Liberty and Learning: Part Ten

Summary

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Liberty and Learning with Mark Levin and Larry Arnn – Episode 10 (July 11, 2025)

Overview

This milestone tenth episode of "Liberty and Learning" brings together veteran broadcaster and constitutional scholar Mark Levin and Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, for a profound discussion on the enduring legacy and meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Timed just after July 4th, they explore the philosophical, political, and historical significance of the Declaration, its interpretation through moments of national crisis—namely the Civil War—and how modern progressives deal with and challenge its principles. With a blend of mutual respect, historical insight, and candid assessment of contemporary politics, the hosts take listeners deep into America’s founding philosophy and its relevance today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Philosophical Roots and Achievements of the Declaration

• [02:16–08:22] Deep Dive into the Declaration’s Origins
  • Dr. Arnn praises the Declaration as a “philosophic, political, theological masterpiece” ([02:16]).
  • Jefferson’s education and influences are highlighted—drawing on thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney ([03:11]).
  • The American colonists’ journey: initial focus on religious conformity, evolving toward religious freedom as a necessity through 150 years of self-governance.
  • Unique circumstances in America: settlers brought European knowledge but no aristocracy, leading to the development of highly evolved local governments and legislatures.
  • The British policy changes after 1763 (post-Seven Years’ War, taxes, and regulation) forced American thinkers to articulate their unique understanding of rights and governance.
  • Jefferson was chosen to draft the Declaration not only for his Virginian background, crucial for uniting colonies, but for the eloquence and strength shown in his earlier pamphlet "A Summary View of the Rights of British North America."

"Let those fear flatter, sire, it is not an American art. You should know that your ministers are servants." — Dr. Larry Arnn paraphrasing Jefferson ([07:14])

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The Declaration and the Civil War: Lincoln’s Legacy

• [11:31–17:54] Lincoln’s Use of the Declaration
  • Lincoln’s genius: reframing slavery as a direct violation of the ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
  • The Gettysburg Address ties the nation’s purpose back to 1776.
  • In the early days (e.g., Northwest Ordinance of 1787), there was momentum against slavery—but as time went on (notably in the Missouri Compromise), this faltered.
  • Key opposition: Confederate leaders (John C. Calhoun) dismissed the Declaration as “obsolete,” favoring a theory of racial hierarchy justified by pseudo-scientific ideas of evolution and progress.
  • Lincoln’s statesmanship was about restoring the link between the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, affirming that the founding generation, even with their imperfections and compromises, planted the seed for slavery's eventual abolition.

“All of Lincoln’s statesmanship is to demonstrate that it’s an innovation, that we have come to think slavery a good thing… even the slaveholders among them were enemies of slavery. In principle, it’s a bad thing.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([13:36])

• On Drafting and Constraints
  • The original draft of the Declaration did attack slavery, but it was removed for political necessity.
  • Recognition that the founders were not perfect; historical actions were shaped by real limitations of their time.

“The best they did was the best they could, in my opinion. But also, of course, it was imperfect.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([16:55])

• Lincoln’s Vision for the Next Generation
  • Lincoln believed that future Americans (“their progeny”) must finish the founders’ work, ensuring freedom for all.

“Any people that would write a Declaration of independence like that couldn’t support slavery forever.” — Mark Levin ([17:33])

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The Progressives (American Marxists) versus the Declaration

• [17:54–22:29] Ideological Shifts in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century
  • The “Progressives” (Wilson, et al) dismissed foundational principles as quaint and only relevant for their time, asserting modern leaders were free to redefine society.
  • Dr. Arnn draws a parallel between the “scientific utopianism” of Calhoun and German-inspired progressives, noting both justified hierarchy and centralized power as necessary to ‘improve’ humanity.
  • Progressivism’s tendency: more centralized power, less deliberation, an impatience to act without reflection.

“Those are old days. Those days are past. There’s not that much to think about anymore. Now we just have to do.” — Dr. Arnn, quoting progressive thought ([21:43])

- Progressivism, like the pro-slavery argument, claims certain people are more “evolved” and should govern those deemed less so.

