Conservative commentators to expose what he calls the deep Historical Files in their use of americas founding history. Its about an hour. Welcome to after words. Guest thank you very much. Host were here to talk about your book thats not what they meant reclaiming the Founding Fathers from americas rightwing. How have they claimed the Founding Fathers . Guest i think the Founding Fathers are probably one of the in america and we all claim them for a lot of different points. In the current historical moment the right wing has done two things, and i found a little bit disturbing fourth. They found a single entity, the sort of high of mind founding father candidates attributed a whole lot of things one or two people during the founding generation believed during this collective mind and used it to further shutdown the debate to try to say this is what our founders believe, certain opinions are illegitimate and cannot be entertained and have used that founding mess, and i think it is a little predictable that people are going to use whatever is rhetorically powerful to ground their arguments, the but i think that that collectivization of the mind of americas Founding Fathers is particularly dangerous because as i see so often in the book they were not coming and presenting them as such tends to dramatically oversimplify the politics of the founding generation, and then it comes to be used as a big pattering ground to beat people over the head with in ways that i think our book is rhetorically on sound. Who in americas rightwing are we talking about . Guest i started off with glenn beck and i was determined i was going to read this book about 15 minutes after i ran into glenn becks translation of the federalist papers, the original argument. And there was an hour supermarkets become our krogers here in wichita. I said to people can you believe this . Glenn beck has translated the federalist papers, and almost everybody said whats wrong with that . And i said there english, they dont need to be translated. And people didnt understand why i was so upset about this and it kind of ticked me off, so that was the first book i read is the glenn becks translation of 33 come of 34 of the federalist papers with a lot of commentary. Host guest and also the recent biography of George Washington and his half reproduction, have commentary on thomas kanes common sense. That is how i started the project is reading those books. Sean hannity, david barton, i dont know if you are familiar with david barton, the jefferson lies, that is his most recent book and a variety of similar works. And then there were a number of works by politicians that i read, and this is always dangerous because politicians usually dont write their own books, but i figure they ought to at least be willing to agree with what is in them, so i read several recent books by new gingrich and theres a book called fed up that is a manifesto, some of the politicians on the right and that Entertainment Complex could be the foundation. That would be 30 or 40 books glenn beck, that a wide swath of opinion. Host would you expect anything more from the propaganda . In other words is this what we might expect when it is as complicated as over 200 years ago is written about and talked about the people that are up for reelection and trying to sell books is this just an inevitable outgrowth of the culture that talks about issues in this way . Guest to a large extent, yes and if you look historically at the discourse, it hasnt changed much over the last 200 years. This kind of very propaganda history. Even while the history was being made, people were very propagandistic about people were free propagandistic before they were dead, and what they meant. So, yes. I do think thats part of the genre, and it needs to be people like me and saying if this is where you are getting your history its wrong or if its not wrong its at least much more complicated than it is being made out to be. Host lets talk about this point of it being more complicated. Lets say they had good copyeditors that set of the founders they said many of the founders said something or most of the founders or it was a common opinion at that time and that simple kind of change of freezing enough to satisfy you or is there a deep concern . Guest that would totally eliminate the huge devotee of what i call the founders sign monster. Host that is a wonderful metaphor. Guest when i first decided to do this i decided that would be enough, so the founders started a blog that was my first attempt to use photoshop, took a picture of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and john adams and stuck them all together and that was the founder, the great collective Founding Fathers opinion and the rhetorical effectiveness depends on unanimity of opinion. If using some founders believe this and some founders believe why and hear barack obama is talking about why and not x, that isnt the stick. Thats saying somebody is entering a long historical conversation. When you see the Founding Fathers believed x and barack obama believes why it, that becomes the stick. So i think that at a very fundamental level, kind of discourse that i am responding to cant draw that distinction between the founders believe and most founders believed or many founders or some founders believed because of that historical the incoherent unity of opinion as fundamental to the way the discourse is being used. Host is there any hope for propaganda as you described them to have a meaningful constructive conversation about the founding father . Guest that is at odds with what most are talking to. Host let me ask about the Founding Fathers apart from what they have said about them. This is a special group of people and maybe theyve been treated wrong by the people to talk about in your book but if this is a group of people were the evin ellen 20 talf. Guest i do think so. I think these are very remarkable people who care deeply about their country and cared deeply about ideas. They were also a full and very often Controversial Group of people that in their own ways they cared deeply about the country that they were creating and what they were doing. And i think they have a lot of wisdom. I dont think more than anybody else has ever lived. They have been an historical periods in american and other places a lot of very wise people that we ought to Pay Attention to but i do think that the Founding Fathers individually were people who were coming yes, fought a lot about what it meant to live in a Representative Democracy at the time in the world very few people have given a lot of thought to that. Guest host we take for granted what a remarkable moment that time was. I mean, there was no stable democracy in World History before that. There were cities and states that didnt last, but this is a democracy that was created as a constitution the was voted on across the country. Without people being murdered for what they voted on the constitution and its still here last. So, what is it about them that was so special . One were you use a lot in the book is compromise. So tell me about their ability to compromise. Guest well, i think that you cant build a representative dhaka see across a very Large Population and a very large land area without compromising a lot. And i think that in our present this course, wed like to pretend that the constitution and a lot of the nationbuilding enterprises in the founding era were done by consensus, people getting together on a grand which think is absolutely nowhere near the truth. You have people who wanted to accomplish something remarkable. The creation of the constitution was something absolutely remarkable for its time. The creation of a Representative Democracy across 13 large land areas that have different economies, different modes of production, very different religious values and different histories, a very different outlook on things. When they came together, i think that the 55 people who gathered in philadelphia had most of them, not all of them, most of them had an imperative that they were going to create Something Like a Representative Democracy or republic of all of these different elements, and they have almost everything but that and they can with a whole lot of different ideas about what they were going to do. And nobody came away with exactly what they wanted. Most people didnt come away with anything close to what they wanted except that a very remarkable thing. Host these are very polarized times. The congress and the 79 piece is as polarized as today in your book if we think the media is polarized or in tents today and we havent seen anything with compared to then. So how were they able to compromise than in the similarly polarized times it is hard to compromise that. Guest they didnt like it any better than we like it, and they got as mad. Somebody said, and ive never been able to track this down, maybe you know who said it, politics has compromised Everything Else is fear. And i think we are looking at a lot of fear right now. But i think that the compromises are going to happen, too. Host koza what do we do to sort of create the environment now that promotes compromise . Is it possible is it just something that happens when a nation is creative and not any nation as continued . Guest there have been a lot of times in history. I think the constitution is a very good i call it in the book an engine of compromise that propels us towards compromise and one of the ways it does it is it is used to shut the whole thing down, but its for any government a couple of people in congress can do it, a few people on the Supreme Court can do it. Its much easier to keep things from happening than to let things happen. What drives compromise is the need to do something, the need to move forward to get we are always going to have a lot of political theater, and i love that. I come at this with an anguish major with a background in theater. I love the theatrical elements of our politics. I think its fascinating. Its a dramatic, its common and tragic. Its just a wonderful bit of literature. In the and the founding generation had a country to create. They were willing to give up almost everything but that. Weve got problems to solve, and i wrote in the book and believe right now the National Debt is probably our generations problem to solve, and its a big problem and its one where there are a whole lot of different values on the line, different interests on the line. I believe we would compromise on that because we have to. Because the alternative is just grinding to a halt. But theres always every compromise in the convention come every compromise of the founding generation was certainly attended by its fair share of very over dramatic theater, and its no different today. Host we talked about some of the success comes some of the historically unprecedented things the founders did but there were also many things about the ways that they could that dont look so good from where we sit today. This was 55 aristocratic man come of varied backgrounds. So given the flaw how the constitution was created, do the lessons still translate to today . Guest i think they do. We have to be very sensitive about that and have to realize this was a great leap forward. It wasnt beyond where we are now. It was a leap forward where most of the world was to them and allowing a much larger percentage of the population to be involved in the political process than had been involved almost anywhere in the world after that point. From our perspective, it might not even