Liberty + Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty + Leadership
Relearning American Political Thought
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Roger welcomes Samuel Goldman, associate professor of humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education and TFAS faculty member, for a conversation about American political thought, civic education and the ideas that sustain a free society. Goldman reflects on his academic journey, his work teaching TFAS students in Washington and his commitment to helping young people engage seriously with the founding principles of the United States.
They discuss Goldman’s approach to teaching the Declaration of Independence by reading it closely and treating it as a carefully constructed argument about the purposes of government. Goldman explains how studying Jefferson’s writings, “The Federalist Papers” and “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin” helps students understand both the ideals and the imperfections of the American founding. They also explore the growth of civic centers such as the Hamilton School, the decline of civic literacy in K-12 education, the role of religion in public life, the influence of Adam Smith and how the founders might assess the condition of the republic 250 years later.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today. I'm your host, Roger Reed. I'm excited to welcome Dr. Samuel Goldman to Liberty and Leadership. Dr. Goldman is an associate professor of humanities at the University of Florida's Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. He also teaches American political thought for our TFAS academic internship programs here in Washington, D.C. Sam's research examines political theory and intellectual history with a particular focus on the religious sources of American national identity. He is the author of several books, including After Nationalism, Being American in a Divided Age, and God's Country, Christian Zionism in America. Sam has contributed pieces to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Sam, welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for having me, Roger.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let me begin by asking you just to give a little background on yourself. Maybe you could tell listeners kind of where you grew up and whether any of those early experiences led you to this academic career you're on now.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I grew up in and around New York City and spent high school in New Jersey. And my main interest as an older kid or very young man was actually music. I was in the punk rock scene. It's hard to believe now I know. But when I was 19 or 20, I had a terrible realization, which is that punk rock was passe. You could shave your head, you could wear a leather jacket, but no one was really provoked by this around the turn of the 21st century. But I realized that if you really want to ruin family Thanksgiving, what you should do is wear a blazer and a tie and talk about Reagan or Milton Friedman. So I realized that was what I needed to do. I changed my look and began to pursue the course that has carried me this far.
SPEAKER_01:And you got a PhD in government from Harvard? I did. And who were, if any, intellectual influences that you worked with at Harvard?
SPEAKER_00:Well, one of them, of course, is the great Harvey Mansfield, who retired a couple of years ago at the age, I think, of 91, and whose new book I just reviewed for The Wall Street Journal. The book is a compendium of lectures that he gave for many years at Harvard in the History of Modern Political Philosophy survey course. I was a teaching assistant for that course when I was in graduate school, and I really enjoyed returning to these lectures, which I only dimly understood at the time. I think I understand them slightly better now, but certainly that was one of the formative influences on me. But Mansfield was not the only one. I spent a lot of time talking to other political theorists in the government department, including Nancy Rosenblum, who's a scholar of civic association, and Michael Rosen, who's a scholar of German idealism. With regard to what I learned from Rosen, I have sort of the opposite experience. At the time, I thought I understood something about Hegel and Kant, but now I'm quite certain that I don't.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's uh a great path. Uh, Harvey Mansfield, aside from his great academic accomplishments, of course, is probably best known for the fact, the story that he gives two grades out, the grade a student deserves to get for a paper or a test, and then the grade that he has to give out because of Harvard's grade inflation standards. I don't know if that was something you experienced.
SPEAKER_00:He had he had given up that practice by the time that I arrived. But I imagine that he's uh feeling vindicated now that the Harvard faculty have just issued a report recommending that the number of A's be capped at 20%, reflecting a complaint that he has been raising since I think the 1960s, but had always been ridiculed for doing. So sometimes in the long run, people can recognize that you were right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we've got some interesting things to talk about. First, I'd like to talk about the fact that you're leaving your current position. You've left your current position at George Washington University, and you've joined Hamilton College at the University of Florida and will begin teaching there this fall. Can you talk a little bit about the Hamilton College program at Florida?
SPEAKER_00:I will lightly correct you as professors like to do. It's the Hamilton School officially, not Hamilton College, but that's just a bit of academic um jargon. The important thing is that the Hamilton School is a new unit established in 2023, devoted to teaching and scholarship in the principles of Western civilization and a free society. When it was established, it had a faculty of three. The faculty has now grown to over 50, and I am told it is going to continue to expand to something like 70. We offer four majors, and again, I am told something like 3,000 students take our classes. So this is really an exciting development on a scale that is virtually unprecedented to add so many faculty, so many new majors, so many new classes. And although they were very generous to me at GW, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to put into practice some of the arguments that I and others have been talking about for a long time.
