The Charlie Kirk Show - Great American Story: The Genius of the Constitution with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 2)

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 Today on a special Saturday episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, my continued conversation with Dr. McClay from the wonderful Hillsdale College.

00:00:09.000 Many of you have a love of history.

00:00:10.000 I know based on the emails you send us, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:00:14.000 It's time to dive deep into that history.

00:00:16.000 What is the American story?

00:00:17.000 Today, we talk about the Constitution, getting from a declaration to a regime.

00:00:22.000 Who were the anti-Federalists?

00:00:24.000 The genius of compromise, the wound of slavery, and so much more.

00:00:29.000 And if you want to teach your children proper history, and if you want to take the classes for yourself, go to charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:00:37.000 I go to my hillsdale.edu portal every single day.

00:00:41.000 When I'm working out for about an hour, hour and a half, I take a couple of these classes.

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00:00:56.000 So there's free online courses.

00:00:58.000 So I'm about to finish.

00:00:59.000 I'm so close to finishing the Introduction to Western Philosophy.

00:01:02.000 Introduction to Western Philosophy.

00:01:03.000 I'm 75% done.

00:01:05.000 All I have left is Kant, Nietzsche, and C.S. Lewis.

00:01:08.000 So pray for me as I go through Kant and Nietzsche, not exactly uplifting thinkers.

00:01:12.000 And I end with C.S. Lewis, which is a nice way to end.

00:01:15.000 I'm 17% of the way through the Genesis story, reading biblical narratives, a phenomenal class.

00:01:20.000 I have finished Constitution 101, the meaning and history of the Constitution.

00:01:24.000 I have finished Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, How to Lead a Good Life, and I finished Introduction to the Constitution.

00:01:28.000 And I plan, this is a big statement, to take every single Hillsdale online course eventually.

00:01:34.000 I'm not putting a timetable on it.

00:01:36.000 I want to take them all.

00:01:37.000 A wise man loves to be corrected.

00:01:40.000 And Aristotle says everyone loves to know.

00:01:43.000 They have a desire to know.

00:01:45.000 If you want to know how to save the country, dive deep into our history.

00:01:48.000 Maybe you are interested in Mark Twain.

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00:01:52.000 Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn.

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00:02:19.000 Thomas Aquinas on nature, grace, and life of God.

00:02:21.000 Martin Luther on justification.

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00:02:24.000 Christianity Enlightenment and knowing God in the 20th century.

00:02:28.000 All of that is in their Theology 101 class.

00:02:30.000 Go learn right now from the Beacon of the North, the place that has all these courses you can go into great detail.

00:02:36.000 It's charlieforhillsdale.com.

00:02:40.000 And I ask people, they say, Charlie, what can I do?

00:02:43.000 And you know what my sponse is?

00:02:44.000 How many Hillsdale online courses are you taking?

00:02:47.000 Now, if they've taken a couple, I'll dive deep into things they can do.

00:02:50.000 But until you and your children spend the time to know, to understand, then what are we really doing here?

00:02:58.000 How can you preserve and save a country that you don't know about?

00:03:04.000 Charlie F.O.R.Hillsdale.com, as you can tell.

00:03:06.000 I'm super enthusiastic about this.

00:03:08.000 I was so happy to be able to announce this partnership because I myself have benefited.

00:03:13.000 People say, Charlie, how are you able to cover all of this information, these range of topics here on the Charlie Kirk show?

00:03:20.000 It's because we take learning seriously here.

00:03:23.000 We take learning seriously.

00:03:26.000 And that's what you guys can do.

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00:03:29.000 And you guys can get the curriculum there, land of hope, best textbook.

00:03:33.000 So make sure you check it out.

00:03:34.000 Dr. McClay is here.

00:03:35.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:03:36.000 Here we go.

00:03:37.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:03:39.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:03:41.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:03:44.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:03:48.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:03:49.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:03:50.000 His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:03:57.000 Turning point USA.

00:03:58.000 Will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:04:07.000 That's why we are here.

00:04:11.000 Hey, everybody.

00:04:11.000 Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:04:14.000 Back with us today, despite all the storms and all of Mother Nature's best attempt to thwart us today is Dr. McClay.

00:04:21.000 Dr. McClay, welcome back to our continued dialogue about the great American story, the land of hope.

00:04:27.000 Thank you, Charlie.

00:04:28.000 It's really great to be with you.

00:04:30.000 So we got some wonderful response and lots of questions.

00:04:34.000 And people have been really looking forward to this particular topic about the Constitution and what you call the genius of the Constitution.

00:04:44.000 You don't really hear that language as much anymore.

00:04:48.000 Instead, we kind of hear about the flaws of the Constitution or the bigotry of the Constitution, as some academics would say.

00:04:55.000 Talk to us about why the Constitution was truly a stroke of genius.

00:05:00.000 Well, it was very much conceived in a particular historical moment.

00:05:07.000 And that part of it's really interesting, but it had a kind of larger vision that was part of that.

00:05:17.000 You know, it's very rare that when people are involved in politics that they're both thinking about addressing the moment and thinking about something that's going to last permanently.

00:05:28.000 Although, you know, some of the framers, even George Washington, didn't really expect it to last that long or needing to be radically revised.

00:05:37.000 I think all of them would be surprised that 234 years later, bing, still there it is with some amendments and alterations, but fundamentally the structure that they envision and the longest lasting Constitution in the world.

