Charles Cooke of the National Review, Melody Barnes of the University of Virginia, and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University explore the debate about the core values of the American Idea—liberty, equality, democracy, and federalism—throughout American history and model the way in which Americans of different perspectives can come together in the spirit of civil dialogue. This program was recorded live on February 9, 2024.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Advanced Staging Productions and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Melody Barnes is the executive director of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. She is also a senior fellow at UVA Law’s Karsh Center for Law and Democracy. She is chair of the board of trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the private, nonprofit organization that owns and operates Monticello. During the administration of President Barack Obama, Barnes was assistant to the president and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She was also executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and chief counsel to the late U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’59 on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Charles Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and the former editor of National Review Online. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford, at which he studied modern history and politics. His work has focused especially on Anglo-American history, British liberty, free speech, the Second Amendment, and American exceptionalism. He is the co-host of the Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast, and is a regular guest on HBO's (Real Time with Bill Maher). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University. His books include The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (2024)
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Additional Resources:
- Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2008)
- Sean Wilentz, The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics (2016)
- Charles Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future
- Charles Cooke, "The American System Works, and It Will Work If Trump Wins Again" (2023)
- Melody Barnes, Corey D.B. Walker and Thad M. Williamson,“Introduction: can we make American democracy work?” In Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (2020)
- Melody Barnes (and others), “Hate-fueled violence is ripping apart our cities and nation. We need to stop it.,” USA Today (2022)
- Melody Barnes and Caroline Janney, "Opinion: In a civil war, accountability must precede healing,"The Washington Post (2021)
- Melody Barnes, "Opinion: It's time for Sally Hemings to show us the unvarnished Thomas Jefferson," The Washington Post (2018)
Excerpt from interview: Melody Barnes emphasizes the need to bridge the gap between aspiration and reality and the importance of both local and federal roles in promoting justice.
Melody Barnes: In fact, we recently at UVA had Melvin Rogers come and speak about his important new book, "The Darkened Light of Faith". And in fact, I know that he was also a guest with Jamel who I don't know if he's here yet at the National Constitution Center talking about these 19th century black intellectuals who thought about and had faith in the American idea, even when evidence didn't necessarily say that you should have faith in the American idea. They were racing ahead to what they believe to be the fulfillment of the aspiration of that idea. And you see it in Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and David Walker and the list goes on.
So I think we can pull that tradition through, and it exists today. I mean, you speak of the views of an immigrant, and I think about this as the embodiment of so many different traditions, immigrant ancestors who were slaves, ancestors who were indigenous people. And what all of that means as we do this work in democracy and think about, and focus on and believe in the idea of justice and the work that we do at the University of Virginia as I lead my team is that our objective is to close the delta between reality and the aspiration. It is an ongoing journey and an ongoing project, and it is exemplified in the expansion of justice that we have seen across American history. I think the frustration comes when after one lesson after another, a war gets fought, 600,000 people die.
The list goes on and on. When it feels like we've taken two steps forward, but we've taken another step back. And I think that's where people become very deeply frustrated and angry, and you see that in the literature well into the 20th century as well. So I believe that to be true. I mean, I also want to go back and we should probably have coffee or a drink or something later, and talk about this idea of federalism and what I meant when I talked about the abstraction.
As someone who's written about community wealth building and the idea of a local focus of the expansion of wealth for those who have not had access to opportunity and the social and economic conditions that make democracy possible, I believe that there's an important place for the local, but I do that and say that without issuing the importance of the federal, because otherwise, I feel like there's a great big notwithstanding clause when you look at the progress that's been made over the course of the 20th century to where we are today that absolutely requires the federal government to be involved and to enforce and to make that real as a blanket of the expression of the rights and responsibilities that people have as citizens in the United States.
Sean Wilentz argues that federalism and states' rights have historically been tied to slavery and civil rights. He emphasizes that these concepts must be understood in their concrete historical contexts rather than as abstract principles.
Sean Wilentz: We should move from abstractions to concrete. I mean, the point about federalism in the decades before the American civil war, states rights and so forth, became attached to a very specific thing. That wasn't the case when the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, for example, were passed in 1798. That was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison trying very, very hard to keep the federalists from running amok with their Alienist Addition Acts and so forth. Actually, they were almost nullifiers. They came very close, but the issue was not an abstraction. The abstraction continues, but the issues change. And so by the time you get to the 1830s, when you have real nullification, and by the time you get to the 1850s, when you have secession, well, then slavery is the issue. Slavery becomes the issue. So we can't divorce our sense of what these concepts are from how they're adhering in particular ways at particular times. I think it's crucial to do that. And again, I think we'd all agree, in terms of civil rights, civil rights has always had to be a national issue. You cannot leave it up to the localities, because then little local oligarchies are gonna run everything.
And that's going to include the subjugation of black people. So it always had to be national. And it's for that reason, in fact, that, for example, in the 1960s, when I was coming up, much of the states' rights talk coming out of the 1940s and into the Wallace campaign was all about civil rights and race. Now, it doesn't have to be about civil rights and race. In many cases, it oughtn't to be about civil rights and race, but for some reason in American history, it's often about civil rights and race, and there are reasons for that. So when talking about the development, I would want us to at least understand that development is not happening in the abstract. I like to tell my students, for example, I'll give you a little history lesson for a second, okay? In the 1840s and '50s, there was a gigantic conflict over fugitive slaves. When fugitive slaves would run to the north, there was a fugitive slave clause in the Constitution, then there was a Fugitive Slave Act in 1793, and then there was a Fugitive Slave Act, a super act in 1850, okay?
Now, much of the time, the slaveholders had been talking about states' rights, states' rights, states' rights. To counteract those Fugitive Slave Acts, northern legislatures started passing things called personal liberty laws, in which the states would have the power to determine whether they were gonna return the slaves or not. States' rights, they said. So in a sense, it's sort of states' rights for me, but not for thee. It depends on the issue. So it's not an abstraction. I think historians ought to see the patterns at which, not just how federalism evolves, but where the issue is being located. I think that's really important.
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