The Book Club: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison with Ben Shapiro

[Music] welcome back to the book club I am Michael Knowles and today we will be talking about the Federalists this is the guidebook for our Constitution our whole system of government we have a great guest who cares a lot about our Constitution and system of government to help us through it but first I've got to thank our friends over at thinker in this fast-paced world it is very difficult to make reading a priority nobody has time to do it so luckily at think org they summarized the key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-size forms so you can read or listen to hundreds of titles including Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people and American classic or jordan Peterson's twelve rules for life if you want to challenge your preconceptions expand your horizons and most importantly sound smart at cocktail parties go to thinker dot org that is thi NK are no e no time for that thinker org to start a free trial and put your mind in motions the subject today is the federalists we will delve the depths of our entire constitutional system and the only man I know who can speak fast enough to get all of that into 25 minutes is Ben Shapiro hey thank you for coming on so let's say good to see you but obviously not Cruz just be an absolute lie but I had to have you come in you were the only person I know first of all you loved the Federalist I do you did the Federalist on your number one rated podcast you did one Federalist paper each week for a year and a half year and a half the Federalist Papers also known as the Federalists are this guide book that was written by Alexander Hamilton James Madison little tiny bit John J little John July he really yeah he was the guy in your in your third-grade class who really didn't do anything but like pasted something on the diagram and then was like I was part of the group Rogers I've of them he shows up late to the birthday party he says this gift is from all of us you know so it was written to defend the Constitution right after it was written by the guys who wrote it by the guys who were pushing it and it explains the whole constitutional system right it does not explain the Bill of Rights which is a pretty important thing so everybody in the United States now thinks of the Bill of Rights when they think of the Constitution they think they think of the amendments but forget that they are called amendments because they actually amend the Constitution the reality is that even even the presidents the Bill of Rights is a pretty controversial thing most of the founders or at least a lot of the founders we're not in favor of the Bill of Rights because they thought that it expressed that governments could do anything that was not mentioned in the Bill of Rights right which is why there's an amendment that specifically says all rights not mentioned here are delegated to the States or to the people meaning there are other rights that are not included in the Bill of Rights that we're not going to talk about here the the American tendency to focus on the Bill of Rights obscures what was seen to be the chief protection for the American people which was the structure of the American government which is the actual Constitution the structural Constitution so the Federalist focuses solely on the structural Constitution and as I say the the authors of the Federalist Papers were very much against a bill of rights because they were afraid people would focus in on freedom of speech or freedom of the press instead of focusing in on how were these branches supposed to interact to prevent exactly the kinds of usurpation of public power that we've seen over the over the subsequent 200 years because you see in these 85 essays which 77 of them appeared as op-eds in newspapers in New York could you imagine you get this caliber of op-ed in your daily newspaper and they appeared to just try to convince their fellow citizens and explain the system of checks and balances because they had this problem which is can human beings describe and define their own system of government can we really be free to govern ourselves and if so how are we going to do that knowing that men are not angels men are avaricious men want power they're ambitious what is the the system that they're describing here it's a system I guess of checks and balances right there are a few things that the Federalist paper is designed to solve and to understand what it's trying to solve you have to understand the history slightly before the Federalist Papers namely have to understand the Articles of Confederation which is the first constitution of the United States and was deemed extraordinarily weak basically there are several problems with it number one the executive branch basically didn't have the power to do anything the federal government didn't have the power to gain tax revenue in any way which meant that the United States and have power to pay back its debts which was a serious problem it meant that the United States had to basically ask very nicely in order to gather military power because otherwise everyone was afraid there'd be a standing army at the top of the government that that standing army could be used to cram and down violations of Rights just like Great Britain had and so the Articles of Confederation was written to give enormous amounts of power to the state and virtually none to the federal government and this results in most famously the shays rebellion which is a situation where there's a Massachusetts farmer and he doesn't basically doesn't wanna pay his debts and he starts essentially a debtors revolt against the state of Massachusetts which was trying to give money try to tax its own citizens to give money to the federal government to pay back war debt and this necessitates the calling in of the armed forces it becomes a really massive issue in the early republic and so the original mandate for the Constitution of the United States was to get together to amend the Articles it was not to replace the Articles and the founders get together and they quickly realized this is unworkable there's no way to work from the current basis we have in the Articles of Confederation we need to replace the entire structure with something that empowers the executive more gives the legislature a little bit more power but it also needs to make sure that number one the states feel protected and number two the people feel that their rights are protected by the amount of gridlock that's built into the system so the way you see that today is people freaked out whenever they see that the government is not doing what we want why won't the government do what we want I'm so frustrated whatever we may think there obstructionist right and the entire system is built for gridlock so the entire system is built in order to prevent the government from taking action that would be seen as precipitous they violate rights and the founders weren't content to just say okay here's a right and now we're just gonna pledge not to violate it they didn't believe that anybody could pledge to the future that these rights would not be violated instead they set up a system and they basically said no matter how hard you try to violate the system it's gonna be very difficult for you to violate the system itself because of all these checks and balances so they are solving a couple of problems as I say they're solving the problem of pure majoritarianism they were afraid of the the what they call the tyranny of the mob yeah surely a democracy right the idea that 51% could cram down on the other 49% whatever it is they want and you see a lot of people in today's America calling for exactly that saying that we ought to get rid of the electoral college we're gonna get rid of the Senate we ought to get rid of any sort of quote-unquote anti-democratic means 51% should be able to crime down on 49% you see people actually actively calling for that today so all of these all of the roots of the Constitution have and they have precedent and that they are precedent for it for today the they were also trying to solve the problem of federalism so they're trying to balance the needs of the state with the needs of the federal government now the way that you see this play out today is that there's an entire side of the political aisle that effectively wants to do away with states and states has obstacles to the desires of the federal government they don't they're not interested in localism one of the authors you'll see cited most often in the Federalist Papers is Baron de Montesquieu who specifically talks about the power of local government and why local government is better why it matters more why it's easier to get things done why local government ought to have more power to do things in people's lives than a federal government far removed from you and then finally they're trying to solve the problem of of as I say these this sort of checks and balances question what if the executive grows too too powerful and too large and can cram down on the American people what they want well then we have to check them with legislative branch that can be fund them what if the legislative branch decides to get too ambitious well then we have executive branch the convene oh what both of those decide to get too ambitious well then we have a judiciary that's allowed to step in and say that this is unconstitutional and then the other two branches are allowed to speak back to the judiciary either by limiting its jurisdiction or in some cases ignoring it and negotiating with it as we actually saw in the early republic so the idea is that these checks and balances to avoid tyranny of the majority that protection of Rights lies in the necessity for a supermajority basically unless everybody agrees on a big thing nothing big is getting done and this is seen is now the obstacle today right all this is the bad stuff this is why all the stuff that people complain about in American government that's the feature not the bug yeah that's the reason that you have rights is because the government was constructed such that interest was supposed to counteract interest as Madison talks about in Federalist 51 the idea is that you're supposed to have all of these gears that grind to a halt unless everybody is pushing in the same direction at which point we can have a constitutional amendment but we're not supposed to be shifting wildly along political lines because the more you shift wildly the more chance there is that the individual is going to be overrun by the collective will and this is you know the word ambition they use and you mentioned Federalist 51 maybe the most important certainly one of the most famous of the Federalist Papers the key line here is ambition must be made to counteract ambition the interests of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place and this is where what's so interesting about the Federalist is it's written by these different guys some of whom kind of bitterly disagreed with each other but it's all written under one pen name Publius Publius from the founder of the roman republic whose name meet literally means the friend of the people and they all come together and write this way and they're writing in part political philosophy probably the great greatest political philosophy Americans ever produced but in part it's very practical in Federalist 51 he writes Madison writes what what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature if men were angels no government would be necessary if angels were to govern men neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary in framing a government which is to be administrated by or administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this you must first enable the government to control the governed and in the next place oblige it to control itself so in my view this is the single most important expression of the American constitutional system ever written and the reason is because again it does go to human nature and you see again this battle over human nature being played out in elections like today's where you have certain people who will suggest that those who govern us are of high mind and sound character they're the best among us the bureaucrats in the executive branch right these are the people these experts who are going to decide for us what is best and they won't have to take into account what the people want and why do we need any checks on those people because after all they are the wisest and greatest among us and so checks and balances are actually a problem and this and on the other hand you have people who have suggested historically that human beings are degraded and terrible and therefore they shouldn't be afforded any rights you should have one person at the top of government and that person should basically be cramming down roles on the rest now they come up with the same sort of solution right that people who run government are good means the government has no limits the people at the bottom are bad and therefore you need one person who's very powerful to make sure they all stay in line is the same sort of thing just from a different angle what what the founders we're attempting to do was avoid the Hobbesian Leviathan right which is that that second theory which is basically that people would be killing each other in the streets if it were not for a powerful overarching government that has the right to figure out what sort of rights you ought to be entitled to and on the other hand these sort of Marxist utopianism that says that if you delegate all power to the government that the government can cure all all problems everything will be good because human beings are naturally good if made if made good by a by a better social system imposed from above and that's such a great point because you see in Federalist I think it's fed 6ya fed six by Hamilton he said is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age this idea that we're just everything's gonna be tickety-boo to quote our friend Andrew Clavin you know the view of human nature here is the key because they don't think that men are totally depraved they don't think that men are angels in in fed 56 Madison writes as there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence and here's the key republican government the government that the Constitution sets up presupposes the existence of these qualities something to be confident about something respectful in a higher degree than any other form men can't be totally depraved or else we can't governor's this is the part that people sometimes in the libertarian side tend to forget about which is that you do need a virtuous Society in order to uphold a republic so this is something that the founders recognized they believed that virtue is to be imposed by social institutions rich social institutions that existed outside of government again this provides a sharp contrast to a lot of the talk that happens today or in for example in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention there was a video that was flashed up on the Billboard and it said government is the only thing we all share right and that's something that founders long to write along too and that that's that's something that the founders would have rejected wholeheartedly they believed that what we all shared was family what was church were social institutions in which we all engaged and then when we had to come together in order to take care of a common problem then we came together in the form of government but the idea that government was gonna be the great unifying glue in American life was something that was completely foreign to the founders and would have been foreign to them because again the states had just broken away from this other government everyone was British right I mean these were all British subjects until five minutes ago and now they have formed their own country everyone's chief Allegiance I mean they talk about this in the Federalist Papers at length the assumption was that everyone's chief allegiance would be to their home state before it was to the federal government the hope of the founders is that eventually people would shift that allegiance gradually toward a federal government overarching Lee but in terms of who you were going to deal with from the government on David day basis it was supposed to be the local and the state government and so the the idea that what we would share mostly was an allegiance to the federal government the federal government is where we're going to put all of our concerns that's considered deeply dangerous by the founders it's deeply dangerous today when people suggest that the Fed government is where we all share things the truth is most Americans don't believe that which is why it's so inherently dangerous to invest such inordinate power in a federal government very far away from you and governing over these disparate populations that largely disagree with one another the only way we can have tolerance and diversity in a society is if we leave each other alone well this structure was meant to allow that to happen you know for mostly for good in some ways for bad right I mean when it came to slavery that was for bad because the founders made the calculation that it was more important to have a union than it was to get rid of slavery by the way