00:05:54.000 So obviously there's something, you're doing something right if you last that long in a turbulent world.

00:06:02.000 And I think that the genius of it is one of the ways that compromise sometimes produces a better result than what either side wanted.

00:06:12.000 I think that's the case with the Constitution because it expanded the scope of the national government, but not too much, just the right amount, while enshrining protections against the abuse of power, some of which, you know, we've lost or we're in danger of losing.

00:06:38.000 I mean, three and a half trillion dollars budget voted on yesterday or today.

00:06:46.000 You know, it's kind of horrifying.

00:06:47.000 They would be horrified.

00:06:48.000 I'm horrified.

00:06:50.000 But we won't get into present events, current events.

00:06:55.000 So the protections of the Constitution are not absolute. 0.99

00:06:59.000 Nothing in life is foolproof because the world is full of fools. 0.98

00:07:04.000 And the Constitution has failed. 0.98

00:07:06.000 It failed in the Civil War, you could say.

00:07:09.000 But did it fail us or did we fail it?

00:07:14.000 That's really the question.

00:07:15.000 I think what the Constitution does is it starts with a very realistic view of human nature.

00:07:23.000 I mean, your view of human nature really is at the bottom of everything.

00:07:27.000 And if you have the wrong kind of conception of human nature, the government that comes out of it is going to be ineffective and likely to be prone to tyranny simply because those who make it up will say, you know, we just need to turn the screws a little harder to get things the way we want it when you're going against the grain of human nature.

00:07:51.000 They understood that we are motivated by interests, sometimes by even by greed or cupidity, but by our self-interest, the pursuit of our self-interest.

00:08:05.000 And instead of trying to outlaw that or badger us into an idea of virtue that would cause us to renounce our interest, it sets up a system in which interest is given its place, but is held in check by the other people pursuing their interests.

00:08:27.000 And so the system is like an equilibrium when it's working properly.

00:08:32.000 And it's slow.

00:08:34.000 That's something that frustrates a lot of people.

00:08:36.000 It frustrated Woodbrow Wilson.

00:08:38.000 We were just talking about the slowness of government.

00:08:42.000 But if you're interested in protecting liberty, you don't want to be hasty.

00:08:48.000 You don't want to declare every bump in the road to be an emergency that requires you to suspend the laws and spend another trillion dollars.

00:08:58.000 And so the Constitution, I think, is made for a people who have that kind of patience, have that kind of realism.

00:09:07.000 Are we still that people?

00:09:09.000 That's, again, a current events question.

00:09:11.000 But it was the product of this extraordinary group of people, even people who don't especially like the Constitution.

00:09:22.000 When they study the framers, they have to say, wow, these guys, an average of 45 years old, I believe, very young for the most part, who came up with such a profound document.

00:09:39.000 But I don't know whether you want me to talk about this, I'll show you a little bit about the circumstances, because it really was a product of very special circumstances.

00:09:51.000 You know, we had a revolution and we talked, you and I talked about that last time, that that was in large measure a revolution, I call it a revolution of self-rule.

00:10:01.000 It was a revolution to, on the colonists' part, to retain their rights as Englishmen, which oddly enough meant they had rebel against England, which was they saw as taking those rights away.

00:10:16.000 Yes.

00:10:17.000 And during the revolution, we fought the revolution under the Articles of Confederation.

00:10:24.000 That was the charter of the national government.

00:10:27.000 And just the name Confederation suggests this is a loose alliance.

00:10:35.000 Going back to the Declaration of Independence, it concludes by declaring that the British colonies are free and independent states, which is great, you know.

00:10:49.000 But what does that mean in terms of the kind of government that will are they independent?

00:10:53.000 Does it mean the Rhode Island is going to be its own country?

00:10:57.000 Or was there some sort of national structure envisioned?

00:11:02.000 And if so, what?

00:11:04.000 And it was very important to them to keep a degree of separateness and autonomy in the states.

00:11:13.000 So that was the problem.

00:11:15.000 And the articles were a good solution for their moment because they vested most power in the states.

00:11:24.000 The president was very, really, the president was really just a presiding figure.

00:11:30.000 The states ran things.

00:11:32.000 You had to have a unanimous vote to get through Congress.

00:11:37.000 And obviously, that was very difficult to do.

00:11:41.000 You didn't have a real regulatory power to regulate interstate commerce or To conduct diplomacy, even to conduct warfare.

00:11:52.000 So, you know, once the revolution was over and it was driven by a momentum of its own, it became clear that the articles were not going to be adequate for the future.

00:12:05.000 And there were several things, you know, that the British refused to leave some of the Western lands where they were encamped in forts.

00:12:15.000 We didn't really have the power to do anything about it.

00:12:19.000 And there were debt rebellions all over, especially in Massachusetts.

00:12:25.000 There was one famous one called Shays' Rebellion, which debtors who were, many of them were soldiers of the Revolution, who'd been paid in IOUs that had never been redeemed.

00:12:37.000 So they were broke.

00:12:39.000 They couldn't pay their mortgages.

00:12:42.000 And meanwhile, guys who had sat out the revolution, running the banks in Boston and so on, started to proceed to foreclose on them.

00:12:51.000 And this produced a rebellion, shutting down the courthouse.

00:12:55.000 And people like Washington, who were very concerned about the whole enterprise holding together, began to feel we've got to do something.

00:13:07.000 And Hamilton and others, Alexander Hamilton, star of Broadway Musicals, and also, you know, Washington State de Camp, decided that they needed to convene a convention, which happened in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation.

