The Founders’ Intentions: Jeffrey Rosen
April 4th, 2024
”The Constitution is a framework for productive conversation.”
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. We discuss how the Constitution is a framework for a productive conversation for people with fundamentally different points of view.
For the Founders, personal self government was a pre-requisite for political self government. In order to deliberate with fellow citizens and vote wisely, citizens ought first be their best selves, which puts a high bar for citizens to educate themselves. In fact, the founders thought education was central to creating the perfect citizen. Thinking in constitutional terms opens citizens up to hear arguments they might disagree with, which in turn makes it possible to change their minds. Jeffrey Rosen stresses that “that openness, that curiosity to diverse points of view is exactly the point of the Constitution”.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Jeffrey Rosen
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Jeffrey Rosen Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. Democracy is not a spectator sport, so we are here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year and empower you to change the status quo.
In our current moment, we are awash in conversations about what's constitutional and what's not, whether the Constitution will permit this or that. And with originalists muddying the waters on what the founders had in mind, who really knows? Well, our guest today is someone who took a deep dive into the personal histories, education, and the reading lists of America's founding fathers, and he can help us better understand their intentions.
Jeffrey Rosen is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, which examines what the pursuit of happiness meant to our nation's founders, and how that famous phrase defined their lives and became the foundation of our democracy. Jeffrey Rosen is also the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.
Welcome, Jeffrey. Thanks so much for joining us.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:44] Thank you. Great to be with you.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:47] So to ground our conversation today, let's start with the basics. Because as I mentioned in the intro, people are busy talking about what's constitutional and what's not. But actually: what is the Constitution?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:59] The Constitution is a framework for productive conversation. The word constitution comes from the Latin constituere, which means come together or
stand together. And a constitution is a platform so that people can listen to one another and deliberate productively. Just as Holmes said that the Constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing points of view, and that's why the American Constitution has been so remarkably successful.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:31] Well, let's talk about how the Constitution came to be in terms of the ideals that the founders wanted to bake in to this new nation. You start your book with a quest to understand why "the pursuit of happiness" -- this phrase -- is in the Constitution and what it meant to the founders. They were heavily influenced by classical moral philosophers, the Stoics and enlightenment thinkers, and their concept was that happiness is about the pursuit of being good as opposed to feeling good, which is the way we understand happiness today. Tell us more.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:03:06] Absolutely, yes. The phrase the pursuit of happiness appears, of course, in the Declaration of Independence, and I set out during the Covid quarantine to read the books on Jefferson's reading list that he said most influenced his understanding of the pursuit of happiness. And what I learned came as a revelation. As you said, for the founders, happiness meant being good, not feeling good; the pursuit of virtue, not the pursuit of pleasure. And by virtue they meant something in particular. It came from classical moral philosophy, and they meant self-reliance, self-improvement, character improvement, being your best self, we would say today, so that you can serve others. And this idea of happiness as a form of self-mastery -- really a daily quest for self-mastery that requires forming the habits of industry and deep reading and thinking that are necessary to really use our talents to their best -- all came from thinkers like Pythagoras, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus. All of these great figures who talked about the importance of using our powers of reason to moderate our unproductive passions or emotions so we could achieve the tranquility of soul, as Adam Smith put it, channeling Cicero, that are necessary for happiness. What's so remarkable about this reading project was this understanding of happiness prevailed for much of history, not only in the East and in the West, but it just dropped out of our popular culture sometime around the 1950s. And it's unfamiliar today.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:52] Mhm. I kind of want to do a shout out here to a woman I recently met who was an ethics teacher in a Catholic school in Canada, where apparently ethics continues to be a class that is required for all students; and that their
premise is that if you live an ethical life, then you will live a happier life. So it exists in some parts, but not in general in public schools. I agree with you there, but help us connect the dots here. You argue, and I'm going to quote you here, that "the founders believe that harmony that results from a well-tempered constitution mirrors the harmony of a well-tempered mind." So how did the founders think about designing a democracy that derives power from the people to achieve public happiness?