Madison and the American Experiment

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Try quote for free. plus get twenty percent off your first six months when you go to quote dot com slash daily stoke. Quo d. com slash daily stoic. Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Dough podcast There has never been a better time for people to read the book today's guest and to listen to this conversation. As soon as I read it, I reached out to have Tom Ricks on the podcast becausecause this is exactly connected to what we talk about here at Daily Stoke. The book is firstirst prrinciples what America's founders learned from the Greeks and Romans and how that shaped our country. It's really about Greek and Roman philosophy, Stoicism, Epicureanism, what ancient Rome taught Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and John Adams them the good lessons they took from it, the flaws inherent in some parts of the system This is a conversation I was so excited to have. I'll just give you General James Mattis's bllurb of the book Thomas Ricks knocks it out of the park with this jewel of a book on every page I learned something new. Read it every night if you want to restore your faith in this country Please listen to this conversation with the great Tom Ricks, but read first principles what America's founders learned from the Greeks and Romans and how that shaped our country. We talk about stoicism, we talk about America. We talk about right and wrong. We talk about justice, we talk about power, talk about a lot of great things Be safe, everyone, be smart And Do the right thing So you titled the book first prrinciples, and I think it's a great title because you essentially correct if I'm wrong with the premise of the book is did the people who created this country belief and where did they get those beliefs from Absolutely. and to a degree that I think we don't recognize We're not even equipped as a society generally to recognize They took their inspiration to a surprising degree from the ancient world for them Remember, they didn't have rock stars, they didn't have movie stars, they didn't have sports They're idols and they're role models where the gpe Philosophers and political figures of ancient Greece and Rome, especially Rome and especially the decline of the Roman people who are tried to stop the decline. So Kato Cicero a few other people around them and then some of the philosophers and generals It's interesting too, because I've got to imagine that for a good chunk of American history, that set of shared first principles would have almost been so obvious as to not be noticeable because everyone shared that sort of classical understanding. And then today, it's hard to notice because People don't have the familiarity with these ancient teachers to notice, you know a lot of the illusions and the nods, the subtle quotations and the influences that you would even have to write your book is almost a bit of a commentary in and of itself They would find it surprising. but remember, it wasn't everybody then, it was elites. There are a tiny number of colleges in America six or seven or eight at various times during the prevolutionary. And there were a tiny number of people who had graduated from high school let alone graduate from college who got an education were white Most people who got more than a year of education were white males. and even then typically they got one or two years They really didn't know the classical world, but at the same time, They didn't have much of a political voice. But the people who led the revolution, the people who designed the country after the Revolution were indeed in this ancient world to them Ancient Roman history especially had the urgency of front page news Because as they designed the country, didn't have a lot of examples. They were trying to design a country that wasn't going to be a monarchy And they didn't have a lot of historical examples. But you're right. We're left with a country nowadays where if you take the dollar bill out of your pocket There's Latin on both sides. If you look at our the center of our political universe U. S. capital. is named for a hill and role Capital N Hill. The The Democratic partarty comes from a Greek word, The Republican partarty comes from a Latin So it is all around us. But we don't even see what is in front of our eyes And if you called someone a cataline or a Kado They wouldn't understand whether that's an insult or a compliment and what the implications of those accusations would even be. And that's right. in the eighteenth century, by contrast, one of the most popular plays of the century was the play Cata by Joseph Addison a favorite of George Washington, who was not steeped in the classics yet really absorbed it culture around him Two lines in that play are really striking at one point One character regrets that they have only one life to give to Rome And another character says, G me liberty or give me death And so when politicians quoted those People knew what they were referring to. These days, we think they're just hot cootes of the revolutionary era not realizing and they were quoting iss the equival These days of'm quoting casa bllanca are ghostbusters I've joked on the podcast a few times that Kato was the Hamilton of its day That's a very good way of putting it. It hadn't occurred to me. Yeah I mean, so popular that that Washington puts it on allegedly at Valley Forge. like the depths of the America it's it's even just difficult to wrap your head around a play being that important that at the depths of the darkest moment of The American Revolution, Washington