The Making of the American Mind

Roger welcomes Dr. Matthew Spalding, Kirby professor in constitutional government and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College, for a conversation about the ideas and intellectual traditions that shaped the Declaration of Independence. Drawing from his latest book, “The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence,” Spalding explains how the American founding was influenced by classical philosophy, the Christian tradition and centuries of debate about law, liberty and self-government. 

They discuss the philosophical roots of the Declaration and the influence of thinkers such as Cicero, Aristotle, John Locke and Richard Hooker. Spalding also explores how sermons, pamphlets and debates in the Continental Congress helped shape public understanding during the revolutionary period. Additional topics include the role of natural law in American political thought, the founders’ views on religion and liberty, debates surrounding slavery and the Declaration, and the importance of teaching younger generations the true story of America’s founding. The conversation also looks ahead to the upcoming America 250 celebrations and the opportunity to renew public understanding of the nation’s founding principles.

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.

Transcript

Welcome And Matthew Spaulding’s Work

SPEAKER_01 0:00

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 Reim. I'm excited to welcome Matthew Spaulding to Liberty and Leadership. Matt is the Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College. He oversees the Alan P. Kirby Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship at Hillsdale's Washington, D.C. campus. Matt is the author of several books, most recently, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of the Declaration of Independence. And previously he wrote, We still hold these truths, rediscovering our principles, reclaiming our future. Matt is the original executive editor of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, a line-by-line analysis of each clause of the U.S. Constitution. And he currently serves as academic advisor for Freedom 250. Matt, welcome and thank you for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

It's great to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Well, we have a lot to talk about. You have an excellent new book. We'll dig into that. My first question, which you can dismiss if it's way off target here, is this is a particularly timely book. Yes. Being that we're celebrating our semi-quincentennial this year. The title seems to be a variation on Alan Bloom's classic, The Closing of the American Mind. Did you have that in mind when you chose the title?

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yes and no. I had more in mind the original source of Bloom's title, which I assume where he got it from. It's a letter that Jefferson later writes in 1825 to Henry Lee, and Henry Lee asked Jefferson about the declaration. What were you doing? What were you thinking? And Jefferson famously writes back to him and says he was trying to capture the common sense of the argument. And he was responding to, I didn't look at any particular books, but it was the books of public right that were influential: Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, et cetera. But then he makes this other comment was I didn't make up new things. I wanted it to be an expression of the American mind. And so I wanted it to use that and the making of that mind, having in mind that there's this other book that comes later that Bloom writes calls the closing of the American mind. I wanted to focus on the beginnings of what was it? What was the story behind it? How did it develop? Where did it come from? And hence the title.

The Forgotten Story Of Independence

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Well, you truly did that. It's a reflection of not only heavy research that you've done, and I'm sure not this for this book, but it's an era you've focused on your whole career. What would you say are the uh key forces that shape the American mind? You touched on it there that Jefferson was referring to.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