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:05:38] It's a great question, and some of the answer is in the Federalist Papers, which read through this new lens of classical psychology appears as a manual for public happiness. Madison and Jefferson use the phrase public happiness. Many times they say that that's the purpose or end of government. They're quoting the natural law theorist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, and the way to achieve it is to mirror, in the constitution of the state, the same balance of faculties or powers that we strive to achieve in the mind. And Madison learned all this at Princeton under President Witherspoon. For the mind, Plato talked about three faculties or powers reason in the head, passion in the heart, and desire in the stomach. And the goal of the mind is to balance those faculties. So reason puts the more passionate or appetitive souls in balance. Madison and Hamilton, in writing the Constitution, talked about creating the same balance in the separation of powers, so the executive and Senate and House would balance each other the same ways that the prudent and desirous and appetitive parts of the soul balanced each other. Crucially, you wouldn't give all the power to one branch. The power belongs to the people, but we parcel it out to various branches so that no one can speak in our name, and that you can't make fast or impulsive decisions. The point of a constitution is to check our initial impulses, in the same way that the individual has an obligation to check our anger and jealousy and fear, so that in the case of the Constitution, we achieve the cool deliberation that's necessary to promote the public interest rather than faction. And in Federalist 10, Madison famously defined a faction as any group, a majority, or a minority, animated by passion rather than reason, devoted to self-interest rather than the public good. And the point of the Constitution is to temper that passion so that the public good prevails.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:43] Tell us a little bit more about Madison, because he had some very specific views about how a republic should be constituted, how many people there should be, if they're far away, or not. And when I was reading that part, I was like, "wow,
nobody talks about this," but I'd love for you to explain how Madison conceived of how republics should function in the United States.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:08:04] I'm so glad you asked, because Madison's theories about how to preserve a republic and prevent it from going the way of Greece and Rome are crucial. So Madison's very afraid of factions or mobs. He sees Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts, where a group of armed debtors are mobbing the courthouses and refusing to pay their debts. And he's read Classical Political Philosophy, which holds that large groups that deliberate face to face always descend into mobs. Madison says in Federalist 55, in all large assemblies of any character composed passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Even if every Athenian had been Socrates, Athens would still have been a mob. Classical political philosophy said you needed, if you had a republic, to have it be small, because people had to know each other in order to deliberate face to face. Madison says that's wrong. In fact, using the new theory of representation, you could have a large republic where representatives are able to deliberate on behalf of the people. And Madison also said the large size of the republic could be a benefit rather than a drawback, because in a large republic it would be hard for mobs to organize, and by the time they found each other, they might get tired and go home. As a result, said Madison, extend the sphere and you can take in more interest. You'll make it more difficult for particular factions to organize and mobilize, and that plus representation will turn classical political philosophy on its head and ensure that in America, liberty will prevail.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:46] Yeah, well, I thought it was interesting that he was specifically against direct democracy. And, you know, we are in the current moment continuously asking whether we shouldn't have a presidential election by direct democracy, by popular vote, as opposed to through the Electoral College. And, and these mechanisms that seem imperfect. But I understand at the time how they thought about it, which was really illuminating.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:10:10] It really is. And of course, you could have a popularly elected president, but not have the president be directly pandering to the people like a demagogue. James Wilson, the great American founder, wanted a popularly elected president, but still thought the president shouldn't tweet. Basically, he shouldn't communicate directly with the people. And Madison originally wanted the president
elected by the Congress, but also believed that the president should not directly communicate with the people. And in this sense, the biggest changes to the presidency occurred both during the age of Andrew Jackson, where the first time the president began to see himself as a steward or representative of the people that ramped up with Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, who directly saw them as instruments of the people's will. But it was mass technology, in particular the radio under Franklin Delano Roosevelt that allowed the president now communicating directly with the people to reach the people on a mass scale. And that, combined with social media, has gotten us to the situation we're in today.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:13] Um hum, um hum. Well, I have a question in terms of how you think about citizenry, because now that you've done this deep dive into the founders’ intentions, and given that they conceived of citizens as people who are interested in the public good and in the pursuit of constant personal improvement, have you changed your mind about what citizens should be? And how would you define what a good citizen is today?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:11:43] Yes, I have changed my mind about what a good citizenship should be. This deep dive in the reading helped me see that for the founders, personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. In other words, we couldn't deliberate with our fellow citizens and vote wisely and choose virtuous leaders until we first find that balance in equipoise within our own individual selves. And it really puts a high bar for citizens to educate themselves. It's really crucial how central the founders thought education was to create, what some of them called the perfect citizen and the perfect state. That was a quotation from fifth century Athens. And Jefferson insists that people have to prove the proposition that mass education on a broad scale is possible. And it really means that it's not enough just to vote. We have to vote wisely, and we also have to inform ourselves, and we have to deliberate. And mostly we have to not be drawn to the most extreme candidates who are flattering us and giving us what we want in an immediate sense, rather than listening to other people deliberating and reaching results that are in the good of the entire nation.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:05] Right. Well, I'm curious now whether you have changed your mind also about democracy as an ideal political system, because the kind of citizen that you're describing, and the kind of citizen that the founders were, engaged deeply in their
personal pursuit of virtues, which I think we can both agree most Americans don't do. Right. They're not, in general, well informed, let alone reading, let's say, Cicero. So I wonder if the hurdle isn't too great for everyday people and even John Adams, you note, and Mercy Otis Warren feared at that time that American virtue had not reached, "that sublime pitch" necessary to sustain a republic. So what I'm really getting at is what is the case for democracy?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:13:54] Well, it's a very important question. And as you say, at the end of their lives, the founders weren't sure whether citizens would find the individual virtue necessary to keep the republic. They have different degrees of optimism. Adams took a really dark view of human nature, was pretty despondent, and thought you needed an extremely strong executive. Jefferson was concerned about the coming of civil war. Washington worried about the rise of factions. Only Madison was moderately optimistic. He had faith in this new media technology, the broadside press that a class of journalists he called the literati would use to diffuse complicated arguments in the newspapers, and people would discuss it in coffeehouses, and reason would slowly diffuse across the land. Obviously the opposite of the age of Facebook and X or whatever it's called now. So you ask, what about democracy? Is it wrong to put too much faith in it? None of the founders favored direct democracy. The Constitution was set up to check direct democracy because of Shay's Rebellion. Some were more democratic than others, and the famous debate between Hamilton and Jefferson about whether a strong executive and representative republic or some form of democracy -- although Jefferson was not in favor of direct democracy -- was better, was the source of our initial political parties, and divided the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans, and has been a really important division ever since. But it's impossible to read the founding literature without being struck by how much the founders were on guard about direct democracy, and to the degree that new media technologies, as well as the polarization of our politics, have increased, the opportunities for demagogues to flatter factions by using this technology. It represents the founders nightmare.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:56] hmm, I'm going to ask you to clarify, since you're a specialist, and I'm going to venture to guess that most people don't know what Shay's Rebellion is. What was it and why was it so concerning to the Founding Fathers?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:16:11] In 1787, which was the year the Constitutional Convention was convened, riots arose in western Massachusetts from farmers who couldn't pay their debts. There was a big inflation after the Revolutionary War, and they were unable to pay their creditors, so they mobbed the courthouses to close them down so they didn't have to pay their debts. And this was so alarming both to Federalists and Anti- Federalists that it was a major reason for calling a constitutional convention. The framers wanted to create a government strong enough to put down insurrections like Shays Rebellion, but also constrained enough to protect liberty. And lots of folks at the Constitutional Convention warned of Shay's Rebellion. And that idea of mobs storming government buildings and trying to shut them down represented a central concern of the founders.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:07] Hmm. Well, I want to definitely get to that. But before we do that, as an expert on the Constitution, what do you make of originalism? The belief that a text and in this case, of course, the Constitution should be interpreted in a way that is consistent with the way it was understood at the time it was written. And I'm not sure that the people who argue for originalism today have the kind of depth of understanding that you have. Now that you've written this book, are they off the mark? And the way that you see it talked about in the popular media and the newspapers and if so, how?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:17:43] Well, this is the biggest debate in constitutional interpretation. It's the center of what I teach in my constitutional law classes, and also what we teach at the National Constitution Center, where we try to empower citizens of all ages, starting in middle school to learn about the methodologies of constitutional interpretation so that they can use them consistently and make up their own mind. And those methodologies include, as you suggested, textualism, originalism, a focus on precedent, a focus on natural law, and a focus on principles of democracy. To some degree, all justices and all judges think that text and original understanding are relevant, Justice Elena Kagan said not long ago. We're all originalists now in the sense that everyone agrees that it's important to begin with the constitutional text and to ask what its original public meaning was at the time of ratification. But whether you stop there, how you apply the Constitution to situations the framers couldn't have anticipated, how broadly or strictly the text should be interpreted. When you just ask what did the text mean in its original context? And when you look at broader historical understandings, all these represent the central questions that divide judges and citizens. And even if you
are an originalist or you think that it's very important that the text be interpreted in its original context. On the Supreme Court today, the liberal justices accused the conservatives of being inconsistent originalists, of switching among text history and original public meaning opportunistically in order to reach preferred results. So that's why it's so important to learn the methodologies and to deeply study constitutional text and history so that you can read the decisions yourself. And we're all real cheerleaders at the Constitution Center to encourage citizens to read the majority opinions and also read the dissents. You don't have to be a constitutional lawyer to do it. It's so inspiring to see kids starting in middle school, reading those opinions, reading the majority opinions, reading the dissents, and making up your own mind.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:05] We're taking a short break, and we'll be back with Jeffrey Rosen in a moment.
But first, I want to tell you about a podcast called 10% Happier. The 10% happier podcast has one guiding philosophy. Happiness is a skill you can learn, so why not master it? Hosted by Dan Harris, a journalist who had a panic attack on national television and then set out on a journey of transformation, he's now on a quest to help others also achieve peace and happiness. Every week, Dan talks to top scientists, meditation teachers, and even the odd celebrity in wide ranging conversations that explore topics like productivity, anxiety, enlightenment, psychedelics and relationships. The interviews cover everyone from Brené Brown to Alexander Dreymon to Sam Harris. Think of listening to 10% Happier as a workout for your mind. Find 10% Happier wherever you listen to podcasts.
And now let's return to my conversation with Jeffrey Rosen.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:13] Well, now that you've explained how to think about it, how to approach it, what does it really mean for someone to say this is unconstitutional or this is constitutional? And let's say in the case of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, and I'm thinking here not in the way that an expert or an academic or even a judge would use these terms, but the way that everyday people understand it in their daily conversations and they throw around like a provocation.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:21:40] To say something's unconstitutional is to say the government can't do that. It lacks the power to restrict my liberty in this way, or to pass a law in that way. And the First Amendment is a great example. It begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or abridging the freedom of speech." And that means that Congress lacks the power to pass the law. And if it does pass a law abridging the freedom of speech, like a law requiring you to salute the flag in school, the Supreme Court can strike the law down as inconsistent with the Constitution. Because when there's a clash between the Constitution, which represents our supreme law, and a statute passed by a legislature, which is merely the will of our temporary agents or representatives, then judges are supposed to prefer the superior to the inferior law and strike the statute down. That's the theory. It's one of the most important guarantees of American liberty, and of the rule of law, that judges in America have the power to strike down unconstitutional laws. It's not the case in all Western democracies, even in England. It wasn't until pretty recently that they got an independent Supreme Court. Previously, all power had been concentrated in Parliament with the power to strike down unconstitutional laws, despite the fact that Parliament, in theory, is sovereign. There are other democracies that don't have judicial review, but an independent judiciary. And the fact that the president can't just call up the judges and say, indict this person or convict this person the way Putin can in Russia, or kill my enemies, and judges can't stop that. That's the very definition of the rule of law.
Mila Atmos: [00:23:27] Thank you for explaining it in this way. And it connects everything that we just talked about. So we started this question about freedom of speech. And the first thought I had when you talked about that is how do book bans fit in when it comes to freedom of speech?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:23:45] Well, if a book ban is passed by a legislature, and a legislature says you can't publish a book about the pursuit of happiness, and if the book is published, it has to be burned. That would be the quintessential example of an unconstitutional law. Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of speech. A law saying that I'm not allowed to write or speak about the pursuit of happiness in my book should be burned, would be a law restricting or bridging that. Book bans in schools are sometimes more complicated because legislatures have some power over curriculum, and if the ban is supposedly content neutral and respects time, place, and manner, then it might possibly be constitutional. And of course, bans in private universities which are
not bound by the First Amendment are generally not governed by the Constitution. But one of the great statements of free speech that inspired the founders is John Milton's Areopagitica, which I just recommend to listeners because it's so incredibly inspiring and so gorgeously written, and it's a pain or a warning against book bans and book censorship. And it reminds us that book bans are profound violation of free speech.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:02] Um hmm. What do you want everyday Americans to understand about the Constitution? Or maybe the other side of that is, what is the common misconception that you encounter in your work at the National Constitution Center that you wish you could cure?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:25:18] Well, it's important not to confuse policy arguments with constitutional arguments. And if the Constitution Center, we always say we're going to separate our political and constitutional views. In other words, when we have a constitutional conversation, we won't ask, do you think gun control, for example, is a good or bad idea? But: do you think the Constitution allows or forbids it? And you might decide that the Second Amendment to the Constitution forbids gun control, even though gun control is a really good idea. Or conversely, you might think that the Second Amendment allows gun control even though it's a bad idea. And that move, that distinction between constitutional and political views is what judges are supposed to engage in. It's what law students try to engage in, and it's really important for citizens to engage in it, too, because it opens you up to the possibility that the Constitution is not a solution to all our problems. And it might forbid some things that you think are really good. And conversely, it might allow things that you think are really bad. And by thinking in those constitutional terms, you open yourself up to arguments that you disagree with. You have to listen to both sides. You open up the possibility of changing your mind after you've heard those other arguments and that openness, that curiosity to diverse points of view is exactly the point of the Constitution.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:40] Oh, thanks for putting it this way. I had not considered that perspective in the way that you just described. So we are in a moment where it seems inconceivable that a person who has been barred from conducting business in the state of New York and who has been convicted of sexual assault, should continue to be on the ballot. But based on the Constitution, what are the conditions a presidential
candidate has to meet in order to preclude them from running for office? What actually disqualifies them?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:27:09] Well, the Constitution doesn't say much about that. It says you have to be 35 years old and you have to be a natural born citizen. Those are requirements in the Constitution. There's a third provision which is interpreted by the Supreme Court. If you have engaged in insurrection against the United States, you may not hold any office under the United States. And whether those who commit an insurrection against it are automatically barred, or whether Congress has to pass a law saying they're barred, whether states can decide that on their own. And then finally, of course, whether or not President Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6th. And... the court will not disqualify President Trump from the ballot, so he will remain on the ballot.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:54] Um. Of course, there's also the immunity case before the Supreme Court. And this is this immunity case regarding the January 6th election interference. Speaking about the insurrection that we talked about earlier, if he is convicted, let's say, does that bar him because it sounds like that's not the case. But what does the Constitution say?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:28:16] The Constitution does not bar convicted felons. In fact, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for for president in 1920, ran from a jail cell. He'd been convicted, amazingly, of denouncing World War One. And in an age before the First Amendment was strongly enforced by the court, he stood up and said, "don't enlist in the war." And he was convicted under the Sedition Act of 1917, and he ran for president from a jail cell. So that could happen.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:45] It could happen that Trump might run from a jail cell?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:28:49] It could. I mean, it doesn't seem very likely because of the timing that he would be imprisoned before the election. But if he were, he could run for president. And then the question of what happens next? Whether he could pardon himself is a huge question that the Supreme Court may be asked to confront, or whether his sentence could be stayed or suspended. All these are novel questions never confronted before in American history.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:16] Well, after you've done your deep dive on the founders, what would they say if they were alive today?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:29:23] I... You know, I always feel embarrassed about channeling the founders. I'm no better able to channel them than anyone else. But I did mention that January 6th was James Madison's nightmare. And I think we can be pretty confident about that because he spent so much time denouncing mobs and insurrections and was so concerned about stopping government functions based on mob violence and the Insurrection Act. The Federal Insurrection Act was passed after the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, one of the first uprisings against the new government in protest to Alexander Hamilton's whiskey tax, and it's been invoked several times throughout US history, generally against those who are trying to promote disunion through violence, including Fries's Rebellion right before the Civil War against the southern secessionists, after reconstruction against those who were resisting federal authority, and in the civil rights era. So demagogues who whipped up mob violence to promote disunion are the founders' nightmare. Alexander Hamilton talks about a man, ambitious and reckless, who will reap the whirlwind and flatter the people. And even Jefferson, who was much more favorable to direct democracy, worries about a minority demagogue. And there's an amazing letter from Jefferson where he says that he's most concerned, he tells James Madison, when he gets a copy of the Constitution, that in the future, a demagogue will lose an election by a few votes, cry foul, enlist the states who voted for him on his behalf, and refuse to leave office. It's just an amazing prediction.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:07] Yeah, indeed. I know the Constitution can be amended and there are multiple voices saying, you know, first of all, we should pass the ERA, or we should pass an amendment to prohibit money in politics, you know, to basically upend the Citizens United decision. What are your thoughts about an amendment that would strengthen our democracy in this moment?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:31:33] The National Constitution Center had a great project recently called the Constitution Drafting Project, and we convened three teams of scholars: liberal, conservative, and libertarian to draft a constitution from scratch, the very distinguished scholars well known in their fields. It blew our minds that after just a week
