Breaking History - Who Owns the Declaration of Independence?

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, a quiet war is being waged over what the Declaration of Independence really means — with some on the new right dismissing it as globalist fantasy and some on the left reducing it to a document written by slaveholders. Writer and former national security official Michael Anton joins Eli Lake to examine the ideas of Harry Jaffa, a Brooklyn-born philosopher who spent his career insisting that the Declaration's truths are not relics of the 18th century but eternal facts about human nature. Jaffa's argument was unfashionable when he made it and it's contested now, but Anton thinks it's never been more urgent. Along the way, Michael and Eli take on the new right's growing rejection of the ideas that made the founding possible, the left's long abandonment of the Declaration, and how both sides have managed, in their own way, to get America's origin story completely wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Breaking history listeners, we are incredibly fortunate to have a really great guest today. His name is Michael Anton. You may have heard of him because I wrote a profile of him last year for the free press on the Maga Machiavelli. And we are not going to today be talking about the Trump administration, the Iran War, matters of current events. Instead, consider this as sort of part two in terms of our interviews about the Declaration of Independence as we come up upon the 250th anniversary of the Republic. because Michael Anton has many, many skills. He's a really fascinating guy. And one of them is he is a student of the late Harry Jaffa,

who is, in my opinion, a really important intellectual for understanding the Charter of America and the importance of the Declaration of Independence in the context of natural rights, natural law, and the history of Western thought. So with that, thank you so much, Michael Anton, for coming on first. breaking history. I've wanted to do this for a while.

You're welcome. Well, I love Jaffa. As we called him the old man who's been gone from us now since, if I remember correctly, January 2015. So 11 years. Okay. So let's start with a really basic question. Who was Harry Jaffa and why should we read him?

Why is he still important today? So he was a Brooklyn-born child of Jewish immigrants born in 1918. His middle name was Victor, not because it was a family name, but in honor of the victory of World War I. So, and he was, you know, talented, precocious, went to those New York, one of the New York City competitive entry public high schools, Erasmus Hall. I mean, those, I guess, are still pretty good, but you can imagine what they were like in the mid-20th century with all of these brilliant kids, a lot of them Jewish kids, just off the charts in terms of intellectual. that their family had no money and they could go to these places that were all of a sudden they were surrounded by kids as smarter, smarter than they were. And he got a great education. He went to Yale as a young man, graduated. I know he graduated in 1939. And I'm pretty sure

he's 19 years old. He graduated early. He was an English major and just became, he was very, you know, this sounds so schmaltzy, but it's really true. If you knew him, I knew him. I spent a lot of time with and I'm still friends with dozens of people who spent years with him. He was so stereotypically American, right? He just loved American things like baseball hot dogs, apple pie. I don't know about Chevrolet, but he just was like a caricature, even though he was not from the Midwest, he did spend a dozen years in Ohio, teaching at Ohio State, but he was like a caricature of a, of the typical Midwestern mid-20th century American with just exactly those tastes, except he didn't drink beer because he gave up drinking in the 50s when he claims to have been like, I remember this

story. He was like arguing with a bunch of students in the 1950s, if you could imagine that, you know, about Reifer and say like, this is bad, you know, and the students will say, well, you drink scotch. And he, I mean, I'm doing short shrift, but he said that he felt that he had been defeated in his own argument, and he quit. So from that point on, on Churchill's birthday, he would always take a tiny little sip of cognac because that was Churchill's drink and toast Winston Churchill and have like one sip because you can't toast without they didn't drink. And that was it. And you never saw him. Right. Oh, wow. So, but he, so that, anyway, that's just a segue. So he, he gets out of Yale. The war starts because of eyesight and other issues, the

armed forces won't, won't take him. His best friend from Brooklyn named Joseph Cropsey did to go into the army and fought at Anzio and other spots in Italy. So he got a job as a federal bureaucrat, basically, in one of the war production departments, in one of those temporary buildings on the mall that were later torn down. So this gets him through World War II, and he's out of a job. Back then, the government actually did use to kind of shrink when it completed a task. That doesn't happen anymore, as we know. But he didn't have a job.

So he goes home, he goes back to New York. His father runs basically a saloon on McGregn. Dugel Street in the West Village and Jaffish just works there because he didn't have anything else to do. He's the other way to make money. And he starts taking classes at the new school, which is walking distance from the saloon. And either they were free or they were like so cheap, they were functionally free. And he meets a great man. That's where he meets Leo Strauss is at the new school.

And he said that it was mind-blower. He used to say, this is the other thing about, like he was Jewish, but he read the Bible with these Yale wasps and a bunch of other kids. Alex Witherspoon was the teacher with whom he read the Bible in a reading group, not even for a class. And he said, like, there were wasp kids. There were Catholics. There were Jews.

And then this wasp leading the class. And we just read the Bible, like, just without any kind of preconception or from our own religious tradition, just like, we're just going to figure out what this says. And he had such a memory that, you know, he was like Lincoln in that respect. Like he could, I don't know how often he picked up the Bible to read it. But if you just needed to know some quote from scripture somewhere, He just remembered everything. He remembered everything.

So where was I going with the Bible part? Anyway, he meets, oh yeah, he used to always say, nothing prepared me for my encounter with Leo Strauss. You know, I was more astonished. It was even more of a conversion experience than Saul on the road to Damascus. So, you know, that's like, despite being Jewish, he didn't just quote the Old Testament

or what an Orthodox Jew would call the Bible as opposed to that appendage that comes later. Like, he knew all of it. And he knew all the Christian aspects of it. He knew that, like, he just knew all of it. He just had a, if something was important, he just wanted to know it. Like, he didn't say, well, I'm from this particular perspective, therefore I'm not going to learn that. He was like, no, if this was worth knowing, I'm just going to learn it.

Okay. Now, let's talk a little bit about Leo Strauss, who's, you know, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. Leo Strauss is somebody who I think is, you know, almost weirdly, you've got to kind of get through layers, but Leo Strauss believed in the esoteric readings of great... Yeah, I mean, more than that. I mean, you could say he rediscovered it, that it had been kind of buried underground for 200 years.

So tell me, what is that... I want to just say, what does that mean, which is to say that the textual analysis of Leo Strauss, which is what he was really saying is that sometimes the great thinkers didn't say out straightforwardly, what they meant and that you have to understand and you got to kind of read between the lines. I keep, by the way, one example of this that I keep going back to is that if you read the guide to the perplexed by Moses Ben by Monities, it's straightforwardly an argument with a student saying

that you should not give in atheism, you should believe in God, but many people would interpret it later as saying, well, the arguments were structured and so weak in such a way, than in some ways the guide to perplex is the Rombom's attempt at maybe making the best case for atheism. But that's kind of what I think about in terms of understanding and the esoteric text and things like that. Let's get back to Maimonides in a second because I want to clarify that. But before we do, the simplest way to explain esotericism is to say that there are a certain number of great books. As Strauss himself put it, not very many of them, but more of them than most scholars of ideas, suppose, that have two meanings at once or two doctrines at once.

There's a sort of public outward facing or exoteric teaching that is in most respects conventionally respectable or at least does not challenge whatever the received opinion of its particular time, place, milieu are. And then there's a more inner doctrine that is stated by implication that's really meant for an elect, or if not an elect, just people who can see that there are problems in the surface and they want to go deeper.

Now, to read a book esoterically, you have to, first of all, you've got to come to it with the preconception that if you find a mistake or a contradiction, it's not sloppiness. It's intentional.

