Dr. Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss the reaction to Brexit and the political outlook for the United Kingdom.
Transcript:
HH: Last radio hour of the week, that means it’s time for the Hillsdale Dialogue. All of the Hillsdale Dialogues are collected at www.hughforhilldale.com going back four and a half years now beginning with Homer and Achilles’s rage right up through last week’s events as we cover everything that matters in history with the president of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn. All things Hillsdale available at www.hillsdale.edu, and all of our dialogues collected at www.hughforhillsdale.com. And one of them that is incredibly popular is our conversation last week after the Brexit vote. Dr. Arnn, a lot of people were surprised when I knew that when Churchill referred to the United States of Europe, he wasn’t talking about the EU as it is today, and that’s because we’d been talking about it. Have you seen the number of people who have invoking Churchill as authority for why Britain made a mistake? And how are you reacting to that?
LA: Oh, gracious. First of all, there was a book that appeared. Andrew Roberts reviewed it, and it’s a very good book with one exception. It’s about Churchill and the EU, and it ends with a little eulogy sort of thing about how Churchill would have supported it. What it does is it leaves out all of the passages in all of the major speeches that Churchill gave about the European Union in which he said Britain should not be a member of it.
HH: (laughing) You can write a pretty good book that way, can’t you?
LA: You know, and the book, according to Andrew, I haven’t read the book, but according to Andrew, the book promises a second volume into which he goes further into it. I guess he was going to put that stuff in there.
HH: It is pretty amazing. Would you, for the benefit of the new audience, which we have in San Francisco and across the United States that joined, just summarize Churchill’s view, because he did advocate, as you said last week after the Brexit vote, for a United States of Europe. He did not advocate for this EU, and you and I both agree, he would be happier today were he alive with the result.
LA: Yeah, as far as we know. I mean, he’s dead, of course, but he’s not here to speak. So Churchill, so remember that the war was, the world was racked with two great wars, and the worst in history, and they started around Germany, and they were European wars, and they dragged the whole world into both of them, especially the second. What are you going to do about that? Churchill believed in collective security, and he wanted a strong United Nations with powerful, regional groupings led by free countries. And he wanted Europe to be one of those groupings. He also wanted the British Commonwealth and Empire to be one. And he wanted the United States to be one, associated with Britain, through a special relationship. He wanted the free countries to lead this thing. For Europe, he wanted them to learn to get along and become a united force, and especially between France and Germany, which were much to do with the relations between, much to do with the outbreak of the wars. So he proposed a customs union, that is to say, free trade between them. And then he also proposed a common currency. He did propose that. And he proposed common defense methods, where they might even have a common army wearing, he thought, national badges on their uniforms, too. And he thought that they should have agreements not to attack each other. But what he didn’t ever propose was the great regulatory state that has grown up. And that thing, and in my opinion, that’s where all the controversy lies, right? Another part of the controversy is free movement in goods and people, and people are different things from goods. People are citizens. And so are we to abolish citizenship? You can’t find a word in Churchill that thinks so. And citizens are people who agree about a common end. Lincoln said every nation has a central idea from which all its minor thoughts radiate. So that part of it, too, is controversial. And so it’s, you know, it’s just hard to imagine him endorsing this thing. Another thing is Churchill was a constitutionalist, and the Constitution of Europe is very messy. It’s made through a series of treaties. There was an attempt to, in 2004, there was an attempt to pass, Europe-wide, a unified constitution. And it passed in two countries, and it failed in two countries, important, one of them, France, very important, the other, the Netherlands. So what it is, is instead a series of treaties. In fact, in 2007, after those two votes failed, and they abandoned the idea to get the people to pass a common constitution, they put large parts of it into a new treaty signed in Lisbon that greatly expanded the powers of the European Union, but also set up a system in one house of the European government of direct representation of the people. And in my opinion, that hasn’t worked very well, as Daniel Hannan, whom I know well, a member of the European Parliament, used to say. I guess he stopped saying it now, because they’re getting out. He used to say I’ve represented my district long enough now that everybody knows who I am. They just don’t know what I do.
HH: (Laughing)
LA: (Laughing) So that’s the problem. If you think that the people have a right to consent to the government, then there needs to be some mechanism for them to do that meaningfully. And as my friend, Vaclav Klaus, who was a former free market, not former, he’s a current free market economist trained in Austrian economics. He was one of the leaders of the achievement of Czech freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, and he was then president of the Czech Republic. And he used to say I lived my life, most of my life, in the Warsaw Pact, and I didn’t have a country with borders to call my own. And now, I’ve got one, and I don’t want to lose it to the European Union. So those look to me like the issues.
