The Eric Metaxas Show - Richard Brookhiser

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

From the National Review, historian Richard Brookhiser weighs in on the political landscape and presents ideas from, "Give Me Liberty: A History of America's Exceptional Idea." 

show i shouldn't tell you this but eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show but since i'm the announcer they told me so i am telling you don't be fooled the real erics in jail and welcome hey folks welcome to hour two of the irkman texas show today's election day if you haven't yet voted what are you doing listening to this program if you're not listening to this in your car on the way to the polling booth uh you need to you need to you need to you need to get on and vote uh it's the greatest privilege imaginable for free people to elect their leaders. I'm talking to John Zmirak.

We've just got this segment to talk about this election. What else is on your mind, young man? We need to vote like we never voted before, pray like we never prayed before, because American exceptionalism is on the ballot today. Today, our people decide whether they want to continue to be the exceptional country that carries on the Christian view of the human person. that's having fundamental dignity, fundamental rights, endowed with them by a creator, not by the thing.

Are we carrying on the Christian view of the human person as having rights? Life is being sacred. Citizenship as being important. Responsibility and family and local community as being essential. Or are we going to transform America into just another normal country, as Barack Obama once said, are we going to become more like Belgium where the army goes on strike?

Like the Netherlands, where they're doing youth in Asia for children. Are we going to be like France where angry refugees behead people in churches and we worry whether we've welcomed them sufficiently or made them feel excluded and alienated and it's our fault?

Will America be the country you talked about in your book if you can keep it? Or will your book, if you can keep it, become historical curio. Like, oh, remember that country that used to have those wacky ideas

about life being sacred and there being inalienable rights and private property and independent business? And remember all those quaint ancient American ideas? Whatever happened to those? Oh, the people gave up on them. They got battered by one lousy virus

with a low fatality rate. And they just collapsed the way the French did in 1940. And then a bunch of collaborators like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came in and administered the country on behalf of communist China and stripped it of its assets and, you know, gradually just took it apart piecemeal. But it was a good try. They had a pretty good run. They last, you know, 250 years. Not to not to be a nitpicker, but I believe it's pronounced Carmela Harris. You know, John, I think Trump will win. I think we will know before midnight tonight that he has I don't think we will know it officially, but I think most of us paying attention will have a sense.

And it's going to play itself out over the next weeks because we know what you said, that the left is, we'll do anything, basically. Including undermine the, it's kind of funny, like they will happily undermine the republic and our institutions in order to undermine the republic and our institutions. In other words, that's their ultimate goal. So they have nothing to lose by confusion. using people by lying that Trump is trying to steal the election. And there was all the stuff that previous Democratic administrations would have refrained from doing because they knew it would have done incalculable damage to the Republic. That's no longer on the table.

The Republic is the enemy of the leftists who now control this party. So that's to me what I see ahead. But what I also see is if we dodge this bullet by the grace of God, it will be only by the grace of God. it will be only by the grace of God. That's right. And if we are delivered from the slavery, the tyranny, the bondage of what you and I know would come with the BLM Antifa left virtually in charge, that if we're delivered from that bondage, the way the Israelites were delivered from bondage in Egypt, we will owe it to God to utterly give him our lives and our dedication in a way that we haven't been.

There's been a complacency in the American church and among Americans, generally speaking, that has allowed us to come to this hideous crossroads. And so I really believe if we are granted to take the path of freedom, that we owe God infinitely more than we have been giving him, that we need to kind of return to who we are and to our faith. I really believe that revival and reformation will have to come. That's right. We can't go on if we've been doing. We found out that the house we're living in is infested by termites.

The floorboards are rotted and the foundations are cracked. We can either rebuild or it will collapse around us. If we dodge this collapse, if we manage to stave off this collapse the next four years, we have to spend it energetically rebuilding our institutions cleaning out corruption, cleaning out foreign collusion, cleaning out insane ideology, and reckless, irresponsible, crazy talk that dominates our universities and is increasingly dominating our churches. We have another priest at stream.org I hope you will look at called evangelicals call,

progressives to repentance. It's from the American Association of Evangelicals. They have a very powerful statement calling on the church to purge itself of radical ideology that has been infiltrating the churches in part through the money George Soros spends, bribing pastors, bribing magazine editors, bribing seminary professors, renting evangelicals in his own terms. Who wrote that piece? It's from the American Association of Evangelicals. It's a coalition. I'm one of the signers on that. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a piece at stream.org today calling on Catholics and evangelicals both to repent our collusion with rich anti-Christian progressants who've been throwing money around in both churches.

