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The Charlie Kirk Show
The Amazing Endurance of the Constitution—The Great American Story with Dr. Wilfred M. McClay (Part 4)
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- [00:00]
Charlie Kirk
Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. The fourth part of my conversation with the wonderful Dr. Maclay. We get into the modern era and we talk about how the Constitution has endured the transformation of post Civil War America into an industrial power, what it means to live under a Constitution, and what is the Constitution? And the rise of expert knowledge and the administrative state, and why we must revive the Constitution and. And why it remains better than any other alternative. If you guys want to take the Hillsdale Online courses, which I take quite often. In fact, I just started a new one. You go to charlieforhillsdale.com and you enroll for free. That's Charlie f o r hillsdale.com and you can take some of the best courses out there to be able to learn about your country, dive deep into these incredibly important ideas. You know, people ask me all the time. Somebody has asked me at an event in Houston, charlie, where do you learn this stuff? Where do you. Where are you able to make sense of what's happening? Well, when I take the Hillsdale Online courses, I feel that I am able to look at what's happening in our country with more clarity, and I'm able to talk to you, our audience, with more confidence about this. I encourage you to take the Introduction to Western Philosophy course. Now, you might. Oh, what's a course? What do you mean?
- [01:23]
Dr. Bill McClay
I.
- [01:23]
Charlie Kirk
It's a video and a short quiz. That's it. And it's so fulfilling. When you finish it, everybody, you are able to say, hey, I know these ideas. The course on the Second World wars is phenomenal. The course on classical children's literature, terrific. It's my goal to take every single Hillsdale Online course. There's one, actually right here that I'm working my way through. Theology 101, the Western theological Tradition. How about Winston Churchill and Statesmanship? That can all be found@charlieforhillsdale.com and I challenge every single parent out there. If you can't homeschool your kids, that's okay. Then take one hour a week and teach them what you learned from the Hillsdale Online courses earlier that week and tell them and communicate to them why our country is so exceptional, where these ideas come from. For example, there is a Hillsdale online course, Constitution 201. The progressive rejection of the Founding and the Rise of Bureaucratic Despotism. It's a phenomenal one. CharlieForHillsdale.com right next to the Great Books 101, ancient to medieval. Sign up. Teach your kids. And if you are a student, this will make you much more enlightened than going to Most colleges across the country. Dr. Bill McClay, everybody, buckle up. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie.
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Charlie Kirk
He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one
- [03:03]
Dr. Bill McClay
of the most powerful youth organizations ever
- [03:05]
Charlie Kirk
created, Turning Point usa. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk show, our fourth part of this amazing series. Charlie for hillsdale.com of the wonderful great American story, Land of Hope, brought to you by Dr. Maclay. These episodes have been getting phenomenal feedback, Dr. Maclay, and I've really enjoyed them. And now we're kind of in the modern era. And so I'm looking forward to that. And I just want to say it again, everyone, you guys can follow along with these episodes. You can re listen to our other conversations while also taking the Great American Story course. And I think you'll get a little bit more nuggets here and there by re listening to these episodes. Dr. Maclay, so good to see you. Now that we are in the modern era, I want to talk about how the Constitution has endured and kind of the assault on the American Constitution kind of post Woodrow Wilson, and it kind of started a little before that. But walk us through why this is so important for people who love the Constitution to recognize and realize.
