00:00:02.000The fourth part of my conversation with the wonderful Dr. McClay.
00:00:06.000We get into the modern era and we talk about how the Constitution has endured, the transformation of post-Civil War America into an industrial power, what it means to live under a Constitution, and what is the Constitution, and the rise of expert knowledge and the administrative state, and why we must revive the Constitution and why it remains better than any other alternative.
00:00:30.000If you guys want to take the Hillsdale online courses, which I take quite often, in fact, I just started a new one.
00:00:36.000You go to Charlieforhillsdale.com and you enroll for free.
00:00:46.000And you can take some of the best courses out there to be able to learn about your country, dive deep into these incredibly important ideas.
00:00:58.000Somebody has asked me at an event in Houston, Charlie, where do you learn this stuff?
00:01:04.000Where are you able to make sense of what's happening?
00:01:06.000Well, when I take the Hillsdale online courses, I feel that I am able to look at what's happening in our country with more clarity and I'm able to talk to you, our audience, with more confidence about this.
00:01:18.000I encourage you to take the Introduction to Western Philosophy course.
00:01:25.000And it's so fulfilling when you finish it, everybody.
00:01:28.000You are able to say, hey, I know these ideas.
00:01:31.000The course on the Second World Wars is phenomenal.
00:01:35.000The course on classical children's literature, terrific.
00:01:38.000It's my goal to take every single Hillsdale online course.
00:01:44.000There's one actually right here that I'm working my way through: Theology 101, the Western Theological Tradition.
00:01:51.000How about Winston Churchill and statesmanship?
00:01:53.000That can all be found at Charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:01:59.000And I challenge every single parent out there: if you can't homeschool your kids, that's okay.
00:02:05.000Then take one hour a week and teach them what you learned from the Hillsdale online courses earlier that week and tell them and communicate to them why our country is so exceptional, where these ideas come from.
00:02:21.000For example, there is a Hillsdale online course, Constitution 201, the Progressive Rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism.
00:02:58.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:03:06.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:56.000Now that we are in the modern era, I want to talk about how the Constitution has endured and kind of the assault on the American Constitution kind of post-Woodrow Wilson.
00:04:07.000And it kind of started a little before that.
00:04:09.000Walk us through why this is so important for people who love the Constitution to recognize and realize.
00:04:15.000Yeah, well, and it is very important because really what's happened is the idea that government, like anything else, can be perfected by means of science, by means of the scientific method.
00:04:34.000You know, in the 19th century, people were so thrilled by all the advances that the natural sciences had made that they thought, hey, why not apply this scientific method to social things?
00:04:48.000And the term political science is really related to this idea that there could be a science of government.
00:04:55.000Woodrow Wilson, a very strong believer in that, and he really sort of invented the idea of public administration as a field of study.
00:05:06.000That's something entirely separate from elections, campaigning, making your case to the voters, public debates, that sort of thing.
00:05:14.000Instead, experts could arrive at disinterested scientific knowledge of the best ways of governing and then implement that.
00:05:26.000And one of the things you see in the progressive era, and some of you out there will still be living with institutions like this, the idea of a city manager instead of a mayor.
00:05:39.000The idea was to take governance out of politics because, you know, all that quarreling and people getting down in the mud, fighting over their respective interests, which the founders saw as being part of the game.
00:05:53.000Part of what politics is, that people fight over their differing points of view and their different interests.
00:06:02.000Everybody's going to have different views, different interests.
00:06:05.000What you want to do, and what the Constitution tries to do, is to provide a mechanism for ordering these debates so that they aren't just, you know, bare knuckle fist fights every time and bombs and knives, but that you can have some kind of resolution, some kind of legitimacy.
00:06:25.000Well, you know, that all seemed very wasteful to the progressives.
00:06:30.000You know, why fool around with the political process when you could have an expert come in and say, hey, the talking is over.
00:06:42.000And to give them some credit here, I mean, when you had things like large corporate entities, such as the railroads, that had such a huge influence over so many people's lives and were had to be regulated in some way, then the expert class had a little bit of a claim.