“What the Declaration says: What is good for one human being is good for another one.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([22:25])

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Modern Misinterpretations: Obama, the Left, and the Declaration

• [25:30–32:24] The Self-Execution Argument and Redefining Equality
  • Obama (and modern progressives) often cite the Declaration selectively, suggesting its principles are not “self-executing” and government must actively reinterpret and enforce them via expansive social policy.

“The principles of the Declaration of Independence are self evident, but they’re not self-executing. We have to execute them. And to execute them can include changing their meaning.” — Dr. Larry Arnn, summarizing Obama’s view ([26:35])

- Dr. Arnn argues this redefinition transforms equality from equal treatment (which produces a diversity of outcomes) to equal outcomes, which he says requires government power and undermines the founding vision.

- Mark Levin ties the left’s approach to Marxism—discarding the eternal for the mutable, and promoting the idea that “the world begins today and man decides what it looks like.”

“Hope and change. That means the past doesn’t mean anything, but we can change the future into anything we can hope. And that’s what’s despotic and vaunts power.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([31:41])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s a philosophic, political, theological masterpiece. It’s, it’s a tremendous achievement and written by some of the greatest people who ever lived.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([02:16])
• “By the time it gets to the Declaration of Independence, they’ve been working hard…” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([04:16])
• “The best they did was the best they could, in my opinion.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([16:55])
• “A standard maxim for a free society always to be striven for, always to be sought after, never to be wholly attained.” — Dr. Larry Arnn on how the founding principles must always be imperfectly pursued ([17:42])
• “Those are old days. Those days are past. There’s not that much to think about anymore. Now we just have to do.” — quoting a progressive politician ([21:43])
• “What is good for one human being is good for another one.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([22:25])
• “The principles of the Declaration of Independence are self-evident, but they’re not self-executing. We have to execute them. And to execute them can include changing their meaning.” — Dr. Larry Arnn, summarizing Obama’s perspective ([26:35])
• “Hope and change. That means the past doesn’t mean anything, but we can change the future into anything we can hope. And that’s what’s despotic and vaunts power.” — Dr. Larry Arnn ([31:41])

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Understanding the Declaration’s Philosophical Roots: [02:16–08:22]
• Lincoln’s Embrace of the Declaration During the Civil War: [11:31–17:54]
• The Progressives and the Rejection of Founding Principles: [17:54–22:29]
• Obama and Modern Left’s Approach to the Declaration: [25:30–32:24]
• Concluding Thoughts: Education and Hillsdale’s Role: [32:24–End]

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Closing & Reflections

Mark Levin closes with a heartfelt tribute to Dr. Arnn, summarizing Hillsdale’s impact and Arnn’s role as a leading educator on the principles underpinning American liberty:

“It truly is an honor to know you and to call you my friend and to have learned so much from you. … Anybody who hates me can hate him first.” — Mark Levin ([32:24])

Dr. Arnn reflects on their shared mission and friendship, referencing Aristotle: “The things of friends are in common.” ([33:58])

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Summary

This episode delivers a sweeping, passionate, and rigorous examination of the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of American liberty and self-government. Levin and Arnn weave together deep historical knowledge, philosophical inquiry, and contemporary critique, defending the country’s founding ideals against both historical and modern attempts to undermine or reinterpret them. Their conversation highlights the timeless tension between power and principle, tradition and reform, and offers listeners both context and inspiration for maintaining the American experiment in liberty.

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Transcript

[A]

You're invited to take a deep dive into the founding principles of the United States. Join Mark Levin and Larry Arne, the president of Hillsdale College, as they present Liberty and Learning.

[B]

Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin with our dear friend Dr. Larry Arndt, President of Hillsdale College, and our joint podcast, Hillsdale College in Westwood 1. Liberty and learning. That's what we call it. This is episode 10. Well, that went fast. And we're going to talk to Larry in a moment. I want to remind you, go to Hillsdale College's website. There's a ton of great information there. Hillsdale. Edu. Hillsdale Edu. Free courses. You can take all kinds of information, great professors and faculty, and just, it's loaded with great information. And of course, this podcast, Liberty and Learning. Larry Arn, how are you, my friend?

