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Pilgrims, Totalitarians, And Babies: A Conversation With Hillsdale College’s Larry Arnn

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Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript from a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour with Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, for the 1620 Project. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

John Daniel Davidson: Welcome to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I’m your host, John Davidson, political editor at The Federalist, and I’m joined today by Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, which I should say at the outset, full disclosure, is my alma mater—class of 2004. Dr. Arnn, welcome to the program today.

Larry Arnn: Great to be with you, John.

JDD: We’re going to talk about The Federalist’s 1620 Project, which we launched just before Thanksgiving, a series of essays, podcasts, interviews, and articles about the landing at Plymouth Rock, about the Pilgrims, the Mayflower Compact, and really the beginning of the American story. Dr. Arnn, I wanted to have you come on and talk to us about that, not just because Hillsdale College has played, especially in recent years, such a big role in reviving the ideas and the spirit of the American Founding, but also because we’re living in a time when the spirit of the American founding in the mainstream culture is not necessarily something to revere, or something that’s considered salutary, but as maybe something that we should apologize for. So maybe we can just begin there. And the obvious comparison to our 1620 Project would be the New York Times’ 1619 Project. If you could maybe just start off our discussion with a comment about the distinction between the frame of the 1619 Project and something like our 1620 Project.

LA: Well, the 1619 Project is an exercise in despotism of the kind described in the novel “1984.” Their initial position was they discovered the true key to the American Founding. But it turns out that claim is nonsense on its face, as was proved by the very noble efforts for example of Gordon Wood, a very distinguished historian. And so now their position is that was a posture that they took to affect the present. And the whole thing in “1984” is that the past is malleable, and we can use the past, the past is in our control. What is the doctrine of the Big Brother regime? “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.” So you know, this temper is evident everywhere in America. Scholarship, academic things, you’re supposed to begin by looking at the thing that you’re trying to understand and gain a better understanding. Journalism is supposed to be the story of the day, what happened today—as it truly happened. So we now are all in a contest, who can be powerful? The purpose of the New York Times’ project, on its face, is to exercise and influence a power on the future. Not to tell a truth about the past.

JDD: That’s right. It strikes me as fundamentally political, not historical. It’s not really related to the purposes of journalism, but it’s also not really related to the purposes of history, because it is fundamentally a political project and is concerned, like much of the left, with power, as you say. That’s not what we’re trying to do. And as our publisher, Ben Domenech, noted in our opening 1620 introductory essay, the purpose of the 1620 Project isn’t to refute the 1619 Project, because the 1619 Project is self-refuting, and has already been repudiated by its own creators after getting push-back. They sort of walk back their claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, which is ridiculous and was called out by many historians as such.

But that leaves us with the 1620 Project and the importance of 1620. And I wanted to talk to you especially about the interplay or the correct understanding of 1620 together with 1776, the nation’s Founding. I think that we have to look back to the Mayflower Compact, and we have to look back to those first Pilgrims who arrived in 1620 as the start of an American project, as a nascent American project, but that our true founding as a nation belongs to and will always be 1776. Maybe you can comment on the interplay and the relationship between these two momentous dates and how they affect one another.

LA: Well the Declaration of Independence is of course a culmination, a beautiful culmination, of 150 years of learning on the new continent. The Mayflower Compact is arguably the first deliberate act, let us say, act of legislation, of common policymaking in the New World. And it’s extremely telling. I like to say that if you want to understand the American Revolution you have to watch the great old westerns, because they’re always the same—like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” one of the best of them. There are two things in that town that contend for authority: a law book and a gun, and the town is incapable of producing either. They brought it with them, right? And so it never happened before in history, and it actually can’t happen again, that a highly developed civilization would pick up and move to a new place. And they didn’t bring much of the stuff with them, they brought the knowledge with them. And the Mayflower Compact is a wonderful microcosm of the knowledge they brought. So the two main things are religion and moral philosophy. And the Mayflower Compact is expressive of those two things, and beautifully so.

