. Well, yeah, the, uh, Andrew Robertson is very good. Recent biography of Churchill Walking with Destiny goes through how much Churchill traveled during the war. A multiple of all the other world leaders put together because he was keeping a grand alliance. He called it together, and he went three times to beg the French to fight to the last. And the French had had, uh, a treaty with Britain that they would do that. And they did break that treaty. Uh, in one of the meetings, de Gaulle young he was one of the young European military commanders who understood the tank. Patton was another. Rommel. And Guderian did, uh, and he was a junior, though Churchill noticed him there and noticed that he had a lot of fire in his eyes and he sat bolt upright. Well, he’s in these meetings, right. But we can also see that, um, the French are collapsing. They call out PTEN and vegan heroes of the First World War. PTEN was the commander at Verdun, the bloodiest battle in the West in the First World War. And they’re trotted out and they’re making policy now. PTEN would eventually be the president of the Vichy Republic under the German thumb. Uh, and at one point, uh, Churchill says, uh, you can consume two German Army corps in the streets of Paris. And Patton says, we’ve already given the order for the evacuation of Paris. And Churchill replies, Nations that die fighting rise up again. Those that surrender tamely are gone forever. And then. And now we have a record of this from a man named Edward Louis Spears, who was a very close friend of Churchill, and he was raised in France, and who was his French was excellent, and he was the liaison officer between the British and the French armies in both First and Second World Wars. And he wrote excellent books about them. The first one is called liaison 1914. The second one is called Assignment to Catastrophe, and he is the one there as a translator to record these conversations with the French. And he was in very close sympathy with Winston Churchill. He’s a brilliant man. In fact, the first time he was elected to Parliament was the first time Churchill lost his parliamentary seat, and he immediately wrote to Churchill and offered Churchill his seat. So after Churchill said that about nations that die fighting Renault, who was a little better, although they were having one of these meetings in a in an apartment where Renault was hanging around with his mistress, and her nightgown was draped over one of the chairs. Uh, something that General Spears noticed. And Reynolds says he’s the prime minister. He says. Well, if you will give us your Air force, we can carry on. And, uh, Spears records. He said that was a moment of danger, he says, because I knew Winston and I knew how generous he was, and I thought he might do that. And Churchill looked down for a minute and looked up and said, this is not the last battle. He says, they must kill us in our island or they cannot win. And Reynolds says, how will you stand up against the whole German war machine by yourself? And Churchill says, I haven’t thought about it very hard yet, but I expect the plan will be to drown most of them on the way over and choke the rest of them to death on the beach.28:43S2

I want to close with one quick, one quick anecdote. Quote. I am a strong believer in transacting official business by the written word. In Churchill’s own phrase, he underscores and italicizes written word. He knows he’s got all this power. He does not want people speaking in his name unless they’ve been authorized by him to do so. Is that a practice you follow?29:11S3

Oh, yeah. Well, um. Sure. Um, but, you know, Churchill wrote a million emails, memos, and they’re very good. They’re tremendous. Um, uh, once in a while they’re long. Uh, they are always well ordered and clear. Uh, he had a stamp he would put on things. Uh. Action this day. Uh, but. And if you wrote him and he did, most of his memos are very short. Uh, uh, and very precise and concise. Right at the point you can. They don’t leave much room for ambiguity. If you gave him a long memo, he would do what, uh, Margaret Thatcher used to do. I knew her pretty well. And I was told that by several people who worked for her. If you handed her a multi-page memo while you were standing there, she would start reading the first page. And he would she would put the later pages in the wastebasket. Huh?30:16S2

Oh, brutal. Oh, that’s a good message. And you’d pretty soon get one page memos. Uh, the statue of the Iron Lady is on Hillsdale’s campus, by the way, and they have. We’ll have to talk about that someday, doctor. Don’t go anywhere, America. All things [email protected]. All the hughforhillsdale.com. Welcome back America doctor. I’m finished by telling them what you were telling me off air.30:39S3

I was telling a student the other day because we were talking about how, you know, about the past, because there are all these crazy things being said about the past. And I said, well, the past, we know it because it’s written down. Did you ever, I said, discover something that you wrote in high school, a paper or a letter? And they said, yeah, somebody, by the way, the other day presented me with my original correspondence with Martin Gilbert. Oh, I was in Claremont, and that starts in 1977, a long time ago. And the young man said, yeah, I did do that. And I said, and wasn’t it a resting when you did that? Didn’t you correct whatever memory you had of your time back then? Because you write it down. Right. And, and that means that, you know, and you know, the records of the college, the future archives of the college are today my working files.31:32S2

And, you.31:32S3

Know.31:33S2

Larry, We’ll leave it here. But in evidence, when you teach evidence. I don’t teach evidence, but I remember it. Uh, someone called written documents put into evidence. Are the past knocking at the door of the present, uh, demanding to be heard. And that’s it. Demanding to be heard. Well.31:51S3

The day you write the thing you don’t know about today yet, write the future, right?31:56S2

No. You don’t.31:56S3

That’s that’s why that’s how you write. You know, if you if you if you, uh, study with Martin Gilbert, you learn like it’s such a blessing that Churchill wrote so much because you can, in fact, know what he was thinking. He wrote so much of it down and you can have it from the time Churchill followed a rule that he would not excoriate people for things they did unless he had taken a position on it himself at the time. And, uh, and that and, you know, he did take so many positions and they are written down and they are spoken in the House of Commons, and all that is written down verbatim. And that means you can know what he thought, but what he’s writing about here is exactly connected to that. Right. In other words, uh, the the biographer of Hugh Hewitt will ask Betsy, where’s the letters? And, you know, that’s the first thing you ask for. Where’s the papers? Your emails. Right. There’s a million of them. Those are hard. They present challenges.33:03S2

Oh my goodness. Do they ever.33:04S3

By the way, the digital age, like most of our correspondents, Hugh, which is extensive, is an email.33:11S2

It’s an email. Right? Yeah.33:13S3

Will that be around in 15 years? I hope so. The lawyer our attorney hopes not, but I hope so. And, uh, you know, it’s, uh. But you see, in other words, uh, there’s a danger that the effect of the digital age will be to cut us off from the past. In part, there will.33:33S2

Be no or fewer knocks at the door. Fewer. Doctor. Thank you. We will come back next week and we will talk about the amazing chapters four and five in this book, The rush to the sea, where Larry’s father in law and 330 000 other brave and lucky souls get off of Europe as Rommel and Guderian surround them. Don’t go anywhere. Adam. Thank you. Harley. Thank you general. Thank you. We’ll talk to you next time on the next Hillsdale Dialogue.34:06S1

Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.

The post Churchill’s The Second World War, Part Twenty-Five appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, is joined by Matthew Mehan to discuss his new book The American Book of Fables. Matthew Mehan is associate dean and associate professor at the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C..

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Narrator: Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.

Scot Bertram: Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. Today, we’ll hear a conversation between Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, and Doctor Matthew Meehan from Hillsdale in DC. He has a new book out for young children, young adults and big adults too. It’s called the American Book of Fables. Here’s Doctor Kathleen O’Toole.

Kathleen O’Toole: Well, I’m so pleased to be joined by Doctor Matthew Meehan. Doctor Meehan is the associate dean and associate professor of government at Hillsdale’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government, where he teaches young undergraduates and young professionals about political philosophy and literature on the Hill. And along with that, he’s also a children’s book author and a father of numerous children himself. So he’s he’s come by it honestly. Matt, thanks for joining me today.

Matthew Mehan: Thanks for having me, Matt.

Kathleen O’Toole: My kids and I have really enjoyed reading your two children’s books that you’ve already published, Meehan’s Mammals and The Handsome Little Cygnet. And one thing we notice about them is they’re beautiful, and they give you a lot to think about, both as a child and an adult. I think you meant for them to be that way, didn’t you?

Matthew Mehan: I did, I wanted it to be for the whole family.

Kathleen O’Toole: I regard Meehan’s mammals as fascinating and perplexing. And I’m going to resist the urge to ask you a bunch of questions about it. We’ll do that later, maybe. For now, I want I want you to tell us a little bit about this new children’s book that you have coming out later this spring.

Matthew Mehan: The American Book of Fables. It’s a big book, 250 pages for the 250th anniversary of the country, 13 chapters for the 13 colonies. And it’s something old, something new, something red, white and blue. Sort of a lot of old nursery rhymes, but a number of them updated and adapted for the American experience and for modern English sometimes. And then it also, I’ve written some new ones that match the Declaration of Independence and its themes and its principles, and then a section for middle sort of middle readers, which is a bunch of fables, some of them very old, all of them adapted to American animals and the ecological zones that we go through in the 13 chapters. I’ll say more about that in a minute, and then a section for bigs where its primary source material from the founding and the settlement of the country with some glosses from me, but also a funny new genre, which is a kind of think animal Farm meets a Socratic dialogue where animals sort of talk about the principles of virtue and self-government, but also of constitutional republics with this lead character named Hugh Manatee. Uh, yes, a terrible, bad pun come to life. Uh, but humanity travels the country on a mission to help the manatees through a hurricane by gathering friends from around the country. But he had no idea how long the journey would be, so it becomes moot by the end. Uh, but, uh, so it’s, it’s a, it’s an unusual fun, but a very exuberant and fitting sort of tribute to 250 years that is going to be a big heirloom copy, beautifully illustrated book for families.

Kathleen O’Toole: So I want to get into the content of the book. But first, let’s talk about the illustrations. You have this painter, this artist that you’ve worked with over the years. Tell us about him. Tell us about the work that he’s produced.

Matthew Mehan: So John Farley is his name and he is a realist impressionist. So it’s the best of both worlds in my mind. He’s trained in the Boston school, and he traces his sort of pedigree master apprentice all the way back through the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, all the way back to Raphael’s workshop in Florence. Yes, that Raphael. So he is in the deep classical tradition, but he’s also innovative and has wound up mixing realist, sort of beautiful, very tight and clear. What you see is what you get and more with impressionistic flair. So each one feels a little dreamy, but also has really popping very specific points of focus. He’s doing 14 oils, big, beautiful, like big screen TV sized oils that are going to be double page sized that that highlight humanity’s journey and shows us all kinds of beautiful landscapes from the country, and then with quotes to American artists and American folklore and all kinds of things. And then there’s going to be about 35, 40 watercolors that are really beautiful. And so combining both means mammals, which had a bunch of oil paintings, and the handsome little signal, which was all watercolors. Now we’re going to sort of put those together. And then beyond that, because it’s such a big book and there’s so many little fables and stories and nursery rhymes, and we wanted to have at least a little bit of illustrative accompaniment for everything. There are going to be a bunch of pen and ink jots think Shel Silverstein, but not as ugly. Um, and maybe they’ll have graphic design color with the publisher. We’re sort of ironing that out now, but but there’ll be probably 100 and I’m hoping 150. But we’ll see whether how much of John’s sleep I can eat into to get him to do all that. But but there’ll be at least 150 illustrations total. So it would be a very beautiful, classically illustrated book.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah, an incredible amount of work. Uh, let’s talk about the importance of illustrations in children’s books.

Matthew Mehan: Yes. So John and I are unusual in that what you usually do is you hand off a manuscript to a publisher, and then they just go get someone to illustrate it, and the author just comes back or is received, receives an illustrated version and goes and gushes like, this is great. I, as an author, I could never like I actually find it appalling. I’m like, that’s what you do. You release the images to someone else. It’s like, no. John and I have forged a friendship over many years. We actually spent a year before we illustrated our first book, just doing political cartoons, and we sold a few to local papers, and we actually got one in the hands of all the senators, which we were told tipped the balance because everyone said this image was so arresting, I had to vote no on this horrible treaty. It was like this awful UN treaty, but we just did one one a week, just as a discipline to figure out how my words could get into his pen and faithfully translate so that we had a unified image that the word and the deed, the illustration and the story were one and worked as a single piece of art. And we’ve taken that to heart. And I think it shows because each image is feels very mysteriously textured, like the text. And we have a sort of idea of one. It must be beautiful. Mhm. And in a certain sense, ancillary to that are supportive of it. It must be careful that everything in the illustration is carefully chosen. And everything you look at is material for your reflection, for your enlightenment, for the improvement of your wit and your wisdom. So there’s nothing wasted. Every part of the buffalo is used, but also there’s a lively level of detail and symbolic layering so that it feels alive. I’m with Aristotle, right. Good art is an imitation of nature. Right. And nature is so full of liveliness. You look at a cadaver and you can see it’s dead. You look at a living person, even if it’s completely still with their eyes closed. Like a sleeping beauty. There’s something alive. Why? Every little vascular movement, like we just sense that something’s alive. Because there’s so much happening in lively things. Natures are alive. They’re teeming with life because of so many little actions. So every one of our poems, every one of our fables, every one of our stories, and every one of our illustrations are just jam packed with life and meaning and layers of detail, history, symbology, ethic, moral. Um, and I think the result is, is the way things used to be. Like I sound like I’m doing something really special. Like this is kind of how it used to be. Right. Right. And we’ve forgotten it. And so we’re, we’re kind of trying to restore that sort of care and beauty.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah. My own children, we love reading together. And, um, you know, it’s obvious, I guess, but, you know, their experience of the book is primarily the pictures when they’re very young. And over time, you know, your voice saying the words becomes just as important. And eventually it will become more important as they learn to read themselves. But you know, when they’re when they’re one, two, three, four, it’s the pictures that their eyes are resting on. And if those pictures aren’t beautiful, and if those pictures don’t give them something to think about, then the book is much lower quality, even if the words are excellent.

Matthew Mehan: Yeah, I mean, a one, uh, into my veins, as the kids say, like totally agree like 100%. Um, but also. What I see often, and I don’t like to dunk on my colleagues in Kidlit, you know, I mean, some people I will, but generally speaking, there’s a lot of people trying to do good work. Yeah. But this is why John is such a treasure for me is we’re both classically trained in our skill sets. Right. And because he actually did the groundwork of drawing. Right. He, he drew his way to painting. He didn’t start with impressionistic or collage or he, he went through the old classical disciplines to build up to reality. It’s so packed with what is real and what is real is a reflection of God and the Imago dei in creation. And you see some of these illustrations, you’re like, there’s something breathtakingly interesting about that painting or that illustration, but there’s also something wrong. There’s something off, and it’s really hard to put your finger on it when it’s well done. Even like the some of these books that are well done, but there’s still something not healthy about it. Mhm. And it’s and that’s the best of them. But you slide quickly down into this is actually harmful to the child in some aesthetic bleeding into moral way, where it’s like, this isn’t good because you actually want them to be acclimatized to acclimated to beauty so that they demand it in their own life. And by analogy, they’ll demand it in their own deeds and words and in the words and deeds of their friends and family. And so you actually raise the culture and raise society in civic life that way. And if you put ugly things before children, they will start to imitate ugly behaviors. And I do think that’s a responsibility that, again, we’re kind of slouching. We’re not doing that as well as we could.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah, yeah. It means you have to understand what beautiful is. And that takes that takes education and time. So let’s talk about this. These three levels that you have. You’ve got nursery rhymes for little ones. You’ve got fables for middle age kids, middle aged kids. And you’ve got.

Matthew Mehan: That. I’m one of those.

Kathleen O’Toole: And you’ve got and you’ve got primary source texts and other things for for adults and for older readers. Let’s talk about nursery rhymes first. So, you know, why do we read nursery rhymes to our little ones? What is it about a nursery rhyme that that can shape and form the imagination of a very young child?

Matthew Mehan: So several things leap to mind in answer to that question. One is obviously just the idea of word and song and making sure that those are bound, because then it it actually makes reason and beauty bound right from the beginning. So I think it’s very good to start with nursery rhymes for children because, well, yes, in the journey towards education, you’re going to have to basically sort of murder to dissect, right, and go into prose and like just read clunky things, you know, like you’ve got to read a textbook on economics in In college. There are things that aren’t so beautiful, right? But but at the end of the day, that really is those two things are those Transcendentals should be one. The good, the true and the beautiful should be one at the end of the day. So it’s good to start at the beginning in a kind of little postage stamp image of what the rest of your communicative life. And frankly, if you go all the way to the pursuit of happiness beyond the grave, what do we do in heaven? Sing. Right. Like word and song. Like word and beauty. These are the this is transcendence. So I think that’s just as a baseline of very good grammar of assent, if you will. That’s important. I also think that in the tradition of nursery rhymes, I did a lot of research for this book over the last five years. And one of the things I realized is there’s a whole cottage industry that is now dead, but people writing and explaining what nursery rhymes are about. And they’re actually think of Shakespeare songs, these strange little songs and greasy Joan doth keel the pot. like, what is this song in Love’s Labour’s Lost about? Well, if you actually look very carefully at that funny little song, it’s a very quiet and deep, simple, almost psalm like meditation on the themes of that play, but so suppressed. One that’s easier to see, right? Because evil is less artful. It’s double, double toil and trouble, right? The doubleness of betrayal. And that leads to all kinds of toil and eventually just trouble that ends your life, right? Just a tiny little sing songy witch’s brew song is the play in in writ small. And that’s what real good nursery rhymes are doing. And there’s people who analyze them. So you can actually see the old nursery rhymes from England. And then the glosses from all these Oxford dons, like, this is what this one’s about. And so, and, you know, maybe they’re wrong, maybe they’re right. Sometimes they’re, they’re certainly right. Sometimes they’re certainly wrong, but it’s actually a kind of way of giving shorthand, memory like ring around the rosy pocket full of posies. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. That is about the bubonic plague. And most people kind of vaguely remember that. But that’s a little token of memory of our past, of a suffering of Western civilization. Right? And, and it’s, it’s a very somber little reminder of difficult times. And so these misery rhymes also are sort of these historic tokens that teach you to make small images of great things that you can then carry as a reminder. And I suggest that actually the educated citizenry of the United States prior to I don’t know when exactly, but in a phasal way, sometime in the 20th century, let’s say, for the sake of argument, adults used to know this about nursery rhymes. They used to know what I just said, much more like, oh, this is about something. So I tried to recapture that, and I made it a little clearer because the book actually all 13 chapters take 13 parts of the Declaration of Independence. And so each section of nursery rhymes and fables and big kid material. Uh, each section. Those nursery rhymes are housed under some thematic statement from the declaration, so it actually sort of asks you to think through what does this rhyme have to do with that? And so whether or not you figure it out every time, it doesn’t actually matter because of these other things I’ve said about why nursery rhymes are useful, but trying to bring both song and idea together again. And I think that’s what rhyme has always done for civil society.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah. You gave a talk yesterday to the, uh, the graduate students here in the classical Education program about images and the importance of being able to use images to call up the right image to make your point, you know, and how an image is so much more effective than a full explanation to which people may not be willing to listen. For example, um, fables are images, aren’t they?

Matthew Mehan: Definitely.

Kathleen O’Toole: And so let’s talk about that. How, um, how, how does giving young children, perhaps older than nursery rhyme age, these American fables to think about, help them conjure up the right images? And what, what kinds of images were you trying to get them to imagine when you wrote the book?

Matthew Mehan: So I try to be a genre buster in each of my books, as you know, from me and Mammals and Handsome Cygnet that it is, yes, an alphabet abecedarian alphabet poem, but it’s doing a little more than an alphabet poem. And I try to do a little storybook, but there’s something a little more than a weird storybook going on there. Like, I try to sort of break the genre and sort of make it a little more interesting and for the adults, so they can sort of. So but with the fable, what I wanted to do was both give a moral, as you would expect, but I also wanted to recapture the fable tradition, which is not so infantilized as most fables are today. They’re simple, but they don’t always have a clear moral conclusion. Or rather, they have a clear moral conclusion. But you’re left going, that’s not all that’s in here. And that’s actually the old Lestrange. Uh, Caxton, the ones that were on the founders libraries on the shelves. Like those, those fables were complex and were designed to train upper level moral reasoning. That wasn’t just easy. Good guy, bad guy, white hat, black hat. It wasn’t so simple, right? Because self-knowledge is to realize that actually you have a problem too, right? And so you might find a bad guy, but now your reaction to the bad guy is also a danger because you have to do you have to answer the problem with the right kind of solution, or you become part of the problem. So they’re very clever and witty, almost like moral puzzles. And it turns out that animals give you so much room to play. One you get some distance, right? But also, sometimes you can include human beings, and even sometimes Greek and Roman gods will play a part in the tradition. Um, and sometimes just human beings. The fable tradition has a lot of freedom, but I like to use American animals, one, to get people to know and love the creation they’ve been given to care for. Right? Like, manatees are a wonderful new creature. Let me back up for a moment. In the founding, peel, the famous museum keeper, had a museum above Independence Hall when they were drafting the Constitution, literally above where they were drafting it. And when you bought a ticket and the the representatives would, would, would go up and visit and sort of relax and take it in. It was not a zoo like we have today with living creatures. They didn’t have the means to keep them all. It was a taxidermist zoo, so not quite as fun. But it says the Book of nature will teach thee how to govern. That was literally on the ticket like this. You. By learning the animal spirits and characters, by learning the irascibility of the wolverine, the appetitive desires of the manatee. Right. The stubborn pride of the bull. Right. That these. These kinds of. The cleverness and duplicity of the raccoon. Right. The masked marauder and bandit. The trash panda. Right. Like by by, by thinking these through, you actually get a kind of easy to deal with image of your own passions, your own sentiments that have to be governed. And so as a way to both teach us to love our land that we’ve been given and its ecology and history, but also to come to know ourselves. The fable tradition is just the richest mine. It’s such a great and such a neglected genre. So I wanted to really build it up again.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah. And this book, it sounds like, is kind of a, you know, it’s beautiful fables, it’s nursery rhymes, it’s stories, but it’s also a kind of encyclopedia, naturalist encyclopedia of American Animals and American landscapes too.

Matthew Mehan: Yes. So we, we start in the Everglades. There’s a big hurricane coming. And the opening lines, right. In Congress, July 4th, 1776. The manatees hold a Congress and they send Hugh Manatee on this mission, as I mentioned. And so he heads north up the East Coast, which, by the way, manatees do. I don’t know if you know this, but manatees actually feed on sea grass up through the summer and get as far as Boston.

Kathleen O’Toole: Oh, wow.

Matthew Mehan: Which I didn’t know.

Kathleen O’Toole: I thought they were just Florida animals.

Matthew Mehan: No, they migrate up the sea grass and then they come back down for winter. Wow. Not all of them, but a bunch of them will go up. So he goes up, uh, goes to the great bays, and you learn about the Chesapeake and how special Chesapeake and Delaware Bay are in the whole world. Like just the part of patriotism comes from gratitude for the gifts God gave us in this country, and part of the gifts that our founders were so keen on. George Washington had two huge paintings of the Potomac and two of the Hudson, because everybody recognized the Hudson was this insanely fertile and deep channeled river that was easily like, like it was great for economic commerce because it was such a river and that these bays were the most felicitous bays that anyone has heard of, and to this day are still the greatest trade bays deep enough for ships. Solid ground on all sides. No brackish swamps just like soil. So you can easily put a dock in. Meant for trade. No tons of protection. Many wide rivers and channels like these are great gifts. And so all the. The fables and stories as they tell the Moralia that I was mentioning, they’re also kind of opening the door to a new sense of wonder about our land and its it’s beauty. So I do. I do think that that is an important part of rekindling. Patriotism is just coming to love the land. Mhm. And and the people and each each stage of settlement has its own beautiful, noble and harrowing stories. Mhm. Which we tell there’s a number of them that are brought forward through primary sources that are intermingled with these dialogues with Hugh and these creatures from each region.

Kathleen O’Toole: So tell me more about that. The the portion of the of the book that’s for older, older kids, adults. What will I find when I, when I open it?

Matthew Mehan: So I leave it to the bigs, i.e. the adults to decide what in the bigs section they want to read to their children. I suspect most of them will want to read the dialogues and adventures of humanity, which is the big oil painting illustrations. But there are also other stories, other fictions such as there’s a beautiful story that’s actually based in history of Matt Warner, who was a bandit in southern Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, who ran with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who went clean and felt really bad about the wickedness of his early life and spent his last years trying to bring Butch Cassidy in so that he, too, could beg forgiveness, to gain amnesty and and go straight and suffered a lot to try to bring his old bandit friends in. It’s a beautiful story of redemption, but of, like, you know, the Wild West and wrongdoing. So I tell a kind of fictionalized account of one of his escapades trying to bring Butch in, and Butch refuses. And he did in real life, he fled and then died somewhere in South America. So it’s a very sad story, but it’s it’s kind of Wild West adventure. Gunslinging lost in a canyon drought, bullet wound. You know, it’s a fun kind of like a Western, you know, a magazine story. Yeah. Um, so they get those kinds of things that are deeply enmeshed in our history, but teach lessons. And then they have primary source material, some of it from the settlement of the country in that region, but oftentimes back and forth recourse to the Revolutionary War. A letter from Abigail Adams, a letter from John Adams, a speech from or a letter from George Washington. An account of a father and son. There are beautiful poems written by various women who had to flee from New York, and they liken their. Their flight to Aeneas fleeing Troy. And they say that they’re. They don’t have to bring their household gods with them. They actually. They care their God within their heart. The new Christian God. But they are nevertheless fleeing from their burning home to found anew. And it’s this really beautiful, kind of like Roman sternness, you know, sort of Roman republicanism, you know, sort of, but with this beautiful new Christian American overlay. It’s I bring these things up and try to show the heart and soul of the founding. Um, and relate each one to the various statements of principle in the declaration. So it’s a combination of primary sources poems from the founding era, some patriotic, some about the various principles of, you know, family, virtue, nature, rights to life and liberty. Um, I have a speech from Frederick Douglass in the chapter that’s just on liberty, which is the Great Plains sort of cowboys go wherever you want, but it turns out you can’t go everywhere you want. You need water. You have to avoid prairie fire. Right? You’ve got to you’ve got to have a mission. And so liberty actually has laws to it. And so they learn these lessons. But in the in the midst of these dialogues, humanity will literally explain something to another character who’s too reckless or thinks freedom is just do whatever you want. He’ll explain with a paragraph or two from Frederick Douglass. Right. Talking about bleeding Kansas and how lawless that is to just decide to undermine the natural rights of the declaration and the constitutional order through popular sovereignty of the wrong sort. So it’s a very fun. It’s it’s I’ve, I’m very glad that I found a genre that allows you to integrate very new, fun, sort of playful drama, animal fable with a re presentation of primary sources to where you get to see the beautiful souls that founded and settled this country. And not all of it’s beautiful. I don’t hide from certain definite pockmarks. Slavery’s in there. Uh. Some of the Indian relations were far less than savory, although nowhere near as evil as the popular culture today would leave you to believe. It’s actually a very complicated situation, and I bring that forward. It’s actually quite beautiful how some people really tried to handle it with great patience. Others not so much, but it’s a it’s a beautiful story. I fell in love with the country again in the research. Like I thought I loved the country. I’m a big patriot, sort of Fife and drum America, School of Government, Washington, D.C. just getting to know the country and the founding again in this more sort of almost folk wisdom like way and principled sort of patriotic way. I hope, I hope the book will translate to others and give that gift to another generation. Maybe. Maybe more than one.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah. Beautiful. In an early version of this book, I think it was called The American Family’s Book of Fables. You imagine this book being used being read by a family together.

Matthew Mehan: That’s right. The publisher wants. He’s like, you will get max purchase if it just says the American Book of Fables. Right? Like, well, I don’t have a family. Right. So but you might still want to learn about the country for a 250 whether you do or not. Uh, but it’s still fundamentally a family book with littles, middles and bigs. And there is a sustained theme of the family. Um, one of the things I did in research for the book is I elected to write this policy paper on what is the role of the family in the American Republic, and how does the American Republic basically revolve around the family and serve the family. And how does the family strengthen Republican self-government? And I basically went through the founders letters and did a phenomenological study of their attitude towards family and its relationship to self-government. And I realized that representing family life and the ethics of fatherhood, motherhood, spousal love and dedication and fidelity, being a good sibling, I actually bring a lot of beautiful old like there’s a I must be nice to mother. It’s not nice. I must be good to mother or I must not tease my mother is one of the poems. It’s written by an Englishwoman, but I sort of Americanized it changed it a little so that it’s more readable. But it’s a beautiful one about, like, honoring your mother. Uh, and that’s, and that’s in a specific, a specific part of the book in the declaration that relates to basically the kind of like people have a right to a reputation, people have a right to the pursuit of happiness unmolested, right? Sort of people have a right to the work of their labor or the fruits of their labor. I wind up tying the family in throughout in a way that I think is, frankly right. What is a good writer do? He provides the medicine for the sickness of the time, and the family is a bit on its face right now. And so I try to gently, without hitting people over the head, sort of honor and bolster the family through the book.

Kathleen O’Toole: For families that are trying to cultivate a habit of reading to their children, reading with their children. What advice do you have? How can they use this book at home?

Matthew Mehan: So I recommend basically picking a region, looking at the pictures first and just sort of flipping through and then making decisions on age groups and the kids of what pictures they find interesting, and then going to those. Each of these work together. So every chapter and every subsection, because within each chapter are like, maybe a few phrases and then another phrase, and then another phrase, and then the next chapter. So inside of a longer passage, sometimes there are subsections. Each one of those subsections works as one thing. So the nursery rhymes are building arguments that parallel and complement are built on by the fables. And then the Biggs is a kind of maturation and summation of the themes in that section. So they work as one. So if you want to do that, you can. But at the same time, that may be for an older kid to do on their own. You can just take them to which, which picture do you want to learn about? And each one stands alone. So you can just enjoy any one thing based on the illustration that that gathers the child’s interest and curiosity. That’s my hope is it’s you can flip through it like you could like Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues, you can just open it and turn to anything and read and be, have an enjoyable read for, you know, and let’s be honest, when you’re reading aloud to children. Sometimes everybody’s on a very short clock because it’s late and people are tired. Maybe the kids, maybe the adults, right. So you can go straight through. You can go straight through a chapter, you can go straight through a subsection, or you can just let them find a beautiful image and want to read what that image is about.

Kathleen O’Toole: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, the book is coming out this May May 2026.

Matthew Mehan: May 19th.

Kathleen O’Toole: May 19th, 2026. And, uh, I encourage you all to pick it up. Whether you are a parent or a teacher of young children, middle aged children, or older children, there will be something in the book for you. Matt, thanks for your time.

Matthew Mehan: Thank you. Kenny.

Scot Bertram: That was Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, and Doctor Matthew Meehan from Hillsdale in DC. His new book is The American Book of Fables. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast.

The post Kathleen O’Toole and Matthew Mehan on The American Book of Fables  appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Guests: Matthew Mehan and Randy Barnett

Host Scot Bertram talks with:

Matthew Mehan, associate dean and associate professor at the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C., about the pedagogical power of fables and his new book, The American Book of Fables. 

And Randy Barnett, professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown University Law Center and director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, discusses his time as a prosecutor in the Cook County State Attorney’s Office and his new book, Felony Review: Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago.

From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.00:25S2

Fables are not that simple. There’s always a simple part to a fable that a child can get, but most fables open up with a world of different moral technical knowledge. Like, oh, I can be much smarter about being good. And that’s what a fable can do, is train up that good mother wit.00:41S3

This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was Doctor Matt Meehan from Hillsdale in DC. He’s back today to talk about his new one, The American Book of Fables, and then stick around later on. Randy Barnett is back. We’ll talk about his delightful new book, Felony Review Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. First, we’re joined by Doctor Matt Meehan. He’s associate dean and associate professor of government at Hillsdale in DC. Also a best selling author whose previous works include Mr. Meehan’s mildly amusing Mythical Mammals and The Handsome Little Signet. The new book is Bigger Than the Others. We’ll discuss it in a moment. It’s called The American Book of Fables. Matt, thanks so much for joining us.01:31S2

Thanks for having me, Scott.01:32S3

Excited to talk to you about the American Book of Fables. I follow you on X. So I saw a lot of the research, the travels across the country that went into the American Book of Fables. You’ve written two previous books for younger audiences. This one is different. It’s for young people. It’s for teenagers. It’s for adults as well. What made you want to create this kind of book something more expansive and very American in its scope.02:03S2

I wanted to do The American Book of Fables in honor of the 250th birthday of the country. And that’s why it features the Declaration of Independence interwoven through 13 regions of the country that. Hence the travel. But I also wanted it not to just be a flash in the pan for a 250, which is why it’s a big, hefty kind of hardback heirloom coffee table style. It’s a big, fat, beautiful book with all these illustrations in it, because I actually want people to be able to grow up with it. So you can read it as a child with nursery rhymes for for littles, there’s sections just for littles. Right. Although really it’s for everyone. Then there’s sections for middles, which are fables and stories and poems. And then there’s sections for bigs which have primary sources from the founding and from all across the history of the country and different local history and regions, but also poems, Socratic dialogues think like Animal farm meets, Aesop. Meats. Hugh. Manatee. This. Manatee that travels around through the whole country. And it’s. So. It’s. It’s designed for the whole family to enjoy. But also for a child to grow up with. And you read it again and again like a great book.03:10S3

I know when developing shows, books, creative content, some things, sometimes things just click into place. Was there a moment when you said, oh no, that’s the format. That’s exactly how I want to approach this in terms of, again, appealing to sort of a lifelong love of reading and American Book of fables.03:28S2

When I finally seized upon the engine of traveling from region to region, 13 chapters in honor of the 13 colonies, that’s when I realized, ah, now I can actually key all these nursery rhymes, these fables, these stories to local history and national history, and tie the whole sort of union together through the declaration. And so each of them winds up being this commentary on the lines of the declaration. So one chapter is just the word life. Another is liberty, and another is pursuit of happiness. Others are the abuses of King George, then the abuses of Parliament. That’s when you go to the desert. Yeah. So once I saw that, that’s when it was off to the races.04:09S3

So what makes something in your mind truly an American fable that that deserved inclusion in this book?04:18S2

I wanted so the fable tradition is old. Very old. It’s book of Proverbs, King Solomon in Scripture. It’s it’s in Greece. It’s in Rome. And the Romans were actually the big Fabulists. A lot of Aesop collections, they realized, are from that time. So in one sense, there’s nothing new in doing fables because it’s part of the Western tradition. But an American fable, I think, has two characteristics. One, it is about America and our experience, our animals, our history, our lands, our folklore. But it is also about the special virtues and the kind of sort of way. Virtues take shape in a people who want to be self-governing, i.e. free people. And that’s different than a different kinds of regimes monarchies, oligarchies, tribes, nations. So there’s a heavy emphasis on wit and wisdom, which is a theme that Ben Franklin put in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Uh, and we can talk more about it, but it turns out Aristotle says wit is actually a virtue, but it has to be trained up. In fact, there’s a line in the book I quote from Chaucer, and it’s. But it’s a bunch of different poets all mashed together, but they’re saying the same thing, which is you have to train up your good mother wit, without which all other learning is half lame.05:35S3

Madmen with us. His new book is The American Book of Fables, which you can order now. The book is. You sort of have outlined treats America as a as a character in the book two through rivers and mountains and the plains and the deserts. How does that tie into what you’re trying to accomplish in the book and our celebration of America.05:55S2

250 the history of the country is its founding, obviously its founding. We go to the Puritan New England and and see the frontier of Florida from the very beginnings when the British and the Spanish were sort of at odds. But but the entire experience of the settlement of the country is part of what has made our national character and the implementing of that founding the sort of the declaration of those words that touched off all of this motion I say in the book. And part of that is this incredible encounter that the American people had again and again in different ways with the land. And that did two things. And I think they’re important virtues for us to imitate. Even though we’re not settling the land anymore, we need to sort of experience it vicariously through the settlement of the country. And those are these providence, right? Sort of this, this awe and thankfulness that this incredibly fertile, beautiful, Rugged, wild, just unbelievably amazing landscape was ours and given to us in a certain sense, like it was, you know. Yes, there were Indians. Yes, there was a settlement and difficulties. And I cover all that actually, and handle it, I think, very delicately in the book, to try to explain the ethics of how we could have done it better, but how we did a lot of good things. And we should celebrate those too. But but that’s a kind of gratefulness, a thankfulness, right? And so when the character of the land is in the book, it’s almost like the character of Providence sort of quietly, right? It’s this gift of this beautiful land. And then the other one is all of the different virtues of self-governance required to shift for yourself on difficult terrain, right? You got to cut down forests, you got to dam rivers, you got to, you got to, you know, get to kill a cougar before he kills your cattle. And now, obviously, there’s a whole ecological thing about preserving. And I feature the national parks. There’s a whole story about how we we saved a couple species from extinction. So it’s not just about shooting, you know, wild animals, but but that’s part of it. You’ve got to settle the land. And so it’s the virtues that you come, you gather from that. But it’s also the gratitude of recognizing that it’s America, the beautiful right given to us by God.08:04S3

The introduction to the American Book of Fables tells us the book can help us remember our people’s way of life, or learn it for the first time. Living in modern America with everything that brings. Do we still have the ability to put ourselves back 250 years ago and and sort of see and experience what those settlers experienced?08:28S2

Yeah. I mean, in literary study and in neurobiology, they talk about mirror neurons, which are actually operative neurons. So if you have an experience, you get neurons that kind of remember that experience. So you handle it better next time. Well, if you read a story, you actually get these mirrored versions of that. So you can handle similar situations. So I do think literature is a kind of secondary. You have to have experience too. But it’s a secondary sort of, you know, pontoon that will prevent your boat from capsizing. Capsizing is these literary stories. But but I also, I think I did a ton of research beforehand on the fable tradition, but also on the founding imagination. What were they doing? In fact, we’ve spoken about this before, but the, that, that notion of the founding imagination. Right. It was extremely moral.09:16S3

Mhm.09:17S2

And, and they moralized like freely, hilariously, uh, relentlessly. And it’s actually people think of that today, I think in the post-freudian sort of 20th century debacle of like, morality is this oppressive thing. It’s actually an incredibly joyful and freeing thing. And you see it in their imagination scape and how they tell stories. And I tried to sort of represent that kind of sort of moral ecology of the imagination for the next generations to come, because I hope this book lasts us another 250 years is a kind of stalwart of the sort of. This is definitely going to have this book in the library because it’ll help form your character, and I think it’s a joyful moral imagination that that is the American optimism that the book tries to bring forward again.10:06S3

Matt Meehan with us, his new book is The American Book of Fables. If you follow Matt on X, you saw pictures of his travels across the country. You mentioned pontoons. You’re in the Everglades. I don’t know how many gators you saw, but.10:21S2

You went crocodiles.10:22S3

Yeah. You went all over the place, looking at places, looking at landscapes, experiencing the country. Were there particular incidents, incidences that inspired specific selections in the American Book of Fables?10:37S2

Many. For instance, I found this place, uh, off the Bay of Biscayne, uh, just east of the Everglades. When I was down there, I was on an NIH grant doing research, and I won the innovation prize, heritage two. And so I was doing all this research, and I found the Deering Estate, which is this little K off of the ocean in front of this beautiful old sort of lodge with palm trees. And it has a freshwater spring. And the manatees come and drink the fresh water because they’re in the salt water most of the time, but they’ll drink the fresh water there. And so I’m like, this is the perfect place to have a Congress at the beginning of the book. So the manatees, you know, in Congress is the first thing on the Declaration of Independence as it was published, at least. And so it’s about what does it mean to be a social animal? And it’s also a hurricane because the declaration was started in a storm. So I found this perfect place, the Deering Estate, for the first Congress of the manatees, to decide what to do about the storm, which sends Hugh on this big trip. The other thing that is a Hugh’s final stage in his journey before he takes a long Empire train back from Montana is and it’s it’s a joke to get a huge, fat £2,000 manatee all over the lower 48. And there’s lots of different madcap stories in there. The cover has one with he’s on a Ford F-250 in Navajo country. It’s a long story, but we ended at Glacier National Park. The backbone of the earth. And it is one of the most awe inspiring, most glorious, most God given. Just close your mouth. You’re drooling. You’re so gobsmacked by the beauty of the place that I. And there’s a beautiful place called going to the Sun Road. And that idea of going to the sun is a kind of closing theme. It’s one of the last poems. It’s it’s a featured in the last story of Hugh Manatee and a number of the last fables. The mountains there talk to one another and so do the rivers and the lakes and the. Going to the sun is a kind of a kind of double pun, but it’s about American optimism and hope. Lowercase and uppercase H.12:40S3

Hope Doctor Matt Meehan is with us from Hillsdale in DC. More talk about the American Book of Fables in a moment if you’re preparing to celebrate America. 250 what a great option to have to see the first film from Hillsdale College on the big screen in theaters. It’s revolutionary America. It tells the story of the American founding, of course, the greatest political achievement in history. You can find theaters and get [email protected] slash. This is your chance to see the true story of America’s founding on the big screen in a limited theatrical run. 250 years ago, a group of ordinary people did something truly extraordinary. With the anniversary approaching, it’s time to remember exactly what they did and why it still matters. See Revolutionary America in theaters May 31st, June 1st and June 2nd. Find a theater near you and get your [email protected] slash FILM hillsdale.edu/film. You won’t want to miss Revolutionary America. We continue with Doctor Matt Meehan from Hillsdale in DC celebrating America 250, in part with the new book, The American Book of Fables. Matt John Farley is back to do the illustrations in the American Book of Fables, and the illustrations are a big part of the experience, from the cover to many inside. How does your illustrator, John Farley, help shape the final product, the final book of the American Book of Fables?14:22S2

So John and I work on every illustration very closely. We have insane Google Docs, bizarre text streams. We’re going back and forth with reference images and ideas. And he. He’s a realist impressionist from the Boston School through the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He can trace his lineage all the way back to Florence. Master apprentice to literally Raphael’s workshop in Florence, the Raphael. He’s a classically trained rock star and the artwork is his best ever by far. It’s truly amazing. He came with me to Glacier National and Yellowstone and some of the paintings he painted on site that are in the book he did on site oil and watercolor painting of some of the places we knew we were going to do fables like Old Faithful and different places like that. And so the book is beautiful and we have pen and ink, we have watercolor, and then we have 13 gorgeous oil, two page spreads for each 13 of the 13 regions that are covered in the 13 chapters. But we did pen and ink, watercolor to oil in this almost kind of the way the Declaration of Independence is. In one sense, it’s a scrawled document, but it it takes on life. Like we inhabit those principles. We live out liberty. We find a civil war to make sure everybody’s free. Like this kind of like something going from a scribble to out to the lived full color experience. John helped me basically create this beautiful kind of motif. And the book actually, uh, inside is a kind of interior is, is breathtakingly beautiful to the graphic design, which John helped spearhead with Sophia and myself.15:56S3

Is there a particular chapter or section you’re really happy with the way it turned out?16:02S2

My favorite, my favorite two are definitely the two where John came with me. And so we have all this additional live painting images. And those are the two that feature just two national parks. It’s chapter 11 called The Warmth of Yellowstone. And then chapter 13 called Many Glaciers. Uh, and the, those two really, I think are especially beautiful. Um, they’re especially kind of artistically. They sing even the prose is written in a kind of, uh, almost sort of musical rhetorical verse. Others too, but that those are, I think, the most the most sumptuously beautiful. And I kind of, you know, like a good, you know, a good symphony, you hit a certain, you know, peaks, you know, and so I, I went for one big peak, which is at the Continental Divide, the high point, the giant warm bulge of the the thermals at Yellowstone, and then one more at the backbone of the earth at this high point of the continental Divide. So we we hit the continental divide. And it’s a big sort of denouement. And then we, we go to the West Coast, and then we come back for our kind of last finale. And those, I think are my favorite.17:08S3

Mad men with us. His new book, The American Book of Fables. Beautiful book available now. Uh, your dad many times over your previous books to have had these themes of fatherhood and what it’s like raising children, this book, the ability for parents to read with kids, young and old. What does it mean for, for families to have that kind of experience, that kind of literary and historical experience together?17:37S2

It’s the same experience writ small that I hope that this book does writ large for the country. When you read aloud, it’s a unifying experience. It’s a shared moment. It’s you share not only the words of the text, but the voice of someone you love. And it’s also a kind of a powerful way to bring forward literature, not just in the book, not just in the mind, but into the space of the family and allow it to be there. And I consider it like people are like, I bought your book and I go, thank you. And I actually mean it because it’s a great honor that someone’s willing to let my words into their home. And it’s a greater honor if they let it into the air of their home, like they actually speak these words. Which is why I try to write very beautifully so that there are beautiful moments, but that’s that unified memory of what it says and what it teaches about America, and beauty and truth and virtue in the country and the landscape and our history. That’s a shared memory, doubly because you share it and because of the thing it is. And that’s what the book does for the whole country is it’s actually re gifting the shared memory of our loves of people and principle and liberty, justice and love.18:49S3

About me and with us. The book is the American Book of Fables. You spend time when you’re not raising children, uh, in the world of education now at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale in DC, but also previously teaching and helping to shape young adults as well. What do you think that these stories and fables do that the textbooks and lectures can’t do?19:11S2

It’s a great question. Aristotle has this line where he says, basically in the de anima, that no one can think without an image. Uh, and historical textbooks will give historical images, which are good, but if you use some art, you can actually shape even more economically, even more vivid. You can sort of heighten the beauty and truth beyond history into something that is even more memorable and more sort of delightful. And so that’s one thing that a textbook can’t do is that heightened ornamented beauty and truth. But the other thing that fables do, right, besides giving a kind of image of good things that help you live well and think clearly, is it also can train your wit in a way that you can’t with a textbook, a textbook. What’s said there is always true.19:59S3

Mhm.20:00S2

Whereas when you use a fable, there are snakes with forked tongues. There is a big, you know, big grumpy buffalo that doesn’t quite have it all worked out. You know, there’s humanity who makes a lot of sense, but then sometimes gets too bossy. Right. There’s the complexity of character that fable allows for, because fables are not that simple. There’s always a simple part to a fable that a child can get. But most fables open up with a world of different sort of sort of moral, technical knowledge, like, oh, I can be much smarter about being good. And that’s what a fable can do, is train up that, like I mentioned earlier, that good mother wit that you can see through, uh, the apparent virtue of something and find a flaw, or you can see through the apparent viciousness and find a virtue. And that’s something that you have to have to be a good American citizen and a good person, I would argue. And you need literature and particularly fable to do that.20:59S3

I want to ask another virtue question, and we’ve had this conversation previously, but it’s a good time to bring it back. Patriotism is patriotism a virtue? Should we strive to love our country? Should we strive to instill that love and understanding of country in our young people?21:16S2

Yeah. So it actually is a moral virtue, like in the tradition, like it is something you’re supposed to do. It’s an active condition of the soul involved in moral choice. And it is that to love and honor and Revere, Right, your forefathers. And we begin the book with a dedication and a thanks to our forefathers and our forebears. But the trick is, a constitutional republic that is dedicated to natural rights is a series of principles. But it turns out that patriotism doesn’t easily map on to a series of ideas. They map on to people, right? The Patria, the fathers. Right. Or fathers and mothers. And it’s not just the Founding fathers. It’s all of our ancestors, the people who came before us, who built the roads, who settled Nebraska. Right? Who, who, you know, drained the swamps in Louisiana to solve for tillable land. All the cool things that people have sacrificed, all those guys who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s part of Patria, right? And so what I try to do is merge. Each chapter merges the principles of the declaration in our Constitution, which we should care about with the thing that’s frankly easier to love and is the preservative of that. If you. This is why the left. Forgive me for a minute for getting a little political. They always attack the Founding Fathers as gross or the previous generations as gross and bad. Why? Because the principles. It’s hard to love the principles if you don’t know. If you hate the prod or the producer of the principle. Right. So. So you have to wrap these two things up. And I think frankly, uh, the, the dialogue today is, no, we’re a creedal nation. We’re principles only or no, it’s the heritage Americans or the roots of this, that and the other, uh, you know, I feel like the little girl in the meme, like macaroni, like why not both, you know, macaroni and cheese, you know, it’s like, it’s both, uh, and patriotism is a virtue that I think is a way forward because you ask, oh, these are we have to love our fathers and Revere them. Well, why are their our fathers? Because they founded a nation with these principles, etc., etc.. Right. So this is the kind of, uh, sort of double thinking, the wit and what wisdom, uh, of what it is to be an American. And the book tries to help us with that.23:26S3

Matt Meehan and the American Book of Fables. You’ve done this a time or two before with prior books, and I wonder what you’ve learned, or perhaps even just what you love about the way that kids and families engage with the stories that you’re telling.23:43S2

So like I said earlier, I kind of want these family books so people can grow up with the book. That is the thing I love is I mean, me and mammals was 2018, I think. So we’re, you know, it’s been out for a while. Yeah. And you get these older kids who are like, oh, I read your book. I read it again and again. You’re like sort of families that have sort of gotten to know it. I try with my books to like, the book is like a little seed and it sprouts and it can grow. And the more you look at it, the more you see the layers and the meaning. And, and so I actually, it’s one of my favorite things. And my hope is that I’m long dead before this one grows to full height, because this is a big book. It might be a little mustard seed of a book, but hopefully it grows very big. But I, I, I love watching families grow with my book and then their older kids or their, you know, tell you like, oh, I know what that one’s about. You’re like, oh, awesome. You know, maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. Keep reading, you know?24:41S3

Yeah. Matt Meehan is associate dean and associate professor of government at Hillsdale in DC, and his new book, with beautiful illustrations by John Foley and the wonderful words by Matt Meehan, is the American Book of Fables. Matt Meehan, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.25:01S2

My pleasure.25:02S3

Up next, Randy Barnett is with us, well-known constitutional scholar, but we talk about his new memoir about tales of true crime and corruption in Chicago. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. Welcome back to the Radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertram. Be sure to check out more Hillsdale College [email protected]. Older editions of this show, plus The Larry Arnn Show in Primus and Hillsdale College online courses podcast. Find them wherever you get your audio. We’re joined by Randy Barnett. He is a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center. He directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Also prolific author, great originalist. He’s been on the program before. His brand new book is called Felony Review Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. Randy, thanks so much for joining us.26:11S4

Always good to talk to you, Scott.26:13S3

This is a treat. We talked to you about a life for liberty, the making of an American originalist. And inside that book, the memoir is this mention of your time working in Chicago as A as A, A, D, A and other roles. And I didn’t know that about your past. And now you’ve got an entire book with stories from this really interesting time. Why an entire separate book from the memoir, even about your time in Chicago?26:40S4

Well, the memoir is your memoir, as you will recall, is very, very long. Yeah. Um, maybe a little too long, but I had my reasons. However, adding this material in would have made it impossibly long. And so the only way to get the memoir out the door was to take these chapters out of the memoir. And then by doing that, I was actually able to blow them up. Um, and add a lot more detail, add a lot more cases, add backgrounds on the individuals I was dealing with, the lawyers I was working with, and more information about what happened after the cases than I even knew about. Um, and also draw lessons throughout the book, um, spontaneously, so to speak, as we tell stories, as I tell stories, lessons about the criminal justice system, lessons about lawyering and all of that would have been impossible within the framework of a lifetime memoir that really traces my path to being a constitutional law professor.27:34S3

Why do you want to be a prosecutor? How did that end up being being where you ended up?27:38S4

Well, it’s pretty simple. I’m a child of TV, and the TV show came on when I was ten years old, called The Defenders, starring e.g. Marshall and Robert Reed as a father son criminal defense team in New York. Filmed on location in New York. It was inspiring. It was gritty and. One of the things in hindsight, I realized for why that was the show that made me want to be a lawyer and not Perry Mason, which was on every Sunday night, is that Perry Mason was about solving murders and The defenders was about practicing law. Um, and ultimately it was about justice with it making the criminal justice system work. And that actually, now that I’ve gone back and rewatched episodes of The Defenders that included cooperation by the prosecutors and judges as well as as the father son legal defense team, the, uh, the presidents. Um, and so, um, that’s what got me into it. And then whether I was going to be a defense lawyer or prosecutor, that sort of was an open question until I got into law school. And for various reasons, I opted for the prosecution side, but I could have been a public defender. I would have been happy to be. Maybe if the Cook County Public Defender’s office wasn’t as political as it was in my future, there would have been much more up in doubt as opposed to the prosecutor’s office, which at the time I went in, there was a Republican held office in which, um, promotion was based on merit.28:56S3

Felony review is the new book from Randy Barnett. You mentioned you draw some some lessons, learned, some things perhaps in reviewing material. Uh, early in the book, you point out that one of the benefits of the rule of law, which requires that light cases be treated alike, is that any deviation from the norm is a signal, a potential signal of something improper. How did that help you in your early days?29:21S4

Right. Well, it was a lesson that I drew from the first case that got fixed out from under me in auto theft. Preliminary hearing caught a big chop shop case, um, involving taking stolen cars, chopping them down for parts, which was a kind of, uh, murder one type case if you’re working auto theft. Um, and we had a case come up where it was a preliminary hearing and the judge had a standing rule, no motions to dismiss, um, at preliminary hearing. And as we are as the defense attorney is cross-examining the arrest, the, the arresting officer and the arresting officer is admitting to circumstances that sound an awful lot like an illegal search. Um, I we object beyond the scope of preliminary hearing because, you know, we’re not supposed to do that here. And then the judge overrules that objection and we went, oh my. Now that’s a very that’s a complete deviation from his standing practice. And so then we knew when the case was thrown out that not only was the cop on the, on the take, but the judge was on the take too. And in felony review, I’m able to name names, Um, uh, of all the people who are on the take because they ultimately ended up facing justice themselves.30:24S3

Yes. Operation Greylord a well known sting in the Chicago area. I want to come back to that in a little bit. That first judge that we meet, we meet a lot of judges in this book, and they’re all such rich characters, Judge John J. Devine. Dollars. Devine. Uh, the nickname for him because he is on the take in fixing some of these cases. He’s not the only one, though. And this happens to you not infrequently through your career. What is it like as a prosecutor working with a deck known to be stacked against you?30:54S4

Well, in fairness to the Cook County Judicial judiciary, this was primarily done at the misdemeanor level and the traffic court level, because that’s where you could do high volume of small dollar corruptions, make a lot of money, but not raise a lot of political heat. By the time you get to the felony trial courts, things were on the on the level. Um, and those judges had their strengths and their weaknesses, but being on the take was not one of them. With one exception, which I do talk about in the book, but only one. And, you know, he didn’t actually fix a case out from under me, but later on we discovered he’d fixed some other cases, but he was the only circuit court judge in the history of the circuit court to be convicted of, uh, of throwing a murder case for money. So that was very unusual.31:37S3

Scott, I’m talking with Randy Barnett. His brand new book, Felony Review Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. There’s a really interesting part in here where you answer the question, why do criminals confess to the police? Why don’t they shut up? Why don’t why aren’t they silent? Why do people feel like they want to or have to? Uh, why do they confess to police?32:01S4

Well, first of all, let’s talk about the felony review unit, because that’s where I got the opportunity to examine so many defendants or people who were accused and get confessions. The Felony Review Unit is a specialized unit in Chicago that was set up as a result of an arrangement between the Chicago Police Department, which a unit of the municipality of the City of Chicago and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, who works for Cook County. They have no corporate relationship with each other, but they enter an agreement that say that no felony charges could be brought by a Chicago police officer without approval of a Cook County state’s attorney. And that meant you needed a full time unit of state’s attorneys available to go to district police stations, interview witnesses, talk to the cops, try to get statements or confessions from accused if possible. Um, and we and the felony review was set up to be this 24 over seven unit. I was on it for nine months. Um, you work on a all day shift for three days and then you get three days off and you’re working all night shift. You have your own squad car, your offices are in the police station, not in you don’t go to court. It’s fascinating. It is the core of felony review, the book in addition to my trial experience. Um, and so that’s the reason why I was interviewing a whole lot of people in the police stations. Prosecutors never get to talk to the accused because by the time the prosecutor sees them, there, represented by counsel. Right. But if you’re in the police station’s on felony review, you do get to talk to them. And so I took a lot of confessions, and I was able to draw some generalizations from the confessions I took.33:27S3

Uh, what’s the most prominent one? I mean, what is the most likely reason, most common reason that a criminal is going to confess to the police.33:35S4

That’s very easy. They don’t know. They’re confessing. They’re trying to talk themselves out of a crime. And by trying to talk themselves out of a crime, they’re actually talking themselves into a crime. So let me give you an example. If somebody says, um, yeah, uh, my brother and I did go and try to rip off the former cellmate drug dealer of my brother, but it was my brother who stabbed him to death, not me. Well, that was they’re trying to get themselves both brothers, by the way. In that case, both Robert King and George King each made a statement like that against the other one, and I had to try both of them separately because of that. Mhm. But in each case, they were basically confessing to felony murder. It didn’t matter which one of them stabbed. I’m not 100% sure I know which one of them stabbed Gregory Perkins to death, but it didn’t matter legally, they confessed.34:20S3

Randy, in our first conversation or our conversation about a life for liberty, I think we brought up this question about how, as a prosecutor, you would deal with these low level drug cases that could result in jail time for the accused, when that’s not something that you necessarily believed in. And there’s a portion in felony review. When you talk about your your your about to prosecute a death penalty case when at the time you were anti death penalty, how did you juggle those you know, those those conflicts and what ended up happening in that case?34:56S4

Well, there weren’t that many conflicts. Happily, the drug conflict was resolved by the fact that I worked the misdemeanor drug court. Right. And, uh, my boss at the time, the Cook County state’s attorney, had a very liberal policy on, on personal possession so you could get diversion. So I never sent anybody to jail for drugs. Um, and then when it came to this one case, this, this death penalty case, it ultimately pled out. And so I never really had to do what I was probably going to do, which was try the case. Um, but it was an interesting phenomenon. And it also goes to my contrary nature. When I was in college, I was for the death penalty. When I was a prosecutor, I was against it. And now that I’m a law professor in liberal law professor land, um, I’m for it again.35:43S3

Randy, one of my I think it’s my favorite part of felony review is, is the twist in the end. And we’ve already alluded to this operation Greylord probe, which resulted in a number of high profile judges and others in Chicago being put behind bars. And there’s a wonderful twist that you can’t see coming. Uh, I’ll leave it to readers to find out for themselves. Okay. But also in the book, you have a story about witnessing voter fraud in Chicago, which is very hard for me to believe. That happens there. But but but you say it does. Uh, and one of the lessons you draw here is that requiring matching signatures is the most important way to combat voter fraud. Why does that work?36:24S4

Well, we were on election patrol, and I thought election patrol was just a waste of time. What was what was I ever going to do on election patrol? The only thing that we could do when we showed up at a polling place as state’s attorneys, was to stand behind the judges who were supposed to be Democratic and Republican judges, but they were all Democratic judges because there are no Republicans in Chicago. Um, and so, uh, and what and what they’re supposed to do is if somebody goes to fill out a card to vote, he signs the card and he goes up to the desk, and then he shows them the card. And then they compare the signature in the card with the signature in the voter registration binder. And if they match, they give them a ballot. And I’m looking down watching the signature comparison, and there’s absolutely no comparison. This person I’m looking down, there’s no comparison between the card and the binder. They’re just completely different. Then I look up and I see I’m looking at a kid. I’m looking at a teenager, an older teenager who probably isn’t old enough to vote anyway. And so I’m stuck. I got to do something about it. And then the book talks about how hard it was to get anybody to do something about it. There’s a Chicago Police Department. Chicago police officer there assigned. He wouldn’t do anything about it. And I was being escorted by a Cook County sheriff’s policeman, and he wouldn’t do anything about it. So the book talks about how I was ultimately able to get somebody to do something about it. And ultimately, the kid was given, you know, supervision down the line, uh, when when it was adjudicated. But it was a very interesting example of how voter fraud is done without voter ID, without voter verification. And, um, it’s, it’s an old story.37:56S3

Randy Barnett with us, his book, Felony Review Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago, available now. Rich characters throughout the book. You are not shy about explaining things you did wrong from forgetting to read someone Miranda rights. At one point, your first cross-examination didn’t go all that well, although you still got the conviction. You had a conviction overturned because of the way you presented your closing argument. Would you be willing to identify in your mind the biggest mistake you made while working in Chicago?38:29S4

Well, I think it’s the last one. Um, and that is, uh, it was during closing argument, I accused the defense lawyers of engaging in cheap lawyer’s tricks, which they had done. Um, but, uh, in fact, uh, the appellate court thought that was improper closing argument and the, and the conviction was reversed. They ultimately defended, ultimately pled guilty, um, upon, you know, remand after conviction. But that was the biggest mistake I made. And it was, you know, it, I didn’t know, but here’s the problem. Here’s the thing. It wasn’t only my fault. The defense objected to my saying that. And if the if the judge had sustained the objection, I would have stopped. But the judge overruled the objection and I kept going. So there were two people in the court that made that mistake. One day it was me and the cop of that court, which is the judge. All the judge had to do was say, objection sustained, and we both would have been saved. That reversal.39:20S3

You worked with and under a few names that became very prominent and important in Chicago, both Democrats, Richard M Daley, the son of Richard J. Daley, who was then mayor of Chicago after serving in the prosecutor’s office, and then Dick Devine, who then became a I forget the exact title, but chief prosecutor, state’s attorney in Cook County, years after the fact, both guys. Pretty partisan Democrats. You are not. What was it like working underneath and with them?39:49S4

Well, I worked for Bernie Kerry, the Republican former FBI agent, reform states attorney, someone who actually helped initiate Operation Greylord, um, for three years. And we really prided ourselves on being a professional outfit and nonpartisan professional. You know, most of the people I work with were. Democrats had been hired by Editor Hanrahan prior to Kerry coming in, and then when Rich Daley, one after I was there for three years, the day, the next day after the election, it was like a morgue. It was like a wake at the office, because we just felt like all of our professionalism was going to go down the drain, and we were going to be just another corrupt Chicago institution. Or maybe as political as the public defender’s office was. But that’s not what happened. It turns out that, uh, Richard Daley, Dick, you know, um, Richie Daley, the son of the mayor who had his eyes set on being mayor himself, decided that the way to for a political future is to be an effective prosecutor. And so much to my surprise and other people’s surprise, all the supervisors normally have to resign. They resigned. And the people that he promoted from within were the good people. There was a few partisan people, partisan Democrat type people who he didn’t promote. Um, and so at least for the time I was there, he ran the office wonderfully. And before I left, before I resigned, I took a leave of absence to go to University of Chicago Law School before I could get a teaching job. But after I formally resigned, or as I formally resigned, I made an appointment to go meet with him in the Daley Center just to thank him for being, you know, a stand up prosecutor when I worked for him because he was.41:22S3

Randy Barnett with his felony review, is the new book. I know you a little bit and I know you, you, you keep things. You’ve sent me emails where you have pictures and items from the past and I, I have to imagine that all those things and some of them pop up as figures in the book are big help when a big help when it comes to remembering details, filling in blanks, and again, making these stories and characters come to life in this book about crime and corruption in Chicago. Did you intentionally do that? Did you, did you, did you, did you say, I need to keep all this stuff? I got to take copious notes. Um, was that intentional back then?42:00S4

I’m a pack rat, and I’m very sentimental. Yeah, and I just can’t part with things I have a sentimental attachment to. And that was the thing. But I thought something that nobody has really asked me about, but you’re sort of alluding to is one of the practices I decided to do when I started in the felony trial courts was I. I ordered up and kept a copy of the mugshot of every defendant. I tried a jury trial. Uh, and so I actually have a complete collection of Chicago Police Department mugshots for every jury trial. And all those mugshots are in the book.42:37S3

They are. They are in the book. Um, I want to close Randy with a question about the postscript, which is a bit of fun. These letters that you wrote to Grant Tinker at NBC about Hill Street Blues. Steven Bochco, who is the creator of LA law in the 1980s. And, uh, you know, the title is better than TV. What are the biggest things that TV writers get wrong when they try to to create these prosecutors and these characters in their shows.43:07S4

Yeah. Well, the biggest thing is that they, they, they consider prosecutors to be adversaries to the police. And we are not we tend to work with the police. We’re part of law enforcement ourselves, although the law and order gets that part right. But I would think the biggest thing that bothers me is just the way people talk to each other on TV. They give speeches on law and order. They give speeches all the time. The way people talk is a lot more like The Wire. The wire is the closest thing we have to what it’s really like. And it’s a cop show, not a lawyers show. Right. Um, and so, and the prosecutor is an intimate part of the wire and that’s what we were, we, we work with law enforcement and we’re not the same as they are. And in some respects on felony review, we’re there to check them, but we’re also there to help them. Um, and I think that’s the biggest thing they get wrong.43:51S3

Randy Barnett is professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University Law Center, also directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Fantastic. Engrossing new book. Felony review. Tales of True Crime and Corruption in Chicago. Randy, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.44:10S4

It was my pleasure. And there are more stories than the ones we talked about.44:14S3

Indeed there are. And they’re all they’re mostly fun. They’re mostly fun. Randy, thanks so much. Take care. That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to Matt Meehan, his new book, The American Book of Fables, and Randy Barnett with Felony Review. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast. Find [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I’m Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

00:00:06
From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

00:00:25
Car pulls up on the other side of the pump. Woman gets out. For 20 ish year old son gets out and takes a few steps to go pre-pay. And she stood there with stress. She looked at him and said, let’s do $20. That’s why we need greater supply of natural resources to lower the cost for that woman. And that’s what we want to tell. The story is at the gas pump.

00:00:45
This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was John Tillman. He’s the author of the new book. The Political Vice of the Radical left controls America and the path to regaining our liberty. We go in depth with John on today’s program. Also later on, Luke Foster from Hillsdale in DC tells us all about the spirit of a gentleman first. We’re joined now by John Tillman, who’s CEO of the American Culture Project, one of the nation’s most prominent leaders in the free market public policy area. And he’s got a new book, The Political Vice How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. It’s right there. John, thanks so much for joining us.

00:01:32
Great to be with you, Scott. Thanks for having me. Good to talk to you again.

00:01:35
The book attempts to answer this question. Why do all politicians, whether they be Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, move to the left once in office and there is a device. It’s real. There are diagrams that you’ve designed called the Political Device to help us describe this. Let’s sketch this out, because it will help provide the basis for a lot of the conversation to come. What’s the political vice as you describe it?

00:02:03
Well, the political vice, the politicians, the political decision makers, mostly we think of elected officials, but it applies to anybody that has political power to make policy decisions. They’re in the middle of the vice, in the traditional sense of it. And then on one side of the vice, it’s a three sided vice. Think of it as the letter U. In the middle of that, you are the politicians. As I’ve said. On one side is the media, on the other side is the people or the public. And on the bottom side, which is the most important side are elite influencers. And all three sides apply pressure squeeze like a vise. Think of the trash compactor scene in the original Star Wars movie, where they’re getting squeezed from all sides, and there’s terrible trash in there. It’s a very good metaphor for politics, which is a trashy business. So anyhow, the point is that well, well thought, thoughtful conservatives often get elected. And the question I began my journey with is why is it conservatives who claim to be conservative and some of them are. Get into office and move left and start voting for big government programs and all the rest of it. And why does nobody ever move to the right? So I started on this journey to study it. I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of elected officials and people in politics, and what I learned was that the incentive structures in politics all move you to the left. And in terms of policy decision making, because the way you win votes, even for your pet projects, are by voting for bigger and better and more extravagant government that will solve all our problems. And the influencers, by the way, Scott, are important because they not only apply direct pressure to the political decision makers, they run operations that create influence in the media, as well as with the American public. As we’re seeing with these indictments that just came out from the Department of Justice on the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:03:45
Yeah. And influencers, we should sort of, uh, define because it’s not influencers necessarily in the new social media definition of the term employers means those who have influence on politics. And as we’ll talk later, one of the biggest employers are like unions, public and private sector unions. So it’s not just social media stars, it’s those who have an influence on politics. And one of the reasons that’s important is because the lesson that you learned, too, is that pressure works when the vice surprise applies pressure, most of the time it works in pushing someone an entity, an organization, an individual, a politician towards an intended goal. Why is pressure so important in moving someone toward a prescribed policy goal?

00:04:36
Well, the three motivators of a political actor are a political principle political fear, and political expediency. So most politicians, 60, 65% of the votes that they take, positions that they take, they’re just doing an expedient thing. Insane. I’ll vote for your bridge if you vote for my gazebo in my home district, or whatever the case might be. My new highway deal making of one sort or another. And most of those votes go under the radar of the influencers, the public, and the media. There’s just a lot of that work that is done out of sight and out of mind, and people sort of go along and get along. And then there’s fear. Political fear means I really don’t want to take this vote because my constituents will be unhappy with me. My donors will be unhappy with me. The media may be unhappy with me, my community influencers, my leaders may be unhappy with me. Or if I do take it, this other set may be happy with me. And so fear is a big driver of what makes an elected official tick. And then I mentioned political principle, of course, when I got involved in all of this over 20 years ago, I was a very naive former political science minor who thought that all politicians operated out of principle. Uh, sadly, it’s only about 5% of the votes, 30% fear, and about 65% expediency. And so the reason this pressure works is because politics is a pressurized system. He who can apply pressure has power and politicians don’t like pressure, so they take votes to try to minimize or avoid pressure. I write in the book about the case with former Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, who actually ran a libertarian think tank at one point, and he just crumbled under the pressure during the Kavanaugh hearings that we could see right there in front of our eyes in an elevator bay where these paid activists, fake influencers, if you will, were shouting at him to take a procedural vote to delay the Kavanaugh hearings further. And he crumbled under that and eventually left the Senate because he couldn’t take the pressure.

00:06:33
John Tillman with us. His book, The Political Vise How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. So why why is the left so much better than the right in operating? The political vise?

00:06:48
A bunch of reasons, but the biggest one is the left loves government power. They actually believe in expanding the purview of government to to regulate and tax every aspect of our lives. They believe they have the moral and intellectual high ground on how society should be organized. And they think that the American people are just dumb rubes who vote the wrong way all too often, and make bad choices for what’s good for America and good for our various communities, and good particularly for subsets within group identity politics. And so they really think that government power is the only way to overcome rapacious capitalism or free enterprise system. That, in their view, is, is a flawed entrepreneurs become super successful and take advantage of the system and don’t pay their fair share. They believe in all of that, and they believe only the government can come in and put its foot on the scale to right those wrongs and create fairness and quote unquote, equity for their agreed coalition within their voting bloc. So they love government power. So what happens is, even though you have somewhat of a diverse coalition of the left, the one thing that unifies them is for all of them to be successful, they have to work together because they all require government power. And going back to the influencers, you mentioned government unions, private sector unions, the trial bar, nonprofits that get most of their money from government that we’ve learned through Doge and much of what’s been going on during the second Trump administration. They all have one thing in common as well, which is that their business models, their revenue models, require government tax and regulatory efforts and policies in order for them to have a business model that works and creates revenue. A union, whether private or public, relies on government regulations, and the government unions directly extract money from taxpayers to pay union dues and to pay union members. Trial bar relies on government regulations to allow them to sue people in the private sector. And then going back to the other side, in the private sector, most of the people just kind of want to be left alone who are conservative. They want the government to protect our rights as enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of rights. Other than that, they want a light hand and just let’s go live our lives. And so we don’t really like power as much. We want to actually devolve power. And so you don’t attract the power hungry people into politics on the right as much as you do on the left. And when we do, sometimes they’re big government Republicans, which is also not good.

00:09:10
John. Sometimes it does work for those on the right. And one of those examples is prominent in the book and one that you were involved in the Supreme Court case, Janus versus AFSCME, which was which was a victory for for freedom. And this is an example of the right using the vice, uh, squeezing people toward a desired outcome and defeating even the powerful public sector unions in this case. How did that all come together?

00:09:37
It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I founded the Liberty Justice Center in 2011. And then you might recall that there was going to be a case called Friedrichs That was going to bring this issue of forced union fees in government workers to a head. But then then Supreme Court Justice Scalia died in the Friedrichs case was deadlocked at 4 to 4. We happen to have the next case in the docket right behind it. Ours would have become would have become, become irrelevant if the Friedrichs case had gone forward in Scalia had lived and assumed that he voted with what was later a majority. So the basic point there was that a 1977 case called Abood, uh, split the baby. When it came to union dues, the court said that, uh, mandating dues from a union worker who’s opted out of the union for collective bargaining was reasonable. And you can do that, but, um, union fees are if you opted out, you couldn’t do the collective bargaining, but then you still had to pay agency, what we called agency fees. And basically our case, Janice versus we said that everything the union does is political by its nature. Therefore, no money should come out of somebody who has opted out of out of the union’s membership. And that’s what the ruling was. Justice Alito wrote the ruling. A great jurist when it came to worker freedom. And it came about because a court’s respond to politics, too. And there was a really, uh, anybody who’s a political watcher knows that courts respond. Politics just go back to Justice Roberts and the Obama care case. And you know how that works, right? But nevertheless, in this case, we really had a coalition of people on the right. And I think the best illustration of why we won that fight is because during the protest, when the case was heard in February of 2018, I was one of the leaders of the protest in front of the Capitol, and we were having a good old time with our signs and right next door, where the government unions and they were protesting, too. And the irony was we we all had the same size signs, rather workers rights were for the worker. Empower the worker. And eventually, as I write in the book, these women came over to try to infiltrate our protest and disrupt us. And I got to talking to him and I said, so what are you protesting for? And she said, workers rights. And I said, that’s what we’re protesting for. I said, let me ask you, you know, who do you think should control your relationship with your union, you or the union boss? And she kind of gave me that look like, oh, no, this is a trick question. But she goes, I think I should. I said, you should be over here with us. And she kind of walked away with her friend sheepishly. And I realized that that was the point, right? Who should control your destiny? We believe in the workers, and that’s what that case was about. So we had a great coalition of people from the State Policy Network, the D.C. think tanks all around the country, the state think tanks, all publicizing this case for many, many months and frankly, years in advance of it. And that really helped, I think, give the justices the courage they needed.

00:12:34
My old friend John Tillman will continue with us in just a moment. His new book is The Political Vice. First, take a moment now to make your plans for May 31st, June 1st or June 2nd, or maybe all three dates. That’s when Hillsdale College’s big screen debut is in theaters. It’s Revolutionary America, the first documentary about the revolution you can trust from Hillsdale College, America’s 250th anniversary is approaching, and you can find out more about what happened all those years ago with Revolutionary America. hillsdale.edu/film. FIL. Don’t let the anniversary pass without seeing the film. That shows what our founding fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors. Tickets available now for a limited run. Find a theater near you and find your [email protected]. For Revolutionary America. Edu slash film. We continue with John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project. Find him on X John M Tillman. His book The Political Vice How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. John. Discussion about those different sides of the vice. One of them is the media. And there’s portions of the right that would say, why ever go on CNN? Why ever talk to NBC? Why try to have an op ed placed in the New York Times? They’re biased. They don’t care about our voters. They’re going to twist your message. There’s an argument in the political vice that says, well, there’s value to that for a couple of reasons. Why should the right conservatives still consider legacy media opportunities?

00:14:29
It’s a great question. And the point I make in the book is that the reason you want to go on the legacy players is there are persuadable, soft Democrats who are open to moving to our side, and that is the place where you can reach them. And if you come across as a reasonable communicator, you make a moral high ground argument about why our ideas are better for all people, and especially the poor and disadvantaged. You can move some of those people over. I would be cautious, for example, with a long form interview with the New York Times reporter who’s going to do a print interview because they will twist your words. I prefer, in those cases to use email and or keep my own recording of it, but live or even taped events. I highly recommend people engage because you can win people over. And the other reason is that even if you don’t get the greatest message out, you can edit yourself, edit it yourself, put it in the framework that you want, and then redistribute your version of that interview that’s favorable to your argument, to the target audiences using digital tools. And you can target the very people I just described. You can just target soft lefties who are open minded on issues and would hear that message on CNN because they’re hearing it on CNN. They see you on CNN. They’ll give you a listen. Or as you did, the same exact verbiage on Fox News, that soft lefty Democrat won’t give you a listen. And that’s why you should take advantage of all types of media.

00:15:49
Also inside that chapter is a portion on on cancel culture and how to resist cancel culture. And I found this very interesting, this advice that to, to, to, to beat back and to defeat cancel culture, you need the ability to deploy your own media. You call it a marketing machine, you help to build this inside Illinois Policy Institute, which is one of the reasons why the Janice fight was so successful. So for I don’t know if it’s possible for individuals, but for organizations or for those who might be in the crosshairs of cancel culture, what does it mean? And how can you deploy your own media to fight back against those allegations?

00:16:28
Uh, we deployed what we call the continued use across all the organizations. I’m involved with what we call an owned audience strategy. So the strategy is twofold. One is you have content that you create, that you want to disseminate, and that content should be customized for the different audiences that you’re after. So if you’re after parents and suburban schools, that’s one audience. If you’re after African American men living in urban America who are fed up with the crazy progressive agenda, and they might be open to voting the other way, that’s a different audience and so forth. So you first start with your message, but then there’s a distribution strategy. And the distribution strategy, as we just talked about a moment ago, is taking advantage of third party channels such as legacy media. The other way to do it is to try to build a channels of communication that you largely control. And with an owned audience strategy, what you do is you use third party channels such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and you put content out there that is compelling. And all of your listeners have certainly seen this, where they see something on one of the social media platforms, and there’s a little button there that says, learn More. Well, we do the same thing in our issue, uh, ads on those platforms when you click Learn More, you’re given the opportunity to provide your first name, last name, zip code, and email address. From that point on, that person has opted in to our content stream that we can now directly go to them with through email, and then we often get their cell phone number and can directly go to them with text messaging. And the key, of course, is to not abuse that privilege, but always to have interesting, compelling content that is given at a proper pace and proper cadence. That is where they’re receptive to it. And then over time, with a really thoughtful strategy of messaging, you can develop a relationship with all those folks, educate them on various issues long before an election happens, and then when election time comes along, turn them out. So this is something that anybody can do at any scale. If you’re a city council member, if you have just a very modest budget, it’s not as expensive as you think to do this. If you’re doing it in a statewide or national effort, you’re going to have to spend a lot more money and have a material budget. But what I highly recommend is starting somewhere with a social media strategy. Thinking through your brand identity, whether you’re an individual activist or whether you’re running a small or mid-sized or even a large size nonprofit.

00:18:42
John Tillman is with us, whose book, The Political Vice. How do we turn that vise toward liberty? Perhaps we look at another example of school choice and the fight for school choice in areas all across the country. It’s one of the issues on which I think the right has been most successful over the past decade or so. What lessons can we learn from the successful campaigns for school choice and school options across the country that can be applied toward other issues of freedom and liberty?

00:19:12
It’s a great question. So briefly, there are three types of vices the political vice. There’s the traditional one in which I described earlier. There’s the one we’re in the middle of, where the political left is trying to restructure the vice and put the American people in the middle of the vice, and then partnering with liberal media, liberal politicians and elite influencers of the left, force us to comply. They are really into coercion and submission. And the trial run of that, of course, was the pandemic. And they watched and saw how many people were much more worried about their security and were willing to submit to those pressures and start to comply with the government mandated behavior instead of those who really want to preserve their freedom. So we got a real experiment there. To answer your question, we have to create a liberty focused political advice. And what we have to do there is move the American people to the bottom of the vice, which is the leveraged position. Put the politicians back in the middle. And then through our work and how we follow people in media and which elite influencers we choose to follow, restructure the other two sides of the vice. There’s a lot of really good work and great investing going on right now. On the media side, there’s a great burgeoning media infrastructure that’s been going on now for well over ten years that needs to continue and expand into popular entertainment, in my view. And then on the other side, we’re watching right before our eyes, different elites being chosen. The election of President Trump is the choice of an elite, and all that he has done to put different people into the cabinet positions in the various agencies, the governors that were endorsed and supported when they started to reject the lockdowns. Governor DeSantis in Florida, um, all the governors that, you know, around the country, Governor Kemp in Georgia and elsewhere, who did right by the people and stopped the lockdowns. So we get to choose who the elites are by who we choose to follow. And we get to choose who the media, which media has power by, who we choose to pay and subscribe to. That’s how we begin to put the liberty focus back into the political device and put the politicians under the pressure of the people once again, the way it should be.

00:21:16
One additional hurdle that you identify inside the political device for the right is that we fracture often, more often than we unify. It seemed like the Trump 24 campaign was one instance in which that didn’t happen. And that’s how we ended up with people like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard and Lori Chavez Dreamer in the cabinet, because those those different portions of the voter base all came toward Donald Trump in 2024. So is that a singular event due to a singular candidate, or is there a lesson learned on the right?

00:21:48
No, I think this is a this is a really important discussion point because I think we’re in the middle, maybe not the middle. I forget exactly where I would or I haven’t thought too much lately about where I’d say we are in this process that I’m about to describe, but I’ve been talking really since the advent of the Tea Party back in 2009, and I’ll call the Tea Party area two era, 2009 to 2014. That that was the beginning, that the public became aware of a complete political restructuring. And the Trump candidacy that was publicly launched in 2015 picked up the reins of the now falling behind or, you know, sort of going dormant Tea Party movement, but took the energy that was still there, uh, had had gone dormant, dormant because of a lack of leadership. And he rebuilt it into what we now call Maga. And this movement is not about partisan politics. This movement, and the reason you got this coalition that you just described, which is across partisan divides, is because it’s really a rejection of the duopoly in politics between Republicans and Democrats, of sort of a settled wisdom about how things should be run in America with this bipartisan consensus on big government ever expanding spending deficits and the insiders, the privileged, the the connected, always getting the the favoritism and average people, middle class people and even affluent people. And of course, the poor and disadvantaged always being left on the outside in. There’s been great discontent for decades with the establishment of both parties. That’s what the Tea Party was about. That’s why Donald Trump got a lot of Bernie Sanders votes in 2016, because the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was part of the left during the Tea Party movement, there was a Venn diagram overlap with the grievances, such as corporate bailouts and corporate welfare by government. So the reason I think that this is going to continue is because those structural problems are going to continue. And people who think Maga is going to die when Donald Trump’s presidency ends, I think, are sadly mistaken. There is a great awakening among the American people that is rejecting the bipartisan consensus since the end of World War Two era.

00:23:52
John Tillman, one of my favorite portions of the political advice is when you begin talking about group identity politics. Wokeism. But this idea that you lay out the progressive left that insists that government institutions are responsible for providing their sense of purpose and fulfillment, and later that they are seducing the American people into a mindset of learned helplessness, dependency, grievance, and fear. Uh, these are, uh, these it is seductive, uh, when you hear those messages to believe them and believe the deck is stacked against you and there’s nothing you can do to overcome. You need someone, something the government in this instance to come in and lend you a hand and help you out and punish someone else to help you rise. All right. What do we have in our in our weapons? What? What weapons do we have to fight against that kind of message?

00:24:45
Yeah. You’re talking about the fact that every human being, uh, experiences calamity in their lives. We all experience disappointments. We didn’t get the job. We thought we should get the promotion. The girl married my neighbor instead of me. Whatever the case might be, we all we all suffer. And as a result of that, the American tradition has long been that. Geez, I’m so sorry that happened to you. And a little pat on the butt from your your parent or your your coach and get back out there, pick yourself up and go at it again. And we had to lift ourselves up and overcome that. The left’s message is different. Now. Not only do you not get a pat on the butt, you actually get a pad that’s patronizing on the head and saying, yes, it’s so terrible. These awful things have happened to you, and you need to you need to marinate in your grievance. You need to marinate in your resentment of these terrible things and these specific people that cause this problem. And as a result of that, you need to come and join us in our political coalition because we are dedicated to alleviating and mitigating your grievances against the man. And the man is often a white, middle aged dude like me. I won’t put you in that category. Uh, but, um, you’re too young. But the, um, but the point is that they, they sell the idea that is very seductive, that every calamity that befalls you is not your fault. You’re a victim. And as a result of that, you need to join with us. And you can be on the righteous side of history when we all come together to solve these problems and fix these problems for those that have been aggrieved by unjust society, and particularly a free enterprise system that is broken and doesn’t work, founding principles that were never noble and don’t work, and they particularly don’t work for people of color. They particularly don’t work for anybody that’s different and unique. And that’s why the Grievance coalition of identity politics is an ever expanding group? The only people left standing are basically white men who are not allowed in to the grievance coalition because they’re the oppressors. I write in the book, Scott, as you probably remember, that one of the reasons young men are turning to faith more than ever is because I really believe it’s because everywhere else they turn, they are seen as the villain, and they’re looking for support and hope and redemption in a wonderful place, and I think that’s actually a good thing. Our antidote to this, by the way, is what I just described about grievances. One side of the human condition that we all face, that the other side of the human condition, what we must gravitate to and sell is that human beings, by their nature, are builders. We, by our nature, our collaborators, we like to think of how we can make tomorrow better than today for ourselves, our families, our communities, our friends. And so we like to build. We are creative beasts. We’re a gathering species. And when you look at the places in this world where that part of the human spirit is most unleashed, the greatest achievements have been created. And that, of course, is America and the American miracle. And that’s what we have to focus on as the antidote to the grievance culture.

00:27:38
John Tillman, the end of the political vice, lays out a grand strategy to help take back the vice and to take away power and control from the left. So again, how do we do that? What’s the grand strategy behind taking back the turning the screws on that vice?

00:27:57
Well, I’ll try to summarize it briefly. Number one is we have to build more capacity to compete for the commanding heights of American cultural narratives. The late, great Andrew Breitbart popularized the idea that politics is downstream of culture. That’s true. The point I’m always trying to make to everyone that’s involved is that means we have to be at the headwaters of the river, engaging in competition for mindshare of the American people and thus the American cultural narrative. For example, in Virginia, the very narrow laws on the ballot measure that did the Democrat favor and gerrymander that battle was being fought months and months and months and months before the actual voting. And I was involved. One of my organizations was very involved in Virginia directly and indirectly. And the Democrats were on the ground long before the election, socializing, if you will, this idea and trying to get the yes votes and the only one very, very narrowly. Our side waits too long. We do not go in early. Our donor class and some to some degree, our consultancy class has a blind spot to perpetual investment and we have to get to those headwaters. So that’s number one. Number two, we have to really build capacity in message creating messages. And it has to be done in a data driven way and tested relentlessly. One of the things that various teams I’ve been involved with over the years, we have capacity to do data analysis. We have a whole data science team at the marketing agency I co-founded, Ion Light, and we analyze constantly on a daily basis different segments of the audience that we’re after. We slice and dice it into very fine pieces, and then we test different messages with them to see which one resonates and which one. You can test a proxy call to action in voting so that by the time we get to elections many months later, we have a pretty good feel for what’s going to move voters to a call to action. Um, unfortunately, there’s not enough people investing in that work between elections. We have to do more of that. The third thing we have to do when it comes to messaging is we have to take the moral high ground back. One of the things that Trump administration and all of its spokespeople have been particularly good at, and Marco Rubio is perhaps the best at it, is not accepting the premise, the narrative premise of the media and the left. They always reject it, and they pivot and reestablish a premise where we are on the moral high ground of the argument, and that is why they’ve been so effective in persuading. Despite the media onslaught of negativity. So taking the moral high ground back and all the arguments is important, and then we have to continue to invest in building distribution. We need distribution across the board. As I mentioned earlier, we have excellent investments going on in conservative media, but we’ve got to compete in podcasting, which we have good advantages there, but we have to keep doing that. A popular film and entertainment streamers and all the content that comes out of the streaming programs. Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Land Men and Yellowstone and the one I just started watching the Madison. I mean that if we could clone Taylor Sheridan, we would have some really good content because he is putting out content that is pro liberty and not just in a, in a perfunctory or, uh, pandering way at all. I mean, he is doing it in a challenging and interesting and compelling way. One of the problems, Scott, with content on the right is our creatives tend to want to beat people over the head with the message. And what we want to do is actually create compelling characters and compelling story, and the message is an underlying part of it and not the thing that you drive home in the face.

00:31:22
Well, this is something that Illinois policy did and does so well. Um, is, is, is telling the story and not just using facts, figures and graphs, identifying people who will really be affected by the policy change and how their lives will be different and how it will affect the difference or affect the lives of people around you, friends, families, loved ones. Uh, the right has to get better at telling those stories and in that way, influencing voters minds and activities.

00:31:56
The easiest way to think about how to do that, because it’s not easy, and especially for people that come out of the policy side who are a little academic. It’s very hard to think about how to do that. But here’s the way I’ve taught people this over the years, is you want to tell the story about public policy at the point it intersects an individual’s life. So, for example, high gas prices, when you want to talk about that, you don’t talk about the fact that we need to expand fracking. We need to drill offshore, we need to open up Anwar and all the other places and all the national lands. That’s that’s the way policy people talk about it. So we need to talk about is, you know, I was at a gas station recently and I pulled up, pulled out my credit card and put it in there. I was going to fill up my tank. I can afford to fill up my tank. Every time a car pulls up on the other side of the pump, woman gets out. Her 20 ish year old son gets out and takes a few steps to go pre-pay, and he turns back and looked at her and said, mom, how much? And she stood there with stress and tension in her face and did some calculations in her head. She looked at him and said, let’s do $20. That’s why we need greater supply of natural resources to lower the cost for that woman. And that’s what we want to tell. The story is at the gas pump.

00:33:08
John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture project. You can find them on X as well. The brand new book, The Political Vice How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. John Tillman, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.

00:33:24
Thanks for having me, Scott.

00:33:26
Up next, Luke Foster from Hillsdale in DC tells us all about the spirit of a gentleman. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. Welcome back to the radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertram. Go ahead and follow us on Spotify at YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Never miss an episode of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. When you subscribe, we’re joined by Doctor Luke Foster. He’s assistant professor of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.. Doctor foster, thanks for joining us.

00:34:15
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

00:34:17
Talking today about an essay you wrote over at Modern Age. People can find it there. It’s called The Spirit of a gentleman. For those who haven’t caught this piece, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by the spirit of a gentleman?

00:34:33
Thank you. Um, so the the inspiration is a famous line from Edmund Burke and the reflections on the revolution in France, where he’s trying to articulate what the sources of liberty, self-government in the Western world were and how they’re threatened by the new revolutionary ideological tyranny coming out of France. Um, so he says, uh, everything good about our civilization is dependent for ages upon two principles and were the result of both combined combined. I mean, the the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. What I think he’s trying to say there is we used to know how to civilize and gentle men literally. Right. The the harshness, the the aggressiveness, the even the cruelty of other human beings. And I think men specifically have to be refined and polished into something, um, that uses the raw materials, but is, is better and more finished than those raw materials. And if we don’t have um, education, social practices, customs and institutions, political institutions that, that know how to do that gentling work, we really can only be governed by force and fear basically. So constitutional self-government and all the good things that go with that require this gentlemanly attitude and spirit. And part of why I wrote the piece is to say, this is not just a quaint argument from Burke, but is actually just a human principle, which our civilization has understood for a long time. And even when things are very disordered in the world, you can work to cultivate it in yourself, to foster in others, to, to create expectations, to behave this way. So it’s a concrete good that we can seek as well.

00:36:21
How would you how would you explain the way that people perhaps think about Gentlemanliness today? And how does that compare to what we’ve just explained?

00:36:30
Yeah. So this is part of the problem is meaning of a word shift over time. And sometimes that’s a neutral thing and sometimes things get lost. I think to the extent people think about gentlemanliness, typically in our in our society today, what we mean is holding doors for ladies, taking off your hat indoors, a sort of superficial derivation of maybe like mid-century classic Hollywood ethos. And there’s all that stuff is good, right? All that stuff is part of Gentlemanliness, and it’s in its true and fuller sense, but it’s not, um, it’s not essential to it. And there’s a danger, I think, of superficial politeness, almost kind of prissiness being, uh, be becoming held in contempt, uh, and therefore getting dismissed. Right. So, um, what I’m trying to do is point people to the deeper philosophical sources. Much of the piece is really, you know, extended quotations from canonical thinkers. Yes. Burke. But also Aristotle, Cicero, um, John Henry Newman. I want, I want to put people in touch with the deeper tradition that I’m just riffing off of, uh, to show them where they can go to learn about this.

00:37:44
Mhm. So, yeah, you trace this back to Aristotle, Cicero, this idea of the spirit of a gentleman as well. What what did they understand about human formation that perhaps we’ve we’ve forgotten a little.

00:37:56
Right. So the core notion, along with this insight that aggression, strength, masculinity is in a way easy but manly. Refined, um, civilized habits are difficult. The other core principle they they share is the notion that nature needs to be perfected and fulfilled by what, what, what Burke calls art. Um, convention social practices, how we, how we live together. Um, so human beings are a strange kind of animal because we, we have a nature. The classical thinkers argue, we, we develop and flourish in certain characteristic ways that are given and not chosen. But at the same time, you know, we’re, we’re born, um, unable to walk, unable to, unable to talk minutes away from death without proper care. Right. So the human being, the human nature to be fulfilled requires an awful lot of work by other human beings. But that work isn’t arbitrary as well. And so part of Gentlemanliness in this tradition thinks about what are the customs and and conventions that are build out what nature intends and what are, what are things that would thwart it. So eating with a, with a knife and fork is good and, and proper. And one way to, to make out our eating together, not just barbaric, but there are other possible ways, right. You could eat with chopsticks or there are even ways of eating with your hands, which are which are manually. Right. So culture doesn’t necessarily culture is not arbitrary, but it’s also quite flexible. And so different contexts are going to develop different rules, different practices. Um, and there’s legitimate variation as well.

00:39:44
So is the rejection of the gentleman really a deeper rejection of, of tradition and inheritance over the years?

00:39:52
Yes. So in the piece, I kind of finger Russo for this. You could point to other people, but Rousseau in the 18th century is the the a very beautiful, articulate, poetic argument for saying, no, no. Our real nature is the raw, primitive thing down beneath. It’s not it doesn’t have anything to do with convention or society. And in fact, society should be suspect, because that’s how his version of the fall is socialization. So this has a tendency to move people to think in terms of year zero, blank slate, start, start all over again in each generation. Um, we can undo all the sins and failings of our ancestors. We don’t inherit anything from them necessarily. Um, and that unfortunately means a lot of, a lot of gentlemanly codes become unintelligible because they require generations and even sometimes centuries of practice to build up.

00:40:47
So in this piece over at modern age called the spirit of a gentleman, we talked with Luke Foster here on the program. You describe the gentleman as someone who recognizes unearned advantages but responds with magnanimity rather than guilt. Why is that distinction so important?

00:41:04
Right. So I think this brings us to one of the most important things about this argument today. In a way, what you have from the left, the very powerful kind of philosophical, poetic move on the left is to say any hierarchy, any inequality, is necessarily oppressive and well, at the very least, suspect. Right? Maybe it can be dealt with, but it’s a problem. Um, and so this means that, um, of course things like family name and inherited wealth, we know, fall in this category, but increasingly things like, um, someone’s race, someone’s sex, um, you know, even even increasingly, right. Citizenship, the very idea of being born an American citizen, which is not open to everybody in the world. All these things are problematic because, because they’re unearned, right? They’re not directly the products of our own labor. And there’s a certain kind of, I think, shallow response on the right which plays into the hands of this right, which says, well, I’m just defending merit. I’m defending earned success. But the reality is that if we are as if human beings are natural and artifactual in this complicated combined way that the classics, the classic thinkers articulate, there’s going to be a lot of things, um, we have which are good and we value that we haven’t created for ourselves, going all the way down to our nature ultimately, which is a gift of God. We can’t, we can’t make that happen. So they’re basically, you know, the response on offer today from the left is guilt tripping, right? And, and that, you know, we know about how this gets, you know, our public arguments about reparations or about structural injustice. But on a personal level, I think what this leads down to a lot of people feel guilty and ashamed about their advantages in life. And my argument is to say I’m very worried about people who want to respond to that. Also by just saying, yeah, let the let the great do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, right? Just to kind of doubling down on, you know, sort of Nietzsche and spirit power, um, domination, success, as if that’s all there is to, to, to the moral life. And I’m trying to say gentlemanliness is part of actually the missing piece there, which is you can be great and magnanimous. You can use your greatness in a way that’s gentlemanly, generous, and builds up others. And this is core to the gentleman’s understanding, right? His, his gifts and his powers are not for himself alone, but are actually to, uh, make for a richer, more beautiful, more enjoyable social and political life for everyone. Um, so in a certain way, the most gentlemanly thing to do is to actually is to raise others up to your level. If you genuinely are better and greater than others, right? And this, I think, was the attitude of, of our of our founders. This was the attitude of this is, in a way, the attitude of God himself, right? Who’s who, who comes down to us, but in the process raises us up. Mhm. Um, so it actually has very, very rich philosophical resources, but practical resources to think this way as well.

00:44:20
All right. Let’s get to that, which is how can we revive this spirit of gentlemanliness in this day and age? What does it look like in practice? And perhaps are there figures from your historical overview who might be beneficial for the challenges we face in our time?

00:44:38
Thank you. Um, this is yeah, something that’s dear to me and, and genuinely difficult, right? In the historical overview, um, one of the people I talk about I is, is John Henry Newman who wrote this wonderful book, the idea of University in the middle of 19th century. And Newman was worried that, you know, because he’s a he’s a Victorian Englishman. Uh, he’s worried that gentleness is in the process of decaying because it’s disconnected from what Burke called the spirit of, of, of religion. Right. Gentleman is just becoming mere social convention, mere mere niceness, mere politeness. Um, you know, he says, he says it’s almost the definition of a gentleman to make all feel at home, to never give offense. But when there are real evils or errors being promoted in society, you need people to not just go along to get along, but you need people to actually stand up and object and argue back. And so, um, I think Newman’s warning is really salient, right? If we try to revive Gentlemanliness, it can’t just be mere conformity because that would get to that would get us to acquiescing with the Di regime, with, uh, giving your pronouns before every, every board meeting, right? It can be corrupted very easily. So I think it has to start with with religion, with philosophy, right? With higher transcendent standards of justice and goodness that aren’t just mere convention. Right? But then we have to work out, you know, in our particular day and age, what are the forms these things should take? You know, I think one really important area today is social media and electronics in general, right? We probably should shame people more in more social settings, right, for being glued to their phones. Right. It ought to be normal in a nice restaurant that you put your phone away. It ought to be normal. Thankfully, in a Hillsdale classroom, it is normal that you that you put your phone away in class, right? Yes. Not everywhere. Right. Some institutions are struggling with the kind of the selfie narcissism, narcissistic age intruding on everything. Um, and we have to fight that. But I also think especially, you know, in a context like Hillsdale, we can teach these virtues explicitly. We can exhort people to see why they matter, to think about their positional duties based on where they are in a, in an institutional hierarchy and how they can best, how they can best reflect their their rights and duties. I mean, I’ll give you a little example from the from the office, right. There are certain privileges that faculty have that are different from, from staff privileges, right? Like we have better parking. I think it’s really important, therefore, that I don’t leave my dirty dishes in the sink, but I wash them up after myself because if I don’t do that, it means de facto, I’m assuming somebody from the staff has to do.

00:47:32
It.

00:47:33
Right there. That principle should percolate into all our social interactions of the more we have privilege, the more responsible we are. And that’s the core of the ethos.

00:47:45
Luke Foster has piece at modern age the spirit of a gentleman. One final question. Is there a female equivalent to this ideal, or is the spirit of a gentleman pointing to something that is specifically masculine?

00:48:00
Excellent and difficult question. Um, which I in the piece I mostly speak to young men because that’s the, that’s the experience. That’s the context I know best. So I think unfortunately, it’s a slightly complicated answer, but let me, let me try to take it on two levels. A large part of this gentleman, the ethos is just, um. What the conduct of a noble person. Right. That’s how the classic authors think of it. Aristotle, Cicero, primarily they’re saying this is what it is for virtuous human being to be like. And you even have equivalents in the Confucian tradition, like the Junzi in East Asia is, is really meant to be the excellent virtuous person of both sexes. However, I think there are. two things which make it gender to an extent. One is one, as I mentioned, aggression. Warfare, right. Men need to be gentled as part of their civilizing socializing process in a way that women do not as much.

00:49:01
Mhm.

00:49:02
Um, so that does mean historically there is an emphasis on um, self restraint on, on learning how to value persuasion and friendship rather than force and fear. Uh, for men particularly. And then I think there’s another layer, which is the, the Christian Middle Ages with the codes of chivalry and the poetry around chivalry, um, make many of the things of the gentlemanly duties specifically have to do with his treatment of ladies. Right. So the superficial courtesies I talked about earlier are, you know, holding doors, taking off hats. Those are remnants of, of, of that code, which is just distinctively Christian because the assumption is you’re, you’re trying to civilize people into the marriage of free and equal spouses who can, who can commit freely to each other for life. Um, so there’s a much actually higher view of womanhood and therefore of what a man has to do to become worthy of a woman to win her. Um, so that’s where again, there’s, there’s specific, I think different duties for, for each sex, but, but it’s called lady likeness for, for women and there are concomitant duties, I think of, you know, knowing, uh, one of the great sources on this is, is Jane Austen, right? How does a woman discern, well, when a man is worthy of her trust, how does she learn to inspire and motivate the best in him without making him feel mothered or stifled? Right. These are really rich and complicated themes of wisdom and tradition, which, if we cut ourselves off from them, I you know, I think it’s not surprising that young men and women are increasingly having a really hard time forming couples and forming families. Um, because because the internet alone won’t civilize you.