SPEAKER_01:And this is one of a number of other similar types of programs, schools, as you call it, at other public universities that have been established over the last decade to try to put more emphasis on civics and classical education and a liberal arts education. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's exactly right. So they're known as civic centers collectively, even though some of them, like Hamilton, are described as schools or in different ways. But they're all intended to address a real deficit in American higher education, which is not just civic education, but civic education in a broad sense. You know, when we talk about civic education, people often think about sort of textbook stuff, you know, how many branches of government are there, how a bill becomes a law, how is the president selected, and those things are important. But there's less and less attention in universities to the history and practice of the ideas of constitutional government, individual responsibility, reflective patriotism that distinguish our political tradition in the United States, and I think more generally in the West from others, that existing departments and units just weren't doing. It's not a new complaint. This goes like Professor Mansfield and Great Inflation. People have been saying this for a long time, but over the last 10 years, and really especially just in the last few years, legislatures have started to act and have passed statutes and appropriations that compel universities to establish these things whether they like them or not. And I genuinely believe, looking beyond Hamilton, this is the most exciting thing to have happened in American higher education in a long time.
SPEAKER_01:Will this include both undergraduates and a graduate program?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, there are plans underway to unveil a PhD program. I think they're going to call it History of Ideas, but at the moment, Hamilton is undergraduate only, offering both the four majors I mentioned and a number of general education courses that are open to students taking any major at any part of the University of Florida.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's outstanding. So the influence will be beyond just the school itself. This is our hope. Yeah. And given your background, are you going to be teaching some of those courses that relate to the history of the ideas, some of the influences on the founders in terms of the Aaron? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00:They haven't told me yet exactly what they want me to do. So I can't answer precisely, but I would imagine so. And I should say that it's something I really welcome doing. One of the famous pathologies of higher education is that there are a lot of incentives for faculty to teach only in their narrow specialty rather than the kind of general courses that many students need to make sense of their place in the world. I really like teaching those courses. I think they're one of the most important things that we can do as professors. So I hope, although I don't know, that I'll be assigned some of the general education responsibilities.
SPEAKER_01:Well, at TFAS for several years or a number of years, you've been teaching a course on American political thought for our students who come from all over the country and internationally, of course. What is kind of the focus of that course? And who are some of the thinkers you try to expose students to when you teach that course?
SPEAKER_00:So that course is framed around the Declaration of Independence. And we begin by just reading it together, not only line by line, but word for word. And this is an experience that very few students have had. All of them have, of course, heard the Declaration of Independence. Many of them can recite portions of it, usually the second paragraph, but they've never really paid close attention to it, and they don't have an appreciation for it as an argument, as a very finely wrought argument about the origins and purposes of government, as well as applying those general principles to the specific situation of the former British colonies and newly independent states. So we start just by reading that. Then we look at some of the specific lines and try to decipher what might have influenced them, the implications that were drawn by other American figures, or the significance that they have for us. So, for example, when we get to the famous line, all men are created equal, we also read parts of Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia, where he reflects on and tries somewhat reluctantly to justify slavery, which is so obviously at odds with the claim of the Declaration. And one of the effects of that is that it shows students that, contrary to what they often think, you know, the founders and framers were not stupid. They were not hypocrites who simply said one thing and did another. They were human and they were flawed, but they were profoundly thoughtful people who were trying to figure out the moral and political significance of their choices. I think and hope that students come away with a much deeper appreciation for the American political tradition than usually they had coming in.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I have firsthand evidence that they do. You may have heard this story, but last late last summer at the end of the program, I hosted a lunch at TFAS with about a dozen students and two donors who were supporting their scholarships. And one of the donors asked these students, I'd like to go around the room and have each of you talk about your highlight of the summer. And two of those students said it was reading the Declaration of Independence in Professor Goldman's class. And one of them I remember saying that he said, I don't know if I'd ever read the Declaration of Independence before. He said maybe in seventh grade we read some of it. But to go through it over the course of two days in the classroom, looking at it word for word, he said was just the best experience he could have had in the summer. Both of these students were saying we didn't just skim it. You know, it wasn't a question of memorizing it. We read it slowly, carefully, line by line, and as you said, and and with things behind the words like Jefferson's notes on Virginia. So that is something that's important, I think, for every student who attends one of our programs to do is spend time with a professor in the classroom going through the Declaration of Independence.