- [04:15]
Dr. Bill McClay
Yeah, well, and it is very important because really what's happened is the idea that government, like anything else, can be perfected by means of science, by means of the scientific method. You know, in the 19th century, people were so thrilled by all the advances that the natural sciences had made that they thought, hey, why not apply this scientific method to social things? So we have social science, and the term political science is really related to this idea that there could be a science of government. Woodrow Wilson, a very strong believer in that, and he really sort of invented the idea of public administration as a field of study. That's something entirely separate from elections, campaigning, making your case to the voters, public debates, that sort of thing. Instead, experts could arrive at disinterested scientific knowledge of the best ways of governing and then implement that. And one of the things you see in the Progressive era, and some of you out there will still be living with institutions like this. The idea of a city manager instead of a mayor. The idea was to take governance out of politics because all that quarreling and people getting down in the mud fighting over their respective interests, which the founders saw as being part of the game, as it's part of what politics is, that people fight over their differing points of view and their different interests. That's natural. Everybody's going to have different views, different interests. What you want to do and what the Constitution tries to do is to provide a mechanism for ordering these debates so that they aren't just, you know, bare knuckle fist fights every time and bombs and knives, but it's. But that you can have some kind of resolution, some kind of legitimacy. Well, you know, that all seemed very wasteful to the progressives. You know, why. Why fool around with the political process when you could have an expert come in and say, hey, this is the talking is over. This is the way it has to be. And to give them a little some credit here, I mean, when you had things like large, large corporate entities such as the railroads that had such a huge influence over so many people's lives and had to be regulated in some way, then, you know, the expert class had a little bit of a claim. We see this now with big tech. You know that a lot of us are very concerned about big tech. And you know, I'm very wary about bringing in the government, but I've also recognized that there have been times in the past when we've had to, for example, call something a common carrier or a public utility and regulate it that way. But anyway, I'm getting a little bit off the point here. The point is that the expert class, the claims of expertise, were supplanting the democratic process. And I think we are living with the results of that now that it's not clear to us, especially this public health panic that we've been through for the last year and a half. Are we to yield our freedoms entirely to the men in the white coats, the lab jackets? And there's the added difficulty that we don't always know that the men and women in the lab coats really know what they're talking about or whether they are using expertise as a veil behind which a naked grab for power can take place. All of these things are in our minds. And by the way, the earliest critics of the idea of expert rule were very much aware of that, that expertise can be used as a, as a black box. You've all seen the wizard of vog. That's a parable, you know, the end of the movie when the man. Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain.
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Charlie Kirk
That's right.
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Dr. Bill McClay
He's an expert. He's an authority that can't be approached and has some of the characteristics of a God in at least the movie version of that. It's a great parable for this that when we turn ourselves over to experts, we make ourselves. We disempower ourselves as citizens. And it's not a coincidence, is it, that the concept of citizen and citizenship, that being a citizen is full of privileges and responsibilities. It's not for everybody who's just walking around on this soil voting goes with being involved in that process, being invested in that process. We are losing. We are losing. I've been looking at this great new book by Victor Davis Hanson called they think the Death of the Citizen, and he's got it. It's really a key thing. But in a democracy, we don't necessarily decide things the way they the experts tell us. The experts may come to a particular conclusion and we may say, well, okay, we're going to weigh that and we'll decide. James Q. Wilson, the great political scientist from Harvard, had a great saying that I like very much, which I'll pass on to you and your listeners. He said, experts should be on tap, but not on top.
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Charlie Kirk
I like that.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Isn't that nice? I mean, we should consult experts. We should consult them, but they don't get the call. Ultimately, the people decide. That's what we, the people is about. We weigh the risks and we don't. And as much as possible, we have the freedom to do the wrong thing. That's what freedom is. Freedom is not necessarily only the freedom to do the right thing that the experts approve. I think it goes to a very fundamental issue about our society.
- [10:59]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah. And part of the issue is that the kind of the empowerment of the expert class ends up being tyrannical by nature. Because if you question, for example, Fauci right now, he will argue from authority and say, no, I run nih. I know more than you do. And so by definition, it chokes it out.
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Dr. Bill McClay
To disagree with me is to disagree with science. That's right, he said that. And, you know, I think one of the things that would be so much better, and Fauci, to be fair, at times, has done. What I'm about to say is to be modest, to say, you know, we're not really sure what the hell is going on. And a few times he has said that. It's the declarative statements. Masks are not necessary, and no uncertain terms when he first took that line. And then now masks are the be all and end all, depending on what day of the week it is and whether you're Democrats or Republicans having a party, whatever, on Martha's Vineyard or wherever. So there's an inconsistency that I think a lot of undermines the kind of respect for expertise that we ought to have. We ought to. I mean, people who have devoted their lives to studying immunology or one of these other very recognized fields, they deserve to be listened to more than the guy at the other end of the bar who's on his fifth beer but on tap but not on top, you know, that is. And the guy at the end of the bar does have a voice. It may not be worth listening to, but we don't believe in silencing just because he's drunk.
