The Charlie Kirk Show - Great American Story: A Land of Hope with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 1)

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, happy Saturday.

00:00:02.000 We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with Hillsdale College, the beacon of the north, the place where truth is taught and our country is honored.

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00:00:21.000 So we have a new partnership with them, and you guys should go to charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:00:28.000 That's charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:00:30.000 So Charlie for Hillsdale, but for is spelled, not the number four.

00:00:34.000 And you'll be able to register for the online courses.

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00:00:39.000 They are substantive, they're beautiful, they're entertaining, and they are fulfilling.

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00:00:48.000 And so every Saturday for the foreseeable future, we're going to be diving into these ideas with experts from Hillsdale College about the most important issues of the day and how they translate historically and philosophically.

00:01:05.000 With us today is Dr. McClay from Hillsdale College and University of Oklahoma.

00:01:10.000 He is the author of the best textbook you can get your hands on, Land of Hope, The Great American Story.

00:01:19.000 And again, you can find that at charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:01:22.000 Are you afraid your children are not learning proper U.S. history?

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00:02:58.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:02:59.000 Here we go.

00:03:00.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

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00:03:21.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:03:30.000 That's why we are here.

00:03:32.000 Hey, everybody.

00:03:33.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:03:35.000 We are just thrilled today to have with us Dr. McClay, who, in my opinion, is one of the most important thought leaders when it comes to teaching American history in our country.

00:03:49.000 This is, of course, part of our partnership with Hillsdale College, as Hugh Hewitt calls it, the Beacon of the North, where you can find this course and all things Hillsdale at charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:04:02.000 Dr. McClay, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:04:06.000 Charlie, it's my pleasure to be with you.

00:04:08.000 Well, so I want to get into the specifics of the course and also the book that accompanies it.

00:04:15.000 So the course, I believe, is called Great American Story, but it's based off of the book Land of Hope, which I have been recommending to parents and teachers ever since I heard you talk about it with Dr. Arne and Hugh Hewitt.

00:04:30.000 But I want to talk about something that's a little bit broader and ask this question.

00:04:34.000 Why are stories so essential to human beings?

00:04:38.000 Why is it important that we tell stories properly in order to create good citizens?

00:04:44.000 Well, those are actually two different questions, but the stories, it's the way we understand how things came to be as they are.

00:04:54.000 You can use a word, a sort of analytic category, descriptive word to say, how did things come this way?

00:05:04.000 It evolved.

00:05:05.000 It developed.

00:05:06.000 But if you tell a story, first there was this, and then there was this, and then this happened, and the response to it meant we had to do this, and so on and so forth.

00:05:15.000 And the end result is we have the situation that we now see before us.

00:05:22.000 To tell a story is the only way to get at that.

00:05:25.000 You know, why are all the men in your family firemen?

00:05:31.000 Just as a hypothetical.

00:05:33.000 Well, it all started with Uncle Charlie long ago, who did this and that, that, that, and it was passed down this way.

00:05:40.000 Everything in our lives as individuals, our lives in groups, our lives in the country is embedded some way in the passage of time and the way events condition what we do next.

00:05:57.000 So you have to do it.

00:05:58.000 Stories are the way we make sense of things.

00:06:01.000 They're the way that we, you know, you can't, it's funny.

00:06:04.000 Have you ever noticed how you can't remember facts if they're just isolated factoids?

00:06:10.000 But if you put them into a story, all of a sudden they make sense.

00:06:15.000 Our faculty of memory really works through stories, through narratives.

00:06:20.000 So one reason we fret so much about, you know, when we talk about the news, about the narrative, a lot of times that exists in advance of the way that the facts are being reported.

00:06:33.000 And that's bad.

00:06:34.000 That's bad.

00:06:35.000 But it shows that there's a human need for stories as a way to make sense of things.

00:06:40.000 So it seems to me.

00:06:41.000 So when we historians stop telling stories, people stop reading us, stop paying attention.

00:06:47.000 And so it seems today that there's this big debate over what story are we telling.

00:06:53.000 For example, some people from the New York Times might say that we want to tell the story that America was founded in 1619, for example.

00:07:02.000 What is the story that you tell in this phenomenal course, The Great American Story, Land of Hope?

00:07:09.000 Is it one that obviously it's accurate, but what are you trying to achieve as you go through this?

00:07:14.000 What is the story you're trying to tell?

00:07:18.000 Well, I think what I've tried to do is to strike a balance between a sort of uncritical celebration of the country, which I don't think we want to do.

00:07:28.000 We know we have faults.

00:07:30.000 We know that we know those faults are things that we have to correct.

00:07:35.000 And some of them are faults of longstanding.

00:07:40.000 So it doesn't do to forget them and think they'll go away.

00:07:45.000 But it doesn't do young people.

00:07:48.000 Doesn't do any of us a service to present America as a villain when, in fact, we've been one of the greatest benefactor nations in human history.

