The Wrong Constitution (Woody Holton vs. Polybius, Cicero, Sallust, Plutarch, etc.)

names like polybius have become
exotic and strange to us in the 21st century but it's not that they were well known to the average american it's that they were well known to the type of guy who wrote the constitution of the united states of america at some point we have to take a step back and ask ourselves about the limitations of an economic and pragmatic explanation for how it is the united states of america ended up with a system of government derivative of an author famous at that time and totally forgotten today like philippines in politics both in the present tense and in the writing of history economics often becomes a place to hide from the importance of ideas ideas that really shape the decisions people make ideas that have terrible terrible consequences people are very eager to imagine that slavery was abolished for economic reasons and they're very eager to imagine that slavery was created in the first place as an institution and culturally for economic reasons it's so much easier to believe in economics and to look to economic explanations than to deal with the stupidity and the immorality of the ideas that guide people's actions now idea has positive connotations in english right when we say idealism or idealistic we just kind of presume this is a good thing if you're getting serious about the origins of the nazi ideology in germany you got to deal with ideas you got to deal with idealism of a most sickening and disturbing kind and it's because people find it so disturbing that they reach for these economic explanations for fascism that are meaningless that have no explanatory power that take nothing away from the past and add nothing to the present of the future it's it's i've heard it so many times oh well you know the consequences of the peace and world war one and uh monetary policy and hyperinflation it if you want to understand the origin of the nazi ideology in germany you would be better off doing research on christianity on what was going on in the lutheran faith at that time like just even a specific little box within christianity in the 20th century in german late 19th century right you can look at what's going on in spiritualist new cult movements because there was a lot of that a lot of supernatural spooky stuff right sure and you could look at biology evolution and all the crazy political ideologies that come with that all right tragically ideas matter right people will assume you're saying something positive and inspiring and uplifting you say hey ideas matter history is made you know like history to the world changes because people have new ideas right guess what most of the time it's a tragedy most of the time it's sickening all right the justifications for slavery christopher columbus you know reinventing slavery in the new west slavery had existed before but not like this this is a whole new concept of slavery international race-based slavery linking africa to the new world and so on okay it came out of a set of ideas it came with a set of ideals it can't be explained through the dry economic facts of history an earlier video i talked about the importance of this book i've now bought a second copy i bought one for myself and i bought one for my mom this is woody holton's unruly americans if you are going to buy one book on the origins of the american constitution for your mother this year i totally endorse the terrorism it's a brilliant book it's a wonderful book it's totally okay but the purpose of this video is to criticize it and to criticize the tendency many of us have to favor economic explanations over dealing with ideas and ideals and if you like some of the cultural baggage of why historical decisions were made in the way that they were um if you had a friend who grew up in cambodia and you know they grew up there and they saw some american movies they saw some american tv shows but they grew up speaking the cambodian language and they are genuinely authentically culturally alien from the united states of america they have no understanding and then they grow up and their parents force them to learn english as a second language 10 11 12 years old start learning english they go to high school they start getting more interested in learning english they go to university and let's just say they become highly educated enough to try to get a university degree in english language and now they're looking at things differently now they're looking at the political reality of what america is and how it operates and they're asking questions that all come back to this thing you guys worship you guys have so much respect for called the constitution what what why did america bomb cambodia what why do you guys call this the secret war what do you you know once you start asking questions about oh and you never really declared war and politically how things happened you know in his own country this this hypothetical student plays like cambodia laos and vietnam maybe that's the flashback maybe it's just what this person sees in the news right now they're looking at the reality of 20 years of war in afghanistan they're looking at the reality of police brutality and people burning down buildings and killing cops on the streets sometimes all the you know conflicts that have come out of the year 2020 and questioning the world policeman and then they're looking at this thing called the constitution that everyone quotes and everyone cites and they're looking at the wikipedia and they come to you and they ask how did this happen why is america the way that it is why is the constitution written this way are you going to say to them well you have to understand at that time there was an economic crisis people had no paper money so they couldn't pay their taxes and they couldn't pay their debts unless like as farmers they literally took their cows to the courthouse to try to pay their taxes or pay