that calculation historically ends up being justified because the fact is that if the founders had said no we're not going to get rid of that we are going to get rid of slavery in the Constitution the entire south breaks away and not only does that become a separate country slavery is still legal there for decades after the Civil War right there's no cause for the Civil War because they're actually two separate countries occupying the same continent presumably in a state of constant tension and possible war so the the obviously tolerance and tolerance for four other points of view requires you to back off of things that you may not like and then the in the Constitution you know there's more of a general conversation about the Constitution the Constitution was supposed to put slavery on a gradual not so gradual road to extinction I mean this is very explicit from the words of the Constitution but the the bottom line and the Federalist Papers that what it sees that human beings are greedy and ambitious but also capable of great good which is why they don't need government cramming down some vision of the good on top of them and the only way again we're gonna be able to live in a diverse society is with a very light hand at the very top of government but heavy enough so that if need be then there can be a popular mobilization to get a thing done but it has to be so important that pretty much everybody agrees it needs to get done this is a very American idea this is what I mean by the obviously it's by definition an American idea cuz it comes from you know the description of our founding founding of the country it's not totally clean it's not totally abstract philosophy it's not just one government it's this very messy system of different governments kind of conflicting with one another there's a line in Fed fifty five is one of my favorite lines in the whole Federalist this is by Madison he says nothing can be more fallacious than to found our political calculations on arithmetic imprinted sort of acknowledgment that while this is absolutely high-minded philosophy it's also down in the politics and real practical wisdom coming from the guys who have helped to found the country who have written the Constitution who have dealt in a really personal way with these local politicians and the people how much of the Federalist is philosophy and how much of it is just a user's manual for the Constitution I would say that it's about 30% philosophy and 70% users manual but the 30% philosophy is the important part yeah what I mean by that is that it's it's it's really like asking what's more important to the building the foundations of the building or the or the stories built on top of it right the philosophy is the foundation of the building and then the entire superstructure is built on top of those foundations so if you shift the foundations yeah you destroy the superstructure and that's basically what has happened in terms of the shift in American governments it's the beginning of the 20th century so founding philosophy is explicitly rejected by the progressives at the beginning of the 20th century right the Federalist is basically seen as an Akron aesthetic a product of time it was it was a Miss is Miss calibration of what human beings were it was it was it was portrayed as an eternal view of what human nature was but it was really just a reflection of what human nature was at the time and now we've got better people at the beginning of the 20th century and that means that we can have a government unbounded in the woods words of Woodrow Wilson the Declaration of Independence is sort of hackneyed it's done we don't need it anymore the only thing the founders really wanted was for us to know that we have these rights and then it was up to us to figure out how to guarantee those rights that's not true at all again that is that is completely miss reading the Constitution and the Federalist Papers it's reading the structural Constitution out of the Constitution and that is the important part and and that's what we've seen right we've seen the executive branch which was supposed to be executive or who's supposed to execute it was not supposed to be a legislative branch it's become the energetic branch of the government as the writers of the Fed because it was not supposed to override anything the other two branches we're doing where I was supposed to compete with the other branches but it could always be defunded by the legislature the notion of an executive branch that has within it a legislative branch which is the entire bureaucratic says it's the current system we had right that is the current system most lawmaking does not happen in Congress most lawmaking happens at the bureaucratic level where the legislature delegates a very broad law to these regulatory agencies and then just says okay fill this in so they'll write the Clean Air Act and it'll say make the air clean and they'll just kick it over to the executive branch and you have a bunch of regulators over there saying okay what that means that you can only have this many parts per million of Brig or particulate in the in the air well the problem with that of course is that that's not answerable to the people because those bureaucrats are not answerable to the people so the executive branch has become a legislative branch the legislative branch increasingly is becoming a vestigial organ doesn't matter who the president is it's been happening under Bush Obama it's it's happening under Trump to the growth of the legislative branch they of the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch and that's not just the fault of the executive that's the fault of the legislature one of the things that's that's really fascinating about the Federalist Papers is if you really want to get a great picture