HH: I also want to ask you in this week of terror in Turkey, another ISIS attack in the aftermath of President Jayvee’s romping good foreign policy, and Secretary of State Leading From Behind, it is spread everywhere. And we have not only San Bernardino and Orlando, but Brussels and Paris, and now Istanbul. What was Churchill’s view of Turkey’s role in the European common market?
LA: Well, I’m going to confess I don’t know a lot about that. It didn’t come up much. Churchill thought that Turkey was terribly important. On the eve of both world wars, he wooed Turkey hard. Turkey went with the German powers in the First World War, lost its empire, which it has really effectively lost already anyway because of that. In the Second World War, beginning in 1943, Churchill began to go to Turkey and keep up constant communication with them to get them into the Allied side in the Second World War. They joined, finally, in February, 1944. And he thought that Turkey was of the first importance to the West, because if you think about it, it sits at the crossroads between Europe and Asia on the one hand, and Europe and Asia and Africa on the other. And the control of the Dardanelles has been a major strategic point. It, there’s a really good book written by an ancestor of my wife. His name is John Arthur Ransome Marriott called The Eastern Question. And he says in that book, I read that book in graduate school before I met my wife. And I won points, because they brought him up, everybody in the family knew him, and I knew all about him.
HH: (laughing)
LA: In fact, excuse me, I’ll tell a quick story. He was apparently a very proud man, and I met an aunt of my wife who had one of his, many of his books in her house, and he once went there and opened one of the books, and discovered, because in old books, they used to print the book so that you had to cut the pages as you read them. They were still joined at the top. And he noticed the pages had not been cut, and he was very angry about it.
HH: (Laughing)
LA: But this book, The Eastern Question, which is very worth reading, it says this. It says that Napoleon and the Czar, for example, could agree and work together fairly well up to the point where they got to talking about the Dardanelles. And so Turkey is important. And the Soviet, you know, Stalin had designs on Turkey. Turkey was very afraid of that in the Second World War. Churchill’s point to them was you need to be part of the world organization, and you need to be allied with the United States and Great Britain, or else there’s no safety for you. And that’s one of the reasons Turkey got into NATO.
HH: We’ve got to be scared to death of ISIS reaching into Turkey and destabilizing it. ISIS destroyed Egypt’s tourism trade, as did the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, they’re attempting to destroy Turkey’s economic relations with the West, aided by Erdogan’s rather authoritarian and fundamentalist approach to Islam as well. But if they continue these attacks, as they have across the country, NATO suffers, the West suffers, everybody suffers.
LA: Yeah, you know, I was in Turkey last year in one of the port cities on the Mediterranean. I’d never been there, to that part before. And it was just thriving. And it’s a very pleasant place to go, and very, very many people from all over the world do go there. And so Turkey has a huge stake in all of that.
HH: When we come back from break, we’re going to continue to talk about the aftermath of Brexit. As markets calm this week, as Dr. Arnn and I predicted last week, the aftermath of Brexit is very complicated politically in Great Britain. We’ll talk about that and what it means for the world as a new Conservative Party emerges from the ashes. Don’t go anywhere.
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HH: However, I do want to say, Dr. Arnn, I’ve known you long enough. You may not recall this conversation, as you are apt to forget many things. And Dr. Arnn and I have been friends for a long time. He’s forgotten many things. I don’t forget much. I’m not perfect, I’m just the best at this. But in the aftermath of the coup against Maggie Thatcher many, many years ago, you and I had a conversation, and I called you up, because I was worried about the coup against Maggie Thatcher. And you said our friends tell me that Major is a reliable man, and I didn’t know anything about John Major. And he was a reliable man. Well, on Wednesday of this week, David Cameron said the most extraordinary thing in the House of Commons to the man opposite him, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the left, even as David Cameron is on a short leash of two months or less as the prime minister in Number 10. Let’s listen to what he said and then have you comment on that, and the uncertainty of British leadership elections.
DC: And I have to say to the honorable gentleman, he talked about job insecurity and my two months to go. It might be in my party’s interest for him to sit there. It’s not in the national interest, and I would say for Heaven’s sake man, go.