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Charlie Kirk
Yes, that's stupid. So, Dr. McCloe, you bring up a great point, which is that every time we see massive scientific discovery, there's almost always a philosophical movement that's correlated with it. For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Francis Bacon, with a lot of their discoveries into the natural world you saw correlated with it not immediately, but the rise of Hume and Kant and. And Rene Descartes and the same. I could be, and I would love to have you kind of your thoughts on this is that with the rise of Darwin in the 1800s and kind of some more of the more declarative statements being made that we now think we can master nature, that nature can now kind of be subservient to us humanity, it all of a sudden made Hegel and Marx a lot more applicable, especially Hegel. I don't want to get too deep down this rabbit hole, but can you talk a little bit about the context of where the progressive movement came out of? Because I think that would be really helpful to explore.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Yeah, I think the Darwin part is a great place to go in on that, Charlie. That Darwin. I mean, there were other theories of evolution around before Darwin and after Darwin and. But it was really the concept of natural selection that was the key thing that is that organism, organic life comes out of a constant process of adaptation to a changing environment. And the organisms are, you know, there's billions of random mutations in each generational transmission. And the ones that make you, you know, giraffes neck, that's longer gets to survive because he's better suited to. To sort of survive in the savannah, that kind of thing. And we're all familiar with these sort of just so stories of evolution. Well then the idea Arises that, well, again, if science applies to the physical world, biological world, why not to the human world? So why don't we view human societies as being like organisms that adapt, that are constantly changing, so that the idea that Constitution, a fixed law, a fixed structure that is there in place for, you know, for all time, and only very with great difficulty, amended that violated this sort of Darwinian sense of organicism. And so Woodrow Wilson picked up on this in a major way, this idea that the whole idea of Constitution institutionalism was obsolete. It was. You know, it was sort of, you go with the flow that everything is flowing, and you want to adapt your institutions to the changing circumstances. It's not a completely wacko idea, only mostly, but, I mean, the end of the 19th century, America was changing so much. Big cities, big industry, big everything. Big labor, big business, big national transportation system, national communications. We were becoming a power in the world. Big Navy, Spanish American war. We were becoming a major outfit in the world. And by the end of the 19th century, we were the leading industrial power in the world. Just astonishing how fast that happened. A lot of people were just dizzied by this. And it's kind of like, where's my America? The country and immigration, even on a scale greater than what we've been seeing, although recent immigration rivals that. So it makes sense that people were kind of reaching for some other way of explaining what was going on, that maybe the 18th century way of looking at things that embodied the Constitution wasn't good enough anymore. But that, I think, has been shown to be wrong. I think we are living through a time, the rise of originalism and constitutional people are returning. They're saying, okay, we tried that, that whole organic approach. It doesn't work. It's like, let me use a homely analogy that I love my students follow. It's like the difference between somebody who's going on a diet and writes out the diet. So, okay, I'm going to follow this, and if I follow this rigorously, I'm going to get where I need to go. And someone who says, well, you know, today I really feel like ice cream. And, you know, that's kind of organically what's required or the circumstances. That diet, you know, that was yesterday. Today is today. Well, you get the idea or one that, you know, the marriage vow. You make a vow when you get married, and then, you know, two years later you feel, well, you know, I got a little bit of an itch. You know, I want to kind of go out and mingle. So that promise is gone. The Constitution is a kind of promise of what we're going to hold ourselves to. And that still works. The organicism doesn't work because it just grows and grows and grows out of it. And now look at us. We're in debt by $30 trillion, where our institutions are on the verge of collapse, all because we have, in constitutional and monetary currency terms, we've been violating the most fundamental rules and we're going to pay for it.
- [18:52]
Charlie Kirk
Violating the laws of nature and nature's God, some would say.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Nicely put. Where'd you get that phrase? I like that.
