The principles as debated truths
Bob Zadek frames the founding principles as the subject of a debate that began with the Revolution and continues. When the Constitution was written and the Revolutionary War fought, he says, the colonists were not committed to independence and were not thinking about how self-government would happen; the war was followed by a years-long public debate over what the founding principles should be, and that debate continues. Indoctrinating students, he argues, cuts off thought and debate and is anti-intellectual and anti-critical thinking, and he says it is happening in Texas and California, where textbooks are captured and students indoctrinated Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
Zadek cites the educator Diane Ravitch, whom he calls very smart and devoted to educational theory, as saying of textbook writing in California that it is outright censorship and that it dumbs down textbooks and makes them bland. He also cites McGraw-Hill’s self-imposed guidelines for elementary and high school texts: of the people pictured, 40% must be white, 30% Hispanic, 20% African American, 7% Asian, and 3% Native American, with 5% disabled and 5% over the age of 55. Zadek’s objection is that the history and the facts do not matter under such standards Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010).
The loss of first principles in politics
In a 2019 conversation with John McGinnis, a professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law and a professor of constitutional law, Zadek offers that Trump has been described as transactional — making decisions ad hoc rather than from a core set of values or a creed — and says there is no indication of what Trump believes as a matter of principle. Zadek says this leads him to be concerned about the loss in the country of founding principles, which he says are rarely referenced in public debate and which give American exceptionalism its power Here Comes the Storm (2019).
McGinnis agrees and compares Trump to Reagan, who from ‘76 to ‘80 traveled the country writing speeches trying to imply Hayek’s ideas, whereas Trump’s background is that of a real estate operator from New York, which McGinnis calls completely transactional. McGinnis says Trump does not have the inclusive focus on principle that Reagan did, but identifies two sources of hope. The first is Trump’s commitment to appointing judges who will read the Constitution as written — originalist judges — which McGinnis says matters because of a long theory of the Supreme Court going back to the early Republic that the justices are in some sense Republican schoolmasters who, if originalists, call the country to its founding principles. He says many justices have done the opposite, writing Roe v. Wade, which he calls something made out of nothing that takes powers away from the states, and he credits Trump for the appointment of Gorsuch, who he says has turned out to be great, while saying Kavanaugh is not yet known Here Comes the Storm (2019).
The second source of hope McGinnis names is Trump’s most recent State of the Union address, which he says captured some principles by talking about the danger of socialism and the importance of freedom in a way the inaugural address did not. A clip of Trump is played in which he says socialism has bankrupted an oil-rich nation and driven its people into abject poverty, that virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay, and that all nations should resist socialism. Zadek says the passage was right out of Hayek and was the first time Trump drilled down to a principle in support of his policies, which encouraged him. McGinnis says one reason to think it continues is that giving government more power is not popular, and that if opportunism and principle coincide, Trump will not oppose principle Here Comes the Storm (2019).
The philosophical attack on the Declaration
C. Bradley Thompson, author of America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, tells Zadek that the rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence began in the 1830s, when the ideas of European, particularly German, philosophers were brought to America — specifically those of Hegel, initially brought by a pro-slavery Southerner. Pro-slavery intellectuals during the antebellum period, Thompson says, became the first great advocates of this German philosophy, rejecting the idea of an absolute, certain, permanent, universal truth and accepting the ideas of socialism. He calls it a great irony that pro-slavery defenders like George Fitzhugh defended the peculiar institution on the grounds that it was the beau ideal of communism, and says the first pre-Marxian Marxists in America were pro-slavery writers who were trenchant critics of limited government and laissez-faire capitalism C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).
Thompson describes a philosophic tsunami that crashed upon American shores beginning in the 1870s, bringing in the ideas of Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and transforming America’s universities in one generation. That, he says, is when the strongest critique of the principles of the Declaration and of the Constitution emerged; Woodrow Wilson attacked both, and in place of limited night-watchman government came the ideas of German statecraft and the Prussian state, producing the first big movement for a statist government C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).