00:50:43
Doctor Luke Foster is assistant professor of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C. you can read his piece at Modern Age. It’s the spirit of a gentleman. Doctor foster, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.

00:50:57
Thanks for having me. It’s a real honor.

00:50:59
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to John Tillman, his book, The Political Vise, and Luke Foster from Hillsdale in D.C. remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast, podcast.hillsdale.edu, or wherever you get your audio. Until next week. I’m Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

The post The American Book of Fables appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Join Dr. Matthew Mehan as he explores the stories, fables, and American imagination that have shaped our nation’s character. Drawing from his new book, The American Book of Fables—released in anticipation of America’s 250th anniversary—Dr. Mehan reflects on the land, people, and principles that have made the America a truly exceptional nation.

Celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with Hillsdale in D.C. professors, co-hosted with WMAL radio host Larry O’Connor. Discover the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, American culture, and more. New episodes every other week! 

Scot Bertram: To celebrate 250 years of freedom. Hillsdale College’s Matthew Spalding, along with professors from Hillsdale in D.C., sit down with Larry O’Connor of WMAL to discuss the truths that make this country great. This is Hillsdale on the Hill.

Larry O’Connor: As you know, we’re celebrating America’s 250th anniversary this year. It’s the something centennial. It’s hard to pronounce. It’s just it’s 250. Can we just call it America? 250. And part of that celebration is every couple of weeks, we’re connecting with our friends at Hillsdale College, specifically Hillsdale College in Washington, DC campus. That’s where the Van Andel Graduate School of Government is located. And it’s where they offer a part time M.A. in government for all young professionals. You really need to look at this. It will advance your career and it’ll advance your love and appreciation for our founders and our nation. And we continue that conversation today with Doctor Matthew Meehan, associate dean and associate professor of government at the aforementioned Van Andel Graduate School of Government. And by the way, author, your book comes out next week. Doctor Meehan, thanks for joining us this morning. And tell us about your book, because I think it sort of fits in with our conversation today.

Matthew Mehan: Yeah, it’s a kind of a reintroduction of the founding imagination for people. It’s called the American Book of Fables. It’s a big sort of hardback giant heirloom coffee table style family book with tons of beautiful illustrations. But it’s basically got sections for littles, middles, and bigs, and it features a Hugh manatee, a madcap creature, but it also has nursery rhymes for littles, fables from Aesop, but also new ones all keyed to the American regions, and each of the 13 chapters in honor of the 13 colonies actually has a sentence or a word or a phrase from the declaration, and walks through the declaration while walking through the country to explain both the principles, the people and the places of the country.

Larry O’Connor: What a great concept. I love this so much, and obviously great for all the homeschool parents out there who really do. They’re starved for good, pro-American, patriotic U.S. history materials. It’s amazing how hard it is to find good stuff like this. And it’s also sounds to me like a great, maybe late Mother’s Day present or early Father’s Day present because moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, godparents, they love reading to little ones. And what better story to read to little ones than the story of America?

Matthew Mehan: Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s got this nursery rhymes from Mother Goose from the founding period and the New England primer, but also new ones that are keyed to the American experience. And it has fables, but it also has a section for bigs. So there’s primary sources, letters from John Adams and Abigail Adams. I write short stories that, frankly, I think are pretty darn good. Like in the sort of American literature. They’re very nice. Excellent. You know, I’m a literary trained guy. I’m a best selling author. Like, let’s go to town for a 250. Nothing’s too great. Right. But so there’s there’s actually lots for the adults, too. I wrote a family book. So the child can grow up with the book, but also a parent and an adult or a young, you know, a high school or a middle school reader can get a lot out of this. So it’s for every part of the family.

Larry O’Connor: Well, and I’m looking at it right now, doctor me and it is a beautiful book. The illustrations are fantastic. And you’re right, this is one of those like a coffee table book or one of those prized books, you know, the books on the bookshelf where you don’t actually put it. So just the spine is looking out. You, you flip it around so the cover is seen. It’s like a showcase book, in my opinion. It’s beautiful.

Matthew Mehan: I wanted to do that for for America’s.

Matthew Mehan: 250 I mean, we just got to do it like it’s you can’t spare no expense, as they said in Jurassic Park, but hopefully with less tragic results this time.

Larry O’Connor: So it’s the The American Book of Fables, and it’s officially due out on the 19th. But everyone knows how this works. You can start pre-ordering it now and rack up those orders and those sales. It really is. Looks like a collector’s item, doctor man. So let me ask you, when you had to research this book, I know you’ve been focusing. I’ve heard you use this phrase, the American imagination, this, this idea of telling stories about our founding that, you know, before we had a public school system, we educated our own children and our own communities, children and, and it was telling these stories and enlightening the imagination of young people about how incredible America is. That was a big part of our culture. It should be a part of our culture going forward.

Matthew Mehan: I wound up in preparation for the book. I studied a lot about how did the founding generation educate their children and how did they sort of store the imagination? So professorial privilege. I’m going to get nerdy for a second, but.

Larry O’Connor: We expect no less from you Hillsdale types.

Matthew Mehan: Thank you. We’re we’re incorrigible. Uh, Seneca is, uh, the great Roman philosopher who Washington read, memorized, and used in his speeches and letters all the time. The Seneca says this about the imagination, that it’s like a pantry, and it helps you cook every decision. The ingredients are your imagination. And if your ingredients are stale or their way back in the back, when it’s time to make a difficult choice. If you don’t have the right ingredients, you will make a bad choice. And so I wanted to see what was in the pantry of the imagination that allowed these founders to cook up this American republic and make so many smart choices and brave choices, all the things they did in the Revolutionary War. And so I wound up studying all that and realized, oh my goodness, we’re feeding ourselves some pretty thin gruel today. And at most we get something pretty or cute or funny, but it’s not witty and it’s not wise. And that’s what I’m trying to re sort of restore the American imagination so that we have that witty, wise kind of self-government, an imagination that can fight for and defend liberty, but also pursue happiness in that way. You hope that someone who’s self-governing as opposed to a peasant or a subject or a slave, that’s sort of very free person who’s, you know, steely eyed and smart, knows how to, you know, use every part of the buffalo.

Larry O’Connor: And I love the way you put this because, you know, if you look at much of academia today who are sort of looking at the world skewed from the from the left perspective and the political left, they’ll say that the big thinkers and the big political imaginations among us today, they’re all looking at socialism. They’re all looking at social programs and the potential and possibility of what the government can do on behalf of the collective instead of this, this individualism, the individual imagination, where maybe our dreams and our aspirations and our vision don’t fit in with what the collective demands. That’s a very American idea, isn’t it? This American founding imagination you’re talking about. These men were brilliant, but they had a vision. They had. They had a vision of our own personal liberties and our personal potential, not of a collective possibility.

Matthew Mehan: They understood that individual virtue was the kind of stuff of heroes, but it’s also the stuff of a common free people, that everyone is a kind of hero in their own family, in their own town, in their own city, in their own business, their own school. But that part of that is it’s not that it’s almost a both. And. You don’t even have to do the trade off that if you are that kind of individual, independent, thoughtful, moral, clever person, then you’re actually going to be able to serve other people much more adeptly. And instead of instead of basically this kind of everybody knuckle under and let the government tell you how to help other people and your neighbor. You are like, are you kidding me? I know how to do that. I’m actually. I know how to shift for myself. There’s, there’s a, if I may, on the on the, the pediment of the House of Representatives, the apotheosis of democracy, meaning we’re going to elevate the people to its highest status ever, because America is now going to be a democratic republic, and the people are going to be in charge of the people’s House. The lady Democracy is protecting a little child. And that child is the genius of democracy, which is the fancy Latin word for wit the i.e. democratic or republican wit. And the argument is, don’t stifle the people’s wit by making too many laws protect the witty nature of men to shift for themselves. We start businesses, we start schools. We find a spouse, we raise a family, we do stuff. And that is actually a kind of habit that you have to do, where you don’t wait around for someone else to provide for you. You know how to shift for yourself.

Larry O’Connor: I’ve never heard it put that way, actually, but it makes perfect sense. And it’s, again, very much an American idea and the American way of looking at things. These founders, they had to communicate to the colonists at the time that this was the way to go. And I recognize the colonists were also driving this. I mean, they weren’t just inflicting independence on the colonists. The colonists wanted it or a good number of them, but they had to sell them the on the idea. Number one, it was the right idea. Number two, we can do it. And number three, we’re going to be okay on the other end of it, right? Because all anyone on the planet knew was being a subject subject of a monarch, and certainly the subject of King George the Third, these American colonists. So what was needed? Number one, for the American imagination to envision what was going to be on the other side. And also what did our founders need to articulate and, and sort of communicate to the colonists about how we can get there? You know what I mean?

Matthew Mehan: Yeah.

Matthew Mehan: I think that probably there’s two things that come to mind. I’ll take up one now. I think one is they needed an imagination for the power of rhetoric and persuasion and speech. Right? You have to be good at talking in order to be good at free society. Now this is I’m telling Larry O’Connor, this is dangerous. I’m pumping up the head of a of a of a man who talks for a living. But keep.

Larry O’Connor: Going. Do you hear.

Matthew Mehan: Me? Yeah. That’s right. Sing, sing, sing of Larry. No, but but there is this kind of this knowledge of of rhetoric and persuasion and clever speech that can give an image of what we ought to do, because the only options are either words or swords. Either you convince your neighbor to join you or it’s the jackboot, right? It’s either force and fear or it’s persuasion and friendship. And so you actually have to wittily practice the art of friendship, persuasion, and rhetoric. And my book tries to really bring this out for the next generations of Americans.

Larry O’Connor: I love that. And by the way, your book is also aided with some gorgeous illustrations. I want to get to those illustrations in a minute. The style of the book. It’s the kind of thing that people would really treasure having. Well, I want to button up what we were just talking about. You took the perspective of the rhetorical skills and art to sort of paint the picture of the American founding imagination there that our founders had, first of all. Would you agree that who was who do you think was the best writer in wordsmith of the founders? Everyone says Jefferson, and obviously they all elected Jefferson to write the declaration. Do you agree?

Matthew Mehan: Jefferson was a beautiful writer, but. But I think the wittier and wiser writers, probably John Adams, are just.

Larry O’Connor: You don’t hear that a lot.

Matthew Mehan: No, but he really. The letters to know Vangelis are some of the most rhetorically genius things that slowly. He’s called the right the the Atlas right of independence. Right. He’s he’s this incredible fulcrum upon which they turned a lot of minds. And Jefferson came in beautifully with the Declaration of Independence. And he deserves full credit for setting that up. Although my colleague Matthew Spaulding, who I know you’ve had on on the program, his book actually shows that Jefferson wrote a little less than we think, and it was actually everyone writing together, including Adams writing together and editing it such that Jefferson even complained that they ruined parts of it. But so but I think Jefferson’s beautiful, but for a kind of American imagination and rhetoric, I would give John Adams and then his son, John Quincy Adams, was the first professor of rhetoric in the history of America at the College of Philadelphia.

Larry O’Connor: The career of John Quincy Adams cannot be overstated. What that man was able to accomplish and all of the great things that he did. I would also say, I mean, Thomas Paine was a pretty damn good writer in terms of hitting that populist nerve and speaking to the everyman. And you had Washington celebrating common sense, but then you had, you know, your factory worker and dude working in the fields reading common sense. That takes real rhetorical skill to be able to have every kind of education level and every kind of class get inspired by what you’ve written about our independence.

Matthew Mehan: Yeah, there’s I try to include a lot of sort of folk knowledge, folk hero folk history and what you find, and I include some of this in different fun ways in the, in the big section, letters of just normal people. They were extremely literate. They were very clever and witty because they had gotten this kind of American imaginative education. And, you know, we used to think, and I think we will think again as the education reform continues, a pace that the arts of liberty or the liberal arts, as we call them, or the arts of liberty, that the summation of that was actually rhetoric, because rhetoric was the ability to talk about all the arts and sciences such that you can organize life together. And I think that’s something we have to get back to.

Larry O’Connor: No, I don’t disagree. This book, by the way, The American Book of Fables, people of my generation will remember how influential Bill Bennett’s Book of Virtues was. Everybody bought it. Everyone had it. Everyone used it with their kids, grandkids. That’s what this book is, the American Book of Fables. And like Book of Virtues, doctor Meehan, the art here, not just the grand, sweeping, beautiful, full color works of art, but also the typeface, the layout of the book. This was really intentional to make this book so beautiful and such a keepsake. Um, and talk to me about your intentions there and why this was such a big, important part of this endeavor.

Matthew Mehan: Like I said before, for.

Matthew Mehan: The, for the semiquincentennial, for America’s 250th.

Larry O’Connor: Semiquincentennial.

Matthew Mehan: There you go. I got it, yeah.

Larry O’Connor: There it is. Semiquincentennial.

Matthew Mehan: You you have to go big or go home. Like it’s just got to be beautiful. The country deserves the most beautiful book possible. So my illustrator and I, who are dear friends, and this is our third book together, he’s a realist impressionist, trained in the Boston school and can trace his lineage all the way back to Florence, the workshop in Florence where Raphael worked literally the field. So this is like very beautiful classical, but also modern. It’s like a mix of modern. It’s called realist impressionist style. He did 13 gorgeous oils, one for each chapter. But then he did dozens of watercolors that are absolutely stunning, and then tons of pen and inks. And we kind of had a lot of pen and inks because we it’s almost like an image of the Declaration of Independence becoming America in that first a scribble on a piece of paper, then it starts to take color, and then it expands into these gorgeous panorama of the American people and the American history. And it’s such a beautiful thing. We wanted to sort of have a kind of mirror of that unfolding of American history in the actual art itself, and it came off beautifully.

Larry O’Connor: Well, and as you said, for the littles, the middles and the bigs, there really is something for everything here. And by the way, usually the bigs, you know, teens and 20s, they love going back and reading the littles stuff too. It’s incredible. I know I do. What an achievement this is. Congratulations to you again. The book is The American Book of Fables. It’s available next week, the 19th. That’s when it’ll ship. But go ahead and order it now. Preorder it a great present. And by the way, get it as 4th of July presents Independence Day presents. I know we don’t give each other presents on Independence Day, but why not start that this year, especially this year? And then you can make a habit of reading out of this book with your children, with your grandchildren from this point forward. Congratulations on this achievement. You you do Hillsdale proud, that’s for sure.

Matthew Mehan: Thank you Larry.

Larry O’Connor: You bet. It’s Doctor Matthew Meehan. And thank you for joining us, doctor, for our regular conversation here celebrating America’s 250. We’re really proud at webmail to partner with Hillsdale on this. Thank you so much and thanks for continuing your great work at Hillsdale.

Scot Bertram: Thanks for listening to Hillsdale on the Hill, presented by Hillsdale College. To learn more about the Van Andel Graduate School of Government and Hillsdale’s work in our nation’s capital, visit dc.hillsdale.edu. That’s dc.hillsdale.edu.

The post The American Imagination: Fables, Freedom, and the Nation’s Story appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the nature of American foreign policy before introducing Wilfred McClay.

Americans have overcome many challenges throughout our history, including the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. Studying the great stories from our past inspires us to preserve the blessings of liberty in our day. Now you can study these stories with Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale’s free online course, “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” explores the history of America as a land of hope founded on high principles. In presenting the great triumphs and achievements of our nation’s past, as well as the shortcomings and failures, it offers a broad and unbiased study of the kind essential to the cultivation of intelligent patriotism.

After a respite from foreign affairs following the War of 1812, the United States emerged as a world power by the end of the nineteenth century. American involvement in Cuba and the Philippines raised important questions concerning the nature of the republic.

Discover the beauty of the Bible in “The Genesis Story,” encounter the brilliance of Plato and Aristotle in “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” and explore the true meaning of America in “Constitution 101” all with Hillsdale faculty. 

Jeremiah Regan: Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan.

Juan Davalos: And I’m Juan Davalos. We’re back with the great American story A land of Hope. We’re going to be covering lectures five and six today. The experiment begins.

Jeremiah Regan: That’s right. So in our last lecture, we learned that America had won the Revolutionary War. It had established a new nation, and now it needed to go about the business of governing itself.

Juan Davalos: That’s a part that we typically forget because we focus so much on the Revolutionary War and how great America, you know, the idea of America is and and the beauty of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, those are incredible documents. The beauty of the American political thought as expressed in the Federalist Papers. But then we forget that we actually have to put that into practice. And that’s very difficult. And that’s that’s what Americans start to do in this time period. And that’s complicated. It takes a lot of prudence.

Jeremiah Regan: Yeah. The difficulty wasn’t a surprise to the founders. They knew that governing themselves would be difficult. All governing is difficult. And when you diffuse power among the people and require the people to think about the laws of nature and nature’s God as the standard, that that’s a good theory. It does work in practice, as our history has shown, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. It means people need to figure out how to interpret the laws of nature and nature’s God. They need to think about contentious issues and issues of justice and issues of prudence. What what is right by nature, and then what is going to be most likely to affect our safety and happiness. And so these are the types of questions that the founders had to wrestle with.

Juan Davalos: This is a beautiful course, and it’s appropriate for us to be looking at the history of America as a land of hope. As we are getting ready to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary here shortly, at least at the time of this recording. And, uh, it’s a bit of a long course because it covers so much of American history, but it’s definitely worth it. And we encourage you to take advantage of our study guides. If you go to hillsdale.edu/course, that’s hillsdale.edu/course. There’s a lot of resources in the course, not just our study guides, but additional videos that you can watch, additional readings from the from American history that you can look at. So we encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course.

Jeremiah Regan: That’s right. We’re always pleased to have you listen to the podcast. But as Juan said, this is a long, beautiful but very involved and complicated course. So really take advantage of the learning that we offer. Now we turn to Doctor McClay for lectures five and six of the great American story, land of Hope. The experiment begins part one and part two.

Wilfred McClay: Now, you may remember from last time that I closed with a kind of ode to the United States Constitution and talked about the way in which, unlike other constitutions, it is almost identified with American history. It is a part of us, an expression of us. But I cautioned at the very end that it was in certain respects conceived as flawed, and I had in mind its inability to deal with the question of slavery, which was becoming a more and more entrenched institution in American life. In some ways kicked the can down the road, uh, and, uh, to, uh, our subsequent, uh, disfavor. But let me talk a little bit about slavery. Slavery is ubiquitous in human history. It’s not peculiar to American history. It’s almost the rule rather than the exception in the overwhelming bulk of human history. It’s been underwritten and supported, at least for a time, by all the great religions of the world. Uh, the important thing to know about for the start about the British colonies is it was never intended to be any part of a sort of master plan for the colonies, for the development of English colonization. Of course, as we saw, there was there was no master plan, so there wouldn’t be a master plan for it to be part of. But in many ways it arose in an incidental way, in tandem with a more consciously thought out labor system called indentured servitude. This was an important but brutal institution, important in that it supplied a way that poor Europeans who were willing to make the passage to America, uh, for and contribute their labor to the development of the colonies, could have their passage paid for by their employers in exchange for a period of, of, of contractual servitude to that master. And then they would be freed, and then they would be able to pursue their lives as free men. It’s estimated that as many as half of the white male immigrants to the Chesapeake area, uh, were indentured servants originally. Um, and it may well be we don’t know this for sure that the first black Africans who arrived in Jamestown in 1619 aboard a Dutch ship came as indentured servants, uh, rather than as slaves. What we do know is that over time, the African population grew very slowly in in the Chesapeake area. Uh, and, uh, that the first Africans experienced conditions fairly similar to the whites. But as time went on, the 1650s or so, uh, Ezra numbers increased slowly. Um, there were practices of discrimination against them because of their race that began to be imposed and hardened until by the 1660s, these were laws, slave codes kept by, um, or passed by colonial assemblies, which dictated that Africans and their offspring were to be held in permanent bondage. That is, they were to be chattel, human, uh, legal property of their owners. This interest in using slaves grew as indentured servants became more rare and more expensive. By 1750, half the population of Virginia and two thirds of South Carolina were the enslaved Africans. It should be remembered in this context that even though I’ve mentioned two southern states at the time of the revolution, slavery was still permitted in all states. So by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the institution of slavery was pretty well established in at least a section, a portion of the new nation. And it was economically entrenched because of tobacco and eventually cotton and other cash crops that were what the South depended upon for its economic well-being. So this when the revolution came and the revolution was made in the name of liberty, this fact caught the eye of perceptive critics of the Americans. Uh, the famous Samuel Johnson said in 1775, the year of Lexington and Concord. How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? And it was a good question, particularly since the most eloquent yelpers were people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who owned slaves themselves. More than half of the framers of the Constitution were slaveholders. So it’s a reasonable question to ask today. How can we admire, uh, or how can we even understand these otherwise enlightened, uh, individuals who are exemplary in so many ways, uh, buying into being so blind to, uh, the dehumanization of these, of these people who were enslaved, how could they have been blind to the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. Um. How could they be at peace with this practice? Um, and what made the American situation especially intolerable was the fact that it was, as Johnson was pointing out in his way, uh, that this practice was, um, uh, ethical to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the principles that Americans claimed to stand for and to practice the high and noble ideals. They were living in inconsistency, and they knew it. By and large, Jefferson agonized over his possession of slaves. Washington freed his slaves at his death. Jefferson did not. But both of them understood that in some way slavery was an offense, an offense, as Jefferson would later say. Events against God and an offense Against the well-being of the nation, a possible source of national dissolution. Many of the framers believed that slavery was on its way out, would naturally disappear after the revolution, and that nothing dramatic needed to be done about it. It was just an institution whose whose time had come and was passing. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, very influential figure in the compromise by which the Constitution came to be, took this view. Oliver Ellsworth said in slavery and time will not be a speck in our country. The Constitutional Convention, as I said, took an ambivalent view. It didn’t applaud slavery. It never used the word. It never used the word slave or master. Uh, it didn’t enunciate the principle of slavery. Um, it was, I think, a clear case in which the need to foster unity among the colonies to form a new nation took precedence over the writing of what many saw as a wrong, and that that would have to be postponed, which from our point of view, at times we say, well, you know, they should have taken care of it at the time. But this is a it’s a different question for us to ask today than it was for them to deal with at the time. And that’s part of what I mean when I talk about the need to think historically is to put yourself in the context in which particularly political actors are acting, and instead of saying that they should have conformed to an ideal good that really was not within the range of political possibility, we should admire him for what they were able to accomplish. I think this is something we’re going to see in Abraham Lincoln, uh, very soon as an example of this. So slavery, uh, was there was a concession to slavery. The notorious 3/5 rule, which, uh, counted the slave population, uh, for representation purposes. Um, even though slaves had the no, no rights as citizens, by the way, northern delegates had wanted slaves to be counted at 100% for taxation, but zero for representation. Um, so they, they were in a way the ones forced to compromise. Um, but the Constitution’s otherwise, uh, notably silent about slavery. There’s a, there is a concession allowing the transatlantic slave trade to be abolished after 1808, which it was. Um, and there’s a fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, although as I said before, it does not use the word slavery. It says persons held to service or labor had to be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. They’re really trying very hard not to use the word slave and not to use the word master. Um, and I think that’s at the very least, this silence, this indirection, this euphemism reflects an unease with the institution, um, and a desire not to go so far as to enunciate the defense of slavery as a principle of to which the Constitution would be bound. I think what we have to do is to see this period as a period of moral transition. They’re on the cusp of a transformation of moral sensibility in the world, uh, that leads by the 19th century to the abolition of slavery. Uh, and we are on the other side of that transformation so fully that it really requires an exercise of the historical imagination to see how good exemplary men could have nevertheless countenanced or or been willing to kick the can down the road about such an issue. Um, hence, I argue, it would be wrong, as so many people do in a casual way these days, to say that the United States was founded on slavery. No, it was founded on other things. It was founded on other things, principles of liberty and self-rule that had been worked out over many years in English and then American history. Uh, and, uh, the fact that these foundational principles didn’t come into the world unstained, unmarred untroubled is simply, uh, an, an example of the way that history actually happens. There are no immaculate conceptions or virgin births in history. Uh, there may be one, but but only that one. So, um, onward with the Constitution. It had to be it had been drafted. It had been approved. Now it had to be ratified by the states. And that was not a for sure slam dunk outcome. There was a there was a lot of ingrained inertia, opposition to changing something like a constitution. Uh, there are always winners and losers whenever you change the structure of things. And many people who had it good under the old regime, particularly state and local elites, were not thrilled with the idea of having a much more powerful national government. Um, in every state, there would be a heated debate over whether or not the Constitution should be Ratified. And of course, the factions divided into the Federalists, who were very clever in seizing the high ground of a positive name for themselves, and the Anti-Federalists, who, you know, had the the negative name and were a much more heterogeneous group, but concerned about the concentration of power in a way reflecting this older American revolutionary concern about the dangers and corruptions that come with the concentration of power. Someone like Patrick Henry of Virginia, who was a great patriot in the time of the revolution, opposed the Constitution because, he said it squints toward monarchy. That it was would represent a repudiation of what the revolution had been fought to accomplish. So these debates were heated. And like many heated political debates, it gave rise to some of the most wonderful and rich writing about basic, fundamental political issues that we’ve ever seen. Um, the United States hasn’t produced, uh, people like John Locke and Rousseau and so Hobbes and so on, who’ve written massive treatises. Instead, we have these occasional documents that are the, the focal point of the richness of our political tradition. And certainly the Federalist Papers written by Hamilton, Jay and Madison, um, as part of the debate in New York over the ratification, are among the most distinguished products of that debate, probably the most distinguished products of that debate, Thomas Jefferson’s said, and others have echoed this, that it was the definitive work of interpretation of the United States Constitution, and people still go to it for that purpose. Just not to say the Anti-Federalists are all did not also produce thoughtful expositions that bear rereading now, and that influenced the course of the nation then and since. And many of these writers on both sides wrote under Roman pseudonyms, Publius was the name that the three authors of the Federalist adopted. Brutus and Cato were authors on the. On the Anti-Federalist side. And the choice of those two names indicating a Republican small r Republican sensibility over. Against the idea that this new Constitution with a powerful presidency would be, um, squinting towards empire. Uh, to paraphrase Patrick Henry, um, the papers of the Federalists, uh, bear extended analysis that I unfortunately don’t have time for, but they featured a darkly realistic view of human nature. You remember Washington’s remark about. We’ve had two too high an opinion of human nature. The Federalist does not reflect too high an opinion of of human nature. Um. If men were angels, government would not be necessary. Uh, Madison said Federalist 51, which, um, he clearly believed was a definitive statement about men. Uh, ambition, he said, must be made to counteract ambition because the sources of faction are sown into the hearts of men. And the only way to, to counteract, uh, the excessive ambition, uh, power, mad tendencies of, of, of some men is to have other men who are similarly ambitious, uh, to counter them. Uh, so the need for a constitution that would check use checks and balances in opposing forces to harness, as we saw last time, that tendency toward conflict, towards the exercise of power. Um, something else that comes out in the Federalist is the, the huge stakes that the authors of the Constitution, the framers, as we call them, saw implicit in their enterprise. Uh, they really thought that, uh, this was the last, best chance to use words that Lincoln would use later for the whole world to establish a Republican form of government. What Hamilton said in Federalist number one, that the question before them was to decide whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political Constitutions on accident and force. In other words, can we self-consciously making use of what we know about history, about the ways in which republics have failed in the past? Um, all the way through human history, going back to antiquity, can we make use of this knowledge in order to create a republic that will not fall into these traps, will be, uh, to the extent possible with human flesh to be immune to them. So this is one of the great enterprises in their minds of human history. They were, uh, using this unique occasion to try to create a new science of politics for a new world. They were using history to defy history. Uh, so, um, the Anti-Federalists, uh, were not they were defeated in the end, but they were not completely defeated. They managed to wring out of Madison and the others a concession that there would be a series of amendments to the Constitution, which we now call the Bill of rights, that were designed to protect individual liberties against the incursions of this newly powerful national government. And thank goodness that they did. They deserve a lot of credit for seeing things the framers themselves did not see so well. Um, uh, we would not want to have the Constitution without the Bill of rights in it. Actually, to the extent that some people think that when you talk about the Constitution, you’re only talking about the Bill of rights and not the Electoral College or the separation of powers or any of the other things that go with the Constitution. So it’s seen by all of us as integral to the Constitution. At the time the Constitution was adopted. A lot of people were skeptical, even those who voted for it. Even George Washington himself confessed that he didn’t expect it to last more than 20 years. He would have been surprised, as anyone, I suppose, to see it still going 230 some odd years later. Um, but the skepticism was justified. This was something new. This was a blueprint for a building that hadn’t been built. It was the score for music that had not yet been played. No one knew what was going to happen with the building was going to look like what the music was going to sound like. Um, but it made a big difference that everyone knew who would be running the show from the presidency, at least for a few years, to get things started. And that would be, of course, George Washington, who was both blessed and cursed with the status of being the indispensable man, as his biographer, uh, once put it, uh, James Thomas Flexner. The Indispensable Man is the title of his biography of Washington. Washington didn’t really want to do this. He wanted to retire. He wanted to go back to his beautiful home at Mount Vernon, on the shores of the Potomac River, and live the life of a gentleman farmer that he hadn’t been able to live for 20 or more years, that he had been engaged in strenuous public service, some of which we talked about last time. But the country was one of the great experiments of human history, and he couldn’t back away from accepting his responsibility to see to it that the experiment succeeded. He said in his inaugural address the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps, as finally staked on the experiment. He uses that word Experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. So, you know, he had to be there. He couldn’t back out. He couldn’t go back to the farm and take it easy. Among the most urgent tasks, tasks facing him was the country’s parlous financial state. And he turned this task over to Alexander Hamilton, who was something of an economic genius. And Hamilton devised a basically three parts oversimplifying a little bit, a three part plan for bringing the nation into solvency. First, it would assume all the debts of the states and pay off the national debt in full at par value. Um, this was ingenious because it would bind the states, bind the most powerful force imaginable to the national government. It wouldn’t depend just on affection. There would be material considerations involved. Second, he proposed high tariffs. Yes, you heard me right. High tariffs to protect American nascent American industries and help the United States to develop a balanced commercial economy, something he avidly sought. And third, he called for the creation of a national bank to deposit government funds and serve as a regulator of the currency through the printing of banknotes. These were the three principal things that he wanted to do in his economic program. There are other things, but we can look at the book for those. Um, and, uh, the National Bank was the most controversial. They were all controversial. But the National Bank, particularly Madison Jefferson, Virginians hated the idea. Um, on the other hand, Hamilton and they thought it was unconstitutional. The Constitution, in this view, was a charter of enumerated powers. Enumerated Meaning if it ain’t there, you ain’t got it. It’s enumerated. It’s spelled out. The powers that are given to the federal government, the national government. Hamilton, on the other hand, said, well, hey, look at article one, section eight. It says that Congress has the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying out the functions of government. Well, this went to a very fundamental disagreement that would last for years, arguably is still with us today between the strict construction and loose construction of the Constitution. Um, Jefferson and Hamilton symbolized these two approaches. Jefferson. The strict construction. Hamilton the loose interpretation. Jefferson thought the loose interpretation was just a fancy way of saying the end justifies the means. Uh, Hamilton thought that the nation was a Hercules in the crib, as he once said that it was just ready to bust out if. As long as it was given the economic tools to do so, including a government that was active enough to to produce results. So the two men came to symbolize these different views, not just of government, but of the nation as a whole. What kind of nation was America to be? Hamilton envisioned an America that was a commercial power, that was a world power that would be able to contend, go toe to toe economically and ultimately in other respects, too, with the great nations of the world. Jefferson, on the other hand, thought the ideal for a virtuous citizenry, and he used that older language of virtue was a fundamentally based in agriculture. His America would be an America of yeoman farmers, a freehold land holders who work their own farms and, uh, and in that way made a living a sufficiency. They would maybe with some sale of surpluses, but, uh, not capitalists in the full sense of a capitalistic agriculture. Those who labor in the earth, he once said, are the chosen people of God. And so he. He favored agriculture, even though he. He was not much of a farmer himself, and actually loved spending time in Paris and hobnobbing with cosmopolitan intellectuals. A very interesting guy in that regard. The two men also represented different views of foreign policy, which the United States, despite its distance from Europe, could not avoid, because, after all, France had been part of the successful revolution in America. And when France had its own revolution in 1789, a lot of Americans, including Jefferson, including those who followed Jefferson, were on the French side. They thought the French Revolution was great. They thought it was an extension of the same kind of Liberalism, the same kind of affirmation of universal rights that had been alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. Why not? Hamilton, on the other hand, um, uh, who favored, uh, imitating the British model in some ways he was he was, uh, more impressed with the British way of doing things than the American, even though he was a great fighter for the Constitution. Um, Washington, who was president for two terms, the first two presidential terms in American history, uh, thought the better path was neutrality. And so he tried to keep a neutral path, uh, which with great difficulty, because the nation was not inclined to follow, or at least the most activist elements in American political life were not inclined to follow. And indeed, this was a period, particularly getting into the 1790s of great stress in American national life. Constant worries that factionalism was going to break out, and even that those who supported the French might go to the extent of treason, uh, in their support of the French cause and their opposition to their homegrown opponents. Washington gave a wonderful farewell address on September 17th of 1796 as he was about to leave office, and he cautioned against excessive entanglements in foreign affairs and wanted to stress National Union as the most important principle of American foreign policy. Um, this proved very hard to sustain, particularly after he was um, had stepped down and was succeeded by John Adams, his vice president. Adams had a very turbulent and difficult presidency, a one term presidency, our first one term presidency, and Adams may well have been ill suited to the job. Washington was an impossible act to follow. All sorts of reasons for that, uh, administration being problematic. But there’s one thing that he did or allowed to happen that especially marks him, gives him a black mark in historical legacy. And that is his administration’s passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which basically were efforts to, uh, they were response to what was seen as the fake news of the time coming from the Federalists. Well, both from Federalists and Republicans. And it became a crime under these laws to publish what someone else might judge to be, quote, false, scandalous and malicious criticisms of high government officials. Um, 25 Republican newspaper editors were Prosecuted under this these laws. In response, Jefferson and Madison did something equally bad in in drafting the so-called Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, which were basically, uh, proclamations of the right of states because the Constitution was considered a compact between the states. An issue will come up very soon in another context, because it was a compact between the states. The states had the right to interpose themselves or to nullify federal laws that they didn’t agree with. So which of these is worse? They’re both pretty bad. George Washington was appalled by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, and he said that if pursued, they would dissolve the Union. So both parties were fearing out of control at this point, uh, that the Republicans were acting like were being seen by the other side by the Federalists says wild eyed Jacobins. The Federalists were being seen by the Republicans, the Jeffersonians as crypto monarchists, people who wanted to impose monarchy on the country. And then, in the midst of all this, December 1799, George Washington dies at a time when all this acrimony reigns and there’s no longer that figure, that enormous figure, not just physically enormous, but politically and spiritually enormous, uh, leader, uh, to hold things together. Miraculously, though, the election of 1800, which was a fiercely contested election, as you would expect it to be between Jefferson and Adams, um, which Jefferson won by a small but decisive margin. Uh, there’s some complications there we can’t get into. But he did win it pretty clearly. And as President Jefferson turned down the heat. He turned out to be a very, uh, unifying president. Surprisingly so. He gave one of the great inaugural addresses in which he began to express the desire for that kind of unity that Federalists and Republicans were all on the same side, that they were part of the same union. Um, so, uh, the first inaugural was almost as masterly a speech as Washington’s farewell address. This is a great time for American oratory. So the revolution of 1800, as Jefferson would later call it, was actually a step in the maturation of the nation. Um, uh, symbolized by the venue in which Jefferson spoke. He spoke at the new national capital in Washington, D.C., for the first time, uh, of of an administration having an inaugural there. Jefferson’s presidency. I’m going to pass over rather quickly, except to say that there’s a pattern to it. And the pattern is that Jefferson, first of all, found himself unable to reverse and even unwilling in the end, to reverse Hamilton’s economic program, to which he had so heartily objected. Um, he found himself unable to overcome the federal judiciary led by John Marshall. Uh, the Federalist Supreme Court justice, who was a very long serving chief justice and really established the role of the court through the Marbury versus Madison case as the agent of judicial review. That is a review of the constitutionality of acts of Congress. Um, none of which Jefferson, who really distrusted the judiciary, being a more radical Democrat, small d Democrat. Um, uh, he didn’t really think that, uh, judges should be able to lord it over the popular will. Thanks to Marshall, the Supreme Court would have a preeminent place in American politics, one that was never spelled out in the Constitution itself. Although most of us think that the founders, the framers did intend for such a role to exist, the greatest achievement of his administration was the Louisiana Purchase, which was, uh, heretofore in American history, the most, uh, sweeping act using executive power to acquire 800,000mi² of additional land, more than doubling the size of the country. Again, the details of how the purchase came about are interesting. And there in in the book, land of Hope. But, um, it was the bargain of the millennium, arguably $15 million paid the French for this enormous tract of land to the west of the existing United States. So consider the irony. Just as Jefferson consolidated the Hamiltonian economic program under his watch, he affirmed a kind of Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution by acts like the Louisiana Purchase. And in doing all of this, he consolidated his power over against the Federalists. Hamilton’s party, and by the end of his administration the Federalist Party was a shadow of its former self on its way to death. This is very ironic and very American. It seems to me in this way that the practice of politics doesn’t always obey the ideological lines that you would expect. After Jefferson, his administration came in the election of 1808, his retirement back to Monticello in Virginia. Um, the problem of the British, uh, and British interference with American trade, which had been a sort of nagging problem for many years, became so prominent and so intolerable that James Madison, who was Jefferson’s successor as president, ended up being pushed into war, the war of 1812, um, which is a war that just a few things to be said. The United States had no business fighting such a war where the United States is very fortunate that it got out of that war without too much damage, uh, to itself. There are two good things that came of it. One was the composition of the poem the Star-Spangled banner, which would become our national anthem. Francis Scott Key, observing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore and the flag waving. And then a second. A good thing was a a glorious, if unnecessary, battle fought in New Orleans under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, who defeated a superior British force and gave the nation something to be proud of and gave the nation a new hero who. A military hero on a par with Washington, on a par with the heroes of the Revolution. Um. Looking forward into a new era that would be dominated by the common man. So, um, uh, those were the two good results of the otherwise potentially disastrous war of 1812, uh, which the United States probably would have been better off not fighting if Hamilton had been a stronger. Excuse me, if Madison had been a stronger and more forceful leader. So things were looking better for the United States in terms of foreign policy after the war of 1812. It was really possible to. Absent itself from world politics, the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed by James Monroe, who was a protege of Jefferson and Madison, declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to further European colonization. It was kind of declaring a sphere of influence for the United States and the United States, now free from foreign entanglements for a period of time, began to boom economically. The years after the war of 1812 were great years of economic growth, the building of railroads, the knitting together of the nation as a national economy looked like smooth sailing ahead. But one thing, one speck on the horizon to come back to where we began, that unresolved question of slavery. When the state of Missouri, which was acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission to the Union, it was a big problem because up to that time, the nation had managed an informal balance between slave states, states that permitted slavery and the northern states that had abolished it. So the question of slavery and slavery’s future in the country was kept at bay by this rough parity of states. To admit Missouri, which had been settled by slaveholding pioneers, would reopen. The question In general. You will see this when we talk about the Mexican War in a lecture or two. The westward expansion always opened up the question of slavery. It always put it back on the table, because there was the question of whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the territories. And this Missouri episode led to a huge national debate over the problem that had not been resolved at Philadelphia at 1787, and it would not resolve the debate in this occasion either. A way of carving a state, the state of Maine, out of Massachusetts and admitting it to the Union in parity with Missouri was how the problem was solved. But it concluded with Jefferson having a deep foreboding that the Missouri Compromise, as it was called of 1820, was more of a harbinger of a very dark future than it was a solution to the problem, he wrote to a friend. This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed, for the moment, but this is a reprieve only not a final sentence. He never spoke more darkly than this, and more prophetically, and he went on to express his sense of things in a memorable final sentence, which I will close with. We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. He had identified the principal danger to the American experiment, and we’ll see how that danger manifested itself in our next lecture. Thank you.