And all too many people have been willing to take the 30 pieces of silver. That's kind of what I see happening, John, is a reawakening. I think that, as I said, if we dodge this bullet, which we don't. deserve to. We will have to thank God for his grace by returning to him in a new way. We can't live as, you know, half-time Christians or third-time. I think we have to understand how deeply we have failed. You know, Trump issued some kind of executive order about patriotic civics in our schools. I don't know if that has teeth, but that to me is the kind of thing. If we do not begin to do that as a culture, we will never get another chance like this again.

This is our moment to do things that we have failed to do that have allowed us to come to this horrific moment. Right. I mean, if the party that destroyed Seattle and Minneapolis, Chicago and New York, you know, all those riots, if the party that sponsored those riots that oversaw those riots that played catch and release. Finally at this moment.

We get to promote this great book. If that party doesn't move around. If the American people read enough that they've got to be missing something. They really are like Patty Hurst. It's a massive and expensive undertaking. It's Stockholm syndrome. I was just going to say it's Stockholm syndrome. It's Patty Hurst.

Symbionese liberation army syndrome. Everybody's going to be wearing a machine gun and wearing a beret in the bank. And if that happens, if that happens, we'll have to, we'll have to resist doggedly. and look for God's mercy and look for God's help and realize we are sort of in the equivalent situation of people in Poland in the 1970s or East Germany in the 1970s. Madness has taken control of the corridors of power, and we have to fight for what liberties we can sustain. So we face a very solemn choice today, and we need to look at it under the aspect of eternity in the light of history.

I hope and pray Americans do not choose to throw away the great heritage that our ancestors sacrificed and died to give us. If we do, if we do, we are like some crazy air, some trust son baby, who takes all his ancestors' hard work and snorts it up his nose in the form of cocaine. But let's not talk about Hunter. Yeah. Well, our friend Rod Dreher wrote a book about Christians under. the horrors of the Soviet Union.

I really think that we deserve all of that if we do not do everything you and I've been talking about. We're out of time, folks. Vote as often as you can. Thank you. Well, you wonder why I always dress in black? Why you never see bright colors on my back? And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone?

Well, there's a reason. From the program, I have the honor of speaking with Richard Brookheiser. You probably know that name. He's written so many books by now. The most recent one came out last year, it's called Give Me Liberty, a History of America's Exceptional Idea. Richard Brookheiser, welcome to this program. Thanks for having me, Eric. Are you still officially with National Review?

I always think that you're some kind of an editor there or whatever, but I never know, like, you know, what these things, where these things stand as of yesterday. Yes, they call me a fellow of the National Review Institute. I've been a senior editor for a long, long time. And still there. A long, long time. Yes, I know you have, and I've got many dear friends over there. I was excited about your book, and I'm sorry, it took us this long to get you on,

but give me Liberty, a history of America's exceptional idea. It is an exceptional idea, but obviously very few people are aware of quite how exceptional it is or even whether it's exceptional. So let's talk about that. And the first question really would be, what led you to write the book? I didn't think people were talking about it enough. The conversation had shifted to nationalism, both here and worldwide. and, you know, it's a very heated conversation, a very fraught. There are, you know, to be encouraged, some that are admirable, some that are pernicious and horrible. And, you know, people who are in favor of it say it's all the one, and people who are opposed, say it's all the other. And what I wanted to do in this book is to focus on what I thought was the character.

of America's nationalism, which is our concern with liberty. And we've been doing it since before we were a country. We've been doing it now for 401 years. I had no idea when I wrote the book that there would be a 1619 project that we would all be talking about. But indeed, my book begins with my 1619 project, which is what happened in Jamestown, even before the first ship selling enslaved black people docked there, which was the meeting of the General Assembly of the Jamestown Colony. And this was America's beginning of its experiment with self-rule.

And then the book has 12 more episodes going up to Ronald Reagan's tear down this wall speech in Berlin in 1987. So in each of these episodes produces a document. It's some of them are speeches. A lot of them are speeches. The Jamestown General Assembly produced the minutes of the meeting. One is an argument in a court case. One is a poem. Richard, I'm intrigued, I must say, by when you mention a poem as one of these 12 documents.

Can you tell us what that poem is? Well, the poem is called the new Colossus. It was written by Emma Lazarus, in the 1880s, and it is on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. And I think it's a noble poem. Emma Lazarus thought it was the best poem she wrote. She was a literary woman who lived in New York in the late 19th century. I think the poem has to be completed, though, because it's on the Statue of Liberty. And in her poem, Lazarus calls the statue the mother of exiles. But that's not all she is.

She is the statue of liberty. And the exiles that she was welcoming were coming to a land of liberty, which had great consequences for their future and for the future of their children. America was not the only mother of exiles in the 19th century. The United States was not. in proportion to the population, Argentina got many more exiles than we did. Those people, a lot of them from the same places that sent exiles to the United States, those people became Argentinians. And as the 20th century would go on, that was a much more difficult thing to be than to be citizens of the United States.

So I think the poem is an excellent poem. It's worth study and certainly worth study how it came to be written. But it's vitally important to its own meaning that it is attached to the Statue of Liberty. Well, it is an interesting thing because I've talked about this a little bit in a book I wrote called If You Can Keep It. This idea that America is exceptional, I argue, is because we have always, thought of ourselves on some level as a nation for others, that what makes us exceptional is that we are so welcoming. And I don't mean, you know, indiscriminately welcoming the way I think Angela Merkel was in letting a million people in rather carelessly. But I mean that we we want

people to come and to flourish here and to be part of this American experiment because we are not an ethnic group. And that, that to me is something that we ought to celebrate more, and I assume in your book you do. Yes. And, you know, some people who are very anti-immigration today try to downplay the poem by saying, well, it was only added to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty 20 years after the statue went up, which is true. But the poem was written in order to help raise money to pay for the pedestal in the first place. Right.

I mean, that's why the poem got written. France gave us the statue. It was a gift from French Republicans, you know, with a small R, to the United States. And it was originally conceived to celebrate the liberation, the emancipation of slaves at the end of the Civil War. Then they thought they might be able to get it here by 1876 to celebrate the centennial of the revolution. It doesn't finally get put up until the 1880s. But the statue is a gift, but the French said, well, you've got to pay for the pedestal. You know, you've got to find some place to put this thing. And the money raising was a long project.

And one of the ways to try and raise money was they got some literary people and some artists to do a fancy volume that, you know, you could purchase. And two presidents wrote contributions to this thing, and Mark Twain wrote a little piece, and Brett Hart wrote a little piece, and they asked this young blue stocking in New York City, Emma Lassras, will you write a poem? And the poem she wrote was the new colossus.

So the poem was intimately connected with the Statue of Liberty and the whole project of erecting this statue from the beginning. Well, we should, in case anybody's tuning in and they're wondering about the poem, we should recite at least enough to tell them. So it's give me your tired, you're poor, your... Your huddled masses. Ureting to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Right, and it's being welcomed here.

And the contrast, it's the new, Colossus. The contrast is the old Colossus, the Colossus of the ancient world. That was the Colossus of Rhodes, and it supposedly bestrode the harbor of the island of Rhodes. And that celebrated military victory during the wars after the death of Alexander the Great. It was a monument to conquest and victory. And Emma Lazarus is saying, fine, you keep that. Here's what we have instead. You know, we are welcoming people who are fleeing, among other things, that, you know. It's interesting that in your book you cite documents that are not, they're not official documents necessarily. In other words, if you talk about the Lincoln's second inaugural, or there are a number of documents that have become part of something, but it's not really an official record.

I guess John Winthrop's sermon in 1630, there are a number of things that we can look at as having shaped us, having made us who we are. What would be the opposite case? In other words, why would people argue against that? Why would people say that, you know, it doesn't matter the way the pilgrims settled in 1620, whatever, that that's irrelevant. We're only going to look at these documents. I mean, legally, I get that. but it seems that, you know, we don't only exist legally. Well, some of these, you're right, some of these documents are official.

Some of them are by presidents. They're utterances of the chief executive. But others are by ordinary citizens, very ordinary citizens. One of the most moving to me is maybe the most obscure. That's the flushing remonstrance. This is going way back in our colonial history. It's 1657, and it's in where you and I live, New York, but it was when New York was New Amsterdam, run by the Dutch. And this was a protest by ordinary people in the village of Flushing to Peter Stuyvesant, who ran the colony and was cracking down on Quakers.

And they said, we cannot obey this edict of yours because we would do unto others as we would have all men do unto us. Let's hang on there. This is important. We'll be right back, folks. I'm talking to Richard Brookheifer. Today is Election Day. We must stop the far-left radicals who want to fundamentally change our country. It will take proud Americans, like you, turning out to vote to beat the Democrats in the fake news media.

This election will determine if America keeps going towards the path of greatness or if the United States will descend into full-blown socialism. This is the election of our life. A vote for Republicans is a vote to save our country. Make sure you vote today. Text Metaxis, M-E-T-A-X-A-S to 880-2 to find your polling location. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to Richard Brookheiser Long with the National Review Magazine and the author of many books, Give Me Liberty, a History of America's exceptional idea being the latest. Richard, you were just talking about the flushing remonstrance. strange term until you read is that flushing is right behind me here in Queens. I was born

near Flushing and the idea that religious liberty in 1657 had a big moment long before this country was founded. Tell us more about the Flushing remonstrance because I'm fascinated with it. Well, it happens in a part of what would become the United States that was not British. This was Dutch New Netherlands. The Dutch had a flourishing colony in the middle of the eastern seaboard for about 40 years. The capital of it was New Amsterdam, which is now New York. They got as far north as Fort Orange, which is now Albany. And the last governor of this Dutch colony was a man named Peter Stuyvesant, who was capable, efficient, effective. But he was also a Martinette. and he was a bigot. He was a military man, and he was the son of a Dutch reform minister,

and he thought Calvinism is the only route to heaven. So he didn't want non-Calvinists in his colony. And he leaned on Lutherans and Jews. And then when he did that, he got his chain yanked by his employers, the Dutch West India Company. Like a lot of early colonies, this was a commercial enterprise that an investment company back in Europe was paying for and running. And so they told Stuyvesant, you know, lay off the Lutherans and Jews. We've got directors and investors back here in Amsterdam who are Lutheran and Jewish, so, you know, cut this out. And Stuyveson obeyed his employers.

Religion shows up in his domain, the brand new, very countercultural. They believe in speaking the word of God as they are inspired. That sounds like Quakers for me. wherever they happen to be. It sounds like Quakers to me. I'm not sure if that's a, who are we talking about now? We're talking about Quakers. These are Quakers, first incarnation.

And they believe that women could be equally inspired with men, which was a very shocking thing in the 17th century. So they begin to show up in Peter Stuyvesant's domain. and he doesn't quite know what to do. He turns away the first shipload of them. Then they leave two women behind who are preaching in the street, saying that the world is going to end. You have to listen to us.

So he shoes them away. Then there's a young man who continues the job. And so he whips him. He whips him almost to death until one of his subjects writes an anonymous letter and says, you know, why don't you just let this guy go? There's no point whipping him to death if you're going to put them in a work gang. So then he says, all right, no more Quakers here at all. It will be a crime for any ship to land.

Anybody who harbors Quakers, that also will be a crime. And then this provokes a remonstrance, a protest from 30 men in the village of Flushing, which was on Western Long Island, and it's still there. Now it's part of the neighborhood of Queens, but then it was a separate village. And these quite ordinary men, they signed a letter to Stuyvesant saying, we cannot obey this directive of yours. And the reason they give, the most important reason they give is biblical. They say, we would do unto others as we would have all men do unto us. Our Savior saith, this is the law and the prophets.

And what fascinated me about this is that when we are taught about the history of religious liberty in this country, It's often attributed to the Enlightenment, to thinkers like John Locke and to their followers like Thomas Jefferson. Or it's attributed to pragmatism. You know, we had so many religions here that it just makes more sense to let them all live in peace. And this is an argument that James Madison, among others, makes. But it's interesting to see this earliest expression of it is precisely on religious grounds. These men in Fleshing are telling Peter Stuyvesant, we can't obey your prohibition because the Bible tells us not to. And what moved me, particularly about it, is sticks of the guys who signed this remonstrance couldn't write their own names.

Wow. A very important marker. And then, of course, what Stuyveson did is he called in the people who actually wrote it. He interrogated them. He arrested them. You know, he cracked down. And there was no one to stop him. I mean, the only people to stop him were across the Atlantic Ocean and Holland.

So then that's the status quo for a few years. Another Quaker shows up. He keeps this guy in jail for six months. And then finally, he sends him back to Amsterdam to be tried. And then he finally gets the ruling from his bosses, look, Let these people come in. We need settlers. We don't like Quakers either, but if they want to settle here, let them do it.

And then a few years after that, the British take the colony, and it becomes New York. It's an amazing story, and people hardly ever bring up the flushing remonstrance, but because I was born in Queens, I just, I'm amazed that this seminal document comes from, you know, a place I can take the subway there. So can you, right? It's, it's an extraordinary thing. We're going to go to a break. When we come back, we'll continue our conversation with Richard Brookheiser. He's the author of Give Me Liberty a History of America's Exceptional Idea. Don't go away. Hey there, folks. We're talking to Richard Brookheiser. He's the author of Give Me Liberty, a History of America's exceptional idea. Richard, you referenced the Flushing Roman.

I have to, I always want to brag. I'm from Danbury, Connecticut. I was born in Queens, but moved to Danbury. And Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist is another one of those documents. It's not official. Sure, he was president. But it does seem to carry tremendous weight culturally and otherwise. Does that make it into year 12? It doesn't make it into my selection, but I say in the book, I could have had a B team, I could have had a C team, I could have had a D team. Because this country has been obsessed is not too strong a word. Obsessed with liberty, with trying to define it, with trying to acquire it and uphold it, you can have multiple lists.

I mean, I jotted down 12 ideas, then I came up with the 13th. Those are the 13 I have, but there could be others, certainly. Well, it is fascinating to me, really, because we've lost our appreciation for American exceptionalism generally and for religious liberty in particular. We've been so blessed with liberty and religious liberty that we take it for granted. And when it's abrogated, we don't notice or we don't care because we've just never really understood it. I think that one of the most important things about religious liberty is what you said in

the previous segment is that it really. really does come, at least by my thinking, out of the scriptures themselves. In other words, Christians from Luther onward, even though Luther didn't quite get it, he's clearly pointing in the direction of that kind of freedom. The freedom of the gospel leads to freedom of conscience, and it leads to these kinds of things. It seems inevitable. So if anybody ever accuses me of being parochially Christian, I say, well, here's the problem. If I'm parochially Christian, my Christianity says, I need to stand up for you. I need to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. But I think that that idea, and I think you touched on it, is also at the heart of what

it means to be American and what American exceptionalism is. We are not chest beating nationalists. We can argue about the term nationalism, but there's something about this country that has always, we've always existed as a shining city on a hill. We're here for others to look at us, to want to become like us. We want to give away our ideas concerning liberty for free. I assume that's a big part of your book. Yes. And you do find as I go or not were often generated by religious people. Another episode in a document that I look at is the Constitution of the New York Manumission Society. This is where I've been. begin to treat slavery, which is the great failure of liberty in American history, the institution

of chattel slavery and its long existence here until the 13th Amendment. But the New York Manumission Society was founded in 1785 in New York State. And I wanted to pick that to remind people that slavery was not just a southern thing. In 1776, all the 13 states had slavery. All of them did. A number of them got rid of it during the Revolutionary War. After the revolution, there was a push in New York State to get rid of it there. And New York City had more slaves than any city in America except for Charleston, South

Carolina. So slavery was an institution. that was bred into the life of New York State. There were some people with huge estates worked by slaves and indentured servants, but also small farmers, artisans, they would have one or two slaves to help them on their farms or in their shops.

It was just something in our life. So there was an interesting alliance of two groups of people who founded this Manumission Society. One group was the revolutionary elite. You had the governor of the state, George Clinton, veteran of the war. You had John Jay, the great diplomat and spymaster. You had Alexander Hamilton, an up-and-coming star, also a veteran of the war. But the other group

that helped found this organization were Quakers in New York City. And the Quaker religion had ruled in the middle of the 18th century that no Quakers could own slaves. So the whole religion had become anti-slavery by this point. So you had this oddball alliance between the elite of the state and these political outsiders, the Quakers. They founded a Manumission Society, which had several goals. One was to stop slave catchers who would pick up free black people. You know, and this did happen. People would come looking for escaped slaves if they couldn't find the escape slaves, these professional slave catchers would just as soon seize free black people and say, well, that's just as good. You're going to live the rest of your life and slavery.

We're taking you back to your new owner. The Manu Mission Society also founded schools to educate the free black population of New York on the grounds that people who are educated will be better able to defend themselves, to defend their rights, to not be fooled by slave catchers. And then they lobbied to end slavery in the state. It didn't happen until 1827. July 4th, 1827, that's when the last slaves in New York State are free. So you can look at that and say, well, that took a long time. I mean, that was 42 years. But you can also look at that and say, yes, but then New York State is a free state. And when the country pulls apart in 1861, New York is going to be on the side of freedom,

not on the side of slavery. And someone had to make that happen. You know, these things are not automatic. Liberty is not a perpetual motion machine. People have to work for it. I wrote a book, and forgive me for referencing my books, but we're talking about these subjects. I wrote a book about William Wolverford, and I really was astounded. at the Christian roots of abolition.

I mean, there's no denying it that whether you watch Stephen Spielberg's film Amistad, I mean, here in the United States and certainly in Europe under Wilberforce, it was the outspoken Christians, the evangelicals, the Quakers, who were leading the charge against slavery. And that, again, fascinates me because certainly you can be a secularist who's against slavery, but most of the leaders did it because of their faith, which is yet another reason to talk about religious liberty generally. We're going to go to a break. Folks, I'm talking to Richard Brookheiser. His new book is Give Me Liberty, a history of America's exceptional idea. He's written

many other books, and I hope he will come back to talk about some of those. We'll be right back. It's night you know I couldn't sleep, wouldn't sleep, tossing and turning about. Thinking about the way it's been, hey, it's been so hard to figure out. We go on sneaking around smoky places. Folks talking to Richard Brookheiser. You may know him from the National Review. You may know him as the author of many books. what was the title of your book on Washington?

The first one was founding father rediscovering George Washington. That was the first biography I wrote. Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking about. I know I read that some years ago. The new book is Give Me Liberty. What have we not touched on that we can touch on in the few minutes we have left? Well, I think I want to conclude with the story that I ended the book with. This anecdote is about Ulysses Grant.

After he's president, he takes a tour of the story. the world, and he's a celebrity, he's welcomed everywhere. So when he comes to Berlin, he has a meeting with Otto and Bismarck, who has just put together the German Empire. So here you have the two great nationalists of the middle of the 19th century. You have Grant who suppressed a rebellion in the world's greatest republic, and you have Bismarck who put together this brand new empire in the heart of Europe. And they have a little chat to, you know, and they don't know each other. so it's not very deep. But then Bismarck brings up the Civil War, and he says, well, that was a very sad thing

because you were fighting your own people. That's always the worst. And Grant says, yes, it had to be done. And Bismarck says, well, to save the union, of course. And Grant says, end to end slavery. And Bismarck says, well, but wasn't saving the union the most important thing. And Grant said, we thought so at first, but we saw that it couldn't be saved without ending slavery. And slavery had to be ended to preserve the union. So you can see nationalism in the 20th

century is like train tracks here. The Bismarck track is going to go on, you know, just union. That's it. The grant track is union, but it must have liberty in it. And I think that's a very fateful conversation. Well, I mean, union, it seems to me, is meaningless unless there's some value behind the idea of it. I mean, you know, China is all for union with some parts of the world that aren't for union. So that is interesting. I wasn't aware of that grant quote. I'm dying to know. Did Bismarck speak English? How did that work? He did speak English. Yes, he spoke English, and we know about this because a reporter accompanied Grant on the trip and took notes. Well, I think, you know, when you talk about the exceptionalism of America, it seems, to my mind, undeniably to be a moral issue. We believe in certain things here, and sometimes we're slow, but we believe in what is right. We believe in liberty. So when we say, you know, even when the president says make America great again or America first, I interpret that to mean that. To mean that,

we've got to get those things right, but not for our own sake, but for the sake of the whole world, that the Liberty Statue of Liberty holding that torch up, it is for the whole world. And if we don't get it right, as Reagan got it right in the speech, which I know is in your book, if we don't stand for these things, who will stand for them? So I'm sorry, we're out of time, but Richard Brookheiser, just great to have a few minutes with you. The book is, Give Me Liberty, a History of America's exceptional idea. I hope we can wheedle you into coming back and talking about some of your other books. Congratulations on this one and thanks for your time. Thank you, Eric.