In a second excerpt from the same episode, Zadek argues that the limited purpose of government is founded on rational, scientifically concluded principles about the relationship of humans to one another and the inherent rights of humans, and that the word “truth” is in the Declaration. Any change in the role of government, he says, had better be founded on a more compelling truth than the truth on which the country was founded, rather than on claims that people deserve something or that social policies would be nice to accomplish. Thompson agrees and says the first attack on the principles of the Declaration began in the late 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, when pro-slavery writers rejected the idea of absolute, certain, permanent truths and adopted Hegel’s view that history, manners and mores, and rights are changing. Along with rejecting the Declaration’s first two truths — summed up in the words equality and rights — they denied that all men were created equal and denied natural rights, holding that rights were specific to historical times and places, thereby justifying slavery C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019).
Patriotism and the 1619 Project
Steven B. Smith, in a conversation about his book on reclaiming patriotism, tells Zadek that the principles are under attack. He cites the New York Times 1619 Project, which he says would have us believe that America is founded in racism and slavery, that racism and white supremacy have been the core of American national identity from 1619 to 2021, and that these are not departures from the principles but are the principles. Smith calls that a deeply corrosive ideology and part of what he describes as the new-age progressivism of recent times, distinguishing it from an earlier and older progressivism Steven B. Smith on Reclaiming Patriotism (2021).
Smith says American founding principles were not born pure and that Americans have argued about them from the beginning, fighting a great civil war over what they were. He calls Abraham Lincoln the hero of his book and says Lincoln understood that American principles were founded in the Declaration of Independence, particularly its clause of human equality, which provided the bedrock of the nation. Lincoln understood, Smith says, that those principles had not been perfectly realized in 1776 or in 1861, but that we struggle to achieve them. To give up on them, as many on the left and increasingly on the right have done, Smith calls a kind of fatigue with American patriotism. Patriotism, he says, is a virtue that is difficult, not part of our DNA, and must be taught and cultivated through practice and education Steven B. Smith on Reclaiming Patriotism (2021).
The founding as promise
John Cribb tells Zadek that the Founders have come under criticism lately for talking a good game — writing about equality and freedom while setting up a country that institutionalized racism and slavery. Cribb says Lincoln argued the Founders knew slavery was wrong, including slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson, who in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence wrote that slavery is a cruel war against human nature itself, and Benjamin Franklin, who called it an atrocious debasement of human nature. Lincoln explained, Cribb says, that the Founders could not fight a war against Britain, set up a new country, launch an experiment never tried before, hold thirteen very different states together, and get rid of slavery all at the same time. Lincoln drew a metaphor: the Founders realized slavery was like a cancer in the body politic, but cutting it out all at once would make the patient bleed to death America’s Second Founding (2021).
What the Founders could do, and did, Cribb says, was lay down principles in the Declaration of Independence that spelled the doom of slavery, and they did it on purpose — the statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Cribb calls the declaration of those principles, at a time when the vast majority of people on earth enjoyed little or no freedom, a magnificent step forward and the first time a nation was created out of the idea that people should be free and govern themselves. Those principles, he says, were a promise to future generations, and the Civil War became a fight to redeem that promise for millions of enslaved Americans, which is why Lincoln speaks in the Gettysburg Address of a new birth of freedom. Cribb says the country has constantly moved toward those principles and promises, and may never perfectly get there America’s Second Founding (2021).
Across episodes
The same question — whether the founding principles are fixed truths or historical products — is argued across the excerpts, and the treatment shifts with the interlocutor. Thompson, in 2019, locates the attack on the Declaration in pro-slavery Hegelians of the 1830s and the German-trained generation of the 1870s; Smith, in 2021, locates a current attack in the 1619 Project’s claim that racism and slavery are the principles rather than departures from them; Cribb, in 2021, answers the same charge by way of Lincoln’s argument that the Founders laid down principles that spelled slavery’s doom. McGinnis, in 2019, supplies the political diagnosis — transactional politics and the loss of first principles — and the judicial remedy of originalist appointments. The excerpts show no resolution of the question, only its recurrence.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any litigation over textbook guidelines, nor do they identify any bill, case holding, or amendment underlying the debates they describe. The immigration episode is represented only by a summary and a list of topics, with no excerpted argument about founding principles, so nothing from it is attributed here. The excerpts also break off before several speakers finish — Zadek’s question at the end of the McGinnis episode and his remarks opening the Smith and Thompson segments are cut — and nothing beyond those points is reported.