HH: Dr. Arnn, there is an echo of Cromwell speaking to the Long Parliament there, and there is a leadership election underway. You and I love British politics. Maybe much of the country doesn’t, but this choice between Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liam Fox, and the unrest on the other side of the aisle, and the Cameron exit, this is all very fascinating from a clinical perspective. But are we going to be as certain about the successor as you were about Major many years ago, and you were right to be certain about him?
LA: Well, who knows? Of course, was I certain? By the way, there must be some relationship between how much you know and how much you forget.
HH: (Laughing)
LA: (Laughing) But…
HH: Well played.
LA: I got up this morning at this ungodly hour. I’m on the West Coast, and I listened to that debate for about 45 minutes, and it was excellent. And those words were like Cromwell’s to the Long Parliament. You’ve been here too long for any good that you’ve been doing. In the name of God, go, and he dismissed the Parliament. But I’ll tell you something funny about that debate. It was all very gloomy. And almost all of the speakers were wringing their hands on both parties, wringing their hands about leaving. And it was a long list of how are we doing to take care of this, and how are we going to take care of that. And you know, it’s a modern administrative government, and it deals with the details of people’s lives on a much greater scale than it used to do, and in a different way. And the truth is, what I was thinking through much of that is, well, okay, but you know, what do we think here? Britain right now has a trade deficit with the European Union. Is the European Union going to write that off? Do they want to write that off? That’s crazy. They’re being very tough. They’re saying you’ve got to get on with it. John Kerry went over there, and you know, that, as we all know, that man is a genius.
HH: (Laughing)
LA: And (laughing), and so his report of this in an article in the Guardian this morning, in Britain, was, it read like this. It quotes from him. He said well, I want to be very discreet. I’m the Secretary of State. And then he proceeded to say Cameron has no idea what to do, and there are several ways of walking this back. And as Secretary of State, I don’t want to mention those, but there are several ways.
HH: Unbelievable.
LA: Isn’t it? And, but Cameron said in that debate this morning, the referendum is, of course, going to stand, right? It had a two million vote majority. And you know, the people have voted. Are we going to, if you just look at the history of the European Union, just remember many of the things in the current European Union Constitution were defeated in two of the four countries where it was proposed. And then it was enacted by the governments through treaty later. And that means that was unrepresentative at least in France and the Netherlands, which voted against it. So…
HH: But when we come back from break, the idea that the American Secretary of State, like the American President, lecturing the United Kingdom voters on how to vote in the first place, and then to ignore their own vote, is astonishing, Larry Arnn. 20 seconds, it just is. It’s astonishing. Do we have any precedent for that?
LA: It’s astonishing and customary.
HH: (Laughing) I’ll be right back. Dr. Arnn and the Hillsdale Dialogue continues. Don’t go anywhere, America.
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HH: This is one of those weeks where we talk about politics in the right here and now. A leadership election in Great Britain that will have impact far beyond the shores of the United Kingdom throughout the United States, may occur well before our own election and tell us something about Trump V. Clinton. And so Dr. Arnn, I do not know any of the candidates except Dr. Fox, who’s been my guest in my studio and at length often. But I greatly admire Theresa May, the Home Secretary, for her six years at the helm of that difficult job, especially in these days. And I would like you to explain to it. And Boris Johnson’s impressed me from afar as a man of energy. So if you wouldn’t mind walking through the three candidates to replace David Cameron and what Americans might need to know about them, especially what it means to be Home Secretary. I think Churchill was Home Secretary, wasn’t he?
LA: He was. He hated the job.
HH: (Laughing) But why? Because it was difficult, right? It was Ireland.
LA: Yeah, well, it was criminal justice, and it’s Ireland, and you know, in charge of the penitentiaries. Churchill was in penitentiary in South Africa, a prisoner of war once. And he really hated, especially hated death penalty cases. So it’s a tough job, because it’s enforcement of various kinds over the British people. It’s interesting how Churchill handled death penalty cases. His great, probably his closest friend in his life, was a man named F.E. Smith, who’d been Lord Chancellor of England, and was a very distinguished lawyer. And any death penalty case, Churchill would recommend to the Prime Minister to recommend to the Queen whether it would be commuted or not. And so he would read the record, and he would write his own defense in any positive respect he could find that differed from the defense that was given, and then he would make that to F.E. Smith. And if F.E. Smith said that there was a chance on Churchill’s argument for the man to be acquitted, then he would recommend commutation of the sentence.
HH: Wow.
LA: Yeah, Churchill was a serious man.
HH: What a capacity for work.
LA: Oh, yeah. I mean, it was, you know, it’s just there’s never been anybody like him. You know, it’s really awesome.
HH: Well, what you just described is for any lawyer who, I won’t handle criminal law because of the responsibilities, and my father had one death penalty case in a 55 year practice. And it haunted him. He got the guy off death row. He did it on an assignment by the court, as often happens. But it’s a terrible burden.
LA: Yeah, it is, and you know, and life and death. So Churchill disliked all of that a lot. He was not happy in that job, but he was extremely energetic in it, as he tended to be. And Theresa May has been doing that job, and she’s a distinguished woman. And you know, Liam Fox is a distinguished man. And Boris Johnson is a distinguished man, and also a more unusual man, you might say, than the other two, because, what, he’s an author, he’s a poet, he’s you know, he’s a ragtag looking guy who rides bicycles all over London, and is a big foster of, you know, he rides a bicycle to work when the weather’s good, I think.
HH: And on the day after the election, he was photographed playing cricket at Princess Diana’s brother’s estate. I mean, he’s quite the Etonian, isn’t he?
LA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, well he and Andrew Roberts and David Cameron when to school and university together. And they’ve known each other for a long time. And they’re friends, right? And of course, he and Cameron were on opposite sides of this remain-leave, the Brexit election. And they, you know, and they’re still friends, I would bet. I watched, I enjoyed watching Cameron this morning, who was precise and good humored about all of this. I think he’s wrong. I think he thinks that things work because the government makes them work instead of conceiving the government as a thing that facilitates people to do their own work. And so you know, but that’s, you know, that goes to the root of the difference between constitutional and bureaucratic rule. And so they manage a lot of details, and now a lot of those details are going to change. And so that’s a big work that’s got to be done, and it is daunting and formidable. And Boris Johnson’s statements since the election have been that we’re going to get about that work now, and it’s going to go okay. We’re going to get through this just fine and be stronger because of it. And others are saying we’ve got to vote again. You know, the first minister of Scotland, Miss Sturgeon, is in Brussels right now to meet with the president of the European Commission, I think is what that guy. There are two presidents in this thing, and I think it’s the European Commission one she’s meeting with. Maybe it’s the council, the other one. And my wife told me last night before I left that he was so far refusing to meet with her, but I don’t really know the truth of that. So…
HH: Well, let me ask you for a moment, because there are three great candidates there in Dr. Fox and Secretary May and Mayor Johnson. And each of them have significant accomplishments, Fox having run Defense quite well, May having run the Home Department quite well, and Boris Johnson, I think, mayor for eight years. Maybe it was only four years. Was he mayor for eight years? I think it was eight years.
LA: I don’t know.
HH: But during that time, he oversaw the London Olympics, which is no mean feat. They had to build that all, it had to work, it had not to get attacked. It was a wonderful celebration of details coming together because of energy in the executive appropriately constrained, contrasted with the Rio disaster that is unfolding in front of us, or the Venezuelan collapse. So of those three skill sets that you see in front of them, if you’re a British voter, whom would you be inclined to be supporting, or a British Member of Parliament, because it’s the British Members of Parliament who support the new prime minister. Which one might you put your name down next to?
LA: Well, first of all, I’d think more about it, but I know a lot more about Boris Johnson, I’ve read his book on Churchill, than I do about the others. But they all look formidable to me. If I were voting right now, I’d vote for Boris Johnson, because what a hoot. It would be fun to watch him in office.
HH: And there is something to that. There was, it was fun to watch Churchill in office, wasn’t it?
LA: Oh, yeah.
HH: And there are Democrats who are afraid that the Brexit vote and the rise of Johnson say good things about Trump in the United States. Is that overstating it, or is that a good set of analytics?
LA: Well, there’s a relationship, right? So this morning in the Washington Times, no, Examiner, excuse me, in the Washington Examiner, I have published an article with a man named Boyd Matheson, who’s on the Platform Committee. And our article says, first of all, I’ve been for years saying party platforms should be like the first Republican platform that Lincoln ran on, which I’m very proud to say predecessors of mine at Hillsdale College helped to produce. And what that platform is, is simple and beautiful and short. We’ve actually written a draft in my personal capacity. We, Boyd and I, have written, with some help from others, a draft platform that has the same number of planks. And it starts with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and it condemns the modern regulatory state, and says we have to devolve authority. Those are Trump themes. It says the entitlement state should be secured, because we’ve invested so much in it. And then it has the planks that come from the Trump campaign. And when I wrote them down, I just looked them up, and you know, people say he doesn’t have any policies. The truth is, he’s got four or five things that he just always says them, and I discover he’s been saying them since 1990. And what are they? They are agreements with other nations should be made in the interest of the American people. Our military should be very strong, only cautiously used, when we fight wars, we should fight them economically and fast, and get it over with so we can go back to living our lives as quick as possible. He says things like that, right? And he says the American people get to judge who gets to be citizens with them. Well, if you put it at that level of generality, and platforms are supposed to be general documents, now they’re, you know, the last one is 33,000 words long, let’s say, six times longer than the Constitution. Well, you can’t really settle the details in a platform document. That happens in politics between the Congress and the president, especially, after the election. So why address them? And I do think that the concerns and the themes of the Brexit campaign are being reproduced here in American politics. And I think Trump is the nominee because he saw that clearly and first.
HH: Rick Santorum wrote much the same thing in the Philadelphia Inquirer today, saying don’t underestimate him at the same time that battleground polls show him down double digits in many key states. And I am curious, but polling in Great Britain missed this one. One poll had Brexit losing by 10. It won by 4 in Great Britain. There is a peculiar era that we are now in where it is almost impossible to gauge what the public believes with any degree of reliability.
LA: Ronald Reagan was down 17 points at the 1980 Republican convention. And one of the factors, you know, the Brexit poll was wrong. The turnout was high. But they didn’t get the numbers in the leave areas that they thought they would get, although they got large numbers. They thought it would be overwhelming in Scotland and Wales and London, and it was, a strong majority, but not what they expected. And then they underestimated the remain vote, which was very large, in the middle of England.
HH: I think you reversed it. They underestimated the leave vote in the middle of England.
LA: There you go. I’m sorry.
HH: Yeah. And…
LA: I got it all backwards.
HH: I do it all the time, because remain and leave, but old England…
LA: I have to learn to think of them as Mr. Leave and Mr. Remain.
HH: (Laughing) Well, Mr. Remain lived in London and is quite the toff. Mr. Leave is running in the shires, and is quite the old-fashioned person.
LA: Yeah, including in the home counties, you know, that’s the counties that are near London, and that are heavily under London influence. And Mr. or Mrs., Ms. Leave carried those handily. And they didn’t really anticipate that. So, and, but with the American election, there’s something else than the difficulty of polling, and that is the election is not here, yet. And you know, the polls look to me like they have been heavily influenced by, you know, the hot thing going on right now. And forever, the hot thing going on right now was that Hillary Clinton was in trouble. And now, she’s pretty much secured the nomination, and the stories have receded somewhat from the front page that she’s going to be prosecuted about her email, whereas everything’s negative about Trump right now. And you know, maybe Trump can’t put a campaign together. Maybe the Republican Party, maybe the conservative movement, is going to oppose him, right, which I myself hope that it does not. But maybe all that’s going to happen, right? We don’t know. And what we do know is that come September and October, those two people are going to stand on a stage, and there’s going to be enormous attention on that. And that’s going to be, the only way you can make it better would be to put Boris Johnson in there. And so that’s going to have, that’s going to be a big deal, isn’t it?
HH: Oh, it’s going to be an enormous deal. When we come back from break, we’re going to have to talk about that and the moves that they make in the next two weeks defining a great deal of the campaign, as they will the Conservative and Labour parties in Great Britain. Don’t go anywhere, America. It’s Hugh Hewitt and the Hillsdale Dialogue. And also, remember you should be checking out, as I said earlier this morning, that Hillary Clinton is in big trouble, because Loretta Lynch can no longer cover up for her, according to the big story this morning in the New York Times, Loretta Lynch stepping out of the chain of command. It’s going to be up to James Comey whether or not she gets prosecuted.
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HH: Dr. Arnn, I wanted to talk about an interview I did with Donald Trump last Thursday in which I gave him ten recommendations. He wrote them all down. He was being very studious. One of them was that he name either Tom Cotton, who had killed terrorists, or Chris Christie, who had prosecuted terrorists, as his vice president. Subsequent to that, I said on Twitter, I said bring in General Mattis as Secretary of Defense, only to learn, and I didn’t know this, I’m happy to admit when I don’t know something, that you can’t name a general officer to be Secretary of Defense for seven years after they’ve been a general officer. So okay, make it John Kyl or Jim Talent or someone like that. But I want a national security emphasis in the aftermath of the Istanbul attack, and the aftermath of Paris and Brussels and Orlando and San Bernardino. What do you think about that emphasis and those names and that thrust?
LA: Well, you know, we have to take care of our country, right? And the job of our government is to protect our rights. And they’re to protect the rights of all of us, and equally. That’s fundamental, right? But if what we think is in order to be kind to foreigners we have to take risks, well, that’s a luxury you can afford when you’re not in danger. And so I think that’s just right. Another thing I think is that we have to remember again, we get intoxicated, both parties, in my opinion, with the fact that we’re a very great and mighty power. And we underestimate the danger of war. It’s a vice that Winston Churchill never had. You know, he ran a great country in association with our country. His country, 50 years before, had been the greatest of countries. And he thought look at what war has become. I mean, these terror cells, right, they disrupt the whole country. And they do it often now. It’s a regular occurrence. And you go, you don’t know if the building you walk into is not going to blow up. Well, it’s a prime purpose of government to stop that. And you’re going to have to stop it by two means – by policing at home, including, in my opinion, policing immigration, and you’re going to have to stop it by going and getting these guys where they are and undoing them. And those two things should both be done efficiently and in a way to preserve the maximum freedom of the American people.
HH: And to that end, one last thing, on Senator Cotton, whom I know you know quite well, I have heard since I made that interview that he’s too young and he’s too inexperienced, and that Hillary Clinton is very experienced. Well, she’s experienced in losing Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood, Libya to ISIS, Syria to civil war and genocide, Iraq to civil war and genocide. I think we could use a little inexperience. I like the experience of killing terrorists at the front a platoon over her experience of failing everywhere.
LA: Yeah, and isn’t Tom, Senator Cotton, such a great Senator? You know, he does the most dramatic things. And what I like about his dramatic things, like writing a letter to the mullahs in Iran to remind them that this is an executive agreement, and it can be turned over by the Congress of the next president. That’s not a stunt. That’s what a Senator concerned with foreign affairs is given the specific authority to purview over, right? So he’s being a Senator in very striking ways, and I like that. And I think he’s good at his job.
HH: And so on that note, we direct you back to the Hillsdale Dialogues, www.hughforhillsdale.com. All of them are collected there. I remind you that on the July 4th celebration ahead, Dr. Arnn and I will be spending two hours, and now we will be doing it not only on every station you are listening now, but beginning on Monday on AM 860 in San Francisco, KTBR. We are taking that over, Salem hook and line, so you can listen to the first two hours as you drive about your morning celebrations on that Independence Day. But if you are going to be off that entire day, I think Dr. Arnn and I want to join in wishing you a happy 4th of July, a celebratory 4th of July, because it remains, Dr. Arnn, wouldn’t you agree, the best place to be in history right here, right now?
LA: Uh huh. May you live in interesting times, an old Chinese curse.
HH: And we are living in interesting times, but more importantly than interesting times, we’re living in free times, if we can keep it. What did Dr. Franklin say?
LA: A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.
HH: And is that apocryphal, or is that real?
LA: He said that.
HH: He said that, a republic if you can keep it, and he was a smart guy, wasn’t he?
LA: Wasn’t he, though?
HH: (laughing)
LA: Also shifty (laughing)
HH: Well, (laughing) and somewhat licentious as well. He was also, like Boris Johnson, quite an interesting character. Great men often are, unless they’re Washington. I mean, I don’t mean to say he’s not interesting, I just mean to say he was not, what’s the word I’m looking for?
LA: George Washington was the most self-restrained, self-controlled, utter crazy man in history.
HH: (laughing) Rectitudinous, but also wild.
LA: Oh, man, he had a temper that you could see it across a battlefield of 20,000 people. And the amazing thing is he controlled it.
HH: On that note, what a great, what a great thing to think about on the eve of the 4th of July weekend. Enjoy the weekend, enjoy the 4th. Come back and join us on Monday as we celebrate the life and thinking not of the founders and the framers, but of Dr. Harry Jaffa on the next Hugh Hewitt Show.
End of interview.
