The Charlie Kirk Show - August 21, 2021


The Statesmanship of Lincoln—The Great American Story with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 3)


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37 minutes

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141.74834

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5,351

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377

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4

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6

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. McClay from Hillsdale College joins us to talk about Abraham Lincoln and his life and impact on our nation. Dr. Mckelly is the founder of Turning Point USA, a national youth organization dedicated to educating and inspiring the next generation of leaders.

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.
00:00:00.000 Happy Saturday.
00:00:02.000 Another conversation about what some people would say is our greatest president with Dr. McClay.
00:00:07.000 Dr. McClay from Hillsdale College, the Beacon of the North.
00:00:10.000 It's part of our partnership with Hillsdale College.
00:00:12.000 Look, you guys got to start taking these online courses.
00:00:15.000 They're phenomenal.
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00:00:19.000 That's charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:00:23.000 Check it out right now.
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00:00:35.000 And people say, I don't have time to homeschool.
00:00:37.000 I totally understand.
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00:00:44.000 That's my challenge to every parent listening.
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00:01:01.000 So it would bless us if you go to charlieforhillsdale.com, register free of charge.
00:01:06.000 Dr. McClay, an in-depth conversation about Abraham Lincoln.
00:01:09.000 Also, it's brought to you advertiser-free.
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00:01:16.000 Buckle up, everybody here.
00:01:18.000 We go.
00:01:18.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
00:01:20.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
00:01:22.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
00:01:26.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
00:01:29.000 I want to thank Charlie.
00:01:30.000 He's an incredible guy.
00:01:31.000 His spirit, his love of this country.
00:01:33.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:39.000 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.
00:01:48.000 That's why we are here.
00:01:52.000 Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk.
00:01:54.000 So with us again by Popular Demand, this is Dr. McClay from Hillsdale College.
00:01:59.000 Dr. McClay, I was just in Oklahoma, singing your praises, thinking that you still had something to do with Oklahoma.
00:02:04.000 And they said, no, no, they went to the beach.
00:02:07.000 He's now in the beacon of the north in Hillsdale College.
00:02:10.000 So that's where you belong.
00:02:12.000 We're here to talk about Lincoln today in the great American story, Land of Hope, which you've done a phenomenal job of putting together.
00:02:20.000 Tell us about Lincoln.
00:02:21.000 Why should every American know the story of Lincoln?
00:02:26.000 Well, because there's so many reasons, but one of them is that he was the common man who rose to the highest office in the land and was arguably our greatest president.
00:02:39.000 He was a person who, with almost no, well, really no formal schooling, ended up becoming a master of oratory in the English language.
00:02:53.000 He was a brilliant legal mind, a brilliant constitutional mind.
00:03:01.000 And he saw and expressed, I think, what is the essential character of our nation better than anybody else.
00:03:10.000 That's a good starter as to why we should know about Lincoln.
00:03:17.000 The only thing that we don't know about Lincoln never will is what would have happened if he had been assassinated at the moment he was.
00:03:23.000 What could the whole settlement of the Civil War have been done better?
00:03:28.000 Less acrimony?
00:03:30.000 Would we be looking at the problems that we have today if he had remained in charge?
00:03:38.000 It's very hard to know, but I wish we had had that opportunity.
00:03:44.000 You know, that's a really important point that isn't always talked about is that we talked about how he was probably America's greatest president, his ability to keep the union together.
00:03:53.000 But it was an incomplete presidency because his successor, they were much more aggressive towards the South than even Lincoln wanted to be.
00:04:02.000 He had a much longer-term picture of trying to heal the nation.
00:04:07.000 So I want to kind of go back to Abraham Lincoln's upbringing.
00:04:11.000 He was a lawyer for the railroad companies.
00:04:14.000 He studied Euclid, Shakespeare, and the Bible.
00:04:17.000 That's what he always said.
00:04:19.000 And one of his earliest speeches I want to talk to you about, Dr. McClay, is the Lyceum Address, because you can kind of see a little bit of a foreshadowing of the leader to come.
00:04:29.000 Tell us about a young Abraham Lincoln and how we know him today.
00:04:34.000 Well, he was born in Kentucky and to very, very, very humble origins.
00:04:44.000 When he was asked once about his origins, he said that he referred to Thomas Gray's poem, which we call Gray's Elegy, and has a line in it about the short and simple annals of the poor.
00:04:58.000 He said, that's enough to describe his upbringing.
00:05:01.000 And so we, and we actually don't know a whole lot.
00:05:04.000 We know that he had this experience of being a farmhand.
00:05:12.000 He knew firsthand how laborious and difficult farm labor was, especially in that era before we had mechanization of any kind.
00:05:23.000 He saw slavery in Kentucky, and in his trip to New Orleans, he actually saw a slave market.
00:05:36.000 Every piece of evidence points to his having found slavery to be a repulsive, vicious, and unacceptable, un-American institution from very early on.
00:05:49.000 He probably in part got this from his father, who did not figure in his life heavily, but he was a Baptist.
00:05:58.000 His father was a very serious Baptist.
00:06:00.000 So, okay, moving ahead, he had the work ethic par excellence.
00:06:06.000 He worked very hard.
00:06:08.000 And when he came to New Salem, Illinois, you know, just a raw kid, he got himself a job at the post office, established himself, ran for office, educated himself, used every spare minute.
00:06:23.000 His law partners called him this little engine of ambition that never stopped.
00:06:31.000 But he was a perfect example of the American ethic.
00:06:35.000 You work hard and you can get ahead.
00:06:38.000 So he comes from this frontier background.
00:06:41.000 He understood the frontier experience of expanding America.
00:06:46.000 And he understood the opportunities that were available to him.
00:06:50.000 So he got into politics.
00:06:52.000 He ran for office.
00:06:55.000 He educated himself in the law and became, as you said, a very good lawyer.
00:07:01.000 I mean, he had a great legal mind, which he mainly got from reading Blackstone and other classic legal sources.
00:07:08.000 But it isn't just reading them, he incorporated them, he assimilated them, he made them his own.
00:07:16.000 So that now to jump ahead to the Lyceum Address, 1838, this was a period of great unrest, not unlike the present moment in American society, particularly in the sense, maybe more like last summer, a time of racial tensions, tensions over abolitionism and anti-abolitionism.
00:07:39.000 There was a murder of a prominent abolitionist.
00:07:43.000 There was mob justice here and there in the country.
00:07:48.000 The rule of law in many places seemed to be breaking down.
00:07:52.000 And the Lyceum address, and this is a very young Lincoln, he's 28 years old when he gave a speech, which is still worth reading today.
00:08:00.000 It's still a very fine speech.
00:08:01.000 He says, Look, the Revolution was a great thing, the American Revolution, but the people who made that revolution are dying off.
00:08:14.000 By 1838, there's really nobody left.
00:08:17.000 George Washington's been dead for almost 40 years.
00:08:21.000 Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, July 4th, 1826.
00:08:26.000 So 50 years after the Declaration.
00:08:29.000 So it's a new generation.
00:08:32.000 And he's saying, in effect, we don't have the revolution to unify us.
00:08:40.000 We don't have the revolution as a goal that causes us to set aside our petty difference.
00:08:50.000 Now we have petty differences that are dividing.
00:08:54.000 And what we need to do is look to something else.
00:08:58.000 We need to look to the rule of law.
00:08:59.000 We need to, as he says it in the speech, to make the law, the love of the law, reverence for the law, the political religion of the land and make it something that is inculcated in every step of the way.
00:09:18.000 Now, just pulling back for a minute, there's some other great things.
00:09:21.000 There's a great line in there about how the pillars, the men of the great men of the revolution who had upheld the Republic are gone through the silent artillery of time.
00:09:36.000 Just the passage of time.
00:09:38.000 He showed already he had an immense gift for fresh and compelling metaphors.
00:09:46.000 But he ends up coming on the side of the law and reason, a kind of reasonableness coming out of the idea of the veneration of the rule of law.
00:09:58.000 And I have to tell you, but just to make a present-day comment, side comment, if there's anything I think that's missing from our political discourse, particularly coming from the left side of the aisle, it is this idea that the law, the rule of law, is a preeminent value.
00:10:17.000 And this is something Lincoln again and again stressed: is that if we don't, paraphrasing, we don't, if we don't preserve the Constitution, we don't preserve the framework of laws that undergird our institutions, we are going to have a liberty worth having.
00:10:34.000 That the first prerequisite of liberty is order.
00:10:37.000 He didn't say that, Russell Kirk said that, but it's true.
00:10:41.000 So that's the thrust of the speech: that it's the rule of law has to be observed.
00:10:49.000 And he said, even an unjust law.
