Who Owns the Declaration of Independence?

Summary

Breaking History – "Who Owns the Declaration of Independence?"

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Host: The Free Press
Guest: Michael Anton

Episode Overview

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, this episode explores the meaning, relevance, and ownership of the Declaration of Independence. Historian and political theorist Michael Anton joins the host for an in-depth discussion centered on the ideas of Harry Jaffa—one of the 20th century’s foremost interpreters of America’s founding principles—his relationship with Leo Strauss, the universal vs. particular nature of the Declaration, debates within the right and left about its legacy, and the challenges facing American civic identity today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who Was Harry Jaffa and Why Does He Matter?

• Jaffa was a Brooklyn-born child of Jewish immigrants, a Yale graduate, and a famed student of Leo Strauss. He was as "American" as one could imagine—loving baseball, apple pie, but abstaining from beer after an argument with students in the 1950s. (Anton, 01:38–04:59)
• Jaffa’s importance lies in his lifelong engagement with the Declaration of Independence and the basis of American political principles. His intellectual evolution was shaped profoundly by Strauss, especially regarding the concept of natural rights and the relationship between religion, philosophy, and political life.

"I knew him, I spent a lot of time with him and... he just loved American things... he just was like a caricature of the typical Midwestern, mid 20th century American."
— Michael Anton [03:44]

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2. Leo Strauss, Esotericism, and the Problem of Truth

• Strauss’s approach: Great books often have both an "exoteric" (public) and "esoteric" (hidden) meaning, which requires attention to contradiction and context. This became foundational for Jaffa’s method. (06:30–12:58)
• Example: Maimonides' writings possibly conceal deeper meanings about faith and reason, a point of ongoing debate among Straussians.

"The simplest way to explain esotericism is to say that there are a certain number of great books... that have two meanings at once... There's a sort of public, outward facing or exoteric teaching... And then there's a more inner doctrine..."
— Michael Anton [07:50]

• Jaffa was skeptical that this esotericism always equated to atheism or a rejection of religious morality, pushing for a nuanced synthesis between reason and revelation.

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3. Jaffa, Historicism, and the Declaration

• Jaffa bucked 20th-century intellectual trends, rejecting the prevailing relativism and historicism dominant in academia. (14:06–18:59)
• He spent his career challenging Carl Becker's relativist interpretation, especially the notion that asking if the Declaration's truths are "really true" is meaningless.

"You could almost say that his entire subsequent career... was a decades long refutation of Becker..."
— Michael Anton [15:27]

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4. Lincoln, the Founding, and Evolving Interpretation

• Jaffa’s scholarship covers how Lincoln re-animated the moral core of the Founding, with his view evolving from seeing Lincoln as a transforming "ennobler" of the Founding (in Crisis of the House Divided) to later arguing that Lincoln was restoring, not transforming. (19:23–22:59)

"Lincoln elevates and ennobles the Founding while claiming to be acting in the name of the Founders and being in keeping with the founders. But that's a dissimulation on Lincoln's part... [Jaffa’s] subsequent career... is to say, actually no... Lincoln is not dissembling..."
— Michael Anton [19:23]

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5. Declaration as Resolution to Ancient Dilemmas

• The Founders faced the challenge of unifying a religiously and ethnically plural society without relying on divine-right monarchy or sectarian religion, as was common in old Europe. (23:09–30:02)
• The Declaration is both a philosophical and practical solution, blending classical political thought with modern realities.

“They came up with... the only possible solution to the political problem... within modernity... So to him, this was both a great philosophical and a great practical achievement..."
— Michael Anton [28:17]

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6. The Universal and Particular in American Identity

• The ongoing debate on whether American identity is primarily "creedal" (based on universal principles) or cultural/ethnic is addressed. Anton contends that both currents were present from the start, using Jefferson and Franklin as examples of both tendencies. (30:02–36:01)
• Anton critiques both contemporary "creedalists" and "culturalists" on the Right for taking one aspect and denying the other.

“It’s both. It's both at the same time. It always has been both at the same time.”
— Michael Anton [32:10]

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7. The Founders' View on Immigration and Belonging

• The Founders supported immigration for practical reasons (to settle American land), but always with attention to republican compatibility and cultural assimilation. There was an explicit expectation for immigrants to understand and accept American principles. (40:38–43:27)
• Only the "constituted people" can determine the terms of admission and citizenship.

"We, the constituent, the constituted people of the United States, get to decide, Period. End of story... there's no such thing as a civil right for a foreigner."
— Michael Anton [44:01]

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8. Universal Principles and Their Limits

• The Declaration asserts universal natural rights, but the Founders did not believe this entailed an obligation to export those rights by force or admit all comers. (48:17–55:18)
• The principle rebukes imperialism: nations must consent to their government, but other nations are not required to interfere.

“The universality of the principle is a pretty stark rebuke to imperialism...”
— Michael Anton [54:31]

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9. Decline in Civic Education and Historical Understanding

• Both the Left and parts of the Right now question, or outright reject, the Declaration’s authority and universality.
• On the Left: Since the Progressive Era and especially with the influence of German historicism and critical scholarship, tradition and universal principles have been downplayed or derided. (61:34–68:07)

"The loudest voices attacking the universalism of the Declaration, all men are created equal and equal natural rights for the first half of the 19th century... were Southern voices."
— Michael Anton [65:34]

• On the Right: A new wave of skepticism about natural rights as the root of "liberalism" has arisen, especially among some online "new right" thinkers.

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10. Can We Recover the Meaning of the Declaration?

• Anton expresses pessimism about immediate prospects, citing the decline of serious history in academia and the rise of partisanship and ideological curricula—though he acknowledges cycles and the hope that some "flowers" of genuine learning and patriotism might survive and reemerge. (69:40–77:09)
• The importance of returning to primary texts and first principles is stressed as a possible path forward.

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Notable Quotes

• "Nothing prepared me for my encounter with Leo Strauss. I was more astonished... than Saul on the road to Damascus."
  — Michael Anton [05:49]

• "If you go back and study all the debates at the time... what they find is a consistent... discussion of this universal principle and equal natural rights."
  — Michael Anton [49:21]

• "If you take the principles of the Declaration seriously, ...no nation has the right to rule another nation precisely on that principle ground itself."
  — Michael Anton [54:31]

• "Imagine... trying to make the case to a nation that has been celebrating July 4, 1776 for 250 years in a row that it was all meaningless and it was all based on our cultural tradition..."
  — Michael Anton [60:35]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:29 — Introduction to Harry Jaffa's biography and importance
• 06:30–12:58 — Strauss’s esotericism, Maimonides, and the problem of atheism
• 15:27 — Jaffa’s intellectual opposition to historicism and relativism
• 19:23 — Lincoln as restorer or transformer of the Founding
• 23:09–30:02 — The crisis of church, state, and political legitimacy resolved in the Declaration
• 32:10–36:01 — Creed vs. culture in American identity
• 40:38–44:01 — The Founders’ view and logic of immigration
• 48:17–55:18 — The universality and practical limits of the Declaration's principles
• 61:34–68:07 — Critique of the left, right, and academia regarding the Founding
• 69:40–77:09 — Intellectual and cultural decline, and thoughts on recovery

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Recommendations for Further Reading (from Anton)

• Crisis of the House Divided (Jaffa’s most beautifully written, accessible major work; best for tracing his intellectual journey)
• New Birth of Freedom (deeper, more complex elaboration of his thesis)
• The Rediscovery of America (collection of key essays; especially chapters 1, 2, and 6)

“You can get an education just from reading that piece alone.”
— Michael Anton [79:40]

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Final Thoughts

This episode delivers a sweeping, often candid, and at times pessimistic yet hopeful tour through the clashes over the meaning of America’s Declaration—drawing lines from the ancient world, through 20th-century intellectual debates, into the current battles for America’s soul. For listeners seeking to grasp the contested legacy of the Founding, Jaffa’s legacy, and why the question “Who owns the Declaration of Independence?” remains so urgent, this conversation is a valuable resource.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[Michael Anton]

The five you got is next year's model, Lee Harvey Oz. Irving Berlin. What happened once happens again.

[Host of Breaking History]

Breaking History. Listeners, we are incredibly fortunate to have a really great guest today. His name is Michael Anton. You may have heard of him because I wrote a profile of him last year for the Free Press on the Maga Machiavelli. And we are not going to today be talking about the Trump administration, the Iran war, or matters of current events. Instead, consider this as sort of part two in terms of our interviews about the Declaration of Independence as we come up upon the 250th anniversary of the Republic. Because Michael Anton is in, you know, has many, many skills. He's a really fascinating guy. And one of them is he is a student of the late Harry Jaffa, who is a, my opinion, a really important intellectual for understanding the charter of America and the importance of the Declaration of Independence in the context of natural rights, natural law and the history of Western thought. So with that, thank you so much, Michael Anton, for coming on Breaking History. I've wanted to do this for a while.