their debts in kind so the farmers rose up in rebellion they didn't want to be ruined by the new taxes they didn't want to be ruined by paying their debts back to primarily british investors they just fought a war against england the american revolution they just fought a rebellion and now here they were being bankrupted the whole economy was in ruins it's devastated and you know all of the soldiers who had fought in the revolution were given these kind of coupons they were given these special vouchers that the government said they'd redeem in future and they'd you know pay interest on but most of the soldiers were poor so they sold those to wealthy investors and then the wealthy investors had stockpiled these special coupons from war veterans and they were trying to get money out of the government to pay that back but the government couldn't collect taxes it's fascinating it's important everyone should know this kind of background and it does it does explain the series of short-term crises and compromises that made the american constitution the way it is but it leaves so much unexplained now in the writing of history we may say in the history of history the pendulum seems to swing back and forth on this you will go through periods of time where people really believe in the economic explanations for slavery and the abortion of slavery and then someone stands up and writes a book and said no ideas matter what was going on religiously and philosophically at the time of what books people were reading it really matters and that really explains why slavery was abolished when it was and in the way that it was in the united states in thailand in china in france in haiti right the abolition of slavery is a different history in each of these places but ideas play an important role in each one and it can't be reduced to simple economic factors the french revolution in some ways parallel to the american revolution in some ways a contrast to it ever since karl marx people have been trying to reduce what happened in the french revolution to some set of simple economic interests like you know well this can be explained because people in paris didn't have enough bread i'm simply buying slaves guess what there always had been poverty in paris poverty wasn't new poverty wasn't different the wars of the time weren't even new or different you know what was new or different in the years leading up to the french revolution ideas all right the books that were published by people like voltaire and jean-jacques rousseau and boswell with his journey to corsica all right you know what the ideas really mattered they really presented people with new options and new opportunities they'd they never thought of before and the deepest source of influence of all in terms of forming the ideology of the british empire the ideology of the french empire and the ideology of the particular members of the economic elite who wrote the british pardon me who wrote the american constitution england still doesn't have a constitution by the way i misspoke there because who wrote the british constitution but he wrote the american constitution in the ashes of the british empire right it's plutarch plutarch's lives how many people how many of you have read plutarch how many of you have heard the name plutarch right you didn't you didn't learn this in high school people like people like polybius really other than my youtube channel in your whole life how many times have you heard the name polybius cicero and sallust on catalin's conspiracy the name cicero remains known because he appeared in a few action movies and soap operas like gladiator and hbo's room but nobody actually reads no pressure reads cicero right there was an ideology there there was a set of ideas that was as familiar to those men then as it is alien and exotic to us now and in that study you find in a meaningful sense the explanation for why the american constitution is the way that it is don't you and including honestly not just the significance of slavery significance of genocide or imperialism or empire in america i think you find a really profound and meaningful explanation for the problems we have today with with police brutality okay so the pendulum does swing back and forth i would say two guys who illustrate the extremes on this is woody holton who i'm a huge fan of right but then the other extreme you got a guy like bernard balen so bernard balan many many years before he wrote this book he became famous he made his name and he won a bunch of awards by writing a book called the ideological origins of the american revolution that title why is it striking why does it matter it's because there were a lot of people who didn't think of the origins in the american constitution as ideological it was saying hey ideas matter we have to get back to dealing with the ideology this sprung from as opposed to the interpretation of the authors of the constitution as being a cynical conspiracy of the economic elite acting in their own self-interest a trend that as i discussed in an earlier youtube video really was started by an historian named charles beard right the charles beard tendency that is in some ways being reinvented and revived in a much more intelligent and meaningful form today by authors like woody holton oh might as well get the exercise in lifting these books uh michael j clareman and yeah another colleague of theirs this book i have not bought who i'm less impressed with frankly uh terry bowden all right so i used to work in the publishing industry and i know that as an author you have only a limited amount of control over what's on the cover of your book what's on the back yearbook and what's in the advertising blurb many of my viewers english is not their first language blur b-l-u-r-b right blurb it's a real word tragically in our language look it up all right the advertising blurb for this makes this bold and ridiculous statement that what this book will teach you