00:07:09.000We see this now with big tech, that a lot of us are very concerned about big tech.
00:07:14.000And I'm very wary about bringing in the government, but I've also recognized that there have been times in the past when we've had to, for example, call something a common carrier or a public utility and regulate it that way.
00:07:31.000But anyway, I'm getting a little bit off the point here.
00:07:35.000The point is that the expert class, the claims of expertise, were supplanting the democratic process.
00:07:44.000And I think we are living with the results of that now, that it's not clear to us, especially this public health panic that we've lived through for the last year and a half.
00:07:57.000Are we to yield our freedoms entirely to the men in the white coats, the lab jackets?
00:08:06.000And there's the added difficulty that we don't always know that the men and women in the lab coats really know what they're talking about or whether they are using expertise as a veil behind which a naked grab for power can take place.
00:08:50.000He's an authority that can't be approached and has some of the characteristics of a god in at least the movie version of that.
00:08:59.000It's a great parable for this, that when we take, when we turn ourselves over to experts, we make ourselves, we disempower ourselves as citizens.
00:09:12.000So, and it's not a coincidence, is it, that the concept of citizens and citizenship, that being a citizen is full of privileges and responsibilities.
00:09:25.000It's not for everybody who's just walking around on this soil.
00:09:29.000Voting goes with being involved in that process, being invested in that process.
00:09:52.000But in a democracy, we don't necessarily decide things the way the experts tell us.
00:10:00.000The experts may come to a particular conclusion and we may say, well, okay, we're going to weigh that and we'll decide.
00:10:09.000James Q. Wilson, the great political scientist from Harvard, had a great saying that I like very much, which I'll pass on to you and your listeners.
00:10:18.000He said, experts should be on tap, but not on top.
00:10:48.000I mean, freedom is not necessarily only the freedom to do the right thing that the experts approve.
00:10:54.000So I think it goes to a very fundamental issue about our society.
00:10:59.000Yeah, and part of the issue is that the kind of the empowerment of the expert class ends up being tyrannical by nature, because if you question, for example, Fauci right now, he will argue from authority and say, no, I run NIH.
00:11:25.000And, you know, I think one of the things that would be so much better, and Fauci, to be fair, it Times has done what I'm about to say is to be modest, to say, you know, we're not really sure what the hell is going on.
00:11:45.000It's the declarative statements masks are not necessary.
00:11:50.000And no uncertain terms when he first took that line.
00:11:54.000And then now masks are the be-all and end-all, or depending on what day of the week it is, and whether you're Democrats or Republicans having a party, whatever, on Martha's Vineyard or whatever.
00:12:07.000So there's an inconsistency that I think a lot of has undermines the kind of respect for expertise that we ought to have.
00:12:16.000I mean, people who have devoted their lives to studying immunology or one of these other very recognized fields, you know, they deserve to be listened to more than the guy at the other end of the bar who's on his fifth beer.
00:12:48.000So, Dr. McClure, you bring up a great point, which is that every time we see massive scientific discovery, there's almost always a philosophical movement that's correlated with it.
00:12:58.000For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Francis Bacon, with a lot of their discoveries into the natural world, you saw correlated with it, not immediately, but the rise of Hume and Kant and Rene Descartes.
00:13:13.000And the same, I could be, and I would love to have you kind of your thoughts on this is that with the rise of Darwin in the 1800s and kind of some more of the more declarative statements being made that we now think we can master nature, that nature can now kind of be subservient to us humanity, it all of a sudden made Hegel and Marx a lot more applicable, especially Hegel.
00:13:39.000I don't want to get too deep down this rabbit hole, but can you talk a little bit about the context of where the progressive movement came out of?
00:13:47.000Because I think that would be really helpful to explore.
00:13:50.000Yeah, I think the Darwin part is a great place to go in on that, Charlie.
00:13:55.000That Darwin, I mean, there were other theories of evolution around before Darwin and after Darwin.
00:14:03.000But it was really the concept of natural selection that was the key thing.
00:14:07.000That is that organism, organic life comes out of a constant process of adaptation to a changing environment.