JDD: Why did they pick up and go, though? You know this is something that I think a lot of people, in the era of the 1619 Project, the only plausible reason for the Pilgrims to pick up and leave a highly developed civilization in Europe would be to come to America and commit genocide against the Native inhabitants, or to act out their dominion over the earth and over all other peoples in a founding act of white supremacy. And that is literally how the Pilgrim story is taught in universities and high schools, and probably at this point in elementary schools as well. But there are other reasons for picking up and coming to the New World, and I wonder if you might comment on what those might have been and why Europe was not a place where something like the Mayflower Compact could be written and signed, and something like the Declaration of Independence also could not arise.

LA: Well the Mayflower Compact pays homage to King James, which monarch would not let them do that on English soil. The whole idea was establishing a government by compact, by agreement among some people. And that’s both a broadly Christian idea and a Protestant idea—well it’s three things—and a precept in moral philosophy that had all developed. Christianity has an interesting posture toward government. It’s a universal religion that explicitly, by the words of the founder, does not establish a kingdom. And that means kingdoms, to be just, have to protect the practice of Christianity. And that means religious freedom, in fact limited government itself, is born chiefly in the realization over time of this particular significance of Christianity.

So that’s the first thing. That’s just broadly, that’s what it is, right? It’s very different from the religion of the Spartans. It’s very different from the religion of the Persians. It’s very different from the religion of the Jews. So there’s that. And then, these people are Protestants. And what’s going on in Protestantism is the idea that we come together as volunteers to form a society, to seek our salvation. And that is the religious parallel of the mechanism of government-by-consent that’s one of the main precepts of the Declaration of Independence. And so these people had worked all this out by the time they left for left Holland for America.

And they came for that, right? If you just read the record—and see, if you’re a serious student of anything, if you stop and look at anything, you’ll find out that there’s an awful lot of candor in the world. So like, if you want to know what Hitler thought you can find out by reading Hitler, he tells us what he thought. Same thing with Stalin, right? They’re liars and cheats and murders on a mass scale. And yet they say what they’re up to. So the point is, the Mayflower Compact, it says what it’s up to. And indeed it’s a dramatic document because there was divisions among the people on the boat, and they’d already had a hard time and getting ready to have a worse time. And so they thought the way to maneuver through this was for us all to reach an agreement how we’re going to behave. And that’s awesome, right? That’s freedom, that’s compact. And so under pressure they repair to that. That’s where they think safety and efficacy lie. And that’s deep, right? It’s marvelous.

And you don’t really get things like that in the ancient world. Because religion was different, and philosophy was different in some ways, some ways the same. And then if you think of the unfolding of America, it’s all implicit in that set of arrangements. The doctrine of equality is not in there except implicitly—but powerfully implicitly, because they all have to sign it. And the point is, get everybody together. And the people who were on the boat who were not Puritans, they called them Strangers. And they were very concerned about them because they needed their help, but they wanted them to behave properly, and were prepared to behave properly towards them. And so they make a compact with them. And that’s very powerful.

JDD: And it strikes me, too, that this is not the kind of thing that we saw, or could have seen, in the Europeans who came to different parts of the New World. The development of European civilization in the Americas that was started by Catholics, that was started in Catholic Spain, in New Spain, in what is now Mexico and Central America.

The culture and the institutions that developed were not built on this idea that you have to get everybody together and that you have to have a compact, they were the exportation of authoritarian, absolute monarchical rule from Europe to this new place. And it produced completely different institutions, so that 150 years later when the American Founding was taking place and the seeds that were planted by the Mayflower Compact were coming to fruition, in places like Mexico and Central America, there were very different things afoot. And not just in the 18th century, but all the way into the 19th century, you had absolute monarchy contending with revolutionary insurgencies that didn’t follow the American pattern at all. And now today you have, on the same continent, over a shared border, completely different societies based on completely different sets of ideas about what government should be and how we should arrange our lives together. And that is a very powerful thing, I think, when you think about the ripple effects of something as simple maybe as the Mayflower Compact as opposed to the declarations made by Spanish conquistadores when they landed on the coast of Mexico or Central America.

LA: I think first of all just ask the simple question, who’s on the boat? So the Spanish, they sent men, you know? A bunch of men, alone, is an essentially dysfunctional society. And so they had priests and soldiers. And the English sent families. They called them plantations, and then they could grow and become self-sufficient because of that. In fact, the survival of Plymouth colony was rooted in the fact that they were disciplined by the need to defend their loved ones. And then they could go, right? So I mean, it’s really great because the English did send one big bunch of men that landed in Roanoke, and they settled down, built a fort, and went off, left a note, went off into the country, they’re going to go explore, and they were never heard from again.