So what I wanted to do was obviously we're in this semi-quincentennial, or since that's always hard to say, we say America 250. Or freedom 250. Our freedom 250. In this moment, I wanted to capture the story of the Declaration in this sense that there was an this American mind. And so part of that is that's kind of a theme right there. You know, oftentimes we think of the Declaration and we know a few famous lines, and we think of it as merely Jefferson's ideas and these few famous lines, and we move on. But in reality, it's there's a much more interesting story, how it was created, where it came from, and the particular phrases and what happened to the signers, all these things. But the other thing we oftentimes overlook is what kind of informed, how do you get to the Declaration? You know, there I what I looked at especially, and I've been teaching this for a long time, I still teach it, but that era, that period that we we what we refer to as the beginnings of the American founding before the Declaration, massive amount of pamphlets, sermons, which were very influential in terms of shaping public debate, and then of course the debates in the Continental Congress itself, which was made up of some really stellar minds like John Adams and John Dickinson. And all of that really starts coming together along with events and really snowballs into the Declaration. I also very much emphasize the role that these longer, deeper intellectual traditions have on the decision for independence and the Declaration itself, because this fight between the American colonies or the British colonies, really, at the time, and England was largely a debate about the meaning of this tradition of liberty growing out of British constitutionalism. And that tradition in turn grows out of other traditions behind it. In particular, the Greek and the Roman tradition, in particular, Cicero, turns out one of the things I learned in writing the book is the importance of Cicero to the American founders, both in terms of if you learn Latin, you read Cicero. Cicero was everywhere in the schools. And if you studied law, which most of them did, you studied Cicero, because Cicero is the origins of the rule of law from a legal perspective. And then the other tradition, which is very important, is the Christian tradition, both from the medievals and the intellectual thought of it, but also the backs and forths of the beginnings of the Protestant Revolution, the Reformation, and those things that shaped a debate about the role of religion in politics that shapes the Americans, because many of them, as we know, left England in particular to come to America to have their religious liberty. And so there's this whole kind of train of things coming into this moment. And then you've got these 13 colonies on the eastern seaboard, relatively isolated from England, and they learn to govern themselves largely. And then sometime along the way, after the French Indian War, after the things start turning a different direction. England with the rise of parliamentary supremacy, you've got the seeds then for a conflict. And that's really what kind of produces the American Revolution.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Well, a couple questions that come out of what you just said. First of all, with Cicero, is that really the main thing they drew from him was this idea of the rule of law? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

There was more because once you kind of get into Cicero, you see that there's more there. What they get out of Cicero is this sense of the importance of law. But law in Cicero, because Cicero is a student of the Greek classics, Plato and Aristotle in particular, the notion that law is not merely something that we deem it to be. There's conventional law, the law we make, but it's grounded in the nature of things. And so you get it. So they do imbibe all that from Cicero, which is then, of course, overwhelmingly expanded and becomes even more influential because of the Christian tradition and its emphasis on natural law. And then, for instance, someone like Richard Cooker, the great Anglican divine, very influential, influenced Locke. He writes a lot about this concept of law grounded in nature. And he footnotes Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. So this they're getting this, all these influences coming in from different sources that really shape how they think about things. So I think that really is defines the parameters of this American mind.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Yeah. Stepping forward to more modern times, I know Hayek wrote about the fact that law is something that you discover, whereas legislation is something that men enact.

Natural Law Covenant And God Language

SPEAKER_00 7:43

That's actually a great distinction. That's right. And so the question is how do you kind of put those things together? You know, sometimes we have the today we have a tendency to think of it as one or the other. It's either all conventional, nothing else matters, or it's all just kind of this philosophical grounding and reality as but there's this long tradition that we make particular laws, uh, we have political orders, we have constitutions, that's very important. But those things have to be in turn grounded on something that we can see and understand and know through a very long tradition, but ultimately grounded in what we can know by our reason. There's a rational tradition, not in the modern sense, but in the classical sense.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Yeah. Now you've, I think a couple of times mentioned them drawing on this the influences of the Christian tradition. You didn't say Judeo-Christian. So let me just ask a little bit about maybe what they drew from the Old Testament and the idea of a covenant, perhaps.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Yes. No, I I didn't mean to discount that at all. As a matter of fact, that that is very important, the Hebraic tradition, for a couple of reasons. One is you get from the Hebrews obviously monotheism, but also the notion that man is created and has this unique position and place in the order of things. And also the notion that man has this idea of covenant, which you referred to, which is very important, which another way of putting it in the early colonial language is uh a compact.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:14

And so Mayflower Compact. Mayflower compact very famously. And so sometimes with even with Locke, we were talking about a compact or a contract. There's a slightly different meaning once you get into a modern context, but it really does go back to that older religious theological sense of that. So I think actually that the Judeo part of Judeo-Christian is important, but they did understand it as the Hebraic grounding of that really is the groundwork upon which Christianity then grows out of.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