00:14:15.000And the organisms are, you know, there's billions of random mutations in each generational transmission.
00:14:22.000And the ones that make you, you know, giraffe's neck that's longer gets to survive because he's better suited to, you know, sort of survive in the savannah, you know, that kind of thing.
00:14:36.000And we're all familiar with this, these sort of just-so stories of evolution.
00:14:42.000Well, then the idea arises that, well, again, if science applies to the physical world, biological world, why not to the human world?
00:14:53.000So why don't we view human societies as being like organisms that adapt, that are constantly changing, so that the idea that a constitution, a fixed law, a fixed structure that is there in place for all time and only very with great difficulty amended, that violated this sort of Darwinian sense of organicism.
00:15:20.000And so Woodrow Wilson picked up on this in a major way, this idea that the whole idea of constitutionalism was obsolete.
00:15:31.000It was, you know, sort of you go with the flow That everything is flowing, and you want to adapt your institutions to the changing circumstances.
00:15:44.000It's not a completely wacko idea, only mostly.
00:15:48.000But I mean, in this, at the end of the 19th century, America was changing so much.
00:15:54.000Big cities, big industry, big everything, big labor, big business, big, big national transportation system, national communications.
00:16:06.000We were becoming a power in the world.
00:16:12.000You know, Spanish-American War, we were becoming a major, major outfit in the world.
00:16:18.000And by the end of the 19th century, we were the leading industrial power in the world.
00:16:23.000Just astonishing how fast that happened.
00:16:25.000So a lot of people were just dizzied by this.
00:16:28.000It's kind of like, wow, where's my America?
00:16:31.000The country and immigration, even on a scale greater than what we've been seeing, although recent immigration rivals that.
00:16:41.000So, you know, it makes sense that people were kind of reaching for some other way of explaining what was going on, that maybe the 18th century way of looking at things that embodied in the Constitution wasn't good enough anymore.
00:16:57.000But that, I think, has been shown to be wrong.
00:17:01.000I think we are living through a time, you know, the rise of originalism and constitutional, you know, people are returning.
00:17:09.000They're saying, okay, we tried that, that whole organic approach.
00:17:30.000And if I follow this rigorously, I'm going to get where I need to go.
00:17:34.000And someone who says, well, you know, today I really feel like, you know, ice cream and, you know, that's kind of organically what's required for the circumstances.
00:17:44.000That diet, you know, that was yesterday.
00:18:59.000Yeah, only we originally built a civilization around it.
00:19:03.000So, Dr. McClay, so Woodrow Wilson was the first president, as you mentioned, to outwardly declare a philosophical war on the founders, heavily inspired by the expert class.
00:19:15.000And there's someone that doesn't get a lot of attention, but I want to just give some contemporary examples right now.
00:19:21.000Cass Sunstein is someone who is an expert defender.
00:19:25.000In fact, he believes that experts in committees are the best way to run society.
00:19:30.000There's also another one, Dr. McClay, that you would remember, but many of our younger listeners wouldn't.
00:19:35.000A guy by the name of Jonathan Gruber, who was one of the architects of Obamacare, who remember he said that people are too stupid to know what's happening.
00:19:52.000We can get the clip later to kind of play through that, which I think is important.
00:19:56.000And so there is this arrogance that sets into the expert class.
00:20:00.000And in fact, a lot of what we're seeing in Kabul and Afghanistan is that same sort of belief system that, you know, we're in charge because of, you know, some sort of credentialing or managerialism.
00:20:14.000The Constitution, by its intent, tries to push back against this kind of almost soft oligarchy of wise men.
00:20:25.000How do you say historically, like, what would you say beyond Woodrow Wilson, where we really went wrong here in the modern era, Franklin Donovan Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson?
00:20:34.000Walk us through that more in the modern, in kind of the modern sense.
00:20:37.000Yeah, well, that's a really interesting question.
00:20:42.000And I was thinking as you were asking about the difference between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
00:21:16.000He was a university professor and then a university president.
00:21:21.000Yes, and he was a product of Johns Hopkins University, which I confess to you and your audience, I am too, in the sense I got my PhD there.