[Michael Anton]

You're welcome. Well, I love Jaffa, as we called him, the old man who's been gone from us now since, if I remember correctly, January 2015. So 11 years.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay, 11 and a half years. Let's start with a really basic question. Who was Harry Jaffa and why should we read him? Why is he still important today?

[Michael Anton]

So he was a Brooklyn born child of Jewish immigrants, born in 1918. His middle name was Victor, not because it was a family name, but in honor of the victory of World War I. So, and he was, you know, talented, precocious, went to those New York, one of the New York City competitive entry public high schools, Erasmus hall, when I mean those I guess are still pretty good. But you can imagine what they were like in the mid 20th century with all of these brilliant kids, a lot of them Jewish kids, just off the charts in terms of intellect. But their family had no money and they could go to these places that, where all of a sudden they were surrounded by kids as smarter, smarter than they were. And he got a great education. He went to Yale as a young man, graduated, I know he graduated in 1939. I'm pretty sure he's 19 years old. So he graduated early. He's an English major and just became, he was very. This sounds so schmaltzy, but it's really true if you knew him. I knew him, I spent a lot of time with him and still friends with dozens of people who spent years with him like he was so stereotypically American, right? He just loved American things like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie. I don't know about Chevrolet, but, you know, he just was like a caricature. Even though he was not from the Midwest, he did spend a dozen years in Ohio teaching at Ohio State. But he was like a caricature of a. Of the typical Midwestern, mid 20th century American with just exactly those tastes. Except he didn't drink beer because he gave up drinking in the 50s. When he, he claims to have been like, I remember this story. He was like, arguing with a bunch of students in the 1950s, if you could imagine that, you know, about reefer and say, like, this is bad. You know, like. And the students will say, well, you drank scotch. And he, he, I mean, I'm. I'm doing short shrift. But he said that he felt that he had been defeated in his own argument and he quit. So from that point on, on Churchill's birthday, he would always take a tiny little sip of cognac, because that was Churchill's drink, and toast Winston Churchill and have like one sip because you can't toast without taking a drink. And that was it. And you never saw him, right. You know, wow. So, but so that. Anyway, that's just a segue. So he gets out of. He gets out of Yale, the war starts. Because of eyesight and other issues, the armed forces won't. Won't take him. His best friend from Brooklyn named Joseph Grazi did go into the army and fought at Anzio and other spots in Italy. So he got a job as a federal bureaucrat, basically in one of the war production departments, in one of those temporary buildings on the Mall that were later torn down. So this just gets him through, you know, World War II, and he's out of a job. Back then, the government actually did used to kind of shrink when it completed a task. That doesn't happen anymore, as we know. But he didn't have a job. So he goes home, he goes back to New York. His father runs a. Basically a saloon on McDougal street in the West Village. And Jaffa just works there because he didn't have anything else to do. He never had a way to make money. And he starts taking classes at the New School, which is walking distance from the saloon. And they're either. They were free or they were, like, so cheap. They were functionally free.

[Host of Breaking History]

And he, he, he meets a great man.

[Michael Anton]

That's where Theo Strauss is at the New School. And he said that it was mind blowing. He used to say this is the other thing about, like, he was Jewish, but he read the Bible with these Yale WASPs and a bunch of other kids under the. Alex Witherspoon was the teacher with whom he read the Bible with, like, in a reading group, not even for a class. And he said, like, there were. There were WASP kids, there were Catholics, there were Jews, and then this WASP leading the class, and we just read the Bible like, just. Just without any kind of preconception or from our own religious traditions. Just like, we're just going to figure out what this says. And he had such a memory that, you know, he was like Lincoln in that respect that he could. I don't know how often he picked up the Bible to read it, but if you just needed to know some quote from Scripture somewhere, he just remembered everything. He remembered everything.

[Host of Breaking History]

So

[Michael Anton]

where was I going with the Bible part? Anyway, he meets. Oh, yeah, he used to always say, nothing prepared me for my encounter with Leo Strauss. You know, I was more astonished. It was even more of a conversion experience than Saul on the road to Damascus. So, you know, and he. That's like, despite being Jewish, he didn't just quote the Old Testament or what a, you know, an Orthodox Jew would call the Bible, as opposed to that appendage that comes later. Like, he knew all of it and he knew all the Christian aspects of it. He knew that. Like, he just knew all of it. He just had a. If something was important, he just wanted to know it. Like, he didn't say, well, I'm from this particular perspective, therefore I'm not going to learn that. He was like, no, if this was worth knowing, I'm just going to learn it.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay, now let's talk a little bit about Leo Strauss, who's, you know, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. Leo Strauss is somebody who I think is, you know, almost weirdly, there's. You've got to kind of get through layers. But Leo Strauss believed in the esoteric readings of great.

[Michael Anton]

Yeah, I mean, more than that. I mean, you could say he rediscovered it, that it had been kind of buried underground for 200 years.

[Host of Breaking History]

So tell me, what is that? I want to just say, what does that mean? Which is to say that the textual analysis of Leo Strauss, which is what he was really saying, is that sometimes the great thinkers didn't say out straightforwardly what they meant and that you have to understand and you got to kind of read between the lines. I keep. By the way, one example of this that I keep going back to is that if you read the guide to the Perplexed by Moses Ben Maimonides, it's straightforwardly an argument with a student saying that you should not give in to atheism, you should believe in God. But many people would interpret it later as saying, well, the arguments were structured in so weak, in such a way that in some ways the guide to Perplexed is the Rombam's attempt at maybe making the best case for atheism. But that's kind of what I think about in terms of understanding and the esotericism.

[Michael Anton]

First of all, let's get back to Maimonides in a second because I want to clarify that. But before we do, the simplest way to explain esotericism is to say that there are a certain number of great books, as Strauss himself put it, not very many of them, but more of them than most scholars of ideas suppose that have two meanings at once or two doctrines at once. There's a sort of public, outward facing or exoteric teaching that is in most respects conventionally respectable, or at least does not challenge whatever the received opinion of its particular time, place, milieu are. And then there's a more inner doctrine that is stated by implication that's really meant for an elect, or if not an elect, just people who can see that there are problems in the surface and they want to go deeper. Now, to read a book esoterically, you have to, first of all, you got to come to it with the preconception that if you find a mistake or a contradiction, it's not sloppiness, it's intentional. And then you have to find the reason for it. So the example that I give students is an easy one, right? Is Machiavelli in Prince 7 says at the very beginning he's going to offer up Cesare Borgia as an example of a prince to be imitated. And if ultimately Borgia failed, it was not his fault, but fortune just was too powerful for him to overcome. And then in the same chapter at the very end, he says that Cesare Borgia made a particular bad choice and this bad choice was the cause of his ultimate ruin. Okay, you can't square those two. They're flatly contradictory. Either he did everything right and fortune slayed him anyhow, or he screwed up and that was the cause of his ultimate ruin. Now, if you notice that contradiction, you can either explain it one of two ways to reduce this to the essence. You can say, well, Machiavelli was just kind of a careless guy. Maybe he wrote one part at one time, and maybe he wrote the second part another Time and he forgot. Or he's just not that systematic a thinker, so, you know, let's give him a pass and move on. Or you say, no, he knew exactly what he was doing. That's a deliberate contradiction. Now, student, think through the reason for it. Strauss says, if you're going to come to a book of a thinker on the statue of Machiavelli, Maimonides, Plato. Right. It's always safer to just assume everything in it is intentional. And you try to. Before, you know, you need to try to figure out and exhaust all alternatives before you conclude that an author of this stature just blew it. So Strauss was the. He definitely revived the philosophic study of Maimonides in the 20th century. There's no question about that. He wrote several essays about it and then he was essentially responsible for the publication of the first new translation. I don't know in how many years, but in many decades. And then wrote the introduction. I've got the. Right up there. Wrote the introduction to that translation, which is like a 50 page exegesis of the structure and the design and the plan of the work. Where I quibble with you, it's more than a quibble, it's kind of important is the atheism question. Right. So this is a, there's a kind of an, there's a divide within the Straussian world. Right. And I'm on one side of it just, you know, being open about that. Right. Where I think there are some who would say, oh yeah, yeah, no, the difference is a surface that, that professes fealty to the Torah and so on, and then an inner doctrine which is atheistic. Right. And that's what Strauss revealed. Okay. Those, those people are out there some, in some respects they make a good case. I come away from it with a different take though, which is unless you're going to define atheist super strictly as like, you know, full on orthodox obedience to every jot and tittle of the law and anything that falls short of that is ipso facto atheistic. Okay, well then maybe you can say that. But another way to put it would be that Maimonides is pointing underneath the surface to a more philosophic grounding for certain teachings, which again, a pious believer can't accept. That is to say for a truly pious believer. You should, by the way, have on my friend Glenn Elmer's, if you're doing a series on the Declaration, because he's doing a lot of work on this too, and he and I are talking about this all the time. But like it is from the perspective of the pious believer starting to question why the law is what the law is, rather than just full submission and total obedience is already an act of impiety. Right. So they would maybe side with that and say, listen, Anton, you may be trying to explain away this inherent atheism, but we're not buying it. Right. We just obey the law. We accept the word of God as what it is.

[Host of Breaking History]

Yeah, but in the Jewish tradition, there is a. There is a. The Talmud is a document of how we interpret. You know, the believers have different interpretations, but that's.

[Michael Anton]

But that. Strauss's mind and universe, I think that points to the inherent limitation of the human mind to interpret something as unfathomable as the word of God. Right. Whereas obeying the law is not that difficult. It may be morally difficult, it may be personally difficult, but understanding what the law is is not that difficult. Right.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay, okay, okay. All right.

[Michael Anton]

Now, Maimonides is a philosopher. There's no question about it. He addresses directly many doctrines of Aristotle's metaphysics, and you name it, and so on and so forth that really have nothing to do with pious observance of the law. I just question that at root, it is reasonable to call him an atheist, unless you're defining piety. So strictly, as you know any. Like, I'm not making myself very clear here, but anyway, Strauss was always very. And this is one of the disputes between Jaffa and a lot of the other Straussians is. I think he thought that others oversimplified the case for esotericism or the case for a philosophic grounding of some kind of natural goodness and natural justice as simply atheism, if it doesn't begin from the point of scripture. Whereas he says, no, there's actually kind of two routes to almost the same end. If intellectually incompatible, there's a lot more common ground. I mean, Jaffa was always one of the first ones to point out that the content of revealed law on morality and the morality of Aristotle's ethics are not 100% coterminous, but there's a massive amount of overlap there.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay. All right, I want to get back now to Jaffa now that we've covered how he was. So his. He was intellectually very much shaped by Strauss. Now, in some ways, the more I dig into Jaffa and I'm very. I have to say, I'm. I'm envious that you had a chance to study with him because he is such a rich thinker, but there's something about him that's Kind of interesting in that he's coming along in the middle of the 20th century in an era when the intellectual fashions and currents are leading towards historicism, towards eventually more than leading postmodernism, more than leading towards.

[Michael Anton]

I mean, Jaffa always said he graduated From Yale in 1939, 100% of his education was already historicist and relativistic. And he said he didn't even question the premises of that until he met Strauss in 1944.

[Host of Breaking History]

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

[Michael Anton]

So let's get back. Since you want to talk about the Declaration, let's talk about the Declaration. Declaration for a second. Yeah, Right. By far the most famous book on the Declaration at that time, and maybe still to this day, was Carl Becker's 1926 book, whose title escapes me off the top of my head. So Jaffa read that, took for granted that it was right. And you could almost say that his entire subsequent career after meeting Strauss was a decades long refutation of Becker, who completely accepts the. His source, this relativistic interpreter of the Declaration, and even at one point says in his book, to ask whether the, you know, self evident truths of the decor are really true or not is essentially a meaningless question. Right. Like Jaffa, if you could boil his career down to one thing, it's honing in on that statement and saying, I'm going to refute, I'm going to refute that. I'm going to show that that's wrong.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

And the rest of it is a.

[Host of Breaking History]

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

[Michael Anton]

Yeah. Although it's more complicated than that because there are two forms of historicism really. There's one that says times change and truth evolves with it, but truth is still true, it's just contingent. And there's another that says it's not even contingent. It's just climate of opinion and receive wisdom at any given time. It's never really true.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

And for one side, the process will eventually, like for a strict Hegelian, the process will eventually end and you'll come to the final synthesis, an idea most popularized by Fukuyama in 89, that famous last end of History essay that he turned into a book. And then Strauss always thought that the intellectual case for the Nietzschean Heideggerian alternative of irrational historicism that never ends is stronger than the case for Hegelian rational historicism, but that the case for classic natural right was in fact stronger than either of those two. So what Jaffa tried to do is take Strauss's intellectual architecture in favor of or to reestablish, if not the authority, the plausibility and the greater intellectual strength, the greater philosophic strength of classic natural right, and apply that to the United States of America and his judgment over decades. It evolved a little bit, but we can get into that if you want. His judgment over decades was that the United States, the regime of the American founders and the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln and the great American statesman are the nearest. And Churchill, he loved Churchill. I mentioned the toast every year. Are the nearest approximation to both a philosophic and a political account of classic natural right impossible in the modern world? But then we would have to go into all of the things that make the modern world different from the medieval or the ancient world, which is why natural right in practice looks different in the modern world than it did in the ancient world. It all gets kind of complicated. And as I mentioned, Glenn, as Glenn and I say to each other all the time, it's like, this seems so easy to us. Why does nobody else get this? So there's two possibilities. One is we're just geniuses and the rest of you guys are dumb. Obviously. I don't think I actually believe that, or the argument is actually quite complicated. And the reason why we think we understand it is because we just spent 40 years on it and maybe it takes a while. Yeah, I don't know. Or we could be wrong. There's also that possibility.

[Host of Breaking History]

This gets us to the meat on the bone here, which is that. I mean, listen, obviously Jaffa has many great works, but the two most famous works are Crisis of the House Divided and then New Birth of Freedom and Christ of the House Divided. And I want to defer to you, but there he sort of portrays Lincoln as somebody who has perfected the insights of Jefferson in the Declaration.

[Michael Anton]

It's more than that. The Simplest way to state the thesis of the crisis of the House Divided is that Jaffa accepted a kind of interpretation of Strauss which says that modern political philosophy lowers the goal of political action to basically comfortable self preservation. And the American founders picking up on the ideas of modern political philosophy, in particular, Locke. But others institute a regime dedicated to cultural or sorry, comfortable self preservation. So the preservation of mere life, the means to life, property and so on. Lincoln elevates and ennobles the Founding while claiming to be acting in the name of the Founders and being in keeping with the founders. But that's a dissimulation on Lincoln's part. He knows that he's transforming the founding into something else. So that's kind of the thesis of crisis of the House Divided and then the subsequent career of Jeffrey is to say, actually no, Lincoln is not dissembling his. When he says, I'm restoring what was already there and preserving what was already there, he's telling the truth and the Founding is higher than I thought it was when I wrote Crisis.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right. So in some ways he, he, he, he's. His strongest argument against historicism is at the end of his life or the,

[Michael Anton]

I mean, he published that. It took him about 40 years to write it. And partly, you know, I mean, he, it's not like he didn't do anything else in those 40 years. We used to joke with him and chide him. He was very argumentative. But he, he enjoyed arguing and he, he liked art. Like, he, yeah, he, he certainly thought that he was wiser and he was, of course, and that he knew more than we are. But he wasn't like one of those never challenge me kind of guys where it's like, no, if I said it, it's true. Like, if he said it, he thought it was tr. He wanted to hear why you might object so that he could. And then he would just argue constantly. Right. It was never beneath him to sit around and just talk to grad students for three hours. One of the reasons why it took him 40 years to write that book because he spent a lot of time on other stuff. He got into all kinds of fights with various conservatives and he was legendary for his querulousness. He would argue with people in writing all the time. Other professors, famously with Supreme Court justices and near Supreme Court justices like Robert Borkman, and would spend hours writing, trying to correct them on this and that at Mies, you name it, every conservative luminary of the 20th century, it seems he picked a fight with at one point and we would Sometimes say amongst ourselves, and sometimes to him, Professor Jaffa, if you maybe didn't spend so much time writing 20 page letters to Anson and Scalia explaining why he was wrong about the natural law, you'd have finished the book by now and he just would laugh. He didn't take that kind of thing personally. He, he wasn't, he, he, he certainly thought highly of himself, but he wasn't like one of those super thin skinned. I mean, I don't know, I'm trying to right Somebody, one of the people like he attacked frequently and really got on their nerves. Like let's say Walter Burns, another Straussian of great accomplishment. I like, I respect him a lot. But they got into these titanic intellectual battles. If, if I were to say to that, and Walter, who died, they died on the same day, by the way. Jaffa and Walter Burns.

[Host of Breaking History]

Oh, wow.

[Michael Anton]

If I were to say, and Walter Burns heard me say Jaffa was not thin skinned, I mean, he would guffaw, he'd be like, are you kidding me? But what I mean is, like, he wasn't this sort of like remote figure who would say, okay, everything I'm telling you is received wisdom. Now don't ask no questions and don't criticize me and don't argue with me. He wasn't like that with us at all. Got it.

[Host of Breaking History]

All right, so I want to get back to just, I want to get back to the Declaration here, because in some ways this is the core of Jaffa's work, right?

[Michael Anton]

Oh, he would say the same thing. Yeah.

[Host of Breaking History]

He believed in some ways that it was. I mean, is it, is it too much to say that it was a kind of revelation almost in that it was.

[Michael Anton]

It's too much to say. So, you know, this may be. I'm going to pull something up here and let's see if I. Now, what is this? I was asked, modern age is doing a symposium on the Declaration on the meaning. And they cast a wide net, ask people to say something. And you had a limit, strict limit of 250 words, which I think is fitting. Right? It's the 2/50, 250 words. So I wrote something that is exactly 250 words. And Glenn and I went back and forth and edited it. And another one of Jaffa's longtime students and dear friends, young friends, then young we were all then young. Julie Ponzi did too. So I'm trying to explain what the Declaration did, and it's hard to explain. And eventually Glenn and I, sooner or later we're going to Jointly co author a book that walks through every stage of this and try to keep it as tight and short as possible. But it's still going to be 50,000 words at least, right? The founders faced a unique, not a unique situation, a situation that had sort of been brewing and swirling for a couple thousand years or at least 1500 years, and had never been resolved. And that is that before. Whether you're talking about pagan antiquity or Jewish antiquity, before the coming of Christianity, there's no separation or even distinction to be made between civil and religious law. So political authority and theological authority are the same and they have the same source. Christianity divides that. And at first it's not so much of a political problem because the Romans have conquered the entire habitable world, Western world. I mean literally everything is Roman. It's one state, it's one city, it's one polis. And eventually that one polis becomes more like an ancient polis where it, it adopts one God. It takes a while. You know, first they have to stop persecuting the Christians, then tolerate the Christians and then they, then they legalize it and then make it the official religion of the empire. But it still doesn't solve the question of the bifurcation of political and theological authority. And then that one city breaks up, okay, it breaks up into a lot of little kingdoms, a lot of princes here and there, one prince claiming to be, you know, the, the God's vice. Actually you have two princes claiming to be God's vice region on earth. You have a so called Holy Roman Emperor who never unifies all of Europe. Charlemagne is the closest they ever get. And then you have a Pope who until the Reformation at least claims to have the spiritual authority over all Christendom and politics. This is one of Jaffa's greatest insights that he develops at length in chapter two of Natural Right. Sorry, Chapter two of New Birth, Politics becomes a kind of combination of religious disputes. Think about the famous disputes between bishops and kings, Henry II and Thomas Becket, and I'm blanking on his name now. But the famous emperor who had to do the walk, Holy Roman Emperor, had to do the walk to Canossa to grovel before the Pope.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right?

[Michael Anton]

The Pope's spiritual authority confuses things and the rest is just dynastic wars. Who's going to rule? Is it going to be York or Lancashire? We're just going to fight and see who gets to rule. Right?

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

And the Reformation complicates that even further because now Christendom is divided between Catholic and non Catholic. And then Protestantism further divides and so on. And so what the founders face. And remember, you got to think through the specific circumstance they found themselves in, not just the theological and the political and the philosophic question. Right. They are now a people on a continent. There are about 3 1/2 million of them in 1776. 3 to 3 and a half. I don't think anybody knows exactly, but it's something like that. Imagine that the entire 13 colonies is less than half the population of New York City today. Although New York City may be down, I don't know, people are fleeing Montana. So maybe, maybe it's low, maybe it's lower, but okay. And they've got. Yes, it is very overwhelmingly an English speaking Anglo Protestant population, but it isn't a hundred percent. Right. And even if it were, within that problem you have that the Protestants come in all flavors. Okay. Even if you had. No, I know there's like.

[Host of Breaking History]

And then there's.

[Michael Anton]

Even if you had no Catholics and no Jews, you still have the same. You still have this problem because the. So there's no way to put a theological basis on the law. There's no way to do that.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

They have just rebelled against a legitimate, clean king. I mean, legitimate, non. I, I mean that in a precise sense. That is to say, they would say illegitimate because of the grievances listed at the end of the Declaration. Right. But there's no question that he is the legitimate offspring of the, you know, he has legitimate lineal descent from the kings of England.

[Host of Breaking History]

And, and well, and, and also we know that there were efforts before the Declaration to address the exact.

[Michael Anton]

No, and they say that in the Declaration, we've tried everything with this guy. Right. And we're getting nowhere.

[Host of Breaking History]

Yeah, right, Right.

[Michael Anton]

So I would say a flimsy and no longer credible claim to political legitimacy in all of Europe and Christendom at that time and including in the North American colonies. And there's more than just us, there's colonies all over North America, European colonies, British colonies, French, Spanish, Portuguese, you name it still traces back to a claim of divine right, which has all of these problems inherent in what I just talked about, which I haven't explained super well, but hopefully the book will do that. Right. So they can't use that. So what are they going to do? Right. They come up with. And this is Jaffa's view. Okay. And this is why he called in, I think it was 1989. 89 or 90, in a little pamphlet that's been republished as a chapter of a book that his Students Ed Erler and Ken Misugi edited called the American Founding is the best regime, the bonding of civil and religious liberty. Right. They came up with, in Jaffa's view, the only. Not merely the best, but also the only possible solution to the political problem, A, faced specifically by the American people on that soil at that time, but B, within modernity, simply given all the changes from the ancient to the medieval to the New World to the modern world, and given all the religious and other political changes. So to him, this was both a great. It was a great philosophical and a great practical achievement. It was an achievement of kind of in thought and in statesmanship at the same time in a way that the world had never seen before. I mean, the closest thing, I guess you could get to it are sort of the thought experiments and Plato's Dialogues, but those are never implemented.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

The Republic has never. Even the regime of the laws, which is a lot more practical than the regime of the Republic, is never implemented anywhere.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right, okay. But also House Divided and New Freedom. I mean, House Divided, there's an asterisk, Right? I mean, he. Because he thinks that Lincoln had improved upon it. Whereas in House Divided, he comes back and he says, no, wait a second. Actually, you have to read the Constitution in keeping with the Declaration. And the Constitution is a compromise and the Declaration itself envisioned.

[Michael Anton]

Yes. Eventually, the Declaration announces the principles, and the Constitution is a vehicle for operationalizing the principles. Now, that's not to say I don't want to get super abstract here, just because. So as I put it in the beginning of my little submission for the symposium, right? As we've seen, if you read a lot of Twitter or X, which I don't, but it has a way of finding you, whether you're looking for it or not. There's been a lot of back and forth on the Right. Okay? So the most recent outburst of this was Neil Gorsuch. I guess he's got a book out, going around doing the podcast and lecture circuit, talking about the American creed. And younger people on the right saying, look, this creedal Boomer nonsense is getting out of hand. We're a people. We've always been a people. And the issue for me and for Glenn and for basically all of us who read Jaffa carefully and understand him is they're both right and they're both wrong. They're both right to see that their part of the argument is part of it, but they're wrong when they say the other side doesn't have a point. Right? So I have spent, actually the last, let's say, since I got out of government the first time, or the fifth time, whatever it was, anyway, not this administration, but the Last 1, the 2018, I've spent a lot of effort pushing back on, you know, over creedalism and over emphasis on the creed, to the complete exclusion of any kind of cultural continuity and so on, in part because I felt like, you know, the Claremont Institute and a lot of people who understand Jaffa, let's say, lightly emphasize that without realizing that there's more to it than that, they pick up a little part of it. Yes, all men are created equal. Yes. This is a universal principle. And they go, well, that's all you need to know. So we can basically just take anyone from anywhere in the globe, even a couple million a year, and bring them over here. And as long as they understand that, then they'll just immediately become American. And there's absolutely nothing cultural about it whatsoever. And there's no downside to infinite diversity. Right. We don't need any kind of linguistic cohesion whatever. Like, no, the founders wouldn't say that. Jaffa wouldn't say that. I've been pushing back from the other way, but now it seems like the young right is taking just. They're just making the same mistake from the other direction. They're like, all talk of creed is boomer. It's universalist. It's neoliberal or globalist or what? I mean, whatever. I'm sure they say worse things, too, whatever terms they're flinging around now. And so any kind of talk of creed just shows that you're a liberal and there's nothing to America that's creedal whatsoever at all. The Declaration of Independence doesn't announce any principles. It's like, guys, is it really. This is the part where we do get frustrated. It's like, is it that complicated? It's both. It's both at the same time. It always has been both at the same time. And not a single one of the. Like, if you want to, you know, divide up the founders, the most kind of philosophically aggressive creedalist is Jefferson, and he wouldn't deny that there's something cultural about, you know, what makes an American an American. And I don't know who would be the.

[Host of Breaking History]

No, he was. He was a. He was. He was convinced that, you know, the concentration of capital would have. I mean, would.

[Michael Anton]

Would.

[Host of Breaking History]

Would ruin, you know, what made America great. He was. But some would say he was like a pastoralist. He believed that everybody totally.

[Michael Anton]

I'm trying to think Like Jefferson's the obvious case to. He's the obvious candidate. If you're going to say who was the most sort of Creedle in his rhetoric of the founders, it would be Jefferson. And then who was the most cultural? I don't know, it might be Franklin. I mean Franklin was, Franklin was like worried that these Germans couldn't maybe assimilate to American ness. Right? I mean we're talking about like northern European Saxons where we get Anglo Saxon from. And he's like, I don't know about these German. I mean imagine what he would have thought about the rest of Europe, which mostly wasn't present in large numbers. Like that's pretty skeptical. So although both these strains of thought are present from the beginning and both are necessary and look as a historical matter, there's really very little doubt in my mind that despite, you know, the difference between a New England Puritan and a Virginia Cavalier and so on and other stripes of Anglo Saxon in America at the time, there's still a kind of core thread of similarity there between these peoples in 1776, 1787, that if you didn't have that, if you just had some sort of Austro Hungarian empire like conglomeration of different peoples, they're never going to unite and fight the revolution successfully and create a new government successfully and come up with these principles and write a constitution like that. That would not have happened. So the culture types, the historical types are right about that. I don't have any doubt about it. But then they take it too far and say no, they never announced any universal principles. I mean one of the things that drives me completely crazy, and I think it's super self defeating on the young right is they've just become, a lot of them have just become utterly hostile to any conception of equal natural rights. Right? Because that just leads to them, that just leads to liberalism, like period, end of story. As soon as you say there's a right, then I mean, you know, it just leads to egalitarian leveling and infinite government and so on.

[Host of Breaking History]

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[Michael Anton]

Well, I mean look, the founders view of immigration was somewhat complicated in that they were pro, tentatively pro, but cautious.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

And they had, they had pretty specific reasons for being pro immigration be, you know, or very, let me put it this way, extremely practical. Like one of their basic reasons that it was we've got this big continent and remember the United states as of 1783 is not the 13 colonies anymore because we get ceded to us by treaty what is now almost the entirety of the Midwest out to the Mississippi.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right?

[Michael Anton]

No, this is before the Louisiana Purchase. Right. This is, we're talking about like the states that are now Ohio, Illinois, we're talking about the Northwest, the so called Northwest Territories. Most of what we would, you know, the Midwest, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin. Not every, not every little line. Some of it gets a little bit adjusted later. But we're talking about basically it's a third of what is now the continental United States is U.S. territory as of the Treaty of Versailles and almost none of it is settled. And if you know anything about political philosophy or history, you know that the easiest way to lose a land that you nominally control, even according to international law or whatever is just don't have any of your own people on it. You're not going to keep it. So they're quite open to immigration from certain sources. Right. And they really do, they do prioritize cultural, religious continuity and specifically they write into the law in the one of the big differences, I mean everybody points to certain language in these, which we can go into if you want. But the 1790 and the 1795 Naturalization Acts, one of the things they add to the 1795 act, which supersedes the 1790 act, is they say they want peoples coming from sources with a tradition of republican government who will be faithful or loyal to the principles of this government and its constitution. Right. This is one of the things that

[Host of Breaking History]

they're very aware of.

[Michael Anton]

It's like, what if we take in a bunch of people from. And nowadays these kinds of thoughts are just dismissed out of hand as bigotry and racism or whatever, and therefore illegitimate. But I don't know, is it unreasonable for the founders at the time to say, well, listen, if we take in lots of people from countries or regions that have never had any kind of smaller republican government ever, that have been ruled for millennia despotically or in some kind of, you know, monarchist way, and we're an anti monarchical country, we're an anti monarchical government specifically founded to throw off an English king. Like, how is that going to work out for us in the long run? And they were, they were very. Well, they were very concerned about that.

[Host of Breaking History]

That's the, you know, 100 years after the Declaration, John Stuart Mill, considered the founder, in many ways, of modern liberalism, makes that argument on representative government. He basically says, hey, there's certain cultures that are just not ready for this, so sorry. And everybody now accuses him of being imperialist. But if you actually look at the arguments, he lays out what I think one could argue fairly, objectively, dispassionately, are criteria one needs in order to get to this. You know, what Jaffa would say is the first combination of consent and the

[Michael Anton]

first thing I should have started here. So this thought is like prior in logic to what we were talking about. But the first thing the founders would say about immigration is we, the constituent, the constituted people of the United States, get to decide, Period. End of story. This is a government based on social compact. We get to decide who comes here and in what numbers for any damn reason we want. And if we decide that we just don't want anybody for now or for a while, we get to say that. And we don't have to justify, oh, well, you got to tell me why you don't want me, and I can tell you why it's legitimate. And if I determine that it isn't, then you have to admit me. It's like, no, this is two way consent, period. You cannot come to the United States and Become either a resident or a citizen of the United States without the consent of the current people of the United States, as that consent is given through the legislative process. So the idea that there's any kind of. I mean this idea really does emerge in the 60s. You gotta. It wasn't. I used to call it a floor speech, which was incorrect because he was still Attorney General. But when they were debating the 65 immigration act, RFK was the attorney General, but Johnson was president obviously. And he went and he gave Senate testimony. He was running for the Senate and he won that new seat in New York in 64. But he basically said, look, this country is undergoing a fundamental change towards civil rights and we're doing the right thing by extending civil rights to our own citizens who have been denied it for too long. But now it's high time we did the right thing by extending civil rights to basically everyone on the globe, to foreigners. The founders would have a been appalled at that and laughed at it as ridiculous. By definition, there's no such thing as a civil right for a foreigner. Civil rights are those you have natural rights. Every human being has natural rights that come from God and nature and nature's God, as the Declaration says. But only citizens by definition have civil rights. So if you are even the most worthy potential immigrant imaginable right, like a Nobel Prize winning scientist and who's going to do it? Blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And you want to come not just to this country, but to any country and they go, yeah, well hey, good luck. We have nothing personal, but we just don't want you, you don't have any right whatsoever to move to that country. According to the founder's political theory and according to any law of common sense that makes sense.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay, I want to push back. I'm not push back, but I want to want to probe here. Would you accept? I mean, well, let me first of all notice something about the Declaration. It's maybe the most viral political document in history in the sense that if you can start with what the first, I guess it was Haiti. Right. But then you go all over the world, everybody is copying pretty much what the Declaration says when they declare independence. Including Ho Chi Minh in whenever 1948, when he declares an independent Vietnam and including Israel everywhere.

[Michael Anton]

Yeah. I mean you could say the French were really the first with the Declaration of the Rights of.

[Host of Breaking History]

Yeah, right.

[Michael Anton]

Although Jack would point out students would have us, this is one of the exercises we did in graduate school. They would have us read the Declaration and some of these others side by side and and we would contemplate the differences Important differences usually tend in a in in the subsequent documents tend in a more kind of heedlessly universalistic and messianic direction. They lack the prudence and the yes. You know the sort of notion of sacred and practical limits of the Declaration. And this is one of the reasons why these other countries get into trouble.

[Host of Breaking History]

I We would say they say revolution is serious business. We don't do it for transient reasons. You gotta have a good reason for it. Okay, but what I wanna get at is would you accept that because these are universal principles and they are applying to human beings that at a certain base level it doesn't matter whether you're living in Zimbabwe or Siberia that human beings want to live in freedom for the most.

[Michael Anton]

I mean that's.

[Host of Breaking History]

Do you accept that or no or am I misinterpreting Jaffa there that there is a universality to it. Right. It's based on natural law, meaning that it's expression of something that.

[Michael Anton]

Let's get past the notion of human desire for a second because you can always as distasteful and uncomfortable as it is, you can always point to some this or that circumstance in the past where people seem to be quite content to live in a bad regime that doesn't respect their rights and ends up regretting it as much as they may hate it at the time for that grass is always greener reason then ends up regretting it later. Let's talk about what obligations natural a universal principle places on those who accept it. Okay. I the United States the founders would say the principle is universal because the only possibility of a basis for the law in modernity among an ethnically however, it's not as ethnically diverse back then, not nearly as it is today, but it still was diverse enough that what you couldn't do, for instance in 1776 is say okay, this is an English country, then you're going to have to kick a whole lot of people out. And I mean maybe some wanted to do that but whatever, it's not what they did. Right.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

And you can go back and study the all the debates at the time. I think nobody is better at have really combing through everything that was said during the founding era, not just at the national or the federal level, but in state constitutional conventions and private letters and sermons. And people like Tom west have done more research on this than anyone alive and they just don't find that what they find is a consistent from New Hampshire all the way down to Georgia discussion of this universal principle and equal natural rights. And yet the founders, none of them, none of the actual founders, the leading statesman, nor just the people who were alive at the time and accepted this argument, believed that it entailed any kind of obligation to extend that principle outward. It was the basis on which we declared our independence. It was the basis on which we declared the legitimacy of the law, of the new law. It was the basis on which we declared inalienable rights. But we didn't say that. And because it's universal, yes, in principle it applies to everyone, but it can only really be operationalized if a people congeals around it. That's a dumb word, but you get what I'm saying. And operationalizes it for themselves. So it does become a bit of a foreign policy question because of the French Revolution. That is to say, there was an argument that, well, if they're going to announce this revolution on principles similar to ours, are we not morally obligated, having done so, to support it? And there were people in France who tried to make that kind of, if you want to say, guilt trip argument

[Host of Breaking History]

on the early Americans, Thomas Paine and Tom Jefferson very much believe that we had to support the revolution.

[Michael Anton]

Well, no, no, Paine's a radical on this point. Paine was one of these guys who's like, kind of like a modern libertarian. He just thinks through the logical direction of his own argument and then says, wherever that ends, we have to do it. All other considerations be damned. Jefferson is wiser than that. I mean, he's actually Secretary of State during the most turbulent part of the French Revolution. And in the cabinet, he's by far the most sympathetic to what's going on over there. And even he. And whereas Hamilton's by far the most hostile, or maybe he's tied with Adams. But even Jefferson realizes that as a practical matter, this is just not something the United States can do. We just can't. I mean, I really sympathize. I mean, look, some of Jefferson's rhetoric is kind of semi unhinged on this part. Like one of his letters, he says, I would rather see half the world perish than that revolution fail. Like, really half the world. Like, I don't know. I don't know what the population was then, but does it even matter? Like, that's a pretty. It's rhetorically stirring, but if you think it through for a second, you realize, like, that's kind of crazy. What does the universality of the principle imply? Either as a moral obligation or as a prudential, practical Obligation. I mean, the other, the other quote that's easy to jump to here is the famous John Quincy Adams oration on the floor of the House, fourth of July. Oh, God, I'm blanking on the date. I think it's 1821. The monsters to destroy speech, which is a very long. It's like a 90 minute. I don't know how long, but it's long. And it's just this one paragraph. But at the end he says, look, the principle is universal, but that doesn't obligate us or make it wise for us to go around trying to spread it by the sword. And we won't. We won't do that.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right, but. But I just want to. I mean, I think you and I would agree. Let's just leaving the foreign policy implications aside, that you and I would agree that in fact, because these are universal principles, and in some ways it, in Lincoln's era, like with Frederick Douglass, kind of proves that anybody can access these ideas and articulate these ideas and live by these ideas that anybody who wants to sort of say, no, we're a product of very specific. I mean, in some ways, when you were describing the New. Right, they were engaging in their own kind of historicism. Right. I mean, they were saying, no, this is very particular to the English and Scottish Enlightenment and things like that. I mean, the sophisticated ones will make that argument. And what I think, correct me if I'm wrong, what I think Joff would say is, no, no, no, no. These are universal and they are true and they apply to everybody.

[Michael Anton]

Well, I think the founders believed that they were universal and true and in principle could apply to everybody. But they certainly, they were candid back then in a way that makes, like I said, we moderns uncomfortable. I mean, Hamilton says flatly, there's no chance this revolution in Haiti is going to work. Yeah, I mean, all right, and here we are, it's 2026, and Haiti has a pretty sad record of political instability and revolutions and various things that, let's put it this way, one would not want to live through, and one might not actually live if one were in the middle of it. So the universality of it doesn't mean it's a practical likelihood that it's going to happen here, there, or anywhere.

[Host of Breaking History]

Yeah, okay, fair. Okay.

[Michael Anton]

But the universality, this is why the foreign policy implications are exceptional.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

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

[Host of Breaking History]

Right. Okay, now let's talk about the implications. Like, sort of, what's the relevance of Jaffa now? Where do we, where do we place it? What can we learn from him today in terms of dealing with the many problems that face our republic, in your view?

[Michael Anton]

I think just learning from him the understanding the actual grounding of what the founders were trying to do, why they were trying to do it, what problem they were trying to solve. I mean, you know, again, this is something. I bring up Glenn's name again. We talk about this, the new right. You know, some of these guys that just hate the idea of natural rights, equal natural rights, and then they'll start railing against the government like, well, they're impinging on my free speech. They're trying to take my guns. To which I'm like, we both are like, well, okay, I agree with you. They shouldn't do that. That's unjust. But, like, on what basis can you about it?

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay.

[Michael Anton]

I mean, I guess they would say, well, the traditional rights of. Okay, well, you're an American, some of you, according to the, you know, your conception. This is the other thing, too, that,

[Host of Breaking History]

by the way, can we name. Who are you talking about? Adrian Vermuel. Who are you talking about?

[Michael Anton]

About, I don't know enough about him to know and see. I mean, look, I, I, I get along fine with Deneen, and I actually have read why Liberalism Failed, and I read Regime Change. Look, I, I just, I, I, Look, I, I don't know that I don't want to say anything that sounds insulting, because I do get along with him, and I, I think he's a good guy. I, I just, I reviewed Regime Change at length, and I sort of explained what I thought was wrong with it, but I just think there's a, there's a theoretical incoherence at the heart of this, you know, that particular claim, the inner, the integralist claim or the anti enlightenment claim, because it, what I think it misses Is the extent to which, however ridiculous, you know, and whatever problems Enlightenment introduced, you got to understand that there were a lot of problems that it solved and that just, you know, there's no dialing back. I don't think in the, in the modern world I'm more, I'm more, talking about less than, you know, what do you want? I want to, what's the word I'm going for here? You know, prominent people with endowed chairs and stuff like that that I'm talking about just like writers, bloggers, sub stackers, which maybe I shouldn't pay any attention to, but. And I mostly don't anymore. But I, when I got out of the Trump administration in 2018, I returned to teaching at Hillsdale and I returned to doing the fellowships at Claremont. So you end up meeting, you know, one or 200 young people a year and also just trying to figure out what's going on. I read a lot of stuff and I mean, look, if somebody wants to, maybe the best thing by me that I could point to is I, I got into a, a debate with I think the, the, the Suede. His name's Lafayette Lee. I don't actually even know who the guy really is, but he's a fairly prominent Twitter sued. And we, we went, we did a back and forth On I am 1776, which is a kind of new right online magazine. It's a little edgy. And I defended the founding and I just asked a bunch of questions and you know, and tried to explain why the founding was good, necessary and better than any alternative than anybody has yet come up with. And you know, he, he was a reasonable interlocutor here. This time I won't name a name, but I'll just say that they, they wanted it to be. I can't remember if it was supposed to be a three way conversation or two way, but in any event, one of the or two way. And then when this other guy backed out, they backfilled it with Lafayette, but some other fairly prominent suit was supposed to do it and we had like one exchange and he just put up his hands and walked away. Now, maybe he was exasperated by me or maybe he didn't know what to say. In my gray haired arrogance, I tend to think it was the latter, that they, a lot of these kids that don't have the education that they, that, or I'll put it this way, that I was fortunate and Glenn and many others that I know were fortunate enough to get and so they would just wander into waters that they haven't really thought through and find themselves lost pretty quickly. So, like, okay, saying you have no rights, okay, Leaving aside the philosophical untruth of it is such a dead end as a political message to the American people. Right?

[Host of Breaking History]

Sure.

[Michael Anton]

Imagine like going to. And like people who want to talk about the insignificant. Let's get back to the Declaration too. Since now I'm ranting like people want to talk about the insignificant significance of the Declarations, like every American. Like, you can go back the very first anniversary of July 4, 1777, there were like public readings and celebrations throughout the nation. And that has been true every single year since. Right. But we've got these sophisticated people writing under nothing against suits. I like suits. I used to sued. We all know it. Right. The Federalist Papers was written under a suit. A lot of the debating going on during the founding era was written under suit. So I'm not criticizing suits. I just find it hilarious. A lot of these guys are like, trying to make the case to a nation that has been celebrating July 4, 1776 for 250 years in a row that it was all meaningless and it was all based on our cultural tradition of like, do you think this is going to go over at a barbecue of maga Hatted truckers?

[Host of Breaking History]

Also is.

[Michael Anton]

Hey guys, hey guys, let me stand up. I'm going to tip this keg over. I'm going to stand on top of it and I'm going to tell you, number one, you have no rights. And number two, your Fourth of July picnic and all of the flag wing that you're doing, it's all meaningless.

[Host of Breaking History]

Like, well, no, I mean, you don't

[Michael Anton]

even know your audience.

[Host of Breaking History]

I was going to say Michael Anton, that they're making a version of an argument that I associate with Howard Zinn or Charles Beard and people on the left which is like, oh, the Declaration of Independence, that's marketing material for like property owners and white supremacism. Right. I mean, like, at a certain point it's like it is a little bit of a horseshoe. And that actually gets me to. I mean, we've spent a lot of time talking about. And I'm glad we are talking about the kind of new right and the younger people on the right. But what about the left? When was the last time the left, you know, gave a crap about the Declaration and cared about it? Do you think that it's that, that that one side of our political discourse right now just doesn't even care to try to interrogate?

[Michael Anton]

I mean, when I, when I was a younger When I was, let's say college, yeah, the left was pretty hardcore anti founding.

[Host of Breaking History]

Yeah.

[Michael Anton]

At least the intellectual left was. And I'm not sure if the rest of the left paid that much attention. My hazy recollection is that Obama, at least in the first term, sort of made it cool to be patriotic again on the left. Like, well, now at least we have a president who's kind of one of us. He's a younger, progressive, first black president, you know, very much of that kind of. I mean, even though from Chicago or spent a lot of time in Chicago, I was going to say like coastal knowledge class. But Chicago, it's on the coast of a lake, I suppose, and still basically from the university, you know, from the elite university class of American expert. And they thought like, okay, now that he's the president and he's giving the fourth of July oration, maybe it's okay. And then when he kind of let wokeness rip in the second term, we went right back to the old ways and we've been stuck there ever since. So it feels to me with the

[Host of Breaking History]

left, I mean, as a kind of a somebody who is interested in the history of ideas, does that start with Charles Beard? Does that start with. I mean, where do we. Where does the. I mean, maybe it starts with Woodrow Wilson, right? I mean, I don't know. Where do you think they lost their way? I mean, I mean, as a counterpoint, I mean, I considered, even though this is before Jaffa writes this stuff, but you could argue that Calvin Coolidge's great speech on the 4th of July for the 150th is an expression of Jaffa, a notion that it's enduring and true. And this is our charter, this is our identity. Those are very Jaffa principles. And he says it in his great speech that Yuval Levin and others really love. But in some ways, if you go back, that was a response to Wilson saying, boy, we need to modernize our whole operating code. Right. I mean, it was. Coolidge was in fact a reaction to the Progressive Era.

[Michael Anton]

So one of Jaffa's greatest students, John Morini, once said, in my hearing, he said this more than once, but I remember the first time he's like, well, it all started to go down. And the most important. No, this is what he said. He's like, actually, the second only to the Civil War. The most important event of the 19 or the most important year of the 19th century was 1876. I was like, what? What happened in 1876? It's the founding of Johns Hopkins University, like the founding of Johns Hopkins is somehow the. He's like, this is the importation of the German model of the university into the United States. Oh, and it begins there. Now, I mean, everything has deep roots because you don't, you know, progressivism is a kind of an Americanized and then politicized version of Hegelianism. And you don't get Hegel without Rousseau and you don't get Rousseau. And you can trace this. This is where Strauss is so useful. You trace this all to Machiavelli. And then Machiavelli is trying to solve a problem that, you know, is introduced centuries earlier than him that I already sort of outlined. So where did it all begin? I mean, you could say with creation. But when the United States, you know, before the importation of European progressivism into the intellectual world and then into the political life of the United States, you could say that most of the anti Americanism in the United States or the anti Foundingism had two sources. And this is the kid, you can't. I'm going to get in so much trouble. By the way. This is why I don't do these kind of things anymore, because people are going to listen to this. I just made everybody in the universe mad. And like there's just going to be Twitter mobs after me for quite a while. It's boring. I just would rather be quiet and read.

[Host of Breaking History]

You love it, Anton.

[Michael Anton]

No, not anymore. I'm too old for this crap anyway. All right, so anytime you say anything like you get. You get the Southerners mad. Especially if you're a Jaffa student. The Southerners think that you must hate them and want to eradicate them and just kill them. I mean, my wife's a Southerner, for Christ's sake. On both sides. Going back to this, it's like mid-1600s. So that means my children are half Southern, but whatever. You can't convince them otherwise. But it is true that the loudest voices attacking the universalism of the Declaration, all men are created equal and equal natural rights for the first half of the 19th century, up through the Civil War, were Southern voices. Okay, not doing it from the left, but making it. And this is one of the reasons they hate Jaffa, is because he kind of pointed out as you talked about the horseshoe or the, you know, the Venn diagram, there's a commonality between a lot of the arguments being made by them at that time that get picked up later, despite coming from a totally different perspective and having a totally different end and. And the second strain which was much less coherent theoretically. But it was just. There was always a kind of. At least present, if not very strong or influential, but present a kind of pro European snobbery, especially, let's say in the Boston Brahmin class and others of that ilk, kind of. That America is a bit low and vulgar compared to the great cultural achievements of Europe. And. But it. Only the left and that they're kind of left right in a certain intellectual way, if not the way they live their lives or anything. But if you want to just pinpoint when it starts, when it really starts. For us, it's the importation of German progressivism and then German. Two strands of German thought, you could say German idealism, Hegel and German historicism. I mean, one of the great. We want to talk about Jaffa. We should talk a little bit, just a little bit about. But Alan Bloom, they were great friends and then they had a giant falling out and Jaffa was pretty much the cause of that because he reviewed Closing the American Mind so relentlessly, negatively. But Bloom's the part two of Closing the American Mind. The very first chapter is called the German Connection, and Bloom focuses on one half of that, which is the sort of the Nietzschean strain that it starts to affect American intellectuals. And Jaffa. And Jaffa really left the progressivism argument to his students. He didn't. He. He made this argument. But it was. It's his. It's Morini and RJ Pastrito and a lot of others that really discovered this and fleshed it out. They focus on the other side of the German connection, which is the importation of German idealism that becomes progressivism. You know, probably America's leading progressive philosopher is John Dewey, who's kind of a. I was going to say pale copy. Maybe that's too dismissive. But he's definitely downstream and derivative from Hegel.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay. But what I wanted to get at is where we are today.

[Michael Anton]

We're nowhere good today.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right.

[Michael Anton]

Certainly not intellectually.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay. Because there's an argument that if you don't have a strong American conservatism that is rooted in the Constitution and rooted in the preservation of these universal truths, then we really do go off the rails because we just have to sort of price in that the left is going to constantly be yammering on about a living constitution and taking their very kind of historicism and constantly adding and tinkering and everything else like that, and then all of a sudden we lose what is enduring. That's not my argument. But I guess my question to you is sort of trying to bring it up to the current moment. Are we staring down into the abyss at this point, given that some of the trends on the right would suggest, as you said, that the Youngs are embracing this idea that. No, no, no, no. This is just a, you know, this is what got us liberalism. We don't like it. I don't give a damn if there's Thai restaurants in Omaha, Nebraska. I want my country back.

[Michael Anton]

Yeah. So I don't know. What's the question?

[Host of Breaking History]

My question is, I mean, like, can we, can we, you know, what do you do? Do you start by just trying?

[Michael Anton]

I don't know what to do.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay.

[Michael Anton]

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what to do, and I've kind of stopped because I'm, I'm not even sure that's the right question right now.

[Host of Breaking History]

So what is the right question?

[Michael Anton]

We're just. What I've decided to do and what a couple of my friends have decided to do is like, okay, what we were trained to do is go right to the root, go right to first principle. And why don't we just do that since we know how to do that and maybe some flowers will grow out of the dung heap in the future, but right now, like, trying to figure out, you know, whether it's political action, like, how do you reform the intellectual class right now? I mean, I don't know. I, I, I just finished reading a book because I read Heather McDonald's review. It called the Sanderson's Fail Manhattan. And it's about an elite, super elite, like 65k a year high school on the Upper east side and the college application process and what they're all teaching now and what they require and how the colleges drive what the lower, you know, what the high schools or the prep schools teach. And it's all woke garbage. It's like, I mean, when you face a tidal wave of dysfunction like that, like, how do you know what to do? How would you, how are you going to fix the IVs?

[Host of Breaking History]

Or.

[Michael Anton]

I spent a massive amount of time in 2024 and a little time since researching my own book, I spent it in Berkeley. How are you going to fix Berkeley? I mean, is it fixable from this, from the. Is, is it fixable to make it do the things you and I would like to see it do? Like, I, I have no idea. I doubt it. If it is, I don't know how to do it.

[Host of Breaking History]

Can I just slightly push back because I share a lot of your pessimism. One thing to Notice is that in the field of history we've seen, like everything else in the academy, a kind of trend towards against writing. Popular histories, great men histories, patriotic histories. I mean, would you agree with that? I basically, I'm saying academic discipline of history. Yeah.

[Michael Anton]

No, I mean, look, everything is cyclical. But I just, my pessimism leads me to, if not conclude, fear that we're really on a downward zoom, that it won't cancel the cycle long term. But I think it's too much to hope that the cycle is going to correct itself in a decade or a couple of decades.

[Host of Breaking History]

No, no, but I want to finish the point here. The academic histories have become less accessible and have become more ideological. I think we can.

[Michael Anton]

Well, I don't think anybody reads them.

[Host of Breaking History]

But in place of that, what we've seen is that some of the most popular books that are sold now are popular histories written by, you know, non academics. The late David McCullough. You know, you know, and, and that there is still a hunger among people, Americans who read, but they're just not, you know, reading man.

[Michael Anton]

How many of them do? And I, you know, to be a doomer. How many of those are like older people are dying off and the younger people don't really read and the young, you know, and they've also much more likely to have been indoctrinated by whatever's out there. And whatever's out there, what they're getting mostly is anti American propaganda, anti Western, anti enlightenment.

[Host of Breaking History]

All right, okay. But on the other hand, let's just take your story. You encountered that not everybody who goes to Berkeley comes out of Berkeley brainwashed and woke. Some people come out of Berkeley like you, and they become great conservative intellectuals and they, they, they run the other direction as fast as they can.

[Michael Anton]

Yeah, but can you name anybody? Can you name anybody else?

[Host of Breaking History]

Well, I don't know. I mean, I, I didn't go to Berkeley. I went to Trinity College in Connecticut. But I, you know, I had plenty of very.

[Michael Anton]

I mean, I'm not going to name him because he's now an enemy. But like, who was a conservative intellectual for a while who's now like a mouth frothing, anti conservative leftist.

[Host of Breaking History]

So that also happens. Sure. But my point is, is that not every student.

[Michael Anton]

That's true. I just think it's not.

[Host of Breaking History]

I'm saying, when you're talking about the dung heap and planting those flowers, right. If you can reach the, if you can reach the rebels in the 21st century Universities who are looking around and saying, wait a second, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't agree with this interpretation of my country. This doesn't reflect reality.

[Michael Anton]

It was easier when I went to college to. If you wanted to seek out great books type stuff and normal history, you could find it. I mean like read Jim Hankins. I don't know if you know who that is. He was in the Harvard history department for 40 years and he made a splash like a year and a half ago by announcing that he was quitting and not quitting teaching, just quitting Harvard and going to Florida to teach at U of F. And who leaves Harvard to go to the University of Florida. And he's like, it's just all woke garbage here. And they no longer, one by one, everybody teaching Western history, you know, the history of Western Europe, the United States, so on, aged out and retired and the committee structure is now so woke that they simply will not hire. So it will be not long. It probably already is true that there isn't anybody on the 40 or 50 member Harvard history department who teaches the history of Western civilization at all.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right?

[Michael Anton]

That's by design. I mean, read Harvey Mansfield was a dear.

[Host of Breaking History]

He's got a new book coming out.

[Michael Anton]

He's got a little book, he's got one that just came out on modern political philosophy and he's got a little book. It's like a collection of where Harvard went wrong over the years. Of all the things, you know, he's been needle. He's like the, he's avoid the Socratic gadfly of Harvard and has been for decades. Just very. It's. There's no rancor in it, there's no bitterness. But he, with humor, points out all the ways that they've screwed up and like it. They keep screwing up.

[Host of Breaking History]

They're not.

[Michael Anton]

It's not getting better.

[Host of Breaking History]

It's.

[Michael Anton]

Maybe it'll get better at some point. Inevitably it will get better at some point. Everything will get better at some point. I totally believe in cycles it'll come around, but I don't think it's going to come around soon. And I think we may have to go through some real bad cataracts before it comes around.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay.

[Michael Anton]

And the real problem is this, this mental, you know, which like I keep using his name but Glenn and I have been exploring in private conversation and

[Host of Breaking History]

you know,

[Michael Anton]

he wrote a little book that came out, I don't know, two years ago, three years ago called the Narrow Passage. It's a strange title. It doesn't really tell you what the book is about, but it isn't very long. It's like 100 pages, if that. And it's a really good account of kind of the psychosis that's gripped the elite mind in the last several years, more than several, several decades.

[Host of Breaking History]

Glenn's book.

[Michael Anton]

Yeah. Elmer's. The Narrow Passage. And so he and I. I don't know what we'll call it. We want to. We. I mapped it out. Talk to him about it. He's game to do it as a joint project with me because I think it'll be way better if we're both on it rather than if I just did it or if he just did it, for that matter. Where we're going to try to trace this really from the beginning, you know. No, I can't wait and run like by the beginning. We got to go back to the Bible. The problem is, like, you're not going to like the answer because once if, to the extent that people really get what we're talking about, they're going to be like, well, there doesn't seem to be a solution to this at all. And that may be the answer. Sorry.

[Host of Breaking History]

Right. Okay. No, I mean, anyway, I'm interested in that. Okay. Well, I think this is a good end point for the conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time. Michael and I wanted to say this now for our listeners. I would like to have you back for a separate conversation on the great Niccolo Machiavelli.

[Michael Anton]

Yeah, you should. No, I want. I do have a book. It's finished.

[Host of Breaking History]

Oh, great. Yeah, we'll do it. I've completed it.

[Michael Anton]

I've gone through the galleys. The publisher's a little mad at me because I'm such a perfectionist. I'm always massaging my. So they'll give me galleys. They're like, just approve this. And then I sent it back and I marked it up. I thought this was done well, you know, I found little pieces, I think,

[Host of Breaking History]

for our listeners who are generalists usually, and there are some young people who haven't given up on America. What is the first book? What is the first place to start in our journey into Harry Jaffa?

[Michael Anton]

The first place to start? Well, maybe you just get that the book is called the Rediscovery of America. It's, in a way, his last. But it's previously uncollected things that Ed Ehrler and Ken Masugi put together. But the chapters maybe to start with are chapter two, Equality, Liberty, Wisdom, Morality and Consent in the Idea of Political Freedom. And then six, which I've already mentioned, the American founding is the Best regime, the bonding of civil and religious liberty. But you could. Everything in here is very good. And another one, the chapter one, is called Aristotle and Locke in the American Founding, which is really philosophic. It could be daunting to a younger reader who's not. Who hasn't read Aristotle and Locke, who doesn't do political philosophy. But it's kind of the core of Jaffa's argument that the American Founding bridges the gap between ancient and modern theory and practice, which is a controversial argument. Controversial among the Straussians, controversial among students of the Founding, but I think is very powerful, persuasive, and certainly challenging as hell. You can get an education just from reading that piece alone. But look, Jaffa, in terms of the quality of the writing and what will actually spellbind a reader the most, there's no doubt Crisis is his best work in that sense. Rebirth, I think, is more profound and truer to the phenomena. But it took him a long time to write. He kind of overrode it. He had to have somebody I know really well edit it very carefully. It's just not as polished a complete, you know, like, work, beginning, middle to end, planned out the way Jaffa, in his 40s, was able to do, as opposed to when he got. When New Birth came out. I think he was 70. Close. When I met him, he was 70. He was, like, 75 when I met him, so. Or yeah, roughly. And 76. So new birth would have come out when he was 80, 81, 82. And again, now I'm making everybody mad. So if Misugi or Erler hears this, they're gonna be like, he dissed the old man. He said New Birth is incoherent. No, I'm just saying it's not. Like, as a polished piece of writing, that's just one of the most beautifully perfect pieces of rhetoric. And at a high intellectual level, Crisis is the best. Is it the best place to start? Not necessarily. It's the best place to start. If, like, your reading of Jaffa, you want to trace his intellectual journey, then sure.

[Host of Breaking History]

Okay. Well, that's great. Thank you so much. Michael Anton made a lot of new enemies today.

[Michael Anton]

Well, actually, no. I just. All I did is whack the hornet's nest of all my old enemies. I guess it doesn't really matter. Yeah.

[Host of Breaking History]

Thank you very much. This was great. And for taking the time.