Jeffrey Rosen

Jeffrey Rosen:

Unless citizens can take the time to educate themselves, take the time to read, understand the importance of the separation of power, study history, so we realize how easy it is to surrender to a silver-tongued demagogue than we'll go the way of every previous republic in history.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is Jeffrey Rosen, 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. Jeff is known for his deep expertise on constitutional law in American history. In this thoughtful conversation, he explores how our founding principles can still guide us today. He argues that self-discipline and a commitment to learning aren't just personal virtues—they're essential to a healthy democracy. In fact, from his perspective, reading might be the most patriotic thing you can do. We unpack the real meaning behind the famous phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," and trace the evolution of executive power over the last century, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt. You're in for a great conversation.

So Jeff, you're the head of the only constitutionally chartered institution devoted to civic education, which is kind of amazing just in its own right. But can you—for our listeners who are unfamiliar, what is the National Constitution Center and why was it created?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Thanks so much for asking. I love to recite our mission statement at the beginning of all of our programs, so I'm going to do that. It comes from the charter that Congress passed in 1988 during the bicentennial of the Constitution. And it says that the National Constitution Center's the only institution in America chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the US Constitution among the American people on a nonpartisan basis. And we take that nonpartisan charter so seriously and on all of our programs and podcasts and educational material, we bring together liberals and conservatives to explore areas of agreement and disagreement about the US Constitution. The core of our educational platform is called the Interactive Constitution. We launched it in 2015. It's gotten more than 90 million hits since we launched, and it's among the most Googled constitution in the world. And you can go to the website, constitutioncenter.org, click on any clause of the constitution, and find liberal and conservative scholars exploring areas of agreement and disagreement.

It's just an incredibly rich resource and that same model, we do on the We the People podcast that I host every week that brings together liberals and conservatives. Finally—I know I sound like a Ginsu knife salesman, but there's more—

Ted Roosevelt V:

[laughter] Not at all.

Jeffrey Rosen:

The Constitution Center is also this amazing building, right on Independence Mall, across from Independence Hall, with the most inspiring view of the hall in America with a hall of the framers. You can see life-size statues of the framers and see what they look like and touch them and get a sense of what it felt like in the room where it happened. It's just the most inspiring constitutional temple in America. It's a kind of sacred space devoted to the study and appreciation and debate about the Constitution. So that's what the Constitution Center does. It's an honor to be part of it.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So Jeff, what you're talking about here is really the nuances of the interpretation of the Constitution, which as you point out is just sort of almost endless in the number of conversations you can have. I'm curious about the basics of the Constitution as a starting point, what powers each branch has, because I don't get the sense that that's something that's as broadly understood in our country today as it ought to be. What is your opinion about the basic understanding of the constitution that Americans have?

Jeffrey Rosen:

That's a great question. For America's 250, we decided to distill the big ideas of the Declaration and the Constitution and came up with three ideas for the Declaration and three for the Constitution. The Declaration big ideas are: liberty, equality and government by consent, and the constitution's big ideas are: separation of powers, federalism, and the Bill of Rights. Americans don't understand them very well. We see all the time the polls that suggest that more Americans can name the three stooges than the three branches of government and civic knowledge is going down. I mean, it's a national crisis that we don't have a better understanding of the basic ideas of the separation of powers. What's the big idea? The big idea is that the president's not a king. He doesn't have all the power. He can't put people in jail because he doesn't like them, or tell judges how to rule, or send troops into war without congressional consent.

And if the President doesn't have all the power, who has the power? "We the people"—that's the language of the preamble. We the people have the power. We parcel some of it out to the federal government and some to the states. That's called federalism. What happens when there's a clash between the will of the people, represented by the Constitution, and the will of our representatives, embodied in ordinary laws or statutes? Well, when there's a clash, then judges are supposed to favor the will of the people, not the representatives, the principal to the agent. And then there was one other big idea, the Bill of Rights—Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of an establishment of religion, or abridging freedom of speech or the press. The Fourth Amendment rights of unreasonable searches and seizures. Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. The Bill of Rights doesn't create those rights.

Those come from God or nature, not from government. Many of them are natural and unalienable. And in fact, James Madison thought a Bill of Rights was unnecessary or dangerous. Unnecessary because the Constitution itself is a bill of rights—it constrains Congress's power and gives Congress no power to abridge speech. And our natural rights are so broad that you couldn't possibly reduce them to a short list. But in the face of opposition from anti-Federalists, Madison changed his mind. He was a practical politician at all times, and he came to think that a Bill of Rights could be extra security for rights, so that's why we got the Bill of Rights and that's why we have separation of powers and federalism and there we've just done it. We just did the entire Constitution.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Jeff, did Madison—he must have explicitly talked about some of the other unalienable rights that are not outlined in the Bill of Rights. Can you remind us of what some of those are?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Well, that's one of the most controversial questions in all of America. What are those unalienable rights?

Ted Roosevelt V:

I didn't even know that.

Jeffrey Rosen:

Of course, the Declaration of Independence says that our unalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That raises the question, what's an unalienable right? Madison thought it's a right that can't be alienated or surrendered to government during the transition from the state of nature to civil society. Madison defines an unalienable right, he says: because the opinions of men being dependent on evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot be controlled by other men. In other words, I can't surrender to you the power to control my thoughts or opinions because I can't entirely control them myself. They're the product of my reason, and that's why freedom of conscience is the first of all the unalienable rights. In addition to that, we have the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What's the pursuit of happiness? It's the right of self mastery. The right to live according to virtue and reason rather than immediate impulse control. Now, once you get beyond those basic rights of conscience, life, liberty, and happiness, the question of what are the other rights? People disagreed a lot about this. It has led to the biggest battles over constitutional interpretation of the past 200 years, and people disagree about how to identify them.

Ted Roosevelt V:

How does one square maybe originalism with this idea of unalienable rights that extend beyond what is explicitly written in the Constitution?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Well, it's so interesting. Originalism is not opposed to unalienable rights. That was the original, right? I mean, the Declaration of Independence begins by saying that we have natural rights that come from God or nature. All the framers agree on this. Justice Thomas, as it happened, himself is one of the biggest proponents of using the Declaration and natural rights as a baseline for interpreting the Constitution. Justice Thomas's view is that the Declaration creates a presumption of limited government power and then we should strictly construe government power to ensure liberty. But the framers didn't agree on that. There was a huge debate between Hamilton and Jefferson on precisely this question. And Jefferson wanted to construe the Constitution strictly to prevent the federal government from doing anything that wasn't explicitly enumerated. Hamilton says, we should construe the Constitution liberally to allow Congress to carry out its broad purposes within the spirit of the original document.

That debate came before the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Marshall sided with Hamilton, not with Jefferson, and upheld the Bank of the United States. And ever since then, great nationalists—John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, Lincoln, FDR, and on the current Supreme Court, John Roberts, whose hero is John Marshall—have favored Hamilton's approach, not Jefferson's approach. Indeed, even Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas disagree about this central question. Scalia called himself a Hamiltonian who thought that congressional power should be construed liberally. Justice Thomas is a Jeffersonian who thinks it should be construed strictly. I have a new book coming out about—it's called The Pursuit of Liberty: How the Battle between Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America. And I note that from the very beginning, originalists and strict constructionists disagreed. The central question in American law, as in American politics, is not between originalism and non-originalism. It's between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Does it give you any comfort that this is a conflict that's maybe embedded in the Constitution and is meant to be something that we're wrestling with?

Jeffrey Rosen:

That's a great way to put it. And yes, it does give me comfort. I was so struck in the course of looking at American history about how this essential conflict went back to the beginning and the fact that presidents, political parties, and Supreme Court justices have disagreed from the beginning about the relationship between liberty and power suggests that it's a productive tension that's meant to continue. And that's why it's so important to recognize this debate as something that's hardwired into the system and has to be maintained.

Ted Roosevelt V:

There is another counterbalance to the fraying of the threads of society that you talk about, which is kind of pointing back to the pursuit of happiness. And it actually means something different than a cursory reading of what those words might suggest. It's more of a mindfulness, a right to mindfulness than it is a right to maybe what we might define happiness as. Can you explain that better than I asked this question?

Jeffrey Rosen:

No, you asked it very well, and I like right to mindfulness. That's a good way of summing it up. I set out during COVID to figure out the original understanding of the pursuit of happiness, and I was inspired to do this by discovering Thomas Jefferson's reading list, and he has this incredible reading list where he suggests getting up every morning before dawn, reading moral philosophy for two hours, watching the sunrise, then you read ancient history and political philosophy, then lunch, then science and math, then you have dinner, then you can have some Shakespeare and light poetry for mild amusement and then go to bed. So I don't know what got into me, but it was COVID and we had more time. I decided just to read the books of moral philosophy. These are books like Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Epictetus, Seneca's Letters, and then Enlightenment philosophers like Hutchison and Locke and David Hume.

But I got up early. I read moral philosophy, I watched the sunrise, and really what I learned came as a revelation. I learned as you suggested, that for the founders, happiness meant not feeling good, but being good. Not the pursuit of immediate pleasure, but the pursuit of long-term mindfulness as you put it, or lifelong learning is another way to put it. And by lifelong learning and mindfulness, they meant using our powers of reason to moderate or modulate our unreasonable passions and emotions so we can achieve that calm tranquility or mindfulness that defines virtue. For them, virtue was a synonym for happiness and virtue included the classical virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. Those were all virtues of the soul of the mind, that calm tranquility, not trying to control the thoughts or emotions of others, but focusing on the only thing we can control, which is our own thoughts and emotions, which is the Stoic dichotomy of control and maintaining that kind of calm tranquility that allows us to be totally tuned in every moment so we can focus on helping others and on productive work. And that's why they put so much emphasis on individual lifelong learning and self-mastery as the key to keeping the republic.

Ted Roosevelt V:

As I hear you give that answer, I'm wondering what caused the decline in our awareness of this and my mind jumped to capitalism as a juxtaposed system to it, or at least capitalism as it works today in our society. Do you feel like that is congruent with these ideas or countercurrent or juxtaposed to these ideas?

Jeffrey Rosen:

On the one hand, the sociologist Max Weber noted the deep connection between the capitalist spirit and the Puritan ethos of self-improvement. And he emphasized that the Puritan notion of self-improvement and self-mastery in order to prove the glory of God and as well as establishing one's own ultimate justification is similar to the ethos of capitalism, which requires self-sacrifice, self-mastery, and individual self-improvement in order to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. On the other hand, the sociologist Daniel Bell in a great book called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism noted that the rise of consumer capitalism that puts an emphasis not on being a citizen but of being a consumer and puts the gratification of our immediate desires and by buying consumer goods above things like delayed gratification and self-sacrifice seems to undermine the very emphasis on self-mastery that capitalism needs to sustain itself.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So I want to talk about why it's important because it's been in the room but hasn't necessarily been explicit in this conversation. And there's a TR quote, which is: "In a republic like ours, the average citizen is the only sovereign and he must therefore be able to rule himself." And it leads into this idea that the core ingredient to self-governance is a mindful, well-educated citizenry. Why is that so important in your mind?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Washington thought that without it, the Republic would collapse. His warning, in the farewell address, is that unless citizens can take the time to do two things, we'll go the way of Greece and Rome and succumb to dictators and Caesarism. First, we've got to study the politics of government and the principles of the Constitution. And second, we have to study the habits of civil deliberation and dialogue, how to disagree without being disagreeable, how to listen to differing points of view. TR is the most inspiring, modern example of a president who lived that mindful approach. He was such a deep reader. There is an amazing letter that he wrote in 1903 to the president of Columbia, recalling the 124 books in English and French he'd read since taking oath of office. The list begins with parts of Herodotus, the first and seventh book of Thucydides, all of Polybius, a little of Plutarch, Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, Sophocles's Seven Against Thebes, Euripedes's Hippolytus and Bacchae, and Aristophanes's Frogs, parts of the politics of Aristotle. That's just the beginning of his list. He did that while he was in the White House and then TR founds the entire new nationalism on the idea of using the Hamiltonian means of a robust national government and federal power to achieve the Jeffersonian ends of curbing the corporations and ensuring industrial democracy.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I wonder if at the core... if a citizenry of a self-governed republic's individual character is a prerequisite for good governance, is the inverse true? Is it true that if we have a broken republic, that that is inherently a reflection of a citizenry with poor moral character?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Yes, it is. Because citizenry that doesn't take the time to educate itself will succumb to demagogues and dictators and will go the way of ancient Rome. The new book on Hamilton and Jefferson begins with the following scene: Hamilton is at Jefferson's house for dinner. At some point, Hamilton says to Jefferson, who are those three guys on the wall? And Jefferson says, those are my three examples of the greatest men in history: John Locke, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. And Hamilton pauses for a long time, and then he says, the greatest man in history was Julius Caesar and this convinces Jefferson that Hamilton is for a monarchy based on corruption, and he wants to resurrect Caesarism in America. And he founds the entire Democratic Republican party in opposition to the supposed Caesarism of Hamilton, the Federalist. Now Hamilton was almost certainly joking because he, like Jefferson, fears a Caesar.