is putting having his men act out a play about ancient Rome you to cheer them up It sounds like a Montyython' seeing. We're in Valley Forge. What are we do? Let's put on a musical. right It is interesting too, Stoicism appears in the book, you know a few times. I would have argued that maybe that Stoicism was closer to the first principles than maybe you do. but it is interesting in the book the different paths that the founders take to their classical knowledge, right? So someone like Washington sort of gets it through pop culture and maybe a few books here or there And then Jefferson is reading Seneca in the original Latin. you know, and certainly Washington wasn't doing that. One of my favorite moments in the book is when his vice president John Adams is having an argent with Timothy Pickering who soon was to become postmaster genereneral And they were arguing about whether Washington was illiterate. and Adam says no, he wasn't a literr. I got some very good letters when I was at Congress during the war written by him Pickering says written by that young Alexander Hamilton boy He's a good writer Washington was very conscious of this lack of education though and brought in people likeike Hamilton form skills that he was conscious of being deficient in. Kato very much is Washington's model. Washington has the misfortune of constantly have these models forice again gun. Do you consider Cicero a genuine stoic So I have him in that book as actually somewhat similar to the way you portray Adams in the book, which is a person who understood these things brilliantly. could sort of utterly fail to actually live up to them. So Cicero is fascinating in that He's responsible for rescuing much of stoicism from the sort of dustbin of history and he translates it and he illustrates it and tells these stories. But then when you actually look at his life he failed to actually put into practice much of what he purported to believe Yeah know, like John Adams turns out to be kind of the witty Allen of the American Revolution He's a big whiner, unlike the Stoics, he constantly wears his feelings us on his sleeve is a great line that the novelist and historianans shalock. A about Cicero, which applies to Adams as well which is that he'd loved to talk about his country and he'd loved to talk about himself. and unfortunately, he did both things equally as much. Yes And I was fascinated with Cicero because it's like Cicero seemed to be play acting through most of his life, all these ideas. And even up through the Cataline conspiracy, which was real, as I talk about in Livves of the Stokes, it's real, but you can't help maybe feeling that Cicero might have exaggerated it a little bit for his own good. And then ironically, Rome does face a real sort of constitutional crisis, a moment of truth. And Cicero is basically nowhere to be found. And in the real moment of destiny, he fails I have the feeling that, Cicero was very happy to see the conspiracy come down the pl It's a little bit like the Ged which with Madis and Greek Ses rebellion the revolution during the Arbic as a Confederation era It's exactly what Madison needed. to show our current system isn't working blow the whistle and could start beating the drama The Constitutional convention Cicero very much is Adam's model While I have some problems with Adams, I think his reputation has been inflated a lot lately. It is amazing to me that young John Adams decides to become America's Cicero That succeeds. Yes, whichich is interesting too, because Cicero basically decided to become Cicero. And you know there's a self madeenness to both of them that you can't help but admire There is and you know John Adams is the only one of our first four presidents who never owned a slave . grraduates from college hisis parents don't have the money to support him He can't sit down and read Greek and Roman history. Madison does for several years to prepare for the Constitution Adams has to go get a job, but he winds up a schoolteacher in a backwater in Massachusetts doesn't even have a post office He hates teaching. He totally is unprepared to be a teacher emotionally eventually decides to become a lawyer, but it's striking to me Adams never has a mentor. I think he's such a prickly figure. Interesting. He is unable to find a mentor. George Washington a mentor where' Thomas Jefferson had a couple Jefferson becomes mentor to Madison. John Adams almost has to mentor himself. and you read his diaries and he's constantly berating himself pay l attention to girls and hunting Pay more attention to books. becausecause nobody else is guiding him, even the guy in whose law office he works Sent him off to Boston without a letter of recommendation or introduction anybody Now this may have been, I think because Adams was making eyes at the guy's wife which is a constant problem in this era. Thomas Jefferson is so striking to me. As he's he's an epicureian. he is an anti stoic. He's into the avoidance of pain, the pursuit of happiness and possly pursuing married women was like And I think it's the classic Epricure and recipe. It's all the rewards of her romance without any of the risk of her permanent entanglement Well in one of Seneca's letters, he talks about, he says, you must choose yourself a cado. He says, sort of pick your model And that could be a model you actually know or it could be a sort of an ideal. But I think it's fascinating your book illustrates this so well. It's like John Adams picks Cicero and becomes much like Cicero the with the flaws, you know sort of being very well pronounced And Washington seems to pick pick Cato to some degree, as