00:13:27.000 And of course, what they ended up doing was much more extensive than that.

00:13:32.000 They really drafted in secret a whole different arrangement.

00:13:38.000 And I think a lot of you know that there was an element of compromise, a profound element of compromise in that the large states wanted for population to be dominant in representation and figuring out representation.

00:14:02.000 And the small states wanted statehood.

00:14:05.000 Pick on Rhode Island again.

00:14:07.000 Rhode Island was so a tiny little place, still is, hasn't gotten any bigger.

00:14:13.000 And if voting was done by population, they'd be reduced to being nothing compared to Virginia, New York.

00:14:24.000 On the other hand, if you had representation by states, it would be very unfair with regard to population.

00:14:31.000 And there were other things disputed, but they came up with the compromise of the House and the Senate, in which the principles of representation, each of the principles of representation is there.

00:14:42.000 And this was a pretty brilliant solution.

00:14:46.000 It borrowed some from the British parliamentary model, but it was in many ways uniquely American.

00:14:56.000 Our whole idea of federalism is federalism, the concept that the national power should be divided between the national government, the states, and within the national government between the three branches.

00:15:12.000 That's something new.

00:15:14.000 That's something new in human history.

00:15:16.000 You find precedents for it, of course.

00:15:18.000 It didn't just come out of nowhere.

00:15:20.000 But that particular assemblage that the Constitution lays out is something new.

00:15:26.000 And yeah, genius.

00:15:28.000 I would call it ingenious because it doesn't try to eliminate the sources of division which inevitably arise in society.

00:15:38.000 We all have different interests.

00:15:39.000 We come from different places.

00:15:42.000 We enter the economy in different places.

00:15:45.000 One size does not fit all.

00:15:48.000 So, how do you deal with that?

00:15:49.000 You can't reduce everybody to the same common denominator.

00:15:53.000 Instead, you build the system, a kind of mechanism for political action to fight things out and determine what is the best set of policies for the general good.

00:16:09.000 So, that's what we've done.

00:16:10.000 It often looks very messy because it involves conflict.

00:16:17.000 I remember I was in Turkey giving speeches in the country around the time when things got really messy with the Iraq war and George W. Bush's presidency.

00:16:32.000 And, you know, he was fighting with the Congress, which was dominated by Democrats.

00:16:39.000 And the Turkish journalists were all saying, well, is this the end?

00:16:42.000 Is the Constitution going to fail?

00:16:44.000 Is Bush going to be taken out of office?

00:16:48.000 I said, no, this is how our system works.

00:16:52.000 We have conflict.

00:16:54.000 It's good.

00:16:55.000 We are accustomed to it.

00:16:57.000 We get tired of it sometimes, but we know that it's necessary, that that's what our constitutional system is about.

00:17:04.000 It kind of internalizes and channels all these conflicts into something that in the end, we believe is productive of the greater good.

00:17:15.000 I think one thing that the Constitution may be faulted for is that it doesn't talk enough about civic virtue.

00:17:26.000 Some people would fault it for that.

00:17:28.000 I don't because I think the state constitutions at that time were considered to be the real sort of seed beds of training citizens for virtue.

00:17:39.000 So, you know, they were very, you know, people talk about how God isn't mentioned in the Constitution.

00:17:46.000 Well, that is, it's not a sign that the founders were all atheists, hardly.

00:17:53.000 It was a sign that they thought religion and things like the establishment of religion.

00:18:00.000 That was the responsibility of the state.

00:18:01.000 That was not any of their business.

00:18:04.000 And even the First Amendment, which was part of the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, is really just about a national church.

00:18:14.000 It forbids a national church.

00:18:18.000 The states went right on having a state establishment.

00:18:22.000 That was entirely constitutional.

00:18:25.000 So, oh, getting away from me, getting too excited here.

00:18:30.000 So, that notion that the Constitution ought to inculcate virtue, I think, is maybe a little overblown, but there's something to it.

00:18:40.000 It's not just the collision of forces, just the same as in a courtroom.

00:18:45.000 You know, you expect the defense attorney to amount of vigorous, you expect the prosecutor to be vigorous, but that doesn't mean they get a right to lie or cheat or withhold evidence.

00:18:57.000 They are officers of the court, which means they have a loyalty to the process.

00:19:01.000 And we sometimes lose sight of that.

00:19:06.000 Veneration of the Constitution is absolutely essential if the Constitution is going to work.

00:19:13.000 And I don't see, I don't think we have a whole lot of that.

00:19:16.000 We're not bringing up young people to venerate the Constitution, that's for sure.

00:19:19.000 Can you talk more about the story of the Constitutional Convention, how it came to be, the drama around it?

00:19:26.000 I talked about the importance of story.

00:19:27.000 This is one of the best, the greatest stories in American history that really hasn't been told.

00:19:33.000 I would love to see some Martin Scorsese type do a real movie on this.

00:19:39.000 Talk about it.

00:19:41.000 It's a really beautiful moment in American history.

00:19:44.000 Well, it is.

00:19:44.000 It is, you have this assemblage of great, great people.

00:19:49.000 You have all of the conflicting, or many of the conflicting interests in the country represented, including the southern planters who were not yet as addicted to slave labor as they would become.

00:20:11.000 But even so, very resistant to the idea of abolishing slavery at the time of the founding of the adoption of the Constitution.

00:20:21.000 That's one of the things we look back at and we just sort of say, why could they have done that then?