of deliberation in a state of nature or state of zoom, they agreed on five amendments to the Constitution. And here they are. First, an amendment that would impose term limits for Supreme Court justices. Second, one that would make it a little easier to amend the Constitution. Third, one that would make it a little harder to impeach the president, but a little easier to convict him in the Senate. An amendment that would remove the natural born citizenship requirement for a president. And one that would resurrect the legislative veto, which allows Congress to repudiate presidential actions by majority vote. Not generally amendments having to do with rights, but with structure. And it just was really striking that these very ideologically diverse teams all were able to agree on these structural amendments. It gave me some hope that in a less polarized environment, we might actually be able to converge on meaningful constitutional reform.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:52] Yeah, those are all great suggestions. I was not aware you had a project like that. So we aspire here at Future Hindsight to be good citizens, and we're always looking to bolster our civic action toolkit. What are two things an everyday citizen can do to enliven our civic culture, to have good civic habits, essentially to embrace the pursuit of being a good citizen.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:33:19] Well, the first thing to do is to learn about the Constitution. And a great place to start that learning is ConstitutionCenter.org, the Interactive Constitution. It's this amazing free resource. It's gotten almost 70 million hits since we launched in 2015. It's among the most googled constitution in the world, and we bring together the leading liberal and conservative scholars, thought leaders, and citizens to debate each clause of the Constitution, describing what they agree about and disagree about. And it just blows your mind how rich the resource is. Justice Amy Coney Barrett debating Neal Katyal about the meaning of the habeas corpus clause. Multiply that by 80. And then in addition, there's the weekly podcast I host, We the People, that brings together liberals and conservatives to debate the constitutional issue of the week; a Constitution 101 class primary source documents selected by leading scholars. It's just marvelous to be part of this organization that is spreading so much light on a nonpartisan basis, and I hope listeners will check it out. And the second thing I would say is just read deeply. In general. Not just about the Constitution, but about history, literature, politics, science, and art. The habit of deep reading allows us to learn and grow and to make ourselves more perfect. It was inspiring for me to see how deeply the founding generation read, and I started to read more deeply as a result.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:50] That's great. What was your favorite part about doing the reading and doing the research to write this book?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:34:58] It was really the habit, the practice of getting up early every morning, watching the sunrise, reading these books of ancient philosophy that I'd never encountered before. I ended up writing sonnets summing up the wisdom, which is a very weird practice, but it turns out a lot of people who read this great literature in history have also written sonnets, because there's just a desire to encapsulate the wisdom Ben Franklin would read from the wisdom and turn it into sonnet form too, I later found out. I still kind of can't believe I did it. It was an unusual way to spend Covid, to say the least, but I just kind of was moved to do it. And once you get into the habit of doing this kind of reading and writing, it becomes habitual. And it was the most satisfying year I've ever spent.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:43] That's wonderful. So as we are rounding out our conversation here today, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:35:53] Citizens make me hopeful. The people who participate at the National Constitution Center, in our podcast, in our classes for middle school and high school, the amazing teachers, these inspiring teachers who are inspiring the next generation to learn all of these marvelous citizens of different perspectives, are committed to a Republic of reason and are determined to uphold the founders vision that it is possible to establish a constitution by reason and conviction, not by force or violence, as Alexander Hamilton said. And that faith, that shining faith in the American idea embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, is still one that many hold. And if we can just get through the noise and the social media and the tweets and the and the partisanship and reason together, as the prophet Isaiah said, and as Justice Louis Brandeis loved to quote, then there is possible for keeping high the light of the American idea.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:57] Hear, hear. I hope that we can keep the light on the American idea. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:37:08] Thank you. It was wonderful to talk with you.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:10] Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center and author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and the author of Justice by Means of Democracy, a bold and urgent articulation of a new political philosophy: power sharing liberalism.
Danielle Allen: [00:37:47] If democracy is really about majoritarianism, isn't it possible that the majority will often vote against what's actually in the best interests of all? And so I'm trying to argue against that by offering a conception of democracy, power sharing liberalism, where the way democracy functions addresses issues of power imbalances, and by addressing those issues of power imbalances increases significantly the likelihood that the decisions made by society will support broad human thriving.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:16] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks so much for listening. If you like this episode, you'll love what we have in store. Be sure to hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts or the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app, so you'll catch all of our upcoming episodes. Thank you! Oh, and please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:39:10] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.