What is the vision? How should we be thinking? How should donors be thinking about the expansion of these programs at other schools?

Well, it's interesting.

As I say, we founded the Madison program 26 years ago, the year 2000.

We began our visiting fellows and postdoctoral fellows program the year after, 2001, and that began to bring to campus under the auspices of the Madison program.

Scholars from other institutions, some very established scholars, people like Hadley Arcus and Alan Gelso, very established, distinguished people in political theory, history, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of law, those kinds of fields.

as well as recent PhDs who were doing work that we found interesting and prompted us to invite them to spend a year at Princeton.

Well, within two or three years, it became very clear that the Madison program was a big success.

So talk to us about this, help donors understand why this is a conversation at all and what they could actually do about it.

Tell us about its philosophical origins and its classical meaning.

Well, I'll be very happy to do that, uh, Jeff.

First, though, let me, uh, say what a pleasure it is for me to be back, uh, at Chautauqua, and I wanna thank Jordan and Deborah and the team, uh, for inviting, uh, me here.

Uh, I also, uh, want to thank the Perrys, Mr. and Mrs. Perry, for their generous sponsorship.

Uh, I had a delightful conversation this morning with the great Carly, uh, Fiorina.

It's our first opportunity to meet, and that was, uh, great fun.

And of course, it's great to be together with my old friend, Lauren Rosen.

Tell us what are the basic elements of constitutionalism as, as you, as you just summed them up so well, and how do they relate to the founders' view of human nature?

Which I lost.

Nine-zero.

Mi- Michael lost it nine-- It was still the most brilliant argument I have ever heard.

He, he had a client who was enmeshed in a massive sex scandal with prostitutes, uh, who had a bad case, uh, but Michael came up with a brilliant, uh, argument.

And when you finish the argument, I thought, "For heaven's sake, I came into this thinking this is nine-zero, you know, no hoper.

You might win.

Michael might win." Well, it turned out to be nine-zero, but it was a brilliant argument.

That's A-M-I-C-U-S, wherever you get your podcasts.

Enjoy.

Civic friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.

That's why I say indispensable, necessary.

And there's a reason for that.

If we fail to treat each other as civic friends, that is to say as fellow citizens, and instead regard each other as enemies to be defeated and even destroyed, then everything is up for grabs every time there's an election.

There's nothing that's stable.

The losing side can expect nothing but retaliation.

Well,

So yes,

when I went to Swarthmore now for the first time, I met people genuinely on the left.

See, that's what I hadn't met before.

Marxists, uh, critical theorists, people were reading Marcuse, uh, the Frankfurt school, Gramsci, people like that.

So this was a new world to me, Andrew.

And, and this, this wasn't my world, but this was not what I thought of as being on the quote left or being, being, being a liberal.

So, um, Two things happened to me at Swarthmore, which were very important.

How did you wrestle with that idea?

It's about this for most countries and most of history.

The country's strength and unity has been founded on shared bonds of ethnicity or religion or race or cultural history or something like that.

Most nations are blood and soil nations or throne and altar nations.

But we Americans, from the very start, come from different places.

We practice different faiths.

We're different races.

We're different ethnicities.

I like

I'd love to hear for our audience, for our sake, because it was an amazing lecture, if you want to reprise some of that.

Well, we've had a Jewish community here in the United States from the very beginning.

Small, of course, at the beginning.

But we've had a Jewish community here, and that community was involved in American civic affairs from the very beginning, including in the American Revolution, including supporting the Patriot cause in the American Revolution.

When George Washington was elected our first president, once we got our new constitution, he received letters of congratulation from people all over the country, worse than from various groups all over the country, including religious groups.

And various minority religious groups wrote him congratulatory letters.

The Baptists did, the Catholics did, and the Jewish community did.

If others ascribe to, say, this group identity issue,

human power.

They're not built into our very nature.

And therefore, for expedient reasons, they can be taken away.

You're not born equal.

We can recognize equality if that suits our goals and ends, our economy, our culture, our traditions, whatever.

But if it doesn't suit us, those of us who have power, we can legitimately take them away.

I mean, some rights are conventional.

So I'm at a moment right now where I'm not sure what that actually would mean to people given the kind of divisiveness, the way we're at each other at this moment.

Here's what he had to say.

The data showed that the belief of Americans in the importance of some of the traditional values that had been our sources of unity and strength as a people had diminished, diminished very significantly, right down in a line like, uh, that.

The belief in the importance of religion.

Mm-hmm

... uh, love of your spouse and your children, love of our, of our country.

We have a day for this and a week for that and a month for the other thing.

Why don't we take some period of time, let's say a month, and encourage our fellow citizens, our fellow Americans, to rededicate themselves to the basic principle of fidelity, fidelity to God, fidelity to our spouses and to our families?

Right

...

in the United States.

We're a people that, uh, is not founded on a common race or common religion, common ethnicity, common cultural heritage.

We're Black and white and Latino and Asian.

Our ancestors from Croatia, uh, come from Croatia and Japan and Armenia and Indonesia and all over the world.