There's a famous speech delivered by Calvin Coolidge on the occasion of the 150th anniversary. July 5th, he gave the speech, because he didn't want to give the speech on a Sunday. Right. But there's I might have to paraphrase the line, but it comes to mind that he said something to the effect that Jefferson had said that much of the ideas he drew in writing the Declaration of Independence about democracy or things he learned in the church pews when he was young. I've asked one uh scholar about that, and this person told me that there isn't necessarily evidence that Jefferson never really said that. Right. He may have, maybe you found it or others have, but it reinforced, I think, this idea that even with Thomas Jefferson is viewed as a deist, he was knowledgeable about his Christian faith and and the Bible, and uh he had done a version of the Bible. So there is clear evidence that the framers were people who were drawing from religious ideas.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

There are quite a few things there. I'll try to kind of parson give somewhat somewhat of an answer because it's very important to kind of think this through because you can overstate the claim.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Yeah.

Slavery Clause Editing And Equality

SPEAKER_00 10:58

There's something deeply theological about the Declaration in particular that I write, but it's not specifically doctrinal. It's not specifically Christian for that matter, but there's something very powerful there. And I think there's a number of reasons for that. I mean, yeah, you mentioned Jefferson. Jefferson is very squirrely when it comes to the particulars of Christianity in specific, about who is Christ and miracles and these kinds of things. But he also deeply respected Christianity, but also in general, the notion that he was not unaware or unaffected by the notion of a kind of a theological religious sense of things. One of the things we sometimes over-emphasize Jefferson per se, which is Jefferson was assigned to draft the declaration. And I always emphasize the fact that he knew who his audience was. So despite his quirkiness on these particulars, he knew he was writing for this audience. And the Continental Congress member amends the declaration to add two more references to God in it. Reverend Witherspoon was the chaplain. John Hancock was a serious congregation, he's the president of the Continental Congress. So he kind of had to kind of go that direction. What Jarrison does write about, as do some of the others, is that the arguments for against despotism, the arguments for kind of the American cause, if you will, were roundly being spoken of from the pulpits. And indeed, I mentioned earlier a lot of the one of the most influential pamphlets of the American Revolution were sermons that were republished. So it was very important. And I think that is an important component of the whole shaping of that mind. And I think we can overstate it if we argue that the Declaration is specifically biblical in some formal way. It was intended to be non-sectarian because, among other things, they wanted to avoid the religious wars of England between Protestants and Catholics in particular. But having said that, I'm very convinced, and I think all the evidence clearly shows that the theology of the Declaration was not this kind of watchmaker god, and it wasn't merely deism, by which we mean kind of a secular rationalism. That's clearly not the case. There's substance to it, there's numerous references throughout the Declaration, and it has real meaning that I think actually is meaning that is still important for us to understand today. It's not particular, but it's something we can generally agree on in the sense of God is creating the order around us, man in particular endowing our rights. But it also talks about God as a supreme judge that sees the rectitude of our intentions. That's actually quite personal, and divine providence. There's a lot more to that. And one thing there is clear is there's no objections, there's no record of any objections in any letters I can find at the time at the Continental Congress from Jefferson or Franklin, who is much more of a deist, or anyone else about those arguments. So I think that actually is a key component of the American mind.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Aaron Powell Of course, there's the issue of slavery, talked about a lot by people such as the New York Times 1618 Project and the role it played. And perhaps it was a bigger issue in coming up with the Constitution, but to what extent did it play a role at the uh Continental Congress in the drafting of the Declaration?

Young People And Reflective Patriotism

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Aaron Powell In a couple of ways. The most prominent way, of course, is that you know the one part of the declaration we don't read anymore are the grievances. Yeah. Which is the biggest part of the declaration. And uh originally there was a clause in there or uh in the in the grievances. One of the grievances was about slavery. Because the grievances kind of build, you know, the here's how the kings abuse his power, here's how he, working with others, they don't actually say parliament, they say others as have usurped our power. And then here are the ways in which he's become barbaric, a true despot. And you know, one is that he's sending over mercenaries, he's burning down our cities, and Jefferson had in that section, and he's also the slave trade. He introduced the slave trade. So there's wonderful language that Jefferson writes against the slave trade in there. He calls it a barbaric war against humanity. I'm gonna kind of paraphrase it. And the Continental Congress, a few weeks before, had already outlawed the slave trade in America, and Jefferson, of course, later writes the language for the Northwest Ordinance, which abolishes slavery in the Northwest Territory. So it's so what goes on there? Because that grievance was removed in the editing process. So what does that signal to us? My read on it is uh well, it's twofold. First of all, there are a couple of colonies that don't want it in there. A couple of the southern colonies don't want it in there, they don't want to they weren't gonna potentially not voting for it, so there's the practical problem, which is the same grounds that becomes a practical problem under the Constitution. But the other thing, which I think is actually more of the answer, is it was of all the parts of the declaration, all the draft language that Jefferson printed, and he's a wonderful writer, it was the worst written clause. Oh, and it was poorly done, and it was obviously a contradictory, which said it condemned the king for introducing slavery in the slave trade, and that was terrible. But at the same time, it also criticized the British for manumitting the slaves to fight for them. So it introduced slavery, but then it freed slaves, and both are bad. And so it just sent mixed messages and it was ham-handed the way it was done. So, okay, let's clean that and not have that there. But of course, the key is they kept the statement stated as a truth, the first self-evident truth that all men are created equal. And so you kept the powerful, clear, ringing statement, which of course the abolitionists looked to, and we know that that's what it meant. There was it was an anti-slavery sentiment because later, John C. Calhoun and the all the kind of the great Confederate uh writers of later era, they all pointed to that as a problem. So that was clearly that sent the message. So the notion that somehow the Declaration was either silent or ignored slavery, or by extension that the founding somehow was an endorsement of slavery, I think is just wildly historically inaccurate. And also misreads what they were actually doing. They wanted to create a country uh grounded on these principles, which meant that it was the principle to which we were we were holding out there, which is exactly how Lincoln reads it, and Frederick Douglass uh reads it as well. And so we we we kind of missed the forest for the trees. So I actually think there's a powerful argument in the Declaration about how they understood slavery, which of course really laid the groundwork there for the eventual extinction of slavery and the abolitionist movement.

unknown 17:48

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

You've been generous with your time and speaking to TFAS students, to young professionals, to our donors. When you're out speaking to audiences, let's focus first on young people. What's your assessment of their knowledge of our Declaration of Independence and America's founding values?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Yeah, no, that's a good question. In general, what I find, especially with young people, is two things. One is they've absorbed a lot of modern educational arguments and things. So they're I wouldn't say jaded, but they're not quite, you know, they're kind of confused about what were you supposed to think about this. And then the second thing is once you start getting into some of the answers to these questions and the and the actual story and working your way through it, I find they really like and they want to hear that answer. They don't actually know the story. And so I think one of the reasons why I think this moment is so important, one of the why I wanted to write this book. I've been studying this, my teachers have taught it. And I was in middle school in 1976. I was a little kid, but this is a unique moment to remind people and revive those stories because there will be some national attention on this. And so, what's the story they're going to learn? Because they'll they'll carry that story with them. Is it gonna be the story told by the founders themselves? I think we have an obligation to tell their story, which I'm trying to do here. Or is it gonna be the kind of story that the modern university may or the modern media culture wants them to learn, which is less about the founders and their what they actually did, and it's more about some current debate they're trying to stir up.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

And so I actually find a lot of I'm getting a lot of interest in hearing that.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Yeah, I was I have told this story on an earlier podcast I did with Sam Goldman, but this past summer in his government course for our college students, Professor Goldman had the students take two class sessions and go through the Declaration of Independence, kind of word for word, sentence by sentence, and review it. And at the end of the summer, when I asked a group of students what was the highlight from this summer of all the things you did, two of the students said it was reading the Declaration of Independence. One saying for the first time, and the other saying, you know, we might have read it in seventh grade civics, but we may have just memorized the opening or something. And that was that's just a shame. And I realized that kids today are growing up in America without understanding these founding principles of their country and therefore not understanding why this is such an exceptional country.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