00:07:59.000 We've taken in people from all over the world, allowed them to become Americans, allowed them to become wealthy, allowed them to become influential, accepted them as exemplary Americans.

00:08:14.000 There's no other nation in history that has had the capacity to do that.

00:08:20.000 That's why everybody wants to come here.

00:08:22.000 I mean, if we were so bad, how would you explain that?

00:08:26.000 They somehow they never do.

00:08:29.000 So I think that there is a kind of radiant ideal that we at our best have represented better than any other nation in certainly in modern history, if not all of human history.

00:08:45.000 And that we have failings, we have flaws, we have the debilities to which all human beings are liable.

00:08:52.000 But comparatively, and this is something I think we need to do more of in teaching American history, remind people of what the alternatives are.

00:09:03.000 If you compare America to perfection, we're always going to fall short.

00:09:08.000 But if you compare America to other countries, then the picture looks a whole lot different.

00:09:15.000 So in terms of real-world alternatives, we're pretty great.

00:09:19.000 And so you ask this question in the first course where you say, why do we study history?

00:09:25.000 Why do we engage in this vexing, awful, difficult task in which the reconstruction of the past is endlessly fascinating, but endlessly elusive?

00:09:34.000 Why especially, and I hear this all the time from my students, why do we study history today when we're living in an era that is so unprecedented in human history?

00:09:42.000 So why do we study history?

00:09:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:45.000 Because nothing is completely unprecedented.

00:09:48.000 I mean, I don't believe that history repeats itself.

00:09:53.000 You know, Mark Twain said it rhymes, and maybe there's something to that.

00:09:56.000 But no, history is a kind of record of basically unrepeatable things.

00:10:03.000 So why?

00:10:04.000 But we do look for patterns in history.

00:10:07.000 I like to say history is the only laboratory we have for judging good ideas and bad ideas, for figuring out how people are likely to behave in certain circumstances.

00:10:19.000 So look at the past.

00:10:20.000 Look at what's happened.

00:10:22.000 It's not a controlled scientific experience.

00:10:24.000 It never can be.

00:10:25.000 That's all we've got.

00:10:26.000 So it's up to us to mine it as best we can.

00:10:30.000 And certainly with the needs of the present and the future in mind, but also for its own sake.

00:10:36.000 I think his studying history broadens us.

00:10:40.000 It makes us larger.

00:10:42.000 It makes our souls larger because we learn about other people, other ways of life, other times, even in our own country, and learn to think ourselves into those situations, into other people's minds, other people's experiences.

00:10:57.000 That's a good thing.

00:10:59.000 That's something that, as I say, makes the soul larger and makes us more aware.

00:11:06.000 This can only be good.

00:11:08.000 And I think Cicero has a saying that if you never learn about the things that happened before you were born, then you will remain always a child.

00:11:22.000 And that's the condition.

00:11:25.000 Somebody for whom everything's unprecedented is somebody who doesn't know anything about anything else that ever happened.

00:11:32.000 They're a child.

00:11:34.000 You know, human nature is not very different, if at all different, from what it was in Cicero's time.

00:11:43.000 So, we're still dealing with the same crooked timber of humanity, trying to do the best we can with that crooked timber.

00:11:52.000 And one reason that we Americans should always go back with gratitude to our Constitution is that it is a scheme that works with the crooked timber.

00:12:05.000 It takes that into account, all the things that we are prone to do and makes a good result out of it.

00:12:13.000 That's so beautifully said.

00:12:15.000 So, I want to ask, and I think it's a great transition, as you mentioned, Cicero.

00:12:21.000 The idea of the West.

00:12:24.000 I first came across the idea that the West was bad when I was speaking at Stanford University, and someone said, Western civilization is one of colonialism and oppression and misogyny and homophobia.

00:12:37.000 I said, What are you talking about?

00:12:38.000 So, Dr. McClay, what is the West?

00:12:40.000 Is it just a place on the map?

00:12:42.000 Is it what ideas influenced it?

00:12:44.000 The floor is yours.

00:12:46.000 Well, you can go back a long way because if you go back to antiquity, there was always this notion, and you see it in the idea of the Elysian fields and the Garden of Eden, and of there being a place in the West, in the land where the sun sets.

00:13:07.000 And I mean, in Europe, especially this idea, where there were fields of redemption.

00:13:15.000 It was like a new Eden, a new Zion, a place where the human race would be redeemed.

00:13:22.000 And that was one of the things that drew explorers West, if not the only thing, but it was definitely part of their interest in the West.

00:13:34.000 And the first colonizing efforts kind of mapped themselves onto that template, that idea of the West is a land of redemption.

00:13:43.000 So, you see, in the Puritans, for example, in the 17th century, you know, not the earliest, but the next earliest settlers, they thought of the new world as a land where a pure church,

00:14:00.000 purifying of the corruptions that it had suffered, could be reestablished and a pure form of worship and a more virtuous way of living could be established.