00:10:53.000 In some ways, this kind of conflicts with the idea of Martin Luther King's notion derived from his reading of Aquinas that we have no obligation to obey an unjust law.
00:11:04.000 Lincoln would not necessarily agree with that.
00:11:07.000 He thought we have an obligation to try to change an unjust law, but we should obey it.
00:11:13.000 And I think that this is a lost insight right now.
00:11:18.000 I think someone needs to write a book maybe about constitutionalism or about the central importance of the rule of law to get this across to young people, young and old people in America.
00:11:32.000 That righteousness for a cause is one thing, but civil society can't subsist if we don't have the rule of law.
00:11:43.000 Lincoln, and let me jump ahead a little bit, if I may, Charlie, that when the Civil War is going full blast and Lincoln is, you know, a lot of Republicans wanted to abolish slavery.
00:11:59.000 Lincoln's position was: I can't do that.
00:12:02.000 And unlike Obarack Obama, he didn't decide, well, maybe I can do it.
00:12:07.000 Yes.
00:12:07.000 But no, he said, I cannot do that.
00:12:12.000 And what he finally did, as you all know, is the Emancipation Proclamation, which did not, if you've ever read it, it's not exactly scintillating reading.
00:12:24.000 It's not like reading the Declaration of Independence.
00:12:28.000 It's simply a legal document freeing slaves who are in those areas that are in a state of rebellion against the Union.
00:12:38.000 So it doesn't include, for example, Kentucky, which was a slave state, but did never join the Confederacy.
00:12:44.000 It doesn't include the areas of Tennessee that were occupied by the Union Army.
00:12:49.000 Tennessee was a Confederate state, but it, you know, was by the time of the Manchu Proclamation was being restored to the Union.
00:12:57.000 So it's a very, and the reason he justified is that I have powers.
00:13:02.000 Alan Gelso has written the book on this.
00:13:05.000 I have powers as commander-in-chief for things that relate to military tactics.
00:13:13.000 So this is a strictly military move and justified, therefore, under my constitutional powers as commander-in-chief.
00:13:21.000 But to abolish the institution of slavery, that I can't do.
00:13:25.000 That has to be done by a constitutional amendment, the 13th Amendment, which, as we know from Steven Spielberg's actually quite good movie about Lincoln, he fought like heck for in his last days.
00:13:40.000 So he was a legalist and a constitutionalist all the way down the line.
00:13:45.000 The way this sort of talk you hear today, by any means necessary, which is a reprise of the slogan of the Black Panthers in the 60s, he would not have gone for that.
00:13:59.000 By any means necessary, no, by the right means, by the correct means, by the legally sanctioned means.
00:14:08.000 That's another reason we need to remember Lincoln.
00:14:10.000 We lionize him, but what did he do?
00:14:13.000 He was a guy who went by the book.
00:14:15.000 For the most part, now you'll get Southerners who will say, man, he suspended writs of habeas corpus and that kind of thing.
00:14:21.000 We can have a discussion about that, about whether that's also a wartime power of the president.
00:14:28.000 But for the most part, he tried to do things constitutionally because he felt if you didn't preserve the Constitution, if you just threw the Constitution away, there'd be no getting it back.
00:14:42.000 There'd be no, you'd have to go through all sorts of hell to try, probably unsuccessfully, to reestablish those institutions.
00:14:52.000 But because we included in the Constitution the power to amend it, it was amendable.
00:14:58.000 It was correctable to be brought in line with what he believed was the founding insight of the Declaration of Independence.
00:15:07.000 That's something else that people argue about a lot.
00:15:10.000 And I won't take it up here, but it's consistent with his thinking.
00:15:17.000 And one other thing, and then I'll let you get a word in edgewise, Charlie.
00:15:22.000 You're a very kind interviewer.
00:15:25.000 He managed to convince Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist, really arguably one of the most powerful speakers.
00:15:35.000 Maybe some people say the most powerful speaker of his age, who when he was, he emancipated himself, really, taught himself to read, became a quite learned man, great orator.
00:15:50.000 He originally was with the faction of abolitionists that thought the Constitution was a pact with the devil and was not, had no moral authority.
00:16:04.000 Lincoln, among others, turned him around on that.
00:16:07.000 And he ended up, in fact, in a speech that has the provocative title, What to the Slave is Your Fourth of July?
00:16:18.000 And it's full of really corruscating, devastating indictments, moral indictments of an American that tolerated slavery.
00:16:27.000 But in the end, he endorses the Constitution in the most, he calls it glorious, a glorious document.
00:16:36.000 So that's a biggie for me.
00:16:38.000 You know, if Frederick Douglass comes aboard, that's an authority I'm bound to respect on the subject.
00:16:46.000 And Lincoln, I think, persuaded.
00:16:49.000 They had a fractious relationship.
00:16:51.000 Douglas often didn't think Lincoln was going fast enough.
00:16:54.000 That's right.
00:16:55.000 Yeah, there's a great story of Frederick Douglass who comes to the White House to go visit with Abraham Lincoln. 0.97
00:17:02.000 And no one can believe a black man would be waiting in line to go to the White House. 0.80
00:17:06.000 And they alert President Lincoln that Frederick Douglass is there. 0.71
00:17:11.000 And almost immediately he calls for Douglass to come.
00:17:14.000 And at every turn, even in the White House, people were trying to stop him to go see Lincoln because they couldn't believe that a black man would be invited.
00:17:21.000 And as soon as Abraham Lincoln saw Frederick Douglass, he said, ah, Frederick, my friend, come on in.
00:17:26.000 It just made everyone silent.
00:17:28.000 It's a great story.
00:17:30.000 I want to ask you about one part of Lincoln's life that was rediscovered by the great Harry Jaffa, which is the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
00:17:38.000 And I want everyone to understand this: that Harry Jaffa was learning under Leo Strauss in New York City.
00:17:45.000 And Harry Jaffa went to a used bookstore and kind of stumbled upon the original transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
00:17:52.000 And no one had ever really done scholarship, meaningful scholarship of this moment of history until Harry Jaffa.
00:17:57.000 There'd be some people that wrote about it.
00:17:59.000 But what Jaffa realized and he discovered was that this was really the ancient debate of what is justice.
00:18:06.000 And Abraham Lincoln was very concerned about that sort of question of what is a human being?
00:18:12.000 What is the correct way we should build a government?
00:18:14.000 Do you talk about how Abraham Lincoln, either willingly or knowingly or unknowingly, was participating in really a new founding of the United States?
00:18:23.000 You can make an argument.
00:18:24.000 He re-founded our country.
00:18:26.000 And that argument has been made by people, both favorable and unfavorable to Lincoln.
00:18:26.000 Yes.
00:18:33.000 Well, that's the thing.
00:18:35.000 That's the one thing that the Calhounites and Jaffa can agree on is that Lincoln changed the country.
00:18:40.000 Yes.
00:18:41.000 And Gary Wills is another who sort of picked up the argument from his speaker, Douglas Adair. 0.98
00:18:47.000 And yeah, no, it's, I think, yeah, I'm not going to go into what my position is on that unless you absolutely want me to, but I'm no Jaffa.
00:19:02.000 Now, Jaffa was, and, you know, I'm not as well acquainted with Jaffa.
00:19:06.000 I actually knew Strauss slightly.
00:19:09.000 Wow.
00:19:10.000 Well, I was a student at St. John's College when he was scholar in residence there.
00:19:15.000 And I had the honor of chauffeuring him a couple of times because a campus buddy had that campus job and he a couple of times he slipped away to see his girlfriend and asked if I fill in for it.
00:19:26.000 So now the truth can be told.
00:19:29.000 And so I got to chat with Strauss, who was a very funny, actually very funny guy.
00:19:36.000 But I don't know that Jaffa has his own sort of take on Strauss's teaching, which I think in many ways, if I could just be very oversimplified,
00:19:47.000 very much more favorable to the American liberal, and I mean liberal in the older sense of the term experiment than a lot of Straussians who looked on it somewhat less favorably, as sort of the best that could be had under conditions of modernity, but not really compatible with the Republic of Virtue.
00:20:17.000 And Jaffa, I mean, with the Lincoln-Douglas discussion, I think one of the things a lot of scholars looked at that, and this is true today, too, that debate and sort of say, well, you know, neither one of these guys is affirming American principles of circa 21st century of equality, absolute equality.
00:20:42.000 You know, even Lincoln draws back from affirming racial equality.
00:20:56.000 And in ways that I think, you know, particularly young people who aren't used to the idea of giving a kind of concession to what prevailing values were at the time, are shocked by.
00:21:14.000 I'm not, partly because there's such a tone in Lincoln's language.
00:21:21.000 We could talk about that in a different time, maybe, but it's clear that he is in part paying his respects to public opinion.
00:21:31.000 That, look, the fact of the matter is, you can't, as politicians, say absolutely everything you think and get elected.
00:21:41.000 You have to be aware of the context in which you're operating.
00:21:45.000 This is not a great moral sin.
00:21:52.000 Particularly in a representative form of government.
00:21:55.000 But what he does do, he's constantly pushing the envelope.
00:21:58.000 He's pushing towards a recognition of the specific ill, evil of slavery.
00:22:10.000 To be opposed to slavery and to be committed to racial equality are not the same thing.
00:22:16.000 They're not the same thing.
00:22:17.000 And the difference would be more obvious to people in the 19th century than to us now.
00:22:23.000 But for him, the idea that there could be a property in man, that you could actually have property in human flesh was abhorrent, repugnant, simply incompatible with the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence and And the foundational values of the country and the Constitution, the Constitution itself, even though the Constitution contains provisions that protect slavery.
00:22:50.000 So, the debate, to me, the interesting part, and this may or may not reflect Jaffa Jeff, I think it does, but the most interesting part comes over the debate about popular sovereignty.
00:23:03.000 And if I may back up for a minute, you know, one of the things that happened with, I mentioned, I think in passing in one of our earlier conversations, that it was really the Mexican war that made a civil war not inevitable, but very likely, because it inevitably reopened the slavery question, which had been settled after a man of speaking with the Missouri Compromise.
00:23:30.000 Because what were you going to do with all this land?
00:23:32.000 You know, the country that more or less doubled in size.
00:23:35.000 What were you going to do with all this land?
00:23:37.000 All these slaveholders who brought their slaves with them to Missouri and Kansas and Nebraska, you know, when those territories became states, would they be slave states or free states?
00:23:51.000 And so the question had to be debated again and again.
00:23:56.000 And I won't lead you through the whole mess of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the other things, except that what ended up happening is that even the settlement of the Missouri Compromise failed and was ruled unconstitutional.
00:24:13.000 That was part of the Green Scott decision.
00:24:17.000 So the issue was out there in the time of the Senate, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, they were both running for the Senate from Illinois.
00:24:30.000 Lincoln had been out of politics for a long time and had been a very successful lawyer.
00:24:35.000 He made a lot of money.
00:24:38.000 But he was goaded back into politics because of this controversy, because he felt as if with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the country was just being wrecked.
00:24:48.000 And he felt called to get back in the fray.
00:24:53.000 So he ran for Senate, lost to Douglas, but Douglas was one of the most prominent Democrats in the country.
00:25:01.000 So he ran a good campaign, kept it close, and was instantly the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 1860.
00:25:11.000 So that was the context of these debates.
00:25:14.000 This was like a prelude to the presidential race two years later.
00:25:19.000 And so the issue of what to do about slavery in the territories comes up.
00:25:24.000 And Douglas has this great idea, which actually is superficially kind of appealing, a popular sovereignty.
00:25:32.000 Let the people decide.
00:25:35.000 Of course, what that meant is in states where slaveholders really wanted to prevail, they all piled in with their slaves to try to bring the population up to a level where when there was a territorial election, they would win.
00:25:53.000 And similarly, on the other side, and you had Kansas break into violent conflict, bloody Kansas over this.
00:26:03.000 It was, again, another place like the 1838 Lyceum Address moment when the country seemed to be kind of, at least in that place, falling apart.
00:26:17.000 And so Douglass suggests popular sovereignty, let the people decide.
00:26:21.000 That sounds good, doesn't it?
00:26:22.000 It sounds very American.
00:26:25.000 But what Lincoln ends up evoking is the idea that you can't, There are certain kinds of fundamental values that even the people acting in the sovereign capacity can't overrule.
00:26:41.000 And one of them is the fundamental dignity of human life.
00:26:46.000 So, slavery is the wrongness of slavery and the wrongness of allowing it to expand beyond where it already was to him a fundamental principle, both of those things.
00:27:01.000 He was willing to accept, and this is another thing that troubles people about him.
00:27:05.000 He was willing to accept slavery where it existed.
00:27:09.000 He ran for president on that platform.
00:27:12.000 The South did not believe him.
00:27:16.000 Maybe they were right not to believe him, I don't know.
00:27:18.000 But even after he was elected, he and some others tried to pass a constitutional amendment called the Corwin Amendment that would have protected slavery forever in the Constitution.
00:27:32.000 They were willing to do that to keep the country from falling apart.
00:27:36.000 Again, presuming that at some later time, sensibilities, moral sensibilities would come around and slavery could be abolished.
00:27:45.000 Now, look, I don't, that's a we can have a debate about that decision, but in any event, it failed because, as I said, the South simply was willing to go its own way, goaded by South Carolina and let along by others.
00:28:06.000 So that issue of popular sovereignty being not enough that there were some constitutional principles that you couldn't just vote to treat some people as property and others as not.
00:28:26.000 That wasn't on, there was no ballot that that could be on.
00:28:30.000 That was Lincoln's, I think, the ultimate thrust of his position.
00:28:35.000 And it's a very important position.
00:28:39.000 And for, again, going back to my very beginning, thinking constitutionally.
00:28:43.000 We think constitutionally, we think there are certain things that are outside the scope of government.
00:28:51.000 You can't just decide, for example, just to pick a random example, that landlords can't evict tenants who don't pay them for six months.
00:29:04.000 And decide this from Washington.
00:29:06.000 It's a fundamental violation of the laws relating to private property.
00:29:13.000 You can't do that.
00:29:15.000 And the Constitution is there to provide, to put up a fence against the passing passions of majorities or even powerful minorities during particular times of crisis.
00:29:30.000 That's why we have a Constitution.
00:29:32.000 It's not for the good times.
00:29:34.000 It's for the hard time to tell us, you know, when we're tempted to transgress that we shouldn't.
00:29:43.000 And Lincoln, he has his detractors on these grounds.
00:29:48.000 And I take them seriously, but in the end, I think he was a profound defender of the Constitution and of the idea of constitutionalism, of the rule of law.
00:29:59.000 And we're very fortunate to have him.
00:30:03.000 It's interesting, if I could make an upside observation, that maybe George Washington would be the main competition with Lincoln for greatest president.
00:30:12.000 And both of them had to make decisions that I think come out not out of a sort of political science playbook, but out of philosophy, out of fundamentally the sort of what is what are what is what is man's purpose?
00:30:34.000 What are the sorts of things that we need to have for society to flourish?
00:30:38.000 They're statesmen, and statesmanship is something that comes out of the human soul.
00:30:44.000 I think it's this sort of prudential wisdom of looking at all the facts, sizing them up, and then making a choice that is not predetermined.
00:30:57.000 You know, there's no playbook.
00:31:01.000 And both of them, we were so blessed to have leaders like that.
00:31:12.000 I'll stop right there, but you know what I'm going to say next.
00:31:15.000 Oh, yeah.
00:31:15.000 I know exactly where you're going.
00:31:17.000 And so I want to close with this, Dr. McClay, which is the enduring legacy of Lincoln.
00:31:23.000 Everyone gets something different out of Lincoln.
00:31:25.000 And yeah, there are the Lincoln detractors.
00:31:27.000 I don't like the Lincoln detractors because I think that the correct way we should view history, as you do in your wonderful book, is in the time and the manner of the place of which they lived, which is what was at their disposal.
00:31:39.000 And you made a great point that Lincoln was very prudent in the way he went about doing things.
00:31:45.000 He was careful not to obliterate the entire constitutional order, even though there was a war on his hands.
00:31:51.000 That being said, Lincoln was very creative and was willing to look at new strategies to be able to try and win the war and also pursue an ultimate good.
00:32:01.000 What do you think is the enduring legacy for Lincoln in today's time?
00:32:05.000 The biggest takeaways, you touched on some of them, his statesmanship, his honesty, his integrity, his wisdom.
00:32:12.000 But he really truly is next to George Washington, one of the greatest leaders this country has ever produced.
00:32:17.000 What do you think that enduring legacy is?
00:32:19.000 Well, it's a legacy of combining prudence with principle. 0.95
00:32:24.000 I mean, you know, a lot of times we, you know, remember back in the Reagan administration, there were the ideologues and the pragmatists, the stupid categories the press invents. 0.75
00:32:37.000 I would say that part of Reagan's greatness was that he was a very principled man and he was a very pragmatic man or prudential. 0.93
00:32:45.000 I like that word better.
00:32:47.000 I don't like pragmatic.
00:32:48.000 I like prudential.
00:32:49.000 That's an Aristotelian word.
00:32:51.000 It is exactly exactly.
00:32:52.000 Pragmatic is a William James word.
00:32:54.000 Yes.
00:32:56.000 Exactly.