Juan Davalos: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit hillsdale.edu slash. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis story, classic children’s literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you’ll learn will enrich your life, and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at hillsdale.edu/today. That’s hillsdale.edu. Thanks for listening.

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Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

The third attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, teaching students to question conspiracy theories, and the rise of radical political candidates like Maine’s Graham Platner. Dr. Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues.

Release date: 11 May 2026

Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio.00:32S2

Morning glory and evening Grace America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. That music means the Hillsdale Dialogue has arrived, the last broadcast hour of the week on the Salem News Channel and the Hugh Hewitt Show on the Salem Radio Network, all of our wonderful affiliates. And I’m back with Doctor Larry Arnn. Doctor Matt Spalding sat in for him last week as they got ready for commencement, which is this week. So it’s a busy week in Hillsdale commencement week. Uh, are you, uh, preparing to process Doctor Arnn?00:59S3

Yeah. It’s a big deal. Commencement is beautiful and exciting and emotional and, uh, controversial. College is kind of famous, and we probably have protesters. We get them sometimes. But yeah, it’s a lovely day. And the weather is promising.01:15S2

The blue robe with the black stripes. There are all sorts of different beautiful robes based upon the degree and where you got it from. What do you have?01:23S3

Mhm. I have a blue robe with four black stripes. And only the Prez gets four. Oh, you get one for each. You get one for each degree you hold, and then you get a fourth one if you’re the boss.01:38S2

Oh, that’s. I’m envious of that. Four black stripes. It’s like. Like command sergeant major of the Army. All right. I want to waste time on our. We taped this earlier in the week because you’re actually processing at the end of the week. So we don’t know if Iran has been blown up more when we’re sitting down to talk about this. We’ll get to that in a moment. But we do know, hopefully the president hasn’t been shot at again. President Trump, since last we spoke, was the object of the attempted fourth time since he began running for president. Of an assassin to remind people um of the they they know the three the guy in the tree in Florida, they know Butler. They probably do not know that on February 22nd of this year, Austin Martin was a 21 year old from North Carolina who was shot and killed trying to break into Mar a Lago with a shotgun and a knife. And then, of course, number four, white House Correspondents Dinner two weeks ago. Are we back in the SDS? 60s doctor earn.02:38S3

A lot of violence. Um, uh, it, you know, so the population is, you know, what is it? It’s 40, 30, 40% bigger than it was in the 60s. And the assassination attempts are a multiple of what they were in the 60s. So yeah, I don’t know, something’s going on here. Um, And it’s a sign. You know, they there were many plots to kill Abe Lincoln, and one of them succeeded. And what was that about? That was about, uh, fundamental difference about the meaning of the country and how it should be governed. And we have those today, too. And it generates a lot of heat. And also, there’s a fair amount of craziness in the population right now. If you just look at, you know, I deal with 18 to 21 year olds, uh, when they were in high school, they were deprived of going to school for two years and most parts of the country. And what they noticed was that none of their friends died. And so what was this all about? And the highest authorities in the land and the leading experts in the world were telling them, you got to stay home, you’re going to die. And they didn’t. And so I think that that prepares them to believe conspiracy theories while they’re too young to to turn to believe, to find out which ones are true. I myself believe in conspiracy theories, and they’re documented. But, um, you have to get a bit older to figure out which is which. Well, John Wilkes.04:17S2

Booth was himself part of a conspiracy. A conspiracy that almost killed attorney, the secretary of State, Seward, on the same night. I think they may have been going for Grant as well, but it was a screwed up 1865 conspiracy. Uh, I do believe we’ve gone to the moon. I hope you’re with me on that one, doctor, but I’ve been saying. Yeah, I’ve been saying if you swim in sewage.04:40S3

I’m not sure. It’s not a phony that we went around it the other day.04:44S2

Come on. We know the Artemis guys. Um, the, uh, adage I’ve come up with is if you swim in sewage, you’re going to get sick. And a lot of the lunatics of the left and the right are living 24 over seven, 7365 in Reddit threads that you and I don’t go to. Among weird people that we couldn’t have talked to when we were their age. How do you counsel your students at Hillsdale not to do that to, to stay attached to the actual reality of books and classics?05:18S3

Well, they, they, you know, life growing up is a process of learning to be a serious person. And so in a really great meeting, we had one night, an extra meeting where we invited a bunch of boys. And, you know, at Hillsdale, we know what everybody thinks and everybody knows what we think. Everybody knows what everybody else thinks. And some of them were, you know, listening to Tucker and stuff and getting ideas. And we find out about that. And so we invited him to a meeting and we talked for like four hours. And we talked about specifics. We talked about, uh, and, you know, it was fun, right? And I told him, I said, I don’t care what you think about these issues. You’re too young to have a serious opinion about them. Uh, you got to learn. I said, but what I want you to know is the difference between a serious opinion and something you listen to on YouTube. And, you know, we talked about the founding of modern Israel. I have to know quite a lot about that. I helped Martin Gilbert write books about that. And you can say that’s illegitimate if you want to, but if you do, then you’re stuck because Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Kuwait and Jordan and the Lebanon and Syria all come from the same set of facts. And they were all founded in roughly the same way, carved out of the Ottoman Empire, which joined the wrong side in the First World War. And the promises that were made to the Arabs and to the Jews were made at the same time, roughly, and for the same service. If you will fight for us, we will give you countries and the Arabs got a whole bunch of countries and Israel got one, but they got all got them the same way. Well, I pointed that out. And you know, it’s just true. You just read Martin Gilbert, you’ll see. And, uh, and then, you know, what is Judaism? You know, questions like that. And one of the points that I made was, and see, this is friendly, right? They’re not, they’re not, we’re not at war at Hillsdale College. Uh, I said, if you write a paper for me or for Professor Gerkey sitting over here, uh, he was young man. He’s a graduate who teaches history. You will probably take it seriously. You probably try to find out what the truth is to write in your paper. You should remember that. That’s how you find out. That’s. You know, what you hear on YouTube may or may not be true. And especially when you’re young and you don’t have all the critical faculties fully developed yet, you should be skeptical and you should go look it up. And, you know, you could, you know, I remember one time were.08:11S2

These primarily fourth year students or were they freshmen?08:17S3

Uh, they were mostly freshmen and sophomores. Uh, and, you know, they’re, they’re fine. Right. Um, I told something about the development of modern Israel. You know, ancient Israel is the first step in Western civilization, the first step in Western civilization. The earliest, chronologically, is God’s covenant with Abraham, which in a time, you know, this is 1500, 2000 years before Socrates, uh, religion at that time was tribal and familial. Your gods were the gods of your ancestors, your own gods, right? Not somebody else’s gods. And so this thing happens in the Bible. I will be your God and you will be my people. And this will be a blessing to all the peoples on the face of the earth. And in all of the several God’s covenants with the Jewish patriarchs. All the people on the face of the earth are always mentioned, the one God for everybody. Well, that’s a wonderful thing, right? Isn’t that a piece of magic, the equivalent of, you know, extended and perfected by Jesus Christ and parallel to the achievement of Socrates, to look for the truth as it is, wherever it is, and not just according to our view of it. So we went through that stuff. And then at one point, I said that the early Zionists in Europe, this is a factual point, were not particularly religious people. And So one young man asked the question, well, then, what’s a Jew? And I said, yeah, I see if you’re a Christian, that’s a religion, a belief. And if you don’t believe you’re not a Christian. And if you do believe you are. But the Jews are different from that because they are a people. That’s not quite the same thing as a race. That’s a family extended. They are descended from one another, and they inherit things through their families that even if they don’t become orthodox, they think of themselves as they’re a people.10:36S2

That’s the correct answer. People that have become a nation, but some have not become part of the nation. And but they are culture and some are religious and some are not. That’s an excellent answer. More coming up with Doctor Larry Arnn on this Friday edition of the Hillsdale Dialogue. All things Hillsdale, hillsdale.edu. All the prior dialogues are collected at [email protected]. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt talking with Doctor Larry Arnn about the 1960s. Back again with all their splendor and glory. Doctor Ron I did want to before we finished up talking about the wildness of conspiracy theories. I read a new book last week by Joseph LeConte, who, um, has written extensively on a couple of old professors by the name of Tolkien and Lewis and how they went through 1933 to 1945. It’s called The war for Middle Earth. It’s really fascinating. And in it, he quotes C.S. Lewis as saying, the best antidote to the madness of Hitler and of the new ideologies. The only cure for it, actually, is the fresh sea breeze of old books. What do you think Lewis meant by that?11:50S3

Well, he writes a lot about that. He actually wrote an essay called On the Reading of Old Books, And his argument there is that, uh, you know, all learning, by the way, involves an act of stepping outside yourself, right? Because learning is of learning something else. You know, I’m looking at my desk right now. There’s a keyboard and there’s a stapler and there’s a whatever there is. And the point is, if I want to understand those things, I have to look at them. There’s a wonderful, you know, in Aristotle’s de Anima Book three, chapter four, people should go and read it. It’s dense, but it’s beautiful. He actually describes what the soul of the human being would need to be like for it, to be able to see a thing in its kind and form. He says the soul has to be immaterial. It has to be only that thing that it sees. Well, there’s step one. But step two is an old book. Lets you step outside the time that you’re in because you know, we’re in this time right now, right? And this time is particularly oppressive with information. Yeah. It’s so abundant with information that it’s oppressive. So read an old book. It’s like visiting another dimension, certainly another dimension in time. And the only old books that are worth reading. Ultimately, the only contemporary books that are worth reading now are books that can contain a microcosm or an explanation of things that abide, things that are the same over time. You know, we think everything changes. And as we say that we are using a faculty of reason to say it, that if it changed, we wouldn’t be able to understand anything. Is it wrong for an adult to abuse a child? Has that changed? It’s been done. It is done. Is it wrong now? Was it wrong then? Can we see that it’s wrong? Is it still true that, uh, human beings live between certain range of temperature best. And when it gets really cold or really hot? It’s hard, right? In other words, fundamental conditions, most of them, that’s why we call them fundamental don’t change. And so reading old books is a way to isolate what those are. And you know, I’ve been reading Chesterton lately. I like him. Uh, I like Lewis the best, I think, but I like Chesterton, and, uh, he is much more of a well, he goes on and on about Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. He just loves those guys. Treasure Island, you know. Stevenson. And I’m reading right now Black Arrow. And you wouldn’t think it would be interesting. What it’s about is it’s about the yeah, it’s about the, you know, it’s it’s and see, he writes adventure books. And Chesterton makes a claim that these books are of permanent and transcendent value. Treasure Island is probably the best of them. People know what that one is. This one I’m early in the book. But what it is, is there are these families and there’s, you know, the English Civil War is brewing and and there’s raiders and there’s and they’re out in the woods and they’re shooting bows and arrows at each other, and they’re having a rollicking series of adventures. And it’s clannishness. It’s, you know, my family, you’re from my clan, your clan, which is a family tribes like tribe. And, and so, and you see these people fighting and saving and rescuing and killing, and you see their characters unfold. You see what they’re like under pressure. Right. And you see that some of them are very worthy. Some of them are not. You see that many of them are very formidable and bad, and many of them are very formidable and good. And you’re on the side of those ones. Well, aren’t those relationships permanent? Aren’t, aren’t aren’t those the characteristic phenomena in human life? And that book was written a long time ago.16:21S2

I was unaware that that Chesterton recommended Robert Louis Stevenson. Louis recommends Chesterton. I learned that in this new book by LeConte, The War in Middle Earth, a very big fan of Chesterton. So that’s our recommendation for the week. We’re coming back. Don’t go anywhere, America. But our recommendation for the week is Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island and the Black Arrow. Though I don’t think we’ll be doing a whole Hillsdale dialogue on it, though I never know. We do what Doctor Arnn wants to do. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. I’m Hugh Hewitt. Doctor Larry Arnn is my guest. The Hillsdale dialogue is underway the last broadcast hour of the week on the Salem News Channel, the Salem Radio Network, all of our great affiliates, all of them are collected, hundreds of them. Hugh, for hillsdale.com, you can also find everything at Hillsdale, including a fabulous new video course on classical rhetoric and logic, which is very seductive, very, very well shot. And a younger man teaching it who I’ve not made the acquaintance of yet. I’m looking forward to Doctor Arnn up in Maine last week, Governor Janet Mills withdrew from the race to become the next United States senator. She wants to take on Susan Collins, but she can’t get any ground picked up on a fellow named Graham Plattner. Now, there used to be a reality show called Extreme Makeover, and it was originally about unkept people who had bad clothing habits or bad hygiene habits, or just didn’t know how to cut their hair, and they would give them an extreme makeover and they would come out great. Then Extreme Makeover Home Edition, that’s the Home and Garden channel. They go into a dump and they would fix it up and then they’d have the extreme. This is the extreme makeover. Young Mr. Plattner, who’s 41 now, has got himself a Totenkopf tattoo, though he’s tried to blur it out. That’s the death head ruined by the SS who guarded the extermination camps that could kill the prisoners on their own volition. Uh, he’s got a Reddit thread over years full of every kind of bigotry and racist evil you can imagine, but they’re nominating him. Janet Mills got out of the race. He’s raising all the money from the young people this, and he’s running against Susan Collins, who’s the moderate moderate. She’s a quintessential nice person, effective representative, chairwoman of appropriations on the Senate Intelligence Committee, lovely lady. And she won by nine points six years ago when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by nine points in Maine. So she’s formidable as well. Why do you think this keeps happening? Why are Democrats nominating crazy people?19:03S3

The explanation of one of my closest and longest serving colleagues is maybe the country is dying. You know, I mean, really, this is pretty bad. Yeah. People think a lot of crazy things now, and it’s easy to, you know, alarmingly and rapidly make them known. And some of these guys, you know, are like Nick Fuentes. You know, who’s a nut? He’s smart. Right? I think he’s fundamentally irresponsible and amazingly wrong. And I read the other day that he’s losing audience. I hope so. But, you know, you can listen to that stuff. And it’s like a whole new world opening up to you before you start trying to find out whether any of it is true or not. And yeah, and people are remember that people, if you took a poll in 1950. Do you trust the federal government? The trust numbers were very high. And if you took a poll in 1970 and every year after that, they are very low. And one of the reasons for that is the federal government has taken over things in our lives that it doesn’t do very well in orders us about. And it’s got half the economy under its control, directly and indirectly. And, you know, in in, you know, in 1930 that that amount was 12%. And so, you know, we got on with living our lives. Most government in 1930 was local government, not even state government. It was over 60% of total government was your city, town, county. So now all those decisions are made remotely and they’re made nationally and they’re not made very well. The federal government used to come to site chiefly for its three main purposes, which are national defence, a national system of commerce among the states, and dealing with the foreign world. And that’s what it did. And so now it does everything right, and it has altered education in fundamental ways. More than half the employees of public education in America are not teachers. And we run charter schools. And that and their ratio is six or 8 to 1 in favor of the teachers, because you don’t need that. Right. And and so if you’ve got teachers who are reduced to functionaries beneath a huge pile of bureaucracy, education suffers. And that means we don’t know as much as we used to know. And that’s dangerous.21:49S2

As education suffers, people do get dumb and dumber. people are more susceptible to mind viruses. I’ll be right back with Doctor Ami. I’ll tell you about the redistricting decision last week by the Supreme Court. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. Hugh Hewitt, the Hillsdale dialogue is underway. All things [email protected]. They’re having commencement this week, so you can get your application for next year now. And I would recommend that you do that. And you can get all the online courses. You can sign up for [email protected]. They have a brand new movie coming out on on our 250th birthday. I recommend you get information there and you can get every Hillsdale dialogue dating back decade now at hue for hillsdale.com. Doctor Aaron, the Supreme Court did something last week which was truly magnificent. They ended the use of race in the drawing of congressional districts. Now, this should have been done years ago. I’ve been teaching these cases for 25 years. They were incoherent until last week when Justice Alito said, and I’m going to condense it here for the Steelers fans. You can’t use race to award a congressional district or to deny a congressional district to anybody. Race cannot be used in the absence of a previously proven definite intention to use race to screw or to award. That’s it. We’re done with it. I’m very enthused about this decision. What do you think?23:14S3

Oh, yeah. Well, race is a special category, right? Um, it would probably be wrong to discriminate against left handed people. But race is more obvious and has a history of discrimination against it. And so there are extra protections in the law against discriminating on that ground. And they are many, many of the institutions built beginning in the 1960s to combat discrimination on race became engines of discrimination on race. Uh, you know, Hillsdale College does not take the money from the government When that money began to be offered in about 1960, there were a lot of debates on our board and they said, well, we could take the money. We we’ve never discriminated on race. Our founding article say, without regard to race, sex or national origin. We’ve always read that at the beginning of every board meeting today. This week, would we have a board meeting? So we thought we could do it. But then, you know, it became a compulsion to count by race, to report, by race, to come under pressure. If you don’t have the numbers that they like of race. And so this redistricting stuff too is the same. You know, I remember a few years ago, I read an article from some conservative or Republican who said, yeah, this is a really good thing because it forces them to concentrate a lot of Democratic black votes, and that will mean more Republican seats. And, and I, I, I responded to that. Okay. It shouldn’t take account of that at all, right? Not for. Not for our political advantage or theirs. Not for anybody’s.25:01S2

Not.25:02S3

And, uh, now, I’m not saying that redistricting is going to be honest. I think it’s going to grow more dishonest. But, um, you know, I, I heard my colleague Mollie Hemingway say the other day, she teaches journalism here. I heard her say the other day that, uh, if the, if the red states did what Virginia is attempting to do, court seems to have stopped them for the time being. Uh, they could get 48 more Republican congressional seats. Well, you know, that means two can play at that game. And the Republicans are more spread out across territory than the Democrats. So I you know, I expect that there’ll be attempts that way. You read about them going on right now. Florida, I think is the latest.25:49S2

Yeah. Well, it’s an era of maximum partisanship. I do not mind this, doctor. I really don’t. I know that the framers weren’t big fans of faction, but faction is here and it’s inevitable. And so provided they don’t draw lines based on race, I think the courts ought to stay out of it. And states can have independent commissions if they want. They can divide by continuity, contiguity or by cities or by compactness, but they just can’t use race and let the chips fall where they may.26:21S3

And that’s an enormous gain, right? And and that by itself. Right. And you know about the founders, by the way, I should mention Matt writes Madison liberty is to faction as air is to fire. We’re always going to have factions. What he tried to do was prevent there being a majority faction. And that’s what the you know, in other words, he defines it carefully in Federalist ten. It’s a group of people who have majority control and rule in their own interests, which is also the definition of tyranny in Aristotle’s politics. So he was trying to prevent that. And what we have a struggle over, the reason politics are intense is that there’s a danger that we could get that here. Because remember what I said, if half the economy directly and indirectly is controlled by the government, then there’s enormous resources at stake, right? And the government itself and its assigns, its employees, its beneficiaries, its contractors are an enormous force in the electoral system. So there are dangers of majority faction among us today. What was the James Carville, you know, the moderate Democrat, said that if for the first time the Democrats get control again, They have to do D.C. put D.C. and Puerto Rico into the Union fully. Get four more Senate seats out of that, and then we have to amend the voting rights laws so we can’t be losing elections anymore. Well, that’s the danger, and that’s why politics are so intense. And then on the other hand, you get certain politicians rising who want to drain the swamp. The swamp is very big and the people in it don’t like it.28:23S2

Don’t want to be drained. They don’t want to be drained.28:26S3

So that, you know, they can’t. They’re swamp creatures. They can’t live if it’s drained. So you see, that’s in other words. And what. And another one with the point in rather more direct language, it is a question what form and purpose of government will we have? Just like in the American Revolution and just like in the Civil War, the consequences of that fate today.28:52S2

And that’s why the debate. We have one more segment coming up. Don’t go anywhere America. Doctor Arnn and his his tribe at Hillsdale have been turning out amazing books. And I want to talk to him briefly about two of them. In our last segment, Mollie Hemingway, he mentioned. But I also have to bring up Matt Spalding. And I also want to bring up one that’s referenced by Brett Baer and Brett’s new book, The Case for America. They’re all Hillsdale books. They’re all Hillsdale people. Stay tuned. You’ll hear their titles next on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Welcome back America. The Hillsdale Dialogue wrapping up this week. Hope you have a great Mother’s Day weekend planned. If you haven’t done anything for mom, here are three suggestions. Doctor Larry Arnn is my guest. He presides as president over Hillsdale College, connected to the College of three books, two of them real new. Uh, Mollie Hemingway, who teaches at the Kirby Center journalism just produced Alito, which is a fabulous book. I also want to mention that Matt Spalding, who was on last week, produced the the book The Making of the American Mind Understanding the Declaration of Independence, which won the ISI Award for book of the year, which is a big deal. And then I was interviewed by Bret Baier for his new book, The Case for America, and he asked me, what should people read? And I said, well, I think they ought to start with Wilfred Maclay’s land of Hope, the one volume history of the American People. That is fabulous. You’re turning out a lot of good books up there in Hillsdale, Doctor Oren.30:16S3

Yeah, I keep thinking I ought to give him more work. Yeah. There’s some talent. All three of those books are splendid. Now, the first book in any of them has written, all their other books are good, too. But these three are sort of coming at peaks in their career. You know, they worked on these kind of things for a long time, and they’ve learned a lot, and they’ve got themselves, their skills to a place where they can really produce. So they’re very worth reading. Alito is, um, you know, he, he ranks there close to Clarence Thomas because those those two are revolutionary justices on the Supreme Court. And thank God for them.30:55S2

Steady and courageous men. Uh, they are steady and courageous. Now, I don’t know who will be judged the more influential over the years. I suspect it will be Alito, but the more inspirational may very well be. Justice Thomas, has a Justice Alito been a guest on your college yet, Doctor Arne?31:14S3

No. He entertains our students in his chambers, and I’ve invited him to speak here. And in this day and age, he didn’t say he never will. He did say he would love to. But he also says he doesn’t want to put the security people to the work it takes these days for him to go anywhere. And, uh, you know, that’s a cost that we all bear by the intensity and violence of the age.31:43S2

It is a consideration of his is generous because it is actually quite real. And when people step out and about at public events. I wasn’t at the white House Correspondents Association dinner this year. Uh, but I doubt that many such events are going to be held anymore. I pray that commencements go well. I don’t know who’s speaking at yours this week, but have a jolly commencement. That’s what they’re intended to be uplifting and jolly. And for the parents who are wondering what their students have been doing for four years because they’re different now than they were when they dropped them off. So have a wonderful commencement, doctor, Larry Arnn.32:22S1

Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.

The post The Rising Tide of Political Violence appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Jonathan Gregg, assistant professor of education at Hillsdale College, delivers a lecture on instilling wonder in your students when teaching mathematics.

This lecture was given at the Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence seminar, “The Art of Teaching: Mathematics” in September 2025. The Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence, an outreach of the Hillsdale College K-12 Education Office, offers educators the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge and refine their skills in the classroom.

Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/

A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.

Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. Great teachers don’t merely know and love their content. They captivate students with it. The best lessons are full of wonder, engagement, and curiosity. But it can be daunting to try to replicate these moments over and over again with some initial work and lots of practice. Teachers can infuse their class time with these elements without running in circles. Doctor Jonathan Gregg, assistant professor of education at Hillsdale College, spoke on how to infuse your pedagogy with wonder at a September 2025 center for Teacher Excellence event on the Art of teaching mathematics. Though his ideas are presented in the context of mathematics, countless applications can be found for every classroom subject. Here’s Doctor Gregg.