00:14:16.000 And that's what they tried to do in God help us, Boston.

00:14:22.000 You know, utopian efforts generally fail, but American history is full of them.

00:14:28.000 You know, that's one of the meanings of it being a land of hope.

00:14:31.000 People have come here always with the idea that you are not condemned to be to live your life entirely in the conditions you were born into.

00:14:44.000 You know, you're not condemned to that.

00:14:46.000 That's not your ticket, it is not stamped at birth.

00:14:49.000 You can make something, as we say, make something of yourself.

00:14:53.000 And the land of hope is the place where those possibilities are there, not certainties.

00:15:00.000 The land of hope is full of all kinds of failures or disappointments, as any enterprising society is.

00:15:07.000 You know, the best businessmen will tell you with this kind of a saying in Silicon Valley now that the only way you really develop is through failure.

00:15:17.000 Failure is not a bad word among some of these people.

00:15:20.000 And I think that's a great, I know there's a lot about Self-Bandaley I don't like, but I like that.

00:15:24.000 That idea that you try things, it doesn't work.

00:15:27.000 Okay, you try something else.

00:15:30.000 We're an experimental people in that way.

00:15:34.000 But we don't believe that we should be condemned to the conditions of our birth.

00:15:39.000 And that's a big difference between us and the old world that so many of our immigrants through our history have come from. 1.00

00:15:47.000 And so, as the West continued to develop and grow, can you just give us some background of the thinkers and the ideas that laid the framework for this land of hope?

00:15:59.000 Should we go all the way back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle?

00:16:03.000 What are the ideas of the natural law and where reason incorporated and the idea of self-evident truths?

00:16:10.000 Because it seems as if that's a missing component at times when we teach history to young people.

00:16:16.000 Well, you know, the founders were our founders were such extraordinary men.

00:16:23.000 And they were basically, I think the average age is like 45, something like that.

00:16:27.000 They're very young to be so wise.

00:16:31.000 And one of the things that made them wise is they'd read Socrates, Plato, Cicero, all that stuff.

00:16:37.000 And they were marinated in the classics, but they also had read the most up-to-date, you know, they'd read John Locke, they'd read Rousseau and Machiavelli.

00:16:48.000 You know, John Adams was quite taken with Machiavelli.

00:16:53.000 I mean, he hated him, but he couldn't talk about him.

00:16:56.000 Stop talking about him.

00:16:59.000 So they were well read.

00:17:01.000 I would not call them intellectuals, though, because if an intellectual is somebody who sort of studies ideas in order to just feed on ideas and spew out more words, that was not them.

00:17:13.000 They fed on ideas as a blueprint for action.

00:17:17.000 So they were always looking at the constitutions of republics in Renaissance Italy with a view towards what does this tell me about what a republic can be, what the requirements to be a republic, what the vulnerabilities of a republic, how we can create a republic, a place where the people rule and don't have a king, but the people rule.

00:17:42.000 Where can we find the blueprint for that?

00:17:46.000 So they looked everywhere.

00:17:49.000 And someone like Jefferson was, of course, very influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, which would include Bloc and Rousseau and others.

00:18:02.000 And there were English Whig writers who some of whom were quite radical in opposing the monarchy that they were influenced by.

00:18:16.000 I would also add, I think it's very important that this wasn't an influence with Jefferson, but it was with most of the others, religion.

00:18:24.000 It was a colonial and revolutionary era of America was a very religious society.

00:18:31.000 It was a kind of Protestantism that was not, it embraced a lot of different denominations, definitely Protestant.

00:18:42.000 Catholicism was a very, very marginal influence at the time of the founding.

00:18:48.000 But they thought, they felt, and this is what surprises people, they go back, is that they did not see any conflict between science and religion.

00:18:57.000 So they saw Enlightenment and revivalism or religious enthusiasm going hand in hand.

00:19:06.000 So the revolution was defended on secular grounds and on religious grounds.

00:19:16.000 And both were present, both sets of influences.

00:19:20.000 I think just to come back to your actual question about the influences of different thinkers, I think the ideas of Christianity, the notion of human equality under God,

00:19:37.000 The idea that the you know the freedom of the will, uh, the um and the notion that that of the improvability of the human condition by our own efforts.

00:19:50.000 Um, all of these have secular and religious roots.

00:19:53.000 It's fascinating, they did not see um a conflict there by and large.

00:19:59.000 You know, Jefferson was not very warmly disposed to religion, I admit that, but um, but he favored freedom of religion, not the abolition of religion.

00:20:09.000 So, I count him a brother in that.

00:20:12.000 Uh, uh, and almost everything that Jefferson stood for uh, in that line has endured.