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Charlie Kirk
Yeah. Only we originally built a civilization around it. So, Dr. Maclay, so Woodrow Wilson was the first president, as you mentioned, to outwardly declare a philosophical war on the Founders, heavily inspired by the expert class. And there's someone that doesn't get a lot of attention, but I wanna just give some contemporary examples right now. Cass Sunstein is someone who is a expert defender. In fact, he believes that experts in committees are the best way to run society. There's Also another one, Dr. Maclay, that you would remember, but many of our younger listeners wouldn't. A guy by the name of Jonathan Gruber, who was one of the architects of Obamacare, who, remember, he said that people are too stupid to know what's happening, so we at Harvard have to design it. And it was this moment of brutal honesty. And he said it over 70 times. We can get the clip later to kind of play through that, and. Which I think is important. And so there is this arrogance that sets into the expert class. And in fact, a lot of what we're seeing in Kabul and Afghanistan is that same sort of. That same sort of belief system that, you know, we're in charge because of, you know, some sort of credentialing or managerialism. The Constitution, by its intent, tries to push back against this kind of almost soft oligarchy of wise men. How do you say. What will you say beyond Woodrow Wilson, where we really went wrong here in the modern era? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Walk us through that more in kind of the modern sense.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Yeah, well, that's a really interesting question. And I was thinking as you were asking about the difference between Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, because Roosevelt. Roosevelt was a progressive. Roosevelt was actually very. I wouldn't say he was contemptuous of the Constitution, but he was rather indifferent to it. But he wasn't quite on the page of the rule of experts the way that Wilson was. And Wilson was. I hate to indict my own occupational group. He ran Princeton he was a university professor and then a university president. Yes. And he was a product of Johns Hopkins University, which I confess to you and your audience, I am too, in the sense I got my PhD there. Hopkins was established as the first German style university in America that was devoted mainly to research. Build around this premise that I mentioned before, that you know, human affairs, there can be human sciences, there can be sciences of man that can arrive at knowledge that's equivalent to the knowledge of science, of natural science. And so all, you know, the people running the history department in those days really believed history could be. Could become a science. At least some of them did. And that's the whole. So Wilson comes out of all that and there's a. Wilson was an arrogant man. Roosevelt was not exactly a modest fellow either. But here's the difference. And I never thought about this, Charlie, this shows a value of a great question. I've never thought about this. But Roosevelt still had the old patrician ideal of service that someone, well born like he was, I mean, he could have just written novels, he was a great writer. He could have just gone out and sailed around in his sail in his yacht. He could have lived a life of leisure and luxury. Instead he plunged into politics. New York politics, New York City politics. He was Kapoli's commissioner, for God's sake. What more grubby job is there? I suppose sanitation. But there are limits to what he would do. But this is pretty amazing that a Dutch American aristocrat like Theodore Roosevelt would do that because he had an ethic of service, of high mindedness. You don't see this in Woodrow Wilson to the same degree. What drives Woodrow Wilson is expert knowledge. I'm not. I rule over you. Not I'm above you, the Roosevelt use. I'm above you in social class. Therefore I have a responsibility. Noblesse oblige. The old idea that those unto those to whom much is given, much is expected. You know, the biblical idea. Even though Woodrow Wilson was a very strong Presbyterian, his father was a minister, he came from this very, very strict Southern Presbyterian background. He didn't really buy that whole service thing. He saw disciplined intellect as the future. And the more that disciplined intellect could be in the saddle, the better for everybody. And of course the people didn't know what was good for them. They didn't have a PhD, they hadn't been to. The people with the PhDs did know what was good for them sometimes. It's true that they did. I mean, I don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry to take control of our nuclear power plants and say, well, I'm just as good as the other guy. No, of course. And we all depend on them. They do know more than we do. But at some point the people have to rule. At some point people have to decide the risks of this kind of energy outweigh the problems with other kinds of energy. We have to make those choices. In the political arena, we listen to what the experts say put before us, but we never go quietly into the night saying, well, the science is settled and so I know nothing. It's our lives. We are the ones who are deciding for ourselves. That's what it means to be a republic, is that we rule ourselves. We got to get back to that.
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Charlie Kirk
And one of the problems with the rise of the expert class is their focus used to be narrow and now it's very broad. So we are now counting on Fauci to organize society when in a previous world it would have been just very strictly. What do you know about epidemiology? Thanks so much. You know, we'll talk to you next month. Where now he's giving, he's giving now advice on how political systems need to be structured and how we need to communicate with our loved ones. So can you talk about how expertise. And I believe Churchill wrote about this and I know either Plato or Socrates did, where they didn't want, they didn't want scientists to run society because there's almost this, there's a moral gap in the sense that an expert running nih, they will not calculate into any considerations the well being of the nation. Right. Can you talk about how when we allow experts to run so much and we don't have a check and balance against them, of which the fourth branch of government has almost no check and balance, they're unelected, they're unknown, with unlimited power that you all of a sudden have people that are actually anything but experts in a certain domain acting as if they are.
- [27:09]
Dr. Bill McClay
Yes, that's really. Yeah, that's so true. Because I've often said there are two problems with experts ruling. One is if they know what they're doing and the other is if they don't know what they're doing, it's a problem either way. If they know what they're doing, then they feel empowered to sort of override the opinions of lesser creatures. And it's our lives that at some point we have to have. If we're going to be a free country, we have to have some say. Now, obviously that's not absolute. And I think there are Instances in which public health concerns can take precedence, but not what we've been going through with all the obfuscation and misinformation and changing perspectives and politicization, frankly, of the whole process. But what if the experts don't know what they're doing? That's that, you know, what if our. It's a process of accrediting people and I think of really a scandalous area of the whole triumph of gender ideology in universities, in schools, in corporate settings. This, you know, this stuff doesn't really have a scientific basis. People like Ryan Anderson, whose book was. Was banned on Amazon, have made this case, I think, irrefutably to anyone who wants to look at it with an open mind. There is such a thing as gender dysphoria. It's extremely rare and it's something that children go through and come out of more often than not, Much more often than not. But we have people with Dr. In front of their name or maybe, maybe not MDs or anyone with any real expertise in the field making these decrees based on their professional credential, American Psychological association and so on and so forth, the American Bar association pronouncing all these things. And it's a misuse of credentials which actually has the effect of undermining all credentials. You know, scientists. I don't know how many real scientists people in your audience know, but the scientists I know who deal with climate, they don't think the science is settled. They really don't. They're afraid to say much of anything because they get stomped on if they don't toe the line. And they don't get their government grants, which are the lifeblood of modern science, getting money from the government. Eisenhower warned against this in his farewell address. Having this happen, exactly what has happened. So science is thoroughly politicized. But a lot of the people I know, when you get them down in the soundproof room where they will speak the truth, they say, we really don't. We really can't justify the kinds of apocalyptic pronouncements that are made even by the UN and other such organizations, let alone your local crazy. So, you know, expertise is kind of caving in on itself. It's what Glenn Reynolds of Insta Pundit fame called. He's always referring to K through 12 implosion. But all the professions are imploding partly because they don't police their own ranks. They. That was one of the premises back in 100 years or so ago when this whole expert knowledge thing started to take hold, was that the experts, they were credentialed elite, but they also policed one another. They had this thing called peer review. We now have a crisis of peer review because so many scientific papers and experiments are unreplicable. That's the most important thing in science. If you make an assertion, you propound a hypothesis and the experiment confirms it, you have to be able to repeat the experiment and get the same result. That's science. It's not a one shot thing. Oh, I did it once, so it must be a law of nature. It doesn't work that way. So we have a crisis of replicability. The whole edifice of expertise is teetering and it's no wonder. I think it's a terrible thing for people to kind of call out the public as if, what is it with you rubes out there? You don't, you stop believing in experts. You don't know what's good for you. Afghanistan.
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Charlie Kirk
I know it's hard. It's hard to trust.
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Dr. Bill McClay
It was not a popular movement.
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Charlie Kirk
Yeah, it's hard to trust the experts after what we have seen from the denunciation of the Wuhan Laboratory leak to what actually the other way around and all of that. So I want to ask you a question about the fourth branch of government, which is a term that we use on this program to describe the administrative state and the bureaucratic state. So our speech, our conversation here beautifully leads up to it because the experts are the ones that lead all of these agencies. But can you talk about how this fourth branch of government really does challenge and in my opinion, diminishes and I'm trying to find the right word. It almost invalidates the promise of the Constitution, which is one that is checks and balances, independent judiciary and consent to the governed. Can you talk about how unique this entire 100 year project is of having unknown unelected federal bureaucracies do whatever they want?