00:21:33.000Hopkins was established as the first German-style university in America that was devoted mainly to research, built around this premise that I mentioned before that human affairs, there can be human sciences, there can be sciences of man that can arrive at knowledge that's equivalent to the knowledge of science, of natural science.
00:22:01.000And so all, you know, the people running the history department in those days really believed history could become a science.
00:23:09.000I suppose sanitation, but there are limits to what he would do.
00:23:14.000But this is pretty amazing that a Dutch American aristocrat like Theodore Roosevelt would do that because he had an ethic of service, of high-mindedness.
00:23:28.000You don't see this in Woodrow Wilson to the same degree.
00:23:32.000What drives Woodrow Wilson is expert knowledge.
00:24:00.000Even though Woodrow Wilson was a very strong Presbyterian from, his father was a minister, he came from this very, very strict Southern Presbyterian background.
00:24:12.000He didn't really buy that whole service thing.
00:24:17.000He saw disciplined intellect as the future.
00:24:23.000And the more that disciplined intellect could be in the saddle, the better for everybody.
00:24:31.000And of course, the people didn't know what was good for them.
00:24:47.000I mean, I don't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry to take control over our nuclear power plants and say, well, hey, I'm just as good as the other guy.
00:24:58.000No, of course, and we all depend on them.
00:25:50.000And one of the problems with the rise of the expert class is their focus used to be narrow and now it's very broad.
00:25:57.000So we are now counting on Fauci to organize society when in a previous world, it would have been just very strictly, what do you know about epidemiology?
00:26:07.000You know, we'll talk to you next month.
00:26:09.000Where now he's giving now advice on how political systems need to be structured and how we need to communicate with our loved ones.
00:26:19.000So can you talk about how expertise, and I believe Churchill wrote about this, and I know either Plato or Socrates did, where they didn't want scientists to run society because there's almost this, there's a moral gap in the sense that an expert running NIH, they will not calculate into any considerations the well-being of the nation, right?
00:26:45.000And can you talk about how when we allow experts to run so much and we don't have a check and balance against them, of which the fourth branch of government has almost no check and balance, they're unelected, they're unknown with unlimited power, that you all of a sudden have people that are actually anything but experts in a certain domain acting as if they are.
00:27:08.000Yes, that's really, yeah, that's so true because I've often said there are two problems with experts ruling.
00:27:17.000One is if they know what they're doing, and the other is if they don't know what they're doing.
00:27:46.000And I think there are instances in which public health concerns can take precedence, but not what we've been going through with all the obfuscation and misinformation and changing perspectives and politicization, frankly, of the whole process.
00:28:10.000But what if the experts don't know what they're doing?
00:28:12.000That's that, you know, what if our process of accrediting people, and I think of really a scandalous area of the whole triumph of gender ideology in universities, in schools, in corporate settings.
00:28:42.000This stuff doesn't really have a scientific basis.
00:28:46.000People like Ryan Anderson, whose book was banned on Amazon, have made this case, I think, irrefutably, to anyone who wants to look at it with an open mind.
00:28:59.000There is such a thing as gender dysphoria.
00:29:03.000And it's something that children go through and come out of more often than not, much more often than not.
00:29:13.000But we have people with a doctor in front of their name, or maybe not MDs or anyone with any real expertise in the field making these decrees based on their professional credential.
00:29:32.000American Psychological Association and so on and so forth, the American Bar Association pronouncing on these things.
00:29:41.000And it's a misuse of credentials, which actually has the effect of undermining all credentials.
00:29:48.000You know, scientists, I don't know how many real scientists, people in your audience know, but the scientists I know who deal with climate, they don't think the science is settled.
00:30:03.000They're afraid to say much of anything because they get stomped on if they don't toe the line.
00:30:09.000And they don't get their government grants, which are the lifeblood of modern science, getting money from the government.
00:30:18.000Eisenhower warned against this in his farewell address, having this happen, exactly what has happened.
00:30:24.000So science is thoroughly politicized, but a lot of the people I know, when you get them down in the soundproof room where they will speak the truth, they say, you know, we really don't.
00:30:38.000We really can't justify the kinds of apocalyptic pronouncements that are made even by the UN and other such organizations, let alone your local crazy.
00:30:52.000So, you know, expertise is kind of caving in on itself.
00:30:59.000It's what Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame called, he's always referring to the K through 12 implosion, but all the professions are imploding, partly because they don't police their own ranks.
00:31:17.000That was one of the premises back in 100 years or so ago when this whole expert knowledge thing started to take hold, was that the experts were credentialed elite, but they also police one another.
00:31:30.000They had this thing called peer review.
00:31:33.000We now have a crisis of peer review because so many scientific papers and experiments are unreplicable.
00:31:42.000That's the most important thing in science.
00:31:45.000If you make an assertion, you propound a hypothesis, and the experiment confirms it, you have to be able to repeat the experiment and get the same result.
00:32:40.000Yeah, it's hard to trust the experts after what we have seen from the denunciation of the Wuhan laboratory leak to what actually the other way around and all that.
00:32:49.000So I want to ask you a question about the fourth branch of government, which is a term that we use on this program to describe the administrative state and the bureaucratic state.
00:32:57.000So our speech, our conversation here, beautifully leads up to it because the experts are the ones that lead all these agencies.
00:33:04.000But can you talk about how this fourth branch of government really does challenge, and in my opinion, it diminishes, and I'm trying to find the right word, it almost invalidates the promise of the Constitution, which is one that is checks and balances, independent judiciary, and consent to the governed.
00:33:24.000Can you talk about how unique this entire 100-year project is of having unknown, unelected federal bureaucracies do whatever they want?
00:33:33.000Well, you know, you've described it very well.
00:33:37.000And it is an outgrowth of the view that Wilson pioneered in a lot of ways that the people are no longer, we live in such a complex world and difficult issues are so hard to explain to people.
00:33:58.000People get the answer to their pants when they're listening to a long explanation.
00:34:01.000They want simple, what are the goodies and what are the baddies?
00:34:06.000And as a result, the actual decision-making is taken out of the hands of representative institutions and put in the hands of bureaucrats that are, as you say, beyond the reach of elections.
00:34:24.000I mean, in a way, we saw this the past the four years of the Trump administration.
00:34:30.000He was at war with the administrative bureaucracies in Washington, the State Department, and other, the Department of Education, and so on.
00:34:39.000And I wouldn't say they won, but they brought him to a draw an awful lot of the time.
00:34:46.000And most, you know, even conservative or so-called conservative leaders are inclined to accommodate the bureaucracies and think that, well, if you get an amicable setting, you can nudge things a little bit.
00:35:34.000But Congress was where the action really was supposed to be.
00:35:38.000What Congress has been doing again and again and again over the last 25 years is passing these big, wonderful-sounding, idealistic things that nobody knows what they mean.
00:35:54.000It's turned over to the agencies to decide what they mean.
00:35:58.000I think back to like the Americans with Disabilities Act.
00:36:02.000I mean, who could be against an act to reach out and compassionately include people who are disabled in the mainstream of society?
00:36:14.000The principle is, I wouldn't say it's unassailable, but it's pretty close to that.
00:36:19.000But then the question is, you pass a bill and then you turn it over to the agencies and the courts to decide what it actually means.
00:36:28.000There's countless examples of this in the post, and you really don't see it much until the years after the Great Society programs.
00:36:41.000Then that's when the administrative state really begins to take off.
00:36:47.000But, you know, Congress lacks the manpower and the interest in doing oversight of these agencies.
00:36:59.000And it turns into a sort of revolving door, you know, that the regulators and the regulated are in bed with one another, sometimes literally in today's Washington.
00:37:14.000People leave the State Department, the Defense Department, and immediately go working for what they call Beltway Bandits.
00:37:23.000The myriad of defense contractors, not all of them around the Beltway, but many of them, and make lots of money doing that.
00:37:32.000And then maybe they'll come back into the government.
00:37:36.000We see this more increasingly with generals and admirals coming back into politics.
00:37:41.000And so it's a triad, a kind of triangle.
00:37:47.000The revolving door doesn't completely capture it.
00:37:51.000But you get the idea that there isn't a whole lot of actual regulating in the public interest going on.
00:37:59.000And we need some heroic congressional figures who are willing to step in and take an enormous amount of flag to begin to reverse that process.
00:38:12.000But of course, everybody wants to be re-elected.
00:38:15.000And if you can look at the Republicans who've supported, who have been supporting the infrastructure, the so-called infrastructure bill, the only way they can justify it is that we're going to bring home a little bit of bacon, maybe a half pound of bacon for our constituents here in Dustin County.
00:38:38.000So, you know, so the rest of the country, you know, feed at the trough.
00:38:48.000And what we need, if I may make a little bit of a tub thump here, we need to form groups that are built around the issue of restraining spending, of restraining the growth of government.
00:39:06.000There aren't any groups out there, even, well, maybe the NRA, but I mean, there aren't very many groups that are really just committed to being against the growth of government, against the growth of spending.
00:39:21.000The taxpayer union, a few of these things.
00:40:09.000It's that idea that the institutions remain.
00:40:11.000So to kind of summarize all of this, we started our first episode that everyone should go back and listen to: the forming of the nation, then the forming of the Constitution, the statesmanship of Lincoln, and now kind of this constitutional crisis that we are in.
00:40:24.000To kind of summarize all this together, as we talk about the story of America, I think one thing you can agree, Dr. McClay, the story is not over yet.
00:40:33.000It's still being written, which is what's so exciting.
00:40:36.000You and I talked about the first episode about the importance of a story.
00:40:39.000That story has not yet been completed.
00:40:41.000And I pray, and we're advocating on this program and at Turning Point USA, a revival of the Constitution.
00:40:47.000In closing, Dr. McClay, make that case of why we need to get back to where our country was really intended to be.
00:40:55.000And that kind of idea of reviving the Constitution, which I will say to our listeners, there is more interest about that than there was 30 years ago.
00:41:02.000That's what I've been told, that there is this renewed sense to get back to our roots.
00:41:08.000Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think that it's often said, Washington said this in his first inaugural address, that America is an experiment.
00:41:18.000We're an experiment in ordered liberty.
00:41:22.000We're an experiment in the idea that a large nation can govern itself, that it need not be ruled over by kings or other, or for that matter, administrative bureaucracies, that we can rule ourselves.
00:41:38.000I think this is just another iteration, another turn of the wheel in that same test.
00:41:48.000Do we need to have people telling us what size sodas we can drink, what size cars we can drive, what our habits and mores should be, what our views should be, what things we're allowed to hate and what things we're allowed to love.
00:42:34.000Well, of course, in Yiddish, there's a term very close to that, nudge, which is to be, I'm trying to think of a printable word to use, but it's to be to Hector somebody.
00:43:40.000That's the right to be wrong and wrong in somebody else's eyes.
00:43:45.000But to find our own way, I think once again, we're up against this.
00:43:54.000And I think you can do a lot with looking at issues that we haven't talked about much at all, like the respect for human life as a kind of unconditional value that we have been more and more and more violating.
00:44:13.000I saw the other day that this was in Canada, but it could easily have happened here, that there were four infants with heart troubles who died because of COVID regulations wouldn't allow them, the ambulance crews to transport them.
00:44:34.000And to me, that just says so much because it's really the COVID regulations are designed for people my age to be able to survive.
00:44:45.000Younger people don't need to worry about it and babies don't need to worry about it, particularly ones with cardiac problems, they've got other things to worry about.
00:44:55.000But we have such a distorted sense of priorities that we don't think enough about how from birth and before birth to the far reaches of old age, that human life has intrinsic dignity.
00:45:16.000And I think this is something that is, I think, understood by the framers and founders.
00:45:26.000We live in an era where things like that need to be more explicit because we really have, and science itself is an engine of threat to the idea of the dignity of human life, which doesn't mean that you're entitled to dignity because you do the right things and you do what the men in the white coats tell you to do.