And that’s because it’s just a bunch of men, and that won’t work. And so it gives an entirely different direction and foundation, just that. And see it meant that it was not an evangelical or a military operation (or both). That’s something different than founding a city, and it’s a less comprehensive set of aims. So it’s completely different. I think I’ve been told, I don’t really know, that most of the people in Mexico are descended from the people who lived there when the Europeans came, but most of the people in North America are descended from immigrants. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it stands to reason if it’s true.

JDD: That’s right, because the Spanish weren’t really founding a society. They didn’t come to create a polity, they came to conquer and to extract riches as best they could. And that was reflected not just in their initial contact with the Natives of Central America and South America and Mexico, but in the institutions that they developed, the rancheros, the societies built around a boss, and patronage. You know these are things that still exist in Mexico today, these social systems. They may be informal now, but they still exist. And they resonate—they have resonated down the centuries in the same way that our systems, founded by in part by the Pilgrims and later by the Founders, resonate today.

But I wonder, in our current moment in American history, where we have this kind of revolution taking place, an intellectual revolution, certainly, taking place about what America should be, about what it was but really about what it should be, if we are not trying to recreate in a modern twenty-first-century context, the kind of patronage systems that would have been alien to the Pilgrims, certainly would have been alien to the Founders, but would have been right at home in New Spain, among the conquistadors and the societies that they ruled in the New World.

LA: Yeah, certainly. What we’re developing now is more like those other Europeans settlements in America than it’s like the pilgrims. But you have to remember this terrible difference. It’s the same thing as the difference between ancient tyranny and totalitarianism. The introduction of the power of modern science, which is of course the most powerful, possible means, but it’s a means that’s construed to be an end. The purpose of technology is the use and production of technology. And that means that that we become subjects of an engineering project. And, you know, the priests who came, the Catholic priests who came to convert the existing inhabitants, well you know, they may have done some wrong, but their purposes were ultimately charitable, and were understood to be the completion of the life of people, and that their own life was completed in the same way.

Whereas the masters of technology, they look at us as something to move and manipulate. They think they can perfect society. And just think, you know the reasons for things are always influential in how they play out. So the reason for those Mexican and Central American and South American settlements, the reason for it was to convert people to God and go find some gold. Well, to convert people to God, that’s a concern for those people, right? But if you launch yourself into utopian world—I’m full of this stuff right now because I just taught a class on totalitarian novels and I read a bunch of them, and you know, they’re horrific and true. And so the thing is, that thing, and I think the New York Times thing, kindly meant of course, I think it is expressive of that thing.

In 1984 the protagonist is Winston Smith, named by George Orwell for Winston Churchill. And his job is to sit all day long with thousands of other people and rewrite the past—every book, every article, every magazine, every encyclopedia, everything in the library. If the party changes its opinion about anything, if it changes its opinion about with whom we’re at war, then everything is immediately rewritten. And that means the past is flowing past like a river. And that means—and see, it is a profound and terrible novel, that becomes explicit in the end, in the culmination of the novel. And it’s the only philosophic seminar I know conducted under torture. But in the end, O’Brien, the representative of the big state, he tortures Winston and teaches him. And what he teaches him is that nothing is real. And the strongest proof of that is that the past itself is not only not real, it takes its reality from what I say, from my will, from the will of the party.

And so I think the New York Times’ [1619 Project], I think that’s what that is. In other words, those people, they’re high-minded, fine people, but they want to have an effect upon us. And so they’re prepared to malign. Because I mean, it just doesn’t work. Where are the documents that show that the purpose of the European settlement of North America was to extend slavery? Because they don’t exist. And of course they don’t exist, because it wasn’t the purpose.

You know, it is true by the way that it happened in American history, it happened sometime between 1787 and 1800. We know this because the Northwest Ordinance is in 1787 and it forbids all slavery, and that was a general agreement by the whole Union in the new territory. And the Northwest Territory, by the way, was given by Virginia on the motion of Thomas Jefferson, and on condition there be no slavery. But then 1800 comes and you have to have the Missouri Compromise for the Union to grow again, because now they’re concerned about keeping the numbers the same, the ratio between slave and free, the same. And that means somewhere, slavery gained some support. And come to find out John C. Calhoun, the great disciple of all that, was a friend of a man named Francis Lieber, at Yale. And Lieber was a descendant of and connected to the people around Friedrich Hegel. And he taught them the doctrines of history.

And that’s what dominates the New York Times today, see. What those doctrines say is, you can read them in either of two ways. You can read that there’s an historical process that places us at odds with each other, it’s going somewhere and eventually we’ll have the end of the process and leap into freedom. Or you can say that it has made some of us into masters and others of us into slaves—that’s Hitler, and John Calhoun. The point is that got into America somewhere, but it didn’t come with the first settlers.

And so to understand that, I mean if you really want to do something about oppression, you need to learn the principles that establish it being wrong, and you need to learn the arguments and principles that assert that what’s right. And you need to get those accurate, right? You need to go, unlike the New York Times, both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas say, “This alone is denied even to God: to make what has been not to have been.”

JDD: Your mention of Calhoun reminds me that my first reaction to the 1619 Project was a column that argued the ghost of John C. Calhoun is haunting the American left, and that the American left today are the true inheritors of Calhoun’s political philosophy, that Calhoun was the one who hated the Constitution, who wanted to find a way around it, who thought that the Founders were wrong. And he said so, he said so plainly, that it cannot be true that all men are created equal. And so he came up with his theory of the concurrent majority and all these other ideas to get around the Constitution. And it seems to me he was a kind of founding father, if you will, of progressivism. You know, people talk about Woodrow Wilson as the founder of modern progressivism, but the intellectual roots and philosophical roots, it seems to me, stretch back to Calhoun.

LA: Calhoun is—people who haven’t read the “Disquisition on Government” should read it in order to be able to brag that they did cause it’s a hell of a mess. But there’s a line in it that shows what Calhoun really was. “It would be envious to think that God would give us the gift of modern science and permit us to use it for ill.” You see, he’s just a progressive. And it’s just explicit in this book, in various places, but that’s the clearest one. And so how can a man think—cause what the concurrent majority means is every law in every jurisdiction, including the national jurisdiction will be passed unanimously or not passed at all. And he thinks that can be made to work. There’s a man detached from reality, big time.

And, you know, very philosophic, and there were cool things about Calhoun. He inherited from his fathers, in the making of the American Union—which were not that long before him, by the way—he inherited the idea of a grand nation. But what went wrong was he added in the idea of a perfect nation. Master and slave, we are all aristocrats, we whites, because we own these blacks, right? We have our slaves. That makes us all aristocrats, even the ones who are not slaveholders. And you know, that was partly a political point because the slaveholders were not wonderfully popular with the poor people like my ancestors in the South who were competing with the slaves.

And that utopianism is a key thing. I mean, if you just see this Black Lives Matter stuff, and all that, “we have to make it right, right now.” And think of what we’re doing to the young people, right? If you know anything about the story of race in America, first of all, you know it’s a tragic story, also relieved by greatness, but it moves in three main long periods. And I’m leaving out of account the Civil War, which is the wrenching struggle to get rid of it, slavery. First there’s slavery, and that was bad. And then after, a time of liberation, and especially the efforts of Ulysses Grant, then Jim Crow. So we went into discrimination, right? And then, beginning in about 1960, but a movement for it longer than that, we went into the age of race preferences, which is just another word for discrimination. And so there’s never been a long sustained period in American history—except leading up to and just after the Civil War—where the idea of equal human rights for all was the dominating notion.

And that’s too bad, and I don’t even think that’s an accident. I think that’s a very hard principle to serve. And that means you’re between a rock and a hard place, because if it’s a hard principle to serve, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the right principle to serve. And so our history has always been a struggle toward this thing that we articulate. And we have long periods where we give up on this thing and try to do something easier. And that’s where the tragedies come. And the contemporary tragedy is, now we’re going to pick them by color, and advanced some and and debase others, to make it up for the wrongs done in the past. And we lose our individuality in that, for one thing. Because you know, I come from Arkansas. My family was blessedly poor. They never had a slave. And so, I stand in the same relation to slavery as John C. Calhoun under these principles that are taking over today.

JDD: And it seems easy if you want to sift through the American past for crimes and injustices, for people like Nicole Hannah Jones, the face of the 1619 Project, to go back to the beginning, to the landing at Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower Compact and say, well, this was only signed by men, only the white men signed this, and here we have evidence from the very moment that the Pilgrims set foot on American shores that they were establishing what she calls a society based on white supremacy—white male supremacy. And it seems to me that their project, the New York Times, but the left’s project more broadly, is at pains constantly to deny the overwhelming evidence that the American Founding, from the Mayflower Compact through to the Declaration and the Founding of the country, articulated these ideals and has worked arduously—in fits and starts, as you said—toward these ideals, toward fulfilling this great idea that all men are created equal, but that ideal wasn’t cynical, it wasn’t hypocritical when it was put down. In other words, the Founders were sincere when they said all men are created equal. It seems to me that for Hannah Nicole Jones and the New York Times and the left, it’s an obstacle that they are at pains to overcome, to convince people that the Founders were lying when the evidence seems overwhelming that they were not.

LA: Well, you know, the question of women is different from the question of race. So I grew up in the Hills of Arkansas. Everybody from Arkansas is my cousin. And I knew both my grandmothers. And my grandmothers, one of them had nine, one of them had eight children. And they basically worked on the farm night and day alongside their husbands. And they made a living, barely. And by the time the kids were grown it was getting time for them to die. And so that was life, for everybody. And it isn’t true that the man worked and the woman stayed at home. Home was the farm, and they all worked it, all the parts of it.

JDD: And that was most of America, for a long time.

LA: That’s right. Well, I think two-thirds of the people were farmers until well into the 20th century. And the tools that we use, that’s changed a lot of things. But this long legacy of “oppression”—you think my grandmothers didn’t get their way when they wanted it? And my mother, for sure, whom I knew very well? Or for that matter, my wife? We have a common project, my wife and me. And our project is to run our family and my career. And we both do that. And that is our career, the combination of those two things. That’s what we do together, and we both do both of them. Because, come to find out, human babies take a long time to raise—longer than other critters. And so it’s going to take devotion to them in the beginning, mostly by the mother, at least in the very beginning. And so the point is, you’re reducing human nature if you pretend that these biological facts are not facts.

Here’s a funny thing about Hillsdale College. We have just about the same number of men and women—a few more men, we are very rare in a liberal arts college. And they come in with exactly the same academic profile. And they do great, people do great here. But it is typical for the top ten students in a senior class, seven or eight of them to be girls. Now, why is that? Well, it’s not a difference in intelligence, I don’t think. I think it’s a difference in character. I explained it last term, because six of my favorite boys, ever, in all the many years I’ve been here, they get into a war with the dorm next door, throwing things that smell bad on each other. The key thing was deer urine. And I said it at commencement last summer, I said, why are girls dominating the top ten? And the answer is, they’re not throwing deer urine on each other.

So there’s a difference, right? And it’s not an intellectual difference. Today at lunch I was sitting with a bunch of girls and boys at a lunch table, and I often ask them what they’re going to do. And they’ve all got big plans. And the girls will sometimes say, “and I’m going to have children”—and the great majority of them intend to whether they say it or not. And I always say yeah, good for you. And good for you developing a career for yourself, too, because you’re likely to live a lot longer than the child-rearing years, and you will need something to do to make a contribution, to be a functioning human being, you need to do that. And you need to marry somebody who wants you to do that. And that’s just nature, right? And any evidence, like if you read the diaries and letters of Abigail Adams, that’s a tremendous woman. And she was tough as nails. And of course she was devoted to her husband. He was devoted to her. She’s the one who made that family work. And so, honor to her, one of the great figures of American history. And if it were modern times, things different now than they were then, I imagine she’d be a college professor or a college president. Because she’d be better than I am at either of those things, and probably better than her husband.

So I don’t know. I think if you if you set your face against the functioning of the family, which changes with time and is a relatively fluid thing and yet the basic relationships have been the same for as long as we know, right? If you set your face against that then you’ve undertaken an engineering project that’s going to meet a lot of violence to try to stamp that out. That’s what “Brave New World” is about. They don’t use violence, they just use overwhelming inducement to reduce people’s lives.

See, here’s another thing. If you raise a child, that’s a huge responsibility. That’s a bigger responsibility than anybody gets in his job. You know, me, anybody. And so, people should do that. For one thing, early in our lives and late in our lives, we’re helpless. And we need the ones in the middle of years to take care of us. And so if we stop having babies, there won’t be anybody. And so, the family is a domain that’s like a kingdom to the people who run it, husbands and wives and children. And that’s an expression of freedom and independence that everyone needs, however important their job is.

I mean—we were talking about it before we started this—I became a grandfather ten days ago, and there’s a six-pound baby living in my house right now (our daughter’s with us and her husband). And the thing is precious, you know, and tiny, and fragile. And it’s going to need a lot of help for a long time. But on the other hand, it’s going to go fast. And I like to say, when she turns two, a little before then, she’s going to start talking. And I like to say in my family, we have boxer dogs and children, and they all hear the same things but the children start talking and the dogs never do. But after they start talking, three months after that, they’re going to know everything in the world. They don’t even have to leave the house. You see? So the human soul is tremendous. It just takes years of cultivation for it to grow to be what it can be. And that point, that’s a duty that we have. Or we can live in “Brave New World” where everything is done for us and we have no serious work to do in our lives.

JDD: We’ve had conversations at The Federalist about this recently, that “Brave New World” in some ways was more prescient than “1984.” The world that we see emerging through big tech and through big government and through progressive leftist ideology, even in some cases explicitly stated by groups like Black Lives Matter, who inveigh against the nuclear family, but a world where there are not families forming, and there are not the responsibilities—the unchosen, in some cases, responsibilities that grounded people in families and in places and to one another in ways that lasted a long time.

So we have a kind of “Brave New World” today where the rulers, the governors and mayors, will impose a lockdown and assume that you’re okay with your weed and your Netflix, and to not worry about anything, that you’ll be taken care of. That seems to me to be much more a picture of the future—of our present—than “1984,” the totalitarian state with Big Brother watching over everything. In this case, Big Brother is a coddling brother. It’s a brother that wants you to not worry and not take on responsibilities—and certainly not to form families, because that is the number one threat to the state that is possible, those loyalties.

I guess we may have strayed away from the pilgrims a bit, but it’s all germane to the to the original point that that they came with families, and that says everything.

LA: We have that same argument around here all the time. And we read both those novels in this class I taught, and three or four others. First of all Aldous Huxley was a teacher of French to George Orwell at Eton college. And they had a correspondence about who was right. Is the despotism going to be pleasure or pain? And Huxley was very confident that he was right. And the same for Orwell. I think the ones who think that Huxley is right are optimistic, because society is not growing kinder. And we’re more and more ready to hurt people. And I don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think bad elements of both are possible.

JDD: That may very well may be. The signs are not good, and I think of the smashing of statutes, this fad of smashing statues. The smashing of statutes never stops with statues. After a while the mob gets tired of smashing statues and monuments and it moves on to people. And I think we saw maybe a little bit of that this spring and summer. And I fear that we’ll see more. And the only way to stop that is to hold fast to the principles and the ideas and the philosophies of the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration and the Constitution. And that’s why we’re doing the 1620 Project and why we wanted to talk to you. And maybe we’ll go out on that note if there’s a closing thought maybe you have on those subjects.

LA: Well, we have to have a revival of learning because we’re ignorant. I think these tense events that are going on are good for us, too. There’s a legislator who announced in the hearing of one of my colleagues that the governor was the rightful leader of the legislature, and that’s why she has the veto power. And, you know the ignorance of that is just awesome. But then, he was thinking about that because of the pressure of these events, and this was pointed out to him. In a less serious time, it wouldn’t never come up. He would have just floated through his life. And the person who heard this happened to be very knowledgeable about such things and explained to him the basic way that separation of powers works, which is the key part of the structure of American government. And it was like a revolutionary for thing for the guy. And, you know, they’re trying to figure out in the Michigan legislature, what to do about this pandemic and what to do about this election. And they’re thinking more seriously about that than I have known them to do in the past. And so I’m not doing it myself, but I know people who are helping them. And I’m pleased about that. In other words, there’s a lot of room for improvement, and there’s a lot of reason to want to make it these days.

JDD: Absolutely. Well, we’ll end on that optimistic note. We want to thank you, Dr. Arnn, for joining us. This has been another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I’m John Davidson, political editor at the Federalist, and until next time, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.