[A]

I'm very well. How are you doing?

[B]

I'm doing great. And by the way, America, they put out this great video, Hillsdale College in partnership with the White House on July 4th. You're going to want to check that out, too. And I understand, Larry, you're going to be producing more of those, is that correct?

[A]

Yeah, we don't know how many, but so far we've taped six or seven, and there'll probably be 20 or maybe more. We've got one out by Pete Hegseth talking about the founding of the army, you know, which is George Washington's work. And. Yeah, and we got the battle of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. And we're going to do the steps to the Declaration of Independence, and we're going to read the document and understand it along the way.

[B]

Yeah. Now, people, I'm sure in this audience know Lexington and Concord. That was actually 1775, which really started the Revolutionary War in many respects, but we'll do that another day. Professor, let's jump into something here that we just celebrated the Declaration of Independence, and that's Independence Day. People read the Declaration, and sometimes I think professors, they aren't taught what it actually means. There's a couple of paragraphs or really a couple of sentences that are like the most brilliant sentences ever written down for a country. No.

[A]

Oh, yeah. It's a philosophic, political, theological masterpiece. It's, it's a tremendous achievement and written by some of the greatest people who ever lived.

[B]

Now, the first draft is. Is written by Jefferson, as we know, and in Philadelphia, Caddy corner to the Pennsylvania Assembly Building. I know, I used to hang around there. Like a homeless guy. No, my friend and I, we used to go there. And you Know, some professor, he and I used to tell the, the park rangers there, we used to explain the Declaration to them. They're smart, but, you know, they wrote, they got their 14 lines and that's pretty much it. But this Declaration is so crucial. First of all, where did these men get the ideas that are in the Declaration of Independence?

[A]

Jefferson talks about that. He says he didn't look to book or pamphlet for it. He said it was the reigning ideas of the age. Then he mentioned some authors, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney. And so it's, you know, Jefferson is one of those people who had in his library every book and had probably read all of them back then. You could do that. In fact, his library forms the basis of the Library of Congress today. So it took a broad education. And it's also important to understand they had 150 years of living in the New World to figure out how to govern themselves and that, that that unique chance is necessary for there to be a United States of America. And the reason America is the last best hope of Earth in Lincoln's terms. But it, it, they, you know, they, they came with one idea mostly. A lot of them came, not all of them. A lot of them came to the New World. And of course, they didn't know what it was. They had seen it before. It wasn't mapped. And they came with the idea that we're being interfered with, the way we practice our religion. And so we're going to set up communities in this vast new thing, however big it turns out to be, and we'll all worship the same way. And so their idea was not really religious freedom, it was religious conformity, but community by community, people by little group by little group. And they found out over 150 years that they couldn't make that work. And they worked their way around to the idea of religious freedom. It's the reason Jews became welcome among them at an early day and have been welcome here, except for on certain radical college campuses consistently since then. And so they were working out the principles of freedom in their lives. They had created state legislatures and town councils and town meetings. They were the most evolved and developed and rich democratic institutions in human history. And they did that in part because when they came across the water, they brought with them all the knowledge of Western civilization and no aristocracy. And so they had to work it out anew. And by the time it gets to the Declaration of Independence, they've been working hard. If you read the immediate steps to the Declaration, they really started in 1763, 13 years earlier and that's because the British changed their policy about the empire. They just won another big war with France. They always seemed to win them. And the war had been expensive. It had been fought in North America a lot as well as all over Europe. And so they thought, you know, we spend a lot of money here and we don't get anything out of them. We should tax and regulate them. And right away that led to friction. Can they put a tax on tea? Can they put a tax on glass? Can they, can they, can they, can they? And if you read the pamphlets, which are a really rich source of the development of the American understanding in the beginning, they all begin by professing great loyalty to the King. And they all continue on to say, well, this is not quite right. This is not the practice, this is not the custom. This is not how you have governed us and we have governed ourselves. And they sharpen as they go. One of the reasons Jefferson was selected to write the first draft of the Declaration, one of the reasons was he was from Virginia. And the Revolution, the fighting had been around Boston mostly and New York, especially Boston. And Virginia is a really big place, a different kind of place in many ways from New England. And they thought, let's get a Virginian because we got to get Virginia on our side. Another reason was he'd written a thing called A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, which is one of the greatest pamphlets in this fight that going that's developing with the British. And the last paragraph of it, which I will quote paraphrase from memory, is, is Thomas Jefferson in beauty he says, let those fear flatter, sire, it is not an American art. You should know that your ministers are servants. See, in other words, he's telling him now, and the loveliness of that document, it's a complicated document, but it's especially begins and ends very beautifully. And people read that and they went wowie. And so he qualified himself to write that document by the strength and beauty and clarity of his writing.