No, that's exactly right. In the book, I use Tocqueville to kind of map out this process. And we'd sometimes forget this, but you know, our our patriotism, you know, patriotism is a bad name today, but I think it's actually a great, very important concept of loving one's country. And it begins when you're young, it's kind of instinctive. You love your community around you, your family, your your uncle who fought in the war. You kind of learn all these things. But but as you as you grow and as you get older, it expands and expands beyond yourself, and it becomes more reflective. And so sometimes I think we kind of miss that process of how one is formed to learn these things. So instead we kind of yes, you go you might go to a little parade or something when you're a kid, but almost immediately you start learning all the bad things about American history.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

And I think we should teach American history warts and all, but you you you can't not teach the the other parts of the story, which are very noble. But that's it means especially with younger people, you've got to actually kind of draw them in to help understand these things. So you can't really understand the the real barbaric sense of slavery, but you also can't understand the dilemma of slavery in a republic dedicated to human equality, unless you understand and can reflect about not only the ideas as they develop, but also the circumstances and the difficulty and what they were trying to accomplish and all the other aspects of it. So it's I think there's actually a much more we need to spend much more time kind of drawing people into those things.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

That's very well said.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

It's the reflective patriotism that that's that's what you want in your citizens, not knee-jerk patriotism, not you know, my country right or wrong, although that's there's a good sentiment to that. But you want, no, I understand what they were crying to accomplish, what we're trying to accomplish. And we want to live up to those principles, even though we're not a we're not a perfect people. We are we are imperfect.

Healing Division Through Founding Principles

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Yeah, that's wonderfully said, I think. Wonderfully said. Two thoughts. There is the progressive attempt to change the narrative with starting with Howard Zinn's book, People's History of the United States, and then the New York Times 1619 Project. And I view the America 250 as an opportunity to reclaim that narrative and give a more accurate picture, which is why your book is so welcome. At the same time, our country seems bitterly divided between left and right. We're this 50-50 country when it comes to the recent elections. But at the same time, you know, this isn't something new, right? We've always had our divisions and bitter debates over things, slavery being one of them that led to a civil war. We've fought over the issue of tariffs, which divided North and South, and of course Vietnam and more recent things, the civil rights movement. But do you get the sense that our country's more divided today than it's ever been? And that maybe there's hope that America too shift and all you have to do.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

I do and I don't. And I want to make a distinction here because in the book, I really very consciously chose not to, I don't mention Howard Santa the 1619 project, for instance. I kind of circumvented all that. Just go directly. Here's the right, here's the story. And I try to tell the story from the founder's perspective. How do they understand what was going on? And so I kind of took a different approach. And part of the reason is because I think we are both divided, but also deeply united. And I want to appeal to the part that unites us. We're divided on politics, policy. The historical debate is a component of that. And that's very disturbing. And all of that is unclear and very cloudy. Having said that, I think there's evidence, and you go around and talk to people out and about when you're not talking about the specifics of the debate, but you're speaking more generally, the argument in my book is what I would very much associate with kind of an older liberalism, which is not conservative in the modern sense of the word, but that's broadly American. And this would have been an overwhelming consensus. And I think that sometimes, even though we should focus on the immediate debate and the divide, and especially those of us who are involved in political debates and things, yes, I understand that. But I think we should do a lot more of appealing to what really does which is a common consensus, which I think there's a majority of the American people out there that are not, you know, so far into the Howard's in 1619 world that they don't think this is still a good country. We might disagree on policy or a lot of particulars or elections or political parties, but they still adhere to that common, that ground, if you will. Well, if you're ultimately going to r reunite the country on these other matters, you need to have that grounding there. So I think this anniversary is a time when we should be appealing to and strengthening the grounding. Yeah. That's my objective.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, I think you're right. I think if you talk to most people, the vast majority of people, they would agree with the basic founding ideas and the idea that we should all live in freedom, that we should have a system of economic freedom, personal liberty.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Yeah. We're equal before the law, but you got a sense of equality behind that, religious liberty, toleration, yeah. You know, all of those, those are all the key concepts that grow out of our founding. And so I you know, you want to kind of recapture all that because yes, we can disagree on all sorts of things. And Americans, we like to disagree on all sorts of things, but but there is something fundamentally different about America that has given rise to this very free, very self-governing republic that's worked for this long time. But that's because there has been this grounding. And I fear that this debate, which is kind of harsh in many cases, is kind of eating away at that. But I get the sense that there's a wide swath of American people that still think it's a good country, still enjoy their freedoms, still want to live in peace and communities and families and have a job to go to and take their care of their children. And so, well, what do they need? They need to understand that there is an America that these ideas are something we can hold in common, that it's not a partisan, bitter divide, and you gotta choose one side or the other, although the politics still matters in that sense, of course. But there's there is something there we can all adhere to. And I think in this, you know, in this anniversary, we'll just it's gonna be a natural occasion to point to that. And I'd like to, you know, okay, then let's let's take that instinctive patriotism, which I think is out there, and draw it in, be more reflective. What what what what gives rise to that? You enjoy your your economic freedom. You you enjoy the ability to succeed in America and flourish. What gives rise to that?