00:32:57.000 And Lincoln, I think, had the same kind of combination of fixed principle, but prudential flexibility.
00:33:07.000 The historian John Lukac said principles are like a mounted gun that they're fixed, but you can turn them this way and you can turn them that way, depending on what the target is.
00:33:23.000 And I always like that metaphor.
00:33:26.000 So Lincoln had certain principles he would not violate.
00:33:31.000 But he was also, the Spielberg movie is very showing what a wheeler dealer he could be.
00:33:37.000 Oh, yeah.
00:33:39.000 He was a good politician.
00:33:41.000 And, you know, he had that kind of feel.
00:33:47.000 And where he got it from, I don't know, because he was, you know, his Harvard was the backwoods.
00:33:55.000 His Kennedy School of Government was the Mississippi River.
00:33:59.000 You know, it was this, he was born with a kind of genius that thank God, we provided our country at that time provided scope for men like that.
00:34:15.000 And may we recover that instead of insisting that everybody that serves in high office go to the Kennedy School and become a Kennedy school clone.
00:34:29.000 But I think these qualities of character in him.
00:34:34.000 And by the way, I think the fact that he loved Shakespeare is not a small thing.
00:34:38.000 This is something Jaffa, Jaffa's very big on.
00:34:41.000 Yes.
00:34:42.000 On the fact that Macbeth was his favorite play, which, you know, I'm always surprised it's not Julius Caesar, but it still.
00:34:53.000 Unfortunately, it ended too similarly.
00:34:56.000 Yes, right.
00:34:57.000 Yes.
00:34:58.000 But he had an appreciation for what we would today call the humanity.
00:35:02.000 Yes.
00:35:03.000 And remember George Washington and his love of Addison's play about Cato.
00:35:09.000 And there's a way in which great literature can call us to higher things, but also impart a kind of wisdom.
00:35:21.000 And I see this in Shakespeare. 0.90
00:35:23.000 Shakespeare is great at teaching us the limitations of human nature and the follies to which, I mean, Macbeth is a fool who's led by the nose by his ambition and his ambitious wife to make a wreck of everything.
00:35:40.000 Well, and that's a great segue, Dr. McClay, to the Hillsdale online course on Shakespeare, Hamlet, and Attemptist.
00:35:46.000 That's a phenomenal segue.
00:35:48.000 It's charlieforhillsdale.com.
00:35:50.000 Sorry, Dr. McClay, we have a hard stop today.
00:35:53.000 But I really enjoyed this conversation on LinkedIn.
00:35:57.000 And I think next week, can I just hold up for your letters made me backward, but that we've been talking about.
00:36:06.000 And I just happened to have a copy.
00:36:09.000 And let me say one last thing about Lincoln.
00:36:11.000 Really quick.
00:36:13.000 It's in my book.
00:36:14.000 So you'll have to buy it to get the right quote.
00:36:16.000 But at the last meeting that Lincoln had cabinet meeting before he was assassinated, same day, earlier that day, he gave a speech in which he said, I don't want to see any, the war's over.
00:36:31.000 Appomattox has happened.
00:36:32.000 He said, I don't want to see any revenge, any bloodletting, any mistreatment of the South.
00:36:40.000 There's been enough of that stuff already.
00:36:43.000 Let's not have any more of that hatred.
00:36:45.000 And that's the worst thing that came out of his assassination.
00:36:49.000 The hatred just boiled over and didn't stop boiling for a long time if it ever had.
00:36:59.000 So what a shame.
00:37:01.000 What a shame that his spirit of reconciliation couldn't have prevailed.
00:37:06.000 Thank you for letting me get that.
00:37:07.000 No, that's perfect.
00:37:08.000 In the next episode, Dr. McClay will touch a little on Reconstruction and then we'll enter the 20th century. 0.63
00:37:14.000 I know there's plenty to go through. 0.87
00:37:16.000 So I can't wait for that.
00:37:17.000 Land of Hope, Charlie FORHILSDALE.com.
00:37:20.000 Check it out.
00:37:21.000 Just your email to sign up for the online courses is terrific.
00:37:24.000 Thank you so much, Dr. McClay.
00:37:25.000 Talk to you soon.
00:37:26.000 Thanks.
00:37:29.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
00:37:31.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, you can do that at tpusa.com.
00:37:34.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom, at charliekirk.com.
00:37:37.000 God bless you guys.
00:37:38.000 Speak to you soon.
00:37:41.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.