00:20:27.000 But, you know, one of the things that the framers had to take into account was if you didn't bring the whole wagon train with you, if some states dropped out and said, we're not going to do this, the national enterprise would very likely have failed.

00:20:49.000 It would have fallen apart.

00:20:51.000 It would have submitted to a kind of mitosis, a sort of fracturing.

00:20:56.000 And then we would have been praying for European powers to come back, England or others to come back in and pluck us up. 0.63

00:21:06.000 As with the Civil War, so with the period after the Revolution, the critical period.

00:21:12.000 A way had to be found to hold it all together.

00:21:15.000 And, you know, many of the framers honestly believed that slavery was on its way out.

00:21:24.000 It was an institution that couldn't last.

00:21:27.000 Of course, then came the invention of the cotton gin.

00:21:30.000 Yes.

00:21:31.000 John C. Kelvin.

00:21:32.000 Both those things didn't help.

00:21:34.000 Yes.

00:21:35.000 Yeah.

00:21:35.000 But the convention, you're right.

00:21:38.000 It's a wonderful story.

00:21:39.000 And there are a couple of, there's some good books about it.

00:21:46.000 Much of what we know about what actually happened, because it was in secret.

00:21:51.000 You know, in a hot Philadelphia summer, it can get pretty hot in Philadelphia, and especially when you have the windows closed so that nobody can overhear you.

00:22:02.000 But Madison, James Madison, who is often thought of as the architect of the Constitution, took copious notes.

00:22:09.000 And so we know a lot.

00:22:11.000 And it's pretty accurate.

00:22:13.000 I mean, as far as we can tell, what little we get from other sources corroborates Madison's testimony.

00:22:20.000 And yeah, there are all kinds of ideas out there.

00:22:24.000 And the drama, it would be wonderful to have a talented, patriotic Hollywood director.

00:22:32.000 And I mean, that's a contradiction in terms.

00:22:34.000 But I know that's why I'm laughing.

00:22:36.000 But now, the Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is very good.

00:22:40.000 I think the adoption of the 13th Amendment, that Lincoln, and this is something that I think, you know, we turn Lincoln into this sort of plaster of Paris saint.

00:22:53.000 He was a shrewd, shrewd politician and a deal maker.

00:22:59.000 And you could see all of that in that movie.

00:23:02.000 So I recommend it.

00:23:03.000 But there's nothing wrong with, we think of that as a dirty thing.

00:23:09.000 And it's important that we not regard politics as intrinsically a low art.

00:23:16.000 It's the art of getting people who are not on the same page to cooperate with one another.

00:23:23.000 And politicians are the people who talk to one another in lieu of the people who can't talk to one another.

00:23:30.000 Yes.

00:23:32.000 And that's always been true.

00:23:34.000 In a representative democracy, it's especially true.

00:23:38.000 So, yeah, just The process, it's such an intricate story, but the process by which these different proposals coalesce and the proponents of the respective plans,

00:23:55.000 the New Jersey plan, and the Virginia Plan come to champion their view of how representation should occur.

00:24:09.000 And hovering above it all is this feeling, we don't want to make the same mistake that England made.

00:24:18.000 We don't want to submit to a tyranny.

00:24:21.000 We don't want centralized power, but we need more of that than we have.

00:24:28.000 How can we get the right amount?

00:24:30.000 And I'll tell you one thing that has to be part of the story is what would have happened if this shows history is about more than just ideas.

00:24:40.000 What would have happened if George Washington hadn't been there?

00:24:43.000 Well, that was going to be my question.

00:24:45.000 Yeah.

00:24:45.000 And how he presided over it.

00:24:46.000 I was actually, so you can answer my question.

00:24:49.000 Would this have actually been approved if George Washington didn't preside over this?

00:24:55.000 Well, it's more, yeah, I think that's a great question.

00:24:58.000 And I would put it slightly, I would expand it even.

00:25:02.000 Would the office of the presidency have been conceived in the way that it was much more powerful than the people who ended up opposing the Constitution, people like Patrick Henry, who was a great patriot, but feared the concentration of power in the national government that he saw.

00:25:24.000 If they hadn't had George Washington to look to as an example, George Washington, who had steered the country through, I mean, it's not often appreciated just how impossible a job he did successfully in running the Continental Army in the American Revolution.

00:25:45.000 It's incredible.

00:25:46.000 And, you know, we all know sort of vaguely about Valley Forge and the difficult winters and the smallpox and other sort of obstacles that he dealt with.

00:25:57.000 What people don't realize is that every step of the way, his army was in, he was in danger of seeing his army melt away and of people who had served their time or mostly served their time just sort of disappearing.

00:26:12.000 And it was not like a well organized, well oiled machine that you think of a great military.

00:26:22.000 It was so the kind of leadership he had to exercise was just extraordinary.

00:26:30.000 And he came to be universally trusted.

00:26:34.000 Very, very few people in those years that speak negatively about it.

00:26:39.000 Well, and the anti-federalists, when they're critiquing the kind of idea of Federalists, they never attack Washington, right?

00:26:48.000 They get very, they're very careful.

00:26:49.000 They're like, well, they almost admit in some of their own journals, like, yeah, this is going to be hard for us to win because they have Washington, right?

00:26:56.000 Now, can you talk about, though, how Washington is sometimes portrayed by modern historians as being an egotistical person because he didn't want to preside over the Constitutional Convention.