SPEAKER_01 27:08

Yeah, we're still the magnet for much of the world. They'd like to come to this country.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

I always point out, you know, isn't it interesting, all these people around the world, where do they want to go? Yeah. I mean, they don't want to go to Russia or China or Cuba. They want to come here. Yeah. Why is that?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

It ha it has something to do with these principles. That's that's very important. Aaron Powell Right. And very few Americans who want to leave and go elsewhere. We don't build walls to keep people in.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Right.

America 250 Plans Freedom 250 Trucks

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Uh you're a senior academic advisor to the America 250 Freedom 250 program that the White House has developed. Can you give us a few highlights of what might be taking place this year?

SPEAKER_00 27:43

Aaron Powell No, I I think wonderful things will be taking place this year. And I it's a great honor for me. I mean, I'm a scholar. I love these things. I write about them to be brought in to and to advise them on these things. There are a number of things being done through the Department of Education in terms of getting arguments out there and supporting conferences and things. But then there are some particular things which are going to be very much overwhelming. There's a congressional commission called America 250, and they're going to be doing lots of things in Philadelphia, and they've got other activities going on. This current administration, they created a task force to oversee the federal government's activities for this anniversary. And so there's a large, intense focus on that. And then there's a group called Freedom 250, which is a separate, a private entity to kind of carry out these ideas, these concepts of things. So for instance, they other they illuminated the Washington Monument on New Year's. I saw that.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

My guess is it might happen again. Good, good. By the way, I should mention, I think for people listening, that I think you can find the video online and it's worth watching. Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

And then the other thing, uh the particular thing that's now kind of just kind of rolling out, started, and the last one will be hitting the road here pretty soon is I mentioned I was in early middle school in 76, and I remember the Freedom Train. Yeah. We wanted to do something like that. We actually looked into could you actually get the Freedom Train going again? Most of the cars have been, you know, they're gone. Uh the local few exists, but it would be very difficult to get them going again. It was not possible. So we came up with an alternative, uh, which this Freedom 250 is would be the is a sponsor of, and they'll be doing this. And we found a cut there's a company in outside of Greensboro, North Carolina, that makes these massive semi-trucks that expand, like at NASCAR races or Coca-Cola or big corporations do these. And we're creating six freedom trucks and they're mobile museums. And so rather than a train that can only go where the train tracks go, and whether there's one train, there's six of them that can go all over the country and stop at schools and conventions and rodeos. So that'll be a big thing all over the country. And then, of course, the Fourth of July here will be massive. Yeah. And there's going to be, I think it's called America, the American Great American State Fair, which is the concept of state fairs, but every state's going to come and do something on the mall in the summer. Right. There'll be a massive bunch of activity here. So I think there are lots of more of these things to come. And but the point is you want to do things that generate not merely a commemoration of July 4, 1776, but a celebration of it, what it's led to.