he said, is also a little histed on him then embodies the genius of Kato and some of the flaws. It seems like each founder kind of had a model that they were shaping their life against And I found it remarkable how much they ended up being like the influence that they chose because they succeeded We're looking at people who made it to the presidency successfully designed the country. There are other people who in many ways were spectacular failures, I I would say Patrick Henry. is a spectacular failure. Alexandorer Hamilton succeeds, He's basically Washington's prime mininister How do you soon act that considers himself a failure. By the end of the seventeen nineties Alexander Hamilson says to her friend, There is no place in this country for me It's a terrible thought. mean here he has come to this country. He's helped design the country. He has served well in the revolution and in politics And he constantly is using different pseudonyms all of people who were virtuous, yet disrespected by peers Yeah. and I mean, they did become become successful. So there's some survivorship bias there. I guess what I mean iss it's that they came to take on the traits of the person that they spent so much time studying and learning about, which is also kind of a model that I think we struggle with today, sort of who are your heroes, right? And I think as a society,ve we've struggled to decide who our heroes are Yeah, and our heroes are not particularly people you want to emulate. someome of these rock stars the sports stars and so on. and people who we thought of as statesmen in our world today, we find out are greatly flawed You actually just made me think of something I hadn't thought before. I think it's true that George Washington presresident puts kind of a mold of cato on the American presidency We expect our presidents to be dignified, reserved, ree wouldn' and to respect the dignity of the office. And he very much brings that to the presidency as he tries to kind of put the flesh of norms on the bones of the Constitution And he establishes a lot of norms about how the president is supposed to behave And then he steps down after two terms and turns over power grrace fluid his successor And I think that's one reason I think that Donald Trump has shocked people so much. is so much outside that Ao M Yes, which is really h stoical moment for the presresidency I think so. and that point about heroes, I think what Donald Trump has, and I think you can say this without actually getting into the politics in it, what Donald Trump sort of revealed is that we had all these norms, we had all these systems, these processes, these rituals that were based on really hard won wisdom from the ancient world, from the first principles you're talking about. But over the last two hundred years the why of them got lost. Like even FDR, when FDR runs for reelection for a third term, he's violating a Kato esque norm put in place by Washington And and I think people thought population would be much more upset about it than they were. But the reality is not knowing so much about why that norm had been set in the first place, it caused less of an uproar. I think what Donald Trump revealed is how much our education and our understanding of the first principles has atrophied And so when the elites in the media get really upset about this norm or that norm They expect that people are just going to intuitively understand why this is so important Hey, it's Ryan. I'm on the road right now doing talks all over the country. I love traveling, I love going to new places The thing I don't like about it though, is I don't get to sleep in my bed at home which I like not just because it's home, but because I have an eight sleep on my bed. I've had an eight sleep on my bed I don't know, five years. I love it. My wife loves it We love it because it cools the mattress, it heats the mattress. you can have different sides cool at different temperatures. It's even how I wake up in the morning instead of an annoying alarm clock or that, you know, horrible sound on your phone, it lightly buzzes you awake and then when you're up, you want to turn it off. just The mattress There's all sorts of awesome features in my eight sleep. It was worth every penny. The point is, I love my eight sleep and the eight sleep keeps getting better. Eight sleep users report up to thirty two percent better sleep and up to thirty four percent better deep sleep. This is all stuff you love. You can use the code daily stoic at eight sleep dot com slash daily Stoic Right now to five hundred dollars off And this fourth of July sale ends on july twelfth. So don't wait. 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And I think one of the interesting things is that I think for the most part, we're coming around to the idea that, hey, they should come down But what we struggle with is like, well, who should we celebrate Who would if you were putting up a monument today? Let's say you put the Confederate statues aside Who should we put a monument up? You know, the fact that it took sixty years to put up and Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC sort of shows us our struggle with who are our zeroes and how do we honor them The question in Confederate mononuments also is asked Who can put them up? When do they put them up And what did they think they were doing when they put them up? Certainly Certainly. And a lot of them are really celebrations of segregation and Jim Crow and the destruction of reconstruction I was thinking about this a year ago My wife and I just almost by accident happened to be in Belfast in Northern