And then you have to find the reason for it. So the example that I give students, this is an easy one, right, is Machiavelli and Prince 7 says, at the very beginning, he's going to offer up Cheshirea as an example of a prince to be imitated. And if ultimately Borja failed,

it was not his fault, but fortune just was too powerful for him to overcome. And then in the same chapter at the very end, he says that Chesra Borgia made a particular bad choice, and this bad choice was the cause of his ultimate ruin. Okay, you can't square those two. They're flatly contradictory. Either he did everything right and fortune slayed him anyhow,

or he screwed up, and that was the cause of his ultimate ruin. Now, if you notice that contradiction, you can either explain it one of two ways to reduce this to the essence. You can say, well, Machiavelli was just kind of a careless guy. Maybe he wrote one part at one time, and maybe he wrote the second part another time, and he forgot, or he's just not that systematic a thinker, so let's give him a pass and move on. Or you say, no, he knew exactly what he was doing. That's a deliberate contradiction.

Now, student, think through the reason for it. Strauss says, if you're going to come to a book of a thinker on the stature of Machiavelli, Maimonides, Plato, right? it's always safer to just assume everything in it is intentional. And you try to before, you know, you need to try to figure out and exhaust all alternatives before you conclude that an author of this stature just blew it. So Strauss was the, he definitely revived the philosophic study of Maimonides in the 20th century. There's no question about that.

He wrote several essays about it. And then he was essentially responsible for the publication of the first new translate, I don't know in how many years, but in many decades, and then wrote the introduction, I've got the right up there, wrote the introduction to that translation, which is like a 50-page exegesis of the structure and the design and the plan of the work. Where I quibble with you, it's more than a quibble,

it's kind of important, is the atheism question, right? So this is a kind of, there's a divide within the Strowsian world, right? And I'm on one side of it, just, you know, being open about that, right? where I think there are some who would say, oh, yeah, yeah, no, the difference is a surface that professes fealty to the Torah and so on, and then an inner doctrine, which is atheistic, right? And that's what Strauss revealed. Okay, those people are out there. In some respects, they make a good case.

I come away from it with a different take, though, which is, unless you're going to define atheists super strictly as, like, you know, full-on orthodox obedience to every jot and tittle of the law, and anything that falls short of that is ipso facto atheistic. Okay, well, then maybe you can say that. But another way to put it would be that Maimonides is pointing underneath the surface to a more philosophic grounding for certain teachings, which again, a pious believer can't accept. That is to say, for a truly pious believer, you should, by the way, have on my friend Glenn Elmer's, if you're doing a series on the Declaration because he's doing a lot of work on.

this too, and he and I are talking about this all the time. But like, it is, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, from the perspective of the pious believer, starting to question why the law is what the law is, rather than just full submission and total obedience is already an act of impiety, right? So they would, they would, maybe side with that and say, listen, Anton, you may be trying to explain away this inherent atheism, but we're not buying it, right? We just obey the law. We accept the word of God as, what it is. Yeah, but in the Jewish tradition, there is a, there is a, the

Talmud is a document of, of how we interpret, you know, the, the believers have different interpretations. But that's, but that point, in Strauss's mind and universe, I think that points to the inherent limitation of the human mind to interpret something as unfathomable as the word of God,

right? Whereas obeying the law is not that difficult. It may be morally difficult, it may be personally difficult, but understanding what the law is is not that difficult, right? Okay. Okay. Okay.

All right. Now, my monody is a philosopher. There's no question about it. He addresses directly many doctrines of Aristotle's metaphysics and you name it and so on and so forth. They really have nothing to do with pious observance of the law. I just, I just question that at root, it is reasonable to call him an atheist unless you're defining piety so strictly as, you know, any, like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not making myself very clear here. But anyway, Strauss was always very, and this is one of the disputes between Jaffa and a lot of

the other Straussians, is I think he thought that others oversimplified the case for esotericism or the case for a philosophic grounding of some kind of natural goodness and natural justice as simply atheism if it doesn't begin from the point of scripture, whereas he says, no, there's actually kind of two routes to almost the same end. If intellectually incompatible, there's a lot more common ground. I mean, Jaffa was always one of the first ones to point out that the content of revealed law on morality and the morality of Aristotle's ethics are not 100% coterminous, but there's a massive amount of overlap there. Okay. All right. I want to get back now to Jaffa, now that we've covered how he was,

so as he was intellectually very much shaped by Strauss. Now, in some ways, the more I dig into Jaffa, And I have to say I'm envious that you had a chance to study with him because he is such a rich thinker. But there's something about him that's kind of interesting in that he's coming along in the middle of the 20th century in an era when the intellectual fashions and currents are leading towards historicism, towards eventually postmodernism. More than leading towards. I mean, Jaffa always said he graduated from Yale in 1939. a hundred percent of his education was already historicist and relativistic, and he said he didn't even question the premises of that until he met Strauss in 1944.

Okay, right. So he is bucking the intellectual trends of his ear. And I just, can you just maybe put that into relief? As an intellectual, he's somebody who is interested in Aristotle and natural law in the idea that there are certain kinds of final truths. Well. And he's coming in. the middle of the 20th century of an era when you've got everybody talking about

and everything is relative and it's all, well, that's just locked in the 18th century. So let's get back since you want to talk about the declaration. Let's talk about the declaration for a second. Yeah. Right. By far the most famous book on the declaration at that time, and maybe still to this day, was Carl Becker's 1926 book. His title escapes me up the top of my head.

So Jaffa read that, took for granted that it was right. And you could almost say that his entire subsequent career after meeting Strauss was a decades-long reputation of Becker, who completely accepts the historicist, this relativistic interpret of the Declaration. And even at one point says in his book, to ask whether the, you know, self-evident truths of the Declaration are really true or not is essentially a meaningless question, right? Like, Jaffa, if you could boil his career down to one thing, it's honing in on that statement and saying, I'm going to refute, I'm going to refute that. I'm going to show that that's wrong. Right.

And the rest of it is a... So can we just back up? Like, Carl Becker's idea is that the Declaration of Independence is a product of 18th century enlightenment ideas and you need to understand it in that context. And you know what? Things change. Times change. And like Woodrow Wilson who kind of, you know, well, you know, we got to update the...

We got to update the firmware. Yeah. Although it's more complicated than that because there are two forms of historicism, really. There's one that says times. times change and truth evolves with it, but truth is still true. It's just contingent. And there's another that says, it's not even contingent. It's just climate of opinion and received wisdom at any given time. It's never really true. Right. And for one side, the process will eventually, like for a strict hegelian, the process will eventually end and you'll come to the

final synthesis, an idea most popularized by Fukuyama in 89, that famous last end of history essay that he turned into a book. And then what Strauss always thought that the intellectual case for the Nietzschean-slash-Hydegarian alternative of irrational historicism that never ends is stronger than the case for Higalian rational historicism, but that the case for classic natural right was in fact stronger than either of those two. So what Jaffa tried to do is take Strauss's intellectual architecture in favor of or to reestablish, if not the authority, the plausibility, the, the, and the, the, and the,

and the greater intellectual strength, the greater philosophic strength of classic natural right, and apply that to the United States of America. And his judgment over decades, it evolved a little bit, but we can get into that if you want. His judgment over decades

was that the United States, the regime of the American founders, and the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln and the great American statesmen are the nearest, and Churchill, he loved Churchill. I mentioned the toast every year, are the nearest approximation to,

both a philosophic and a political account of classic natural right, possible in the modern world. But then we would have to go into all of the things that make the modern world different from the medieval or the ancient world, which is why natural right in practice looks different in the modern world than it did in the ancient world. It all gets kind of complicated. And as I mentioned Glenn, as Glenn and I say to each other all the time,

it's like, this seems so easy to us. Why does it, why does nobody else get this? So there's two possibilities. One is we're just geniuses and the rest of you guys are dumb, obviously I don't think I actually believe that. Or the argument is actually quite complicated, and the reason why we think we understand it is because we just spent 40 years on it

and maybe it takes a while. Yeah. I don't know. Or we could be wrong. There's also that possibility. This gets us to the meat on the bone here, which is that there, I mean, listen, obviously Jopha has many great works,

but the two most famous works are Crisis of the House divided and then New Birth of Freedom. And they, Christ of the House divided, and I want to defer to you, but there he sort of portrays Lincoln as somebody who has perfected the insights of Jefferson and the Declaration. No, it's more than that.

The simplest way to state the thesis of the crisis of the House divided is that Jaffa accepted a kind of interpretation of Strauss, which says that modern political philosophy lowers the goal of political action to basically comfortable self-preservation, and the American founders picking up on the ideas of modern political philosophy, in particular Locke, but others, institute a regime dedicated to cultural, or sorry,

comfortable self-preservation. So the preservation of mere life, the means to life, property, and so on. Lincoln elevates and ennobles the founding while claiming to be acting in the name of the founders and keeping with the founders, but that's a dissimulation on Lincoln's part. he knows that he's transforming the founding into something else. So that's kind of the thesis of crisis in the House divided. And then the subsequent career of Jaffa is to say, actually, no, Lincoln is not dissembling. When he says, I'm restoring what was already there and preserving what was already there,

he's telling the truth, and the founding is higher than I thought it was when I wrote crisis. Right. So in some ways, he's his strongest argument against historicism, at the end of his life or, you know, well, yeah, I mean, he published that. It took him about 40 years to write it. And, but partly, you know, I mean, it's not like he didn't do anything else in those 40 years.

We used to joke with him and chide him. He was very argumentative, but he enjoyed arguing and he liked art. Like, he certainly thought that he was wiser. And he was, of course. And that he knew more than we are. But he wasn't like one of those never challenge me kind of guys. where it's like, no, if I said it, it's true. Like, if he said it, he thought it was true.

But then he wanted to hear what you might, why you might object so that he could, and then he would just argue constantly, right? It was never beneath him to sit around and just talk to grad students for three hours. One of the reasons why it took him 40 years to write that book because he spent a lot of time on other stuff. He got into all kinds of fights with various conservatives and he was legendary for his querulousness. He would argue with people in writing all the time. Other professors, famously with Supreme Court justices. near Supreme Court justices like Robert Bork

and would spend hours writing, you know, trying to correct them on this and that, at Meese, you name it. Every conservative luminary of the 20th century, it seems he picked a fight with at one point. And, you know, we would sometimes say amongst ourselves and sometimes to him, you know, Professor Jaffa, if you maybe didn't spend so much time writing 20-page letters

to Antonin Scalia explaining why he's wrong about the natural law, You'd have finished the book by now. And he just would laugh. Like, he didn't, he didn't take that kind of thing personally. He wasn't, he certainly thought highly of himself, but he wasn't like one of those, um, you're just super thin skinned. I mean, I don't know. I'm trying to, it somebody, if one of the people like he attacked frequently and really

got on their nerves, like let's say Walter Burns, another Straussian of great accomplishment. I like, I respect him a lot, but they got into these titanic intellectual battles. If I were to say to that and Walter, who. died. They died on the same day, by the way, Jaffa and Walter Burns. If I were to say, and Walter Burns heard me say, Jaffa was not thin-skinned, I mean, he would guffaw. He'd be like, are you kidding me? But what I mean is, like, he wasn't this sort of like remote figure who would say, okay, everything I'm telling you is received wisdom now. Ask no questions and don't criticize me and don't argue with me. He wasn't like that with us. Got it. All right. So I want to get back to

just, I want to get back to the declaration here because in some ways, this is the core. of Jaffa's work. Yeah. Oh, he would say the same thing. Yeah. He believed in some ways that it was, I mean, is it too much to say that it was a kind of revelation almost

and that it was... It's too much to say, so, you know, this may be... I'm going to pull something up here and let's see if I... Now, what is this? I was asked, modern age is doing a symposium

on the declaration, on the meeting. and they cast up wide net, you know, ask people to say something. And you had a strict limit of 250 words, which I think is fitting, right? It's the 250, it's 250 words. So I wrote something that is exactly 250 words. And Glenn and I went back and forth and edited it. And another one of Jaffa's longtime students and, you know, dear friends, young friends,

then young, we were all then young. Julie Ponzi did too. So I'm trying to explain what the declaration did. And it's hard to explain. And eventually Glenn and I, sooner or later, we're going to jointly co-author a book that walks through every stage of this and try to keep it as tight and short as possible, but it's still going to be 50,000 words at least. Right.

The founders faced a unique, not a unique situation, a situation that had sort of been brewing and swirling for a couple thousand years or at least 1,500 years. And it had never been resolved. And that is that before, whether you're talking about pagan antiquity or Jewish antiquity, before the coming of Christianity, there's no separation or even distinction to be made between civil and religious law.

So political authority and theological authority are the same and they have the same source. Christianity divides that. And at first, it's not so much of a political problem because the Romans have conquered the entire habitable Western world.

I mean, literally everything is Roman. It's one state. It's one city. It's one polis. And eventually that one polis becomes more like an ancient polis where it adopts one god. It takes a while. First they have to stop persecuting the Christians,

then tolerate the Christians, and then legalize it and then make it the official religion of the empire. But it still doesn't solve the question of the bifurcation of political and theological authority. And then that one city breaks up. It breaks up into a lot of little kingdoms, a lot of princes here and there. one prince claiming to be, you know, the God's vice-reactually. Actually, you have two princes claiming to be God's vice-reason on Earth. You have a so-called Holy Roman Emperor who never unifies all of Europe. Charlamagne is the else as they ever get. And then you have a Pope who, until the Reformation,

at least, claims to have the spiritual authority over all Christendom. And politics, this is one of Jaff's greatest insights that he develops at length in Chapter 2 of Natural Right. Not, sorry, chapter 2 of new birth. politics becomes a kind of combination of religious disputes. You know, think about the famous disputes between bishops and kings, Henry II and Thomas Abbecket. And I'm blanking on his name now, but the famous emperor who had to do the walk, Holy Roman Emperor had to do the walk to Canossa to grovel before the Pope, right? The Pope's spiritual authority confuses things.

And then the rest is just dynastic wars. Who's going to rule? Is it going to be York or Orlando? Lancash, and we're just going to fight and see who gets to rule, right? Right. And the Reformation complicates that even further, because now Christendom is divided between Catholic and non-Cathlet. And then Protestantism further divides and so on.

And so what the founders faced, and remember, you've got to think through the specific circumstance they found themselves in, not just the theological and the political and the philosophic question, right? They are now a people on a continent. They're about three and a half million of them in 1776, three to three and a half, I don't think anybody knows exactly, but it's something like that. Imagine that. The entire 13 colonies is less than half the population of New York City today.

Although New York City may be down. I don't know people are fleeing one down. So maybe it's lower. But, okay, and they've got, yes, it is very overwhelmingly in English-speaking Anglo-Protestant population. But it isn't 100%, right? And even if it were, within that problem, you have that the Protestants come in all flavors. Okay. Even if you had no Catholics and no Jews, you still have this problem because the so there's no way to put a theological basis on the law. There's no way to do that.