America’s Exceptional Idea And Closing

SPEAKER_01 30:26

Yeah, yeah. I think it'll be a great celebration and hopefully a reclaiming as well of that narrative. Yeah. Uh that's wonderful to be to be part of that. You know, I you and I would, I think, agree that America is an exceptional country. I know President Obama dismissed that idea and said, well, we're the Greeks think they're exceptional.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Everybody thinks they're exceptional.

SPEAKER_01 30:47

Everyone thinks they're exceptional. But we are the I think we're the oldest democratic republic existing in the world today. We've stuck to our one constitution at a time when many countries, especially in this hemisphere of the United States. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Unlike the French the French Constitution, which is in the periodical section of the library, has changed off.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

Yeah, yeah. But if someone asked you, you know, why are we an exceptional country, how would you respond to that?

SPEAKER_00 31:10

Aaron Ross Powell I think it comes back to these principles and as best enunciated beautifully in the Declaration of Independence, which is a what makes us exceptional is that we are a particular nation, we have a particular history, a particular people, particular circumstances. But this particular people had the radical idea, and I mean and the word radical means root, rootedness, right? It wasn't revolution like the French Revolution, it was radical in the in the sense they went back to the root of things. Uh this particular had this idea, which in 1770 was a crazy idea to begin and found a republic on principles that were actually universal. When they say all men are created, that means men, all men are created equal. And we, in this particular place, are going to build a particular country based on that. So, yes, we're a particular country just like anybody else, like the Greeks, as President Obama would say, or you know, the French or whatever it might be. But it's different. And it's different in a way that is not only unusual or unlike Germany, it's different in a way that is is universalized, in the sense that no, we we think there's something true, simply true for all time, all place, all men, and we're gonna adhere to that. We hold these truths. Um and so I think that's that's the source of our exceptionalness, and that's that's the source of our greatness. And I think that actually makes America worthy of our affection, so worth loving.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

And there was no claim to being a perfect country, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:46

No, that's right. And I emphasize more perfect union. Today we kind of we we kind of criticize the existence of all these warts. Well, they're a bunch of hypocrites. No, we misunderstand the nature of politics. You put a standard out there, you raise a flag, you you p you put a principle out there, and you and you live up to it as opposed to kind of wallowing in the imperfections. I think it's a very different, different way of thinking about it. I think today we have a very jaded view, often taught by our universities, that since nothing is perfect, everything is imperfect, if not bad. And look, history is not perfect, history is messy. There are many things and aspects of American history that I kind of cringe at, but I teach because it's kind of how we are as human beings, because we're not perfect and we're flawed. And we're working to improve. But you're improving it. This is, I mean, this is, you know, as as Martin Luther King said, the declaration, it's a promissory, you know. It's something we live up to. But when we dig into it more and realize that, yes, it's a principle that we live up to and we put it out there, but it's also a principle that is simply true, right? The notion of freedom and human liberty grounded in an understanding of the human dignity of each individual, and that no one is born to rule another person. I mean, that's a principle that we live by, that we live up to, but it's also a principle that people escaping Cuba and people trapped in despotisms, in Asian despotism, that's what they yearn for. And there's something just beautiful about that. We need to recapture that because that is actually exceptional. It was exceptional in the in the much of the history of the world for the longest time. It's still exceptional today because there's still a lot of people living under communism and under just despotism and yearning for this thing, which is why they come here.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

Matt Spaulding, thank you very much for being my guest on Liberty and Leadership Podcast. Thank you so much for writing this great book. The Making of the American Mine, the Story of the Declaration of Independence. I hope everyone will buy a copy, give them as well as gifts to their children, and uh we'll all come together this year to celebrate America 250. Thank you. Thank you. 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 Podville Media. I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.