Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, everyone.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Welcome to the 268th episode of objectively Speaking. My name is Lawrence Olivo, senior Project Manager here at the Atlas Society. Jennifer Grossman has the week off because she's currently in Europe attending our annual New Intellectuals Conference.
This year it's in Tbilisi, Georgia. So instead today I'm excited to have with me Atlas Society founder and Senior Scholar David Kelly, along with Senior Fellow Robert.
So we have a special webinar here today because it Constitution Day, first and foremost. So it's celebrating our document that has some really important ideas important for today's conversation. So they're going to be discussing the questions, is America an idea? What does it mean for a country to be defined by big ideas? Why does a country need to define itself by its ideas? And more? But before we get to that, I'm going to pass things over to David, who is going to start us off with a brief discussion about an organization he's been working with, recently known as the Free Society Coalition. So, David, take it away.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: Thanks, Lawrence. I wanted to introduce this in any discussion about, you know, whether ideas are important to America. A founding, founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is pretty important.
Not the only document, but from the time, but a really important one.
And next July, July 4, 2026, will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of that and the, you know, the submission of it by Thomas Jefferson, the author, to the colleagues, to his colleagues.
And we are preparing for that, for the, for that event. We've been doing that for a year and a half now, gathering all kinds of people, leaders of organizations. We have a steering committee made up of leaders of the State Policy Network, CATO, and other organizations. And we're trying to get people to talk about the, the ideas that were important for the, for the Declaration and what they mean today. And if you go to the free society coalition.org which you'll see on the, on the screen to at least to my right, I would urge anyone who's interested to click on that.
This project is not a TIS project per se, but it was founded by TIS trustees Jay Leper, myself and John Aguilaro.
And you will find there the Philadelphia Declaration, which we wrote as the core statement of what the fundamental ideas are updated to today's world.
And so I urge you to read those. You can sign up, sign to, to follow the, the Free State Coalition.
And if, if you want to download the brochure, there's a, there's a button there where you can do that.
So with that said, I Want to turn now to the main topic, which is is America an idea?
And I think the answer is clearly a yes in, in that it was, it was founded in the Enlightenment on the basis of Enlightenment ideas that were explicitly articulated by many of the founders, who were all intellectuals as well as activists.
So Rob has looked more deeply into this. And so I want to turn that, turn the, the podium over to Rob right now and let you comment on, on the idea.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Right, so, so, you know, this idea of where this controversy, where this question comes from, is America an idea? Because this used to be sort of uncontroversial. I think it was, I think it was. Margaret Thatcher had a famous line that conservatives used to quote about how, you know, Europe is the product of history and America is a product of philosophy. That we had philosophical ideas from the Enlightenment that were the basis for us forming our government, that, you know, the, the borders and the balance of powers, you know, within political systems in Europe were all formed on the basis of these historical battles and traditions and things that went back a thousand years. But America came along in 1776, declared these basic ideas as the basis of our revolution, and proceeded to write our government, our state constitutions first. You know, the first thing that happened after July 4, 1776, is every state in every one of the colonies now was an independent state. It needed to have a new constitution that would get rid of the role of the king and re establish things. And they made big, big changes to the.
They oftentimes carried over some of the basic structure of the government they had before, but they made substantial changes.
And so, for example, in Virginia, we're very proud of the fact that one of the things we put into the Virginia State Constitution was the very first, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was the very first recollect recognition, official government recognition in the United States of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
And this was very much Thomas Jefferson's doing and, and, and James Madison's doing.
So, you know, what we did is we transformed we all the governments in the U.S. the individual states and then eventually the Constitution. So this, Today is the 238th anniversary of the. Of. It's the 230th anniversary of the day when the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia signed the finished document, the finished Constitution that they then so not, not finished in the sense of being from Finland, but finished with a D.
The completed document of the Constitution that they had hammered out. They signed that on September 17, 1787. And this is 238th anniversary, they sent it out to be ratified. And that's why this is celebrated as Constitution Day. And you know, we think of the Declaration. One thing, one point I wanted to make is we think of the Declaration of Independence as being the big ideological statement of the American Revolution because it has, you know, we hold these truths to be self evident. All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator, certain inalienable rights. To preserve these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. So that that whole famous sentence from the Declaration of Independence is Jefferson's restatement of essentially the philosophy, the political philosophy of John Locke and, and of other natural rights thinkers of the time. And Jefferson said, you know, I wasn't trying to innovate, I was just trying to see the common sense of the matter. And what he meant by common sense wasn't just, oh, we use our common sense. He meant the common sense meaning that everybody, you know, all is that all American Whigs, all American pro freedom. There's a pro freedom faction, all the pro freedom, pro independence Americans. We were all agreed on these ideas. So these were the ideas that were universally accepted among the founders and then restated by Jefferson and the Declaration, Declaration of Independence. And it's based on this Enlightenment philosophy. And by the way, there's a lot of philosophy packed in the Declaration. I know we've, you've done work on this for, for the Free Society Coalition that for example, you know, it starts with some things that you are not just political philosophy, like we hold these rights to be self evident. Well, what does self evident mean? Right, There's a statement there about how, what is truth? And how do you know, how do you know something to be true? So there's this idea of it being, you know, that, that there is a rationally demonstrated idea behind all this, that there's something you can point to and say, well, there's a reason we know this is true. All right, so there's lots of philosophy packed in there. But I want to make up also speak up a little bit for the Constitution because the Constitution is a much more legalistic document. It doesn't deal so much in the wide ideas seemingly. It deals in, well, okay, we're going to create a Congress and people, people we elected in a certain way. And there's lots of, you know, it gets into the nitty gritty of implementation and not so much on the, on the 30, 000 foot level of the Declaration of Independence where stating these broad Enlightenment philosophy, but there are Some really crucial ideas that are contained in the. The Constitution. And it's not. No, partly that's what's contained in the Bill of Rights, which. Where they added specific guarantees for specific freedoms and things like, you know, the no man should be subject to life, liberty and property being taken away without due process of law. And this is an. A big idea that goes back a thousand years of the. The basic. It's the basic foundation of the idea of the rule of law, that everything has to be done by law. There has to be a law and evidence on the basis for everything the government does. This is a radical idea because, you know, it was overthrowing the altern. The opposite. You know, it goes back a thousand years, but it was in. There's a thousand years of European history of that being opposed by this sort of legal royal absolutism or this absolute rule by a sovereign who could overturn the laws. There's something called the dispensing power that the kings used to have or prerogative was another term for it that they had this ability of. There was the law, but the law could be set aside or suspended in certain cases by the king if he wanted to. And this was their way of saying no. In fact, other people pointed out that the first one of the first clauses in the. In Article 2, which creates the presidency, says that the. The president shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed. And this was understood at the time to be a rejection of that idea of a. Of a dispensing power or some exception that the president could make to the laws. You know, that he has. Not only.
