LARRY P. ARNN, the twelfth president of Hillsdale College, received
his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in
government from the Claremont Graduate School. From 1977 to 1980, he
also studied at the London School of Economics and at Worcester College,
Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Martin
Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 until
his appointment as president of Hillsdale College in 2000, he was
president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and
Political Philosophy. In 1996, he was the founding chairman of the
California Civil Rights Initiative, the voter-approved ballot initiative
that prohibited racial preferences in state employment, education, and
contracting. He is the author of Liberty and Learning: The Evolution
of American Education and The Founders’ Key: The Divine and
Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What
We Risk By Losing It (forthcoming February 2012).
Peter Robinson: Larry, I am quoting from you:
“You can read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in a
few minutes. They are simple. They are beautiful. They can be understood
and retained.” Place the documents in their historical context. Why did
they matter?
Larry P. Arnn: There are three incredible
things to keep in mind about the Declaration. First, there had never
been anything like it in history. It was believed widely that the only
way to have political stability was to have some family appointed to
rule. King George III went by the title “Majesty.” He was a nice and
humble man compared to other kings; but still, when his son wanted to
marry a noble of lower station, he was told he mustn’t do that, no
matter what his heart said. That was the known world at the time of the
American Founding.
Second, look at the end of the Declaration.
Its signers were being hunted by British troops. General Gage had an
order to find and detain them as traitors. And here they were putting
their names on a revolutionary document and sending it to the King. Its
last sentence reads: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a
firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge
to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” That is how
people talk on a battlefield when they are ready to die for each other.
The third thing about the Declaration is even
more extraordinary in light of the first two: It opens by speaking of
universal principles. It does not portray the Founding era as
unique—“When in the Course of human events” means any time—or portray
the Founding generation as special or grand—“it becomes necessary for
one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them
with another” means any people. The Declaration is thus an act of
obedience—an act of obedience to a law that persists beyond the English
law and beyond any law that the Founders themselves might make. It is an
act of obedience to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and to
certain self-evident principles—above all the principle “that all men
are created equal” with “certain unalienable Rights.”
For the signers to be placing their lives at
risk, and to be doing so while overturning a way of organizing society
that had dominated for two thousand years, and yet for them to begin the
Declaration in such a humble way, is very grand.
As for the Constitution, first, it is
important to realize that some of the most influential modern historians
suggest that it represents a break with the Declaration—that it
represents a sort of second founding. If this were true, it would mean
that the Founders changed their minds about the principles in the
Declaration, and that in following their example we could change our
minds as well. But in fact it is not true that the Constitution broke
with the Declaration. It is false on its face.
The Constitution contains three fundamental
arrangements: representation, which is the direct or indirect basis of
the three branches of government described in the first three articles
of the Constitution; separation of powers, as embodied in those three
branches; and limited government, which is obvious in the Constitution’s
doctrine of enumerated powers—there is a list of things that Congress
can do in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, and the things that
are not listed it may not do. And all three of these fundamental
arrangements, far from representing a break with the Declaration, are
commanded by it.
Look at the lengthy middle section of the
Declaration, made up of the list of charges against the King. The King
has attempted to force the people to “relinquish the right of
Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and
formidable to tyrants only.” He has “dissolved Representative Houses
repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights
of the people.” He has “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome
and necessary for the public good.” So he has violated the idea and
arrangement of representation.
What about separation of powers? As seen in
the charges above, and in the charge that he would call together
legislatures “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant...for the
sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures,” the
King was violating the separation of the executive and legislative
powers. And in “[making] judges dependent on his Will alone, for the
tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries,”
he was violating the separation between the executive and judicial
powers.
Similarly, he violated the idea of limited
government by sending “swarms of Officers to harrass [the] people, and
eat out their substance,” by importing “large Armies of foreign
Mercenaries,” by “imposing Taxes on [the people] without [their]
Consent,” and in several other ways listed.
By violating these arrangements—which would
become the three key elements of the Constitution—the King was violating
the principles of the Declaration. This is what justified the American
Revolution. And the point of this for our time is that in thinking about
the American Founding, we should think about the Declaration and the
Constitution together. If the principles and argument of the Declaration
are true, the arrangements and argument of the Constitution are true,
and vice versa.
PR: I quote you again: “Woodrow Wilson and the
founders of modern liberalism call these doctrines of limited government
that appear in the Declaration and the Constitution obsolete. They argue
that we now live in the age of progress and that government must be an
engine of that progress.”
Wilson was dealing with conditions that the
Founders could scarcely have imagined: industrialization, dense urban
populations, enormous waves of immigration. So what did he get wrong?
LPA: The first thing he got wrong was looking
back on earlier America as a simple age. There was nothing simple about
it. The Founders had to fight a war against the largest force on earth.
They had to figure out how to found a government based on a set of
principles that had never formed the basis of a government. The original
Congress was called the Continental Congress, although no one would
understand the extent of the continent until Lewis and Clark reported to
President Jefferson in 1806. They had to figure out a way for the first
free government in history to grow across that continent. These things
took vast acts of imagination. And this is not even to mention the
crisis of slavery and the Civil War. So the idea that the complications
of the late 19th century were something new, or were greater by some
order of magnitude, is bunkum.
The second mistake Wilson makes is
fundamental, and goes to the core of the American idea. Wilson is
opposed to the structure imposed on the government by the
Constitution—for instance, the separation of powers—because it impedes
what he calls progress. But what idea was behind that structure? James
Madison writes in Federalist 51:
[W]hat 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 other words, human nature is such that
human beings need to be governed. We need government if we are not to
descend into anarchy. But since human beings will make up the
government, government itself must be limited or it will become
tyrannical. Just as we outside the government require to be governed,
those inside the government require to be governed. And that has to be
strictly arranged because those inside the government need, and they
will have, a lot of power.
Against this way of thinking, Wilson argued
that progress and evolution had brought human beings to a place and time
where we didn’t have to worry about limited government. He rejected what
the Founders identified as a fixed or unchanging human nature, and
thought we should be governed by an elite class of people who are not
subject to political forces or constitutional checks and balances—a
class of people such as we find in our modern bureaucracy. This form of
government would operate above politics, acting impartially in
accordance with reason.
Now, it’s pretty easy for us today to judge
whether Wilson or the Founders were right about this. Look at our
government today. Is the bureaucracy politically impartial? Is it
efficient and rational, as if staffed by angels? Or is it politically
motivated and massively self-interested?
PR: You’ve spoken about restoring a rounded
and rigorous sense of constitutional government, and you have put
forward, in a tentative way, four ideas or “pillars” to suggest how to
begin doing that. The first pillar is this: “Protecting the equal and
inalienable rights of individuals is government’s primary
responsibility.”
Here’s a problem though: Something like 47
percent of Americans now pay no federal income tax, and we hear a great
deal about the tipping point—the point at which more people become
dependent on the federal government than pay into it. What is it within
the Constitution, or within a revived constitutional government, that
prevents this majority from simply voting itself the property of the
minority?
LPA: Well, the first thing is the majority’s
larger self-interest rightly understood. Is that practice working out in
Greece right now? As Margaret Thatcher used to say, pretty soon you run
out of other people’s money.
I myself am not particularly gloomy about the
tipping point you mention. I do understand that there will come a time,
if we do not repair our problems, when we will not be able to repair
them. But given that so many people today clearly think the government
is out of hand and does not represent them anymore, I think we won’t
pass that tipping point. I’ve had the privilege of studying Winston
Churchill for a long time, and his great belief—and I think this should
be the model for us today—was to make the great political questions
clearer to the people and then to have faith in them. I am optimistic
partly because the explanations of the great political questions given
to Americans have not been very good or very clear since Reagan. What if
we were to get better in explaining them? That is our hope, I think.
PR: Okay, pillar two, still quoting you:
“Economic liberty is inversely proportional to government intrusion in
the lives of citizens. We must liberate the American people to work, to
save, and to invest.”
But here’s a constitutional question that
Milton Friedman noticed and that James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for
writing about: The benefits of federal spending accrue to small groups
who have incentives to organize and agitate for more and more spending,
whereas the costs of federal spending are diffused across the whole
population, so that no one has a counterbalancing incentive to organize
and agitate against spending. Therefore, you get this ratchet that
always leads in the direction of greater spending. Did the Constitution
not foresee this problem?
LPA: Two points. The first is that we should
not blame the Constitution. It is the longest surviving and greatest
constitution in human history, and the effort by Progressives to
overturn it is now more than 100 years old. It is not a failure of the
Constitution, but the success of the political rebellion against
it—which has been systematic and going on for a very long time—that
brings us to where we are today.
Second, public choice theory as you describe
it is a true and sufficient explanation of things as far as it goes. But
is there not more to it today? Milton Friedman used to say that
subsidies to farmers are going to grow and subsidies to old people are
going to decline. Why? Because there are so many old people that for us
to give them $100 will cost us $175, whereas there are so few farmers
that for us to give them $100,000 will cost us only $10. That is public
choice theory in a nutshell. But isn’t the fact now that a growing
number of people know we are broke? And that they are going to have to
pay more and more to sustain the voracious appetite of the bureaucratic
state?
I believe there is an abiding or overarching
sense of fairness that touches a majority of the American people. If
there is, constitutionalism will look more attractive than it used to
look. I think that if Americans are provided a good and clear
explanation of the choices before them, they will be willing to begin
moving back toward constitutional government.
PR: On to pillar three: “To accomplish its
primary duty of protecting individual liberty, the government must
uphold national security.” That seems perfectly straightforward. You
also write: “Promotion of democracy and defense of innocents abroad
should be undertaken only in keeping with the national interest.”
Where do you place your views on the spectrum
between Ron Paul and George W. Bush?
LPA: I side with Thomas Jefferson when he
said, “We are the friends of liberty everywhere, custodians only of our
own.” Foreign affairs are prudential matters, and prudential matters are
not subject to narrow rules laid out in advance. But that practical
statement by Jefferson is a brilliant guide.