of it read the Federalist Papers and then also read what are called the anti-federalist papers because remember this is a robust debate right as as Publius is writing right these three these three great Americans are writing the defense of the Constitution they're a bunch of other great Americans including Robert Yates who is one of the members of the Constitutional Convention who's writing that they're writing a series of papers against this right so I don't point counterpoint it was actually the anti-federalists who came first right they were writing these articles and then Publius who's really Hamilton Madison and J they write the Federalist Papers as a response to all these op eds that are coming out against the Constitution the first place and what's fascinating to read about the Anti Federalist Papers see when you read the Federalist Papers and you understand that they're attempting to react to a lack of government ability to even have a system I mean they're looking at the possibility of dissolution of the country and so you need a slightly more powerful government well promising people it's not going to run roughshod right and this is one of the things you see in some of the in some of the Federalist Papers like Federalist 78 where they're talking about judicial power and Hamilton is explicitly saying listen as soon as the judiciary begins to act as a super legislature you know basically cramming down law in the name of the Constitution it loses its reason for being right we don't expect this will ever happen the judiciary would would they never a right though right it just becomes a super legislature we'd have to dissolve it right they would never do any of this and Robert Yates in the anti-federalist right no that's exactly what's going to happen right the judiciary is gonna become a super legislature it's going to write its own law which is exactly we should have and so for the funny is that for the first hundred and fifty years of American experience basically the Federalist Papers are right and then the progressive movement happens and rejects the Federalist Papers and then everything that the anti-federalists say starts to look a lot more I know it's so funny because you read the what you just sided fed 78 which is about the judiciary and judicial review and it's the one that starts to ring the most untrue because you realize now the the courts actually are writing our laws for us even though it's illegitimate but the I think maybe the most depressing one to read especially in the 2020 presidential election is fed eleven by Hamilton and he's referring to how we're never gonna lose ourselves to our passions under this system a rage for paper money I guess where they lost that one a rage for an abolition of debts for an equal division of property or for any other improper or wicked project we'll be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it and when I look at the 2020 candidates running on the Left they are explicitly calling for an abolition of debts and they were calling for more or less an equal division of property so all these years later this is written in 1787 they got they got a lot of things right they predicted a lot of things for the most important work of philosophy ever to come out of America how do they hold up they hold up as a critique of the power of government they hold up in terms of the durability the institutions I mean the the fact that we have any rights at all in a time when most Americans seem at least queasy about the exercise of a lot of our rights wrenching from the first amendment to the second amendment from freedom of religion to the rights of their arms they hold up in the sense that they have provided a bulwark against schemes to to rob us of our rights the only way in which they don't hold up is in the is in the prediction that they will hold up meaning that the the prediction is that we will create the system of government and that in and of itself will well hem in everybody but the problem is that at a certain point the calculus began to change and some of that was inevitable right after the Civil War the growth of the federal government at the expense of the states was inevitable and in in many sense is good right I mean one of the great tragedies of American history's that the Reconstructionist Republicans weren't able to dominate from longer than they were able to dominate the the Radical Republicans in the aftermath of the Civil War but with that said the the attempt that they draw to to draw a balance is not only is not only good it is necessary at a time when politicians promise that we don't have to draw any balance they suggest that we ought to be unified in pursuit of their grand vision when in fact no one has ever been unified in pursuit of this grand vision the grand vision was the preservation of individual rights what the real key to the Federalist Papers is is understanding that Constitution and Declaration arvin are of one piece really what the federalists is it's the philosophy the declaration manifest in the constitution in the way that Abraham Lincoln spoke about it the idea was the Declaration of Independence was about rights that preexist government god-given rights individual rights that invest in that adhere to you as an individual and are not able to be overcome by any communal interest and that those the only reason for a government to exist is to protect those individual rights and the Constitution is created specifically in order to protect those individual rights and allow governments who protect the country more broadly from threats foreign and domestic I mean that's effectively what the Constitution is designed to do when you get rid of the philosophy of individual rights which has been the ongoing project of unfortunately a political left in this country