On July 2, the four pillars of the Daily Wire Cinematic Universe (DWCE) – Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles – gathered together for another “Daily Wire Backstage.” The topic of this installment was Independence Day.
Elisha Krauss appeared via video conference to ask subscriber questions, and Dr. Jordan Peterson later joined the men in person.
The entire conversation lasted approximately two hours. The following are some of the most interesting and insightful quotes from Shapiro, Boreing, Klavan, Knowles, and Peterson.
Principles & Liberty
BOREING: I think one of the things we take for granted – of course, we are a fairly patriotic people here in America. We are a young enough country that as a general rule, we still celebrate things like the founding. People now at least have a cursory understanding of the sort of mythology of the American founding. I think what’s missing more and more though is a philosophical understanding of the founding. The question isn’t “What is America?” it’s “Why is America?”
And I feel like especially right now, in this moment – sort of an un-ideological moment on the Right – we read a lot in these sort of Trump debates that take place on the Right about how we shouldn’t be a party of principle, we should be a party of interests. And of course interests are part of our principal. That’s part of what it means to be on the Right. One thing that Ben and I were discussing is [that] a man can fight for his interests, but he can only die for his principles. By definition, you can’t die for your interests.
So, I think that rather than forsake our principles, it’s the job of conservatives to use our voice to remind people of those principles and to show them how the two things aren’t exclusive – how the pursuit of our interest is the pursuit of our higher principles.
SHAPIRO: One of the worst things that I’ve heard said over the last ten years is in Barack Obama’s second inaugural address … he said something to the effect of what America means is that we each get to define liberty in our own way. And I thought to myself, that is like the exact opposite of what the Declaration of Independence says because the Declaration of Independence basically defines liberty. It says what liberty is is you have these inalienable rights or unalienable rights … and these unalienable rights preexist government, and government is created in order to preserve those rights, and the minute that it starts to violate those rights, governments become illegitimate, and then you can abolish those governments.
So, the view of liberty was always what we would now call “negative liberty”; that it was the government not invading your rights – those were the rights that preexisted government. The rights to life, liberty, and property, in sort of the Lockean formula, or in the Declaration of Independence formula, it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Well, once you start defining liberty as whatever you want it to be, and then you disconnect it completely from virtue – because that was the other half, right? When Thomas Jefferson says “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, he doesn’t mean pursuit of having a hot dog on the Fourth of July, he actually means in the ancient definition of happiness; he means that happiness is supposed to be connected with virtue…
All of that was supposed to be connected with teleology and telos – the idea that you were directed toward certain ends, and using those ends was what was going to bring you happiness; that acting in accordance with right reason in the Aristotelian sort of sense, that was what was going to make you happy. So, the pursuit of happiness was the pursuit of virtue. These were consonant. Instead, what it’s turned into for a lot of people is, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means leave me alone; I get to do whatever I want unless I screw up, in which case, I need you to pay for it, and the government gets to invade everybody else’s rights in order so that we can pay for all of these things.
The Left
KLAVAN: But one of the things that is worrying after these two weeks of Supreme Court decisions is how entirely the Left has abandoned the processes that were put in place to preserve our liberty.
One of the reasons I understand – you guys worry about Trump more than I do – but I know that Trump doesn’t really care about those things, and so it does devolve on people like us, and people who talk and think and write, to protect the processes themselves even when we lose a fight. You can lose a fight and still maintain those processes. Where you allow to Left to speak and you say, “the First Amendment protects you in saying that horrible, hateful thing,” you’re defending the process even though the Left speaks.
It’s very disturbing right now that the Left is basically saying, “No no no, if you say certain things, then the First Amendment isn’t worth preserving.”
BOREING: The great hubris of the Left – and it’s not just the American Left, it’s the global Left – is that they believe in the concept of the end of history. They believe that eventually they win, and that’s it. And so they get ahead of themselves all the time. Whenever they get a little victory, they’ve won. The reason that they are so incensed over Trump is because they really thought that they would never lose another election. Barack Obama happened. That was an event in human history from their point of view; it was the changing of the world to this new order … and because of that, they use their power to alter things to their immediate benefit with the assumption that the guys they don’t like will never be the ones in possession of that new power.
Leftist Ideologies
SHAPIRO: The French Revolution was freaking awful. It was awful, and we’re still living out every element of the French Revolution. Every bad idea of the French Revolution was eventually carried forward in the worst possible way in the 20th century.
So, the idea of the equality of man was carried out in communism; the idea of romantic nationalism that began with the French Revolution was carried out in nazism; the idea of … the creation of a bureaucratic country, that starts with Auguste Compt, right? The idea that all of these experts are going to run everything for you – these have deep roots in a belief, in a sense, that the collective rules the individual, and that’s the real difference between the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence says [that] you are individuals with rights – this is based in Judeo-Christian values, this is the big difference. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says nothing about God, it says everything about the people. The Declaration of Independence says a lot about God, and a few things about the people – but it really is mostly about the idea that individuals are granted God-given rights based on the notion that we are all made in God’s image.
The difference between the English enlightenment, and the Scottish enlightenment, and the French enlightenment is, the English and Scottish enlightenments both held fast to Judeo-Christian values, and the French enlightenment overturned them and … was trying to strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.
Misunderstanding The Founding
KNOWLES: When they talk about it … high school kids or college kids, they talk about the Declaration [of Independence], they say, “Oh, it was these rich white men who were protecting their own property. They were just protecting their own money. It’s not a philosophical document.” The way they get away with that line is because people don’t read the document. It’s right there; it’s right there in the papers that they wrote about the signing of the Declaration [of Independence.] They were signing their death warrants, defending the rights that God had given man, giving practical grievances against a king, creating an English basis, a traditional basis, for breaking away from England. It’s one of the most beautiful documents.
SHAPIRO: There’s no question, the amount of risk that was undertaken by the Founders to do this thing – fighting the most powerful army on earth at the time – it’s an amazing act of bravery. And to try and take that away from people because of historical circumstance, by saying the Declaration of Independence was a document not about liberty, but it was about enshrining slavery, is ahistorical nonsense.
The original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a section ripping into the king of England for having made slavery a part of the American way. It was written by Jefferson, and it was only the Southern states threatening to pull out of the convention itself that amounted to him pulling that out. And when that happened, John Adams said, in a moment of real prophecy, he said, if we do this, in 80 years there will be a great war in this country. And he was exactly right almost to the date because everyone knew at the time that slavery was a major issue.
Anyone who reads the Declaration of Independence as a document that’s enshrining slavery ignores the words of Frederick Douglass, ignores the words of Martin Luther King, ignores the words of Booker T. Washington, ignores the words of Abraham Lincoln. All of the truly great black leaders in this country saw the Declaration of Independence as a call to freedom that had gone unfulfilled, as opposed to a document that was enshrining a system that made them slaves in the first place.
Elisha Krauss joined the guys with the first subscriber question.
Q&A #1
Q: Jefferson wrote that our unalienable rights are self-evident – but are they? And if so, wouldn’t all societies naturally realize them?
SHAPIRO: The answer is, of course, they are not self-evident, but Jefferson didn’t mean they were self-evident to any person on earth. He meant to any right-thinking person who had grown up in a context of Judeo-Christian values. That’s the real answer … Jefferson wasn’t a fool; he knew that most people on earth did not see these rights as self-evidence. He meant that these rights were self-evident given a certain set of premises, including the idea that all people were created in the image of God, and the idea that Englishman had rights. Then it was self-evident that the rest of this follows.
…We make a mistake when we think that we can just take the rights that were generated over the course of 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian history and a 1,500 years of Greek theorizing – you can take those and just implant them anywhere in the world without any sort of military force; that if you just spread the seeds, then the roots will grow. It’s just not true. You have to actually acknowledge that there is a cultural history that preexists the founding of the United States – and that is the soil from which all of this grows. And without that soil, you’re spreading seeds on cement – it’s just not gonna go anywhere. And I think Jefferson knew that.
KLAVAN: I think that when he said “self-evident,” I don’t think he meant actually readily apparent. I think he meant axiomatic – that the only evidence necessary for them was themselves.
SHAPIRO: You can’t have patriotism without the nationalism – that this all preexisted and … it says this in the Federalist Papers, that this was a uniquely-created group of people who all shared a common culture and common history, and that led to a common thought pattern that led to the creation of this republic, and that without that, you can’t have patriotism in the first place. This stuff, in other words, did not come out of nowhere. And I think this is the big mistake I’m seeing in a lot of pro-enlightenment books that are happening right now … there’s a lot happening in the enlightenment movement that is saying that the enlightenment is a gap in kind from what came before it; that basically, there was a sharp break, and then lightning struck, and in 1760, people started realizing what the world was about – and that’s just not true because enlightenment without biblical principle ends up in French Revolution tyranny and biblical principle without enlightenment ends up in theocracy.