00:20:19.000 So, in the Great American Story, and again, it's charlieforhillsdale.com, or you could dive deep into these ideas and also find other courses as well that I have taken.

00:20:30.000 I took Dr. Arne's Introduction to Aristotle, which was awesome, and the introduction to Constitution class, um, and also the history of the introduction to Western philosophy is really a phenomenal course.

00:20:42.000 And I tell people that if you dedicate time to this, no different than you dedicate time running on a treadmill, you will understand what's happening in the world better.

00:20:51.000 And Hillsdale has done such a phenomenal job with that.

00:20:54.000 So, I want to ask you about the genesis of the American Revolution.

00:20:58.000 The Great Awakening happened before that.

00:21:00.000 Dr. Arne would point to, I think, 1766, the end of the French-Indian War, as kind of the beginning of the rumblings of the American Revolution.

00:21:09.000 The American Revolution was obviously significant worldwide, and we count 1776 as our birthday.

00:21:16.000 Can you talk about what was happening leading up to the American Revolution?

00:21:20.000 Um, yeah, the context of that, and this is a good example, Charlie, of how you have to tell this as a story, uh, because if you don't do it that way, it's just not going to work, it's not you're not going to understand anything.

00:21:33.000 Look, the French and Indian War was an instance in which the conflict ended up with the French basically being booted out of North America.

00:21:46.000 So, the colonists, the English colonists, didn't have to fight with them anymore or deal with them. 0.65

00:21:55.000 But the problem was that it was a very expensive war for England to fight, and they bore the expense of it.

00:22:04.000 And so, when it was over, you know, a lot of people felt, and understandably, hey, you know, these colonists need to pay some of the freight on this.

00:22:15.000 So, the problem was how to do it.

00:22:18.000 The colonies all had their own assemblies, they had developed self-government.

00:22:23.000 You know, they've been in business over 100 years at this point, many of them, most of them.

00:22:30.000 And so, they had their own way of doing things and they raised taxes through their own legislatures.

00:22:36.000 That was the principle, you know, that that's how you raise taxes.

00:22:39.000 So, the idea of paying taxes to parliament didn't make any sense.

00:22:45.000 And yet, it's a fair point.

00:22:48.000 The British had to figure out a way to get the colonists to pay some of the expense for their own defense.

00:22:55.000 So, that's how it really started: is this conflict over what it was a settled way of life that we enjoyed in the colonies and the British effort to kind of tighten the screws on the empire so that they could extract some of the growing wealth of the colonies?

00:23:18.000 A sidebar here: the British had a different approach to colonization than the other great powers, the Spanish, the French.

00:23:25.000 They just kind of gave people a charter and said, go to it.

00:23:31.000 They didn't try to exercise centralized control.

00:23:34.000 And that's one reason the English colonies flourished is because they didn't have the heavy hand of government holding them back.

00:23:41.000 They could develop in their own ways.

00:23:43.000 They could profit from their own ventures instead of having to pay it all back to the mother country.

00:23:49.000 So that was now up for grabs after the French and Indian War and when this protracted period from 1763 to 1776, it sort of one effort after another by the Brits to think of something.

00:24:04.000 And the colonists say, no, no, like the old Holland Oates song, I can't go for that.

00:24:11.000 They can't go for that.

00:24:13.000 So it became more and more fractious.

00:24:19.000 But here's the reason I tell the story this way is that much as we love the Declaration of Independence, rightly so, and it is part of our identity.

00:24:32.000 Most Americans saw the revolution not as something radically new, but as a restoration.

00:24:40.000 That is, of their rights, their rights as Englishmen were to govern themselves, to tax themselves, to be judged by juries of their peers.

00:24:50.000 They picked all this up from English law.

00:24:53.000 These were not Enlightenment ideas.

00:24:55.000 They were ideas way back early in the tradition.

00:25:01.000 So the colonists saw themselves as Englishmen who happened to be living across the pond, but they were still Englishmen, very proud of that.

00:25:09.000 And to be an Englishman meant that you had the rights of an Englishman.

00:25:15.000 So they felt that Parliament and the king were taking those rights away.

00:25:20.000 And that's a big, big element of what the revolution was about.

00:25:26.000 Yes, we did have an element that Jefferson really was very influential around the world with the language of the Declaration of Independence, with the idea that our rights come not from government, but from God and nature's God, and therefore they can't be taken away by any human being.

00:25:45.000 And it's a responsibility of government to protect those rights.

00:25:50.000 And when it doesn't, time for a change.

00:25:54.000 So that's all part of the mix, too.

00:25:57.000 But there's a kind of radicals element, but there's also what I would call a conservative element in the American Revolution.

00:26:06.000 It's a radically conservative revolution.

00:26:10.000 And so, Dr. McClay, what I want to ask you is it wasn't just the train of abuses from King George.

00:26:21.000 People have been abused for a long time.

00:26:23.000 There was something else that was happening that made the founders say no.

00:26:27.000 What was happening in the background and in the literature and in the conversations or the intellectual development or the religious development that made the founders say no and have the courage and the clarity to do so?

00:26:42.000 Well, I think it was this combination.

00:26:44.000 There were definitely ideas.

00:26:46.000 I mentioned the radical Whig theorists who are not as well known as Locke and Jefferson.

00:26:54.000 But I think what it boils down to is a fear that they were going to lose their liberties, that little by little they would become enslaved.

00:27:03.000 And they used the language of slavery, ironically, because the institution of slavery was growing.

00:27:11.000 At the time of the revolution, every state, every colony, every state permitted slavery.

00:27:19.000 Everyone, Massachusetts, a lot of them got rid of it almost immediately, but that was creeping in.

00:27:27.000 So, there's a funny irony in their use of that term, but that's the way they saw it.

00:27:34.000 And they knew about the Spanish colonies, which had been virtually sort of, if not enslaved, they were just sort of outposts of government power.

00:27:46.000 They were not real settlements.

00:27:47.000 And the English came and they really settled. 0.89

00:27:50.000 They really made their homes and developed little Englands.

00:27:54.000 You know, there's a reason why so many things in what we call New England are named New Canaan, New York.

00:28:04.000 All these places are named after English towns and cities.

00:28:10.000 And the intention was to try to replicate the English way of life.

00:28:14.000 And now here comes the British government saying, no, we're going to impose taxes on you without representation, without your being represented in parliament by people you elect.

00:28:29.000 And, you know, there were no Concord jets at that time to transport people back and forth to represent the colonies.

00:28:36.000 So it was a real problem.

00:28:41.000 It was not a problem soluble within the constraints of the time.

00:28:47.000 Interestingly, if it all had happened in the 21st century, there might not have been the same issue.

00:28:54.000 But that's really it, Charlie.

00:28:55.000 I think at the bottom, there are a lot of ideas about, particularly about republicanism, that is, the people governing themselves without a monarch.

00:29:08.000 But they were used to governing themselves.

00:29:11.000 They were used to that.

00:29:12.000 That's what they did in the colonies.

00:29:15.000 And this imposition of the power of the crown in parliament on their everyday lives, which by the way was mostly unsuccessful.

00:29:24.000 I mean, the Boston Tea Party is indicative about, you know, they didn't succeed in any of these imposts.

00:29:34.000 None of them brought in any revenue and they stirred up trouble. 1.00

00:29:41.000 British officials were pretty stupid and mulish during this time. 1.00

00:29:46.000 And it was that there were a lot of Americans, so this is something else that's kind of poignant to know. 0.99

00:29:53.000 There are a lot of Americans who really didn't want to do this, but finally, in the end, felt it was what had to be done for the sake of their dignity as free and independent people, that they had to separate.

00:30:08.000 But it was not something everybody wanted to do right off the bat.

00:30:15.000 And there were some of the patriots like John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who would not sign the Declaration of Independence, even though he was just as angry as everybody else was because he feared what's going to happen if we are an independent?

00:30:34.000 Will we be able to kind of handle things?

00:30:36.000 Will we be able to raise an army?

00:30:38.000 Will we be, you know, we've taken for granted certain things that come with being part of the empire.

00:30:44.000 So it took a lot of guts for people, you know, these smart guys who knew what they were getting into to pledge their, you know, their sacred honor to this audacious act of separation.

00:30:58.000 But I think it was a desire to have liberty, to be free, to not have an essentially foreign power, which is what the British had become to them.

00:31:11.000 They had come to think of themselves as American.

00:31:15.000 That's an interesting thing.

00:31:16.000 So this process between 1763 and 1776 or so, we became Americans.

00:31:25.000 We stopped being English colonists living in America and in our own minds.

00:31:35.000 The hearts and minds, John Adams said, were changed.

00:31:39.000 And he says that was the real American Revolution, this coming to think of ourselves as Americans and not just the extension of England.

00:31:49.000 So, Dr. McClay, there's a lot of people that debate what our birthday is as a nation.

00:31:54.000 And I always find it interesting that we consider our birthday to be the day that we signed a separation document, not the day we won the war, not the day that we ratified the Constitution in 1787 or that we had the Bill of Rights become the law of the land in 1791.

00:32:11.000 Why is it important?

00:32:12.000 And what is the argument to say that our birthday was the day that we signed this document in July of 1776?

00:32:20.000 Well, and you know, it could be also July 2nd, because that was the day that we actually passed the resolution.

00:32:26.000 That's true.

00:32:27.000 But July 4th was the day that the document, the Declaration, was ratified and was promulgated.

00:32:37.000 I think, you know, I think that it's actually the other things are not, I think I wouldn't have any trouble dismissing those arguments, but the second versus the fourth, that's an interesting call.

00:32:51.000 You know, part of what Jefferson was doing and what the founders were doing with the Declaration, they were declaring, it was, as I like to say sometimes to my students, this was a press release to the world.

00:33:06.000 Here's what we're doing, folks.

00:33:08.000 And this is why we're doing.

00:33:12.000 And so you get the long train of abuses spelled out in rather vivid prose.

00:33:20.000 Nobody, a lot of people don't read it.

00:33:22.000 Not even say nobody, but a lot of people don't read it.

00:33:24.000 We read the preamble.

00:33:26.000 We read the famous words of Jefferson about our being created equal and so on.

00:33:34.000 But it really is an effort to say to the world, here we are.

00:33:40.000 This is what we're doing.

00:33:41.000 This is why we're doing it.

00:33:43.000 And there's a grandeur about that statement.

00:33:50.000 It's not just a sort of like a divorce decree.

00:33:58.000 It's not against something.

00:34:00.000 It's for something.

00:34:02.000 We've come of age.

00:34:05.000 At the beginning, it talks about in the course of human events that there comes a time when one people should separate from another people. 0.71

00:34:14.000 And there's almost, we've really matured.

00:34:17.000 It's really almost a child that's matured beyond the parent.

00:34:21.000 It's time to be on its own.

00:34:24.000 So I think it's this sense, even at the outset, that we were doing something that was more important than just our own welfare that makes the 4th of July the right day.

00:34:38.000 Because in fact, we now know that we were.

00:34:41.000 We were doing something that was dramatically transformative in the history of the world.

00:34:49.000 There had never been anything like the nation that came out of the American Revolution.

00:34:56.000 Never been a republic of that size come forward and commit itself to the principles of self-rule, of republic and self-rule.

00:35:12.000 So it was momentous.

00:35:15.000 And the Declaration of Rights in the Declaration of Independence, that didn't have to be there, but it was.

00:35:24.000 And I think that's, again, part of the grandeur of the document.

00:35:27.000 It seized the moment and made something much bigger out of it.

00:35:32.000 So I favor the fourth.

00:35:34.000 Now, can I comment on one thing here, Chris?

00:35:37.000 You mentioned the Constitution.

00:35:40.000 I've always felt the Constitution gets short-changed in our national.

00:35:44.000 We do have Constitution Day, but most people can't tell you when it is.

00:35:48.000 They know when the 4th of July is because it's.

00:35:50.000 It's the 4th of July.

00:35:52.000 But September 17th.

00:35:56.000 And there have been efforts to kind of canonize that date.

00:36:03.000 And I hope some of these are beginning to bear fruit.

00:36:07.000 But it doesn't have the pizzazz that the 4th of July have.

00:36:11.000 I wish people did accord it more respect because it seems to me, you know, there are many nations on this planet who have an independence day.

00:36:24.000 There are not many, there are not any.

00:36:27.000 There are not any that can celebrate having a constitution that's lasted for over 230 years.

00:36:35.000 And is, God willing, still going strong.

00:36:38.000 I don't know.

00:36:39.000 It's constantly being battered.

00:36:41.000 And that's an element of our history is that the Constitution has been challenged every day of the week.

00:36:52.000 And so this is not new.

00:36:55.000 I think we have some real obstacles to a restoration of the Constitution as originally understood.

00:37:03.000 But at least it's there.

00:37:05.000 And at least we have it as a president to look to.

00:37:09.000 So I believe we should celebrate it more.

00:37:11.000 I'm all for a much more high-octane Constitution Day than what we have now.

00:37:18.000 So maybe we have both.

00:37:21.000 And also December of 1791, when the Bill of Rights got ratified as well, that's pretty significant as well.

00:37:27.000 Yeah, yeah, it is.

00:37:29.000 It is.

00:37:30.000 And for a lot of people, the Bill of Rights, when they say the Constitution, they're actually talking about the Bill of Rights.

00:37:38.000 They're not really talking about the separation.

00:37:42.000 They should be, but they aren't.

00:37:44.000 It's the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, depending on who you're talking to.

00:37:48.000 And thank God for those things.

00:37:51.000 That's for George Mason, who pushed forward.

00:37:53.000 Yes, yes.

00:37:55.000 And, you know, Madison, James Madison, who was generally considered the architect of the Constitution, he didn't really want a Bill of Rights.

00:38:04.000 And there was a good argument that if you start enumerating some rights, what about the ones you didn't mention?

00:38:12.000 Does that mean those aren't rights?

00:38:13.000 That's the ninth amendment.

00:38:15.000 So there you go.

00:38:15.000 Yeah.

00:38:16.000 Yeah.

00:38:16.000 Well, so that's the ninth and tenth amendments are there, you know, and God knows maybe someday we'll give them the respect they're due.

00:38:25.000 But yeah, it's it's it's thank goodness, thank George Mason, thanks thanks to thank the anti-federalists, because they were the ones who really pushed for that.