I’m going to talk about pedagogy. Pedagogy is not easy. The Greek of pedagogy just means a child leader. And children don’t like to be led. I have some of them. They’re bad at at following. And so pedagogy is necessarily hard. It’s complex. It’s different every day. And it’s it’s hard to kind of what you. The difficulty, I think, in pedagogy is that as teachers, we search for something stable. We want something. We want to eliminate the chaos in the classroom, right? There is you deal with enough chaos every day. And so you want something to rely on. But pedagogy has to be new. It has to be exciting. It has to be something that that you can’t just repeat day after day after day after day, because then it becomes boring and we lose. We lose the sense of wonder here. And so I want to try to inhabit that space a little bit today to think about how do you keep things exciting? How do you keep things wonderful without making making yourself run in circles wildly or making yourself plan for hours and hours every night? How do you how do you do something that’s habitual and yet still wonderful? This is kind of the thing that I’m interested in here. I think that’s the core of core of pedagogy because. So I’ll start with a quote as well. This is, you know, one of those quotes that you read and you just you can’t get it off of your mind. It kind of haunts you. I read this, I read this a few years ago, and I think I think it’s it haunts me. Right. The capacity to wonder is among man’s greatest gifts. It’s so true. And if you think back, even. Just think back to your good lesson. Think back to a good lesson that you did. I guarantee you wonder showed up somewhere. And actually, this is the one place where I do think students will and children will follow. They’ll follow what they wonder about. They’ll follow what, uh, what’s wonderful. Um, and so I think this quote is if we’re looking for a, a beginning of pedagogy, a first philosophy of pedagogy, I think this has got to be it. People are people actually goes on. And he says this, he says, really the situation is this, the deeper aspects of reality. That’s what we want students to get are apprehended in the ordinary things of everyday life and not in the sphere cut off and segregated from it. The sphere of the essential or whatever it may be called. It’s in the things we come across in the experience of everyday life that the unusual emerges and we no longer take them for granted. In that situation corresponds with the inner experience, which has been regarded as the beginning of philosophy, the act of marveling, kind of see how this is going to work? You present something. It’s unusual. Students wonder at it, and then they start to think. And that’s philosophy. And this is where where you can kind of see how wonder is going to be the thing that’s possible as a proof here. And honestly, we can’t we can’t go too far in math without talking about about wonder as a maybe not a proof, but at least some evidence for it. I have to be careful using the word proof around around this, this crew, you guys have some high standards for this, but at least as some evidence. Right? Here we go. Here are some quotes on wonder. We want students. We want to get students to wonder about hypotheses. This was Doctor Dave Gabler four hours ago. Mathematics should instill in students an ever increasing sense of wonder. This was doctor Tom Treloar three hours ago and we mathematicians like to wonder if there’s anything else we can do with this. This was Doctor David Murphy. Not even one hour ago. All right, so these guys are in here talking about wonder, right. I wasn’t in Miss Jackson’s talk but I guarantee you wonder showed up. I’m gonna go back and look at the transcript. But it’s there, right? It’s there. But what I can’t do is stand up here and say, go get your students to wonder. That’s not a thing we can do. That’s that’s not helpful as teachers. So the real question is how do we get students to wonder and how do we habitually do that? This is the question for today. It’s not an easy question. How do we habitually get students to wonder? Because I think if we can, we’re already doing the kind of things that we should be doing in our math classroom, right? You’ve already kind of won as a teacher. Wonder leads to philosophy. So what is wonder and how do we do it? Okay, let’s go to Peter one more time. Socrates. is talking about Socrates here. He’s actually about the Titus. Titus is a dialogue between Socrates and a mathematician. All right. We saw Theaetetus actually show up on Doctor Murphy’s slides here. And he says Socrates brings Theaetetus to the point of admitting his ignorance with his shrewd and kindly but staggering and astonishing questions, questions that stagger and astonish with wonder. And there, for the first time in the theater, without solemnity or ceremony, almost. By the way, though fresh as dawn appears, the thought that has become commonplace in the history of pedagogy. The beginning of philosophy is wonder. You see it again here. But notice what he’s doing with wonder. Saying look wonder happens in two ways. Yes, it’s kind of staggering and astonishing thing. So it’s actually a really lovely word, right? One of the best words in the English language are the words that we equivocate on, that go, that go that have two different definitions, right? Think of the word witness is one of my favorite examples here. Witness. Witness is a beautiful word, right? It means both to observe something taking place and to share about the thing that you saw, right? And the fact that we use the same word for it means when you see something, you are obligated. You have a responsibility to share it. Actually, what you guys are doing, right, you’re witnessing to your students. Okay. Anyways, I’m off track. I’m off track. But wonder is the same thing, right? Where questions that stagger and astonish with wonder. Right. First of all, wonder means that I’m staggered. I don’t know something. Right. I recently wondered how to put Freon in my car because I didn’t know how to do it, and it was 120 degrees in my car and I was upset. I don’t know how to do this. And I was staggered and I wondered, and then what did I do? I did what any self-respecting person would do. Got on YouTube right. And figured it out. But there’s wonder. We are staggered. We then go and figure the thing out. And that’s where learning takes place. But first you have to be dislocated, right? I wonder about this. I wonder what’s going on. I’m confused. It’s almost like you’re you’re you’re dislocated. You’re shocked. Socrates actually calls himself a torpedo fish, which is an electric eel. Apparently that the idea is he’s a he’s just shocking people. He’s like, what about this? What about this? And you’re shocked. I think students you can shock students into wondering. But also this astonishment. Say, oh, I wonder at that thing that’s marveling. It’s this, it’s this or that students can have as well. So we see this dual understanding of wonder, right. And an invocation of the Socratic method. So let’s piece some of this together and think about what pedagogy looks like. So I present to you pedagogy. Thank you. Pedagogy. I’ll take your question. No, I need some labels. Yes, we need some labels. Okay, so don’t take the pictures yet. Wait for the labels. Here we go. Actually, don’t take any pictures. Just email me for the slides. But let’s get some labels here because this shape is meaningless. This is not a meaningful shape. This is not a polyhedron. Right? So what’s going on here? Number one. Right. I have a lightning bolt. I think this is what we think of as an opening question. Right? I’m envisioning the teacher kind of as as Zeus here, right? Chucking a lightning bolt in the middle of students. And what’s going to happen is they’re going to this is the shock part of wonder, right? You’re going to be dislocated. You’re not going to understand the thing. Right? And you can see these blue lines. This is ideally what student responses are going to be that students can go have a bunch of different potential ideas out of this wonder. Wonder leads to this kind of exploration, right? And then these kind of curlicue lines, this is what I’m calling follow up questions that select different student responses and then follow up on them until we get to the green thing. This is the truth. Okay. The thing we want to teach the learning goal, if you will. What you want to teach the student. Okay. And then what we have are these maybe some examples, maybe some practices, some applications. Once we learn this thing, then we practice it, then we do it. Then we. But I think the idea here is that you, uh, this is kind of how one might learn in the, in the field of wonder or using wonder where you’re invoking the Socratic method, where there’s both shock, right? Staggering. And then there’s potentially astonishment down here. Okay. I think every good lesson, or at least a lot of good lessons are going to follow something like this in a math classroom. Okay. And maybe here’s one way of, of proving, again, this is not a proof, but some evidence for this. If we look at the dominant pedagogical approaches that we are surrounded with, I think there’s two dominant pedagogical approaches. I think what you might call the progressive and what you might call the dogmatic, the dogmatic, I think, is this here’s the truth. Let me hand you the formula. Let me hand you how to do it. Practice it over and over and over and over again until it gets drilled into your face. Okay, that’s the dogmatic pedagogy. Or you have progressive pedagogy, which kind of throws out an idea and then says, go students, explore, be empowered, go to your heart’s content. Right? But it doesn’t really believe that there’s any truth to be found, right? It’s about whatever students want to do, right? And it just cuts off the top half of this versus cutting off the bottom half of this. Right? But somehow in between these two extremes, there’s something holistic where we have wonder at the beginning and wonder at the end from wonder to wonder, right? That’s, I think, what a pedagogical approach looks like. But this shape is, is just a shape. Let me illustrate. All right. So I’m going to teach you guys. You guys are students. I will be teacher. And and I’m going to teach you guys pretend you’re first graders. This is a first grade class. Okay, good. Good morning, boys and girls. I’m really excited to be with you guys today. Guess what. I want to teach you guys a new word. Can you guys say this with me? Say this after me. The word is multiplication. You guys say that with me. Very good. Multiplication. Now multiplication is repeated. Addition multiplication is very good. So if I have a problem like three plus three plus three, plus three plus three, that’s a lot of threes, don’t you think? My hand is almost tired writing up all of these threes. Right. So would you guys like to learn a better way for writing that I think we would. So I can write this as five and then I need a new symbol. I’m not going to use addition anymore. Can everyone make me the symbol of addition with your hands? Right. Okay. I need a new symbol. So what we’re going to do? Hold your addition. Oh. New symbol. Right? We have an X5X35X3. And just like I have a word for this, what word do I use for this plus right. I’m going to use a new word for my multiplication. I’m going to use times. Say it with me. So five times three because it’s three five times. Some of you guys are legitimately like, oh wow. Okay, so can we figure out what Three five times three is. Can you guys count with me? Three. Six. Nine. 1250. Very good. Five times three is equal to 15. And you guys just did your first multiplication problem. Okay? And cut and cut. Okay, so we can keep going, right. But what kind of pedagogy was that? Right. That’s dogmatic pedagogy. Okay. It’s entertaining, but it’s handing you the four way to do this. Here’s how to do this. Here’s what the words mean. I’m handing you this thing. Is it good? Do I need to teach kids this? Yes. Is this where I want to start? No. Right. Because if you’re first graders, I can walk in and say, I’m going to teach you guys a new word, multiplication. But if I walk into my ninth grade class, I’m going to teach you guys a new word logarithm. Mr. Greg, why we don’t care, right? Okay, so and slowly. This is why students start to hate math is because we teach it pretty. One of the reasons we teach it pretty dogmatically. And there. There’s no buy in, right? There’s no there’s nothing that they’re doing mathematically. They’re not actually engaging in mathematics. They’re just receiving the results of mathematics. Right. Doctor Murphy said mathematics is a human activity. We need to get them doing the mathematics. Okay. Good. Let me try again. Good morning boys and girls. I’m really excited to be with you guys today. Go ahead and take out your devices. I’ve preloaded the module to explore today’s lesson. It’s called multiplication, but you guys go ahead and explore on your own. Figure it out, see what you can make of what’s going on. And I’ll just be over here in case you need to answer any questions. And you guys can go ahead and explore and we’ll talk at the end just to see. We’ll share how we’ll do a little share out to see what people thought of your chance to explore And cut. Okay, so what kind of progressive what kind of pedagogy here, right? This is what progressive pedagogy looks like or feels like. It’s not. There are other ways to do this, but really what it does is it the goal is for the teacher to fade into the background, to have students do the exploration on their own, right? The teacher doesn’t get to have a role to play that this is that it’s it’s actually oppressive for me to impose my truth upon you. Right. And I think this, as you guys know, it’s it just doesn’t work, right. Students don’t aren’t able, by and large to do this. And what it does, I think, is it bifurcates students into those who can figure it out on their own and those who can’t. Right. I think one of the one of the really unspoken things of progressive pedagogy is that it’s attempt to kind of empower all students equally. The pedagogy is the thing that ends up bifurcating the students into the haves and the have nots. It’s really problematic, actually. The methods of progressive pedagogy undermine their stated goals, in my opinion. I can talk more about this if you want, but okay, let me try one more time. Morning boys and girls. I’ve got a question for you guys today. Which of these two problems is easier to figure out how many fingers we have as a class, or to figure out how many pets we have as a class. You guys are bad first graders. Fingers. Pets. Fingers. Pets. My brother has a cat. Okay. Right. But this is what you want. This is what you want. Okay, so, fingers, let’s try the pets one. What do I have to do to figure out the pets? What do I have to do? I’ve got to ask people. Right. Okay, good. Let’s ask. How many pets do you have? Five. How many pets do you have? Ten. How many do you have? Does my little sister count as a pet? No. Fast forward. Pets, pets. Now I’ve got all everyone’s pets on the board. Now, how do I figure out how much we have all together? I have to use addition. Why do I have to use addition? Ah, because we’re sitting all together. Good. So let’s add fast forward. We have 312 pets as a class. Whew! That is a lot of pets. I hope we don’t bring them in here. So let’s try the fingers one. How do I figure out how many fingers we have as a class? Can I do the same way? Can I do it the same way? Yes. No. Who thinks yes? Who thinks no? Why do you think? Yes. Sure. Why do you think no? Okay, okay. So let’s try. Let’s try it the same way here. Right. How many fingers do you have? Ten. How many things do you have? I have eight. Two of them are thumbs, right? Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. This is what you. But again, this is what you want in the classroom. You want a little drama, you want a little energy, right? Yeah, right. And I get a couple people in here. Do I need to keep asking people? I don’t why not? Everyone has the same number of fingers. That’s interesting. interesting. What do I need to know to solve this problem? How many people there are? I need to know that. And how many fingers. If someone’s missing a finger. Yeah. How many fingers each person has. Right. This is a different kind of problem, right? So. Okay. And I’ll cut there because now what am I going to do? I’m going to do I’m here now, right. And now I’m going to say like, let’s write up the multiplication problem. What you guys just did with the pets. That’s multiplication. That’s not addition. Something new right? Okay. So go ahead and cut. And you could see how a lesson looks like when you walk in and say which is easier. Fingers or pets? Lightning bolt question right. No one knows what’s going on here. They’re like, what? This is math class. You’re talking about fingers and pets. I got reactions. I at least got two reactions, right? I got fingers and I got pets. And both are defensible pets. Probably there’s fewer pets than fingers. It would be easier, right? Then what did I do? Notice the kind of pedagogy that I employed. What did I do? Did I say a single statement? I didn’t say a statement. One time. I say one statement. Right. This is what the Socratic method looks like. By asking, right. Picking the two responses and asking a bunch of follow up questions, I was able to get them to tell me the things that we need for a multiplication problem, namely, namely number of groups and number in each group. That’s what multiplication is. We need two things and we can figure out the total that way. But they’re the ones that did that thing. They engaged in the activity of multiplication before. And we didn’t just kind of let it be there. And then we’re going to formalize it into what what we actually want and practice it like we would like we would normally, but we can see what we you know, we by taking this Socratic method. And is there wonder at the end. I don’t know, but at the very least they should feel that, oh, in this world there are multiplicative situations and additive situations. Is a fourth grader being able to say that? No, but I can say what other problems are like the fingers problem toes. Yeah, right. You guys are bad first graders. How about some non body part ones and ask him to think right wheels on a car, maybe something like this where they’re noticing that the world actually that multiplication is a response to the world and math is woven into the cosmos and all. And what we’re doing is we’re noticing patterns in the cosmos, right? Our first grader is going to be able to say that to, you know, but are they going to slowly feel that math starts to be this thing that I walk in? I put a question on the board or ask a question and we mess around with it and play with it until some truth emerges. Until we discover some truth. That’s, I think, where we can get something like wonder in the math class. This type of a shape. Okay. So again, I still don’t think this shape is all that helpful because how do you come up with these opening questions? What follow up questions do you ask? How do you do these things? Okay. So that’s what I want to do. Don’t let me off the hook for being impractical still, right? I have to give you guys some tangible advice for these things. This is what we need. So let’s do it. Okay. Here’s how you do opening questions. Go. New new. New talk. Opening questions. Socrates says, come then to me. He’s talking to a mathematician here, actually. Right. And do your best to answer the questions I’ll ask you. And if I abstract and expose your ideas? Because I discover upon inspection that the conception which you have formed is a vain shadow. Do not quarrel with me, for it would be wrong for me to admit falsehood, or to stifle the truth. Right. Come to me and expose your ideas. That’s what an opening question does. Exposes student thinking, exposes ideas. Okay, so here we go. What makes for a good opening question? Number one has to be accessible to all students. Okay. The very first thing out of your mouth is something that some students can’t grapple with or understand. You’re going to lose half your class. Okay. There’s got to be something that every student can think about, right? Which is easier? Fingers or pets? Everyone can have an opinion. That’s no access barrier there. Okay. Number two, it has to be challenging to all students because there’s no easier way to lose half your class than for the first thing out of your mouth to be something they already know the answer to. Okay, so it has to be both accessible, right? Which is easier, fingers or pets? No one really has written the has written the book on this. No one. This isn’t a thing that one can really even know, right? This is challenging in some ways to everyone, at least to think about. Right? Number three, it has to provoke multiple thoughtful student responses. I need this is not just a yes or no right or wrong answer that I’m starting with. It has to be multiple thoughtful responses. I want to scatter my students. I want them to be dislocated. I want them to wonder. But number four, it has to be directly oriented to the truth. This isn’t just some progressive. Think about this guys. Do what you want, right? Follow your dreams. No. Right. And in particular, I think these two and these two are really tough needle to thread. How do you get something that’s accessible and challenging to everyone. And how do you get something that’s Towards the truth. Enough that it’s going to get you there. But open ended enough that it’s going to get students thinking in multiple ways. It’s a high bar for opening questions. Okay. I don’t think there’s as high a bar for follow up questions, which is good. But again, don’t let me off the hook. What kinds of things make for good opening questions? What are some good examples? Okay, so what I’ve done, I took all my lesson plans that I ever wrote and put them in one massive pile, and I started just sorting them into different kinds of opening questions. Okay. And I came up with five piles. So here are my five piles. There’s probably more opening questions, but here are the ones that I know that work. Okay. Number one, we get our students. Each one of these has a kind of posture that I want students to adopt, right? So number one, I think these are noticing questions. I think this is the very basic of opening questions. We ask students to notice, say, what’s going on, right? Usually this is a why question. Noticing is observe. See something and try to explain, observe and explain. Observe and explain. See something and explain to me what’s going on, what’s going on here, what’s going on here? Why is this taking place? The very, at the very least, walk in with a why question at the very beginning. Why is this right? I think it’s especially true for generating formulas. Here are some examples. Okay. Why can we not use our method for adding 23 plus 45 for the question 23 plus 48. Notice that this doesn’t work. And explain. Notice and explain. Notice and explain. Why is subtracting a negative and positive? How big a box do I need to carry stuff? Notice stuff comes in different sizes and how to explain if you’re trying to teach volume, how big a box do I need to carry that thing? What thing are you carrying? I don’t know a thing, a turtle. How big a box where what you’re doing is you’re asking students to think and then forcing them to articulate things. They say, well, right. Instead of me being like, volume has three dimensions length, width, and height, right? Ask them to put stuff in boxes, see what happens. They’re going to tell you that things have three dimensions you got to worry about. They’re going to tell you how big space is. Students can do this. They can come up with this stuff. It takes the right opening question. So actually fun fact, I would give this same talk to any of the disciplines. I think this is how we teach literature history science best anyways, right. Here are some other questions. Why is being a hero so difficult? Literature. Why do the Articles of Confederation fail? History. Why do feathers fall slower than bowling balls? Science. Everything. We are driven by these noticing type of questions. Okay, but that’s very basic level. Okay, there are better ones. Number two, I asked my students to notice. Ask my students to compare. Okay. It’s like noticing on steroids. Noticing. Noticing. Times two. Notice. Notice. Compare. See? What’s the difference between really good ones, right? This is different than this notice. Notice. Explain the differences. Right. Juxtaposing two related ideas. It’s often phrased as an er or est question. If you teach like third, fourth, fifth grade, those humans are just little extremists, right? This is what they want to do with their life anyway, right? Just lean into it. Ask them best. Worst math is a lot of about what’s the best way to do something. Which is easier. Figuring out figures of pets. Which is easier, this problem or this problem? Which is faster? Start in the ones place the hundreds. Place the difference between this and this. This one’s really great. This. This factoring one. The second one on there. This is how I teach my eighth graders how to factor. I divide them class in half and I say, give them some reward. Like, you know. All right, a little test for you guys right off the bat. Uh, first, uh, fastest way to get a solution gets half the homework off or whatever, right? And they’re all like, they’re all in now. Like, yeah, okay, good, good. Let’s do it right. Going down right. And I give one half. I pass out this problem. They flip it over and I give the other half this problem. And you know, the the half that I get this problem is done in 10s. The other half is still going. I’m like. And so they’re raising up their whiteboards. I’m like, good, good good good good good good. And this guy, this, this whole half is just getting angrier and angrier and angrier and angrier. Like what? You gave them a different problem. I was like, I don’t think I did. I think it’s the same problem, right? It’s the same problem. Same problem. Right. It’s unfair. Right. And, and I’m like, oh, you, you think this is a hard problem? What’s hard about this? They’re like, there’s two X’s. There’s a squared, right? And I’m like, oh, you want some ways to take this hard problem and turn it into an easier problem? Yeah. Oh let me. And they beg me to teach him how to factor. Right. And I am benevolent and so I do. Right. This is. But the idea is just look, this is hard. Oops. This is hard. This is easy. Let’s learn how to do it right. Easy stuff. Right. Okay. It’s like shooting little angsty eighth graders in a barrel. It’s great. It’s great pedagogy, right? Same in other disciplines as well, right? What’s the difference between the way that Elizabeth envisions marriage, the way that Darcy envisions marriage? Great opening question. Oops. Uh, was there ever a moment when you’d be decisive and moment need to be cautious? If I’m teaching the Battle of Gettysburg. Oh, man. I’m opening with that question. Day one. They had to be real decisive to get that high ground right. Day three, just the boldness run amok, right? Number four. Right. Or the last one, which is harder to roll a ball up a hill to keep it stable at the top of the hill. Good comparison. Okay. I asked them to notice, to compare, to create questions of how would you or design Your kindergarten first, second grade teacher. They should be drawing. They should be designing all of these things they can do. Draw me this. Draw me something. Design me something. Create me something. The idea here is to use get students using their imaginations. We want our math classes to be imaginative. Notice how this is great to get all students doing different things right. This is going to provoke multiple responses to create. This is one of the beautiful things about human beings is we all have different creativity. If I asked you guys to write a poem, you guys would all hopefully write something different. Otherwise it’d be a little creepy, right? Design a game that seems fair but isn’t. If I’m teaching some expected value. That’s a great question, right? Design me a problem that can be solved for this bar model, right? Flip it on its head. Literature. Design me a defensive strategy for Tom Robinson. Design me a scenario of the Roman system of government particularly struggle with. Design me something that seems alive but isn’t. If. I’m sorry, I’m doing all these other disciplines here, but if I’m trying to teach the seven qualities of life right? Movement, science, knowledge, movement, respiration, sensation, growth, reproduction, excretion, nutrition. Okay, great. These are my seven classes. I can walk in and say, all right, kids, today we’re going to learn the seven qualities of life. Write them down. Write them down. Write them down. Right. It’s not really pedagogy, right? That’s just dogmatic teaching. It’s easy. Right? Design me something that seems alive but isn’t. Go work with the person next to you. Explore for a little bit. This isn’t just like explore to your heart’s content, but try some stuff and then let’s come back and talk about it. Right. And my follow up questions write themselves. Maybe they come up with, I don’t know, a robot, a virus Wind. Uh, stories, I don’t know. Plenty of things seem alive, but aren’t. And I can ask them, why do you think that seems alive? Why does it seem alive? How do you know that it’s not alive? I bet you they can get all seven of those things. Or at least six, right? Okay, good. Notice. Compare. Create number for struggle. Okay. Um. The question in the back of your head should be, is this accessible to everyone? If I make them struggle with stuff. No. Right. In that they’re going to struggle. But since I’m asking everyone to struggle, it’s weirdly accessible, right? As soon as if you’re a kid that’s going to that I put a problem on the board and they’re like. But then they look around their classmates and everyone’s going, now I’ve leveled the playing field again, right? This is accessible to everyone. I’m not asking for insights here as much as I’m asking them to grapple with the thing, right? To struggle to try some stuff, right. I think we struggle in two ways. Something initially that seems impossible becomes clearer upon investigation, or something that initially seems simple, that becomes more impossible under investigation. So a couple examples here. Right? 706 divided by three trying to teach remainders for the first time. Throw it up there. 76 divided by three go! Mr. Greg. It doesn’t come out right. Oh, okay. What are we going to do? Here’s $706. You guys just made it divided amongst yourselves, right? Two to the X equals 13. Oh it’s great. I’m trying to teach. I’m trying to teach logarithms. I walk in, right. You guys are the ninth graders. Two to the X equals 13. All right. Go for it, guys. Now your ninth graders, right? Oh, Mr. Greg, why do you do this to us? Oh, what’s hard about this one? There’s no twos that get a 13, Mr. Greg. Oh, okay. How about this one? Two plus x equals 13. Do you know that one? 11. How’d you do that one? Ah, we just subtracted two. Okay. Right. All right. Two times x equals 13. Six and a half. How’d you do that? One divided by two. We know these. All right. Well, two x equals 13. Is the answer bigger or less than one bigger. How do you know? Two to the one is two. Is it bigger? Less than two bigger. It’s bigger. Less than three. It’s still bigger. It’s between 3 and 4. Mr. Greg. Oh, okay. Well, what’s hard about this? How’d you know to divide by two when we had a multiplication problem? Because it’s the opposite of it. We’re not going to use inverse operations. They’re just not going to say it, but they will. You know, they’re never going to use the right words that you want, but they’ll say, say, say. Okay. Well, what’s hard about this one? And some kid will say, oh, well, we just need is a magic thing that undoes the exponentiation. I’m like, oh, is that what you want? Right. And they’ve begged me for logarithms. Right. I mean, like, again, this take take this one. Right. I’m trying to teach the fundamental theorem of calculus. I put this on the board. They’re like, how much area are. It doesn’t even have any lines. Mr.. Greg. Okay, I’ll draw some lines. Fine. Great. Now, how much area? What’s hard about this? It’s not a square, Mr. Greg. It’s got curves. Oh, okay. Is the answer bigger? Less than one. I can see the the follow up questions right themselves. Right. Like bigger. Bigger. How do you know? Well, there’s one square here, and it’s bigger. Right. How do you get a better. How do you get a better approximation?

I could use some smaller squares.

Sometimes you have to pull this out and then some kid will raise their hand. Usually the smart aleck of the smart alecks would be like, why don’t we just use infinite rectangles, Mr. Greg? I’m like, yes, let’s do that. Let’s do that. Right? But again, like, instead of walking in and being like, so now I have a curve and then I have area and I’m going to divide this up into infinite rectangles. Like the kids are just like, what? They can do this stuff, right? You just have to ask the right opening question to get them there. Okay. Struggle questions are all over the place. Lastly, prediction. So the last one I like to do notice, compare, create, struggle, predict. These are what if questions, right. Where they’re either gathering evidence or reasoning forward or they’re imagining what’s going to happen if something were different. What if questions. Okay. What if there were no tends to borrow from. Oh, no. What if we could take the square root of a negative number? Imagine what if there’s an A term that’s not actually not that great of an opening question, but what if there were an a term for this quadratic? What if frog toed shoes and toad were in frog shoes? What if Hitler hadn’t tried to invade Russia? What if we heat this up? We do these types of questions all the time, getting them to predict each one of these postures. Right? Notice, compare, create, struggle, and predict is going to get kids wondering about the thing. Okay? And so when you walk into your classroom, I challenge you. See if you can put a question on the board or a ask them, say to say, all right, boys and girls, I’ve got a question for you guys. If that’s the first words out of your mouth every single time, it’s not going to work right away, right? They’re not going to be used to this and be like, what? This is not math. But if every day you walk in and say, good morning, I’ve got a question for you guys. Good morning. I’ve got a question for you guys. Good morning. I’ve got a question for you guys. Slowly they’re going to start to realize that math is not just repeating and regurgitating the thing, but it’s engaging in the act of mathematics. It’s doing math. It’s figuring stuff out. It’s imagining, it’s hypothesizing, it’s playing around with stuff. You’re involving them in what mathematicians actually do. Okay. I do think this is then a thing that can become somewhat habitual, because you can’t be inventing opening questions every single night, but you can just say, all right, say, I’m going to commit to doing this one thing every single day. Right? And I have five where you sit down to lesson plan. Maybe you have ten minutes, maybe you have five minutes to plan for this thing. Is there a question I can ask that gets my kids either noticing, comparing, creating, struggling, or predicting? One thing that I like to do a little bit is to challenge myself not to write the key formula, definition, or process on the board until the students say it. I can’t always do this. I fail a lot of times, but I like to challenge myself. Can I get them to tell me groups and in each group and total, can I get them to say those words? Sometimes I fail, but at least I’m trying to do that type of thing. Can I get them to say we need a process that undoes the exponentiation? Can I get a student to say that? And then I say, yes, that’s what we need. That’s what we do. Okay, good. New talk, follow up questions. Where am I at? What time is it? We don’t have time, do we? What time? We got time. I’m ignoring. Ignoring the clock. The good news is, follow up questions I think are easier than opening questions. I think there’s a lot of bad opening questions. I think there’s very few bad follow up questions. Okay. And I mean that sincerely. Right. Where again, what we have here is this example from the Theaetetus. If you want to know what it means to just teach Socratically, if you’ve ever wondered what that word means, this is what it means to do this, because this is what Socrates does. Once more, Theaetetus, I repeat my old question what is knowledge? Opening question. This is a struggle. Struggle question what is knowledge? There’s no good answers to that, right? The knowledge is perception. That’s a student response. And then what does Socrates do? He says, bravely said, that’s the way you should express your opinion. Now let’s examine together this conception of yours and see whether it’s a true birth or a windegg. Windegg. This is just an empty shell with no. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten one of those from a grocery store. Okay, good. Okay, so what we have here is this shape where I prompt student thinking. Usually with an opening question, I get a response and then I ask a follow up question based on that response. Right? So there’s other options. I could say what’s five plus eight? Someone could say 13 and I could say good and ask a different question. That’s not a follow up question. It’s five plus 813. How’d you figure that out? It’s using the response as the thing that you go back and forth. This is where you get a little bit of dialogue is the idea here. Okay, so. I’m going to skip through this a lot. Let’s see why our follow up question important. They help students make sense of their experiences, right? They help you to think deeper about the thing. They ask you to dwell on meaningful ideas and problems, probe into the reasons for truth and not just truth themselves. We care about truth, especially in math, but we care about the discovery of truth. Challenge students to provide explanations that go beyond one word answers. One of the best definitions of math. We’ve seen a couple of them. One of them we haven’t seen. Paul Lockhart says mathematics is the art of explanation. Okay. Right. Get them explaining. You’ve already won. Right. If you’re getting students explaining their thinking, you’ve already been victorious. I was I was doing a couple of years ago, I was doing a model lesson in kindergarten. So I was I was doing a kindergarten and we were doing calendar time and I was having a blast. Calendar time is amazing, right? And we it was Tuesday or something, and we put the 14 in the slot of the calendar. It was the 14th. And so I asked, what number are we going to put in the Friday slot? Right. Okay, maybe not the best opening question, but a question. Right. And a girl raises her hand. She goes 17. I was like, yes. How’d you figure that one out? And the look on her face, I’m never going to forget it. And she was like. How did I figure that out? Like, she had never realized that, like, you could have a thought and then attach another thought to that thought, right? It’s this like it’s this. Oh, I how did I figure that out? And she was like, she didn’t say she didn’t give a super long explanation. She didn’t say, well, it’s three days away. And so I added 3 to 14 and she was like, well, we’re going to put a 15 and then a 16 and then a 17. And I was like, what I’ve done is I’ve, as a kindergartener, I’ve got her to explain her thinking, I’ve already won. It doesn’t matter what she says at that point, the fact that kindergartners can say, I have ideas and then I can explain how I get those ideas, that’s a win. And it happens because we follow up on student thinking, okay, good, we’re open, struggling students. Best way to do this? I talk about this in just a sec, right? You don’t know what’s going on. 71 times 14, I don’t know. Well, is it bigger? Less than one. Bigger. How do you know? Well, 14 is bigger than one. And I did a multiplication. Multiplication makes things bigger. Why? Right. Because multiplication, I mean. Right. You’re getting them to explain to you math because you’ve asked them a question and then asked them some follow up questions instead of just like 71 times 14. I don’t know who can, who can, who can help, right? Turning away from that student rather than going deeper with that student. Okay, good. So situations for follow up questions. Number one. Silence. It’s an important one. Notice I said student responses. Silence is a response. If I ask a question and I get silence or I get, I don’t know. That’s a situation. For a follow up question. It’s tempting to either go in a different direction or to. Answer the question yourself, but I don’t know. So is a place where I would then ask a student a follow up question. I would dig in. What students need to know is, I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable response in your classroom. I’m not willing to think about it is not an acceptable response. Okay. There’s a difference. If I say something and you say, I don’t know, and then I ask you a follow up question about this. If I say something like, what’s hard about this? That’s a follow up question about what you don’t know. You have to be willing to think about this with me, right? Put that rule on your on your wall somewhere. I don’t know is an acceptable response. I’m not willing to think about it is not an acceptable response. Okay. Number two wrong answers site for a follow up question. What’s the temptation as a teacher? Fix it. Correct it. Right. Wrong answers. How do I dig in to that wrong answer? I will even solicit wrong answers in the classroom. If you’ve never done this in your classroom, put a problem on the board and say wrong answers only. It’s kind of great. Put a clock on the board for your second graders. What time is it? Wrong answers. Only 781, right? Great. They say, what’s the. And you say, what’s the most tempting wrong answer? And help them to articulate the errors that we might make as students. Right. They start to filter themselves if they’re imagining the wrong answers. You want the wrong answers in the classroom. Wrong answers are gold. Wrong answers are the only times we are going to teach someone something. To go from wrong answer to right answer. Number three correct answers. What’s the temptation here to move on? Great. Move on. I did it, yes. Done. Instead of saying, how’d you figure that out? What was the key? How can we remember this? Notice the follow up questions that are there with a right answer. Lastly, a question from a student. What’s the temptation? Answer it. Right. Especially if you get a good question. How do I reframe that question and turn it back on the on the student who asked it? And not in some cheesy way like, well, what do you guys think? Not a good follow up question. How do you turn that back on the student? Right. Notice I think I’ve covered almost everything here. Right. Every situation can be done with a follow up question. Their only limits are time and exhaustion, both of which are legitimate concerns. Right? You only have so much time. You are going to get exhausted, right? But look, if you’re seeing everything that students do as an opportunity, that’s the key. Every single thing a student responds. That’s an opportunity for me to ask about what’s going on, right? Okay. So types of follow up questions. Here’s how you do them. Number one. Most basic, you press for explanation. Pressing for explanation. Basically, it’s saying, why did you respond the way that you responded? Right. That’s all that question is. You got to be a little careful. You don’t seem like a jerk. Or you’re just like, ask a question, I get silenced. I’m not going to be like, well, why are you guys silent on this? That’s not what you want. But I can ask a question and I get silenced and I can say, oh, that’s good. What’s what’s hard about this question? It’s basically saying, explain to me why you guys are silent here. What’s genuinely hard about this? Right? I think math is hard. I think we should lean into that. Okay. Number two comparison. We saw this as an opening question. It’s actually a really good follow up question as well, juxtaposing it with another thing. For example, let’s try a wrong answer. If I say five plus three and someone says seven, I can say, well, five plus two is seven. What’s five plus three? That’s comparison follow up question. I’m saying compare it with this and rethink, compare and rethink. It’s not the best way to respond to wrong answers, but it’s a possibility. Okay. Number three, hook, hook question goes back to something that’s basic and then scaffolds it back up. Use a basic response as a launching pad for a deeper question. Often it’s a thing that you asked, you got silence or you got 1 or 2 hands. 1 or 2 hands in a math class is silence. Okay, you get 1 or 2 hands. Don’t call on 1 or 2 of those guys. Don’t do it. It tells every other kid they can turn off their brains. Okay, if I get 1 or 2 hands, I’m going to say, oh yeah, this is a hard one. Is it bigger or less than one? I like the idea is go to a basic one and build it back up. We saw this today. Doctor Treloar did this beautifully. Right. How do you divide by a fraction? Silence. Okay. What’s addition? What? Go to a basic one and build it up. What are the different ways we think of addition? What are the different ways you think of subtraction? Right. Build it back up. Opening question. Follow up question. Okay. Number four. Ramification. Probing the implications of this response. How do we apply it? What does it matter? Why does it make sense? What’s the key? Are all problems like this? You could see the the potential follow up questions here about what this means for us. So what I’ve done is this. Okay, great. So what we have here are the situations on this axis and the kinds on this axis. And then just some examples. Not all of all these work, but just to show you there’s so many different follow up questions that I think we can do for every single situation. Now, don’t print this off and put it on a little clipboard and be like, well, this is a wrong answer. So now I’m going to use a hook, right? Don’t do that. That’s not the point of this exercise. But the point is just to say every single situation can be responded to with every single kind of question. That’s not like all it is, is it’s asking students to think more. You’ve got to develop your habit of this, which is easier. Fingers are pets. Fingers. Why do you think fingers? What’s hard about that? What’s easy about that? Pets. Why do you think pets. It’s just getting in the habit of seeing student responses as opportunities. Right. Okay, so some of my favorite ones, I’ll put these on the board for a sec. Uh, I think why is this hard is a really good one. What’s the key? What’s your strategy? All of these things students love talking about strategies. My six year old, I play a lot of war with him, and he’s always wanting to tell me this strategy for the game. I’m like, it’s a pure game of luck, you moron, right? I don’t call my son a moron. I’m always eager to hear his strategy. He’s like, whenever you play a nine, I’m gonna try to play a ten. I’m like. Great. How’s that going for you? Yeah. No, he’s a good kid. He’s going to need to get some athletic scholarships, but he’s going to be a good kid. Okay. Some that I don’t really like up here. Right. Anyone have any questions? Not great. Just doesn’t get much traction, right? How do you feel? I don’t really care. Okay, good. So how do you habituate this one? I think if you’re thinking about ways to prep for this. I don’t think you need to prep for it as much. Right. The follow up questions write themselves a lot of times as long as you start getting the habit of it, but including an anticipated student responses section, what my students say and how might I respond? Right. Number two, think about the different situations. Test yourself as you’re thinking about your own classroom. How do I respond to silence? Do I do it well? Do I do it poorly? How do I respond to wrong answers? Try to make some renewed habits to respond to some of these in different ways. Specifically with this kind of Socratic pedagogy, right? One thing that I find really helpful is to count the number of questions that I ask that can be answered with a single word, and then count the number of questions that beg a sentence. At least one of my absolute proudest moments as a teacher. I was teaching sixth grade, and I don’t know, I forget what question I asked, but a kid raised his hand and he gave an answer. He’s like, I think it’s seven. And because you always make us explain how we got it, here’s how I got it. And I was like, yes, I have broken them. Right? But that’s the idea. You want to do this so habitually that they get in the habit of explaining their thinking, right? That’s the thing that you’re interested in, right? They one word answers are good, but we have to get students talking about the math. Notice, notice this is hard, right? This is hard as a teacher, right? It requires actually more teacher involvement to teach Socratically a few takeaways here. Number one, a deeply rooted understanding of and love of mathematical truth requires an exploration of the mystery that surrounds it. Okay. Number two Questions with opening and follow up are the single most important thing that distinguishes a wonder based pedagogy. If you’re interested in wonder, you want to try to teach socratically. Okay. Number three. I think this wonderful teaching is going to require some habituation. The habit of teaching with wonder is a shape. It’s not a formula, but it is a repeatable shape. That thing is repeatable. It’s new every day, but it’s a repeatable shape. It’s a thing that students can become habituated to. Number two, I think you can build a culture where students are going to respond to questions. This requires perseverance, but students can get in the habit of doing it. They know that you’re going to be asked to explain their thinking, to do mathematics. Teaching is always inventive, but I think it adheres to a set of questions that can become ingrained in teaching practice. Let me finish with the end of this quote. Right. The capacity to wonder is among man’s greatest gifts. It signifies that the world is profounder, more all embracing and mysterious. And the logic of everyday reason had taught us to believe.