00:27:07.000 He was kind of waffling on that, right?

00:27:09.000 Some people would say, oh, it's because of his ego.

00:27:11.000 I don't think that's right.

00:27:12.000 I think it's because he didn't want to put his name behind something that could have been destructive.

00:27:18.000 Can you talk about that, how Washington almost didn't actually agree to it?

00:27:21.000 Yeah, well, no, look, he came out of retirement several times.

00:27:30.000 He wanted nothing more at the conclusion of the revolution than to go back to his beautiful estate in Mount Vernon and Hang out there, you know, and having earned that peace and quiet.

00:27:44.000 But he felt strongly that the country, you know, he owed, he had a duty to his country.

00:27:54.000 He was very formed by sort of ideals of classical notions of virtue, Roman Cincinnatus, yeah, you know, the farmer who returned, who does his duty and then returns to the plow, or Cato, the younger and the elder.

00:28:12.000 Well, one of the dynamics.

00:28:13.000 So, yeah, there was a wonderful play by Joseph Addison about Cato.

00:28:19.000 I think it's actually called Cato, and that Washington apparently saw numerous times and had shown to his performances put on for his troops numerous times at these critical points when morale was going through the floor.

00:28:38.000 And so that was his notion.

00:28:44.000 He could certainly have become king if he had wanted to.

00:28:49.000 And he declined to do that.

00:28:51.000 Is that the behavior of an egotist?

00:28:53.000 I don't think so.

00:28:54.000 It's the behavior of somebody who found that.

00:28:58.000 No, I know.

00:28:58.000 No, I'm not.

00:29:00.000 I didn't addressing this to the people you're talking about.

00:29:03.000 I mean, it's he was, and he actually, I don't think he gets enough credit for being eloquent.

00:29:12.000 I think sometimes he's marvelously eloquent.

00:29:16.000 And his speeches, which, you know, he largely wrote himself.

00:29:23.000 I mean, that's pretty much what was done.

00:29:26.000 And his letters, he has a wonderful letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport that is a crucial document in the history of religious liberty in America.

00:29:38.000 And Washington saw all that.

00:29:40.000 He saw the importance of religion, but he saw, if you look at his first inaugural address, he sees the revolution as having been about self-rule, about Republican, self-governing society in which the people rule themselves.

00:29:59.000 So that's what it was about.

00:30:01.000 So it wasn't about, I mean, it was antithetical to establishing kings.

00:30:06.000 So he wasn't about to subvert the revolution in that way.

00:30:10.000 So to keep on telling the story, Doctor, so the Constitution Convention ends on September 17th, 1787.

00:30:17.000 But then the fun actually begins because the states then have to then start to ratify or accept it.

00:30:24.000 Starts with Delaware.

00:30:25.000 And then all of a sudden, you start to see these anonymous, really well-written publications in New York newspapers, who we now know is written by probably Madison Hamilton and John Jay, almost certainly.

00:30:38.000 I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

00:30:39.000 But then these kind of debates are happening, anti-federalists and federalists.

00:30:43.000 So I have a couple of questions.

00:30:45.000 Why write them anonymously?

00:30:46.000 I have my own personal theory.

00:30:48.000 I'd love to have your theory.

00:30:49.000 And then talk about the process of convincing state by state, because that was also a real, that was an endeavor in and of itself.

00:30:59.000 Yeah, no, that's an interesting point.

00:31:01.000 They published under the name Publius.

00:31:04.000 And most of the, on both sides, this was a sort of convention of the time that you elevated your argument by separating it from your personal identity and instead associating it with some universally revered figure from generally the Roman, sometimes Greek, but usually Roman past.

00:31:27.000 And so, you know, there's something to be said for it.

00:31:32.000 It takes attention away from the personality of the author.

00:31:37.000 You think of today, I mean, you read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and you probably know some of the people who write for that editorial page.

00:31:47.000 I know a couple, but it's sort of pointless to try to figure out who actually wrote this.

00:31:53.000 It's a statement, it's a corporate statement of the entire editorial board.

00:31:57.000 So it's a way of giving what you're saying, what you're arguing for, more of a weight.

00:32:07.000 Now, about the debates and the ratification process, that was by no means a sure thing.

00:32:15.000 There's a lot of these things in early American history.

00:32:18.000 We sort of forget how close run they were.

00:32:20.000 The revolution itself.

00:32:23.000 And I hope I pointed out last time, I think I did, how crucial the intervention of the French was to us winning, and that was not a sure thing.

00:32:38.000 New York ended up being not a crucial state, as it turned out, because it was built into the Constitution that after nine states had ratified, the Constitution would become effective.

00:32:54.000 But New York, you know, love it or hate it, New York is a pretty big enchilada in the American makeup.

00:33:02.000 So yeah, what you were referring to is that Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, and I think we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was those three, and we know which numbers they wrote.

00:33:18.000 They wrote 100, how many was it?

00:33:25.000 You know, I can't remember right now how many, but a number of articles in New York newspapers.

00:33:37.000 And these are, yeah, there's Kessler's edition.

00:33:41.000 Yeah, no, it's the best one.

00:33:43.000 Yeah, it's very good.

00:33:46.000 And it's gotten better over the years as he's added things.

00:33:46.000 It's very good.

00:33:52.000 Imagine newspapers having things.

00:33:54.000 Well, you'd have to read them to see what I'm talking about.

00:33:56.000 These are masterful discourses in political science and political theory.