00:38:39.000 One of the lessons of that history is that in a lot of conflicts in this country, you don't have winner takes all.

00:38:52.000 The winner has to give something to the loser.

00:38:55.000 And sometimes with the part that the loser gives ends up being the best part.

00:39:01.000 So that's something to really in this polarized time.

00:39:05.000 And, you know, I'm feeling pretty polarized myself a lot of the time, but it's important to remember that, that we've had, you know, contrary to what the president said the other day, we have had, we've had worse times than now.

00:39:22.000 We had the Civil War, for example, and we've had worse times even since the Civil War.

00:39:30.000 But we have in our souls a kind of genius for political accommodation that the Constitution is really the embodiment of.

00:39:44.000 And so I think the protection of the Constitution is for me one of the most important tasks they had.

00:39:52.000 And it's really something that, Charlie, I mean, I think you and your organization are fighting that fight.

00:39:57.000 It's, you know, it's, it shouldn't be a cause just for one side of the aisle.

00:40:05.000 The moment it seems to be.

00:40:08.000 And so be it.

00:40:09.000 It's the Constitution, you know, and we have to have it.

00:40:13.000 We have to keep it.

00:40:14.000 Amen.

00:40:15.000 So the last question I want to ask you, it might be a little unusual, but it's about history and how we view history.

00:40:22.000 I know we talked about this earlier, but it seems as if this idea of German historicism, of looking at history as a constant unfolding towards an inevitable utopia or perfection, kind of dominates the way we teach history.

00:40:35.000 How aware were you when you developed this that those kind of influences are there?

00:40:40.000 Can you help me?

00:40:41.000 I'm just personally curious.

00:40:42.000 Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

00:40:44.000 Look, just think of the saying that President Obama liked to use.

00:40:50.000 I'm not sure exactly where it comes from.

00:40:52.000 It's actually an adaptation of a sort of biblical archo-history.

00:40:56.000 The archohistory towards justice, yeah.

00:40:57.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:58.000 And, you know, that whole formulation is faulty.

00:41:05.000 You know, it, it, it, you know, this is a really good question because, you know, especially in a country that's formed by the Bible, by Christianity and Judaism, which are phase in which history does have a meaning. 0.90

00:41:25.000 It's not just, as Henry Ford said, one damn thing after another.

00:41:29.000 It does go somewhere. 0.88

00:41:32.000 We don't necessarily know, except in the broadest outlines, where it's going according to that formula.

00:41:39.000 But then you have, you know, people come along like Hegel, and of course, Marx is sort of an inversion of Hegel, who thought, oh, you could plot the whole thing out, the whole dialectical process of history, how it arrives at the sort of absolute mind at the end of the rainbow.

00:42:00.000 And this whole sort of secular messianism that Marxism is a great example of, although it's not the only one.

00:42:09.000 This is, I think, the wrong way to think about history.

00:42:14.000 I think that history is often the larger vision of where history is going is, I think, not really available to us.

00:42:23.000 I think we see it through a glass darkly, if I may borrow a phrase from Paul.

00:42:29.000 And what we can do is work with what we have, what's in front of us, and try to, just as, you know,

00:42:43.000 the person who formulates theories about relieving world poverty is doing much less good than somebody who picks up somebody who's fallen on the sidewalk and just helps them and helps them over to get bandaged and cleaned up.

00:43:00.000 You know, that's there's an intoxicating quality to big historical pictures that takes people off of the track of the responsibility they have at the here and now to live good lives as virtuous people.

00:43:17.000 So I also think that a lot of his theories of history, Obama's bending towards justice is a positive view, but there's a lot of them that are very negative.

00:43:32.000 The decline of the West and that kind of thing.

00:43:35.000 And I think, again, in our religious heritage, one of the things about Christianity, especially, I think Judaism too, is despair is a sin.

00:43:48.000 We are not permitted to despair because to despair is to assume we know where events are going and that we live under either no God or a cruel God who is taking us there.

00:44:05.000 Despair presumes the things we cannot know.

00:44:08.000 What we can know are about the goods that are right in front of us to pursue.

00:44:13.000 So, but one of the great things about our history is we have such a goodly heritage.

00:44:19.000 We can look back in hard times.

00:44:23.000 We can look back at what the founders did, what Lincoln was able to do during the Civil War.

00:44:30.000 At D-Day, you know, our history is just studded with these moments of resplendent triumph.

00:44:39.000 And that history is still going.

00:44:45.000 The challenges before us now are, I think, less imposing than ones that would have stopped people's hearts in the past, and yet they kept going.

00:44:56.000 So that's one of the, I think, one of the values of history, properly studied, properly taught, properly appropriated, properly.

00:45:07.000 You know, it's one of the things about Harry Truman that I've always liked is that he, Harry Truman never went, well, he really didn't, he did not have a college education, basically had a high school education, but he read history and he learned from it.