[B]

There's so much we can get into this, this Declaration. You've spent your life studying it. I've spent a little while studying it myself, but I want to link this into its embrace throughout American history. As you know, the so called progressives, I don't even like calling them that, but nonetheless, they attacked the Declaration, they attacked the Constitution, and yet before them the Civil War, which really determined whether the United States would survive or not. Abraham Lincoln repeatedly cited the Declaration of Independence, embraced the Declaration of Independence, referred to it in defense of the Union and so forth. So when we come back, Dr. Arne I want to get into that and then we can move into a closer century. But I want to deal with the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration. We'll be right back.

[C]

This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale. Edu subscribe or click the Follow or subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

[D]

Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Great show this week. Our friend Molly Hemingway is back, senior journalism fellow here at Hillsdale College, editor in chief of the Federalist. You see her on FOX News, the brand new bestseller, Alito, the Justice who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. We will talk in depth with Molly Hemingway about the book and about what she's learned about Justice Alito. Plus, Janie Nitza, lawyer and New York Times best selling author, tells us about her new children's book that she co authored with a Supreme Court justice. That's Neil Gorsuch. The book is Heroes of 1776, the story of the Declaration of Independence. All that this week Ambo Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube.

[B]

Welcome back, America. We're here with Dr. Larry Arn, President of Hillsdale College, by the way, professor as well, I'm Mark Levin and this is our joint Westwood One Hillsdale College podcast, Liberty and Learning. Our 10th episode. So, Dr. Arne, where I left off, why was the Declaration of Independence so important to Abraham Lincoln during this Civil War period?

[A]

Well, the document is a genius and he was a genius. And what he did is, by the way, akin to something going on in our own time. What he did was made the question of slavery about the Declaration of Independence because he made the country about that. The Declaration of Independence in his reading supplies the purposes of the country in the famous Gettysburg Address. It begins four score and seven years ago. And if you march backwards, you get to 1776. That's when the nation was created and that gives the reasons. And the Declaration of Independence had got into a curious place by then. In 1787, they passed the Northwest Ordinance, the first time a free government had ever grown. And that ordinance forbade Slavery in the whole Northwest Territory, the first new territory added to the original 13, and it forbade slavery ever to be in that territory. And that came through with hardly a whimper. But then in 1820, when Missouri is to come in, now, all of a sudden, it's necessary to compromise, to attempt to keep the Senate equal between free and slave states. And so something had changed, right? And the Confederate spokesman, a famous one, called the Declaration of Independence obsolete. John C. Calhoun, the great apostle of the Confederacy, quite a significant man, by the way, and not wholly an evil man. He, however, said that the Declaration of Independence was so much nonsense. People are not born equal, they develop to equal. And his theory was that the slaves, the black ones, had, over the course of time, sort of like evolution, become our inferiors, and it would be an abomination to live with them as equal citizens. The Confederacy, on the other hand, liked the Constitution because it does not give the federal government the power to abolish states in the slavery where it exists. That didn't happen until the 13th Amendment after the war. So what Lincoln did was resurrect the Declaration of Independence and restore its connection to the Constitution, which of course was written by some of the same people as the Declaration. And that. I say it's something like, what's going on now. President Trump has his mantra, make America great again. We might forget about the word again, but he wanted to do something that's already been done, which is what Lincoln said he was doing. You see, President Trump is a very pushy man. Of course, nobody could be a serious executive if he was not, and he's particularly so. On the other hand, there's an obedience in that right we should do again. All of Lincoln's statesmanship is to demonstrate that it's an innovation, that we have come to think slavery a good thing. In one of his beautiful speeches, the Peoria Address, he goes through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention and all of the great acts that have been passed that touch on slavery. And he finds that overwhelmingly, in fact, to a person in regard to the Declaration in the Constitution, even the slaveholders among them were enemies of slavery. In principle, it's a bad thing, as it's Northwest Ordinance that I mentioned before that was given to the Union by Virginia, a slave state. And the active agent in Virginia to get that done was Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder. And it was Thomas Jefferson who insisted that there be a no slavery clause in the gift. And so what Lincoln is doing is recovering history. We were talking before this, and I said, it's a matter of 2 million votes in the last election whether we will celebrate the Declaration of Independence with a full heart. And President Trump wants to do that. In other words, he's taking seriously this word again. And that's what we're doing.

[B]

By the way, even in the first draft, wasn't it with the Declaration, memory serves. Jefferson raised the issue of slavery and basically the committee figured that was a little too tough to handle at that time. Am I right about that?

[A]

They did. The Pinckneys from South Carolina were important in that and they were slaveholders. And they are on record saying that slavery has to pass away because it's a bad thing. But they didn't think that that would fly in South Carolina at that time. And see, that's worth mentioning. We don't. I don't. You don't claim that the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence that founded the country were perfect. They were human beings and they were living human lives. And so could they at the same time abolish an institution that was brought here long before there was a Union, before there was an America brought here? While these principles that we talked about before were being worked out over 150 years, could they at the same time found a new nation without benefit of kings, completely under the principal consent of the governed and abolish slavery at the same time? And they didn't think so. And that means that their situation was like our situation. That is to say, we got lots of constraints. There's only so much we can do. We do the best we can. And the best they did was the best they could, in my opinion. But also, of course, it was imperfect.

[B]

And Lincoln said it's up to their progeny to do it. Any people that would write a Declaration of independence like that couldn't support slavery forever. Isn't that correct?

[A]

That's right. That's right. A standard maxim for a free society always to be striven for, always to be sought after, never to be wholly attained.

[B]

Now, let's talk about these so called progressives, or I call American Marxists, because that's what they are and were late 1800s, early 1900s. Wilson in particular, he despised the front end of the Declaration of Independence. It was quaint. It was relevant to that time. Today is our day. We get to decide what the world looks like and so forth. Can you delve into that a little bit?

[A]

Yeah. Well, there's a parallel between this modern historicist thought comes into America under the name Progressivism and the Confederacy. Because John C. Calhoun, who was by the way a kind of scientific utopian. He thought, we're evolving all the time, and that's why there can be a master race. And, you know, the master race leads all of humanity on toward perfection. Well, these slaves, look at them, they're in a degraded condition. They're like our children. What he's really saying is they're like animals, like beasts. And so that kind of thought right now, if you just take the principles of German historicism coming into America in Progressivism, a lot of those guys, Woodrow Wilson and Lincoln Steffens and Frank Goodenow, they were heavily under the influence of Germany, and many of them studied there. What they think is, we have science now. Science now means technology, the ability to make things and master nature. The original word science, by the way, is an old word that means just to behold or unknow to understand. So now we have this progress. We can remake everything, and therefore we can remake ourselves. And they thought that the race, human race, was evolving and not all of it at the same pace. And the most evolved should govern the least evolved. There's a parallel there, and they're not exactly the same. But like in John Calhoun's famous disquisition on government, a very long, turgid document, this sentence occurs. It would be impious to think that God would give us the power of natural science and permit us to use it for ill. And if you think about that sentence for a minute, I mean, heck, we got nuclear bombs now, right? Can they be used for ill? We don't want Iran to have one. And if you boil that sentence down a bit, what he's saying is power is good for its own sake. And that is in Progressivism, too. If you just look at the politics, I mean the ordinary policy politics of progressivism, the solution is always more power at the center. Also an impatience with stopping to think. We have to get on with it. Out in California, there used to be a guy named Mike Ruse who was a very serious California state senator. I once had a debate with him, and he laid out a plan for the Democratic Party in this debate. He said, our purpose is to seize on every event in public, to use the news opportunity. There had been a shooting, you know, another shooting. And so we can get comprehensive gun control out of this. And I read him from the Federalist Papers about the need for deliberation. That's why we have bicameralism. You have to think before you act right. He said, those are old days. Those days are past. There's not that much to think about anymore. Now we just have to do. See, that's progressivism, but that's also the slavery movement, right? John C. Calhoun writes of slavery, through our ownership of slaves, all white people become aristocrats. It will elevate our race if we are masters over another race. And you know, the thing that expunged that thinking and defeated it was the beauty of Abraham Lincoln relying on the Declaration of Independence as I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. That is the meaning of democracy. And see, that's what the Declaration says. What is good for one human being is good for another one.