00:34:04.000 Some of them quite innovative.

00:34:07.000 Yes.

00:34:08.000 Battlest number 10 is maybe the most famous for being innovative because there had been an argument going back to Aristotle and as recently as Montesquieu in that time that a republic had to be small.

00:34:24.000 That if you got larger than a certain amount, you couldn't have a sort of self-governing entity.

00:34:29.000 It would inevitably become some kind of an empire or take on the lineaments of or have to be governed by a monarch.

00:34:37.000 And Madison said, no, you know, there's a way this can work that precisely by, as he called it, extending the sphere, making it larger rather than smaller, you can mitigate the effects of faction, of conflict, of interests clashing with interests,

00:35:01.000 because there's so many more interests encompassed that no one can get the upper hand and dominate over all the others.

00:35:10.000 It was an ingenious argument.

00:35:15.000 Federalist 51, also by Madison, one of the best expositions of the logic behind the separation of powers and federalism that anyone's ever written.

00:35:30.000 And if men were angels, government would not be necessary.

00:35:35.000 That's the most famous line.

00:35:38.000 We have to deal with human nature as we find it.

00:35:42.000 And ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

00:35:42.000 Yes.

00:35:47.000 That's again that notion that you're not going to stop ambitious people from being ambitious.

00:35:54.000 What you have to do is make sure they don't have a clean path by everyone else who's not ambitious just rolling over and say, oh, well, take it.

00:36:05.000 It's yours.

00:36:06.000 No, you have to have other ambitious people standing in the way.

00:36:08.000 And that clash of the ambitious, which is sort of what life is in Washington, D.C., the clash of the ambitious on a good day, is more productive of the general good than if one group, one faction, one person triumphs.

00:36:32.000 It's more consonant with human nature to recognize this.

00:36:36.000 And all through the Federalist Papers, they're really arguing: you know, these are very learned guys, and they haven't just learned things in a kind of book-learning way.

00:36:49.000 They scour the past looking for examples that can have some relevance for their situation, for our situation, at the birth of the nation.

00:37:03.000 So they're really looking for that.

00:37:06.000 Their essays are tremendously learned.

00:37:08.000 Well, now, what about the other side?

00:37:10.000 The side, the anti-federalists.

00:37:13.000 First of all, they didn't have a good name.

00:37:18.000 But there's a very good book that I recommend to anyone who wants to read about this.

00:37:22.000 It's a small book, too, extremely clearly written by a man named Herbert Storing called What the Anti-Federalists Were For, because they were for a lot of things.

00:37:33.000 They were worried that there was no way that the Constitution could hold within bounds this power that was being unleashed in it.

00:37:45.000 Patrick Henry saw it as a document that he said squints toward monarchy.

00:37:52.000 You start out with a republic, but you're going to end up with an empire and thus defeat the American hope, which is to establish a polity based on liberty and virtue and the entwining of those two things.

00:38:12.000 They were not interested in America becoming a great power in the world.

00:38:17.000 They were interested in America being a virtuous, agrarian nation of people who minded their own business and had the joy of living in peace and harmony governing themselves.

00:38:36.000 It's not a bad vision.

00:38:38.000 Hamilton was very interested in growth, in prosperity, in cutting a fine figure in the world, being an important industrial power, commercial power, highly diversified economy.

00:38:56.000 His arch opponent, Thomas Jefferson, was more, and he wasn't around for the Constitution, by the way.

00:39:02.000 He was off in Europe.

00:39:04.000 So he didn't take part in any of this.

00:39:06.000 And he didn't really think much of it, even though Madison was a good friend of his, political ally.

00:39:14.000 And Jefferson thought there ought to be a revolution every so often to kind of cleanse the air a bit.

00:39:24.000 And I do some appeal at the present moment.

00:39:28.000 And Madison calmed them down on that, though.

00:39:31.000 If there was a dialogue and he was like, well, maybe that wouldn't be a great idea because what's going to happen is Jefferson wrote back, yeah, you're probably right.

00:39:38.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:39.000 No, I mean, Jefferson's an interesting character that way.

00:39:42.000 But he and Hamilton did represent kind of opposing visions of the country that first become evident, I think, plainly evident in the anti-Federalist Federalist debates over ratification.

00:39:56.000 One thing that the guys, I mean, the guys who pushed the Constitution, they were a shrewd bunch.

00:40:04.000 They covered all the answers.

00:40:05.000 They were better at PR and more sophisticated at it.

00:40:11.000 And they understood that something really important that in each of the states, if you put this before the state legislature, question of whether to ratify, as we all know, legislative bodies are generally not keen on giving up any of their power and voting themselves, voting themselves a cut in a salary or anything like that.

00:40:36.000 So what they did was they specified there were to be constitutional conventions that would be completely independently chosen.

00:40:44.000 I mean, legislators could serve, of course, but it wouldn't be the identical body.

00:40:49.000 So those people would be operating in different conclaves with different people.

00:40:56.000 And that was a shrewd thing.

00:40:58.000 They eliminated or mitigated one barrier to acceptance of the Constitution.

00:41:05.000 And so they zoomed through and they got a whole bunch of states.

00:41:09.000 New York looked as if it was going to be very, very tough.

00:41:13.000 And by the way, if you look at the margins of the votes in many, many places, it was pretty, pretty close.

00:41:23.000 So it's again, we take it as a foregone conclusion.

00:41:27.000 Well, of course, the founders won the revolution and they established the Constitution.

00:41:30.000 Well, yeah, but there were a lot of steps.

00:41:35.000 And a lot of people had to be kind of dragged along.

00:41:40.000 And some, you know, like Patrick Henry, were not, I mean, he continued to be involved in politics.

00:41:47.000 Yes.

00:41:48.000 But he was not happy with the outcome of the constitutional, you know, installation.

00:41:56.000 So look, let me say this: for the anti-federalists, one of the big things they did for us, for the Constitution, is insist on the Bill of Rights.

00:42:07.000 Yes, George Mason, especially.

00:42:09.000 George Mason, you know, all hail George Mason and his law school.

00:42:14.000 Yeah.

00:42:16.000 The Scalia Law School of Law.

00:42:18.000 George Mason.

00:42:21.000 Madison himself thought that it might be a mistake to have a Bill of Rights, because I think I mentioned this last time that if you, his fear was if you start enumerating rights, what about the ones you don't bother enumerating, like the right to breathe or the right to, you know, all sorts of things, the right to marry.

00:42:44.000 These are things that he feared might be endangered if you went down the road of enumerating certain rights and not mentioning others.

00:42:56.000 Well, I think that worry proved to be ill-founded.

00:43:02.000 The worry that those rights might be violated if they weren't by the national government, if they weren't incorporated in the Constitution, was, I think, much more of a present danger.

00:43:19.000 And I think we're all grateful for the existence of Especially the first couple of amendments.

00:43:30.000 And those would not have come about without the anti-and Virginia Declaration of Rights was the precursor to a lot of that in 76.

00:43:42.000 So, Dr. McClay, my last question, and we only have a couple minutes, but this is a big one.

00:43:42.000 Yes.

00:43:47.000 And I just can't forget this because it was actually on the top of my list.

00:43:51.000 Was the Constitution a slavery or anti-slavery document?

00:43:55.000 Talk about the moratorium on new import of slaves into the United States, three-fits clause.

00:44:01.000 We might have to actually continue this to the next episode.

00:44:03.000 Yeah, and I'd be glad to do that because it's such a heavy topic.

00:44:08.000 Yes.

00:44:09.000 Well, you know, no less a figure than Frederick Douglass, the great, great black abolitionist who was born into slavery and became one of the great orators of the times.

00:44:25.000 And in a speech, the famous speech he gave called What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.

00:44:29.000 That's right.

00:44:31.000 But he ends up, he goes back and forth in a dialectical way in the speech, but he ends up praising the Constitution as a glorious document that enshrines liberty,

00:44:45.000 enshrines freedom as principles, and that it's that underlying character of the Constitution rather than the particular things that were inserted to mollify the slaveholders that make up its real character. 0.77

00:45:03.000 So I think, I don't think there's any doubt that the country was founded on principles other than the principle of slavery.

00:45:12.000 The slavery is a great aberration.

00:45:16.000 It was never part of a sort of organized plan.

00:45:20.000 It was something that sort of came in for economic reasons in areas where labor-intensive agriculture, tobacco first, and then cotton and indigo sugar, so on, where it was profitable to use forced labor, including indentured servants.

00:45:41.000 Yes.

00:45:43.000 But I think the crucial thing, and a professor from Princeton, Sean Willins, who is no right-winger, he organized a petition of historians to impeach Donald Trump twice, both times.

00:46:04.000 He's a man of the left, but he wrote a wonderful book called No Property in Man, which is a very nuanced, but ultimately resoundingly affirmative view of the Constitution on this subject.

00:46:19.000 And one of the things he points out, and he's not the first to do this, is that the Constitution resolutely avoids using the word slavery.

00:46:30.000 And one of the things he's ferreted out is Madison saying explicitly, I wanted to do it this way because I did not want to give any credence, any kind of crevice to be kind of crawled up through that arguing that there is such a thing, a legitimate thing as property in man, that is to own another human being.

00:46:57.000 So there is everywhere place that slavery comes up, there's a kind of euphemism, conditions of servitude, you know, and not never the word slavery itself.

00:47:11.000 And I think that's that's important.

00:47:15.000 Willins thought it was important, pretty decisive that, And as I mentioned before, there are an awful lot of them who felt that slavery was certainly not going to last.

00:47:28.000 And they couldn't have envisioned the way it grew like kudzu as the southern agricultural economy developed.

00:47:39.000 So, yeah, I think that now there are these things.

00:47:43.000 There's a fugitive slave laws. 0.66

00:47:45.000 There's the three-fifths rule, which actually, if it's the northerners, the anti-slavery people that wanted it, the three-fifths.

00:48:01.000 Southerners would have liked to have had slaves represented fully because it would have increased their power. 0.77

00:48:07.000 That's exactly right.

00:48:09.000 And it kind of didn't vote.

00:48:11.000 In a perverse way, right?

00:48:12.000 Like, I can increase my headcount by caring about it, but actually, it's going to keep it.

00:48:18.000 It's a totally paradoxical, actually.

00:48:22.000 Yeah, it's totally.

00:48:24.000 But I think, you know, I think the way people, I'm not, I don't want to defend it, you know, but at the same time, the way people understand it, it wasn't sort of saying a slave is three-fifths of a man or something like that.

00:48:39.000 Often you'll hear that said emotionally that way.

00:48:43.000 So in every turn, and you mentioned the provision that the importation of slaves Thomas Jefferson signed in 1807, one of his first acts as president in March of 1807.