He thinks that the Caesar will come from below rather than above, and he thinks that a future president will take advantage of a foreign policy crisis and install himself as a dictator for life. So in other words, the entire Constitution is set up to prevent the temptation of people who are misled by demagogues to subvert liberty and allow would-be Caesars to subvert democratic elections and consolidate power and establish themselves as kings. Unless citizens can take the time to educate themselves, take the time to read, understand the importance of the separation of power, study history, so we realize how easy it is to surrender to a silver-tongued demagogue, then we'll go the way of every previous republic in history.

Ted Roosevelt V:

This is not necessarily binary, right? It's something that happens over time, this slide into an authoritarian rule, and there has been another tension that's been going on for over a hundred years, which is the power of the US President. And in many ways, I think a lot of historians would actually point to TR as the beginning of the expansion of the executive office. Do you see this as a long-term secular trend that we're living in right now or is it something else?

Jeffrey Rosen:

It is a long-term secular trend, and I do think that TR is largely responsible for the creation of the modern plebiscitary presidency. It's TR in 1912 who says, I believe in pure democracy. He embraces a series of populist reforms including direct primaries for president and the direct collection of senators's popular initiatives, recall, and referenda. He denounces the Supreme Court, he calls out justices by name and says that their decision should be overturned by majority vote. And most importantly, TR says that the president should be a steward of the people. TR says that the president can do anything that the Constitution doesn't explicitly forbid. And then when that's combined with this idea that the president is the only steward of the people who alone has a national election and represents the popular will, that vastly expands presidential power. Of course, the vast expansion of presidential power is not all the fault of TR. It's exacerbated by media technologies they couldn't have imagined, like the radio under FDR and then TV. And also by the increasing complacence of Congress, which as it becomes increasingly polarized, has ceded vast amounts of authority to the president and increasingly deferential judiciary, which has blessed this broad expansion of presidential power. So there's plenty of blame to go around, but there's no question that the modern presidency has vastly expanded in ways that would've made even Alexander Hamilton blush.

Ted Roosevelt V:

What is the constitutional off-ramp for an imperial presidency? What is the counterbalance here? Is it the people? Is it Congress?

Jeffrey Rosen:

The constitutional check or off-ramp is supposed to be all of the above. Congress checking the President by exercising its independent prerogatives, a judiciary, federalism—a division of power between the national and state governments—and of course ultimately the people who will exercise their will at elections. But at no point did the framers ever imagine that the president or any branch of government or any government official would actually channel and embody and be a stand-in for the popular will.

Ted Roosevelt V:

How familiar do you think our elected officials are with the Constitution?

Jeffrey Rosen:

It's easy to be glib, but the truth is I've been impressed by what deep readers in history our recent presidents are and our presidents throughout history. I was so struck by the number of presidents who actually read the primary sources of Hamilton and Jefferson, and even wrote by biographies or books about Hamilton and Jefferson, and they include John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren (who wrote the first political history of the United States), James Garfield, who reads the works of Hamilton in the law library and leads a Hamiltonian revival in the Reconstruction and Gilded Age. Of course, Lincoln, who gets it from The Columbian Orator as Frederick Douglass did. Read through TR's reading list, you can find it online—listeners, if he could do it while he was president, surely we can while we're doing our browsing and our silly surfing every day. William Howard Taft and Wilson and TR in the election of 1912 are all historians who've written books or biographies on Hamilton and are all Hamiltonians. These are not just casual students of the history of the Constitution, but often historians themselves and they're deep readers, and I know that there are deep readers on both sides in Congress today. Now, being a deep reader in history doesn't mean you won't succumb to great partisanship and negative polarization and want to own the libs, and it doesn't ensure virtuous behavior if virtue is defined by moderation and temperance. But it does ensure we at least have a chance of learning lessons of history and try to prevent ourselves from descending into violence.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And I think just to tie it back in, I mean to a certain degree it may be driven by the citizenry and the lack of understanding that the citizenry has. Is that fair?

Jeffrey Rosen:

All of it is driven by the citizenry. We, the people, have the ultimate power and responsibility. Unless we take the time to educate ourselves, which is hard work—You don't have to spend two hours every morning, but you got to spend some time reading. There's a lot to learn—and unless people take the time to learn the lessons of history, we're going to go the way of ancient Rome and convince ourselves that the immediate gratification of some bill or another and the fact that we hate the other side is an excuse for not voting for virtuous leaders who will serve the public interest, who will set aside their ego-based desires, who won't promise us cheap luxuries and discounts and giveaways, but instead ask us to sacrifice on behalf of the common good. If we don't learn about history and educate ourselves, we're going to do just what every previous citizenry has done and give it all up for the sake of immediate gratification.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So at this point, you're no longer living by Jefferson's demanding reading regimen, but how are you living your life differently based on the lessons you learned during COVID?

Jeffrey Rosen:

It really is an hourly effort to maintain focus and temperance and moderation, and not to get too caught up in the daily news. Thomas Jefferson said, I've given up newspapers for Tacitus in the morning and I feel much better. I'm not allowed to browse until I've read. And I wake up and of course I'm addicted to these things, so I'm tempted to check email. But then I think here I've become this virtue monger. I'm going around talking about the importance of deep reading. That would be ridiculous. I can't break this rule. I have to swipe left to the Kindle and not right to email or blogs. So the fact that it's a rule and a habit and it takes place first thing in the morning and it's not an option is what made the difference for me.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Given all the reading that you've done, and I'm looking for sort of practical suggestions for our listeners, but where would you encourage everybody to start this journey?

Jeffrey Rosen:

I'm a huge evangelist for primary texts and primary sources. I think it's a great opportunity and it's also necessary to read the sources themselves. Certainly starting with the founding is a good place to begin. So after reading the Constitution and the Declaration themselves, read the Federalist Papers. You can read Marcus Aurelius for the founding era. You can read John Quincy Adams's speech on the Jubilee of the Constitution in 1839, which predicts the Civil War and sets out the clash between Hamilton and Jefferson as the core of all party politics. You can read Frederick Douglass and it's all about storytelling. So find a story that engages you. That's my suggestion. A half hour or an hour, set it aside, say you're not allowed to do anything else and you've got to read and don't put the book down.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I mean, I feel like if I was going to sum up everything you've said and I will not do a good job, I do go back to that TR quote again, which is "the average citizen is the only sovereign. He/She must therefore be able to rule themselves." That seems to be the key takeaway. Does that feel like a good summary?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Great summary. TR put it extremely well, and he's absolutely right, and it's a very optimistic and empowering message.

We live in a marvelous time. For all the challenges we face, how lucky we are to live in a world where all of these sources, all these beautiful books from all the ages, all the wisdom of the ages, is free and online. What a privilege it is to have this incredible opportunity to spend so much of our time learning and growing in a way that previous generations could only dream of. We have an opportunity. All we need is the self-discipline to do it. And I have complete faith as I travel around the country talking to Americans of different backgrounds in red and blue America. There's a hunger for this kind of learning and also an awful lot of people are practicing it. So to join in this crusade for lifelong learning and self-mastery is such an exciting opportunity and it fills me with optimism in the years ahead.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Well, I love that call to action and a question we ask everybody on this podcast, but I feel like we've circled it, if not directly answered it. What is it to be a good citizen?

Jeffrey Rosen:

Being a good citizen means being a lifelong learner.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I love that. And we've asked that question 45 times now of various people, and that's actually the first time somebody has approached it that way. And I think it's a really helpful take on that question. So thank you very, very much.

Jeffrey Rosen:

Thank you so much. Great conversation.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Jeffrey Rosen, thank you for everything you do at the Constitution Center and for such a rich conversation. The depth of your insights is a testament to the virtuous life you lead. Listeners, if you're looking for your next podcast, check out We the People, Jeff's weekly show of constitutional debate and grab a copy of his book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.

Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.