SPEAKER_00:You know, sometimes the things that seem most familiar are actually the most unfamiliar. Because we're used to them, we never really look at them. And one of the things I try to do in my teaching for TFAS and in my teaching for universities is to force students to really look at something they think they know. And usually the discovery is that it's much more interesting than they had assumed.
SPEAKER_01:What other kind of foundational texts like such as the Declaration, are there others that you focus on in the class?
SPEAKER_00:We read not all. Students are relieved to discover not all, but many of the Federalist papers, which I try to present to them less as an explanation of why the Constitution says what it says. We know from Madison's notes that often the arguments that were made in the convention are different to those that appear in the Federalist, but as the strongest possible case for the Constitution. And once again, students find that these arguments that seem so familiar are much richer and more interesting than they'd suppose. We also read, um, and this is one of my favorite parts of the course, parts of Ben Franklin's autobiography. I see there's you have a bust of Franklin uh just over your shoulder. And that's useful because I think it depicts for us the emergence of a distinctively American character. Franklin is the first person who becomes famous around the world for being American. And in the autobiography, we not only see some of those characteristics that came to be recognized as distinctively American, we also see how he encourages others to adopt them. And one of the things I like to tell students about the autobiography is that it is among the first examples of what I think is the distinctively American literary genre, which is the self-help book.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You still see these things at airports, but Franklin won't wrote one of the first. And I think that's not an accident, that there's a connection between this idea of self-helps and self-improvement and the version of the American character that Franklin came to embody.
SPEAKER_01:Is it true he also truly wanted the turkey to be the American symbol?
SPEAKER_00:I I don't know. I don't know how serious he was about that. One of the things that is fun and also challenging about teaching Franklin is that he was a deeply ironic writer. And partly because they're unfamiliar with 18th century English and partly because he has this great reputation as a sage, students don't always perceive that. They need a little help to see how funny Franklin is. So I don't know how serious he was about wanting the turkey, but certainly one of the things that's distinctive about Franklin is his devotion to commerce, not just in the narrow economic sense, but in the broader way it was understood in the 18th century, exchange between people, exchange of goods, certainly, services, but also ideas and language and inventions. He was committed to commerce as the bond between and among peoples. And he worried that the eagle, which is the national symbol we got, represented war and violence.
SPEAKER_01:Well, this is the year of America 250. In fact, TFS has a conference on March 11th and 12th in Washington to celebrate America 250 and talk about civic education.
SPEAKER_00:I think I will even be there.
SPEAKER_01:You'll be speaking. That's right. Where do you think the framers come down in terms of their expectation that this country would still be here in 250 years and the extent to which we would have kept the republic, as Franklin's words supposedly were? And there probably was a diversity of opinion among them. But can you talk a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_00:On the one hand, I think they would be pretty pleased that we are still around. And I think most of them would have been flattered and a bit embarrassed by the fact that they have become founders, you know, founding fathers with capital letters, because of course they were human beings and they were wary. Some of them warned, you know, don't make me a symbol, don't put up statues of me. And of course, now we we do all of those. On the other hand, I think they would be very concerned about the condition of our republic. Certainly they would be astonished by the vulgarity of our public culture. I mean, they they thought they knew what a vulgar public culture was, but they had no idea. But also politically and constitutionally, I think what they would notice first and would worry most about is the retreat of Congress, which they really saw as first among equals of the three branches of government from public deliberation. And I think that they might say something like: the constitutional crisis that we face is not a particular act of any official or body, but that we have two functional branches in a three-branch system. Being the executive branch, the executive and the judiciary. And I think they would worry that we might follow the example of Rome, which to them was the symbol of the collapse of a republic, that having lost its virtue, having lost its deliberative institutions, it sank into a weird combination of private license and public tyranny.
SPEAKER_01:Many of them were students of that. They knew about that experience in Rome.
SPEAKER_00:Very much so. The Roman example was always before their eyes and is one of the great sources of American political thought, especially in that early founding period. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I was at the Library of Congress on Saturday, just a few days ago, and I went through what they have there as Jefferson's library. Much of it is books that he donated or sold, actually, to the Library of Congress. Some of it had been burned down and they're replacing it to the extent they can find the same edition and replace it. But I uh put my eyes on a three-volume set of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which is also 250 years ago this year.