00:49:00.000 Yeah.

00:49:01.000 Jefferson and Jefferson fought against slavery when he was governor of Virginia, too, earlier.

00:49:12.000 Jefferson is a paradoxical figure because he owns slaves and he knew the institution was wrong.

00:49:21.000 And he said, you know, I tremble when I reflect that God is just and his mercy will not last forever.

00:49:29.000 I'm not quoting him exactly there, but that's the essence of it.

00:49:34.000 I think in other instances, it's a more even more tragic thing that as the 19th century develops and as slavery becomes more and more entrenched and people like John C. Calhoun start arguing that it's a positive good and not necessary evil things that would throw their whole way of life and the economic means that they depend on into disarray.

00:50:01.000 There are some things that they simply won't allow themselves to think.

00:50:06.000 And I think that can be said in this instance.

00:50:12.000 That said, it's very hard when you have an entrenched economy in a certain way to change it because you're dealing with lots and lots of people's lives.

00:50:22.000 And it had to be done.

00:50:25.000 And thankfully it was.

00:50:27.000 But the Constitution survived through it all.

00:50:33.000 And if I may say a thing about Lincoln here, just that one of the interesting things about Lincoln is Lincoln was a lawyer.

00:50:42.000 He was a corporate lawyer.

00:50:43.000 He was a lawyer for the railroads.

00:50:45.000 I mean, that's, you know, not non-college educated, just Shakespeare, Euclid, and the Bible.

00:50:50.000 Non-schooled.

00:50:53.000 He was, you could say he was homeschooled, but it was really, he was schooled by reading books.

00:50:58.000 Shakespeare the Bible and doing Euclid's proofs.

00:51:01.000 Yes.

00:51:01.000 Exactly.

00:51:02.000 Those three are often touted.

00:51:05.000 And he did read a few other things, but he clearly had taken in the language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare in his speech volume.

00:51:18.000 But Lincoln always moved in a way that was designed to bolster the Constitution.

00:51:23.000 So, for example, I'll just give one example because I know we're running out of time here.

00:51:28.000 The Emancipation Proclamation.

00:51:31.000 People look at that.

00:51:33.000 One historian, famous historian, Richard Hofstadter, said it had all the emotional power of a bill of lading, an invoice.

00:51:43.000 And it really isn't an inspiring document at all.

00:51:46.000 It just because what it does is it frees slaves in those areas that were in a state of rebellion.

00:51:55.000 So, even in states where at that point, you know, Confederate states where Union armies occupied part of the states, like Tennessee, slaves there were not free.

00:52:10.000 Slaves in Kentucky were not free because Kentucky had never joined the Confederacy and so on.

00:52:17.000 So, but why did he do it that way? 0.95

00:52:20.000 He did it that way because he was.

00:52:23.000 I mean, it would have been great to say, I mean, a contemporary politician would say, I declare that all slaves are free.

00:52:31.000 But Lincoln wasn't going to do that because it would be way beyond his constitutional powers.

00:52:37.000 What he could do in his reading of the Constitution, and not everyone agrees with this, but he could do as a commander-in-chief was to free slaves as a military as a tactical measure.

00:52:52.000 So, he could free those states, slaves, and those areas in a state of rebellion.

00:52:57.000 And it would in no way endanger the Constitution.

00:53:01.000 He was looking ahead always and saying, I want to come out of this war with the same Constitution we went into it have.

00:53:10.000 I don't want to trash the Constitution in order to win the war and then turn around and have no structure of authority to appeal to.

00:53:19.000 And if we're going to get rid of slavery, let's do it the right way.

00:53:22.000 We passed an amendment to the Constitution. 0.55

00:53:25.000 Yeah, and we're going to talk about Lincoln in our next conversation.

00:53:28.000 And just to kind of tease people, great.

00:53:30.000 I have some questions about Lincoln because some of his detractors say that there's two schools of thought on Lincoln today: that he didn't act decisively enough soon enough in his Cooper Union speech, or he just what he was trying too much focus on process.

00:53:45.000 Um, and I think those people are full of it.

00:53:48.000 Then, the other ones, you've got to get elected, yeah.

00:53:50.000 I mean, that's a minor deed.

00:53:52.000 You have to have political power to use political power, right?

00:53:54.000 And then the other school of thought is that he was a tyrant, suspended habeas corpus, and all that.

00:53:58.000 But we are going to talk about that on the next episode.

00:54:01.000 Charlie FOR Hillsdale.com.

00:54:03.000 Everybody, pick up a copy of the book itself, A Land of Hope.

00:54:07.000 Go buy it and teach your children the proper story of America.

00:54:13.000 And so, it really is a great, great textbook.

00:54:16.000 Dr. McClay, I'm loving this series, and I wish we had more.

00:54:19.000 Well, this is much fun.

00:54:20.000 This is too much fun.

00:54:24.000 As somebody used to say, more fun than a human being ought to be allowed.

00:54:29.000 Well, Dr. McClay, thank you so much.

00:54:31.000 Leave it there.

00:54:32.000 There you go.

00:54:32.000 Talk to you soon.

00:54:33.000 Thanks so much.

00:54:33.000 All right.

00:54:34.000 Bye-bye.

00:54:37.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:54:38.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:54:41.000 And please consider supporting our program, charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:54:45.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:54:47.000 God bless.

00:54:47.000 Speak to you soon.

00:54:51.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 14, 2021

Great American Story: The Genius of the Constitution with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 2)

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