Also, we have to remember that it is a very
dangerous world. Churchill believed that one of the effects of
technology is to make us both wealthier and more powerful. And both
wealth and power can turn to destruction. The great wars of modernity
have been much larger in scale than ancient wars, and equal in
intensity. Churchill believed that liberal society contains in this
respect and others seeds of its own destruction. It is the work of
statesmen to find the cheapest possible way to defend their countries
without consuming all the resources of those countries.
I pray that Iraq is going to be a free
country, and I think there is a chance of it, and I give George W. Bush
credit for that. But I have been skeptical, and it is a more complicated
question than many seem to understand. A senior person in the White
House said to me one time, “Don’t you think the Iraqis want to be free?”
And I said: “Sure they do. But have you read The Federalist Papers?
Do you divine from its arguments that wanting to be free is sufficient?”
As it turns out, it is hard to obtain civil and religious liberty, and
it is hard to maintain it.
But do I think we did a good thing imposing a
new constitution on Japan after World War II? Sure I do. Japan did a
terrible thing to us, we conquered it, and there was an opportunity in
that. It would have been a false economy not to seize that opportunity.
Does that mean that in every country where there is a threat to us, we
won’t be perfectly safe until they are democratic? Maybe. But even so,
is trying to make them democratic practicable and the most practical way
to serve our security? Probably not. Again, these are matters of
prudence.
PR: Pillar four: “The restoration of a high
standard of public morality is essential to the revival of
constitutionalism.” What is your distinction between public morality and
morality per se?
LPA: Public morality means laws about
morality. Murder is a moral harm, and we have laws against it. Public
morality also includes laws supporting the family. Human beings were
made for the family, and we should uphold that. It is hard to raise kids
right, and it takes a long time. Laws should support that effort, not
undermine it. This extends to reducing the size of government so that it
does not become a burden on families. The Gross Domestic Product of the
United States is about $15 trillion, and state, local and federal
spending is about $6.7 trillion. So we are $800 billion away from taking
half of GDP out of the private sector, and the new health care
bureaucracy is coming. Once it comes, if it does, government will be
larger than society.
The principles of our country stem from the
laws of nature and nature’s God. This word “nature” is full of rich
meaning. It comes from the Latin word for birth, so of course the nature
of man, and natural rights, must be understood to include the process of
begetting and growth by which human beings come to be. This process
takes longer, and is more demanding and expensive, than for any or
nearly any other creatures. If families do not raise children, then the
government will. What then becomes of limited government?
PR: And as a constitutional point, do things
that undermine public morality and degrade people include the garbage
language in some pop songs, or the proliferation of pornography on the
Internet?
LPA: Yes. At this college, students are
supposed to be civil, and we don’t have many problems because they
subscribe to that before they come. Having an honor code makes for good
order and operation. Teachers, students, and staff come together and
make a common effort. A well-functioning college is a microcosm of
constitutional rule, and shows what can be achieved in a country when
everyone is governing himself.
It is important for all of us to understand
that free people are not governed by rules. Here at Hillsdale we are
governed by goals, and then the rules are very broad. Tell the truth, be
straight, do not cheat, do not be foul, take care of other people. Those
are rules. But the federal rules pertaining to colleges number now more
than 500 pages. We at Hillsdale do not live under these rules because we
do not take federal money. But I asked our lawyer once to send me the
list to read anyway, and he said I wouldn’t be able to read it. I
replied that even though I am not a lawyer, I am a pretty smart guy,
maybe I can. No, even he can’t read it, he replied, it is
incomprehensible.
Ask yourself, who gets powerful under a system
like that? The answer is, whoever has the power to interpret the rules.
They can do whatever they want.
This is the point I hope every American will
come to understand—that in our country, we are supposed to have a very
powerful government in order for it to do what it must, but also a
government of a far different character than the kind we have today. The
distinction between constitutional government and bureaucratic
government is fundamental.
PR: How can we get there from here? I am
quoting you once again: “There is only one way to return to living under
the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the institutions
of the Constitution. We must come to love these things again.” How?
LPA: First, you have to know about them. I am like the hammer who
looks at everything as if it were a nail. Everything is a teaching
opportunity. Teaching is, of course, what we do here at Hillsdale. But
the great presidents are teachers as well. It is a generous and fine
thing to do, to labor to make important things clear to people—which of
course you cannot do unless you are able to make them clearer than if
you are just talking to yourself. That is why Abraham Lincoln’s speeches
are beautiful. You cannot read many of them unless you read them
carefully. An example is Lincoln’s Peoria address on the history of
slavery. He labored for months putting it together, and Americans could
learn how slavery moved in our country because he laid it out. And then
at the end of the speech he combined that history with a lovely
explanation of why the principles of our country are capable of reaching
and protecting every human being, and ennobling them, because they get
to participate in rule. To know that about the principles of our country
is to love them. I see that happen all the time in the classroom. So
what we need is for people to know and understand our country’s
principles. Love will follow.