That was Doctor Jonathan Gregg, assistant professor of education here at Hillsdale College. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast. I’m Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook. Search for Hillsdale College, K-12 Classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram at Hillsdale underscore k12. That’s Hillsdale underscore k12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. [email protected] or wherever you get your audio.

The post Principles of Pedagogy in Mathematics appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

Guests: John Tillman and Luke Foster

Host Scot Bertram talks with:

John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project, about the Left’s strategies for influencing elected officials and his new book The Political Vise: How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. 

And Luke Foster, assistant professor of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C., discusses the spirit of a gentleman.

00:00:06
From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured and honored. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

00:00:25
Car pulls up on the other side of the pump. Woman gets out. For 20 ish year old son gets out and takes a few steps to go pre-pay. And she stood there with stress. She looked at him and said, let’s do $20. That’s why we need greater supply of natural resources to lower the cost for that woman. And that’s what we want to tell. The story is at the gas pump.

00:00:45
This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. That was John Tillman. He’s the author of the new book. The Political Vice of the Radical left controls America and the path to regaining our liberty. We go in depth with John on today’s program. Also later on, Luke Foster from Hillsdale in DC tells us all about the spirit of a gentleman first. We’re joined now by John Tillman, who’s CEO of the American Culture Project, one of the nation’s most prominent leaders in the free market public policy area. And he’s got a new book, The Political Vice How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. It’s right there. John, thanks so much for joining us.

00:01:32
Great to be with you, Scott. Thanks for having me. Good to talk to you again.

00:01:35
The book attempts to answer this question. Why do all politicians, whether they be Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, move to the left once in office and there is a device. It’s real. There are diagrams that you’ve designed called the Political Device to help us describe this. Let’s sketch this out, because it will help provide the basis for a lot of the conversation to come. What’s the political vice as you describe it?

00:02:03
Well, the political vice, the politicians, the political decision makers, mostly we think of elected officials, but it applies to anybody that has political power to make policy decisions. They’re in the middle of the vice, in the traditional sense of it. And then on one side of the vice, it’s a three sided vice. Think of it as the letter U. In the middle of that, you are the politicians. As I’ve said. On one side is the media, on the other side is the people or the public. And on the bottom side, which is the most important side are elite influencers. And all three sides apply pressure squeeze like a vise. Think of the trash compactor scene in the original Star Wars movie, where they’re getting squeezed from all sides, and there’s terrible trash in there. It’s a very good metaphor for politics, which is a trashy business. So anyhow, the point is that well, well thought, thoughtful conservatives often get elected. And the question I began my journey with is why is it conservatives who claim to be conservative and some of them are. Get into office and move left and start voting for big government programs and all the rest of it. And why does nobody ever move to the right? So I started on this journey to study it. I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of elected officials and people in politics, and what I learned was that the incentive structures in politics all move you to the left. And in terms of policy decision making, because the way you win votes, even for your pet projects, are by voting for bigger and better and more extravagant government that will solve all our problems. And the influencers, by the way, Scott, are important because they not only apply direct pressure to the political decision makers, they run operations that create influence in the media, as well as with the American public. As we’re seeing with these indictments that just came out from the Department of Justice on the Southern Poverty Law Center.

00:03:45
Yeah. And influencers, we should sort of, uh, define because it’s not influencers necessarily in the new social media definition of the term employers means those who have influence on politics. And as we’ll talk later, one of the biggest employers are like unions, public and private sector unions. So it’s not just social media stars, it’s those who have an influence on politics. And one of the reasons that’s important is because the lesson that you learned, too, is that pressure works when the vice surprise applies pressure, most of the time it works in pushing someone an entity, an organization, an individual, a politician towards an intended goal. Why is pressure so important in moving someone toward a prescribed policy goal?

00:04:36
Well, the three motivators of a political actor are a political principle political fear, and political expediency. So most politicians, 60, 65% of the votes that they take, positions that they take, they’re just doing an expedient thing. Insane. I’ll vote for your bridge if you vote for my gazebo in my home district, or whatever the case might be. My new highway deal making of one sort or another. And most of those votes go under the radar of the influencers, the public, and the media. There’s just a lot of that work that is done out of sight and out of mind, and people sort of go along and get along. And then there’s fear. Political fear means I really don’t want to take this vote because my constituents will be unhappy with me. My donors will be unhappy with me. The media may be unhappy with me, my community influencers, my leaders may be unhappy with me. Or if I do take it, this other set may be happy with me. And so fear is a big driver of what makes an elected official tick. And then I mentioned political principle, of course, when I got involved in all of this over 20 years ago, I was a very naive former political science minor who thought that all politicians operated out of principle. Uh, sadly, it’s only about 5% of the votes, 30% fear, and about 65% expediency. And so the reason this pressure works is because politics is a pressurized system. He who can apply pressure has power and politicians don’t like pressure, so they take votes to try to minimize or avoid pressure. I write in the book about the case with former Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, who actually ran a libertarian think tank at one point, and he just crumbled under the pressure during the Kavanaugh hearings that we could see right there in front of our eyes in an elevator bay where these paid activists, fake influencers, if you will, were shouting at him to take a procedural vote to delay the Kavanaugh hearings further. And he crumbled under that and eventually left the Senate because he couldn’t take the pressure.

00:06:33
John Tillman with us. His book, The Political Vise How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. So why why is the left so much better than the right in operating? The political vise?

00:06:48
A bunch of reasons, but the biggest one is the left loves government power. They actually believe in expanding the purview of government to to regulate and tax every aspect of our lives. They believe they have the moral and intellectual high ground on how society should be organized. And they think that the American people are just dumb rubes who vote the wrong way all too often, and make bad choices for what’s good for America and good for our various communities, and good particularly for subsets within group identity politics. And so they really think that government power is the only way to overcome rapacious capitalism or free enterprise system. That, in their view, is, is a flawed entrepreneurs become super successful and take advantage of the system and don’t pay their fair share. They believe in all of that, and they believe only the government can come in and put its foot on the scale to right those wrongs and create fairness and quote unquote, equity for their agreed coalition within their voting bloc. So they love government power. So what happens is, even though you have somewhat of a diverse coalition of the left, the one thing that unifies them is for all of them to be successful, they have to work together because they all require government power. And going back to the influencers, you mentioned government unions, private sector unions, the trial bar, nonprofits that get most of their money from government that we’ve learned through Doge and much of what’s been going on during the second Trump administration. They all have one thing in common as well, which is that their business models, their revenue models, require government tax and regulatory efforts and policies in order for them to have a business model that works and creates revenue. A union, whether private or public, relies on government regulations, and the government unions directly extract money from taxpayers to pay union dues and to pay union members. Trial bar relies on government regulations to allow them to sue people in the private sector. And then going back to the other side, in the private sector, most of the people just kind of want to be left alone who are conservative. They want the government to protect our rights as enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of rights. Other than that, they want a light hand and just let’s go live our lives. And so we don’t really like power as much. We want to actually devolve power. And so you don’t attract the power hungry people into politics on the right as much as you do on the left. And when we do, sometimes they’re big government Republicans, which is also not good.

00:09:10
John. Sometimes it does work for those on the right. And one of those examples is prominent in the book and one that you were involved in the Supreme Court case, Janus versus AFSCME, which was which was a victory for for freedom. And this is an example of the right using the vice, uh, squeezing people toward a desired outcome and defeating even the powerful public sector unions in this case. How did that all come together?

00:09:37
It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I founded the Liberty Justice Center in 2011. And then you might recall that there was going to be a case called Friedrichs That was going to bring this issue of forced union fees in government workers to a head. But then then Supreme Court Justice Scalia died in the Friedrichs case was deadlocked at 4 to 4. We happen to have the next case in the docket right behind it. Ours would have become would have become, become irrelevant if the Friedrichs case had gone forward in Scalia had lived and assumed that he voted with what was later a majority. So the basic point there was that a 1977 case called Abood, uh, split the baby. When it came to union dues, the court said that, uh, mandating dues from a union worker who’s opted out of the union for collective bargaining was reasonable. And you can do that, but, um, union fees are if you opted out, you couldn’t do the collective bargaining, but then you still had to pay agency, what we called agency fees. And basically our case, Janice versus we said that everything the union does is political by its nature. Therefore, no money should come out of somebody who has opted out of out of the union’s membership. And that’s what the ruling was. Justice Alito wrote the ruling. A great jurist when it came to worker freedom. And it came about because a court’s respond to politics, too. And there was a really, uh, anybody who’s a political watcher knows that courts respond. Politics just go back to Justice Roberts and the Obama care case. And you know how that works, right? But nevertheless, in this case, we really had a coalition of people on the right. And I think the best illustration of why we won that fight is because during the protest, when the case was heard in February of 2018, I was one of the leaders of the protest in front of the Capitol, and we were having a good old time with our signs and right next door, where the government unions and they were protesting, too. And the irony was we we all had the same size signs, rather workers rights were for the worker. Empower the worker. And eventually, as I write in the book, these women came over to try to infiltrate our protest and disrupt us. And I got to talking to him and I said, so what are you protesting for? And she said, workers rights. And I said, that’s what we’re protesting for. I said, let me ask you, you know, who do you think should control your relationship with your union, you or the union boss? And she kind of gave me that look like, oh, no, this is a trick question. But she goes, I think I should. I said, you should be over here with us. And she kind of walked away with her friend sheepishly. And I realized that that was the point, right? Who should control your destiny? We believe in the workers, and that’s what that case was about. So we had a great coalition of people from the State Policy Network, the D.C. think tanks all around the country, the state think tanks, all publicizing this case for many, many months and frankly, years in advance of it. And that really helped, I think, give the justices the courage they needed.

00:12:34
My old friend John Tillman will continue with us in just a moment. His new book is The Political Vice. First, take a moment now to make your plans for May 31st, June 1st or June 2nd, or maybe all three dates. That’s when Hillsdale College’s big screen debut is in theaters. It’s Revolutionary America, the first documentary about the revolution you can trust from Hillsdale College, America’s 250th anniversary is approaching, and you can find out more about what happened all those years ago with Revolutionary America. hillsdale.edu/film. FIL. Don’t let the anniversary pass without seeing the film. That shows what our founding fathers risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors. Tickets available now for a limited run. Find a theater near you and find your [email protected]. For Revolutionary America. Edu slash film. We continue with John Tillman, CEO of the American Culture Project. Find him on X John M Tillman. His book The Political Vice How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. John. Discussion about those different sides of the vice. One of them is the media. And there’s portions of the right that would say, why ever go on CNN? Why ever talk to NBC? Why try to have an op ed placed in the New York Times? They’re biased. They don’t care about our voters. They’re going to twist your message. There’s an argument in the political vice that says, well, there’s value to that for a couple of reasons. Why should the right conservatives still consider legacy media opportunities?

00:14:29
It’s a great question. And the point I make in the book is that the reason you want to go on the legacy players is there are persuadable, soft Democrats who are open to moving to our side, and that is the place where you can reach them. And if you come across as a reasonable communicator, you make a moral high ground argument about why our ideas are better for all people, and especially the poor and disadvantaged. You can move some of those people over. I would be cautious, for example, with a long form interview with the New York Times reporter who’s going to do a print interview because they will twist your words. I prefer, in those cases to use email and or keep my own recording of it, but live or even taped events. I highly recommend people engage because you can win people over. And the other reason is that even if you don’t get the greatest message out, you can edit yourself, edit it yourself, put it in the framework that you want, and then redistribute your version of that interview that’s favorable to your argument, to the target audiences using digital tools. And you can target the very people I just described. You can just target soft lefties who are open minded on issues and would hear that message on CNN because they’re hearing it on CNN. They see you on CNN. They’ll give you a listen. Or as you did, the same exact verbiage on Fox News, that soft lefty Democrat won’t give you a listen. And that’s why you should take advantage of all types of media.

00:15:49
Also inside that chapter is a portion on on cancel culture and how to resist cancel culture. And I found this very interesting, this advice that to, to, to, to beat back and to defeat cancel culture, you need the ability to deploy your own media. You call it a marketing machine, you help to build this inside Illinois Policy Institute, which is one of the reasons why the Janice fight was so successful. So for I don’t know if it’s possible for individuals, but for organizations or for those who might be in the crosshairs of cancel culture, what does it mean? And how can you deploy your own media to fight back against those allegations?

00:16:28
Uh, we deployed what we call the continued use across all the organizations. I’m involved with what we call an owned audience strategy. So the strategy is twofold. One is you have content that you create, that you want to disseminate, and that content should be customized for the different audiences that you’re after. So if you’re after parents and suburban schools, that’s one audience. If you’re after African American men living in urban America who are fed up with the crazy progressive agenda, and they might be open to voting the other way, that’s a different audience and so forth. So you first start with your message, but then there’s a distribution strategy. And the distribution strategy, as we just talked about a moment ago, is taking advantage of third party channels such as legacy media. The other way to do it is to try to build a channels of communication that you largely control. And with an owned audience strategy, what you do is you use third party channels such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and you put content out there that is compelling. And all of your listeners have certainly seen this, where they see something on one of the social media platforms, and there’s a little button there that says, learn More. Well, we do the same thing in our issue, uh, ads on those platforms when you click Learn More, you’re given the opportunity to provide your first name, last name, zip code, and email address. From that point on, that person has opted in to our content stream that we can now directly go to them with through email, and then we often get their cell phone number and can directly go to them with text messaging. And the key, of course, is to not abuse that privilege, but always to have interesting, compelling content that is given at a proper pace and proper cadence. That is where they’re receptive to it. And then over time, with a really thoughtful strategy of messaging, you can develop a relationship with all those folks, educate them on various issues long before an election happens, and then when election time comes along, turn them out. So this is something that anybody can do at any scale. If you’re a city council member, if you have just a very modest budget, it’s not as expensive as you think to do this. If you’re doing it in a statewide or national effort, you’re going to have to spend a lot more money and have a material budget. But what I highly recommend is starting somewhere with a social media strategy. Thinking through your brand identity, whether you’re an individual activist or whether you’re running a small or mid-sized or even a large size nonprofit.

00:18:42
John Tillman is with us, whose book, The Political Vice. How do we turn that vise toward liberty? Perhaps we look at another example of school choice and the fight for school choice in areas all across the country. It’s one of the issues on which I think the right has been most successful over the past decade or so. What lessons can we learn from the successful campaigns for school choice and school options across the country that can be applied toward other issues of freedom and liberty?

00:19:12
It’s a great question. So briefly, there are three types of vices the political vice. There’s the traditional one in which I described earlier. There’s the one we’re in the middle of, where the political left is trying to restructure the vice and put the American people in the middle of the vice, and then partnering with liberal media, liberal politicians and elite influencers of the left, force us to comply. They are really into coercion and submission. And the trial run of that, of course, was the pandemic. And they watched and saw how many people were much more worried about their security and were willing to submit to those pressures and start to comply with the government mandated behavior instead of those who really want to preserve their freedom. So we got a real experiment there. To answer your question, we have to create a liberty focused political advice. And what we have to do there is move the American people to the bottom of the vice, which is the leveraged position. Put the politicians back in the middle. And then through our work and how we follow people in media and which elite influencers we choose to follow, restructure the other two sides of the vice. There’s a lot of really good work and great investing going on right now. On the media side, there’s a great burgeoning media infrastructure that’s been going on now for well over ten years that needs to continue and expand into popular entertainment, in my view. And then on the other side, we’re watching right before our eyes, different elites being chosen. The election of President Trump is the choice of an elite, and all that he has done to put different people into the cabinet positions in the various agencies, the governors that were endorsed and supported when they started to reject the lockdowns. Governor DeSantis in Florida, um, all the governors that, you know, around the country, Governor Kemp in Georgia and elsewhere, who did right by the people and stopped the lockdowns. So we get to choose who the elites are by who we choose to follow. And we get to choose who the media, which media has power by, who we choose to pay and subscribe to. That’s how we begin to put the liberty focus back into the political device and put the politicians under the pressure of the people once again, the way it should be.

00:21:16
One additional hurdle that you identify inside the political device for the right is that we fracture often, more often than we unify. It seemed like the Trump 24 campaign was one instance in which that didn’t happen. And that’s how we ended up with people like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard and Lori Chavez Dreamer in the cabinet, because those those different portions of the voter base all came toward Donald Trump in 2024. So is that a singular event due to a singular candidate, or is there a lesson learned on the right?

00:21:48
No, I think this is a this is a really important discussion point because I think we’re in the middle, maybe not the middle. I forget exactly where I would or I haven’t thought too much lately about where I’d say we are in this process that I’m about to describe, but I’ve been talking really since the advent of the Tea Party back in 2009, and I’ll call the Tea Party area two era, 2009 to 2014. That that was the beginning, that the public became aware of a complete political restructuring. And the Trump candidacy that was publicly launched in 2015 picked up the reins of the now falling behind or, you know, sort of going dormant Tea Party movement, but took the energy that was still there, uh, had had gone dormant, dormant because of a lack of leadership. And he rebuilt it into what we now call Maga. And this movement is not about partisan politics. This movement, and the reason you got this coalition that you just described, which is across partisan divides, is because it’s really a rejection of the duopoly in politics between Republicans and Democrats, of sort of a settled wisdom about how things should be run in America with this bipartisan consensus on big government ever expanding spending deficits and the insiders, the privileged, the the connected, always getting the the favoritism and average people, middle class people and even affluent people. And of course, the poor and disadvantaged always being left on the outside in. There’s been great discontent for decades with the establishment of both parties. That’s what the Tea Party was about. That’s why Donald Trump got a lot of Bernie Sanders votes in 2016, because the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was part of the left during the Tea Party movement, there was a Venn diagram overlap with the grievances, such as corporate bailouts and corporate welfare by government. So the reason I think that this is going to continue is because those structural problems are going to continue. And people who think Maga is going to die when Donald Trump’s presidency ends, I think, are sadly mistaken. There is a great awakening among the American people that is rejecting the bipartisan consensus since the end of World War Two era.

00:23:52
John Tillman, one of my favorite portions of the political advice is when you begin talking about group identity politics. Wokeism. But this idea that you lay out the progressive left that insists that government institutions are responsible for providing their sense of purpose and fulfillment, and later that they are seducing the American people into a mindset of learned helplessness, dependency, grievance, and fear. Uh, these are, uh, these it is seductive, uh, when you hear those messages to believe them and believe the deck is stacked against you and there’s nothing you can do to overcome. You need someone, something the government in this instance to come in and lend you a hand and help you out and punish someone else to help you rise. All right. What do we have in our in our weapons? What? What weapons do we have to fight against that kind of message?

00:24:45
Yeah. You’re talking about the fact that every human being, uh, experiences calamity in their lives. We all experience disappointments. We didn’t get the job. We thought we should get the promotion. The girl married my neighbor instead of me. Whatever the case might be, we all we all suffer. And as a result of that, the American tradition has long been that. Geez, I’m so sorry that happened to you. And a little pat on the butt from your your parent or your your coach and get back out there, pick yourself up and go at it again. And we had to lift ourselves up and overcome that. The left’s message is different. Now. Not only do you not get a pat on the butt, you actually get a pad that’s patronizing on the head and saying, yes, it’s so terrible. These awful things have happened to you, and you need to you need to marinate in your grievance. You need to marinate in your resentment of these terrible things and these specific people that cause this problem. And as a result of that, you need to come and join us in our political coalition because we are dedicated to alleviating and mitigating your grievances against the man. And the man is often a white, middle aged dude like me. I won’t put you in that category. Uh, but, um, you’re too young. But the, um, but the point is that they, they sell the idea that is very seductive, that every calamity that befalls you is not your fault. You’re a victim. And as a result of that, you need to join with us. And you can be on the righteous side of history when we all come together to solve these problems and fix these problems for those that have been aggrieved by unjust society, and particularly a free enterprise system that is broken and doesn’t work, founding principles that were never noble and don’t work, and they particularly don’t work for people of color. They particularly don’t work for anybody that’s different and unique. And that’s why the Grievance coalition of identity politics is an ever expanding group? The only people left standing are basically white men who are not allowed in to the grievance coalition because they’re the oppressors. I write in the book, Scott, as you probably remember, that one of the reasons young men are turning to faith more than ever is because I really believe it’s because everywhere else they turn, they are seen as the villain, and they’re looking for support and hope and redemption in a wonderful place, and I think that’s actually a good thing. Our antidote to this, by the way, is what I just described about grievances. One side of the human condition that we all face, that the other side of the human condition, what we must gravitate to and sell is that human beings, by their nature, are builders. We, by our nature, our collaborators, we like to think of how we can make tomorrow better than today for ourselves, our families, our communities, our friends. And so we like to build. We are creative beasts. We’re a gathering species. And when you look at the places in this world where that part of the human spirit is most unleashed, the greatest achievements have been created. And that, of course, is America and the American miracle. And that’s what we have to focus on as the antidote to the grievance culture.

00:27:38
John Tillman, the end of the political vice, lays out a grand strategy to help take back the vice and to take away power and control from the left. So again, how do we do that? What’s the grand strategy behind taking back the turning the screws on that vice?

00:27:57
Well, I’ll try to summarize it briefly. Number one is we have to build more capacity to compete for the commanding heights of American cultural narratives. The late, great Andrew Breitbart popularized the idea that politics is downstream of culture. That’s true. The point I’m always trying to make to everyone that’s involved is that means we have to be at the headwaters of the river, engaging in competition for mindshare of the American people and thus the American cultural narrative. For example, in Virginia, the very narrow laws on the ballot measure that did the Democrat favor and gerrymander that battle was being fought months and months and months and months before the actual voting. And I was involved. One of my organizations was very involved in Virginia directly and indirectly. And the Democrats were on the ground long before the election, socializing, if you will, this idea and trying to get the yes votes and the only one very, very narrowly. Our side waits too long. We do not go in early. Our donor class and some to some degree, our consultancy class has a blind spot to perpetual investment and we have to get to those headwaters. So that’s number one. Number two, we have to really build capacity in message creating messages. And it has to be done in a data driven way and tested relentlessly. One of the things that various teams I’ve been involved with over the years, we have capacity to do data analysis. We have a whole data science team at the marketing agency I co-founded, Ion Light, and we analyze constantly on a daily basis different segments of the audience that we’re after. We slice and dice it into very fine pieces, and then we test different messages with them to see which one resonates and which one. You can test a proxy call to action in voting so that by the time we get to elections many months later, we have a pretty good feel for what’s going to move voters to a call to action. Um, unfortunately, there’s not enough people investing in that work between elections. We have to do more of that. The third thing we have to do when it comes to messaging is we have to take the moral high ground back. One of the things that Trump administration and all of its spokespeople have been particularly good at, and Marco Rubio is perhaps the best at it, is not accepting the premise, the narrative premise of the media and the left. They always reject it, and they pivot and reestablish a premise where we are on the moral high ground of the argument, and that is why they’ve been so effective in persuading. Despite the media onslaught of negativity. So taking the moral high ground back and all the arguments is important, and then we have to continue to invest in building distribution. We need distribution across the board. As I mentioned earlier, we have excellent investments going on in conservative media, but we’ve got to compete in podcasting, which we have good advantages there, but we have to keep doing that. A popular film and entertainment streamers and all the content that comes out of the streaming programs. Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Land Men and Yellowstone and the one I just started watching the Madison. I mean that if we could clone Taylor Sheridan, we would have some really good content because he is putting out content that is pro liberty and not just in a, in a perfunctory or, uh, pandering way at all. I mean, he is doing it in a challenging and interesting and compelling way. One of the problems, Scott, with content on the right is our creatives tend to want to beat people over the head with the message. And what we want to do is actually create compelling characters and compelling story, and the message is an underlying part of it and not the thing that you drive home in the face.

00:31:22
Well, this is something that Illinois policy did and does so well. Um, is, is, is telling the story and not just using facts, figures and graphs, identifying people who will really be affected by the policy change and how their lives will be different and how it will affect the difference or affect the lives of people around you, friends, families, loved ones. Uh, the right has to get better at telling those stories and in that way, influencing voters minds and activities.

00:31:56
The easiest way to think about how to do that, because it’s not easy, and especially for people that come out of the policy side who are a little academic. It’s very hard to think about how to do that. But here’s the way I’ve taught people this over the years, is you want to tell the story about public policy at the point it intersects an individual’s life. So, for example, high gas prices, when you want to talk about that, you don’t talk about the fact that we need to expand fracking. We need to drill offshore, we need to open up Anwar and all the other places and all the national lands. That’s that’s the way policy people talk about it. So we need to talk about is, you know, I was at a gas station recently and I pulled up, pulled out my credit card and put it in there. I was going to fill up my tank. I can afford to fill up my tank. Every time a car pulls up on the other side of the pump, woman gets out. Her 20 ish year old son gets out and takes a few steps to go pre-pay, and he turns back and looked at her and said, mom, how much? And she stood there with stress and tension in her face and did some calculations in her head. She looked at him and said, let’s do $20. That’s why we need greater supply of natural resources to lower the cost for that woman. And that’s what we want to tell. The story is at the gas pump.

00:33:08
John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture project. You can find them on X as well. The brand new book, The Political Vice How the Radical Left Controls America and the Path to Regaining Our Liberty. John Tillman, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.

00:33:24
Thanks for having me, Scott.

00:33:26
Up next, Luke Foster from Hillsdale in DC tells us all about the spirit of a gentleman. I’m Scott Bertram. This is the radio free Hillsdale Hour. Welcome back to the radio free Hillsdale Hour. I’m Scott Bertram. Go ahead and follow us on Spotify at YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Never miss an episode of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. When you subscribe, we’re joined by Doctor Luke Foster. He’s assistant professor of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.. Doctor foster, thanks for joining us.

00:34:15
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

00:34:17
Talking today about an essay you wrote over at Modern Age. People can find it there. It’s called The Spirit of a gentleman. For those who haven’t caught this piece, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by the spirit of a gentleman?

00:34:33
Thank you. Um, so the the inspiration is a famous line from Edmund Burke and the reflections on the revolution in France, where he’s trying to articulate what the sources of liberty, self-government in the Western world were and how they’re threatened by the new revolutionary ideological tyranny coming out of France. Um, so he says, uh, everything good about our civilization is dependent for ages upon two principles and were the result of both combined combined. I mean, the the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. What I think he’s trying to say there is we used to know how to civilize and gentle men literally. Right. The the harshness, the the aggressiveness, the even the cruelty of other human beings. And I think men specifically have to be refined and polished into something, um, that uses the raw materials, but is, is better and more finished than those raw materials. And if we don’t have um, education, social practices, customs and institutions, political institutions that, that know how to do that gentling work, we really can only be governed by force and fear basically. So constitutional self-government and all the good things that go with that require this gentlemanly attitude and spirit. And part of why I wrote the piece is to say, this is not just a quaint argument from Burke, but is actually just a human principle, which our civilization has understood for a long time. And even when things are very disordered in the world, you can work to cultivate it in yourself, to foster in others, to, to create expectations, to behave this way. So it’s a concrete good that we can seek as well.

00:36:21
How would you how would you explain the way that people perhaps think about Gentlemanliness today? And how does that compare to what we’ve just explained?

00:36:30
Yeah. So this is part of the problem is meaning of a word shift over time. And sometimes that’s a neutral thing and sometimes things get lost. I think to the extent people think about gentlemanliness, typically in our in our society today, what we mean is holding doors for ladies, taking off your hat indoors, a sort of superficial derivation of maybe like mid-century classic Hollywood ethos. And there’s all that stuff is good, right? All that stuff is part of Gentlemanliness, and it’s in its true and fuller sense, but it’s not, um, it’s not essential to it. And there’s a danger, I think, of superficial politeness, almost kind of prissiness being, uh, be becoming held in contempt, uh, and therefore getting dismissed. Right. So, um, what I’m trying to do is point people to the deeper philosophical sources. Much of the piece is really, you know, extended quotations from canonical thinkers. Yes. Burke. But also Aristotle, Cicero, um, John Henry Newman. I want, I want to put people in touch with the deeper tradition that I’m just riffing off of, uh, to show them where they can go to learn about this.

00:37:44
Mhm. So, yeah, you trace this back to Aristotle, Cicero, this idea of the spirit of a gentleman as well. What what did they understand about human formation that perhaps we’ve we’ve forgotten a little.

00:37:56
Right. So the core notion, along with this insight that aggression, strength, masculinity is in a way easy but manly. Refined, um, civilized habits are difficult. The other core principle they they share is the notion that nature needs to be perfected and fulfilled by what, what, what Burke calls art. Um, convention social practices, how we, how we live together. Um, so human beings are a strange kind of animal because we, we have a nature. The classical thinkers argue, we, we develop and flourish in certain characteristic ways that are given and not chosen. But at the same time, you know, we’re, we’re born, um, unable to walk, unable to, unable to talk minutes away from death without proper care. Right. So the human being, the human nature to be fulfilled requires an awful lot of work by other human beings. But that work isn’t arbitrary as well. And so part of Gentlemanliness in this tradition thinks about what are the customs and and conventions that are build out what nature intends and what are, what are things that would thwart it. So eating with a, with a knife and fork is good and, and proper. And one way to, to make out our eating together, not just barbaric, but there are other possible ways, right. You could eat with chopsticks or there are even ways of eating with your hands, which are which are manually. Right. So culture doesn’t necessarily culture is not arbitrary, but it’s also quite flexible. And so different contexts are going to develop different rules, different practices. Um, and there’s legitimate variation as well.

00:39:44
So is the rejection of the gentleman really a deeper rejection of, of tradition and inheritance over the years?

00:39:52
Yes. So in the piece, I kind of finger Russo for this. You could point to other people, but Rousseau in the 18th century is the the a very beautiful, articulate, poetic argument for saying, no, no. Our real nature is the raw, primitive thing down beneath. It’s not it doesn’t have anything to do with convention or society. And in fact, society should be suspect, because that’s how his version of the fall is socialization. So this has a tendency to move people to think in terms of year zero, blank slate, start, start all over again in each generation. Um, we can undo all the sins and failings of our ancestors. We don’t inherit anything from them necessarily. Um, and that unfortunately means a lot of, a lot of gentlemanly codes become unintelligible because they require generations and even sometimes centuries of practice to build up.

00:40:47
So in this piece over at modern age called the spirit of a gentleman, we talked with Luke Foster here on the program. You describe the gentleman as someone who recognizes unearned advantages but responds with magnanimity rather than guilt. Why is that distinction so important?