Right. They have just rebelled against a legitimate king. I mean legitimate, not, I mean that in a precise sense. That is to say they would say illegitimate because of the grievances listed at the end of the declaration, right? But there's no question that he is the legitimate offspring of the, you know, He has legitimate lineal descent from the kings of England. And also we know that there were efforts before the declaration to address the grievances. And they say that in the declaration. We've tried everything with this guy. Right.

And we're getting nowhere. Right. Right. So the still the, it's a, I would say, a flimsy and no longer credible claim to political legitimacy in all of Europe and Christendom at that time. And including in the North American column. And there's more than just us. There's colonies all over North America, European colonies, British colonies, French, Spanish, Portuguese, you name it, still traces back to a claim of divine right, which has all of these problems inherent in what I just talked about, which I haven't explained

super well, but hopefully the book will do that, right? So they can't use that. So what are they going to do? They come up with, and this is Jaffa's view, okay, and this is why he called in, I think it was 1989, 89 or 90, in a little pamphlet that's been republished as a chapter of a book that his students, Ed Earl or Ken Musugi, edited, called the American founding is the best regime, the bonding of civil and religious liberty, right? They came up with, in Jaffa's view, the only, not merely the best, but also the only possible solution to the political problem, A, faced specifically by the American people on that soil at that time, but B, within modernity simply. given all the changes from the ancient to the medieval to the new world to the modern world and given

all the religious and other political changes. So to him, this was both a great, it was a great philosophical and a great practical achievement. It was an achievement of kind of in thought and in statesmanship at the same time in a way that the world had never seen before. I mean, the closest thing I guess you could get to it are sort of the thought experiments in Plato's dialogues, but those are never implemented, right? The Republic has never, even the regime of the laws, which is a lot more practical

than the regime of the republic, is never implemented anywhere. Right, okay, but also, House divided and new freedom, I mean, House divided, there's an asterisk, right? I mean, because he thinks that Lincoln had improved upon it,

whereas in House divided, he comes back, and he says, no, wait a second, actually, you have to read the Constitution in keeping with the declaration and the Constitution is a compromise and the Declaration itself envisioned eventually. For him, the Declaration

announces the principles and the Constitution is a vehicle for operationalizing the principles. Now, that's not to say, I don't want to get super abstract here, just because so as I put it in the beginning

of my little submission for the symposium, right, as we've seen, you know, if you read a lot of Twitter or X, which I don't, but it has a way of finding you, whether you're looking for it or not. There's been a lot of back and forth on the right. Okay, so the most recent outburst of this was Neil Gorsuch, I guess he's got a book out, going around doing the podcast and lecture circuit, talking about the American Creed, and younger people on the right saying, like, look, this creedal boomer nonsense is getting

out of hand. We're a people. We've always been in people. And the issue for me and for Glenn and for basically all of us who read Jaffa carefully and understand him is they're both right and they're both wrong. They're both right to see that their part of the argument is part of it, but they're wrong when they say the other side doesn't have a point. Right. So I have spent actually the last, you know, let's say since I got out of government the first time or the fifth time, whatever it was. Anyway, not this administration, but the last one, the 2018, I've spent a lot of effort pushing back on. you know, over creedalism, an over emphasis on the creed to the complete exclusion of any kind of cultural continuity and so on.

In part because I felt like, you know, the Claremont Institute and a lot of people who understand Jaffa, let's say lightly, emphasize that without realizing that there's more to it than that. Like they pick up a little part of it. Yes, all men are created equal. Yes, this is a universal principle. And they go, well, that's all you need to know. So we can basically just take anyone from anywhere in the globe, or even a couple million a year and bring them over here.

And they'll just as long as they understand that, then they'll just immediately become American. And there's absolutely nothing cultural about it whatsoever. And there's no downside to infinite diversity. Right? We don't need any kind of linguistic, cohesion or whatever. Like, no, the founders wouldn't say that. Jaffa wouldn't say that.

Because I've been pushing back from the other way. But now it seems like the young right is, taking just, they're just making the same mistake from the other direction. They're like, all talk of creed is, you know, boomer, it's universalist, it's, uh, you know, neoliberal or globalist or what, I mean, whatever, I'm sure they'd say worse things, too, whatever terms they're flinging around now. And so any kind of talk of creed just shows that you're a liberal. And there's nothing to America that's creedal whatsoever at all. The Declaration of Independence doesn't announce any principles. It's like, guys,

is it really this is the part where we do get fresh it's like is it that complicated it's both it's both at the same time it always has been both at the same time and not a single one of the like if you want to you know divide up the founders the most kind of philosophically aggressive creedalist is jefferson and he wouldn't deny that there's something cultural about uh you know what makes an american and american and i don't know who would be the no he was he was he was he was convinced said, you know, the concentration of capital would have, I mean, would ruin, you know, what made America great. He was, but someone could say he was like a pastoralist.

He believed that everybody should be a farmer. But I'm not trying to think like Jefferson's the obvious case to, I mean, he's the obvious candidate. If you're going to say, who is the most sort of creedal in his rhetoric of the founders, it would be Jefferson. And then who was the most cultural. I don't know. It might be Franklin.

I mean, Franklin was, like, worried that these Germans couldn't maybe assimilate to American. Right. I mean, we're talking about like Northern European Saxons where we get Anglo-Saxon from. And he's like, I don't know about these Germans. I mean, imagine what he would have thought about the rest of Europe, which mostly wasn't present in large numbers. Like, that's pretty skeptical. So, but both these strains of thought are present from the beginning and both are necessary. And look, as a historical matter, there's really very little doubt in my mind that despite, you know, the difference between a New England Puritan and. a Virginia cavalier and so on and other, you know, stripes of Anglo-Saxon in America at the time, there's still a kind of core thread of similarity there between these peoples in 1776, 1787,

that if you didn't have that, if you just had some sort of Austro-Hungarian empire-like conglomeration of different peoples, they're never going to unite and fight the revolution successfully and create a new government successfully and come up with, you know, these principles and write a constitution like that. that would not have happened. So the culture types, the historical types, are right about that. I don't have any doubt about it. But then if they take it too far and say, no, they never announced any universal principles. I mean, one of the things that drives me completely crazy. And I think it's super self-defeating on the young right is they've just become, a lot of them

have just become utterly hostile to any conception of equal natural rights, right? Because that just leads to them, that just leads to liberalism, like period. End of story. As soon as you say there's a right, then, I mean, you know, it just leads to egalitarian leveling and infinite government and so on. This episode is sponsored by Supremacy World War III. I spend a lot of time explaining why world leaders make the decisions they do. Supremacy World War III lets me feel that weight myself.

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And they had pretty specific reasons for being pro immigration, you know, or very, let me put it this way, extremely practical. Like, one of their basic reasons that it was, we've got this big continent. And remember the United States, as of 1783, it's not the 13 colonies anymore because we get seated to us. by treaty, what is now almost the entirety of the Midwest out to the Mississippi. Right. And that's before the Louisiana purchase, right? This is, we're talking about like the states that are now, Ohio, Illinois. We're talking about the northwest, the so-called Northwest territories.

Most of what we would, you know, the Midwest, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin. Not every little line, some of it gets a little bit adjusted later. But we're talking about, basically it's a third of what is now the continental United States is U.S. territory as of the Treaty of Versailles. And almost none of it is settled. And if you know anything about political philosophy or history, you know that the easiest way to lose a land that you nominally control, even according to international law or whatever, is just don't have any of your own people on it. You're not going to keep it. So they are, they're quite open to immigration from certain sources. right? And they really do, they do prioritize cultural, religious continuity. And specifically,

they write into the law in this, one of the big differences, I mean, everybody points to certain language in these, which we can go into if you want, but the 1790 and the 1795 Naturalization Acts, one of the things they add to the 1795 Act, which supersedes the 1790 Act, is they say they want people coming from sources with a tradition of Republican government who will be faithful or loyal to the principles of this government and its constitution, right? So this is one of the things that they're very worried. It's like, what if we take in a bunch of people from, you know, and nowadays, these kinds of thoughts are just dismissed out of hand as bigotry and racism or whatever and therefore

illegitimate. But I don't know. Does it unreasonable for the founders at the time to say, well, listen, if we take in lots of people from countries or regions that have never had any kind of small, our own. Republican government ever that have been ruled for millennia despotically or in some kind of, you know, monarchist way. And we're an anti-monarchical country, we're an anti-monarchical government specifically founded to throw off an English king. Like, how is that going to work out for us in the long run? And they were very concerned about that. That's the, you know, a hundred years

after the declaration, John Stuart Mill, considered the founder in many ways of modern liberalism, makes that argument on representative government. He basically says, hey, there's certain cultures that are just not ready for this. So, sorry. And everybody now accuses him of being imperialist. But if you actually look at the arguments, he lays out

what I think one could argue fairly, objectively, dispassionately, are criteria one needs in order to get to this, you know, what Jaffa would say is like that combination of consent and the following. The first thing, I should

have started here. So this is, this thought prior in logic to what we were talking about. But the first thing the founders would say about immigration is we, the constituent, the constituted people of the United States get to decide, period, end of story. This is a government based on social compact. We get to decide who comes here and in what numbers for any damn reason we want. And if we decide that we just don't want anybody for now or for a while, we get to say that. And we don't have to justify, oh, well, you're going to tell me why you don't want me.

and I can tell you why it's legitimate. And if I determine that it isn't, then you have to admit me. It's like, no, this is two-way consent, period. You cannot come to the United States and become either a resident or a citizen of the United States without the consent of the current people of the United States as that consent is given, you know, through the legislative process. So the idea that there's any kind of, I mean, this idea really does emerge in the 60s. You got to, it wasn't, I used to call it a floor speech, which was incorrect because he was still attorney general.

But when they were debating the 65 Immigration Act, RFK was the Attorney General, but Johnson was president, obviously. And he went and he gave Senate testimony. He was running for the Senate. And he won that seat in New York in 64. But he basically said, look, this country is undergoing a fundamental change towards civil rights. And we're doing the right thing by extending civil rights to our own citizens who have been denied it for too long. But now it's high time. We did the right thing by extending civil rights to basically everyone on the globe, to foreigners. The founders would have, they would have, A, been appalled at that and laughed at it as ridiculous. By definition, there's no such thing as a civil right for a foreigner. Civil rights are those, you have natural rights. Every human being has natural rights, right, that come from God and nature and nature's God, as the Declaration says, but only citizens, by definition, have civil rights. So if you are, even the most worthy potential immigrant imaginable, right, like a Nobel

prize-winning scientist and who's going to do it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you want to come, not just to this country, but to any country. And they go, yeah, well, hey, good luck. We have nothing personal, but we just don't want you. You don't have any right whatsoever to move to that country, according to the founder's political theory, and according to any law of common sense that makes sense.

Okay, I want to push back. I'm not push back, but I want to probe here. Would you accept, I mean, well, let me first of all notice something about the declaration. it's maybe the most viral political document in history in the sense that you can start with what the first I guess it was Haiti right but then you go all over the world everybody is copying pretty much what the declaration says when they declare independence including

Ho Chi Minh in whenever in 1948 when he declares you know independent Vietnam and including Israel everywhere you go I mean you could say the French were really the first with the declaration of the rights of... Although, you know, Jaffa would point out, and Jaffa students would have us, this is one of the exercises we did in graduate school, they would have us read the declaration

and some of these others side by side, and we would contemplate the differences. Important differences. Usually tend in the subsequent documents, tend in a more kind of heedlessly universalistic and messianic direction. They lack the prudence and the... Yes.

You know, the sort of notion... of sacred and practical limits of the declaration. And this is one of the reasons why these other countries get into trouble, we would say. Well, they say revolution is serious business. We don't do it for transient reasons. You got to have a good reason for it. Okay. But what I want to get at is, would you accept that because these are universal principles

and they are applying to human beings, that at a certain base level, it doesn't matter whether you're living in Zimbabwe or, you know, Siberia, that human beings want to live in freedom. I mean, that's...

Do you accept that or no? Is that, or am I misinterpreting this job of that? There is a universality to it, right? It's based on natural law, meaning that it's a, it's expression of something that is innate within us. Let's get past this notion of human desire for a second,

because you can always, as distasteful and uncomfortable is, you can always point to some, this or that circumstance in the past where people seem to be quite content to live in a bad regime that doesn't respect their rights and ends up regretting it as much as they may hate it at the time for that grassless always greener reason then ends up regretting it later let's talk about what obligations natural a universal principle places on those who accept it okay okay um i the united state the founders would say the the principle is universal because the only

possibility of a basis for the law in modernity among an ethnically however you know it's not as ethnically diverse back then not nearly as it is today but it still was diverse enough that what what you couldn't do for instance in 7076 to say okay this is an english country then you're going to have to kick a whole lot of people out and i mean maybe maybe some wanted to do that but whatever it's not what they did right right and you can go back and study the all the debates at the time, I think nobody is better at have really combing through everything that was said during the founding era, not just at the national or the federal level, but in state constitutional conventions and private letters and sermons. And people like Tom West have done more research on this than

anyone alive. And they just don't find that. What they find is a consistent from New Hampshire all the way down to Georgia discussion of this universal principle and equal natural rights. And yet the founders, no but none of them, none of the actual founders, the leading statesmen, nor just the people who were alive at the time and accepted this argument, believed that it entailed any kind of obligation to extend that principle outward. It was the basis on which we declared our independence. It was the basis on which we declared the legitimacy of the law, of the new law. It was the basis on which we declared inalienable rights. But we didn't say that. And because it's universal, yes, in principle it applies to everyone, but it can only really be operationalized if a people congeals around it.

That's a dumb word, but you know, you get what I'm saying. Yeah. And operationalizes it for themselves. So it does become a bit of a foreign policy question because of the French Revolution. That is to say, there was an argument that, well, if they're going to announce this revolution on principle similar to ours, are we not morally obligated having done so? to support it. And there were people in France who tried to make that kind of, if you want to say, guilt trip argument on the early Americans. Thomas. Thomas Payne and Tom Jefferson very much believe that we had to support the revolution. Pain's a radical on this point. Pain was one of these guys

who's kind of like a modern libertarian. He just thinks through the logical direction of his own argument and then says wherever that ends, we have to do it. All other considerations be damned. Jefferson was wiser than that. And he's actually secretary of state during the most turbulent. part of the French Revolution. And in the cabinet, he's by far the most sympathetic to what's going on over there. And even he, and whereas Hamilton's by far the most hostile, or maybe he's tied with Adams. But even Jefferson realizes that as a practical matter, this is just not something the United States can do.

We just can't. I mean, I really sympathize. I mean, look, some of Jefferson's rhetoric is kind of semi-unhinged on this part. Like, one of his letters, he says, I would rather see half the world perish than that revolution fail. Like, really, half the world. Like, I don't know. I don't know what the population was then, but does it even matter? Like, that's a pretty, it's rhetorically stirring. But if you think it through for a second, you realize, like, that's kind of crazy. What does the universality of the principle imply either as a moral obligation or as a prudential, practical obligation? I mean, the other

quote that's easy to jump to here is the famous John Quincy Adams' oration on the floor of the House, 4th of July, oh God, I'm blanking on the date. I think it's 1821. The Monsters to Destroy Speech, which is a very long, it's like a 90-minute, I don't know how long, but it's long, but it's long. And it's just this one paragraph, but at the end, he says, look, the principle is universal, but that doesn't obligate us or make it wise for us to go around trying to spread it by the sword, and we won't, we won't do that. Right, but I just want to, I mean, I think you and I would agree, let's just leaving the foreign policy implications aside, that you and I would agree that, in fact, because these are universal principles, and in some ways, in Lincoln's era, like with

Frederick Douglass kind of proves that anybody can access these ideas and articulate these ideas and live by these ideas, that anybody who wants to sort of say no, we're, you know, we're a product of a very specific, I mean, in some ways, when you were describing the new right, they were engaging in their own kind of historicism, right? I mean, they were saying, no, this is very particular to the, you know, English and Scottish Enlightenment and things like that. I mean, the sophisticated ones will make that argument. And what I think, correct me if I'm wrong, what I think Jop would say is, no, no, no, no, these are universal and they are true. And they apply to everybody. And well, I think the founders believed that they were universal and true.

And in principle could apply to everybody, but they certainly, then they were candid, then in a way that makes, like I said, we moderns uncomfortable. Yes. You know, I mean, Hamilton says flatly, there's no chance this revolution in Haiti's going to work. Yeah. You know, I mean, all right, you know,

and here we are. It's 2026, and Haiti has a pretty sad record of political instability and revolutions and, you know, various things that, let's put it this way, one would not want to live through. Right. And one might not actually live

if one were in the middle of it, you know? So the universality of it doesn't mean it's a practical likelihood that it's going to happen here, there, or anywhere. Yeah, okay, fair. But the universality, this is why the foreign policy implications are exceptional, right? The universality of the principle is a pretty stark rebuke to imperialism. Now, the United States mostly got along with Great Britain during its great imperial age in the second half of the 19th century. But if you take the principles of the Declaration seriously, just because, let's say, this people over here does not live according to equal natural rights, government by consent, social compact, and so on, doesn't give us the right to intervene and either to try to spread that principle or to rule them without their consent. In fact, it would say specifically, like, nobody has the right to rule another nation. No nation has the right to rule another nation precisely on that principle's ground itself. You got to leave these people alone, even if they're not getting it right from what you, you know, what you believe.

Right. Okay. Now let's talk about the implications, like sort of what's the relevance of Jaffa now? Where do we place it? What can we learn from him today in terms of dealing with the many problems that face our republic, in your view? I think just learning from him, the understanding, the actual grounding of what the founders should trying to do, why they were trying to do it, what problem they were trying to solve. I mean, you know, again, this is something.

I bring up Glenn's name again, we talk about this. The new right, you know, some of these guys that just hate the idea of natural rights, equal natural rights, and then they'll start railing against the government. Like, well, they're impinging on my free speech. They're trying to take my guns. I'm like, we both are like, well, okay, I agree with you. They shouldn't do that. That's unjust.

But like, on what basis can you bitch about it? okay I mean I guess they would say well the traditional rights of okay well you're an American some of you according to the you know your conception

this is the other thing too that drives me can we name who are you talking about Adrian Vermeule who are you talking about I don't know enough about him to know and see I mean look I get along fine with Dean

and I actually have read why liberalism failed and I read regime change look I just look I don't know that I don't want to say anything that sounds insulting because I do get along with him and I think he's a good guy I just I reviewed regime change at length and I sort of explained what I thought was wrong with it but I just think there's a there's a theoretical incoherence at the heart of this you know that particular claim the integralist claim or the anti-enlightenment claim because it what I think it misses is the extent to which however ridiculous you know And whatever problems enlightenment introduced, you got to understand that there were a lot of problems that it's solved and that just, you know, there's no dialing back, I don't think, in the modern world. I'm more, I'm more talking about less than, you know, what do you want to want to? What's the word I'm going for here? You know, prominent people with endowed chairs and stuff like that that I'm talking about just like writers, bloggers, substackers, which maybe I shouldn't pay any attention to.

But, and I mostly don't anymore. But when I got out of the Trump administration in 2018, I returned to teaching at Hillsdale and I returned to doing the fellowships at Claremont. So you end up meeting, you know, one or 200 young people a year and also just trying to figure out what's going on. I read a lot of stuff. And I mean, look, if somebody wants to, maybe the best thing by me that I could point to is I got into a debate with, I think the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

sued his name's Lafayette Lee. I don't actually even know who the guy really is, but he's a fairly prominent Twitter sued, and we did a back and forth on IM 1776, which is a kind of new right online magazine. It's a little edgy, and I defended the founding, and I just asked a bunch of questions,

and tried to explain why the founding was good, necessary, and better than any alternative than anybody has yet come up with. And, you know, he was a reasonable interlocutor. This time I won't name a name, but I'll just say that they wanted it to be a, I can't remember if it was supposed to be a three-way

conversation or two-way, but in any event, one of the, or two-way, and then when this other guy backed out, they back-filled it with Lafayette. But some other fairly prominent sued was supposed to do it, and we had like one exchange, and he just put up his hands and walked away. Now, maybe he was exasperated by me,

or maybe he didn't know what to say in my, gray-haired arrogance, I tend to think it was the latter. A lot of these kids, they don't have the education that they, or I'll put it this way, that I was fortunate, and Glenn and many others that I know were fortunate enough to get. And so they would just wander into waters that they haven't really thought through and find themselves lost pretty quickly. So like, saying you have no rights, okay, leaving aside the philosophical untruth of it, It's such a dead end as a political message to the American people, right?

Sure. Imagine, like, going to a – and, like, people who want to talk about the insignificant – let's get back to the Declaration, too, since now I'm ranting. People want to talk about the insignificance of the declarations. Like, every American – like, you can go back the very first anniversary of July 4th, 1777, there were, like, public readings and celebrations throughout the nation. And that has been true every single year since, right? But we've got these sophisticated people writing on.

Nothing against soods. I like suits. I used a sued. We all know it, right? The Federalist papers was written under a suit. A lot of the debating going on during the founding era was written under sued, so I'm not criticizing sues. I just find it hilarious. A lot of these guys are like trying to make the case to a nation that has been celebrating July 4th, 1776 for 250 years in a row that it was all meaningless and it was all based on our cultural tradition. Do you think this is going to go over at a barbecue of Maga-Hadded truckers? Hey, guys, let me stand up. I'm going to tip this keg over.

I'm going to stand on top of it. And I'm going to tell you, number one, you have no rights. And number two, your Fourth of July picnic and all of the flagwomen you're doing. It's all meaningless. Like, you don't even know your audience. I was going to say, Michael Anton, that they're making a version of an argument that I associate with Howard Zinn or Charles Beard and people on the left, which is like, oh, the Declaration of Independence, this is marketing material for, like, private.

property owners and white supremacism, right? I mean, like, at a certain point, it's like it is a little bit of a horseshoe. And that actually gets to me to, I mean, we've spent a lot of time talking about and I'm glad we are talking about the kind of new right and the younger people on the right. But what about the left? When was the last time the left, you know, gave a crap about the declaration and cared about it? Do you think that it's that that one side of our political discourse right now just doesn't even care to try to interrogate this charter? I mean, look, when I, when I was a younger, when I was, let's say, college, the left was pretty hardcore anti-founding. Yeah.

At least the intellectual left was, and I'm not sure if the rest of the left paid that much attention. It's, it my, my hazy recollection is that Obama, at least in the first term, sort of made it cool to be patriotic again on the left. Like, well, now at least we have a president who's kind of one of us. He's a younger. progressive first black president. You know, very much of that kind of, I mean, even though from Chicago or spent a lot of time in Chicago, I was going to say like coastal knowledge class, but Chicago's, it's on the coast of a lake, I suppose. And still, basically from the university, you know, from the elite university class of

American expert. And then they thought like, okay, now that he's the president and he's giving the Fourth of July oration, maybe it's okay. And then when he kind of let wokeness rip in the second term, we went right back to the old ways, and we've been stuck there ever since, so it feels to me with the left.

I mean, as kind of somebody who was interested in the history of ideas, does that start with Charles Beard? Does that start with, I mean, where do we, where does the, I mean, maybe it starts with Woodrow Wilson, right? I mean, I don't know, where do you think they lost their way?

The left lost there. I mean, I mean, I mean, As a counterpoint, I mean, I considered, even though this is before Jaffa writes this stuff, but you could argue that Calvin Coolidge's great speech on the 4th of July for the 150th is an expression of Jaffaite notion that it's enduring and true, and this is our charter, this is our identity, those are very Jaffa principles, and he says it in his great speech that Evol Vinn and others really love. But in some ways, if you go back, that was a response to Wilson

saying, boy, you know, we need to modernize our whole operating code, right? I mean, like, it was, you know, the college was in fact a reaction to the progressive era. So one of Jaff's greatest students, John Marini

once said in my hearing, he said this more than once, but I remember the first time. He's like, well, it all started to go down. And the most important, no, this is what he sees. It's like, actually, second only to the Civil War, the most important event of the 19th, the most important year of the 19th century was 1876.

I was like, what? What happened in 1876? It's the founding of Johns Hopkins University. The founding of Johns Hopkins is somehow that, he's like, this is the importation of the German model of the university into the United States. Oh, right. And it begins there. Now, I mean, everything has deep roots

because you don't, you know, progressivism is kind of an Americanized, and then politicized version of Higalianism, and you don't get Hagle without Rousseau, and you don't get Rousseau, and you trace this is where Strauss is so useful, you trace this all to Machiavelli, and then Machiavelli's trying to solve a problem

that is introduced centuries earlier than him that I already sort of outlined. So where did it all begin? I mean, you could say with creation, but when the United States, you know, before the importation of European progressivism into the intellectual world and then into the political life of the United States,

you could say that most of the, anti-Americanism in the United States or the anti-foundingism had two sources. And this is the kid. You can't, I'm going to get in so much trouble. By the way, this is why I don't do these kind of things anymore because people are going to listen to this. I just made everybody in the universe mad and like there's just going to be Twitter mobs after me for quite a while. It's boring. I just would rather be quiet and read ancient philosophy. You love it, Anton. No, I don't. Not anymore. I'm a tool for this crap. Anyway, so anytime you say anything, like you get the Southerners mad, especially if you're a Jaffa student.

The Southerners think that you must hate them and want to eradicate them and just kill them. My wife's a Southerner, for Christ's sake, on both sides, going back to this, it's like mid-1600s. So that means my children are half Southern, but whatever. You can't convince them otherwise. But it is true that the loudest voices attacking the universalism of the Declaration, all men are created equal and equal natural rights for the first half of the 19th century up through the Civil War were Southern voices. Okay? not doing it from the left,

but making it, and this is one of the reasons they hate Jop, is because he kind of pointed out as you talked about the horseshoe or the, you know, the Venn diagram, there's a commonality between a lot of the arguments

being made by them at that time that get picked up later, despite coming from a totally different perspective and having a totally different end. And the second strain, which was much less coherent theoretically, but it was just there was always a kind of, at least present,

if not very strong or influential, but present. A kind of pro-European snobbery, especially, let's say, in the Boston Brahmin class and others of that ilk, kind of, that America is a bit low and vulgar compared to the great cultural achievements of Europe. And, but it's only the left, and that, they're kind of left, right, in a certain intellectual way, if not, you know, the way they live their lives or, or anything. But if you, if you want to just pinpoint when it starts, when it really starts for us, it's the importation of German, uh,

progressivism. And then German, you know, two strands of German thought. You could say German idealism, Kant Hegel, and German historicism. I mean, one of the great, you know, we want to talk about Jaffa, we should talk a little bit of, just a little bit about Alan Bloom. They were

great friends and then they had a giant falling out. Jaffa was pretty much the cause of that because he reviewed closing the American mind so relentlessly, negatively. But Bloom's, the part two of closing the American mind. The very first chapter is called the German connection. And Bloom focuses on one half of that, which is the sort of the Nietzschean strain

that it starts to affect American intellectuals. And Jaffa really left the progressivism argument to his students. He didn't, he made this argument, but it's Marini and RJ Pastrito and a lot of others that really discovered this and fleshed it out. They focused on the other side of the German connection, which is the importation of German idealism that becomes progress. You know, probably America's leading progressive philosophers, John Dewey, who's kind of a, I was going to say pale copy. Maybe that's too dismissive. But he's definitely downstream and derivative from Hegel. Okay.

But what I wanted to get at is like sort of where we are today. We're nowhere good today. Right. Certainly not intellectually. Okay. Because there's an argument that if you don't have a strong American conservatism, that is rooted in the Constitution and rooted in the preservation of these universal truths, then we really do go off the rails because we just have to sort of price in that the left is going

to constantly be yammering on about a living constitution and, you know, taking their very kind of historicism and, like, you know, constantly adding and tinkering and everything else like that. And then all of a sudden we lose what is enduring. Yeah. That's not my argument. But I guess my question to you is sort of trying to bring it up to the current moment. Are we staring down into the abyss at this point, given that some of the trends on the right would suggest, as you said, that the youngs are, you know, embracing this idea that no, no, no, no, this is just a, you know, this is just, this is what got us liberalism. We don't like it.

I don't give it. I don't give it damn. If there's Thai restaurants in Omaha, Nebraska, I want my country back. Yeah. So, I don't know. What's the question? My question is, I mean, like, can we, can we, you know, what, what, what do you do? Do you start by just trying?

I don't know what to do. Okay. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what to do. And I've kind of stopped because I'm, I'm not even sure that's the right question right now. So what is the right question. We're just, what I've decided to do and what a couple of my friends have decided to do is like, okay, what we were trying to do is go right to the root, go right to first principle. Mm-hmm. And why don't we just do that?

we know how to do that. And maybe some flowers will grow out of the dung heap in the future. But right now, like trying to figure out, you know, whether it's political action, like, how do you reform the intellectual class right now? I mean, I don't know. I just finished reading a book because I read Heather McDonald's review of it called The Sanderson's Fail Manhattan. And it's about an elite, super elite, like 65K a year high school on the Upper East side and the, you know, the college application process and what they're all teaching now and what they require and how the colleges drive what the lower, you know, what the high schools or the prep schools teach. And it's all woke garbage. It's like, I mean, when you, when you face a title wave

of dysfunction like that, like, how do you know what to do? How would you, how are you going to fix the IVs? Or I spent a massive amount of time in 2024 and a little time since researching my own book. I spent it in Berkeley. How are you going to fix Berkeley? I mean, is it fixable from the, from the, is it fixable to make it do the things you and I would like to see it do? Like, I have no idea. I doubt it. If it is, I don't know how to do it. Can I, can I just slightly push back? Because I share a lot of your pessimism. One thing to notice is that in the field, of history, we've seen, like everything else in the academy, a kind of trend towards against writing popular histories, great men histories, patriotic histories. I mean, would you

agree with that? I'm basically the academic discipline of history. Yeah. No, I mean, look, everything is cyclical, but I just, my pessimism leads me to, if not conclude, fear that we're really on a downward zoom that it won't cancel the cycle long term but like I think it's too much to hope that the cycle is going to correct itself in a

decade or a couple of decades. No, no, but I'm going to finish the point here. The academic histories have become less accessible and have become more ideological. I think we can't do that. Well, I don't think anybody reads them. But in place of that, what we've seen is that some of the most popular books that are sold now are popular

history is written by, you know, non-academics, the late David McCullough, you know, you know, and that there is still a hunger among people Americans who read, but they're just not, you know, reading. Man, how many of them do? And I, you know, to be a dumer, how many of those are like older people are dying off? And the younger people don't really read. And the young, you know, and they've also much more likely to have been indoctrinated by whatever's out there and whatever's out there, what they're getting most.

is anti-American propaganda. Okay. But, all right. Okay. But on the other hand, let's just take your life, your story. You encountered that.

Not everybody who goes to Berkeley comes out of Berkeley, you know, brainwashed and woke. Some people come out of Berkeley like you and they become great conservative intellectuals. And they run the other direction as fast as they can. Yeah, but can you name anybody else?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I didn't go to Berkeley. I went to Trinity College in Connecticut, but I, you know, I had plenty of very leftist professors. I'm not going to name him because he's now an enemy, but like who was a conservative intellectual for a while, who's now like a mouth frothing anti-conservative leftist. So that also happens, sure.

But my point is, is that not every student. That's true. I just think it's not like, and then maybe I'm saying when you're talking about the dung heap in planting those flowers, right, if you can reach the rebels in the 21st century universities who are looking around and saying, wait a second, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't agree with this interpretation of my country. This doesn't reflect reality. It was easier when I went to college to, if you wanted to seek out great books type stuff and

normal history, you could find it. I mean, like, Jim Hankins, I don't know if you know who that is. He was in the Harvard History Department for 40 years and he made a splash of like a year or half ago by announcing that he was quitting. He and not not quitting teaching, just quitting Harvard and going to Florida to teach it in U of F. Now, who leaves Harvard to go to University of Florida? And he's like, it's just all woke garbage here. And they no longer, one by one, everybody teaching Western history, you know, the history of Western Europe, the United States, so on, aged out and retired. And the committee structure is now so woke that they simply will not higher. So it will be not long. It probably already is true that there isn't anybody on the like the 40 or

50 member Harvard History Department who teaches the history of Western civilization at all. Right. That's by design. I mean, read Harvey Mansfield. What was a, you know, a deer. He's got a new book coming out. He's got a little book. We've got one that just came out on modern political philosophy. And he's got a little book. It's like a collection of where Harvard went wrong over the years of all the things. Yeah. He's been needle. he's like the, he's a way the Socratic gadfly of Harvard and has been for decades. Just very, it's, there's no rancor in it. There's no bitterness.

But he, with humor, points out all the ways that they've screwed up. And like, they keep screwing up. It's not getting better. It's maybe it'll get better at some point. I inevitably, it will get better at some point. Everything will get better at some point. I totally believe in cycles. It'll come around.

But I don't think it's, going to come around soon and I think we may have to go through some real bad cataracts before it comes around. Okay. And the real problem is this mental, you know, which like I keep using his name, but Glenn and I have been exploring in private conversation. And, you know, I, he wrote a little book that came out, I don't know, two years ago, three years ago called The Narrow Passage. It's a strange title. It doesn't really tell you what the book is about. But it isn't very long. It's like 100 pages, if that. And it's a really good account of kind of the psychosis that's gripped the elite mind in the last several years.

More than several, several decades. This is a cleanse book? Yeah, Elmer's, the narrow passage. And so he and I, I don't know what we'll call it. We want to, I mapped it out, talked to him about it. He's game to do it as a joint project with me because I think it would be way better if we're both on it rather than if I just did it. Or if he just did it for that matter. where we're going to try to trace this really from the beginning.

I can't wait. And by the beginning, you've got to go back to the Bible. The problem is like, you're not going to like the answer because to the extent that people really get what we're talking about, they're going to be like, well, there doesn't seem to be a solution to this at all. And that made me the answer. Sorry. Right.

Okay. No, I mean, anyway, I'm interested in that. Okay, well, I think this is a good end point for the conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time, Michael. And I want to just say this now for our listeners. I would like to have you back for a separate conversation on the great Niccolo McAvelli. Yeah, you should. No, I want that.

I do have a book. It's finished. Oh, great. Yeah, we'll do it with that. I've completed it. I've gone through the galleys. The publisher's a little mad at me because I'm such a perfectionist. I'm always massaging my, so they'll give me galleys.

They'll like, just approve this. And then I sent it back and I marked it up. I thought this was done. Like, well, you know, I've found a little thing. Okay. And then for our listeners who are generalists, usually, and there are some young people who haven't given up on America, what is the first book, what is the first place to start

in our journey into Harry Jam? Hmm. The first place to start. Well, it, maybe you just get that, the book is called The Rediscovery of America. America. It's in a way his last, but it's previously uncollected things that Ed Earler and Ken Musugi put together. But the chapters maybe to start with are the chapter two, equality, liberty, wisdom, morality, and consent in the idea of political freedom. And then six,

which I've already mentioned, the American founding is the best regime, the bonding of civil and religious liberty. But you could, everything in here is very good. And another one, the chapter one is called Aristotle and Locke in the American founding, which is really philosophic. It could be daunting to a younger reader who hasn't read Aristotle and Locke, who doesn't do political philosophy, but it's kind of the core of Jaff's argument that the American founding bridges the gap between ancient and modern theory and practice, which is a controversial argument, controversial among the Straussians, controversial among students of the founding. But I think is very powerful, persuasive, and certainly challenging as hell.

You can get an education just from reading that piece alone. But look, Jaffa, in terms of the quality of the writing and what will actually spellbind a reader the most, there's no doubt crisis is his best work in that sense. New birth, I think, is more profound and truer to the phenomena, but it took him a long time to write. He kind of overwrote it. He had to have somebody I know really well edited very careful. carefully. It's just not as polished a complete, you know, like work beginning, middle,

to end, planned out the way Jaffa in his 40s was able to do as opposed to when he got, when New Birth came out, I think he was 70 close. No, no, he was, when I met him, he was 70. He was like 75 when I met him. So, or yeah, roughly. And 76. So New Birth would have come out when he was 80, 81, 82. And I, you know, again, now I'm making everybody. mad. So if like Musugi or earlier hears this, they're going to be like, he dissed the old man. He said, new birth is incoherent. No, I'm just saying it's not like as a polished piece of writing that's just one of the most beautifully perfect pieces of rhetoric. And at a high intellectual level, crisis is the best. Is it the best place to start? Not necessarily. It's the best place to

start if like your reading of Joppa, you want to trace his intellectual journey, then sure. Okay. Well, that's, that's great. Thank you so much, Michael Anton. Made a lot of new enemies to Well, actually, no, I just, all I do is whack the hornets nest of all my old enemies. I guess it doesn't really. Yeah. Thank you very much. This was great and for taking the time.