00:45:21.000 And not just modern history, he read Tacitus.

00:45:24.000 He was a big fan of Roman history and he knew it backwards and forwards.

00:45:29.000 And it was one of the ways, things that he drew on in the unprecedented situation that faced him at the end of the Second World War, the Cold War, how to arrange things.

00:45:41.000 He may not have done everything right, but he did a lot right.

00:45:46.000 And I think to the extent he did, it was because he had this historical sense.

00:45:51.000 I don't think we have leaders, I don't think we've had leaders in a long time who had that historical sense.

00:46:01.000 And we'd be better off if they did.

00:46:02.000 We'd be more optimistic if we did.

00:46:04.000 Yes, and would be better leaders.

00:46:06.000 I was just curious about that personally.

00:46:08.000 Charlie for Hillsdale, Charlie F-O-R-Hillsdale.com.

00:46:12.000 And this is going to be, this is part one of a multi-part series as we're going through The Land of Hope, the Great American Story.

00:46:20.000 And if you go to charlieforhillsdale.com, you'll be able to register for this course for free and go through it with us.

00:46:27.000 And you can send your feedback as always through email, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:46:31.000 If you guys like to touch things and read through things, then you are able to then order the Land of Hope textbook for all of your kids.

00:46:38.000 So if you're a parent right now and you have kids that are just being propagandized by nonsense at whatever school, and we get those emails all the time, Dr. McClay, buy that textbook and use that as a helping tool, as maybe a second voice, right?

00:46:53.000 Dr. McClay, talk just briefly about that.

00:46:56.000 Oh, yeah.

00:46:56.000 Well, you know, I'm so thank you for the opportunity to do that.

00:46:59.000 As yeah, it is, I think, a very unusual textbook.

00:47:05.000 It's really designed, excuse me, designed to be read.

00:47:09.000 I don't have a lot of jazzy graphics and tables and sidebars.

00:47:13.000 And It is meant to be a story and to have the qualities of a story.

00:47:18.000 And most of the readers and reviewers have said that, have credited that.

00:47:23.000 So I think I did it.

00:47:26.000 The thing I want, especially happy to have you give me this opportunity to mention, is that I just finished a young reader's edition of Land of Hope.

00:47:36.000 And it won't be out until January, but and we still have a lot of work to do on the illustrations and all that.

00:47:43.000 But it's really designed for younger readers.

00:47:46.000 I kind of tried to pitch it to fifth, sixth grade, because a lot of states, that's when kids take their first American history course.

00:47:56.000 It's very similar to Land of Hope.

00:47:59.000 You know, we call it Land of Hope Jr. around the publishing house.

00:48:03.000 But it's much more accessible for younger people.

00:48:08.000 It'll be in two volumes.

00:48:11.000 I hope we have a little box and it will have a lot more illustrations and be more kid-friendly.

00:48:20.000 But with the same content within limits, you know, I can't, there's a lot of economic things you can't explain to fifth graders.

00:48:30.000 So I've had to kind of tone that down a little bit.

00:48:34.000 But those of you who have young kids and think that Land of Hope is just above their reading level, first, give it a try anyway.

00:48:45.000 You might be surprised.

00:48:48.000 And secondly, you know, help is on the way with the Young Readers Edition.

00:48:55.000 I also have for homeschoolers, and a lot of people using Land of Hope or homeschoolers, we have a teacher's guide and a student workbook available to supplement it.

00:49:07.000 So you got everything you need to teach the book at home with your children.

00:49:11.000 Phenomenal.

00:49:12.000 And also the videos that you guys have done from The Great American Story are good starting points.

00:49:18.000 If you guys are living really busy lives, you want to go through them.

00:49:21.000 And what I love about the way Hillsdale does it is there's tests afterwards so you can really test your comprehension of it.

00:49:26.000 So Dr. McClay, can't wait to our next one.

00:49:29.000 We're going to be talking about the genius of the Constitution in the next one.

00:49:32.000 I did the best I could not to get to the Constitution.

00:49:35.000 We got right up to it.

00:49:36.000 And I got a lot I want to talk to you about at the next episode.

00:49:39.000 So thank you, Dr. McClay.

00:49:41.000 Can't wait and we deeply appreciate it.

00:49:42.000 Thank you.

00:49:42.000 What a pleasure.

00:49:43.000 Thank you.

00:49:44.000 And thanks to all of you.

00:49:45.000 You bet.

00:49:46.000 Talk to you soon.

00:49:46.000 Thank you.

00:49:49.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:49:51.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:49:55.000 If you'd like to support our program, please do so at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:50:00.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:50:02.000 God bless.

00:50:03.000 Speak to you soon.

00:50:06.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk. com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 07, 2021

Great American Story: A Land of Hope with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 1)

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