since the beginning of the 20th century in favor of a more communal vision of what exactly we all ought to have is why you here Bernie Sanders talk about the right to health care as opposed to the right to free speech it only cares about one of those things right the or the right to own property which is completely secondary for him that is a complete rejection of the founding philosophy which was the basis for the Constitution so you get rid the philosophy and eventually the Constitution itself is going to be reshaped that's been happening but that just means that we ought to remind ourselves why the founders wrote what they wrote here not just why this is the best system of government ever devised by man but also why the philosophy that undergirded that system that has its roots ranging all the way from judeo-christian history through Magna Carta and up through English history and John Locke why that philosophy is Gretz if we really want the the government that guarantees us our rights while being able to protect us from the violations of those rights then we need to reacquaint ourselves with the philosophy that lies at the root of the Federalist Papers not merely the institutional checks and balances that you can get from reading a 5,000 word document and there's a key word that it's highs in everything that you've said which is it's actually noted in the introduction by Charles Kesler which is responsibility the federalist more than any philosopher document gives us this word responsibility in a political sense meaning that the government has to be responsive to us responsive to what the people want but it also has to get to the root of responsibility which comes down to a sort of oath or a sacred vow or a promise and that is the that is what you can't change about the Constitution that is that's the basis of the whole structure and as you see responsibilities go away generally from society then I think the Fidel that we have to the Constitution and everything that these guys layout sort of goes away as well I guess I don't want to leave us on a downer note but usually you're the one who kind of leaves on it but I there there does seem to be some hope that at least in the broad all these years later the structures that these guys created have endured no no question I mean the system of American government is incredibly durable it'll be more durable if we again reacquaint ourselves with the fact that we were never meant to be a simple majority Arian democracy when people use democracy instead of Republic they're making a catagory error yeah that if we reacquaint ourselves with the fact it I mean now it's actually a perfect time to reacquaint people with the Federalist Papers and you can tell your friends on the left this you know a lot of people on the Left very very upset the President Trump is president and then Mitch McConnell is the head of the Senate and all the rest here's a good idea would you care for the President of the United States was if you weren't bothering you so much I mean I felt the same way about Barack Obama but wouldn't it be nice if we really didn't care who the presidents of the United States was because for the vast early part of American history no one cared really who the presidents of the United States was except in terms of the sort of like major decisions like war other than that the president Bob I mean from for the early part of American history you could literally walk up to the White House knock on the front door of the White House and the president would answer the door yeah this actually happened on Abraham Lincoln was President Abraham Lincoln I mean this is late in American history is 80 years after the founding and that used to happen because the idea was that Washington was not going to be that important in our lives the important stuff that you did in your life was about your family it was about your community if you had things you needed the government to do that was in a local level where you tended to agree with the people who lived around you so now that we look at our country and we're a very diverse country with a set of variant interests then maybe the best answer is to go back to the sort of federalist structure that required a supermajority of support in order for us to get anything done at the national level as opposed to this this people on the Left talked about we polarized we're falling apart we're coming apart and yet what if we just had a government to cram down on everybody and say well if we're coming apart then why exactly do you think the solution is to raise the stakes of that by suggesting that you're gonna be able to cram down your vision of society on all of these disparate groups why not just say okay go your own way as long as you're violating nobody else's rights that was the founding vision because things were pretty fractious in 1787 in many ways more fractious than they are now and you know if the president is really driving you crazy and you're pulling your hair out maybe it's just a reminder that men are not angels people do not govern men and we should listen to these guys about a lot of other things we could go on forever but of course thankfully you were able to fit in a whole lot of the federalist papers even in this short time we'll have to have you back to do the anti-federalists sounds good thank you for being here that is the book club please be sure to tune in next month I'm Michael Knowlton in the meantime happy reading thank you so much for watching this episode of the book club on Prager you Prager you is a 501 C 3 nonprofit organization so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming thank you very much you

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Length: 27min 56sec (1676 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020