is how the average american how poor and downtrodden farmers how the dispossessed and slaves and so on how the average american and the poor played their role in the writing of the constitution and what i would say to you is what this book demonstrates brilliantly is the exact opposite it demonstrates how and to what extent and in what way the american constitution was written by and for a very definite small elite it was a very specific socio economic elite and what he proves beautifully brilliantly quoting them in their own words is that they were self-consciously aware that they were part of a kind of anti-democratic counter-revolution that the first revolution the american revolution itself had produced these more or less disorganized slightly antarctic populist democratic governments 13 of them in the colonies and that they saw the main defect of these governments as being democracy itself so they had to get their act together they had to get organized and they had to create a new system of government that they themselves understood to be less democratic this isn't my opinion this isn't woody holton's opinion this isn't a criticism of them this isn't some kind of ironical post-modern view of it that they were aware of this themselves that that was what they were doing but here's what woody holton's you know account doesn't touch right what were the sources they were working from where did they get their ideas of democracy and a republic and what the alternative to democracy was where was it they got this idea of an explicitly elitist almost aristocratic system of government right and the answer right it's it's in books like these right the fact is that these guys grew up worshipping cicero worshipping salist's account of the catalan conspiracy right worshiping polybius really it's only a few pages of police and these were not average americans these were not ordinary people these were guys who were part of a very palpable social elite that defined itself primarily by having this kind of greco-roman classical education so that i don't think a single one of these guys had read aristotle's politics from cover to cover to use one example i doubt any of them read polybius's histories from cover to cover quite like quite likely they never read uh cicero's orations on catalina all right these were men who from some early stage in their childhood had sat with a tutor in front of a chalkboard who gave them brief inspirational quotations in greek in latin or in both and explained the grammar and told the story surrounding it right these were men who had learned latin quite possibly by reading salist in particular it's it's in very simple blunt latin they definitely learned greek uh from anabasis by xenophon that's it is the foundational text these guys they read stories that glorified the heroism of particular political leaders in the ancient greek and ancient roman context that glorified war that glorified empire and that gave them as an elite a cultural identity that was qualitatively different from the common run of men who grew up reading the bible and for whom the judeo-christian bible and the judeo-christian literature was their high culture it wasn't for these guys it wasn't for the men who wrote the constitution right now i started this video by saying to you very clearly the fact that i say something is an idea or is an ideal does not mean that i regard it as a good thing i'm not saying this to glorify that british empire culture i despise it and it was a culture that you know was built on genocide and slavery not just in north america but all around the world names like polybius have become exotic and strange to us in the 21st century but it's not that they were well known to the average american it's that they were well known to the type of guy who wrote the constitution of the united states of america what was it that these guys had in common with the revolutionaries in france it was that they had read plutarch's lives plutarch's lives of the ancient greeks and romans and that was what they'd grown up on now again i'm not claiming any of these guys were accomplished enough in latin or greek to read any of these texts from cover to cover in latin greek it is quite possible they sat with the school master and they read just a few sentences and got these illuminating motivating passages that are full of very powerful messages about what it means to be a man about what it means to fight for the republic right and that heaps scorn on the primitive notion of living in a society ruled by a king the average american reading the bible didn't see it that way right the bible is completely based on the the brutally simple rule of kings can read it from cover to cover there's no model of democracy there's no model overflow you know any of these texts even if it's just like oh well yes in primitive societies and in ancient times in our own culture we were just ruled by a king but really i mean who can take seriously a society that's just based on being ruled by a king right all of these present this powerful intoxicating notion of what it means to be a man what it means to be a political leader right and what it means to be a part of a society that we could now call a republic or a democracy let's suppose your friend from cambodia asks you sincerely why is it that the constitution the united states is so pagan why is it that it's so utterly lacking in judeo-christian sources or judeo-christian influence i think the answer to this question you know in a really interesting way is at the intersection of you know the kind of approach woody holton has and the more idea-focused approach i'm proposing in this video because you need to know both you need to know the united states of america at that time there were bible bashers there were people who were quoting the bible and who in the decades of debate about what kind of constitution and what kind of government the united states of america should have by