Not only is he about. He's bound by the law in the sense that he actually has to execute the laws. He can't set them aside and decide, I don't want to do this one, or, you know, I disagree with this law. He has to execute whatever the laws are that are passed by Congress. So there's a lot of big ideas about government that are put in there that are taking away absolutism. The biggest one, I would say that's in the Declaration, that's in the Constitution, as opposed to the Declaration of Independence.
Is the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence is more about, here's what government should do. Government should protect individual rights. You know, to preserve these rights. Governments were instituted among men. It gives a purpose for government, a reason why government has to do this one thing.
The Constitution is more about how government should do it. You know, how should we go about who should make the decisions. And the big idea in the Constitution that, that jumps out to me from, and I. I've grown to realize this more thoroughly, more fully recently is in up through the 17th century, you know, about 100 to the period right before the 18th century, that when the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted, there was this idea of sovereignty that, that there has to be some one entity in a government that has ultimate sovereignty and it makes the final decisions on everything.
Now, we would recognize that today as the principle of dictatorship, that you have one person who has the ultimate deciding power. And one of the really radical things that.
That the founders embraced and then put into the Constitution was the idea that no, there will be no one power that makes all the decisions. There's no one person or even no one institution that will be, you know, the ultimate authority that, that determines what gets done. We're going to have power divide. You know, sovereignty will be divided up into all these little pieces. There'll be sovereignty in the states and then sovereignty and the federal government. There'll be sovereignty, parts of sovereignty that are in Congress, parts that are in the courts, parts that are in the presidency. So this idea of, you know, when you ask the question of who decides what gets done, the old answer was, well, ultimately the king decides, and then there was a modification while the parliament decides that they have ultimate power. And then they finally said, no one person decides. Its power is spread out among all these institutions that can check each other and control each other. And that's how we're going to keep government limited. And, you know, that's. I think that's. That's their way that they connected that to government has to. Has to protect individual rights was to say, we're going to divide up the power so that no one has absolute power. And therefore the risk of somebody taking, you know, taking that power too far and evading on the people's rights, we're going to decrease that. We're going to take down that risk by dividing power up among so many different entities that, that can control each other or counterbalance each other. And I think that's the really radical idea.
The big idea in the Constitution is the idea of rejecting this idea of, of the sort of political. Of this, this unified political sovereignty where there's some ultimate authority that rules over everyone and that's really not compatible with the free society. So they had to get rid of that.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: Yeah, let me. I'd like to comment briefly on that, because both the Declaration and the Constitution, the structure of the Constitution had European precedents and at least in theory, because, you know, the notion of natural rights was, you know, goes back to John Locke and to some extent was built on the English precedents.
And similarly, the separation of powers in the Constitution was something. An idea laid out in some depth by Montesquieu, I guess. I assume he was French.
And the founders were very aware of these thinkers, and what they did was separate the ideas which were good from the historical background and institutions and customs that in Europe and made a new country out of new ideas, out of refined ideas, not entirely new, but refined.
And I think the separation of powers, along with the rights mentioned in the Declaration, is really, really important and evaporating today in our mixed economy.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, well, and that's something that, you know, every one of the things that we have to deal with today is, you know, I have a lot of complaints about Donald Trump, but we'll get to that later. And some people have mentioned it here that this idea of people wanting a leader and all the power concentrated with one person. But one of the things that I've come to, you know, that is really important to grasp is that we. That's something that didn't just happen, you know, starting in January. This is something that's been happening for over 100 years, this concentration of power, because everybody wants a strong man if they think the strong man is going to do what they want him to do. You know, so a lot of that starts with Woodrow Wilson in wanting to create this centralized administrative state that could do all the progressive things he wanted to do 100 years ago, and then Franklin Roosevelt and then, you know, Nixon, and it's this bipartisan thing, they call it the. The imperial presidency, that people have been going away from this idea of a government limited by rights, losing concept of that grasp of that concept of rights, and also going away from this idea of the.
A government that has divided powers, because divided powers means you can't do very much. That's the whole point of having divided powers. It prevents you from doing things. But there's always somebody who says, well, no, I want government to do this goal, this, you know, this idea I have in mind. And, and the divided division of powers gets in the way of that. So we need to get rid of the division of power, give more power to my strongman so we can do the things that I want.
And, you know, the irony, of course, is that oftentimes they'll. They'll scheme to give lots of power. I mean, the left, I think, is. Is learning this lesson. Democrats are learning this lesson today. You scheme to give all this power and then it goes into the hands of a guy who doesn't agree with you. Right.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: Well the, the thing about today's world is that it's not the world of the founders anymore. Not, and I don't just mean technology and I mean we have a mixed economy that has developed welfare state and regulations, regulatory state that has grown up over the last really 150 years. Anyway, and there was one question here I wanted to address from my modern Gulf question. What do you think has been the most perverted from its original intent when it comes to American ideas? The concept of rights. Something else. Yes, the concept of rights, absolutely.
Some years ago I wrote a book called A Life of One's Own Individual Rights in the Welfare State.
A lot of it is dated now because it was written in the 90s, but there's one chapter, chapter three, which is an historical account of how during the late night, late 18th and 19th century, up to FDR took the idea.
Let me go back a step. The original idea of a welfare state was coined by Bismarck in Germany. And Germany at the time had no strong culture or tradition of liberal society, individual rights and so forth.
It was always an authoritarian string, authoritarian flavor to it.
But Bismarck modernized that somewhat by saying we're going to make, we're going to take over the private insurance that workers have evolved to protect themselves and make it a state run policy. And that way people are now invested in the state which I run.
So that idea was modified in England and America because we did have a liberal tradition. But still it was grafted onto the idea of rights.
The original founders were very clear that rights were rights to action, they were negative rights as we call them today, that is rights from interference.
But the founders of the welfare state, and in many respects the regulatory state as well, said no. People have a right to food and shelter, to health care, to education and descent that have to be provided by other people through taxes. So that's one reason I think that's in my mind that's the most important change that has happened over the years since the original founding.
Both in terms change from what I think the Declaration meant and what the Constitution embodied.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: If I can push back just slightly on one thing, on that, which is something I think we do have to recognize though, is that I was doing some recent research on free speech. I did a pocket guide to free speech for the Atlas Society. And in part of doing that research, one of the things I realized is that a lot of free speech jurisprudence, a lot of the stuff that's going in the courts that the protections of free speech is surprisingly recent. There's been a lot of extensions. Like for example I found out the just justif all Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is not really a great friend of, of the con of the idea of individual rights. But it was in a dissent to a Supreme Court ruling in the 1920s that I think 1929, it was a descent to a Supreme Court ruling that he came up with the phrase the marketplace of ideas. And the, you know, and the thing is that the ruling that he was dissenting to impose something that we'd recognize today as a, as a violation of freedom of speech. So the court did not in 1929 uphold freedom of speech. But Holmes's dissent making this case for the marketplace of ideas, that the phrase originally comes from an, a metaphor that he used to. He didn't quite use marketplace ideas. It was very similar phrasing.
But that idea was introduced in his dissent and then became much more dominant, was used by people later. There's a whole bunch of things like you know, the right to abortion, the right to a lot of the freedom over your body. I mean the anti sodomy laws that can punish you for, you know, because the state doesn't like how you're having sex. Those were not overturned by Supreme Court I think until 2003, you know, or at least it wasn't recognized that they were, they were officially recognized that they were unconstitutional until 2003. So a lot of the 20th century actually, you know, and this is if totally fitting with the, the 20th century division between quote unquote liberals and quote unquote conservatives, that the conservatives in the 20th century were more friendly towards economic freedom and, and freedom in, in commerce and buying and selling. And the liberals were more, were hostile to economic freedom, but they were much more open to freedom in your speech or freedom in your personal life and that sort of thing. And in fitting with that a lot of, a lot of what we would consider like landmark rulings on freedom of speech and personal freedom and the freedom to decide what kind of life you're going to live. Those are from the 20th century, from the late 20th century and like I said, even a few from the, the, the early 21st century.
So these are things that, so it isn't entirely that. Well, we totally lost the concept of rights in some ways. We've actually the concept of freedom has advanced in a few ways, at least in terms of the legal structure. But I think that the, the intellectual understanding of it is still Very much a mess and explains a lot of what's going on right now. Can I, if David is okay, if I take another question from the comments that I think goes to the heart of a lot of what we're doing here? All right, so somebody said here, here's. I can't read the name of the person who asked it, but the question I would say still needs reconciliation is that America is founded by ideas. Yes, but those, the ideas are particularly of Anglo Christian descent.
Now this descent, excuse me, you know, they descend from Anglo Christian background. Okay. This is the, the, I think a big reason why I want to address, I thought it'd be great idea to address because this is, what this is stating is sort of a bit of the nationalist conservative outlook. And you have a lot of people out there right now. J.D. vance has said it. There was a senator who just gave a speech at the Nationalist Conservative Conference, similar thing, saying America is not an idea, America is a people. And this is sort of the compromise. You're like, yes, it's founded on idea, but that idea requires a particular people with a particular cultural background. And in this case it's Anglo Christian, which basically means, you know, white people who believe in Jesus. All right, let's just put it in those terms.
And here's the thing. You know, I think this is, this, this is a, a fundamental misconception on a number of different levels. Because one of the things is, you know, so if it's an Anglo Christian idea, how can I, an atheist of Eastern European descent, embrace this right.