00:41:04
Right. So I think this brings us to one of the most important things about this argument today. In a way, what you have from the left, the very powerful kind of philosophical, poetic move on the left is to say any hierarchy, any inequality, is necessarily oppressive and well, at the very least, suspect. Right? Maybe it can be dealt with, but it’s a problem. Um, and so this means that, um, of course things like family name and inherited wealth, we know, fall in this category, but increasingly things like, um, someone’s race, someone’s sex, um, you know, even even increasingly, right. Citizenship, the very idea of being born an American citizen, which is not open to everybody in the world. All these things are problematic because, because they’re unearned, right? They’re not directly the products of our own labor. And there’s a certain kind of, I think, shallow response on the right which plays into the hands of this right, which says, well, I’m just defending merit. I’m defending earned success. But the reality is that if we are as if human beings are natural and artifactual in this complicated combined way that the classics, the classic thinkers articulate, there’s going to be a lot of things, um, we have which are good and we value that we haven’t created for ourselves, going all the way down to our nature ultimately, which is a gift of God. We can’t, we can’t make that happen. So they’re basically, you know, the response on offer today from the left is guilt tripping, right? And, and that, you know, we know about how this gets, you know, our public arguments about reparations or about structural injustice. But on a personal level, I think what this leads down to a lot of people feel guilty and ashamed about their advantages in life. And my argument is to say I’m very worried about people who want to respond to that. Also by just saying, yeah, let the let the great do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, right? Just to kind of doubling down on, you know, sort of Nietzsche and spirit power, um, domination, success, as if that’s all there is to, to, to the moral life. And I’m trying to say gentlemanliness is part of actually the missing piece there, which is you can be great and magnanimous. You can use your greatness in a way that’s gentlemanly, generous, and builds up others. And this is core to the gentleman’s understanding, right? His, his gifts and his powers are not for himself alone, but are actually to, uh, make for a richer, more beautiful, more enjoyable social and political life for everyone. Um, so in a certain way, the most gentlemanly thing to do is to actually is to raise others up to your level. If you genuinely are better and greater than others, right? And this, I think, was the attitude of, of our of our founders. This was the attitude of this is, in a way, the attitude of God himself, right? Who’s who, who comes down to us, but in the process raises us up. Mhm. Um, so it actually has very, very rich philosophical resources, but practical resources to think this way as well.

00:44:20
All right. Let’s get to that, which is how can we revive this spirit of gentlemanliness in this day and age? What does it look like in practice? And perhaps are there figures from your historical overview who might be beneficial for the challenges we face in our time?

00:44:38
Thank you. Um, this is yeah, something that’s dear to me and, and genuinely difficult, right? In the historical overview, um, one of the people I talk about I is, is John Henry Newman who wrote this wonderful book, the idea of University in the middle of 19th century. And Newman was worried that, you know, because he’s a he’s a Victorian Englishman. Uh, he’s worried that gentleness is in the process of decaying because it’s disconnected from what Burke called the spirit of, of, of religion. Right. Gentleman is just becoming mere social convention, mere mere niceness, mere politeness. Um, you know, he says, he says it’s almost the definition of a gentleman to make all feel at home, to never give offense. But when there are real evils or errors being promoted in society, you need people to not just go along to get along, but you need people to actually stand up and object and argue back. And so, um, I think Newman’s warning is really salient, right? If we try to revive Gentlemanliness, it can’t just be mere conformity because that would get to that would get us to acquiescing with the Di regime, with, uh, giving your pronouns before every, every board meeting, right? It can be corrupted very easily. So I think it has to start with with religion, with philosophy, right? With higher transcendent standards of justice and goodness that aren’t just mere convention. Right? But then we have to work out, you know, in our particular day and age, what are the forms these things should take? You know, I think one really important area today is social media and electronics in general, right? We probably should shame people more in more social settings, right, for being glued to their phones. Right. It ought to be normal in a nice restaurant that you put your phone away. It ought to be normal. Thankfully, in a Hillsdale classroom, it is normal that you that you put your phone away in class, right? Yes. Not everywhere. Right. Some institutions are struggling with the kind of the selfie narcissism, narcissistic age intruding on everything. Um, and we have to fight that. But I also think especially, you know, in a context like Hillsdale, we can teach these virtues explicitly. We can exhort people to see why they matter, to think about their positional duties based on where they are in a, in an institutional hierarchy and how they can best, how they can best reflect their their rights and duties. I mean, I’ll give you a little example from the from the office, right. There are certain privileges that faculty have that are different from, from staff privileges, right? Like we have better parking. I think it’s really important, therefore, that I don’t leave my dirty dishes in the sink, but I wash them up after myself because if I don’t do that, it means de facto, I’m assuming somebody from the staff has to do.

00:47:32
It.

00:47:33
Right there. That principle should percolate into all our social interactions of the more we have privilege, the more responsible we are. And that’s the core of the ethos.

00:47:45
Luke Foster has piece at modern age the spirit of a gentleman. One final question. Is there a female equivalent to this ideal, or is the spirit of a gentleman pointing to something that is specifically masculine?

00:48:00
Excellent and difficult question. Um, which I in the piece I mostly speak to young men because that’s the, that’s the experience. That’s the context I know best. So I think unfortunately, it’s a slightly complicated answer, but let me, let me try to take it on two levels. A large part of this gentleman, the ethos is just, um. What the conduct of a noble person. Right. That’s how the classic authors think of it. Aristotle, Cicero, primarily they’re saying this is what it is for virtuous human being to be like. And you even have equivalents in the Confucian tradition, like the Junzi in East Asia is, is really meant to be the excellent virtuous person of both sexes. However, I think there are. two things which make it gender to an extent. One is one, as I mentioned, aggression. Warfare, right. Men need to be gentled as part of their civilizing socializing process in a way that women do not as much.

00:49:01
Mhm.

00:49:02
Um, so that does mean historically there is an emphasis on um, self restraint on, on learning how to value persuasion and friendship rather than force and fear. Uh, for men particularly. And then I think there’s another layer, which is the, the Christian Middle Ages with the codes of chivalry and the poetry around chivalry, um, make many of the things of the gentlemanly duties specifically have to do with his treatment of ladies. Right. So the superficial courtesies I talked about earlier are, you know, holding doors, taking off hats. Those are remnants of, of, of that code, which is just distinctively Christian because the assumption is you’re, you’re trying to civilize people into the marriage of free and equal spouses who can, who can commit freely to each other for life. Um, so there’s a much actually higher view of womanhood and therefore of what a man has to do to become worthy of a woman to win her. Um, so that’s where again, there’s, there’s specific, I think different duties for, for each sex, but, but it’s called lady likeness for, for women and there are concomitant duties, I think of, you know, knowing, uh, one of the great sources on this is, is Jane Austen, right? How does a woman discern, well, when a man is worthy of her trust, how does she learn to inspire and motivate the best in him without making him feel mothered or stifled? Right. These are really rich and complicated themes of wisdom and tradition, which, if we cut ourselves off from them, I you know, I think it’s not surprising that young men and women are increasingly having a really hard time forming couples and forming families. Um, because because the internet alone won’t civilize you.

00:50:43
Doctor Luke Foster is assistant professor of government at Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C. you can read his piece at Modern Age. It’s the spirit of a gentleman. Doctor foster, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.

00:50:57
Thanks for having me. It’s a real honor.

00:50:59
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to John Tillman, his book, The Political Vise, and Luke Foster from Hillsdale in D.C. remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews, or listen any time to the podcast, podcast.hillsdale.edu, or wherever you get your audio. Until next week. I’m Scott Bertram, and this has been the radio free Hillsdale Hour.

The post How To Stop America’s Leftward Drift appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.

On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the radical changes brought on by the American Civil War before introducing Wilfred McClay.

Americans have overcome many challenges throughout our history, including the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. Studying the great stories from our past inspires us to preserve the blessings of liberty in our day. Now you can study these stories with Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale’s free online course, “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” explores the history of America as a land of hope founded on high principles. In presenting the great triumphs and achievements of our nation’s past, as well as the shortcomings and failures, it offers a broad and unbiased study of the kind essential to the cultivation of intelligent patriotism.

As the Civil War ended, America entered a period of reconstruction in an attempt to recover from the war’s devastation and find just terms for a settlement between the sections.

Discover the beauty of the Bible in “The Genesis Story,” encounter the brilliance of Plato and Aristotle in “Introduction to Western Philosophy,” and explore the true meaning of America in “Constitution 101” all with Hillsdale faculty. 

Jeremiah Regan: Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I’m Jeremiah Regan.

Juan Davalos: And I’m Juan Davalos. We’re back with the great American story A land of Hope. We’re going to be covering lectures five and six today. The experiment begins.

Jeremiah Regan: That’s right. So in our last lecture, we learned that America had won the Revolutionary War. It had established a new nation, and now it needed to go about the business of governing itself.

Juan Davalos: That’s a part that we typically forget because we focus so much on the Revolutionary War and how great America, you know, the idea of America is and and the beauty of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, those are incredible documents. The beauty of the American political thought as expressed in the Federalist Papers. But then we forget that we actually have to put that into practice. And that’s very difficult. And that’s that’s what Americans start to do in this time period. And that’s complicated. It takes a lot of prudence.

Jeremiah Regan: Yeah. The difficulty wasn’t a surprise to the founders. They knew that governing themselves would be difficult. All governing is difficult. And when you diffuse power among the people and require the people to think about the laws of nature and nature’s God as the standard, that that’s a good theory. It does work in practice, as our history has shown, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. It means people need to figure out how to interpret the laws of nature and nature’s God. They need to think about contentious issues and issues of justice and issues of prudence. What what is right by nature, and then what is going to be most likely to affect our safety and happiness. And so these are the types of questions that the founders had to wrestle with.

Juan Davalos: This is a beautiful course, and it’s appropriate for us to be looking at the history of America as a land of hope. As we are getting ready to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary here shortly, at least at the time of this recording. And, uh, it’s a bit of a long course because it covers so much of American history, but it’s definitely worth it. And we encourage you to take advantage of our study guides. If you go to hillsdale.edu/course, that’s hillsdale.edu/course. There’s a lot of resources in the course, not just our study guides, but additional videos that you can watch, additional readings from the from American history that you can look at. So we encourage you to go to hillsdale.edu/course.

Jeremiah Regan: That’s right. We’re always pleased to have you listen to the podcast. But as Juan said, this is a long, beautiful but very involved and complicated course. So really take advantage of the learning that we offer. Now we turn to Doctor McClay for lectures five and six of the great American story, land of Hope. The experiment begins part one and part two.

Wilfred McClay: Now, you may remember from last time that I closed with a kind of ode to the United States Constitution and talked about the way in which, unlike other constitutions, it is almost identified with American history. It is a part of us, an expression of us. But I cautioned at the very end that it was in certain respects conceived as flawed, and I had in mind its inability to deal with the question of slavery, which was becoming a more and more entrenched institution in American life. In some ways kicked the can down the road, uh, and, uh, to, uh, our subsequent, uh, disfavor. But let me talk a little bit about slavery. Slavery is ubiquitous in human history. It’s not peculiar to American history. It’s almost the rule rather than the exception in the overwhelming bulk of human history. It’s been underwritten and supported, at least for a time, by all the great religions of the world. Uh, the important thing to know about for the start about the British colonies is it was never intended to be any part of a sort of master plan for the colonies, for the development of English colonization. Of course, as we saw, there was there was no master plan, so there wouldn’t be a master plan for it to be part of. But in many ways it arose in an incidental way, in tandem with a more consciously thought out labor system called indentured servitude. This was an important but brutal institution, important in that it supplied a way that poor Europeans who were willing to make the passage to America, uh, for and contribute their labor to the development of the colonies, could have their passage paid for by their employers in exchange for a period of, of, of contractual servitude to that master. And then they would be freed, and then they would be able to pursue their lives as free men. It’s estimated that as many as half of the white male immigrants to the Chesapeake area, uh, were indentured servants originally. Um, and it may well be we don’t know this for sure that the first black Africans who arrived in Jamestown in 1619 aboard a Dutch ship came as indentured servants, uh, rather than as slaves. What we do know is that over time, the African population grew very slowly in in the Chesapeake area. Uh, and, uh, that the first Africans experienced conditions fairly similar to the whites. But as time went on, the 1650s or so, uh, Ezra numbers increased slowly. Um, there were practices of discrimination against them because of their race that began to be imposed and hardened until by the 1660s, these were laws, slave codes kept by, um, or passed by colonial assemblies, which dictated that Africans and their offspring were to be held in permanent bondage. That is, they were to be chattel, human, uh, legal property of their owners. This interest in using slaves grew as indentured servants became more rare and more expensive. By 1750, half the population of Virginia and two thirds of South Carolina were the enslaved Africans. It should be remembered in this context that even though I’ve mentioned two southern states at the time of the revolution, slavery was still permitted in all states. So by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the institution of slavery was pretty well established in at least a section, a portion of the new nation. And it was economically entrenched because of tobacco and eventually cotton and other cash crops that were what the South depended upon for its economic well-being. So this when the revolution came and the revolution was made in the name of liberty, this fact caught the eye of perceptive critics of the Americans. Uh, the famous Samuel Johnson said in 1775, the year of Lexington and Concord. How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? And it was a good question, particularly since the most eloquent yelpers were people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who owned slaves themselves. More than half of the framers of the Constitution were slaveholders. So it’s a reasonable question to ask today. How can we admire, uh, or how can we even understand these otherwise enlightened, uh, individuals who are exemplary in so many ways, uh, buying into being so blind to, uh, the dehumanization of these, of these people who were enslaved, how could they have been blind to the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. Um. How could they be at peace with this practice? Um, and what made the American situation especially intolerable was the fact that it was, as Johnson was pointing out in his way, uh, that this practice was, um, uh, ethical to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the principles that Americans claimed to stand for and to practice the high and noble ideals. They were living in inconsistency, and they knew it. By and large, Jefferson agonized over his possession of slaves. Washington freed his slaves at his death. Jefferson did not. But both of them understood that in some way slavery was an offense, an offense, as Jefferson would later say. Events against God and an offense Against the well-being of the nation, a possible source of national dissolution. Many of the framers believed that slavery was on its way out, would naturally disappear after the revolution, and that nothing dramatic needed to be done about it. It was just an institution whose whose time had come and was passing. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, very influential figure in the compromise by which the Constitution came to be, took this view. Oliver Ellsworth said in slavery and time will not be a speck in our country. The Constitutional Convention, as I said, took an ambivalent view. It didn’t applaud slavery. It never used the word. It never used the word slave or master. Uh, it didn’t enunciate the principle of slavery. Um, it was, I think, a clear case in which the need to foster unity among the colonies to form a new nation took precedence over the writing of what many saw as a wrong, and that that would have to be postponed, which from our point of view, at times we say, well, you know, they should have taken care of it at the time. But this is a it’s a different question for us to ask today than it was for them to deal with at the time. And that’s part of what I mean when I talk about the need to think historically is to put yourself in the context in which particularly political actors are acting, and instead of saying that they should have conformed to an ideal good that really was not within the range of political possibility, we should admire him for what they were able to accomplish. I think this is something we’re going to see in Abraham Lincoln, uh, very soon as an example of this. So slavery, uh, was there was a concession to slavery. The notorious 3/5 rule, which, uh, counted the slave population, uh, for representation purposes. Um, even though slaves had the no, no rights as citizens, by the way, northern delegates had wanted slaves to be counted at 100% for taxation, but zero for representation. Um, so they, they were in a way the ones forced to compromise. Um, but the Constitution’s otherwise, uh, notably silent about slavery. There’s a, there is a concession allowing the transatlantic slave trade to be abolished after 1808, which it was. Um, and there’s a fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, although as I said before, it does not use the word slavery. It says persons held to service or labor had to be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. They’re really trying very hard not to use the word slave and not to use the word master. Um, and I think that’s at the very least, this silence, this indirection, this euphemism reflects an unease with the institution, um, and a desire not to go so far as to enunciate the defense of slavery as a principle of to which the Constitution would be bound. I think what we have to do is to see this period as a period of moral transition. They’re on the cusp of a transformation of moral sensibility in the world, uh, that leads by the 19th century to the abolition of slavery. Uh, and we are on the other side of that transformation so fully that it really requires an exercise of the historical imagination to see how good exemplary men could have nevertheless countenanced or or been willing to kick the can down the road about such an issue. Um, hence, I argue, it would be wrong, as so many people do in a casual way these days, to say that the United States was founded on slavery. No, it was founded on other things. It was founded on other things, principles of liberty and self-rule that had been worked out over many years in English and then American history. Uh, and, uh, the fact that these foundational principles didn’t come into the world unstained, unmarred untroubled is simply, uh, an, an example of the way that history actually happens. There are no immaculate conceptions or virgin births in history. Uh, there may be one, but but only that one. So, um, onward with the Constitution. It had to be it had been drafted. It had been approved. Now it had to be ratified by the states. And that was not a for sure slam dunk outcome. There was a there was a lot of ingrained inertia, opposition to changing something like a constitution. Uh, there are always winners and losers whenever you change the structure of things. And many people who had it good under the old regime, particularly state and local elites, were not thrilled with the idea of having a much more powerful national government. Um, in every state, there would be a heated debate over whether or not the Constitution should be Ratified. And of course, the factions divided into the Federalists, who were very clever in seizing the high ground of a positive name for themselves, and the Anti-Federalists, who, you know, had the the negative name and were a much more heterogeneous group, but concerned about the concentration of power in a way reflecting this older American revolutionary concern about the dangers and corruptions that come with the concentration of power. Someone like Patrick Henry of Virginia, who was a great patriot in the time of the revolution, opposed the Constitution because, he said it squints toward monarchy. That it was would represent a repudiation of what the revolution had been fought to accomplish. So these debates were heated. And like many heated political debates, it gave rise to some of the most wonderful and rich writing about basic, fundamental political issues that we’ve ever seen. Um, the United States hasn’t produced, uh, people like John Locke and Rousseau and so Hobbes and so on, who’ve written massive treatises. Instead, we have these occasional documents that are the, the focal point of the richness of our political tradition. And certainly the Federalist Papers written by Hamilton, Jay and Madison, um, as part of the debate in New York over the ratification, are among the most distinguished products of that debate, probably the most distinguished products of that debate, Thomas Jefferson’s said, and others have echoed this, that it was the definitive work of interpretation of the United States Constitution, and people still go to it for that purpose. Just not to say the Anti-Federalists are all did not also produce thoughtful expositions that bear rereading now, and that influenced the course of the nation then and since. And many of these writers on both sides wrote under Roman pseudonyms, Publius was the name that the three authors of the Federalist adopted. Brutus and Cato were authors on the. On the Anti-Federalist side. And the choice of those two names indicating a Republican small r Republican sensibility over. Against the idea that this new Constitution with a powerful presidency would be, um, squinting towards empire. Uh, to paraphrase Patrick Henry, um, the papers of the Federalists, uh, bear extended analysis that I unfortunately don’t have time for, but they featured a darkly realistic view of human nature. You remember Washington’s remark about. We’ve had two too high an opinion of human nature. The Federalist does not reflect too high an opinion of of human nature. Um. If men were angels, government would not be necessary. Uh, Madison said Federalist 51, which, um, he clearly believed was a definitive statement about men. Uh, ambition, he said, must be made to counteract ambition because the sources of faction are sown into the hearts of men. And the only way to, to counteract, uh, the excessive ambition, uh, power, mad tendencies of, of, of some men is to have other men who are similarly ambitious, uh, to counter them. Uh, so the need for a constitution that would check use checks and balances in opposing forces to harness, as we saw last time, that tendency toward conflict, towards the exercise of power. Um, something else that comes out in the Federalist is the, the huge stakes that the authors of the Constitution, the framers, as we call them, saw implicit in their enterprise. Uh, they really thought that, uh, this was the last, best chance to use words that Lincoln would use later for the whole world to establish a Republican form of government. What Hamilton said in Federalist number one, that the question before them was to decide whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political Constitutions on accident and force. In other words, can we self-consciously making use of what we know about history, about the ways in which republics have failed in the past? Um, all the way through human history, going back to antiquity, can we make use of this knowledge in order to create a republic that will not fall into these traps, will be, uh, to the extent possible with human flesh to be immune to them. So this is one of the great enterprises in their minds of human history. They were, uh, using this unique occasion to try to create a new science of politics for a new world. They were using history to defy history. Uh, so, um, the Anti-Federalists, uh, were not they were defeated in the end, but they were not completely defeated. They managed to wring out of Madison and the others a concession that there would be a series of amendments to the Constitution, which we now call the Bill of rights, that were designed to protect individual liberties against the incursions of this newly powerful national government. And thank goodness that they did. They deserve a lot of credit for seeing things the framers themselves did not see so well. Um, uh, we would not want to have the Constitution without the Bill of rights in it. Actually, to the extent that some people think that when you talk about the Constitution, you’re only talking about the Bill of rights and not the Electoral College or the separation of powers or any of the other things that go with the Constitution. So it’s seen by all of us as integral to the Constitution. At the time the Constitution was adopted. A lot of people were skeptical, even those who voted for it. Even George Washington himself confessed that he didn’t expect it to last more than 20 years. He would have been surprised, as anyone, I suppose, to see it still going 230 some odd years later. Um, but the skepticism was justified. This was something new. This was a blueprint for a building that hadn’t been built. It was the score for music that had not yet been played. No one knew what was going to happen with the building was going to look like what the music was going to sound like. Um, but it made a big difference that everyone knew who would be running the show from the presidency, at least for a few years, to get things started. And that would be, of course, George Washington, who was both blessed and cursed with the status of being the indispensable man, as his biographer, uh, once put it, uh, James Thomas Flexner. The Indispensable Man is the title of his biography of Washington. Washington didn’t really want to do this. He wanted to retire. He wanted to go back to his beautiful home at Mount Vernon, on the shores of the Potomac River, and live the life of a gentleman farmer that he hadn’t been able to live for 20 or more years, that he had been engaged in strenuous public service, some of which we talked about last time. But the country was one of the great experiments of human history, and he couldn’t back away from accepting his responsibility to see to it that the experiment succeeded. He said in his inaugural address the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps, as finally staked on the experiment. He uses that word Experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. So, you know, he had to be there. He couldn’t back out. He couldn’t go back to the farm and take it easy. Among the most urgent tasks, tasks facing him was the country’s parlous financial state. And he turned this task over to Alexander Hamilton, who was something of an economic genius. And Hamilton devised a basically three parts oversimplifying a little bit, a three part plan for bringing the nation into solvency. First, it would assume all the debts of the states and pay off the national debt in full at par value. Um, this was ingenious because it would bind the states, bind the most powerful force imaginable to the national government. It wouldn’t depend just on affection. There would be material considerations involved. Second, he proposed high tariffs. Yes, you heard me right. High tariffs to protect American nascent American industries and help the United States to develop a balanced commercial economy, something he avidly sought. And third, he called for the creation of a national bank to deposit government funds and serve as a regulator of the currency through the printing of banknotes. These were the three principal things that he wanted to do in his economic program. There are other things, but we can look at the book for those. Um, and, uh, the National Bank was the most controversial. They were all controversial. But the National Bank, particularly Madison Jefferson, Virginians hated the idea. Um, on the other hand, Hamilton and they thought it was unconstitutional. The Constitution, in this view, was a charter of enumerated powers. Enumerated Meaning if it ain’t there, you ain’t got it. It’s enumerated. It’s spelled out. The powers that are given to the federal government, the national government. Hamilton, on the other hand, said, well, hey, look at article one, section eight. It says that Congress has the power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying out the functions of government. Well, this went to a very fundamental disagreement that would last for years, arguably is still with us today between the strict construction and loose construction of the Constitution. Um, Jefferson and Hamilton symbolized these two approaches. Jefferson. The strict construction. Hamilton the loose interpretation. Jefferson thought the loose interpretation was just a fancy way of saying the end justifies the means. Uh, Hamilton thought that the nation was a Hercules in the crib, as he once said that it was just ready to bust out if. As long as it was given the economic tools to do so, including a government that was active enough to to produce results. So the two men came to symbolize these different views, not just of government, but of the nation as a whole. What kind of nation was America to be? Hamilton envisioned an America that was a commercial power, that was a world power that would be able to contend, go toe to toe economically and ultimately in other respects, too, with the great nations of the world. Jefferson, on the other hand, thought the ideal for a virtuous citizenry, and he used that older language of virtue was a fundamentally based in agriculture. His America would be an America of yeoman farmers, a freehold land holders who work their own farms and, uh, and in that way made a living a sufficiency. They would maybe with some sale of surpluses, but, uh, not capitalists in the full sense of a capitalistic agriculture. Those who labor in the earth, he once said, are the chosen people of God. And so he. He favored agriculture, even though he. He was not much of a farmer himself, and actually loved spending time in Paris and hobnobbing with cosmopolitan intellectuals. A very interesting guy in that regard. The two men also represented different views of foreign policy, which the United States, despite its distance from Europe, could not avoid, because, after all, France had been part of the successful revolution in America. And when France had its own revolution in 1789, a lot of Americans, including Jefferson, including those who followed Jefferson, were on the French side. They thought the French Revolution was great. They thought it was an extension of the same kind of Liberalism, the same kind of affirmation of universal rights that had been alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. Why not? Hamilton, on the other hand, um, uh, who favored, uh, imitating the British model in some ways he was he was, uh, more impressed with the British way of doing things than the American, even though he was a great fighter for the Constitution. Um, Washington, who was president for two terms, the first two presidential terms in American history, uh, thought the better path was neutrality. And so he tried to keep a neutral path, uh, which with great difficulty, because the nation was not inclined to follow, or at least the most activist elements in American political life were not inclined to follow. And indeed, this was a period, particularly getting into the 1790s of great stress in American national life. Constant worries that factionalism was going to break out, and even that those who supported the French might go to the extent of treason, uh, in their support of the French cause and their opposition to their homegrown opponents. Washington gave a wonderful farewell address on September 17th of 1796 as he was about to leave office, and he cautioned against excessive entanglements in foreign affairs and wanted to stress National Union as the most important principle of American foreign policy. Um, this proved very hard to sustain, particularly after he was um, had stepped down and was succeeded by John Adams, his vice president. Adams had a very turbulent and difficult presidency, a one term presidency, our first one term presidency, and Adams may well have been ill suited to the job. Washington was an impossible act to follow. All sorts of reasons for that, uh, administration being problematic. But there’s one thing that he did or allowed to happen that especially marks him, gives him a black mark in historical legacy. And that is his administration’s passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which basically were efforts to, uh, they were response to what was seen as the fake news of the time coming from the Federalists. Well, both from Federalists and Republicans. And it became a crime under these laws to publish what someone else might judge to be, quote, false, scandalous and malicious criticisms of high government officials. Um, 25 Republican newspaper editors were Prosecuted under this these laws. In response, Jefferson and Madison did something equally bad in in drafting the so-called Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, which were basically, uh, proclamations of the right of states because the Constitution was considered a compact between the states. An issue will come up very soon in another context, because it was a compact between the states. The states had the right to interpose themselves or to nullify federal laws that they didn’t agree with. So which of these is worse? They’re both pretty bad. George Washington was appalled by the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, and he said that if pursued, they would dissolve the Union. So both parties were fearing out of control at this point, uh, that the Republicans were acting like were being seen by the other side by the Federalists says wild eyed Jacobins. The Federalists were being seen by the Republicans, the Jeffersonians as crypto monarchists, people who wanted to impose monarchy on the country. And then, in the midst of all this, December 1799, George Washington dies at a time when all this acrimony reigns and there’s no longer that figure, that enormous figure, not just physically enormous, but politically and spiritually enormous, uh, leader, uh, to hold things together. Miraculously, though, the election of 1800, which was a fiercely contested election, as you would expect it to be between Jefferson and Adams, um, which Jefferson won by a small but decisive margin. Uh, there’s some complications there we can’t get into. But he did win it pretty clearly. And as President Jefferson turned down the heat. He turned out to be a very, uh, unifying president. Surprisingly so. He gave one of the great inaugural addresses in which he began to express the desire for that kind of unity that Federalists and Republicans were all on the same side, that they were part of the same union. Um, so, uh, the first inaugural was almost as masterly a speech as Washington’s farewell address. This is a great time for American oratory. So the revolution of 1800, as Jefferson would later call it, was actually a step in the maturation of the nation. Um, uh, symbolized by the venue in which Jefferson spoke. He spoke at the new national capital in Washington, D.C., for the first time, uh, of of an administration having an inaugural there. Jefferson’s presidency. I’m going to pass over rather quickly, except to say that there’s a pattern to it. And the pattern is that Jefferson, first of all, found himself unable to reverse and even unwilling in the end, to reverse Hamilton’s economic program, to which he had so heartily objected. Um, he found himself unable to overcome the federal judiciary led by John Marshall. Uh, the Federalist Supreme Court justice, who was a very long serving chief justice and really established the role of the court through the Marbury versus Madison case as the agent of judicial review. That is a review of the constitutionality of acts of Congress. Um, none of which Jefferson, who really distrusted the judiciary, being a more radical Democrat, small d Democrat. Um, uh, he didn’t really think that, uh, judges should be able to lord it over the popular will. Thanks to Marshall, the Supreme Court would have a preeminent place in American politics, one that was never spelled out in the Constitution itself. Although most of us think that the founders, the framers did intend for such a role to exist, the greatest achievement of his administration was the Louisiana Purchase, which was, uh, heretofore in American history, the most, uh, sweeping act using executive power to acquire 800,000mi² of additional land, more than doubling the size of the country. Again, the details of how the purchase came about are interesting. And there in in the book, land of Hope. But, um, it was the bargain of the millennium, arguably $15 million paid the French for this enormous tract of land to the west of the existing United States. So consider the irony. Just as Jefferson consolidated the Hamiltonian economic program under his watch, he affirmed a kind of Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution by acts like the Louisiana Purchase. And in doing all of this, he consolidated his power over against the Federalists. Hamilton’s party, and by the end of his administration the Federalist Party was a shadow of its former self on its way to death. This is very ironic and very American. It seems to me in this way that the practice of politics doesn’t always obey the ideological lines that you would expect. After Jefferson, his administration came in the election of 1808, his retirement back to Monticello in Virginia. Um, the problem of the British, uh, and British interference with American trade, which had been a sort of nagging problem for many years, became so prominent and so intolerable that James Madison, who was Jefferson’s successor as president, ended up being pushed into war, the war of 1812, um, which is a war that just a few things to be said. The United States had no business fighting such a war where the United States is very fortunate that it got out of that war without too much damage, uh, to itself. There are two good things that came of it. One was the composition of the poem the Star-Spangled banner, which would become our national anthem. Francis Scott Key, observing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore and the flag waving. And then a second. A good thing was a a glorious, if unnecessary, battle fought in New Orleans under the leadership of General Andrew Jackson, who defeated a superior British force and gave the nation something to be proud of and gave the nation a new hero who. A military hero on a par with Washington, on a par with the heroes of the Revolution. Um. Looking forward into a new era that would be dominated by the common man. So, um, uh, those were the two good results of the otherwise potentially disastrous war of 1812, uh, which the United States probably would have been better off not fighting if Hamilton had been a stronger. Excuse me, if Madison had been a stronger and more forceful leader. So things were looking better for the United States in terms of foreign policy after the war of 1812. It was really possible to. Absent itself from world politics, the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed by James Monroe, who was a protege of Jefferson and Madison, declared the Western Hemisphere off limits to further European colonization. It was kind of declaring a sphere of influence for the United States and the United States, now free from foreign entanglements for a period of time, began to boom economically. The years after the war of 1812 were great years of economic growth, the building of railroads, the knitting together of the nation as a national economy looked like smooth sailing ahead. But one thing, one speck on the horizon to come back to where we began, that unresolved question of slavery. When the state of Missouri, which was acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission to the Union, it was a big problem because up to that time, the nation had managed an informal balance between slave states, states that permitted slavery and the northern states that had abolished it. So the question of slavery and slavery’s future in the country was kept at bay by this rough parity of states. To admit Missouri, which had been settled by slaveholding pioneers, would reopen. The question In general. You will see this when we talk about the Mexican War in a lecture or two. The westward expansion always opened up the question of slavery. It always put it back on the table, because there was the question of whether slavery would be allowed to expand into the territories. And this Missouri episode led to a huge national debate over the problem that had not been resolved at Philadelphia at 1787, and it would not resolve the debate in this occasion either. A way of carving a state, the state of Maine, out of Massachusetts and admitting it to the Union in parity with Missouri was how the problem was solved. But it concluded with Jefferson having a deep foreboding that the Missouri Compromise, as it was called of 1820, was more of a harbinger of a very dark future than it was a solution to the problem, he wrote to a friend. This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed, for the moment, but this is a reprieve only not a final sentence. He never spoke more darkly than this, and more prophetically, and he went on to express his sense of things in a memorable final sentence, which I will close with. We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. He had identified the principal danger to the American experiment, and we’ll see how that danger manifested itself in our next lecture. Thank you.

Juan Davalos: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit hillsdale.edu slash. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis story, classic children’s literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you’ll learn will enrich your life, and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at hillsdale.edu/today. That’s hillsdale.edu. Thanks for listening.

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Once per week, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss Great Books, Great Men, and Great Ideas.

Matthew Spalding, vice president of Washington Operations and dean of Hillsdale in D.C.’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government, joins Hugh Hewitt on the Hillsdale Dialogues to begin a series on the intellectual foundations of the American Revolution.

Release date: 01 May 2026

Thomas Jefferson called the Declaration of Independence “an expression of the American mind.” Not merely a document, the Declaration is the common creed of our civic life, and it inspires the shared poetry of our political soul.

In The Making of the American Mind, best-selling author Matthew Spalding presents the dynamic story of the band of patriots who united to declare independence from—and declare war against—the most powerful nation in the world. He recounts the whirlwind of historic events that led up to the momentous political and strategic decisions of July 1776: from George Washington leading a new and untested army, to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson advocating independence in a divided Continental Congress, to George III forging an absolute tyranny over “the good People of these Colonies.”

In this unique commentary, Spalding recovers the deep roots of the Declaration of Independence by examining the influence of the Greeks and Romans, the Christian West, and the English constitutional tradition on the American mind. Reading through the Declaration clause by clause, he explores the rich history and profound significance of the document’s powerful language and arguments—from the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” “all men are created equal,” and the “pursuit of happiness” to “prudence will dictate” and “abuses and usurpations.” Based on extensive, original research, the work presents in vivid detail the heroic deeds of those who pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to support the Declaration.

America cannot be appreciated without an understanding of the Declaration of Independence. Spalding’s dramatic retelling and thorough explanation of the Declaration’s making and meaning will capture the heart and instruct the mind of every reader.

The post The Making of the American Mind, Part One appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.