look like much of a leap from our perspective a whole lot of people were excluded, and much of the last to hundred 30 years has been working out the idealism of the American Revolution in a way that brings the participation and the political process far past where the founders imagined it. Host given how Different Things are today, too, how we go along as writers and political figures come as judges and professors, how do we go about translating the principles of the 18thcentury for the world of the 21st century . The talk about free speech we of the internet, they talk about the salvation of power, we have the administrative state. So you talk about this as an ongoing process, but given how different the world is today, how do we translate the wonderful historical unprecedented as you say in sight of the 18thcentury to a different world of the 21st century . Guest its not easy. That is a difficult task and i think one of the things i object to with so much of the propaganda that i was responding to was that it made it sound very easy and what we need to do is this, we need to go back to what the founders intended, which is just problematic on a whole lot of different levels. I think that we will make a lot of mistakes if we try to go back to the constitution and read the mind of the people that wrote it because i dont believe they sat down intending to create a checklist of things that we need to do. I think that they created a political process that is still a very dynamic political process and when i have lectured about the but i sort of announced up front what the Founding Fathers would think about this. Unless the question is should the 13 colonies be governed by the british then the only answer is use the process we gave you and figure it out for yourself. Host lets get more specific about the ways in which calfee is kind of propagandist and political figures are talking about this issue triet lets go through some of the issues you talk about in the book. Lets first talk about religion. What was the vision of religion in the american Constitutional Order that was discussed at the time of the founding and how is it then according to your account simplified in these by the rightwing . Guest it depends on who you ask. There were Founding Fathers that were very religious and Founding Fathers who believed that this was going to be a christian nation, that we needed the inspiration of god and the bible, politics. I think Patrick Henry is a good example of a very religious founding father, and that was one of the positions of the founding era. There were Founding Fathers who were not christian, so they were unitarians. There were some who werent unitarians to believe that religion was a sort of good way to control the masses. It was a nice they didnt particularly care much, they thought that it was nice. Perhaps George Washington and john adams fall into that category that they expressed a lot of religious doubt but didnt really try to slow it down, and then theres jefferson and madison who went through a very lengthy debate in virginia about the religious freedom act of virginia and who really saw jefferson was a day story unitarian and wouldnt have been considered a christian, madison i had no idea because i know what he thought about religious liberties. I have no idea what he felt personally but both of them believed that religion was best for religion and the best for the Civil Society if religion were considered something prior to the social contract and therefore not covered by the social contract. You entered into your religious beliefs as you understood him or her to be coming and the state neither helped or hindered, and i think that view is more in line with how the constitution in the upcoming and i think that the Supreme Court has been moving us to words that view that by no means of a straight line. Host this is a good example of the problems youre talking about before in finding collective intentions. So you outlined what they thought and many of them seemed completely in disagreement with what others said. So how do we find the Common Ground when it comes to religion . Collective bodies always have conflicting intentions, the very different people voted for different reasons, but there is still law that comes out and gets the majority. So it is a very complicated picture and interesting one that you are painting of religion and the Founding Fathers. But how do we go about finding with the Common Ground is that led them to agree on this First Amendment treaty . Guest you look at the debate surrounding it and the virginia debate and what people said, but those really arent, they dont governor interpretation. The constitution isnt the virginia statute on religious freedom or the massachusetts constitution. It is its own thing and this is very little about religion. What it does say in the First Amendment you have enormous bodies of literature on the free exercise clause and on the establishment clause. But i think that there is good reason to read that part of the constitution, that part of the amendment in light of the jeffersonian, and addisonian position that religion is sort of exempt, madison says xm from the cognizance that there is a sort of noncognizance of religion which is completely consistent with the freemarket principles, religion circulates in the freemarket of ideas. Government does not interfere with it or anything to establish it, and i think that pretty much drawing those lines reasonably successfully, though there are a lot of people to believe otherwise as there were in the funding generations Patrick Henry vehemently opposed the jeffersonian addisonian position on religious liberty. But it did prevail in virginia. I would argue that it prevailed in the First Amendment, and that it has