And, and, and embody it and, and, and, and believe in these things? But of course I can. And I know people of all different backgrounds. One of the ironies we have these days is that there's an old saying on the immigration debate that the anti immigration viewpoint consists of saying my grandparents didn't come to this country so it could be overrun by immigrants. Right. There are so many people who are. We had this weird thing where America is so good at assimilating people that in one or two generations and sometimes less, you can go from being just off the boat to being a nativist who rails against immigrants. I mean, Vivek Ramaswamy I think is the ultimate example of that, right? A guy who got into politics and his name is Vivek Ramaswamy and his parents came over from, from India and he's this, you know, being rap, trying to do this rapidly anti immigration thing where he wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be here.
So I also want to say the Idea that it's Anglo Christian, you know. Yes.
The, the American system, the ideas of the American system are deeply rooted in, in English history, because that's where those ideas were embedded. But they have roots all over the place. They, you know, you mentioned Montesu. They have, they have roots in French political theorists. They have roots in the ideas of Aristotle and the ancient Greek philosophers. Right. So there's the, the, the, the, the founding fathers were not. And, and there's actually something very interesting, what happens to the Founding fathers in the end. And this is something that I wanted to get to in talking about why America being an idea is that one of the things that happens in the years, sort of there's like 10 years of tumult before 1776, of 10 or 11 years of these protests against various things that the Parliament's doing.
And in those arguments, there's a shift that happens where they start by asking about the rights of Englishmen, and the Americans start by talking about the rights of Englishmen specifically, and also talking about these sort of traditional balance between different forces within the English system. So they. Relying on the traditions, and they're drawing on the rights of Englishmen, the rights of one particular group that have been granted these historical circumstances.
And they go from that to start when that's not working, partly because that's not working, they go from that to talking. And I say it's partly because it's not working, but also because they're starting to talk about these ideas and get deeply involved in these ideas, and they're starting to read all the ancient thinkers and all the different texts from all these different countries, and they're taking inspiration from, you know, the free states in Germany and that there's a number of guys who are important theorists there and from France, from, from the ancient Greece, and they're beginning this broader perspective and they go from talking about the rights of Englishmen to talking about the rights of man.
And great. Mr. Grace Frades, there's a guy who wrote a really great study called the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. And he was a guy who really revolutionized this study is Bernard Balin is the guy's name. And, and what he did is he went through.
He started out by doing just a catalog. He was an academic who started by doing a catalog of all the pamphlets and newspaper debates and arguments that were put forward in the years leading up to the Revolution. And he thought, oh, it's probably. He knew of a few pamphlets, probably a small job turns out to be this massive job with this Huge trove of information they had.
And so then he wrote, after cattling all this and reading all these, he wrote a study called the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
And where he talks about what was the process they went through. And that's why I said that stuff about sovereignty and divided sovereignty. I got that partly just from reading this recently.
And also the other thing he talks about is, he calls it the conceptualization of American life and where he talks about this process where they start to think in terms of big ideas and to.
To go beyond just appeals to tradition and to what, you know, what. Bringing things over from the English system to having a more universal perspective. And this universal perspective is absolutely crucial to the American Revolution because, you know, if they were going to rely on appealing to tradition and ethnicity, you know, they would have remained British. A friend of mine who's a historian talks about. He actually did a TV segment once on, on the history of this, talked about how, you know, in the popular imagination, Paul Revere, when he's going out to warn about the. The British troops coming. In the popular imagination, he went around shouting, the British are coming. The British are coming. And he points out, no, they would not have said that because they thought of themselves as British. British. In as late as 1774, Thomas Jefferson wrote a pamphlet called A Summary View of the Rights of British America. So they thought of themselves as we are British America. They thought of themselves as British. And to get to the point of thinking of themselves as American rather than British, they had to have this. This more universal perspective to say, you know, we're not just trying to maintain our traditional position in English society. We are trying to create something new.
And we're trying to create something that's based on these broader, more universal ideas. And that's, you know, and you can see that when they. They write the Constitution, they. They rely on British traditions and British history for, for examples, but they're relying on all sorts of things from history and they're. They're creating something that's new and different and breaks from that tradition in some important ways as well.
One little symbol of that, because I have to get this in here, it's one of my favorite little details because I wrote something a while back called Drinking Coffee with John Adams.
Because it's based on coming across this wonderful little anecdote because it shows how much the American ideas influence, even down to our traditions, our customs, how we do things.
So this example is from John Adams, a letter to Abigail Adams about the time of the Revolution. This is Right. During the Boston Tea Party time when they, they were mad about this tax on tea and they were boycotting British tea.
And so he says, he writes back to Abigail, quote, I believe I forgot to tell you one anecdote when I first came to this house. He's staying at an inn. It was late in the afternoon. I had ridden 30 miles at 35 miles, at least.
Madam, said I to Mrs. Houston, is it lawful for a weary traveler to refresh himself with a dish of tea or provided it has been honestly smuggled or paid no duties? So it's okay to drink tea if you, if you haven't paid the tax by smuggling it? And she responds, no, sir, said she, we have renounced all tea in this place. I can't make tea, but I'll make you coffee.
Accordingly, I have drank coffee every afternoon since and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner the better. Now, I love this because, you know, the. One of the things about, I find fascinating about this is that this is Americans basically saying, we're no longer Americans. Were British. British people drink tea. If you've been to Britain, they drink tea a lot, all the time.
And this is them saying, we're breaking from that British heritage and tradition. We're not going to drink tea anymore. We're going to drink coffee. And to this day, America has much more of a coffee culture than a tea culture. And I looked this up. British people drink about eight times as much tea as Americans. Right? So it's like a tax protest that we're still doing 250 years later by not drinking, by drinking coffee instead of tea. But that just, that's a small symbol of how much we transformed America and by breaking with those. When we broke with those British traditions in the past.