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Dr. Bill McClay
Well, you know, you've described it very well, what's happened. And it is an outgrowth of the view that Wilson pioneered in a lot of ways that the people are no longer. We live in such a complex world and difficult issues are so hard to explain to people. People get the answer their pants when they're listening to a long explanation. They want simple what are the goodies and what are the baddies? And as a result, the actual decision making is taken out of the hands of representative institutions and put in the hands of bureaucrats that are, as you say, beyond the reach of, of election. I mean, in a way we, we saw this the past the four years of the Trump administration. He was at war with the administrative bureaucracies in Washington, the State Department and other, the Department of Education and so on. And, and I wouldn't say they won, but they fought him to a draw an awful lot of the time. And most, you know, even conservative or so called conservative leaders are inclined to accommodate the bureaucracies and think that, well, if you get an amicable setting, you can nudge things a little bit. Well, they just keep growing. They just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And Congress, I think in many ways, for all the faults of the presidency, the Congress is the one that's abdicated. The founders and framers thought of the legislative branch as the main seat of action in government. Yes, it was important to have an energetic executive. The Constitution did do that. But Congress was where the action really was supposed to be. What Congress has been doing again and again and again over the last 25 years is passing these big, wonderful sounding, idealistic things that nobody knows what they mean. It's turned over to the agencies to decide what they mean. I think back to the Americans with Disabilities Act. I mean, who could be against an act to reach out and compassionately include people who are disabled in the mainstream of society? The principle is, I wouldn't say it's unassailable, but it's pretty close to that. But then the question is, you pass a bill and then you turn it over to the agencies and the courts to decide what it actually means. There's countless examples of this in the post, and you really don't see it much until the years after the Great Society programs. Then that's when the administrative state really begins to take off. But Congress lacks the manpower and the interest in doing oversight of these agencies. And it turns into a sort of revolving door that they, the regulators and the regulated are in bed with one another, sometimes literally in today's Washington. So no real regulation goes on. People leave the State Department, the Defense Department, and immediately go working for what they call beltway bandits, the myriad of defense contractors, not all of them around the beltway, but many of them, and make law, lots of money doing that, and then maybe they'll come back into the government. We see this more increasing with generals and admirals coming back into politics. And so it's a triad kind of triangle. The revolving door doesn't completely capture it, but you get the idea that there isn't a whole lot of actual regulating in the public interest going on. And we need some heroic congressional figures who are willing to step in and take an enormous amount of flak to begin to reverse that process. But of course, everybody wants to be reelected. And if you can look at the Republicans who have been supporting the infrastructure, the so called infrastructure bill, the only way they can justify it is that we're going to bring home a little bit of bacon, maybe a half pound of bacon for our constituents here in Dustin County. So, you know, so the rest of the country, you know, feed at the trough. We've got to stop this. We've got to stop this. But, and what we need, if I may make a little bit of a tub thump here, we need to form groups that are built around the issue of restraining spending, of restraining the growth of government. You know, there's not there any, there aren't any groups out there even, well, maybe the nra, but I mean, there aren't very many groups that are really just committed to being against the growth of government, against the growth of spending. The taxpayer union, a few of these things. But we need more of that. We need more of that. Just resistance to the idea that everything is better when government has its fingers in it, because government. Back to your question, Charlie. Now, it doesn't mean Congress, it doesn't mean anything constitutional. It means these regulatory agencies that are, that are basically invulnerable, that they're there forever. And they know it. They know congressmen come and go, but the Department of Labor is here forever.