[B]

When we come back in our last segment, Dr. Ahn, I want to discuss, well, Howell Obama and his oak view of the Declaration. I kind of think they were rewriting it as they would supposedly quote from it. I want to hit that as well. We'll be right back.

[D]

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[A]

Foreign

[B]

welcome back, America. I'm Mark Levin. We're here with Dr. Larry Orne, the president of Hillsdale College. I like to steal from Reagan when I call Hillsdale College the shining college on the Hill because that's what it is. This is the Liberty and Learning podcast, episode 10, a partnership between Hillsdale College and Westwood One, as we wrap up a very truncated discussion of the Declaration of Independence. Because we just had our July 4th. First of all, let me ask you this. When was the Declaration of Independence actually completed? Bit of a debate about this, no.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, they voted on it and passed it on July 2nd. And, you know, it took a couple of days to get it ready to sign. And they had the signing on the 4th and 5th.

[B]

They had to print it.

[A]

They had to print it. Yeah. There's a broad side printed by the same people who printed newspapers, and it was sort of published in a newspaper, its first printed version. But John Adams writes to his wife predicting our Fourth of July celebrations. He says there'll be fireworks and celebrations and people remember this down through time. But the date that he says in that letter is July 2nd. So he was off a little, of

[B]

course, and he never mentioned hot dogs and hamburgers. That's the only problem there, which is pretty important. Let's go to Obama and somewhere, and he's not the only one. You have a lot of leftists these days and they take certain words out of the Declaration they reference. Scott, doesn't that kind of destroy the whole point of the Declaration?

[A]

Yeah, anything can be interpreted by anyone to mean anything, but then it's always there so you can look and see, what does it mean? One of Obama's famous things he liked to say was, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are self evident, but they're not self. Executing. We have to execute them. And to execute them can include changing their meaning. And what could that meaning be? There are two examples. If it's true that some people are not doing as well as others, then you should change the ones who are doing better to the benefit of the ones who are doing worse. And that understanding of equality is the opposite of the one that follows from the Declaration of Independence. Because what you get if you treat everybody the same is very great diversity of outcomes. I've known you for years, and first few years I knew you, I would never have predicted that you would become a national radio host, because what you were, you were a very tough lawyer, very knowledgeable about the law, very ready to fight battles, very interested in philosophic stuff. Right, right. And the next thing you know, you're a radio star. Where did that come from? Well, that came from you, and I doubt if you even knew it was there until you tried it, but. And that's Mark. Mark is a Different kind of guy. He's his kind of guy, Right. Everybody's like that. Sure enough, right. Look, I just finished a meeting with a prospective student urgently hoping to get into Hillsdale college, and in two months, I'll be in front of 400 freshmen. And they'll be just the same in some important ways. Eager, smart, afraid.

[B]

Right.

[A]

By the time they're seniors, the differences among them will be very stark, despite the fact that half the time, in their time here, they'll all be taking the same courses. And that's because God made us all different. Right. And so Obama sees the Declaration of Independence as an opportunity to execute. That is to say, the government has got to become much more comprehensive, because when it sees differences in outcome, it has to be liberated to make war on them just because they exist now, hasten to say, if somebody is being treated unfairly, that's injustice and it ought to be repealed. But just the fact that they don't come out the same doesn't tell you why, and it also doesn't tell you how to fix it.

[B]

And this idea, we can get into this another day, very deeply. And I do this in my new book. I'm not here to hawk the new book, but it's in there, too. This idea of God is very, very critical, though, because as you know, this whole idea of sovereignty, where sovereignty comes from, and as you've pointed out and have taught this whole idea of natural law and eternal and universal laws and so forth and so on. When I listen to the left, Dr. Larry Orne, when I listen to how they speak today, and Wilson, of course, was a student of the Marxist too. Basically, they argue that the world begins today and man decides what it looks like. Is that all that different than what Marx and the others were preaching?

[A]

No. That's right. Because see, if you think the elements of German historicism, including Marx, Marx is just singular in German historicism because he has a definite political program. Violent, you know, dictatorship, death, force. But what are the central elements? The central element is we are shaped by our time and circumstances, what we think, what we are. We don't look up toward a nature that is eternal and a God that is eternal. We see the things around us and they make us what we are. That's the first step. The second step is now, here, toward the end of history. We come to understand that Hegel writes, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. That means at the end of history. Now we can see the process of history. It has made us. We have been its slaves. Now we can Break free. And the way we break free is by getting control of the process of history. We remake the world according to our will. Look at what they're doing to the family. You know, it doesn't mean anything anymore. I have four children and two grandchildren. And the grandchildren are young, and I watch them grow, and they grow like humans. Mine turn out to be the most great grandchildren in human history, but they're still human children, and they're growing the way human children grow. And that's the same way I grew and you grew. And our fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers and mothers grew. And so we lose sight of that. We lose sight of the continuity, because, of course, everything has changed. Obama's mantra was hope and change. That means the past doesn't mean anything, but we can change the future into anything we can hope. And that's what's despotic and vaunts power. What is the name of your new book?

[B]

It's called On Power. How about that?

[A]

Exactly. See, in other words, you're on the point once again there, Mark Levin. That's it. It's all about power. Now.

[B]

I had a very good mentor. They called him Larry Arnold. And let me just say this to the audience about you, Larry Arnold. Well, July 4th has passed, but we have a whole year of celebration coming up. You're a unique. Not just scholar and academician, but a unique person in the sense that you've committed your entire life to promoting our founding, Churchill, Lincoln, two of the greatest men to ever live who face two of the most horrific events in human history. And you've explained it in a way that people can understand, and you've spread the word. First at the Claremont Institute, now at Hillsdale College. These are two fantastic institutions, quite frankly, thanks to you and the people you've brought with you. And you have people all over this country. You have people on the Supreme Court who've heard what you've had to say over the years and who embrace it. And it truly is an honor to know you and to call you my friend and to have learned so much from you. And you kind of wound me up and set me off. So anybody who hates me can hate him first.

[A]

There you go. The reason we're friends is all that stuff you just said. We've been doing the same thing for a long time, but we used to keep on our desk a Greek inscription from Aristotle. The four of us who started the Claremont Institute, that translates the things of friends are in common.

[B]

I'm glad you said it. And I couldn't but I get it. And it's very, very important. And I'll tell you what, what you've done with Hillsdale College, you know, 25, 30 years ago was an important school, don't get me wrong. But now its academic standards are through the roof. You've got faculty that's second to none. The coursework, the substance, it is really remarkable. And considering what's happened to so many colleges and universities in this country, how they've destroyed themselves and imploded, and as you know, you fight this all the time. It's not that hard to destroy a college universe. All you have to do is let the students take over and all their groups take over. But that said, you have not. You've held the line. And again, that's why Hillsdale College is what Hillsdale College is. It's very, very important. Any final words, my brother?

[A]

No, I just take great pleasure in this, Mark, and of as I have in our friendship for a long time.

[B]

Well, God bless you and thanks for everything you do. And I want to tell you, folks, this is Liberty and Learning, our joint podcast, a partnership between Westwood One and Hillsdale College. You're not going to find anything like this anywhere else in the podcast world, of which there are many. And I just want to thank Larry Arn and the folks at Hillsdale College and. And God bless you, sir.

[A]

Bless you, too. Take care.

[B]

All right, till next time, America, be well.