[00:31:15] Speaker C: So I want to take up another question.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: From.
[00:31:22] Speaker C: From the person named. I like numbers.
Is the idea of American, of America universal or uniquely tied to American history, culture and institutions? Can other nations embody the same idea?
Yes and no.
This would be my answer, yes, in the sense that these are ideals and they're applicable to anyone. And to, to a certain extent, they have spread the idea of a constitution, constitutional limits on power. The idea of individual rights have been adopted first in Europe and elsewhere as well.
But at the same time, I have to say, and this is a. No, part of my answer is that the idea of America is.
It's an idea. Yes. And so it's upstream from culture, which is upstream from politics, but it's embodied and influenced and furthered by a culture of individualism that we still have to some extent and without that culture reflected in all the enterprise of Americans that Tocqueville and many others have written about and the, you know, the enterprise of all the, for example, Indian software people coming and flocking to Silicon Valley and changing the world.
That is, that's something that America has in abundance.
So I. I think I would.
Ideals.
I think I agree completely with the American ideal. I wish it were universal, but it's not and probably won't be. It can't be in present circumstances. Yes, go ahead.
That leads to a question that I wanted to put on the table.
We've been talking about the idea of America, but as I was just saying, the objective view of the philosophy of history is that ideas are the fundamental determiner.
They influence culture and culture influences politics.
Political ideas don't arise out of thin air.
This is the opposite of the Marxist view that says the factors of production and the class structure govern everything else. Government, ideas, everything.
So this is a theory that I think is correct in essence, although it's really complicated.
But what that raises is that America has been subject to intellectual changes just as other nations have. We talked earlier a little bit about the corruption of the idea of rights by adding positive rights to health care and education and so forth to the original concept of rights. That was a way of smuggling them into the American and some extent British vocabulary.
And there's no, there's no exemption from that except by better ideas. That's one of the things that Rob and I and many others have been trying to do in our careers.
There was a.
I mean, you don't have to look too far here. Here's something written by James Wilson. I'm taking this from my book A Life of One's Own. James Wilson, who was one of the founders, not as well known, but great, great thinker, he said, nature has implanted in man the desire of his own happiness.
She has organized, imparted him with many tender affections toward others, especially to the. In the near relations of his life. She, Nature has endowed them with intellectual and with active powers. She has furnished him with a natural impulse to exercise those powers in it for his own happiness and the happiness of those for whom he entertains such tender affections. If all this be true, the undeniable consequences is, is that he has a right to exert those powers for the accomplishment of those purposes in such a manner and upon sub job objects as his inclination shall say. That is one of the strongest statements of individual rights I've ever read.
And as much as says hands off. Individuals are by nature desire their own happiness, which is proper. It's not altruist. It's not altruism, but it's. It's proper.
And they have the capacity of reason to make wise decisions for themselves. Not always right, but the reason is the governing power of individuals. We don't need government to tell us what to do, except not to violate the rights of others.
So. But that changed completely over the next two centuries. And so today we have, you know, just a kind of a mess of ideas. I mean, some people will argue that the, that the constitution died in 1937. A friend of mine often says, Roger Donway, and he, you know, because that was a big year for Roosevelt's court case where they. The court folded and, you know, authorized Congress to go ahead and regulate. I forget what it was, but it was.
So, you know, we have a. We have a nation today that.
Where the ideals are still alive in some way in. In some form in muted fun.
And that's why there's a lot of hoopla about next year's 250th celebration.
But I've been reading a lot of what's written about that, and almost all of it has to do with democracy. Democracy, democracy, the consent of the people, whatever the people want. And that's not what the founders had in mind.
They had in mind individual rights. Democracy is. Is a useful instrument, but it is not a primary, you know, goal or good in society. It's an instrument only.
So, and there's lots of reflecting that. There are lots of things that. That a majority can't do.
We still have a pretty, well, pretty good protection for free speech and freedom of religion and the. Some of the other personal freedoms that Rob talked about. We have almost no freedom of trade and commerce and production. All of that is heavily regulated and subject to the will of, you know, regulatory agencies, Congress, the president.
So anyway, that's. That's a long way of spelling out the idea that.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: All right, so there is.
[00:38:54] Speaker C: As subject to the influence of bad ideas as it is protected by the original founding ideas.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: All right, so there's two things I want to say about that because I'm kind of an objectivist heretic on two of those issues. One is the idea of democracy. So I think democracy actually hugely important. I think we've underrated it now. I think there's a reason. There are reasons why we've under the idea of having a system of government Where I argue that Ayn Rand was a liberal Democrat and now she wasn't a liberal democrat in the 20th century. Since she was. She wasn't out stumping for, for Hubert Humphrey.
Kids go look up Hubert Humphrey. He used to be a senator. He was vice president for a while.
He was like the mid. Standard Mid 20th century Big government welfare state guy.
Anyway, so she wasn't, you know, she wasn't a liberal Democrat in that, in that sort of mid 20th century partisan sense. But she was an advocate of liberal democracy. She talked about the Constitution, how much she loved the Constitution. Well, the Constitution was a document for the consent of the government. You know, then that's another idea that's, it's there in the Declaration of Independence. It's not a secondary thing. It's, it's. Now it comes after the part about rights, but it is not something that they thought was decided indispensable. It's not part of locking philosophy. You can just throw out and say we're going to have rights but not the consent of the governed. Those two things are deeply connected.
All right, so. And it also ties into natural equality. You know, how can. You can't have natural equality without the idea that leaders have to be elected by the people, because otherwise you're creating an unequal group of people. You know, the was that Jefferson said, people born, born booted and spurred, ready to write us legitimately by the grace of God. You know, if you don't have elections, elections are what prevents you from having a class of people who are placed above everybody else. Given that political inequality and that this right to rule by divine, by divine authority.
So this is all deeply connected. So I'm, I'm much more now. I think there's a reason Ayn Rand tended to downgrade talking about democracy, because, you know, she's writing in the, in, you know, she's coming out of the New Deal era, out of 1937.
And she is not, she's one. She didn't want to give the idea that it's okay to take away people's rights as long as you go through the right procedure to vote for it. Right. The majority can't do it.
Just, you know, the, the king can't do it, but also the majority can't do it. So she wanted to emphasize that. But you also see I wrote about this in my book on Atlas Shrugged, that there's all this stuff that's sort of going in the, in the background texture of the world of Atlas Shrugged. One of the things that happens Very subtly is you can see that political freedom is also falling apart. There's more and more discussion about elections being rigged and the, and especially of the media being rigged that you know, that nobody, nobody's allowed, there's work permits for, for reporters and things like this. So you sort of see that the structure of American government is falling apart.
The, the, the democratic structure, the, the consensus of the government is sort of falling apart in various ways in the background. Even though that's not the focus that, that she had, that's probably because she was taking for granted that, you know, that, that elections and rights, these were things were not under direct threat, but economic freedom was. So she's focusing more on that. But I'm, so I'm a bit of a heretic and wanting to stand up for democracy as an ideal, for consent to the governed as an ideal.
But then the other thing I wanted to say that I'm an error took on is this idea that everything comes top down from philosophy, right? There's a prevailing philosophy and then that goes to, translates into political ideas. Then that translates down to other things.
I also think things come from the bottom up and it doesn't come from economic forces. It comes from people trying to solve problems and enhance their knowledge of the world as, as they're going along.
And so, and I think that the American Revolution actually is this, this, this, the America is becoming more philosophical in the process of this crisis.
This revolutionary crisis in America is an example of this. You know, the Americans did not turn to the idea Enlightenment ideals. I mean, maybe Jefferson, you know, was this highly educated guy, very intellectual. Americans generally didn't turn to this because they were the product of Ivy League schools or they were getting it from the ivory tower coming down.
They got these, they turned to these Enlightenment ideas, especially Enlightenment political ideas, because they were trying to solve these specific problems that they were involved in that Parliament was exerting his authority and it was against, it was, it was clashing with the way they were already living as people on the front, as independent people on the frontier. So it also came from them it being in this condition of having this tremendous amount of freedom and independence just by being on the frontier, away from the centers of government, and then seeing that clamped down upon and saying, well, wait a minute, what's going on? How do we, how do we preserve this freedom we have and then being led by that to explore the ideas. So I think it's, it's. And that I think answers this question of how universal is this idea. Well, the thing is that other people can also discover these ideas. Now nobody's going to implement it.
America has a lot of things that are always going to be unique about it because of our history.
And one of the things I want to say that's unique about America is that we've always taken on a large number of immigrants. We've been very good at taking on immigrants and always growing and prospering. Immigration is as American as pizza pie, as I like to put it. Right. That, that we've always taking on these other people and influences coming in.
And that's been part of American culture and part of American political system from the very beginning. The one of the complaints that they had against King George III is that he was preventing immigration to America. Right. So, and, and, or, or Alexander, somebody quoted Alexander Hamilton as saying, well, only people born here in America could really understand. But Alexander Hamilton was from Nevis, right? He was from. He was born in the Caribbean. He's a clear example of somebody who came from a somewhat different culture. Still.
Still part of the Anglosphere. But America has been able to take on tremendous numbers of immigrants. And also what we have seen. I have a more positive view of this is that what we've seen is the spread of these ideas throughout the world in a whole bunch of different ways. That, that they're huge portions of the world, especially Asia, that are more free than they've ever been through all of human history. Right. That, that now not China itself, but a lot of other areas in Asia like South Korea, Taiwan, places like that, that have a much greater degree of freedom than they've ever had. Because this.
By the way, I just got a. There's this guy named Gene Johnson who's really trying to whip in the comments is really trying to whip us into a civil war. The time for dialogue is over. There can no common ground with the left. You want to. There are people. I just got to speak up because this is guys coming into the comments section after the shooting of Charlie Kirk last week. There's been arrest the left. There it is. There's been the people trying to whip themselves up in the idea that because somebody shot Charlie Kirk, therefore we can do a mass crackdown on everybody who's to the left of its hold on everybody. Everybody who's not maga. The left, in their view, is everybody who's not maga. We're going to arrest them all. No, you're not going to arrest us all. We're not going to let you. All right, so here's the thing that Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be killed for his ideas, but neither does anybody else deserve to be arrested or imprisoned for their ideas. You're, you're.
That's a totalitarian idea. That's not an American idea.
So here's the thing. But I do want to say that the more so my other piece of heresy against the sort of objectives mainstream is I do think these ideas have a chance are coming also from the bottom up. People turn to them as the solutions to the problems that they're actually encountering in their lives. They, they're learning these ideas. These ideas are still have a power in the world. And so I'm less pessimistic overall and more.
And do think that we've actually made progress in the last hundred years in some, in some important respects.
And so I think that the, the, the Enlightenment ideas do have a universal application, but everybody's going to apply them and embrace them in a different way. You're going to have similar ideas but with different, you know, each one has to plug into a national tradition. I'll give you just one example. Had a great conversation a couple of years ago with a Ukrainian philosopher. This is, you know, during the, the war that's going on, a guy who's a, a Ukrainian philosopher. And he was talking about how I, I described, I titled the, the title I gave to the, to the podcast it did was Cowboys and Cossacks because he talked about how in a, in, in, in Ukraine a lot of these ideas are, are, are absorbed are, are connected to Ukrainian traditions. And the Ukrainian tradition was the Cossacks, these, these independent sort of warrior bands that, that, that dominated Ukraine a thousand to about 504, 500 years ago.
And this idea that the Cossacks were these independent guys, that they had this tremendous amount of independence. And there's a famous story about them getting this demand for obedience from a sultan, a Turkish sultan, and then giving this incredibly hilariously obscene response to him, basically telling him up yours.
We don't answer to anybody. So there's this tremendous, this whole Ukrainian tradition of the Cossacks as being these free, independent people who answer to no one, who, you know, their leaders are chosen in this sort of contractual way that the leader answers to the people under him. And they have their own independent traditions on which they can connect to and, and, and, and find some basis for that. They're going to connect these universal ideas to, to their, their conditions and, and to what's going on in their country and the traditions they have. So that's why it's so that's why I think these, these ideas are particular in some ways to America, but also universal. And I think immigration. I said, I mentioned America's history of immigration. I wanted to mention Constitution Day is also. I found this out. It's also Citizenship Day, which is there to celebrate people who have moved here and become naturalized American citizens. And I think it's the reason why we can also celebrate citizenship is because if we have some universal basis for what it means to be an American, you can assimilate and incorporate people from all over the world because they can come to accept, accept these ideas and they will bring their own traditions. I said, you know, immigration is American as pizza pie. They will bring their traditions, their food, their language, their music. They'll bring those elements to become part of this, you know, the, the, the crazy dynamic culture that we have in America. But they can all become Americans by the extent that they adopt that American, distinctive American individualist ethos and the, the specific, the American in political ideas.
[00:50:03] Speaker C: I, I agree with a lot of what Rob is saying. I'm a big advocate of immigration, properly understood as immigrants have. Really, we're all immigrants ultimately or, you know, children of immigrants. But a word about democracy, I didn't mean to dismiss it. It is important, but it's misused if it's disconnected from the idea of rights as what the government should protect. I'm happy with people choosing and I think it's important political aspect of political freedom that people choose their governors.
I mean, it's an embodiment of the idea that the government is a servant of the people, not the other way around.
But when democracy for years now has been unhinged from the idea of just choosing leaders and policies that protect individual rights to, you know, claimants for all kinds of benefits structures. You know, we have all kinds of, you know, shady, shady business guys wanting subsidies or controls on their competitors. It just. When you get to that point and democracy has superseded the idea of individual rights, that's. That's where I have my problem.
Yeah, but I, One, one thing I.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: Think I could eliminate this is I wanted to take a few minutes at the end. I do have a book out today, and I have to turn on my writer's card if I don't plug my book.
And. But it's one that I didn't want to mention this earlier because it's a topic that's so big it could take over the whole podcast, but because the title of the book is, you see it here, Dictator from Day One. It's how Donald Trump is overthrowing the Constitution and how to fight back. And this is an argument now making a queen. Donald Trump's. This is the proof here. Donald Trump, Trump is a dictator. Seems a controversial one. I know you find that controversial, David. I'm using it in a very specific sense that it ties back to what I said earlier about this idea of divided sovereignty, that in a free society we decided, well, you have to divide up the powers of government. No one person makes a decision that it's divided among different institutions and different, different people in different institutions. And that's how you keep government limited. And so the thesis of this book is that there's been a concerted attempt by Donald Trump, beginning from the first day he was in office, where he has been trying to and I, I doc the whole, I basically have document five different prongs, five different ways in which he's been trying and has been succeeding. Actually, it's an ongoing thing that is happening that he is centralizing all power in one person and all decisions get made by one guy. And I think this actually is demonstrating in real time the connection though, between rights and democracy in that sense, in the sense that. And I want to, I want to focus. I've got a whole chapter, something I wasn't really expecting to write into this, but a whole chapter on this is in how he's exerting economic control.
And you know, because we think of, oh, the right is pro free market. Well, you've been around, David, long enough to know that. Put a whole bunch of asterisks on that, even in the best of times. And Trump is less pro free market than anybody else. He's very much in favor of. I will be deciding what's going on in the economy. So what I have a whole chapter that's called I own the store because this is analogy about tariffs. This is America is a giant store, a big department store, the best store ever. But on behalf of the people, I own the store and I decide what the prices are.
So this is this very central planning. You know, I am the central person who decides everything in the economy kind of outlook. And I think tariffs are the big example of how he's done that, is that he has.
We've had this whole sort of roller coaster we've been through where he imposes tariffs and then he says, oh, I'm going to lift tariffs over here. I'm going to make them, I'm going to make exceptions to the tariffs and they're going to go up and down and One White House aide. I've got a great quote from that who said, this is the greatest show on earth. You we put tariffs on one day, we take them off the next day. You never know what's going to happen next. And I'm sure businessmen are all, you know, they have their hands in their head saying, I wish this show would end, because how do you plan anything when this is happening? But it goes to this idea of all power being concentrated in one person that he gets to decide. You basically based on what he had for breakfast this morning, he gets to decide what the tariffs are. And the courts have actually ruled, by the way, that this is, that he does not have this power. According to the Constitution, the power to set tariffs is. It belongs to the Congress.
He's using a law that gives certain emergency powers to the president, but the courts have already ruled. He doesn't, you know, these powers don't cover what he's doing. He hasn't met the emergency conditions. This law doesn't justify anything. But he's claimed this ability to say, okay, let's. I can impose any tariffs I want on my own. Say so.
And that's working its way to the Supreme Court. We'll see what happens. But this is part of what he's been doing, not just with. He's doing this with the courts, he's been doing it with Congress. He's been doing this with.
And he was doing this with the economy as well, of taking away a huge amount of economic freedom, giving special exemptions to his friends, special punishments to the people who doesn't like, and exerting this tremendous centralized control over the economy. Like the other examples are buying 10% of Intel. What are the chip makers or some other chip makers are going to are saying? Oh, he says, we'll allow you to have export to export your chips if you give a 15 kickback. There's no legal authority anywhere that allows them to say they have to pay back 15%. The constitution actually explicitly outlaws putting taxes on exports, but here he is doing it. So there's all these examples of him trying to centralize power in one person. And like I said, that is actually the definition of dictatorship. If one person is making all the decisions, that's a dictatorship. That the ancients would have called it tyranny. In modern terms, we call it a dictatorship. So I think this goes to what David was saying, though, that the degradation of the concept of individual rights and that, you know, I mentioned this book by Bernard Bailyn, the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, so what happened is, you know, this is 1967. He wrote this book, and it was coming up to the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And it set off this sort of ren. It was part of this renaissance of scholarship about the founders and people rediscovering this idea of, of, of individual rights and the, the individual rights ideas of the founders. And I think it led to an improvement in the American right. The American right really embraced this sort of in the Reagan era. They were influenced by this. And what I see is that's fading. And you have a lot of people on the right now who have, you know, we used to have, you know, the right was the faction that we could look to that would still talk about individual rights, still talk about the founders. And I think that's fading, that we're losing that influence and we're entering sort of a dangerous point in which I'm not sure there's anybody who's, who's in, in our political system who is really standing up for and really grasping the concept of rights.
But I, I do think that, that what's going on right now is an example of how this, the, the.
What I'm talking about in my book is an example of how when the political system of, of democratic rule or, or representative government, a limited government, you know, government, a constitutional government, this constitutionalism, democratic constitutionalism, when that fades, when that is attacked, individual rights also lose ground. And, and so there's a, There's a symbiosis between those, a very strong symbiosis between those two things.
[00:57:43] Speaker C: Okay, I want to. Just before we close, we only have a minute or two, I just want to say, Rob, I'm looking forward to your book, Rob. And for anyone listening, I, you know, Rob is a very learned objectivist. And, you know, you know, just on top of everything happening in the political sphere and to a large extent the cultural sphere, however, the evaluation of Trump is not a philosophical issue. The Atlas Society is a philosophical organization.
And in this particular case, you know, there is disagreement among the scholars at the Atlas Society about this very issue that Rob is. So I'm glad to see Rob's book, but it's not, it doesn't. It reflects his view, which is well informed and thoughtful, but it is not the view of the Atlas Society per se, for that the only, only things we pass judgment on or insist on as, as an organization are philosophical. The philosophy of objectivism.
So that's not to challenge Rob is just to put, put a context here, for since this is An Atlas Society program.
Okay, back, I guess, back to you, Lawrence.
[00:59:13] Speaker B: Yes, thank you, Rob. Thank you, David. I think that was a really great conversation.
Great comments, questions and comments from the audience, whether it was challenging or not. So it was great to have everyone here to do this, and hopefully we can do it again soon. But I do want to mention one other thing, is if you're looking for something also a bit more philosophical school in mind, Rob has another book coming out soon with the Atlas Society Pocket Guide to Aesthetics. I've got the test print here. It should be coming out pretty soon.
[00:59:43] Speaker C: But if that is a pocket guide.
[00:59:45] Speaker B: That you'd be interested in reading or getting a sneak peek, we're doing a special promotion with the Society right now where if you donate, and I've just put the link in the comment section, you can help support the printing of this book for students around the world. And we do distribution distributions, and you'll also get a digital copy before it officially hits shelves. So official release coming out probably closer to the end of this month, early October. Keep an eye out for that. But just wanted to do that quick plug here at the end. So again, I want to plug it.
[01:00:15] Speaker A: To a little bit because I've been lobbying this for. For this for a long time. And it's a great way to get away from, you know, politics is ugly, but it's a good time. It's nice to have something. Time to talk about art and something that's beautiful.
[01:00:29] Speaker B: Yes, as you can see. I'll just. So, for example, we. I don't know how well it's going to show, but we've got pictures.
[01:00:35] Speaker A: Okay. Now you have to show the worst sculpture. This is the thing I thought is I'm against, you know, the medieval stuff. Show that. Show the. David.
[01:00:42] Speaker B: All right, let me. Well, I'll see if I can. Let's see if I can flip to that.
[01:00:45] Speaker A: Ah, here we go.
[01:00:47] Speaker B: Okay, we've got the foes and we've got a description. So a lot of stuff in there will be really great. It's a great read. I've been enjoying it.
So with that, we've come to a close for today, but if you like what we're doing and you want to see more of it, be sure to join again next week. Jennifer Grossman will still be out, but we will have Society senior scholars Stephen Hicks and Richard Saltzman on. And they're going to be hosting a webinar discussing the intersection of public choice theory and the politics of self interest. So we'll dive into more of that next week. So, again, David, Rob, thank you so much for today. We'll see all of you again next time.