BOREING: There’s a question – can God give rights that God opposes? So, if you take the right to privacy as understood in the Roe decision that there is an intrinsic right to abortion granted in the Constitution, could God grant the right to do something that God himself would abhor? Jefferson actually spoke about this in the Virginia Charter on Religious Liberty – he wrote the preamble. One of the amazing things about it, it’s a legal argument that he makes, but he makes a legal argument, and the case law in which he bases his premise is the Bible. And he basically says since God alone has the right and the power – this is a summary – the right and the power to force his will upon others, and since he chose not to, doesn’t it necessarily mean that we, who don’t have the right or the power, should also not do so? So, in other words, I think that what Jefferson is saying is that we base all of this on the concept of a God who gave us the freedom to fail, who gave us the freedom to do things even when those things themselves don’t work.
After further discussion, Krauss returned with another subscriber question.
Q&A #2
Q: I’m proud of my Mexican ancestry, but also am proud of my American nationality. How do I balance these two things?
SHAPIRO: This is the other half of the patriotism/nationalism question, and that is because America is creedal, we can take people from all different cultures and ethnicities. My great, great grandparents got here in 1907, coming from Eastern Europe with no American background at all, and they came in and they became American. You can celebrate where you come from – particularly the cultural aspects of where you come from – so long as they are not in conflict with the American creed.
BOREING: Ask yourself the question, why did my forebearers choose to leave behind Mexico, for example … why did they make the choice to leave that behind? That’s not necessarily a condemnation at a macro level of every single thing about the culture that brought you here, but it is something. It does mean something that people, many times at great risk to themselves, to their safety, to their economic situation, they would take all the money that they had and travel across oceans, across deserts to get here. Why?
What is America?
BOREING: It’s one of the great lies of the Left … the Left promotes the idea that America is a place, not a creed. They basically suggest that the reason we have everything that we have is because we, by fortune and conquest, took the most fertile piece of ground on earth, and that’s where we’ve made our home… the difference is that on this side of an imaginary boundary, certain ideas are in place, and on the other side of the imaginary boundary, other ideas are in place. And the truth is, if we took the Southwest United States and gave it back to Mexico, in two generations it would look like Mexico. And if you took northern Mexico and gave it to the United States, in two generations it would look like everywhere else in the United States because it’s not race obviously … it’s not land, it’s not natural resources, it’s not conquest, it’s the idea.
Over the course of the next forty to fifty minutes, the discussion moved from Independence Day to complex ideas of religious and political philosophy. After a time, Jordan Peterson joined the group, and the conversation became even more esoteric.
However, near the end of the “Daily Wire Backstage” Fourth of July special, Elisha Krauss once again offered the men a subscriber question.
Q&A #3
Q: America is the greatest country on earth because of its ideas, and it’s pretty obvious. So why aren’t more countries trying to emulate our values?
PETERSON: Countries all over the world are striving to emulate American values – and I would say Western values, more broadly, at a rate that’s absolutely beyond comprehension on historical grounds. And we see right now that things are getting better everywhere quite rapidly to the degree that those ideas are being instantiated. The fundamental idea, I think, is the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. It’s where your fundamental value [is] located. It’s either the group or the individual … to the degree that countries are instantiating those values in their economic systems, they’re doing not only quite well by historical standards, but getting better really fast.
SHAPIRO: This is where I think there’s a bifurcation in the world right now. I think there are developing nations that are looking at the United States and saying, “Why don’t we do some of that, and that will make us a lot stronger and a lot better.” And then there are developed nations that are looking at the United States and they’re saying, “Look at all these crazy religious kooks who live across the water and believe in these things … and they don’t believe in tremendous redistributionism, and they go to church lot, and we should not do that” – and they’re failing accordingly.
But I think there is an attempt to run away from certain American founding values specifically because those founding values are predicated on some of the deep stuff that we are talking about here. People are afraid of that stuff … because it actually comes along with obligations that do not attend on a certain materialism. This is particularly true in Europe where it seems like they’re redistributing the fruits of the last several hundred years of Western civilization rather than re-embracing the roots of what brought them, and so I think that – look, there’s something dangerous about our values. The thing that’s dangerous about our values is that [they come] with a certain level of obligation and responsibility to do the right thing, to act responsibly in the world, to try and … bring order from chaos, and when you’re living amidst chaos, it’s really easy to say, “You know what? I want some more order out of this chaos”…
I think that what you’re seeing now is that there are so many wealthy nations, particularly in western Europe, that have decided, “Okay, we live amongst this wealth, but we don’t want the responsibility because the responsibility is tiring and so we’re not gonna go back to that. Instead, we’re just going to go ahead and assume that all of these fundamental roots of our civilization are no longer relevant, and we can sort of live on top of this iceberg without having to worry about the stability of the flow underneath.”
You can watch the entire video (including the more esoteric portion) here: