WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Tom Del Beccaro: The Lessons of the American Civilization

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Tom Del Bacarro is a former GOP Chairman from California and a former U.S. Senate candidate who ran against Kamala Harris back in 2018. His new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, is out at the end of July. He joins WRFH to discuss the American story from its earliest and tenuous beginnings to its confident rise in becoming the World’s most dominant civilization. 

This is Michaela Estruth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. With me today is Tom Del Bacaro. He is a former GOP chairman from California and ran for U.S. Senate against Kamala Harris back in 2018. He writes for publications including Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax, The Daily Caller, and USA Today. His new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, its confident rise and the possible warning signs of its decline, is being released at the end of July. Mr. Del Bacaro, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me on, and actually pre-orders for the book are available now at Tom Dell, T-O-M-D-E-L.com. Great. Thanks for sharing that.

To begin, would you be able to tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into the work in writing that you now do? Sure. I originally went to school to be an architect major, but I discovered that I was better-suited for verbal skills, and I went to Cal Berkeley as an English major, and then I became a lawyer. My father had been involved in politics for a very long time and introduced me to politics when I was seven years old and met former President Nixon, and I became very interested in politics and writing. and today I make over 400 radio and TV appearances a year all over the world from the Middle East to Hawaii, and writing books became an early passion of mine.

I wrote a book called The Divided Era, which explains how the more government decides, the more it divides. That was actually my third book, and The Lessons of the American Civilization, is my fourth. Okay. And I was going to ask about that, that I read in a review that this new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, builds upon your previous book, The Divided Era. Could you talk a little bit about that book and how the two are connected? Well, power centrals over time and those in power like to keep the power that they get. That's what I try and do in my books is to get people.

to understand how human nature reacts to certain situations. And in America today, unlike what our founders desired, government's at the very center of our lives. So when Thomas Jefferson was president, government was but 2% of the American economy. Today, if you throw in regulations, it's more like 45 percent. And so everything we do is impacted by government, whether that issue is taxes, regulations, or spending. And for every decision government makes, it picks a winner and a loser. And there's a competition to be that winner and a loser. There's a competition to be the party handing it out. And so the divided era simply recognizes the human dynamic, the historical dynamic that every government decision, every dollar spent, actually increases division.

And how did we grow from where we were at the founding to where we are today in terms of government involvement and decisions? You know, that's a great question, which I address in the lessons of the American civilization. you probably heard the phrase that certain Democrats use saying never waste a crisis. That was one of the Immanuels. I think Rahm Emanuel who said that. And the reality of that is throughout history, politicians react to crisis and issues by trying to often try to buy votes, sometimes actually,

to helping people. And if you look through American history in the major crises that occurred throughout our history, the politicians have used the government to respond. Our very constitution was a response to the fighting among the states under the Articles of Confederation. Some believe like Hamilton that we were actually going to have wars between the states. And so they consolidated power behind the federal government to take away certain rights and powers of the states over which was causing these fights and put it into federal government. The Federal Reserve, which everybody is so concerned about today, was a response to banking crisis. The New Deal was a response to the Great Depression, never mind the fact that the Great Depression was largely caused by bad government policies.

So we find throughout history that government power grows in response to crises, doesn't necessarily fix the crises, and then the government power remains. This is Michaela Estruth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. With me today is Tom Del Bacaro. He is releasing a new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, its Confident Rise, and the Possible Warning Signs of its decline. So, Mr. Del Bacaro, on your website, it breaks down certain topics that the book discusses, and one of them talks about you comparing America

to other civilizations in terms of it being exceptional. So could you talk a little bit about that, how America compares to other civilizations in history? Sure. The type of writing I do is called historical philosophy, which basically talks about how civilizations come together, rise and fall. And when we talk about that, we always need to ask compared to others or compared to what. and the civilizations like the great Roman Empire came together. It had characteristics on the way up and characteristics on the way down. So did the ancient Greek civilization and all civilizations.

And so the question always to be asked is, how are we the same and in what ways are we different? And what can we learn from those differences? And that's what I attempt to do with the book. Now, American civilization, we had a different beginning than some because we came to this land, occupied, of course, by other civilizations, indigenous people, which were mistakenly called Indians because Columbus believed he had reached India. But the point being that we came here without the column shackles, if you will, of other civilizations, people came here to pursue their own freedoms, economic and religious.

And at the time that occurred, it was a very classless society. And what I mean by that is if you had come from England, there was a king, there were lords, there were aristocrats all the way down to peasants. We didn't have that in America. Economic and political power was very spread out. And what we have found over the centuries is in connection with growing government, we now have a society where those in Washington, D.C. are exerting enormous power over the rest of America.

which is very different from how the country started. And you touched on this briefly in comparing America at her founding and then the growth in government to today. How can you continue talking about that? How do you think the founders, if they were alive today, would respond to the country they set up? Well, the reality is, a couple of realities. Power centrals over time and those in power like to keep the power that they get. And so we live in an age now where those in power are protecting themselves from the American public. This is a normal dynamic in world history.

It's not unusual to America, but it should be incredibly concerning to America because in the process, the Republic takes pretty extreme body blows. and it's very bad for the country. And what I mean by this is today you are witnessing the FBI and the DOJ, and I've written about this over the years at Forbes and at Fox. The DOJ and the FBI are determining who can really be president and who can't. The selective prosecutions that they are using and the methodologies within the DOJ and the FBI make it harder for those want to combat Washington and its growing power versus those who support it. And so we live in this age where I say that those in power are protecting themselves from the

American public. This is Michaela Estruth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. With me today is Tom Del Baccaro. He is releasing a new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization. confident rise and the possible warning signs of its decline. So Mr. Del Bacaro, I actually, I'm a student here at Hillsdale, and I took a class in the fall on the Roman Empire. And in an earlier question, you were talking about comparing America to different civilizations. And in this class, we talked a lot about, is America similar to the Roman Republic that the founders often

imitated or tried to model upon or is she now an empire? And I was wondering if I could hear your thoughts on that, if you came across that in your research at all. Well, certainly there's a lot of commonalities. You know, civilizations tend to be stoic and hardworking on the way up and less so as they decline amidst their wealth. And what you saw with the Roman Republic was, of course, very hardworking, very stoic in the beginning. But then when Rome itself became ultra-wealthy, the number of Romans, or those in the Italian region, their birth rates weren't very high. They didn't want to work as much during their wealth. And Roman ported slaves that it had captured in its battles and displaced the working class who wound up in many circumstances of the equivalent

of welfare programs, and that caused great consternation. Today, Americans are very wealthy. We spend over 50% of our money on non-essential items, the highest rate in the world. and today so many people are coming across the border legal and otherwise willing to do or actually doing work that is displacing American workers. The May jobs reports showed that 667,000, I think, American citizens lost jobs, whereas those who immigrants came here picked up 200-something jobs. So you have a similarity like that. You have at the Roman Republic ended in a flurry of class warfare. If you look at the Grakai family and their deaths and what they propose to do with redistribution, you find similar class warfare in America today.

By the way, the Greek democracy ended amidst class warfare. So there are issues like that. the Roman Empire expanded greatly and then retracted, in part because it could no longer finance how far-flung it had become. That's a normal arc for civilization. The American civilization, someone argued, are having similar circumstances to that today. Interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I appreciate it.

It was a question that's been looming in the back of my mind for a while. now. This is Michaela Estruth on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. With me today is Tom Del Bacaro. He is releasing a new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, Its Confident Rise, and the Possible Warning Signs of Its Decline. So diving into the subtitle about On Your Book, you call It's Confident Rise and the Possible Warning Signs of its Decline. I was wondering if you could talk about those warning signs and maybe the history of them when you would date a decline to and then the trajectory of the decline today. Well, one last similarity between the Roman Republican ours is the loss of public virtue. The great Edward Gibbon in his book about the fall of Rome talked about how the Romans in their

rise and at their great empire, there was this public virtue, meaning the willingness of those to to support the realm and the empire and did things for the good of the empire. Today in America, one of our warning signs is the level of criticism that the Republic faces. At the beginning of the civilization, people believe in a cause and in their country. And the American cause was freedom of religion and opportunity. Today you see dramatic criticism of that largely on the left, criticizing that the United States doesn't provide opportunity. Criticism that the United States didn't provide enough opportunity at its start, and therefore

it was illegitimate. But never did you see in America this prior to the late 1800s, this concerted criticism of the United States as a place in the world. You had its great leaders like Lincoln talk about how the United States was the last best hope in the world. You had Washington talk about how it is an example for a future job. generations. Today, there's withering criticism about America and its institutions. So if the civilization is born in belief and dies in doubt, and they often do, certainly America was born in belief, and one warning sign is the level of doubt about America today. When you were talking earlier about your book just in general, I was thinking of Gibbons and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

So I appreciate that comparison and you referencing him. And I was wondering, as we've talked about civilizations rising and falling throughout history, is there any way for Americans today to stop that decline? Or is it just kind of a natural part of history that we have to let unfold? You ask a great and important question. The great historian Arnold Toynbee counseled that civilizations don't depend. of their own existence, in effect, he said, because it's made up of wills, the will of people. And civilizations have faced challenges in the past and responded to it.

And often that takes the form of a great leader coming in any particular circumstances and rallying a people. And that has happened throughout history as well. Remember, the Roman Republic may well have ended, but it was 400 years before the decline and perhaps the sack of Rome and otherwise in the late 400s. So the question for America today is, does it learn from the past? Does it come to understand that government is not the answer to everything and that we turn around certain dynamics? And what do I mean by that? Well, if you look at Argentina today, You have a president there who is dramatically cutting government spending, and the inflation rate has dropped from 25% to 4, and a difference is being made.

You look in Sweden, which had government spending and regulations around 70%, and they have driven that down below 50%. So there is, as I say in the book, history is no more a straight line than the emotions of our day, and great leaders in history have remade the world's maps or rallied a nation from Jonah Barth to to Napoleon just within France. And so that possibility always exists. Well, Mr. Delbecaro, I don't have any other questions. Would you mind reminding us where we can presave the book and then also any final thoughts that you have?

Sure. Thanks so much for having me. on, and people can go to Tom Dell, T-O-M-D-E-L.com, and you can get my columns there, but you can also order both books, the divided era, and hopefully pre-order the lessons of the American civilization. And, you know, my goal in life is to provide people with understanding, the value of knowing that virtually, as Thomas Sol would say, every crazy idea in the world has been tried in the past, and we should learn from those type of things. Thanks so very much.

Thank you, Mr. Del Bacaro. I really appreciate it. That was Tom Del Bacaro, author of the new book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, its confident rise and the possible warning signs of its decline. It will be released at the end of July. This is Michaela Estruth, and you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.