Uh, we are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu.

Wow

Tell us how, tell people how they can get involved and what they can do and how they can get, uh, get Fidelity moving on the fast track.

Yes.

Be part of this grassroots movement.

You're as important as anybody else in this.

This is really gonna be built from the ground up.

So go to our fidelitymonth.com website.

Again, fidelitymonth.com, and then look for the list, it's gonna be right there, prominently there, the list of things you can do.

Yeah, yeah

I mean, Jesus kind of warned against the love of money, right? I mean, it was pretty explicit.

So, yeah, the love of money should not be on the same scale as love of God, love of your spouse and your children, love of our country.

So I said to myself, oh, heavens, what are we going to do about this? And then it dawned on me, well, you know, we have a day for this and a week for that and a month for the other thing.

Why don't we take some period of time, let's say a month, and encourage our fellow citizens or fellow Americans to rededicate themselves to the basic principle of fidelity, fidelity to God, fidelity to our spouses and to our families, fidelity to our country and to our communities.

Because after all, John, these have been historically our sources of unity and strength.

We don't have a lot of other sources of unity and strength in the United States.

We're a people that is not founded on a common race or common religion, common ethnicity, common cultural heritage.

Yeah, that's right.

What do you think that Americans today misunderstand most about the founders?

Well, perhaps the first thing that we fail to attend to as much as we should is just what great risks they took and what great sacrifices they made.

Uh, they decided to rebel to preserve their historic rights, not to create something new under the sun, but to preserve their historic rights.

They decided that they would be required to rebel against the greatest military power on the face of the Earth.

When they made that decision, Kevin, to fight the Revolutionary War, they knew, they were in no doubt that they were basically putting their heads into nooses.

The chances of victory against the greatest military power on Earth with a little ragtag militia were very small.

And yet, with faith in God, they decided to take that risk, to bear that burden, to make those sacrifices.

Uh, tell us about that and, and, and how has it been to, to step forward in courage when you, you know it's right?

[laughs]

But I was very interested in him and I was very impressed in these faculty seminars that, uh, he was the guy who was asking the right questions even when, and this was most of the time, I thought he was getting the wrong answers.

He was asking the right questions.

In other words, he was not taking us or allowing us to go down the road that so many academic discussions go down, where you get caught up in minutia, in technical issues, in translation issues, uh, that, that kind of stuff.

If we're supposed to be talking about justice, we should be talking about justice.

What is it? What is the mere simulacrum of justice? What is faux justice? What is injustice? What appears to be injustice, but actually isn't in- injustice? Um, those kinds of issues, and Cornel would always keep the conversation there.

As a result of those engagements, uh, we became, I would describe us in those days as friendly acquaintances, but we were not yet friends and we didn't know each other really.

Oh, very well.

Here's Professor George.

It has been 250 years since our Founding Fathers declared that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

With this declaration, they began a profound experiment, an experiment in ordered liberty and republican government.

Well, how are we doing? Is the experiment succeeding? Unfortunately, polls have shown a precipitous decline in our fellow citizens' belief in the importance of such values as patriotism, religion, family, and community, the values that used to unite Americans despite our many differences.

The statement, "No man is an island," is a cliché, but it's true.

As human beings, we all find fulfillment not in selfish pursuits, but in the steadfast bonds we form with others.

There are many things that we can and should do to restore the faith of our people and to begin to heal the dreadful divisions in our country.

Yeah

... becomes.

If you look at the data that I've seen, anti-Semitism is very rare among people who are 70 years old and older.

It's quite rare, not as rare, but still very rare, 60 to 70.

Still quite rare, 50 to 60.

When you get down to 40 to 50, you're beginning to see, wait a minute, there's more anti-Semitism in that age cohort than in the 70 and above.

And then you get down to 30 to 40, there's even more, and 20 to 30 even more.

Hmm.

What am I making reference to and what was the result?

Well, in 2022, my colleague Hope Lehman and I decided we would have a look at the commencement speakers and the honorary degree recipients at the 25 U.S. News and World Report top-ranked research universities and 25 top-ranked liberal arts colleges.

So we looked at 50 institutions.

When we looked at the commencement speakers, looked at the honorary degree recipients, there was a certain percentage we couldn't identify politically.

We did searches online and tried to see whether there were voter registration records or statements of any kind that indicated a politics.

Certain percentage we couldn't tell what the politics was at all.

But then a very high percentage, a majority, had a political profile.

Yeah.

What am I making reference to, and what was the result?

Well, in 2022, uh, my colleague, Hope, uh, Lehman, and I decided we would have a look at the commencement speakers and the honorary degree recipients at the 25 U.S. News & World Report top-ranked, uh, research universities and the 25 top-ranked liberal arts colleges.

So we looked at 50 institutions.

Uh, when we looked at the commencement speakers, looked at the honorary degree recipients, there was a certain percentage, uh, we couldn't identify politically.

We did searches online and tried to see whether there were voter registration records or statements of any kind that indicated a politics.

Certain percentage, we couldn't tell what the politics was at all.

But then a very high percentage, a majority, uh, had a political profile, and we could easily find a political profile.

Headline, "Princeton faculty mandate proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 years of precedent." Can you just give us the CliffsNote version of what that's all about?

Um, one aspect of Madison's thinking that you find especially illuminating and one limitation or unresolved tension that most shapes how you understand his legacy.

Well, thank you, Julie.

First, let me say, oh, how honored I am to be speaking, uh, on this panel under the auspices of the NCC, and I wanna congratulate and thank the NCC for the wonderful work that it does in public education about the Constitution.

Uh, I don't know if it was always this way.

I've been teaching for forty-one years, entirely at Princeton, with three or four visits at Harvard.

So I'm teaching a fairly small, uh, segment of, uh, of students, but they're pretty high achievers.

And they come in, and this has been true for all forty-one years, knowing almost nothing about the Constitution.

Mm-hmm.

What is the, the heuristic that you would employ?

Okay, so let me begin at a very general level.

The historians are fond of breaking up the eras and the epochs into the age of this and the age of that.

I'm, I'm sure you've heard it many times.

So, so some historians will characterize the medieval period as the Age of Faith.

Now, what do they mean by that? Why do they do that? Well, what they mean is that for the medievals, especially the great medieval thinkers, whether we're talking about those of the Christian tradition, such as Aquinas and Anselm, or the Jewish tradition, Maimonides, or the Islamic tradition, figures like Averroes, for the great thinkers of the medieval period, the ultimate touchstone, ultimate touchstone of truth, and therefore of goodness, of justice, of right, of virtue, is conformity with the teachings of the faith, conformity with the teachings of the religion.

Now, there's some truth in that, although it's an oversimplification, and it can be misleading.

What is the, what is the method? What is the, the, the mathematical formula or the logical formula or the heuristic that you use to distinguish your feelings about some- your mo- your intu- your, your emotional intuitions about something, versus your intuitions actually ratifying and being a sign that there is an objective truth out there? Does that make sense?

Here's Professor George.

(piano music plays) Now, remember the basic problem that our founders faced.

Once they had, against all odds, and to their own surprise as well as the surprise of the entire world, overthrown the greatest military power on Earth to gain their independence, then the question became, okay, now, what kind of government do we establish here in order to avoid jumping from the frying pan into the fire, replicating the very tyrannies and injustices that warranted us, caused us, motivated us to seek our independence from Great Britain? Now, one option was a monarchy, just a better monarchy.

Have a better king than King George.

And that must have been tempting to people because they had the ideal king.

They had George Washington.

You can't get a better king.

Professor Robbie George teaches courses on constitutional interpretation and civil liberties at Princeton.

(laughs)

Both my grandfathers were coal miners.

I had a kinda Huck Finn existence, you know, growing up hunting and fishing and playing bluegrass music.

As you know, I play bluegrass banjo, uh, to this, uh, to this day.

So, the people I grew up with, and my own family back in West Virginia, are Trump people.

So back in 2016, when my mother jumped on the Trump train, um, uh, and I was very critical (laughs) of Trump, (laughs) uh, to the point of, you know, publishing a piece saying that the man is simply morally unfit to be President of the United States.

Well, my mom confronted me about that.

Tell, tell me how you see that, um, from your vantage point.

By happiness, you say they meant felicity, all-round wellbeing, integral fulfillment, human flourishing.

Well, our founders were realists about human nature.

They knew a thing or two about the good parts of, uh, human nature and also the worrying and bad parts of human nature.

And so, they put into place in our Constitution a system of structural constraints on power knowing that no one, given the nature of human beings, could be trusted with unchecked and unaccountable power.

But those structural constraints on power, they understood to be only auxiliary precautions, auxiliary here means secondary protections, against the forces that would undo republican government and ordered liberty.

The primary protections are in the character of the people.

John Adams, for example, said that our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people, and simply will not serve very well any other type of people.

Wow.

We're just rebranding it." But this isn't going over well with this administration, so what is university life like with Donald Trump as president?

Well, first of all, let me say a word about DEI.

Whatever good intentions people might have had in trying to increase on university campuses diversity, equity, and inclusion, that's what DEI stands for, diversity, equity, and in- inclusion, the net result was the opposite of those things.

Instead of diversity, we got conformism.

Instead of equity, we got unfair treatment.

Instead of inclusion, we got the exclusion of people who dissented from the dominant orthodoxies, the ideologies on the campus.

So if it was an experiment, it is a failed experiment, and the way to deal with a failure (laughs) is not to rebrand it.

Give us the name again and tell us where to get it.

Uh, tell me more about what sorts of challenges to unity we might face because of those differences.

Um, we are not a nation whose unity and strength in it is to be found in blood and soil or throne and altar.

We're not bound together because we're of the same race.

We're many different races.

Uh, we're not bound together because we're all of the same ethnic backgrounds.

We are of an astonishing diversity of ethnicities.

The- where our ancestors come from Japan and Croatia and India and Poland and all over the world.

As its founder, how do you measure success?