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Federalist Radio Hour
‘The Making Of The American Mind’: A Deep Dive Into The Declaration Of Independence
00:45:30
On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Matthew Spalding, vice president of Washington Operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College, joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle on the...
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A
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B
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federalist and your experience Sherpa on today's quest for knowledge. As always, you can email the show at radiohefderalist.com follow us on XDRLST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast and of course, to the premium version of our website as well. Our guest today is Matthew Spalding, vice president of Washington operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College. Matthew is also author of a new book, the Making of the American Mind, the Story of Our Declaration of Independence. It's a different view than Ken Burns or the History Channel's leftist prism of the founding. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today on the Federalist Radio Hour.
- [01:49]
C
It's great to be with you.
- [01:51]
B
Absolutely. This is, I think more than anything, it is a book about sacrifice and unity and what all of that meant to the founding generations. As we talk about the making of the American mind, let us begin with the minds of the people who made America, the founders. What were these people like? Obviously they were very dedicated to a principle, and that principle did not come without cost for these people.
- [02:26]
C
Right? No, that's actually your opening thoughts there. A nice setup because what I wanted to do, we oftentimes the concept of the American founding and the American Revolution obviously is an important part of us and we talk about it a lot. There are lots of books written on it. I wanted to take a bit of a different tact, if you will, which you kind of picked up on there, which is that the Declaration, which is a document that's widely studied, actually has a story to it. There's a narrative about it. And, you know, sometimes we too often look at it and kind of read it coldly, if you will. You know, there was this declaration that Jefferson wrote. Then there's A little thing called the Revolution. And then later there was a Constitution. Whereas in reality, it's. It's much more than that. And it turns out the story of that is much more. Much more compelling, much more interesting, much more dynamic, and much more powerful. So the title I've chosen here, the Making of the American Mind, actually comes from a letter that Jefferson writes in 1825, when he says, look, I wasn't trying to invent any new ideas or come up with any new theories here. I was writing this to express as an expression of the American mind, which is that he knew that he was the drafter of the document, but what he was writing for were all the other members of the Continental Congress. This is a legislative document, after all, passed by the Continental Congress. Right. They debated for two days. They debate his draft for two days and edit it, cut it by about a third. It's already been edited by a committee which included John Adams and Ben Franklin. So there's this bigger thing, this thing called the American Mind, which Jefferson beautifully. I give him all credit for his turns of words, which he's very gifted with. He was trying to capture that mind. And so a lot of the book is trying to tell the Declaration story, how it was debated and all that, and then going through the Declaration like a commentary, trying to get a sense of that mind which was captured in this document, but also pamphlets, letters, writings of the time, really, going back to the French Union War, which ended in 1763, and how it developed then over those decades leading up to the Continental Congress, and then eventually the Declaration. So it's a much bigger swath, if you will, that captures this generation, which I broadly refer to as Ironman. Towards the end of the book, there's a chapter on that passing phrase that Lincoln used, called him Iron man, which you kind of alluded to about their kind of the sacrificial. What they actually accomplished. It is quite amazing and impressive the way they. What they actually did. But at the height of this conflict, I mean, literally, literally at that very moment, British warships were showing up in New York Harbor. This is what they produced, and these are the ideas they expressed. And that's just a fabulous, fabulous story.
- [05:53]
B
Yes, it is. From the book, from that chapter which you speak, we have this. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, famously signed with a large, bold signature. He is supposed to have said that now John Bull, the popular personification of England, can read Hancock's name without needing spectacles, and that the king could double the reward on his head when Hancock passed The quill. They all signed the document as individuals not identified by colony. He reiterated the importance of unanimity and said that the delegates must all hang together. Benjamin Franklin is said to have quipped in response that we must all hang together or we most assuredly will all hang separately. It is a famous line, but it is essential to understand just what these people of this time put on the line. Their, their life, their liberty, all that they held precious.
- [07:02]
C
How do you get that?
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B
How do you, how do you get to that point? I guess.
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C
Well, so let's, let's back up. I mentioned earlier that we sometimes again take for granted. There's this whole debate in the Continental Congress leading up to the Declaration, which I follow. John Dickinson and John Adams famously have these long debates about independence. Jefferson arrives late. He's actually a substitute for his uncle who has to go off back to the Virginia legislature. So he arrives late in the session and is known to be a good writer. So they put him on a committee and he's trying to capture all these arguments. So the bulk of the book then is really going through the Declaration. But in doing so I try to capture the larger sweeps of that mind. A lot of times we think of the, the Founders as merely or primarily thinkers of their time. So they were kind of enlightenment, early enlightenment, 18th century thinkers. But there's lots in the Declaration, all those pamphlets, ranks at the time that suggest a much deeper tradition that shaped them. So I spend a lot of time talking about how they were influenced by Greek and Roman thinkers, especially through the educational system, but through their own letters, their references, including references in the Declaration, and also they were deeply shaped by the whole Christian theological tradition, both in terms of giving a, providing a moral horizon for the whole enterprise, but also in particular, I mean the, the Declaration is often seen as a highly secular document, a rational secular document, but there's actually a lot more to it when we look at it more broadly. Not merely as a one off writing of a particular individual, but this broader document that was put together by all these signers who amended it and added, for instance, additional references to the deity. There are only two characters in the whole Declaration. One is the King of England, it turns out he's the bad guy. But the other one is God, who appears four times in the Declaration. And they are juxtaposed against each other. And it really is beautifully written to capture that argument. And so I think part of the nobility of what is going on here is to, is on the one hand there are these great examples of their sacrifices so in that, the chapter you're beginning to quote from, that last chapter talks a lot about how these, these signers, almost all of them were in the war. Many of them had their, their sons involved in the war. Several of them had their sons killed in the war or captured and tortured. There was one signer from New York and the British sent Calvary to surround his house. He wasn't there. His wife was. She refused to give up. They sent ships up Long Island Sound to bombard the house. She was captured and she was only released after George Washington arrested a British aristocratic woman in order to force a prisoner exchange. So on the one hand you have all these sacrifices, it shows you what they were serious. But then you have this wonderful and noble statement of high principle that's really been unmatched in American history. And these things are going on simultaneously. So at the riskiest moment, the moment when they knew they were signing their death warrant, literally their death warrant, they are also signing it on behalf of one of the greatest statements of liberty in Western civilization. That still speaks to us today.
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B
Absolutely. And we think about those profound opening lines that have impacted, have influenced so many of the great leaders, not only in this country, but around the world in the 250 years hence. But we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. And let us pause on what exactly that means, because I think that's central to the American mind. You talk about God playing an important, not just an important, a primary critical role in this and the fact that most of the signers approached it from a Judeo Christian faith center. I know that Jefferson was described as a deist, a clockmaker, God sort of thing, all of that. But these were murky at best. Yes, yes indeed. But the vast majority, John Adams in particular, very steeped in Judeo Christian belief and faith. And that's that line that's in there that all men are created equal. And then it goes on to say that we have inalienable rights. They don't come from King George, they don't come from a line, a succession of kings and overlords. They come from the God of heaven and earth. How critical was that?
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C
The greater has endowed us.
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B
Exactly.
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C
That's crucially, crucially important. So a couple things to point out there. First, I always like to. It's striking that after a rather slow opening line of the first paragraph, when in the course of human events almost put you to sleep, there's a staccato line. We hold these truths to be self evident. Jefferson is Gifted with language, so that there's no coincidence. It's very intentional there. But notice he doesn't say if this was being written today. He doesn't say, we have some values we would like to share our opinion about.
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B
Yes.
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C
Is that a subjective statement of their particular inclination, shall we say? The larger message here is that this is written in the world in which man can know certain things about the most fundamental things. The other signal we have going still in that first paragraph is the reference to the laws of nature and of nature, nature's God. They've put down a philosophical mooring or a marker, if you will, from which they're going to operate. That is their laws of nature, things we can understand by reason. And it turns out these same laws are the laws of nature's God. That is, they were created by a creator God. So kind of a sense of general revelation. So from the very beginning, there's a sense of reason in revelation working together. They're not, you know, today we think these things are at odds with each other in the modern sense, whereas they thought they were compatible on the fundamentals. And you see that in that famous quote you gave us there, we always truth be self evident, that all men are created equal. So on the one hand, that's a statement of what we know. We hold these truths to be self evident. We can understand that by our reason. But what we're understanding to be self evident, that all men are created equal and they're endowed by their Creator with certain rights. So again, it's this beautiful mixing of these great realms of truth, reason, revelation that we find in Western civilization that's central to this whole document. That's the electricity of it, if you will. And so we have the sense of they're equal in some fundamental way. And when you think about it theologically, right, we're all equal before God. We're equally, all equally human. Right. It doesn't say about our height or weight or this kind of thing, but in the fundamental sense, which is why, by the way, they've now put a marker down in the Declaration that becomes the watchword of the abolitionist movement and really begins that because this statement cannot. Slavery cannot coexist without with the statement that all men are created equal.
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B
Indeed.
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C
And then it goes from there. So they're equal. They're endowed by their creator with certain animal rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a term which I spend a lot of time on as well. In terms of what do those words mean? Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, again, we often read these things quickly, and the modern view as well. It's kind of whatever you want, your happiness, what makes you feel good. But I think all the evidence is contrary to that completely, especially if you think of this broader historical context I alluded to earlier. They're deeply shaped by kind of the classical and Christian traditions of the West. You can now read it's life. It's the thing. You have been created. Your life, your liberty. What we do normally as human beings, we act, we do things, we make choices, we choose things. So that covers a lot of ground. Doesn't mean licentiousness. The founders were always very clear on that one. They chose the word liberty, which is the old Roman word, which meant that freedom appropriate for a citizen, for a civilized man. Right. And then the pursuit of happiness, I mean, look, happiness is the. The end of all classical political thought absorbed into the whole Christian tradition. And it clearly meant something more substantive than your feelings. It leaves room there to pursue your happiness. That's your right. But it doesn't suggest it's anything and everything. It's somehow it's pursuing those things that make you truly happy in the human sense, a human flourishing. So again, I think it's all wrapped up together in a way that points towards something, not just anything you want. And again, putting it in a broader sense, this is why the pursuit of happiness is also the root of religious liberty. Because ultimately, to pursue happiness fully, to be fully flourishing human beings, by their argument, meant that you had to have the freedom to pursue, not as a state or government matter, but of your own, a relationship with God and practice freely your religious beliefs. So again, I think it's an extremely rich document that really goes beyond how we today, especially the modern academy and the modern media popularizations. You'll read the document. Pay it off. Pay it off Now. The Watchdog on Wall street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day, Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it affects your wallet. If you have thousands of dollars of.
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- [19:32]
B
Our guest today is Matthew Spalding, Vice president of Washington operations and dean of the Van Andle Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College. Matthew is author of the new book, the Making of the American Mind, the Story of Our Declaration of Independence. You know, it's interesting to think about, as you mentioned before, the mind of the American. What all went into that from the Founders, from this Declaration of Independence and how much. You said, as you noted, the abolition movement relied on the Declaration. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln who really talked about these first principles before we even get to the Constitution. Obviously, the Declaration of Independence, those first principles are woven into this exceptional Constitution that was written several years later. But the American mind, growing up and moving forward in the expansion of the United States of America, became obviously very fixated on this in the 1840s and 50s, which gave rise, of course, to the most destructive time in this republic. How much of those early writings shaped that conversation throughout the intervening years?
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C
Oh, it was overwhelming. I mean, part of it is, think again about what this document does. I emphasize that it was written by the Continental Congress. Continental Congress first meets in 1774. They issue this document in 1776, which declares independence, but also launches a new nation. This actually is a constitutional document. It's not the US Constitution, which comes 11 years later, but it is part of that. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence is considered in the US Code an organic document of the country. This is the first, you know, key document that begins to define the American regime, who we are. It's intimately connected to the. The Constitution. Lincoln, once famous, also famously said that the Constitution is a frame of silver.
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B
Yes.
- [21:59]
C
Intended to frame the apple of gold, which is the Declaration. Right. The Founders, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, you name all the kind of these minds over time understood that the Declaration ultimately was the intellectual and moral heart of all of American constitutionalism. It's when we lose that connection that we get into problems. And you see that, by the way, every major presidential address from the very beginning through Jefferson in 1800, Lincoln, 1860, FDR in 1932, Barack Obama, I mean, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, very famously. They're always looking back to the Declaration. Why? Because that's the defining document, the Constitution. We love the Constitution. It's a great document. It is the framework of everything, all of our liberty. But the thing that it's the heartbeat of America is the Declaration. So what do we fight over? What does equality mean? What do these ideas mean? What does it mean to be dedicated to these truths? And we still. I believe that's still the electric cord in our politics today. We still debate these things. This is still a live question, as it should be.
- [23:22]
B
It is interesting as well, that one of the gentlemen who helped write the Declaration of Independence and edit it was the guy who harnessed electricity. So he knew a thing or two about making things electric, if you will.
- [23:39]
C
That's right. That's right. But just generally, you know, we see it in their architecture and their pen names and what stories they wrote. They were thinking big. They had in mind here being a great nation that would evoke Athens and Rome and London, a great nation, which meant it was dedicated to a great idea, great set of principles, a particular. It's a particular nation, a particular people. But it has this other thing about it which makes it something different, something special or exceptional, as we say. And I think that's the thing we need to recapture and come to understand, perhaps understand it for the first time for many of us that have never been taught this, or understood it, or read it, or know this history. And it makes America worth, worth loving and worth being the object of our patriotic support.
- [24:39]
B
Well, that is. That is a good point. No doubt about it. That is a good point. And that's what I want to ask you. As we move forward, the American mind moving forward, so many things go into the making of that American mind, the vision of what America is. So where did we get to a point in this country today where we have so many Americans hating America? As you know, these are extremely divided times. It's not like we didn't have arguments in the past, but it's. It's something else today, it seems.
- [25:18]
C
No, you're right. And this is one reason why I wrote this book, is to go back to this old Declaration, as we might say, and try to relearn the argument again. I think the Declaration actually is the thing that unifies us and holds us together. And I think that's still true for the vast majority who still think this is a good and great country. It's not perfect. It's had its share of mistakes. We're imperfect people. But it's still worth defending because of what it aspires to, because of its principles. And those principles are the principles in the Declaration. Now there's a deep problem of late. It's gotten, I think, more difficult, I fear. But it really does grow out of the early progressive movement, after the Civil War, early 20th century, when there's a much larger debate in America over the meaning of things like truth, self evident truths. Can we know things? Are there things we can know that transcend history? Are they merely bound by history? These intellectual debates over the course of the 20th century shape how we Understand ourselves, our politics, how many colleges in the academic world teaches students that had an important shaping effect on how we understand these particular ideas? I think the problem of late, which I especially worry about, is in more recent decades on the left and more recently on the right, the effect of that growing sense of relativism that you get out of progressivism, which is that there really are no permanent truths or merely truths relative to their time and place. And these are nice, you know, 18th century ideas, but we've grown out of them. The effect of that is to encourage some to throw them out completely, to think of themselves not only as no longer liberal, no longer progressive, but postmodern. And everything is deconstructed and torn down. And we see that very relevant on one side of the aisle. And then I fear that that is kind of starting to rub off on some others as well, who see America as maybe haven't been. That wasn't that great in the first place, and it's caused a lot of our own problems, and maybe it's not that special. And I think that's kind of the same effect. There's kind of a post modernism on the right as well that wants us to get past America and move on. And, you know, that that all worries me quite a bit because the claim of the Founding and the Declaration in particular is not that these things were true in 1776 or Lincoln, and they were true in 1860. But the argument here is that there are certain things the mind can know, and they are true simply about man, about politics, about how we should organize the fundamentals of our regime and our Constitution. And that's a bedrock. And if that's not true, we throw the whole thing out. At that point, it really is just all against all, and we're off to the races. And I don't see what the ballast is for our politics. So, yes, I think we're turning to the Declaration, returning to it, recapturing it, rediscovering it, falling in love with it again. Augustine said, you can't love something if you don't know it. So we need to know these things. That really is, I think, actually the solution to our current political dilemmas in 2026, the anniversary of the Declaration, that this is the time to do it, which is why I've written this book, but also encouraged these kinds of conversations about this crucial and also beautiful and noble document.
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B
Leftists in this country have long said that the Constitution is a living, breathing document. I don't agree with them on that point. Certainly not the way they mean it to be. So let me ask you this. Is the Declaration a living, breathing document in the way the left tries to frame the Golden Apple?
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C
That's a great question as well. I agree with what you set up there, that the Left says the Constitution is a living document because they want to get around its. Its rules and its framework so they can do whatever they want. There are some adaption in the Constitution, right? It's not meant to be so rigid you can't do anything. But the only reason it can be that is if the Declaration is unchanging. The argument of the Declaration is not merely an argument for this nation or this time or this particular moment. It's a claim that the human mind can know certain things to be true. Simply either all men are created equal, and let's make it simpler for those that don't abide by the claim of a Creator, all men are equal. Equal in some sense of equally being human. Which is some aren't born booted to right others and the others aren't born with saddles on their back. Either that is true or it's not true. That's not a living, evolving concept. It's either right or wrong. And you can't have a politics of a constitutional government which allows for the give and take of liberal and conservative, left and right, disagreement, laws, majorities. You can't have that give and take in your Constitution if there's not an underlying thing we do agree on, which is that no matter how much we disagree with each other, we are all equally human and none is to be persecuted, none is to be discriminated against, all have rights or no one has rights. Well, I'm on the side that all have rights, and that's where the Founders were, and I think they were right about that. And that really is the culmination of the whole Western tradition up to this moment, which is captured beautifully here by Jefferson in this document, which is an expression of the American mind. I think it still is fewer, you know, perhaps fewer understand that perhaps fewer believe that they've been kind of malformed, if you will, by progressive education and other things that have kind of forced them to kind of be clouded in their perceptions. But I think if you really start thinking it through and recovering that and teaching that. I mean, look, look, the old liberals, the old liberal argument, even though we might disagree on the politics of it and the policies and whatnot, would completely agree with this argument, right? We have our disagreements politically and we fight them out in the context of the Constitution. The checks and balances of a legislature and executive and a Supreme Court. But underlying that are these fundamental truths. That was the argument of, of the left for a long time, until rather recently. And here we are trying to desperately conserve it as best we can. And that's what I'm trying to do. I think the best way to do it actually is to recapture the excitement of the story itself, because you really can't not learn that if you read the story and understand what they're doing and try to grasp what they were intending in documents like this one.
- [33:07]
B
You talked about it before. I want to expound upon it just a bit. There is a famous quote that is falsely attributed to Abraham Lincoln and it is this. America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. Do you believe that? Do you believe that is happening now? And if you do, is it because too many of us have not looked to the Declaration of Independence as that American mind guy?
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C
Yeah, so. So yeah, Lincoln did. He said something like that in one of his early speeches. And I think in general, I think he was correct. But what he meant by that was, is important. So his perception, like rightly at the time, this was the kind of, you know, mid 19th century, is we were on our way to becoming a great nation and we were going to be great and powerful and no European country could come over and destroy us. And he was young at the time and kind of oversaid it some, but generally speaking, I think he was right. But what he pointed out though was that what will destroy a republic which says a country that rules itself, that is self governed, it will lose its freedom. It's more likely it will be not because we are defeated in war, it'll be because we defeat ourselves in the sense that we forget our duties and what is necessary to maintain, to maintain self government, which has to do with, we talk about civic education and being prepared to take on the responsibility of citizenship, whether it's being a jury or fighting in the army, to uphold our liberties, to be watchful for our liberties, to protect our free speech and other things. But again, underneath all of that has to be a citizen's understanding of the importance of the Constitution and maintaining its rules and its framework, not wantonly ignoring the rule of law. But behind all of that, underneath all that has to be the agreement, the fundamental agreement of the Declaration, which is not merely ours, although it happens to be American, and I praise it as such. And it should be really the apple, the crown jewel of the American experiment. But it's an argument that is the nature. You can't have a Republican government. The very meaning of republican government is that all citizens are equal. Says who? Well, you got to have some ground upon which to say that. And their ground is. Well, both we know that, both by reason classical and the whole rational tradition, going back to the Greeks and Romans and the Christian tradition, we are equal before God. And it's pretty hard to beat that argument. And if we lose that, then we really lose the whole ground upon which we can justify our constitutional government. So I think he's right. If we are to die, if the Republic is to collapse, it's going to collapse because we no longer uphold the fundamental things necessary to remain self governing. Which goes back to us understanding how we look at each other in some fundamental way that is unchanging.
- [36:36]
B
Perhaps it's a tired question. I don't care. I never tire of it. And I like to ask any historian, every historian I meet in American history and of the American mind, in the conversation that we're having, what do you think, the writers, the believers in this Declaration, what do you think they would say about the America today, the Jeffersons, the Adams, the Hancocks?
- [37:08]
C
I've actually thought about that question many times because it's a great question. You know, so much time has passed. It's kind of, it makes it harder. It's always harder. These speculative questions are always difficult. But I think a couple of things.
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B
At the very least.
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C
One is I think they would be flabbergasted, overwhelmed and joyously happy to see where this great nation has become. And if you look at over time, what has accomplished both here and abroad and in the world and in economics, in defending freedom around the globe, all of those things, I think they would be wonderfully. They would just see that as a great thing because really at the time they weren't sure this was going to work. At the same time, I think they would be deeply concerned and they would go, if you this you can see in their letters, because they actually talk about this a lot. And we're at the time is that, look, we've given you this republic, we've set it up very nicely. You've got a great Constitution. We've grounded it in the principles of the Declaration. It's up to you. You've made a lot of mistakes, you've gone down a lot of rabbit holes. You've had some larger problems like slavery that had to be dealt with and were dealt with very nobly. And now you're at a point where, yes, you've accomplished these great things. You're on the cusp of continuing reviving that greatness. But don't fool yourselves. You can't recover greatness unless you have a grounding for that greatness. And beware, I think they would say, beware the temptations of the politics of old, whether they are of Napoleon or Caesar or whatever it might be, that it's just merely a matter of power. Greatness is really the preservation of republican forms of government. That's what the American spirit means, which means upholding the Constitution of the Declaration. And they would be worried about that, given the state of our civic education, the expansion of the modern state and the administrative state, all the things which we're both very familiar with that are plaguing us. So I can be a mix of both a deep concern, but also a great joyous reflection of what we've accomplished in our past. But a hopefulness that we, a good people, focus on the right things and with confidence, with a. Not a great confidence in human nature, it's drawn to its passions, but also a confidence in the human ability to govern themselves. I think they would look forward to America's future.
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B
Final question for you about America's future tied to America's past. You mentioned at the outset of our conversation that Thomas Jefferson, in a letter in 1825, had talked about what he was after when he started this whole experiment along with his. His colleagues at the time. And you mentioned the fact that that's where he really talks about the American mind. Did he write that letter to John Adams? I ask you that because when I think about America and the American mind, I think about those two minds in particular because they were in so many ways so similar, yet so different. And their politics and their policies reflected that. In fact, they were so caught up in their differences that they were alienated for years. And then all of a sudden there is a re approachment there. You know, there is a new connection there. And they remember as old friends and fighters what it was all about. And they're very cordial and they have a letter writing campaign.
- [41:30]
C
No, that's absolutely right. And the, the later correspondence between Jefferson and Adams is one of the greatest in American letters. The letter in particular was written to Henry Adams. But having said that, you capture, I think, exactly what is going on here, which is, you know, you mentioned Adams and Jefferson. The other, of course, duo that I think of is, is Adams and Hamilton, who become great fighters against each other in the first Washington administration. You can imagine them having. And they actually did famously have a dinner together. And they disagreed and argued about everything. And I'm sure they even argued about what to eat, what wine to drink, everything, in many ways, deeply disliked each other. And yet all of these figures, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Henry Adams, all these figures, all the. They disagreed fundamentally on all these different policies. Where to go, what to do, foreign policy, but they agreed on the fundamentals. What happens is that the Continental Congress in the Declaration is one of those moments where it all comes together at the right moment and the Declaration is written, it's captured beautifully by Jefferson, it's edited into a much, even much better document by people like Adams and Franklin in the Continental Congress. And it becomes this great statement. It's an expression of the American mind. The American mind fights about different things, flutters around, disagrees on policies, but then it comes back again under Lincoln, right? No, no, let's go back to the fundamentals. All men are created equal, right? It's when we have disagreements we don't mean to get rid of. Disagreements will always be there. That is the nature of politics. But every time there are deep fundamental disagreements, and it seems to be getting worse. What have we done in the past and what do we need to do now? We go back to the fundamentals, the first principles of our politics, because that's something where there is deep, deep agreement that really can't be denied, but it needs to be clarified, because we don't necessarily go back there all the time. I think this is one of those moments. I think that this is a time to relearn those things. I think we have a unique opportunity in 2026 to rediscover them, perhaps for the first time. If you've not been taught this, go out, get books, read books, Teach yourself these ideas. We need to understand what it means to be a citizen, relearn the fundamentals. And I would challenge anyone that does that to not see in the actions of 1776, both in terms of the creation of this document, but also what they then did in their own lives with their own fortunes, to not see a great and noble story about great and good ends that really directs us towards things that transcend our immediate times in our lives, to higher things, even eternal things that really do remind us about what is most important in our lives, in our politics, but our lives more generally. And that's, I think, what we need right now. And what would regenerate and revive American greatness?
- [44:49]
B
Well, in this season of blessings and miracles and remembering those blessings and miracles. I hope that we all never forget what a miracle and in my humble opinion, what a God given gift it was, this Declaration of Independence, the people who wrote it and the people who fought for it. Thanks to my guest today, Matthew Spaulding, vice president of Washington Operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College. Matthew is author of the new book, the Making of the American Mind, the Story of Our Declaration of Independence. You've been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federal. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
- [46:01]
A
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