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Charlie Kirk
That's right. Well, there was a joke at IRS and FDA and at the SEC and everywhere. They said, oh yeah, this Trump guy's going to shake it up. He said, but this building's going to stand after four years. And that was repeated. It's that idea that the institutions remain. So to kind of summarize all of this, we started our first episode that everyone should go back and listen to the forming of the nation and the forming of the Constitution, the statesmanship of Lincoln and now kind of this constitutional crisis that we are in. To kind of summarize all this together as we talk about the story of America. I think one thing you can agree, Dr. Maclay, the story is not over yet. It's still being written, which is what's so exciting. You and I talked about the first episode about the importance of a story. That story has not yet been completed and I pray, and we're advocating on this program and at Turning Point USA, a revival of the Constitution. In closing, Dr. Maclay, make, make that case of why we need to get back to where our country was really intended to be. And that kind of Idea of reviving the Constitution, which I will say to our listeners, there is more interest about that than there was 30 years ago. That's what I have been told, that there is this renewed sense to get back to our roots. Just tell us a little about that.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Yeah, well, I mean, look, I think that one. It's often said, Washington said this in his first inaugural press, that America is an experiment. We're an experiment in ordered liberty. We're an experiment in the idea that a large nation can govern itself, that it need not be ruled over by kings and. Or other, or for that matter, administrative bureaucracies, that we can rule ourselves. I think this is just another iteration, another turn of the wheel in that same test. Can we rule ourselves? Can we be self governing? Do we need to have people telling us what size sodas we can drink, what size cars we can drive, what our habits and mores should be, what our views should be, whether what things we're allowed to hate and what things we're allowed to love? You know, it's really that fundamental. And you know, you mentioned Cass Sunstein. You know, he's just sort of a nice guy, you know, people on the right kind of like him because he has this notion that we don't use petty, you know, tyrannical tactics. We nudge people. He has a book called Nudge. We nudge them. Yeah. Well, you know, of course, in Yiddish there's a term very close to that nudge, which is to be. I probably could think of a printable word to use, but it's to be. To hector somebody.
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Charlie Kirk
So you mean to yech and complain. Yes, exactly.
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Dr. Bill McClay
Yeah. Yeah. Another great Yiddish word that's.
- [42:57]
Charlie Kirk
Yeah. I got a couple of Yiddish words we could share.
- [42:59]
Dr. Bill McClay
Yeah, yeah. But the. But to push pretty hard. Not just nudge, but elbow. Yeah. I mean, it's not that easy, I think, to find a common ground between freedom and administrative tyranny. I think freedom means. There's this wonderful guy who runs the. Who started the Beckett Fund. I can't remember his name right now, but he wrote a book called the Right to Be Wrong. It's a book about religious liberty. There's a lot about freedom that's the right to be. To be wrong and wrong in somebody else's eyes, but to find our own way. I think once again, we're up against this. I think you could. And I think you can do a lot with looking at issues that we haven't talked about much at all, like the respect for human life as a kind of unconditional value that we have been more and more and more violating. I saw the other day that this was in Canada, but it could easily have happened here that there were four infants with heart troubles who died because of COVID regulations wouldn't allow them. The ambulance crews to transport them. To me, that just says so much because it's really the COVID regulations are designed for people my age to be able to survive. Younger people don't need to worry about it, and babies don't need to worry about it, but particularly ones with cardiac problems, they've got other things to worry about. But we have such a distorted sense of priorities that we don't think enough about how from birth and before birth to the far reaches of old age, that human life has intrinsic dignity. And I think this is something that is, is, you know, I think understood by the framers and founders. We live in an era where things like that need to be more explicit because we really have. And science itself is an engine of threat to the idea of the dignity of human life, which doesn't mean that you're entitled to dignity because you do the right things and you do what the men in the white coats tell you. It's an intrinsic dignity. And of course, that takes us back. The document you quoted, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator, not by government, but by their creator.
- [46:04]
Charlie Kirk
Amen. Well, very good. Well, Dr. Maclay, thank you again for this wonderful series. Everyone can check out charlieforhillsdale.com and check out the great American story, Land of Hope and pick up a copy. Dr. Maclay, thanks so much. This has been great.
- [46:18]
Dr. Bill McClay
Oh, thank you, Charlie. It's been a pleasure.
- [46:23]
Charlie Kirk
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us your thoughts freedomarliekirk.com and again, charlieforhillsdale.com that's charlieforhillsdale.Com God bless you guys. Speak to you soon. For more on many of these stories and news you can Trust, go to charliekirk.com.