the way a debate that happened again and again because each of the 13 colonies had to write its own constitution right and then you have a gap of 10 or 12 years and then you have the federal constitution and you had all the debates before that like whether or not you should fight a revolution at all or what side you're on and declaration of independence so you had it wasn't just one debate at one time yes there were millions of people or at least hundreds of thousands of people who really passionately cared about the bible and who saw in the bible the model for a better society but here's the problem and here's why the whole greco-roman educated latin and greek educated social elite were set against what they found in the pages of the bible okay the problem is that the model of a society set down in the bible is very centrally based on the idea of the redistribution of land and the forgiveness of debts to achieve equality so the most important debate that is in some ways brilliantly demonstrated in this book but in some ways also kind of sidelined and suffocated and it's more economic and pragmatic analysis right is the debate between people who were inspired by and influenced by the bible and who were in the terms used at the time levelers who believed in levelism who believed in equality egalitarianism and sadly i don't mean equality between black people white people and i don't mean equality between white europeans and the indigenous people they were committing genocide against no this was a totally racist self-centered form of equality there were farmers who read in the bible that what a good society is supposed to be like is one that periodically after so many years takes land away from the rich and gives it to the poor that redistributes land ownership so that each family has an equal plot of land people who argued passionately that you cannot have a republic without equality and that democracy is meaningless if your society is ruled by a small presumably corrupt economic elite disenfranchising or silencing the poor majority and the people who wrote the constitution were of the opposite persuasion the people who wrote the constitution instead felt that they had a lot more in common with senators in rome like cicero and salist here they felt that what they were fighting against was in its way catalin's conspiracy we're living through a period of time when americans are asking themselves as never before why does this country exist america what's the point simplistic explanations that were proffered during the cold war that we have freedom and they don't they don't make sense anymore and they will never make sense again people are asking in a more meaningful way than ever before why is the united states the way it is why does it have to be this way how can it change why why can't it change why are we still stuck with these fundamentally anti-democratic assumptions from centuries ago that we are forced from childhood to call a democracy when in so many ways we know that it isn't why is it that these men who gathered at one time in one place to solve a series of short-term crises with a bunch of very strange compromises why is it that they created a system of government that was explicitly less democratic than that of ancient rome that explicitly excluded and omitted the few aspects of cicero's rome for example that were meant to represent and give a voice to the poor rome as terrible system of government as it had built on slavery et cetera et cetera they had something called the tribunes for the poor right how is it that you got a bunch of guys together in a room who worship these ancient greco-roman sources and who consciously and intentionally create a system of government that is less democratic than the 13 constitutions of state governments that came before them but that is also less democratic than ancient athens or ancient rome the models of government they claim to emulate will it be long will it be long before we are facing the kind of uprisings against the senate that actually each and every historical political source in ancient rome that we have describes i mean the city of rome was not a peaceful place it was in a constant state not of civil war but of class war how is it that you have guys who are looking at this great variety of you know new and inspiring intellectual sources from france in the decades leading up to this time and to some extent even simultaneously and they pick and choose among them to find the most cynically authoritarian system of government possible that even the contemporary french intellectuals alive at that time they were able to turn around and criticize the constitutional united states and say hey wait you guys are calling this a democracy but you're doing this this this and this wrong why is it instead that you're creating a kind of oligarchy a kind of aristocracy this this explicitly literally discovered all right these are questions these are questions that will have to be asked now and in future as never before as i say i think this is a brilliant book i encourage all you to buy it i encourage all of you to read it but it also makes us face up to this question of at what point do we reach the limits of what economics and pragmatic analysis can explain to us and at what point do we have to take a step back and say wait ideas matter culture matters at some point we have to take a step back and ask ourselves about the limitations of an economic and pragmatic explanation for how it is that the united states of america ended up with a system of government derivative of an author famous at that time and totally forgotten today like polybius and my point is not that the answers to that question are going to be good or inspirational or uplifting i think what we're going to do is rediscover the stupidity of our ancestors and start asking ourselves much more difficult questions about america what's next [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes