Music
[upbeat music] [yells] [upbeat music]
Music
Ladies and gentlemen, uh,
Music
could I please have your attention? Can you dig it? [cheering]
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. Very excited for today’s guest, who I was… I had the pleasure of meeting when I was a special guest for a special edition of his excellent podcast, The Road to Now History podcast. But I first was introduced to his non-historical work when my daughter was a little girl and we used to, um, bang our heads on the dashboard to Kick Drum Heart from the Avett Brothers, where Bob Crawford, our guest today, is the bassist for the Grammy-nominated band. Like a lot of the more famous, um, bass players in, in rock and folk history, um, he’s also a historian on the sideline. And, um, [laughs] Bob’s new book is America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams from President to Political Maverick. Bob, welcome to The Remnant.
Bob Crawford
Jonah, as a,
Bob Crawford
a, as a regular listener to this program, it is an honor to be here, and yes, you and I and, and my co-host Ben Sawyer, we did a Road to Now episode live from the Tallah- Tallahassee Book Festival a couple years ago, I think it was, and that was a great time.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, that was fun.
Jonah Goldberg
I, I consider myself a very amateur student of American subcultures, and the Tallahassee book nerd hippie-
Jonah Goldberg
… was one that I did not anticipate [laughs] being there, but it was full of those kinds of people, lots of tie-dyed book readers.
Bob Crawford
Anytime you have a book festival that features The Flaming Lips as the nighttime entertainment, you know you’re in a little different territory.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, sort of out of the typical Jonah Goldberg comfort zone, but, uh, still, everyone was super nice, and it was really interesting, and, um, and you guys were gracious hosts. So really a pleasure to have you here. Sort of serendipitous. I saw you on TV, and I, I knew I had your email somewhere, so just like, “Hey, dude, I saw you on TV. Why aren’t you on my podcast?” And you said, “I’d love to come on,” so we have you on, and your book comes out as I was actually doing reading about the Whigs, so I’m particularly intrigued with all of this. So first question as per custom, what’s your book about?
Bob Crawford
My book is about America’s greatest public servant, John Quincy Adams. Not America’s greatest president, maybe America’s most extraordinary ex-president, but all in all, he is, I believe,
Bob Crawford
at least the 19th century’s greatest public servant of the United States, greatest public servant, if not our greatest public servant in the history of this country. And so he lived this life in three acts, I look at it. He was, of course, the
Bob Crawford
son of John and Abigail Adams. He is an eyewitness to the Battle of Bunker Hill. He goes to Paris with his father as his father’s negotiating France into the war and then peace with Great Britain. He travels across Europe as a young man. He’s kind of has an internship in diplomacy. He’s going to the opera with Thomas Jefferson. He’s, you know, tasting… He’s being exposed to exotic cuisines. He comes back, Harvard Boylston professor of rhetoric, senator from Massachusetts, a Federalist senator who breaks with his party and supports Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act, then has this incredible diplomatic career where he rises to the Office of Secretary of State under President James Monroe. He’s the architect… John Quincy Adams is the architect of the Monroe Doctrine, and then he has a failed one-term presidency, and after that, he goes into Congress for 17 years. And so I, my argument, which I feel is I stand on some solid ground, is that he is the United States’ greatest public servant
Bob Crawford
maybe of, of all time. Maybe, maybe of all time.
Jonah Goldberg
Jimmy Carter and J. Edgar Hoover fans are gonna keep coming at you with, with hot blood. [laughs]
Bob Crawford
Her- Herbert Hoover fans, right? Hoover, Herbert Hoover. Yes.
Jonah Goldberg
Oh yeah, Herbert… I apologize.
Jonah Goldberg
Herbert Hoover fans.
Bob Crawford
Well, yeah, because-
Jonah Goldberg
Very different. Yeah, yeah
Bob Crawford
… because of course I’ve gotten this question, right? Well, and oh, I, I normally preface it by saying, “With all due respect to Jimmy Carter,” who deserves… And, and people ask me like, “Well, who else?” And I say, “Herbert Hoover,” ’cause he lived a long time post-presidency, and he, he, I think he did humanitarian work. I’m not an expert in this area, but I think he did humanitarian work in, um, maybe during World War II, maybe after that. And the Republican Party, I mean, he was there at every convention, like, until his passing in the mid-’60s.
Jonah Goldberg
Well, also just as a public servant pre-presidency, he probably saved more lives than any president in American-
Jonah Goldberg
… you know, again, not as president, but the relief for these f- I guess, floods in Belgium and elsewhere, um, was a really a big, big deal as an engineer, as an engineering guy, but-
Bob Crawford
Well, we need to reassess what it means. Like, we are raised to believe that you rise to the top, right? Like, whatever field you’re gonna get yourself into, you know, we’re, we’re, we have this thing inside of us like we’ve, we’ve gotta get to the top. We gotta be the boss. We gotta be the, get to the best.
Bob Crawford
But I think when you have a true public servant, the top doesn’t really ma- there isn’t really a top. Like, the presidency is an office that youIn which you serve your country, you’re limited, right? You’re limited to eight years, and that is a time of service, and it would be really great to see more contemporary presidents continue to serve past their, their time in office. Wouldn’t it have been interesting to have seen a senator from Texas, George W. Bush, after his presidency or, or Illinois Governor Barack Obama or Ob- Obama in the House or even as a mayor, like, when Adams… He’s going into… He’s standing for Congress, right? He’s not running for Congress at this, in 1830. He’s standing for Congress and, um, his son and his wife were like, “How… This is… No, you can’t do this. This is embarrassing. This is a demotion.” And he says, “I would be the selectman of a town if the townspeople, if my constituents, uh, believed I could best serve them,” essentially. And so he helps us to… And with Hoover and Carter, they help us to rethink what, what it really means to serve.
Jonah Goldberg
Curious question, like,
Jonah Goldberg
’cause I was re- I, you know, I, I told you I was reading about the Whigs, and there’s this book by Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, that I’ve been reading. And I learned from that, that Adams spoke, I wanna say, seven languages, and he, he says that de Tocqueville was very impressed with how fluent he was in French.
Bob Crawford
Yes. Yes.
Jonah Goldberg
Which is pretty impressive. [laughs] And, and so you, when you think about who the most scholarly presidents were, he has gotta be in the top
Jonah Goldberg
five, if not the top three, if not number one. I mean, like, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard is, i- you know, who read Cicero in the original Latin for pleasure is, is pretty impressive.
Bob Crawford
Yeah, and Sean Wilentz points out, uh, that he, he brought the study of the German language to the United States. It cut both ways for him, you know, ’cause when he’s running for re-election in 1828, uh, I found newspaper articles from Virginia, uh, with op-eds saying, “We don’t need a professor in the White House. We don’t need a professor. We need a strong man. We need a Andrew Jackson. We need a leader, not a professor.” So he, what it did was it exposed how aloof he was from the American people during his time in the presidency.
Jonah Goldberg
I was just gonna say, why don’t we get into a little storytelling and just tell the story of his political, his political career, like, to the presidency, at the very least?
Bob Crawford
So Washington appoints him to his first diplomatic post. He’s a young man. His father appoints him to another diploma- you know, in fact, when Adams, when John Adams, his father, is taking over the presidency, he says to Washington, he’s like, “You know, I’m embarrassed to appoint my son. How would that look?” And Washington was like,
Bob Crawford
“No, your son is great.” Like, “We need, we need men like your son to serve, uh, abroad.” And because he spoke so many languages, he was an asset abro- like, as, as a diplomat. And so he serves, uh, uh, as a diplomat during Washington’s administration, during John Adams’ administration. When his father loses re-election, re-election to Thomas Jefferson, his father recalls him, and I think he was serving in Prussia at the time under his fa- his father’s administration. And, um, he wanted to save his son the embarrassment of being fired, you know, by his successor. But I don’t think Jefferson would have fired him. I, I, I believe that Jefferson would’ve kept him on in some diplomatic capacity. Well, so that’s when he comes home, and he goes into the Senate as a Federalist, and he immediately establishes himself as a Maverick because he goes against his party, and he supports Thomas Jefferson during the Embargo Act, kind of like, “Is the Louisiana Purchase constitutional?” Well, John Quincy Adams supported, uh, Jefferson in that and believed it was. And he gets drummed out of the party. He, he gets… They, they don’t choose to, to re-elect him, and he goes home. Well, James Madison comes into office and appoints him the first minister, US minister to Russia.
Bob Crawford
So he serves in Russia. He’s in Russia during the War of 1812, and when it’s time to negotiate peace, he is the leader of the commission at, for the Treaty of Ghent. And so he negotiates the Treaty of Ghent,
Bob Crawford
comes home, and he’s appointed James Monroe in… You know, James Monroe fancied himself a unifier. It was a time of, like, really one political party at this point.
Jonah Goldberg
The Era of Good Feelings.
Bob Crawford
The Era of Good Feelings, and what’s more of a good feeling thing for a president from Virginia to do than appoint the son of John Adams, the man from Massachusetts, his son as Secretary of State? And so Adams has what’s arguably one of the more successful two terms as a Secretary of State. He negotiates Florida into the United States. He assumes Spain’s claims to Oregon Territory. We almost get Cuba, but we don’t [laughs] and parts of Texas, but he has a very successful, uh, term as Secretary of State, and at the time, that’s the stepping stone to the presidency. But in 20- in 1824, when he’s standing for election to the presidency, you have four guys running for office. You have the, the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay. You have, uh, William H. Crawford, the Treasury Secretary, and you have Andrew Jackson, who is the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and has kind of begun to assume this role, this leader-Of this populist movement. White male suffrage is spreading and expanding. We’re, we’re beyond now just property holders having the right to vote. Now you have tradesmen and farmers in the South and in the growing West. And John Quincy Adams, he’s the establishment. And like we said, he’s a prof- he’s an egghead,
Bob Crawford
and he doesn’t get… He’s not perceived to get, uh, the common man, uh, and Andrew Jackson is beloved. In fact, I’m in Nashville, Tennessee, in a hotel this morning. Yesterday, Ben Sawyer, my podcast co-host, and I went to the Hermitage, uh, visited the Hermitage. Uh, my first time there, actually. Uh, and, uh, when you show up, it says, uh, “Andrew Jackson, president of the people.”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Bob Crawford
[laughs] Take that for what you will. But at the time, uh, Adams was seen as out of touch, and so we can get into the election of 1824 if you want to. Adam- Adams wins, but it’s one of the most controversial elections in our history.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. That’s where we get the corrupt bargain allegation-
Jonah Goldberg
… right?
Jonah Goldberg
So why don’t you explain what the corrupt bargain was and, um,
Jonah Goldberg
and whether you think it in fact happened.
Bob Crawford
Right. Yeah. You know, let me explain it first, and then we’ll, we’ll talk about this. Um, Andrew Jackson wins a plurality of the electoral vote and a plurality of the popular vote. He doesn’t win a majority. And again, you got four guys standing here for office, and based on the 12th Amendment,
Bob Crawford
the top three go to an election in the hou- in the, in Congress,
Bob Crawford
where… And in this election, and this is, I think this was John Eastman’s plan in 2020, throw the election into the House, right? He, Che- Ches- Chesbrough and, and Eastman. So based on the 12th Amendment, the top three vote getters go to a election in Congress where each state’s delegation gets one vote.
Bob Crawford
And so the top three were
Bob Crawford
Andrew Jackson,
Bob Crawford
John Quincy Adams, and William H. Crawford. By the way, Crawford had a stroke a year before this,
Bob Crawford
and he still wins Virginia and some of New York, [laughs] and, like, he still had a good chance of, of… Like, and he’s…
Bob Crawford
Really, apparently, it was a, a terrible stroke, and he, he does rehabilitate to a point. I think he serves as a judge after his time as Secretary of the Treasury. But, um, but he was pretty debilitated, and he had a shot at, at winning the White House. The man who’s not in this final top three is Henry Clay, so he can’t be president, but he can be kingmaker, right?
Bob Crawford
And there was no one, and I don’t know how much we want to get into this, but there was no one on earth,
Bob Crawford
two men who hated each other more than Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. Clay fancied himself the Star of the West. He was gonna be the first president from the… He was from Kentucky now at this time. Andrew Jackson’s from Tennessee. Now, he’s born in North Carolina, but, but, uh, lives in Tennessee. And, um, Clay wanted to be the first Western president, and it looked like, um, Jackson had, had stolen his thunder.
Bob Crawford
But there’s more to it,
Bob Crawford
because
Bob Crawford
General Andrew Jackson was down there, uh, fighting these Native American wars in Florida, Span- in s- what was then Spanish Florida. Monroe at some point during his tenure sends this very vague letter about maybe going into Florida, maybe not going into Florida. Like, if you see an opportunity. Like, it’s all very vague. Jackson, being the man he was, goes into Flor- into Spanish Florida and takes Pensacola, and he, um, puts two British mercenaries who are working with the Native Americans to death, creates an international incident. [laughs] Like, and this is when Adams is negotiating with Spain for Florida. Kind of makes Adams’ job a little bit easier. The rest of the Monroe cabinet and Congress, Henry Clay in particular, are up in arms. Like, I mean, he gets… They have, like, committee hearings about, uh, censuring, uh, Jackson. Uh, th- there’s pressure on Monroe to relieve him of his duty, and the only man actually who stands up for, for Andrew Jackson in this moment is John Quincy Adams. So fast-forward 2024,
Bob Crawford
Clay hates Jackson. He says something like, you know, Jackson’s the hero of the Battle of New Orleans. And, uh, Clay has a quote, “I can’t believe that murdering 2,500 British soldiers qualifies you to the highest office in the land.” You know, something to that respect.
Bob Crawford
So Clay didn’t want Jackson to be president, but Kentucky, the first go-around, Kentucky, his, their votes went to Andrew Jackson. So here we get down, we’re in the weeks before this vote in the House, and this un- you know, pretty much unprecedented vote in the House, and K- men from Kentucky begin to visit, friends of Clay begin to visit John Quincy Adams. And Adams
Bob Crawford
has this… If people don’t know about John Quincy Adams, he had a diary that was 14,000 pages long. It goes from the time he’s a teenager until right before his death in 1848, 80 year… Like, you know, this long diary. And he is-He’s a Puritan, right? He’s, comes from Puritan stock. He’s wordy. Let’s say he’s wordy, right? But when the guys from Kentucky come to visit him, he says, “We talked about men and things and events.” [laughs] And it’s all kind of vague, and
Bob Crawford
it does seem like
Bob Crawford
there was some kind of a, like, quid pro quo. And in fact, Clay and Adams get together in this time period twice. Once they’re at a, um… Uh, Lafayette had come back to the United States for his 50th anniversary, and they’re at a dinner in DC, and all the presidential candidates are at this dinner. And Clay and Adams are sitting next to each other, and they’re like, “Yeah, we’ll g- we’ll get together later and we’ll, we’ll talk.” And so the vote comes February 9th, 1825. The vote in the House comes. Adams wins. The votes for Kentucky and some other states flip
Bob Crawford
to J- from Andrew Jackson to John Quincy Adams.
Bob Crawford
Adams gets the 13 votes he needs at that time to secure the presidency. Well,
Bob Crawford
all is well and good. He asks Andrew Jackson to be his, uh, war secretary. Jackson declines.
Bob Crawford
He asks Henry Clay to be secretary of state, then seen as the, like I said, steppingstone to the presidency. And when Clay accepts, that is when the charges of corrupt bargain come,
Bob Crawford
uh, from the Jackson press, you know? The man most qualified to be secretary of state arguably was Henry Clay. I mean, so it’s, it’s really hard, but it, it didn’t look good at the time. Not only did it fuel
Bob Crawford
Jackson’s immediately running for a re-election in 2028, like, he’s immediately out of the gate running. It coalesced an opposition in Congress, and it was kind of the,
Bob Crawford
with Martin Van Buren’s help, it formed the Democratic Party.
Bob Crawford
The, the Democratic Party, not in ideology, but the Democratic Party that we pretty much still have today, you know, forms in this moment in the aftermath of this corrupt bargain.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, I mean, the way to think about it is,
Jonah Goldberg
like, Bush v Gore, right? You-
Jonah Goldberg
I don’t wanna argue with you about Bush v Gore, the case.
Bob Crawford
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
But, like, I think we can both agree it left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.
Bob Crawford
Yeah. Totally, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
And you just, you kick off your administration with this charge that
Jonah Goldberg
cheated,
Jonah Goldberg
or you won, you didn’t win fair and square or whatever. And, um, and so the, the corrupt bargain
Jonah Goldberg
just puts a taint on, on Adams’ whole presidency, which you can see as being at the birth of American populism to have one with an insi- uh, like, I’m a small R Republican. I wanna go back to smoke-filled rooms. I have no problem with, with these kinds of things, but-
Bob Crawford
I agree with you on smoke-filled room. We need to bring back the smoke-filled room. There’s just no doubt.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. But, like, you can see how at, at a moment of populist upheaval, having this deal between the teacher of rhetoric at Harvard and, you know, [laughs] and the speaker
Jonah Goldberg
makes it seem like the system’s rigged, right? Again, someone like Andrew Jackson. You know, I am, I am really deficient in my 19th century stuff, and I’ve been trying to fix it in the last year or two, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Andrew Jackson was a bad guy much earlier than I thought, and that… You know, ’cause I always knew about the, it’s probably apocryphal quote, you know, let… You know, the, the Supreme Court has made its decision. Now let, let ’em enforce it kinda thing.
Bob Crawford
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
But he did say things like that.
Jonah Goldberg
And that’s sort of what I knew for the most part about Jackson, that and the giant wheel of cheese outside of the White House. I, uh, wa- whatever. But, like, um, he defied orders in the War of 1812. He was, he was just a… He, he was a little Napoleon, um, from a very early age.
Bob Crawford
Yeah, and, but, like, okay, so he’s born in 17sev- 1767, Andrew Jackson’s born, the same year as John Quincy Adams. They’re born in the same year. They both experienced the American Revolution
Bob Crawford
in dramatically different ways.
Bob Crawford
Like I said, Adams is in Paris,
Bob Crawford
you know, hanging out with Jefferson, uh, going to the opera, you know, whatever, whatever they’re doing over there, being educated in, like, the finest schools, right?
Bob Crawford
Andrew Jackson’s in the Waxhaws, which is, like, this border region between North and South Carolina, and he’s like, like a, like a messenger for, like, his local militia, and he’s, gets smacked across the face by a British soldier, and he’s scarred for life. He loses his mother, his ch- and his, two of his brothers. Like, he’s an o- at the end of the Revolution, he’s an orphan, and he’s scarred from the British in his soul and, like, literally on his face. And he g- he wanders. He gets, like, an inheritance, like, some kind of an inheritance, and he goes to, uh, law school in Salisbury, North Carolina. And apparently he’s, like, throwing parties and hiring prostitutes, like, like, or some of the women that came to this party, like, they’re of ill repute. And he ha- he’s just, he’s wi… I mean, he’s, like, a, a young guy who’s lost, who has got a little bit of money, and just enough to get himself in trouble. But he fails upwards. He is just constantly failing upwards. And then he goes to Tennessee and he, he purchases land, and he gets into some bad land deals because of, like, the banks. So he’s, he’s, like, he’s scarred by the banks, like, at a, at a young age. What happens when he becomes president? Who is his… Look, there are Trump-Jackson things. They’re different. There’s a lot of Trump-Jackson that is nothing alike, right? But you can write a few op-eds probably about similarities. Like Steve BannonTaught Trump that he was like Andrew Jackson [laughs] essentially. Uh, and there are th- there are things, and there are, like, psychological things, like, like, there are the things that Trump does, uh, it’s because he was s- you know, it’s part of, like, his upbringing and, and things that happened to him, and… So anyway, so, uh, before I get down a rabbit hole that I, I forget what… where we started with this, uh, Andrew Jackson. Like, yeah, yes, he was a bad seed. Duels. Like, he carried lead in his body, like, from duels till the day he died.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, in New Orleans, at, at, at one point in New Orleans, he recruits from plantation owners-
Jonah Goldberg
… black slaves to-
Jonah Goldberg
… and he, he lets them believe that they’re gonna be freed if they do military service, and then he gives them back to the- their slave masters. I mean, just gross stuff. So,
Jonah Goldberg
a- and I, I, I bring this up because, uh, you’re, you… I mean, you’re obviously right that this,
Jonah Goldberg
this leads to the creation of the Democratic Party. When I was growing up, the
Jonah Goldberg
party used to have these Jefferson-Jackson dinners, and Jackson was considered sort of the equal co-founder of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party, in more recent years, has kind of shed that, you know, for kind of obvious reasons. But Jackson is essentially responsible for creation of the other major party, too, which is the Whig Party, which is-
Bob Crawford
The opposition, right?
Jonah Goldberg
The opposition. It’s, it’s v- it’s, it’s, it’s funny. You know, I, I make this point about the 20th century often that one of the things that we, generally in the 20th century, we have this much more ideological understanding of what parties are about, and so we miss a lot of stuff that isn’t necessarily about ideology, even in the 20th century. So, like, when I was trying to get a handle on what the old Right in America believed, you know, these guys prior to the World War II, I would r-
Jonah Goldberg
start looking for this old Right, and I couldn’t figure out what
Jonah Goldberg
made most of them Right wing. And, and then when you broaden it out, like, there were a lot of people that were simply called Right wing in the 1930s ’cause they didn’t like FDR. And it didn’t really matter what the ideological attack was, it just meant that you were anti-FDR, because to be anti-FDR meant you were anti-Democrat, and the Democrats were the good guys, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we see this today, too, is like there are a lot of, there are a lot of anti-Trump people, you know, you know my opinions about Trump, but there are a lot of anti-Trump people
Jonah Goldberg
who basically have come to define being…
Jonah Goldberg
that whatever Trump believes defines what it means to be Right wing. And the reality is, is that on a bunch of discrete issues,
Jonah Goldberg
he’s moved the Republican Party leftward. You know, like, like the Republican Party is, is a de facto pro-choice party now. Still much more restrictionist than the Democratic Party, but much more, you know, tolerant of restrictions in, in, you know, at the state level and all that. But it is a, it’s a nominally pro-choice party now. He’s in favor of all this industrial policy stuff that, you know, the Democrats were much more the party of protectionism prior to Trump. And there’s a reason why JD Vance and these people talk about Elizabeth Warren’s program being good and Lena Khan being great and all these kinds of things.
Jonah Goldberg
there is this tendency in American politics to think that parties
Jonah Goldberg
are these coherent avatars of ideological positions when ideology’s important, but, like, personality and cults of personality are really important. And Jackson’s control of the Democratic Party tr- was a cult of personality about Jackson, so if you loved Jackson, you were a Democrat, and if you hated Jackson, you were a Whig, and then you figured out some of the arguments later.
Bob Crawford
The Whigs, well, first of all, I coined this with Ben [laughs] yesterday. I think I coined this. Iran is a theocracy. Trump is a meocracy. [laughs] But look, the Whig Party had Puritans, right? Reformers, reformers, religious evangelical reformers, and nullifiers,
Bob Crawford
people from South Carolina, the vice president, John C. Calhoun, at the time, the Adams’ vice president, and then Jackson’s, uh, vice president for a little while. South Carolina didn’t wanna pay the tariff, so South Carolina was in revolt. Jackson marched, was about to march troops, took, sent troops to Charleston to collect the, the tariff. They didn’t come to blows. But there were a group in South Carolina called nullifiers, nullificationists, and that if there was a federal law that they didn’t agree, that a state, they believed it was constitutionally sound that if, if there was a federal law that a state did not agree with, they did not have to follow it. And so you had people like… And this is like a nullification isn’t secession, but it’s the precursor to secession. And so you had
Bob Crawford
nullifiers and evangelical reformers, people who believed in [laughs]… You had people from South Carolina who didn’t wanna pay a tariff in the same party with people in the North, uh, evangelicals, who believed that we should spend taxpayer money to fund roads, bridges, and canals, and schools, and things like that. So we talk about, like, odd bedfellows.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, or like the FDR coalition, it had Klansmen and progressive communist Jews and Blacks [laughs] from New York City in the same coalition, you know? Majority, also majority coalitions by definition have competing factions in them. That’s why they’re majorities. It’s like small minority coalitions are coherent because that’s why they’re a minority. All right, but we should, we should move to Adams’ post-presidency, ’cause I mean, that’s sort of a big part of your case about him being this great public servant. I think to the extent-Most listeners who
Jonah Goldberg
know anything about John Quincy Adams, it’s probably from the movie Amistad, right? It’s probably, uh, that he’s, uh, he’s anti-slavery, but I-I… Is it fair to call him an abolitionist? Is that-
Bob Crawford
No, it is not. He is not an aboli- He would be so pissed off right now if he heard you call him [laughs] an abolitionist.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs] Well, didn’t I ask? I knew that.
Bob Crawford
I know, yes.
Jonah Goldberg
I knew it was complicated ’cause he had, he had criticisms of the abolitionists as going too far.
Bob Crawford
Although-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Bob Crawford
… the further he gets, the more he, in line he comes with… Like, he, he gets to a point where
Bob Crawford
he feels more comfortable in a room full of abolitionists and hanging out, like in Philadelphia, he- 1837, uh, at one point, he goes, he s-sees… It’s his birthday. He’s in Philadelphia. He’s hanging out with Benjamin Lundy, who’s this Quaker abolitionist. Like, they kind of… Like, Adams was notoriously cold. He was a very cold man. He would have some glasses of Madeira be at a dinner party, and he would hold court, and he loved that. He loved that kind of stuff. But, but he was, like, his, his son said, Charles Francis Adams said that, “My father wears an iron mask,” you know? But with, like, these abolitionists, like, you could just tell in his writing, like, there are tender bonds. There is a closeness. He respects their genuineness and their integrity and their morality, and Adams was a self-righteously, supremely moral man, and to the point to a fault, right? And I think he sees in some of these abolitionists, he, he recognizes that, and he really respects it, and they’re coming from a different educational, uh, place than he is. They’re not as, like, not as well-read, not as well whatever, well, well-versed, but he sees in them a kindred spirit. Uh, so there’s this o- one moment, like, his birthday, he’s in Philadelphia, 1837. He’s hanging out with Lundy, and they go hang out with the, the Motts, Lucretia Mott and her husband, famous abolitionists, right? And he’s writing about it in his diary later, and he’s, like, talking about how, what a great time he had and the conversation and the anti-slavery conversation. He’s like, “The only embarrassment about the night was that I did too much talking,” like, “I did all the talking,” like, kind of thing.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Bob Crawford
And then after they left the Motts, he and Lundy hang out for another couple hours and, like, continue talking and late into the night. But Adams, and even after this point, 1839, he, uh, writes these letters to his constituents in the newspaper. He writes these, like… Really, they were letters to the nation, but he framed them in, like, a letter to my constituents, and he takes the abolitionists to task. He cuts them down to the quick ’cause he’s like, “Y- It’s emancipation. It’s not gonna happen. You guys are foolish. You’re a bunch of, like… Ev- The rest of the country thinks you’re weirdos because not only are you asking for immediate abolition, which is not practical, but you are, you know, talking about women’s rights, and you’re talking about no God, and you’re talking about all this stuff.” And he just, he just rips them to shreds. So, like, one minute, like, they are begging him to be the spokesman for their movement. The next minute, he, they are condemning him for chastising them publicly and whipping them, browbeating them. But when you get to the Amistad, which is
Bob Crawford
about a year after he writes this letter, he writes this letter to his constituents, and he completely takes… Well, he takes the abolitionists to task, and he also, in the same letter, takes the South to task. Like, he, he’s cut- he’s just cutting everybody down,
Bob Crawford
and then the Amistad happens, and is… For those who don’t know, I imagine most, most people do, but for those who don’t, the Interna- the international slave trade was banned in, like, I don’t know, it was 1807, something like that.
Bob Crawford
But slave traders would do this thing called slave laundering. They would
Bob Crawford
capture people in Africa, and this, this particular group of people, uh, from the Amistad, they were from what is present, present-day Sierra Leone. They would take them to Cuba, which was Spanish-held.
Bob Crawford
They would land them in Cuba. They would forge their paperwork and then land them in another part of Cuba and say they came from Cuba. “Oh, these, these are Cuban slaves. They’re not… They’re, you know, domestic to, to Cuba.” Well, what happened with the Amistad is they land them on Cuba. They forge their paperwork. They’re going to land them again on another part of Cuba, and there’s a mutiny,
Bob Crawford
uh, they kill the mutiny. The captives kill the captain and the cook, and the actual enslavers, the Spanish men, um, Ru- Ruiz and Montes, who, who first purchased the enslaved people, the captives make them sail the ship, and they say, “Take us back to Africa.” So i- during the day, they would go west. At night, they would go north and east,
Bob Crawford
and they, they’re wandering. Eventually, the ship is spotted by a American, uh, uh, vessel, American cutter off the coast of Long Island,
Bob Crawford
and it is boarded. And they realize, like, oh, this is a, a mutiny, and they take them into Connecticut, into port in Connecticut, and there are a series of trials. This, the Amistad, like, reinvigorates the abolitionist movement because what happens between 1836 when A- when… 1837, when Martin Vier- Van Buren takes office, is because of the banking policies of Andrew Jackson, the country is thrown into a terrible depression,
Bob Crawford
and so-The abolitionist movement was being funded, like solely funded by the Tappan Brothers, these two mercantilists from New York and so they lost a lot of money. The movement kinda goes bankrupt.
Bob Crawford
Adams dis- eviscerates them in the press. It, it looks like it’s kinda all over for them, the abolitionist movement and then the Amistad happens and it becomes
Bob Crawford
like the biggest story in the country.
Bob Crawford
And it kinda reinvig- it, it like coalesces the abolitionist movement to defend these captives, right? And the case goes through the courts, the federal court system, it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court and Lewis Tappan approaches John Quincy Adams to argue the case between, before the Supreme Court. So that is kind of like the moment of the Amistad and that is when Adams stands before the Supreme Court, a Supreme Court, uh, made up of mostly ins- slaveholders, and he points to the Declaration of Independence in his closing arguments and he says, “If this document is true,
Bob Crawford
these men are free.” And he wins the case and he wins these men’s freedom. And it is that moment that the failed president of 1828, the failed one-term president is, who didn’t have the gift of gab and didn’t have the common touch, he didn’t have the feel your pain-ness, right, that so many of the best presidents have, he becomes a folk hero to the American people in the North. And it, it’s kind of, I look at that as, as the Amistad being the redemption of John Quincy Adams, the failed one-term president.
Jonah Goldberg
So he’s not an abolitionist.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, like i- in some ways, uh, this is one of the points that Hal makes in his book about the Whigs, is that in many ways…
Jonah Goldberg
So John Quincy Adams is the oldest of the Whigs, right? He doesn’t, it takes a while for him to join the party. He’s l- from an earlier generation, really.
Bob Crawford
Jonah, and he’s never, if you, when you read his diary, every time a presidential election is coming up, he’s ripping ev- he doesn’t, I don’t think he votes. Like, in 1836, I don’t think he voted for any- I don’t know if he voted for… In 1840. Like, he, he, every time, doesn’t matter who’s running for w- in what party, he eviscerates all the candidates.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have j- I, I have a great deal of sympathy for that.
Bob Crawford
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
What was it Roosevelt’s daughter said? You know, if you don’t have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me.
Bob Crawford
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
No, but w- one of the points Hal makes is that in many ways, Adams’s personality was kind of a, a manifestation of the w- the, the, the nature of W- Whigism generally, that it was full of a lot of contradictions, in part because it, it em- emphasized the importance of balance between competing concerns, right? It was this… And also, it was wrapped up in
Jonah Goldberg
the formal art of rhetoric, which we now don’t really recognize as a form of literature, but we did back then. Like, it’s like the speeches of Henry Clay at the time were seen as like the greatest contributions to American literature, and now because we’ve denigrated what rhetoric means, we don’t think of it in those kinds of terms. But, um, when I try to f- figure out what a lot of these people,
Jonah Goldberg
what a lot of the Whigs believed, I mean, the Southern Whigs were different than Northern Whigs and all of these kinds of things, but, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, first of all, the abolitionists, as you describe them, were right, right? They, like,
Jonah Goldberg
you could actually give women rights. You actually could free slaves. [laughs]
Bob Crawford
[laughs] Right.
Jonah Goldberg
You know, just, um-
Bob Crawford
And they were a minority of a minority. And they were looked at as being the wackos. Like, they were-
Jonah Goldberg
Right
Bob Crawford
… like the, ’cause no one hated abolitionists w- more than Northerners.
Jonah Goldberg
‘Cause they were sort of, they were sort of like the vegans of their day. They just wouldn’t shut up about it, right?
Bob Crawford
And many of them were. They were Grahamites.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs] Well, there you go. Um, what, what, I mean, he was anti-slavery, but not an abolitionist, so what, what, what actually is his
Jonah Goldberg
positive vision about what slavery, what, what the policy on slavery should be?
Bob Crawford
He does at one point lay out a constitutional amendment to end slavery, and it’s one of these
Bob Crawford
so many 20 years, 25 years, and th- this and this and this. And it wasn’t practical, but it was a, a plan. Okay, first of all,
Bob Crawford
t- to dip back to a rabbit hole, he writes about having a bunch of these ab- these congressional abolitionist, like, the anti-slavery congr- congressmen over to dinner and he, and he says about them, he’s like, “They don’t drink wine. They don’t eat meat.” [laughs] Like, it was… Okay, anyway. Adams was a defender of freedom of speech. That’s where he thought he could serve the movement best. Because, and I can’t believe we haven’t talked about this, but when he was in Congress in 1836, Jonah, if you and I want to talk to our congressman or we have something to say, we will go online, we’ll send a email to their office, we’ll call them, we’ll call maybe their local office, maybe we’ll call them in DC. Maybe if we’re in DC, we’ll stop by their office, right?
Bob Crawford
The First Amendment to the Constitution
Bob Crawford
allows for us to petition our government for a redress of grievances. We talked about the higher the quality of the r- of the speeches and the speech-making, right? Uh, this is the golden age of the Senate. What we would do as citizens is we would send a petition to our congressman.
Bob Crawford
It could be Mr. Goldberg from Washington, DC is, uh, praying for the, um, for the fulfillment of his father’s Revolutionary War potentia- pa- uh, pension.And then it would be sent to a committee, right? This or that.
Bob Crawford
The anti-slavery movement
Bob Crawford
feels like this is their in.
Bob Crawford
They begin to flood Congress with anti-slavery petitions.
Bob Crawford
And many of them, because it was understood that the Congress had no ability to mess with slavery in the states where it already existed,
Bob Crawford
but Congress had power over territories, of which DC was a federally controlled district. And so a lot of these anti-slavery petitions, like the protest, was a petition to end slavery in Washington, DC.
Bob Crawford
And there were a handful of congressmen who would read these. One was John Quincy Adams.
Bob Crawford
And he would even say sometimes, he would say, “I don’t agree with this petition. I got 15 petitions here. They’re all of the same character, so I’m gonna read this one from 12 ladies from, you know, my district,” and he would read it. By 1836, these things are starting to show up at the Capitol by the wagonload,
Bob Crawford
and they’re really starting to annoy Southern congressmen
Bob Crawford
because what is happening in South Carolina, Denmark Vesey uprising. What happens in, uh, Virginia, Nat Turner uprising. Like, we can get into what started all this, but, like, it’s beginning to get a little paranoid in the South about their enslaved property. And they’re, they know that these speeches being made and these petitions,
Bob Crawford
people, well, enslaved people are hearing about them, and they realize they have allies.
Bob Crawford
And so, Southern congressmen get together with their Northern allies, and they pass something known as the Gag
Bob Crawford
Rule. And in the most basic form, it basically, you could not no longer m- you could no longer mention slavery on the floor of Congress. And these petitions, when they were arrived, they would be not read,
Bob Crawford
not printed. They would be immediately tabled
Bob Crawford
with, like they never existed. And that was that, that moment radicalizes John Quincy Adams in 1836 because
Bob Crawford
it goes from being an issue about slavery, which he abhorred, but he couldn’t figure there, he knew there was no solution for it. He, in 1820, when we’re talking about the Missouri Com- when the debate over the Missouri Compromise is going on, he’s confessing in his diary that the only way slavery is gonna end in the United States is through a civil or servile war. There’s no other way that it’s gonna end. He doesn’t really have a s- no one really has a solution for how emancipation would look before the Civil War. The most radical abolitionists, they said, “Immediate emancipation now, and we’ll figure it out.” Like, Go- like, it’s the right… Slavery is a sin, so it’s gotta stop. And what comes next? We’re gonna figure that out. So Adams,
Bob Crawford
after the Gag Rule, his sole purpose is to end the Gag Rule because he’s like, “Now you’re talking about freedom of speech. Now you’re talking about the First Amendment.” And so he becomes this arch defender of the Constitution and the First Amendment, and that, that… And when they, when the abolitionists come to him and say, “Be our leader. Speak for us,” he says, “I can do more for you defending the First Amendment and your right to petition the government, ’cause once I become one of you, I become small.”
Jonah Goldberg
So it, it’s a really interesting point, and you’re right, we should’ve gotten to it earlier because it’s so central to his post-presidency. It also, like, one of the things I appreciate about it is there are a bunch of people on the, the new right who
Jonah Goldberg
support what they call common good constitutionalism or some version thereof, right? And their critique is that originalism or textualism, all of these things are insufficient because the Constitution itself is a morally neutral document
Jonah Goldberg
that, um, is just about proceduralism,
Jonah Goldberg
and this enrages me. I mean, there are a lot of things that these people say that enrage me, but this, probably more than almost anything else intellectually, I find it so offensive because
Jonah Goldberg
you start going through the Bill of Rights about
Jonah Goldberg
the, the rights, the, the, the rights and privileges that we are granted as American citizens, they are not morally neutral, right? I mean, the, your right to a fair trial is not morally neutral. It’s like one of the most hard-won, hard-learned lessons of the last thousand years, right? The, the right to confront your accuser, the right to be safe in your possessions in your home, these are not morally neutral. These are, like, the cornerstones of a decent society. And, you know, I, I recently had this, I recently did this episode you mighta like, might like, um, about Hannah Arendt, and part of Hannah Arendt’s argument is that truth is, final truth, consensus on truth is gonna be really, really hard in any society. But what is required is conversation, right, is discussion, is free speech. And the idea that free speech has no moral content to it, is just this utterly neutral thing, is preposterous because the, the right to petition government and the right to speak out about your grievances
Jonah Goldberg
is the only path short of war, short of violence, that allows you to pursue moral ends, you know, and, and persuade your fellow man about stuff. And, like, so, like, I’m very sympathetic to that ’cause l- I think Adams was right. If he had become an abolitionist-It’s sort of like the hardcore lefties who say they’re for free speech, but only in the context of the issues they care about, or the hardcore right-wingers who say they’re only for free speech, but it’s only for, like, the right to make post-Nazi memes, you know? [laughs] Not to criticize them. If you actually defend the process itself, you’re creating an opportunity for the better argument to win.
Bob Crawford
So the abolitionists, they really held the Declaration of Independence… Like, they made it sacred, right? It bec- it, it was, it became a sacred document for them,
Bob Crawford
and the ideals of-
Jonah Goldberg
And that’s the tradition Lincoln is drawing on, right?
Bob Crawford
Right.
Jonah Goldberg
In the Gettysburg Address, yeah.
Bob Crawford
Yes, yes. And so a- for Adams, it was like
Bob Crawford
two halves of the whole, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Bob Crawford
Unrestrained liberty,
Bob Crawford
unrestrained democracy, right, is chaotic and ultimately dangerous.
Bob Crawford
The Constitution
Bob Crawford
is the, is the rules. It c- it puts all of the idealism
Bob Crawford
into a,
Bob Crawford
a form. It creates a form for it. Uh, so that, that protects and defends and restrains, and restrains. Like, that’s what I, I think of in response to what, when you’re talking about the, the, the morality of the, of the Constitution, you know? I think Adams… You know, Adams would talk about the Three-Fifths Compromise,
Bob Crawford
and he would say in, when he was in Congress, he would say, “You know, it’s a bargain. It was a bargain.” He’s like, “I wouldn’t make that bargain if, if I was there and, uh, if we had to do it again. I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. But it’s a bargain, and so I’m gonna adhere to it.” But you mentioned Lincoln,
Bob Crawford
and so the day the gag rule was passed in May of 1836,
Bob Crawford
the next item on the agenda, war rations
Bob Crawford
for the victims of Native American incursions and war in Alabama and Georgia. Okay? So there’s been Native American wars in Alabama and Georgia. It’s like we would think of like terrorist attacks, right, on, on white settlers who were on their land probably. But so Congress is voting to send them food and aid. So they just passed this rule where you can’t mention slavery on the floor of Congress, and Adams gets up to speak on these war rations. And he says, “I’m gonna vote for this
Bob Crawford
’cause I think it’s the right thing to do. It’s moral. But I don’t know where the Constitution gives us the right, the ability to send these people aid.”
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Bob Crawford
He’s like, “Unless it’s in the war powers. It’s within our war powers.” Similar, and I’m condensing this amazing speech so, that you can find online in, in books. He says, uh, “You know, come to think of it, in the case of a civil war or a servile war,
Bob Crawford
the Congress or the executive may have to negotiate peace. And in doing so,
Bob Crawford
they may have to free enslaved pe- free slaves. Free the slaves as part of that emancipation.”
Bob Crawford
And he, so he draws out this whole argument of how the same power, if we, if we have the power to send aid as Congress, which he doubts we do, if we do have that ability, it’s in our war powers.
Bob Crawford
It is held in within our war powers. And you say we can’t interfere with slavery in the states where it exists, but maybe we can. And maybe it’s in our war powers. And this is the s- same argument that Lincoln will use with the Emancipation Proclamation.
Jonah Goldberg
I am sure your,
Jonah Goldberg
a lot of your talk radio interviews and that kind of thing, people are like, they hit you with the, “What does this mean for today?” kinda questions. And I kinda hate those questions [laughs] because I kind of, uh… But at the same time, I, I understand, you know, for people. Do you think there is,
Jonah Goldberg
um, a path that you can see, right? We can all just sort of imagine things, but, uh, but do you think there’s an actual path for the kind of
Jonah Goldberg
statesmanship and political leadership that John Quincy Adams led
Jonah Goldberg
coming back into fashion in the United States these days? It’s, it feels like it’s gonna be a long ride before it does.
Bob Crawford
It will only look like that if it comes from the right,
Bob Crawford
right? It’s like if pe- when people have a- they’ve asked me this question and they, but they’ll, they’ll say, um, “Who is John Quincy Adams today?” Like, that’s a good one I get. I say it’s John McCain with the 3:00 AM thumbs down defeating the signature legisla- legislation of the man who defeated him for the presidency, uh, uh, de- defending that, you know, defending that. Um, but now imagine John McCain had been president before that, or Liz Cheney after January 6th, but imagine she had been the president. You know, that, like, the thing about the Adams story, the John Quincy Adams story, okay, first of all, it touches, like, Washington appoints him to his first diplomatic post. He serves alongside Lincoln in Congress. I mean, oh my God, like, he’s the bridge
Bob Crawford
between these two eras. Like, you’re talking about like, “Yeah, I need to go back over my 19th century. I, you know, I, I, Jackson, eh, I know a little bit,” but it’s because we don’t learn it. Like, it’s not one of the highlights. The highlights, you’re gonna hit the highlights, Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War II, Great Depression. You know? So
Bob Crawford
this is a time when there’s no leaders, right? There’s no unifying figure. So Adams is kind of the man standing in the gap.For that time period.
Bob Crawford
It feels like we’re in that, a moment like that. We don’t know, ’cause we can’t see what’s around the corner, but we have been kinda leaderless for a while, for a long time, I think in this country, you know? And so without that, a leader for good, right? [laughs] Like in a, it’s so, it’s so arbitrary, right? Like, we could say, like, you know, looking back on it,
Bob Crawford
whether you elect him or not, Reagan was a, a positive force for this nation, or you could say that about Bill Clinton. Like may- maybe, you know, it’s, it’s so hard, but I know, I think it’s pretty easy to say that right now that Trump is not a force for good. I, I mean, I think, I think that, I think even if you support him, you know, you just look at, like,
Bob Crawford
trashing the Pope or saying you’re glad Robert Mueller’s dead or sending out, uh, memes of yourself as Jesus Christ, uh, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
One shorthand for that, I think, look, and I, I think some of this re- some of these sort of rhetorical approaches can be taken too far, but, like,
Jonah Goldberg
what parent would raise their ki- tell, tell their kids, “You wanna be like him one day,” right? “You should be, you should behave like, like…” Ask yourself, what would Donald Trump do, and do it. Like, no parent, I don’t care how much-
Jonah Goldberg
… how MAGA you are-
Bob Crawford
That’s right
Jonah Goldberg
… you wouldn’t do that, right? You know?
Bob Crawford
The, the MAGA parents are telling their kids,
Bob Crawford
“Share,
Bob Crawford
don’t s- you know, [laughs] steal, be respectful.” Like, they’re telling their kids. I, I know that.
Jonah Goldberg
You’re not Jesus. [laughs]
Bob Crawford
No, no. It’s not Jesus. We’re not Jesus. Nope. Mm-mm.
Jonah Goldberg
And, uh, I don’t know, but, like, there are aspects… So I was a big Daniel Patrick Moynihan fan. There’s this famous line about
Jonah Goldberg
Jews in America, that they live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. One could say the same thing [laughs] about Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Senate, is that he wrote like John Quincy Adams with this, you know, as this serious scholar, but he voted sort of party line. Nonetheless, he was a serious person who made serious arguments in the public space, and we have less of that. My friend Ben Sasse, I think, you know, who’s struggling these days, a, a great sign about
Jonah Goldberg
Ben was he was so ecstatic that he, he requested
Jonah Goldberg
Moynihan’s desk in the Senate, because
Jonah Goldberg
Ben also cares about making, like, serious arguments about serious things and all of that. But I feel like the Jacksonians have just swamped
Jonah Goldberg
the party for the time being, and it’s just a lot of populism and not a lot of well-considered argumentation and, you know, drawing of careful distinctions going on.
Bob Crawford
The thing that has made me s- like, well, well, no, I have no optimism about what you’re talking about, like, like, that we’re gonna have the leaders who will rhetorically articulate a positive vision of the future for this nation. Like, I don’t-
Jonah Goldberg
Or even a grownup vision, right? Or just like, here are some choices that people have to make kind of vision. It’s be- I’d be settled for that in a heartbeat.
Bob Crawford
If you take the meocracy out of Trump, and you just go to, like, the policies, a more coherent policy on immigration.
Bob Crawford
Mm, most people agree on, like 80% of the country agrees about that. [laughs] Like, like, or, or, you know, healthcare and, like, there are so many things that we all agree on, and, but yet, but, but yet there’s arguments over the funding healthcare, will it hurt businesses or, like whatever. Like, there’s, like you talk, like, the practical arguments that a civil society will have formulating policy. I have, I’m, have limited optimism that, that that’s gonna get any better anytime soon. Where I’ve had more optimism is that the, like, like we as a nation collectively put Donald Trump in office for his second, his first term, and then his second term. Like, we, we made that decision. Like, maybe I didn’t personally make that decision, maybe you didn’t make that decision, but we as an American body electorate, corporately, we made that decision. And I, I feel like the American
Bob Crawford
body [laughs] has seen things in the past year that they’re like, [inhales] “Hm, yeah, Minnesota. Hm. Nah, I don’t, I don’t like that.” Like, just to like, like, like, water hoses on people fighting for the right to vote in the fif- ’60s. Like, seeing that, it’s kinda like [inhales]
Bob Crawford
it took it too far. It just took it too far for a lot of people. And so I do feel like, just like the populous brought us into this, the populous will bring us out of this, is what I feel like. But who will be at the front of the parade? And, you know, can we get away from the memification of politics, right? Like, yeah, who needs Henry Clay’s two-hour speech? And by the way,
Bob Crawford
for you and everyone out there listening, uh, I encourage you to read Margaret Bayard Smith. She was a Washington socialite in the 1820s and ’30s, and she was friends with, she was friends with Madison, she was friends with Jefferson, she was friends with Clay, and she gives the greatest, uh, description of going, everybody… Like, if Clay was gonna give a speech, the house was packed. And she tells stories of, like, the ladies, like, sitting in a middle row, and it’s going on for, like, 45 minutes, an hour, and men are putting oranges, bags of oranges on poles and hanging them, like, so the women can grab the oranges for, like, sustenance during this long speech. Like, the descriptions, it, it puts you, it just makes us all human. Like, it puts you there. And she talks about, like, after one of, like, Clay gives a speech, and he’s done, and the poor fellow who’s g- the poor no-name backbench congressman after him is getting up to speak, and everybody leaves.Right? [laughs] For this guy. And she, uh, is sitting on the steps outside the Capitol, and Henry Clay comes out, and he sits right next to her, and they’re just talking. And he’s like, you know, and it just, like…
Bob Crawford
What is this book about? What is my book about? Uh, John Quincy Adams, uh, president, political maverick. It’s about history doesn’t repeat. Human beings don’t change. We’re the same people, and that’s what I discovered writing this book. Like, people are gonna read this book, and they’re gonna see very familiar faces or very familiar types. And, uh, it’s because we’re… Like, like, here you and I are hundreds of miles away from each other, but it’s like we’re in the same room. Technology advances. Medicine advances. Look at Artemis II. Like, we can do, we can do great things, but our hearts and our souls are what they are, and they’ve always been the same thing.
Jonah Goldberg
Underneath it all, you’re a closet conservative ’cause the essence of conservatism is, uh, human nature has no history.
Bob Crawford
Somebody asked me, “Was John Quincy Adams a liberal or conservative?” And I, I said, “He’s conser- I thought he was a very conservative man.” And then, you know, he had a failed presidency because in his first Emmanuel message, he, w- which is, for people listening, that’s like the State of the Union, uh, back then. He tells c- the fellow congressman, he s- or he tells congressman, he says, um, “Look, Europe is, is investing in infrastructure and technology.” So he lays out this program of federally funded roads, bridges, and canals, uh, a national university, which was always Washington’s dream, and a naval academy, and lighthouses of the sky, which are telescopes for scientific research. And so this guy, like, so I’m doing this book event, and I’m like… The, the guy looks at me. He’s like, “Yeah, he was a tax-and-spend liberal, right?” [laughs] Doomed his presidency, by the way.
Jonah Goldberg
Well, it’s funny. So, uh, like, um, there’s this book that I bring up from time to time on here that I’m increasingly sympathetic to, not in every regard, but, um, called The Myth of Left and Right. And one of the
Jonah Goldberg
really useful historical takeaways I got from it was that, which I guess maybe I knew intuitively, but I never really thought about the right way,
Jonah Goldberg
is that basically nobody in the 19th century talked about left and right in America.
Bob Crawford
Okay.
Jonah Goldberg
These were not categories-
Bob Crawford
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… that people thought in, right?
Jonah Goldberg
And I have big arguments with people I respect a great deal about how much left and right are real and important categories and how much they should help us, you know, how much of a prism we should use them as. But I think one thing is, is absolutely clear, is that the left-right thing does make people a little intellectually lazy, and ’cause it’s just such an easy sorting mechanism. And so then when you go back and you look at the 19th century, and you try to figure out what’s going on, you actually have to like, “Well, wait a second. This guy is 22% left-wing on this and 58% left-wing on that, and, and 100% right-wing on this other thing,” because the terms left-wing and right-wing really don’t mean very much in the American context of the 19th century. And it’s the self-sorting by left and right in the 20th century that it just makes it easier to follow it as, like, shirts versus skins kind of stuff. But it’s like,
Jonah Goldberg
I, I think it’s one of the reasons why we don’t know a lot about the 19th century in America, is because-
Jonah Goldberg
… we’re, we have this sort of, these lazy,
Jonah Goldberg
easy prisms that we throw things into. And when we try to do history… It’s like trying to get kids to figure out what the Glorious Revolution was about in England. It’s just very hard for them to get their heads around because
Jonah Goldberg
there’s n- there’s none of those, like, uh,
Jonah Goldberg
the, the training wheels that come with just sort of ideological categorization of left-right.
Bob Crawford
Every newspaper in the 1830s and ’40s was partisan.
Bob Crawford
Like, every, every newspaper was partisan. Like, there was no… Like, everything was MSNBC now or Fox News. Like, there, there, there, there wa- there wasn’t, like, a,
Bob Crawford
a CNN, right? Or, like, as much as… Like, like, there, there, there were… That, that idea of a impartial media landscape didn’t exist. Idea of a media landscape didn’t exist, really. But, so do you think… May I ask you a question? [laughs] Like, like, do you think the self-sorting aspect is a, is a part of media in the 20th century, like, the, of the changing landscape of media and, like, radio and television and, and, uh, you know, definitely the internet for sure? Like, that is, like, an accelerant on self-sorting.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, no, I, I, I do. I mean, I, I think you’re right. You know, uh, like, there was definitely partisan pr- you know, the press was a partisan thing. And, and we think of that today as, like, thinking, like, the press was inherently
Jonah Goldberg
corrupt and bad, and that’s not really true, right? I mean, there were, there were some, like, crazy partisan press, but there was also some, like, responsible partisan press. And, like, when a responsible democratic paper criticized the Democrat, it meant something, right? But, you know, de Tocqueville talks about this in Democracy in America. He says, you know, the key to Ame- understanding America is association, and the, and the key organ of association are newspapers. They were the things that formed kinda communities, and he thought that was a positive and a good thing. And so you don’t get the idea of the objective press. Really, it starts with the telegraph and then accelerates with radio and then finally with TV where you get this fully formed idea, which is a very American… And it’s kind of related to the, the Henry Adams s- talk about technology. But, um,
Jonah Goldberg
oh, if you just put a camera on stuff, you don’t need an interpreter, right? You don’t need someoneTelling you the significance of something, you can see it for yourself, and we can be objective, and you are there, right? And that was sort of the, the worldview, the epistemology that goes into Cronkite’s closing on CBS Evening News, where he says, “And that’s the way it is.”
Bob Crawford
That’s the way it is.
Jonah Goldberg
Right?
Bob Crawford
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
And, um, and I think that one of the things a lot of people in America don’t understand is that,
Jonah Goldberg
that i- that ideal of the objective press
Jonah Goldberg
was, uh, really a construct of a certain moment in American history that was made possible by technology and massive consensus formed from the New Deal and then World War II. And you had a big establishment where a handful of media organizations, basically in one square mile of Manhattan, controlled 80% of the press and d- controlled the messaging. And
Jonah Goldberg
one of the benefits of all that was that if you were a big newspaper or a big television network,
Jonah Goldberg
and 30% of your audience was serious Republican and serious, 30% of your audience was serious Democrat, it actually imposed on you, as a market thing, a certain amount of responsibility to be down the middle.
Jonah Goldberg
And now we live in this era where, you know, everyone is fighting for the sticky 2% or 4% of the market, and that causes people to tell their audiences what they wanna hear, rather than what they need to hear. And, you know, our view at The Dispatch, you know, this little startup that we’ve got, is that if we’re not pissing off 30% of our readers on any given day, we’re doing something wrong. Because the whole point is that we wanna be able to be trusted, and, uh, to tell a, telling people what they don’t wanna hear from time to time. And so I think that’s a big part of it. I think another big part of it, I mean, uh, the smoke-filled room thing is a big part of it. The weakness of the parties has caused, and of Congress, um, have caused a lot of institutions outside of politics, outside of the parties,
Jonah Goldberg
to do party functions. And that’s bad too, because the whole Madisonian scheme was to impose
Jonah Goldberg
s- compromises on the members of the coalition, but now if you’re the NRA or Planned Parenthood, you’re doing direct appeals to your funders. You d- you have 100% position for your people, and you can do voter mobilization, voter education, all of these things based on, um, your single issue thing, rather than the big… The whole point of parties was like, you know, ranchers and farmers disagreed with each other about a lot of things, but they agreed with each other more than they agreed with bankers and railroad dudes. And so you have a party coalition where you’re like, “Hey, look, you give in 30% on this, you’ll get 70% of a loaf, but we gotta do right by the, you know, it’s gotta be this mutual thing.” And now people don’t, the, the institutions that form these coalitions are all maximalist. Like, the NRA is 100% on their position. They don’t wanna compromise. They stop giving to Democrats. And, uh, and I, you know, MS now, try to put a m- a modestly conserv- You can put a b- You can put a conservative person on MS now
Jonah Goldberg
to beat the crap out of Donald Trump. You cannot put them… Like, Charlie Sykes used to be on there. You know, he’s as anti-Trump as I am or as anybody, and whenever he would start saying, “But, you know, actually I think the Trump tax cuts, there’s some, there’s an argument for him,” the audience would freak out and scream, you know, “What are you having this, this, this fascist on for?” And you can see the same thing at Fox. Like, you can, i- it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s…
Jonah Goldberg
Everything is through this, again, this prism of pro-Trump and anti-Trump, rather than, like, any idea- ideas and arguments. And-
Bob Crawford
Does it-
Jonah Goldberg
We got to get past it, and I don’t know how. You know?
Bob Crawford
Does it… Uh, well, I mean, Trump will… I, I don’t believe he’s Jesus. I, I don’t believe he’ll… I think he will pass away at some point, either naturally-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, either for constitutional or actuarial reasons, he’s gonna go away. Yeah
Bob Crawford
… but natural, like, as we a- as we all will. Um-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Bob Crawford
… so w- does it, do we, do we fall into, I mean, it’ll never go back to the way it was. It can’t. But, but do we fall into something more, uh,
Bob Crawford
less i- d, less being driven by a, a icon, or I’ll push my m-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I mean, it’ll-
Bob Crawford
… miocracy? [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
I think po- post-Trump will be less stupid. Um-
Bob Crawford
It sh- it should be, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. No, it will be, and I, I think the cult of this idea that JD Vance is this unique talent who’s gonna take over the party is, is wildly exaggerated. But my problem, and we, we, you know, I didn’t invite you on to, to interview me, although I’m happy to talk about this stuff.
Bob Crawford
Oh, I love it.
Jonah Goldberg
I’ve come to the conclusion, people have heard me say this a million times now, but that I want the Democratic Party to become a sane party, in part because I’ve come to the conclusion you can’t have just one sane party. You need two sane parties.
Bob Crawford
Yes, you do. Absolutely.
Jonah Goldberg
Because if, if one party’s insane, it gives permission to the other party to be just slightly less insane or more insane in some other way. And the GOP will not come to grips with sanity unless the median voter says, “Well, you know, the Democrats aren’t that scary. Look, they’re kinda responsible people.” And similarly, the, the GOP is not gonna win the median voter in a post-Trump era if it’s taken over by the Star Wars cantina that is the Mar-a-Lago crowd. And so, like, I’m very sympathetic to people like Rahm Emanuel. I don’t agree with him on a lot. He’s too liberal for me on a lot of issues.
Bob Crawford
I have to say, yeah-
Jonah Goldberg
But he’s a grown-up.
Bob Crawford
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
You know?
Bob Crawford
Yeah. Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
And, and he’s willing to say shut up to the dumbest parts of his own base, which I really appreciate. And that’s what the Republican Party needs, is someone to say to the base, “Hey, look, you guys are not the party. There’s a reason you’re called the base, is ’cause we have to build on top of you to have a majority. So, like, get with the program.” But I think some of those fixes can’t come unless the, the, there’s, like, some actual institutional things that need to be done. Like, we have to fix primaries. We have to figure out something about, I mean, uh, uh, I’m of mixed mind about campaign finance stuff, because I think there are constitutional issues on one side of it. But as long, when the parties lost the control of the purse strings-That was a huge problem for the democracy, and, and we got to figure out a way to keep people from stupid game shows and reality shows from running for president.
Bob Crawford
Yeah. Yeah, and, and we can’t, we can’t have this illusion post-Trump that, um, we’re gonna all get along. Like, that, that’s not gonna… Like, the parties need to be opposed to each other, and, and politics is okay, and politics has always been a little dirty. So, like, we can’t, we can’t be looking for this, like, utopian society where we gentlemanly disagree about, you know, this or that.
Jonah Goldberg
That was the lesson of the era of good feelings, is that-
Bob Crawford
Right [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
… without, without a party, you can’t hold one set of people account- accountable. You can’t organize people for a shared goal, because then no one knows, like, what team they’re on. You know, like, you can’t have a baseball league with only one baseball team. You need another [laughs] team to play against, you know?
Bob Crawford
It inspires corruption within the, within the party. And I, I just, I describe in, in my book, I describe it as, like, the, um, real- the cabinet, the Monroe cabinet, it was the era of good feelings, but that was branding, and it was really the Real Housewives. Like, it was like a Real Housewives vi- vibe going on in that cabinet, because there was a lot of backstabbing, and a lot of dirty dealing going on. And, and to the point where William H. Crawford, Treasury Secretary, and James Monroe come to blows, almost come to blows in the, in the executive office, where, uh, Crawford raises his cane at, uh, Monroe, and Monroe picks up a fireplace poker. And like, you know. So I mean, yeah, you need, we need to have, uh, differing opinions. And politics is politics ’cause people are people. And, and people,
Bob Crawford
they just, they do people things.
Jonah Goldberg
Democracy is about disagreement, not about agreement. Spencer Cox, who I think is part, i- you know, is the governor of Utah on the way out, um,
Jonah Goldberg
is one of those guys who I think is, wants to be part of the solution rather than the problem, and he, he had this campaign about disagreeing better, right? I mean, like, the whole point of the Constitution is to foster positive disagreement, where people argue about what the best thing for the country is, not… And we need to get back to that sort of conception of things. And that’s sort of the John Quincy Adams point about the gag rule, too, is, right, we need to make, make… People have a right to make their arguments.
Bob Crawford
People have a right to say crazy things.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. And with that, uh, Bob Crawford, thank you so much for doing this. I’m gonna have some colleagues who are gonna be very mad at me that I didn’t ask you all sorts of questions about the Abbott brothers, and, um, I keep forgetting, my friend Mike Warren wanted me to ask you about the album Mignonette, but I’m not gonna do that.
Bob Crawford
Oh, man. Well, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Bob Crawford
Let’s do another, let’s do another two hours. Let’s do it.
Jonah Goldberg
For sure. But thanks again, and, um, and I, I hope to have you back, man.
Bob Crawford
Oh, anytime, man. Anytime. And I’m a big fan of The Remnant, big fan of The Dispatch. You guys are doing great work.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, Bob Crawford has left the, uh, uh, left the studio, and, um, I feel like we should just play some, we should roll out to some Kick Drum Heart or something like that. It’s a fun book. You know, I only got this idea to have him on when I saw him on TV last week, and between moving and all of this, I have not… I, I, I, I read the intro, and I, I scanned around for the various things that I’m interested in, but I have not read the whole thing. But he’s a good writer. You know, for, for a guy who came, he was truly an amateur historian in some ways, uh, um, he knows his stuff. He does his homework. Um, I was really impressed with him when I met him, you know, um, at that Tallahassee, uh, book festival thing. And just a super nice guy, and, you know, a great musician, which is something that you cannot say about a lot of our guests. I mean, maybe,
Jonah Goldberg
maybe Harvey Mansfield plays a crazy jazz flute that I don’t know about, and he can do some serious Jethro Tull, J- Jethro Tull action that I’m unaware of. Anyway, there you have it. Uh, no further great observations to have, because we went so long. Um, but thanks for listening. Thanks again to Bob. And do get America’s Founding Son: John Quincy Adams- From President to Political Maverick. And thank you all for listening, and I will see you next time.
Bob Crawford
No, you won’t. This is a podcast. [upbeat music]
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
[upbeat music]