SPEAKER_00:By coincidence, 1776 as well.
SPEAKER_01:Do you happen to know what kind of influence Adam Smith might have had on the framers of our government? I was told once that his book was a bestseller in the colonies. Of course, that wouldn't have influenced the declaration because it came out the same year, but perhaps the constitution, the drafting of the constitution, the belief in a commercial republic or commerce, but I don't know if you have thoughts about that. I'm curious about the question.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know about the influence of the wealth of nations. I do know that the theory of moral sentiments was very widely read and deeply respected.
SPEAKER_01:Which was 1754, I think.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. 1754. I think looking for the influence of Smith or ideas like Smith, you'd be more likely to find them in Hamilton than in Jefferson. Because in the early Republic, although Jefferson modifies his views a little bit later, it's really Hamilton who is the advocate of a commercial republic that will have industrial development based on the rational division of labor, which is really the core idea in Smith. And Jefferson was famously ambivalent about that. As president, he came around to a lot of those ideas, but he also always had a sort of romantic attachment to the independent farmer. And that's, according to Smith, that's not how nations get rich.
SPEAKER_01:You've written several books that I mentioned earlier. Your book, After Nationalism, explores what it means to be an American in a divided age today. What inspired you to write that book? Can you talk a little bit about the theme you developed there?
SPEAKER_00:I started the book soon after President Trump had been elected to his first term when nationalism was on the agenda again. It had been thought for a long time, at least by the kinds of people who hang around universities, that, you know, nationalism belongs to the past, it's atavistic, it's violent, it's all over. But suddenly nationalism and especially American nationalism seemed to be back. But I was frustrated by a lot of the conversation about nationalism, because it seemed to revolve around thumbs up or thumbs down, nationalism good or nationalism bad. And my thought, which governs the book, is well, you know, there are different kinds of nationalism, and there are different ways of understanding American national identity. And none of them, I think, are purely good or purely bad. They have different advantages and disadvantages. So rather than arguing with each other about whether nationalism with a capital N is good or bad, let's try to think a little bit more carefully and historically about different versions of nationalism. And what I suggest in the book is that in American history, there are three master symbols of different ideas of nationalism that I call covenant, crucible, and creed. I conclude that our debate about nationalism is less about the concept in general, but which of those symbols governs what it means to be American.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, we don't have time to dig too deeply into that, but that's a good teaser for people to get a copy of your book and read it. Crucible Creed and Covenant. Covenant is still a very timely topic as we deal with questions of immigration and other issues that are floating through our public square right now. You also wrote God's Country about the role of religion in public life. And I think that's a very important topic. What are your thoughts about you know the framers? I think most of them thought our system was intended for moral and religious people. Right. These are Adams, John Adams' famous words. Aaron Ross Powell Right. And and we've seen certainly a great drop in church attendance. As you said, our culture has become our framers would be worried about the vulgarization of our culture. Talk about the role of religion in our culture and the theme of that book.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Ross Powell So that book is particularly focused on the origins of what people now call Christian Zionism. So the idea that Christians have a religious obligation to support or promote the establishment and later existence of some kind of Jewish political entity. For a long time, people weren't sure, should it be an independent state or not in the biblical promised land. And what I argue in the book is that that idea really goes all the way back to the Puritans. It comes out of the English Reformation. This is not something that was made up by Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell in the 1970s and 1980s. But of course, that gets at some of these broader questions about the role of religion in American politics and American public life. And I think your characterization is correct, which is that most of the founders assumed that we would have a basically religious and really basically Christian, sort of non-denominational, small L liberal Christian culture that would support Republican government. And I think it's probably true that many of them, maybe not Franklin, who it was, this is one of the areas where he's very careful and very ironic, but probably Adams or Washington would worry that not just the retreat of religious belief, but of religious teaching and association and organization leaves us vulnerable to all sorts of corrupting influences.
SPEAKER_01:There was just this week some controversy, which I don't know if you caught it, but a Trump appointee was expressing a view that because she was a Catholic, recently converted to Catholicism, she could not be a Zionist who supported the State of Israel. Right. Did you follow that a little bit?
SPEAKER_00:I unfortunately She hadn't read your book. She had not, well, as turned out in the hearing, she also had not read Nostraetate, the great statement of the Second Vatican Council, that addresses these matters at length. So, you know, it's not my place to tell Catholics or any Christians what they should believe, since I'm not, and I don't think I do that in my book. But even though the Catholic Church has a historically complicated relationship with Zionism since the 1960s, largely due to the influence of American clergy, this is one of the points I make, that the reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Zionism is partly the result of American influence and responding to some of these deeper currents in American history, the church has at least learned to live with Israel. And some statements, for example, by I forget exactly what title he assumed, but at one time Pope Benedict go beyond that in endorsing the legitimacy of a Jewish state. So, you know, under my definition, that's Christian Zionism.
SPEAKER_01:Shifting now to your role as a professor, you've you've been teaching in the classroom at George Washington University here at TFAS. Do you find that the students who come into your classroom are I mean, you get a pretty good level student generally at these schools and in our programs, but are they well prepared for a college education in terms of their civic literacy, in terms of their understanding of American history, or have we failed to adequately teach these ideas in the K-12?
SPEAKER_00:There's a real range. So there are some students who are extremely well prepared. There are others, probably the majority, who are not. And I do think, and you know, K-12 teachers have a very difficult job and are under many constraints. So I don't want to be taken to suggest that they're not doing what they should. But often the students who are very well prepared have done their own reading or are pursuing their own interests rather than drawing on what they learned in classes. So it's hard to generalize. You know, this is a big country with a lot of schools in it. And that can be very frustrating because whatever generalization you offer, there are going to be exceptions. I won't say we are completely failing, but I'm pretty confident that we could do a better job.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell Would you say there are any areas where students, maybe not just students, but the public has a misunderstanding about American history or particularly our founding era?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell I'll go back to a question you just asked, and I've also done some work with teachers. So I know where this is coming from. But one of what I would consider the myths of early American history is that the revolution was inspired by and that the declaration in particular reflects a sort of deism. And there are elements of that, to be sure, especially if you only read the first two paragraphs. But if you go to the end of the Declaration, and this is one of the things I point out to TFAS students, you find appeals to the supreme judge of the world and to divine providence, which don't sound very deistic if you uh understand deism to mean belief in a sort of God who made the world and then goes away, is no longer involved in our in human affairs. So that's an example of one of the ideas that, you know, has some basis. It's not just made up, but has been exaggerated and through familiarity has lost its contact with the sources. And that's something I like to point out and ask students to think about when they read the Declaration. What is it saying here about the human relationship to God?
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell And I would guess many are surprised at the many references that appear to God.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell They are indeed, because once again, and this is an area where I think there really is a failure of civic education. We like reading snippets, a couple of sentences, a couple of paragraphs. I think that tendency has been exacerbated by the testing regime that encouraged very short passages. Not just talking about the Declaration of Independence, not just talking about politics. We need to read more complete texts from beginning to end, looking at every word and thinking about how they fit together. Because if you don't, you're getting a very partial account. And that I think is what often happens when people see the reference to nature's God at the beginning, but then don't look to the end to see the appeal to a supreme judge and providential guidance.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation. I've enjoyed it. Thank you, Sam Goldman, for joining me today. Thank you for the work you do teaching for TFAS. I think the program you're going to be involved in at the Hamilton School is going to help rectify many of these problems because I would assume many of those 3,000 students that take courses there and the students who major in your four majors, some will go into teaching. Some will go on to get advanced degrees and teach at the college level, higher education, many in the K through 12 space. So we need more of that. And uh I imagine it's been a challenge to some extent for the Hamilton College to find the faculty to bring down there. You've said you've hired 50 already. That's right. But are there enough good PhDs out there to grow?
SPEAKER_00:Well, we certainly hope so. And I do think that the message is getting out to graduate programs that there is demand for this kind of teaching and scholarship. And I hope that by providing a market incentive, we may even be able to influence graduate education at institutions beyond the University of Florida. But there are more of us than people might expect. And I'll just mention briefly that some very distinguished scholars, such as Alan Gelzo, the Lincoln Scholar, and James Hankins, who has just left Harvard to come to the University of Florida, have decided to join us, even though they have had eminent careers and they have secure jobs. So it's not just new PhDs who are contributing to this enterprise. It's also some of the most important teachers and scholars in the country.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we wish you well there, and uh you can count on us continuing to invite you to speak at TFAST programs and do teaching for us in the future.
SPEAKER_00:It's always my pleasure. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. My guest today, Sam Goldman, thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at TFAS.org. And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Hodville Media. I'm your host, Roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things learning.