Ireland took a walking tour The troubles the fighting in Northern Ireland and the over the last forty years And one of the subjects of this tour and it speaks exactly to this Confederate Morial issue was The guy was talking about the difficulty of memorializing He said here was a bombing that killed sixteen people. It was one of the first three bombings. There is no sign Why? Because even now we can't agree on what to say. Were they people victims or were they participants? Was it a murder? Was it a political act And he said, and then why are you putting up one here when you don't put up one for the Cathol down the street who was shot by the police And you have this constant battle over what to actually memorialize. But I think it's an important discussion to have because it does point to What are you going to memorialize? How are you going to memorialize it? My daughter happens to be a public story And she's involved in a project in Baltimore There was this African American cemetery in downtown Baltimore. paved over Now that happens all the time. Sure. African American cemeteries, we're totally disrespected This is a special case because several hundred of the African Americans were Civil War soldiers, colored troops. Oh So you're mixing in this, well, you're dissing the military here too. Well, they didn't care in the nineteen fifties when they ran a highway over So it's fascinated the whole issue of memorialization Well, that was actually one of the things I wrote down that I wanted to talk to you about in your book. and I think it goes to where we struggle as a society right now, which is that Okay, so because the Confederate monument thing is complicated, people go, oh, should should you pull down your monument of Washington or Jefferson? they own slaves. On the one hand, or then some people say you should you should pull them down because they did own slaves. But what I think is what I think what we're not doing what we should be doing I' be curious your take, which is that The founders did own slaves, and it wasn't a horrendous moral contradictions. and and a shameful act I don't necessarily know if we need to come to a conclusion about it But we do have to wrestle with it And I think what you do well in the book that we're struggling to do as a society, It's not as simple as the foundouers own slaves. It's How do we wrestle with how they worked themselves into this moral complication so we can wrestle with our own moral complications today Yeah, and we could be instructed by their failures as well as by their successes My wife happens to be a story of the nineteenth century wrote a herrific book called Escape on the Pearl about the biggest attempted slave escape in American history and a bunch of middle class slaves, wine stewards Island teachers in Washington, D.C. chartered a boat to take them to freedom in Philadelphia. And the boat was captured by a steamboat and they were taken back and it became a big, big thing in in the eighteen forties Cool rule of thumb. is What was the person best known for Robert E. Lee is best known for fighting a war to defend slavery. Monument comes down Thomas Jefferson was best known for the Declaration of Independence My name it's Da And I think it's a helpful indicator or tool. since we're getting into the ancient world of slavery, I want to mention another issue here really surprised me is The founders stood on ancient slavery. as a justification. Yes Yet Ancient slavery Gerally was very different than modern American race based slavery F and foremost, it was not race based Anybody could be a slave In fact, the word slave comes from the slobs who are clearly we would call Caucasian and with the exception of a few places like Sparta Slavery tended not to be as harsh as American race based slavery Slaves had some rights, the right to petition the emperor over abuse and their offspring, if a slave was freed his offspring could hold public office, which was not the case in America And so I think the founders kind of give themselves a free ride using the justification of slavery in the ancient world while presiding over a much harsher system of slavery I'll forward it to you. I just wrote an email for the Daily Stoke list about this. Jefferson wrote about this in notes from Virginia or whatever the book was called. He was talking about he said You know, in the ancient world You know, the Romans, they had Epictetus, they had Ternce, they had Cyrus, they had these brilliant slaves. And he said, that's why the Romans weren't as strict on their slaves as their slaves were smarter And he said, but look at us, we don't have any of those. And the irony is, I mean, first off, Phllis Wheatley was a brilliant slave. But the difference is, the Romans allowed the slaves to read and write. That was punishable by death in large you know a good chunk of the south at this time. And so yeah, it's fascinating that the founders basically took their love of classicalism and twisted it and contorted it almost like the Nazis did into this perverse ideology that allowed them to rationalize a heinous, heinous act Yeah, and then They don't allow slavery just to stain the American fabric, they leave it into the American fabric in the Constitution The Sundament law of the land endse slavery. as a result, two hundred and fifty years later We are still pulling out these strands And people don't recognize that white supremacism was written into the Constitution And they avoided the word race. They in fact avoid the word slavery But they know what they're talking about when they say peopleeople in bondage are to be counted as three fifths of a person