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Foreign. Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

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And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with the last two episodes of the Great American Story, A Land of Hope, the Path of Renewal, parts one and two. If you're listening to this episode on its launch date on July 1, we are just a few days away from celebrating America's 250th birthday. 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And if you've gone through this whole course, you have a much better understanding of American history. This last part here we'll just go with Dr. Maclay. We'll cover some of the Reagan years and then the end of the Cold War and The Presidencies of H.W. bush and President Obama.

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And if you've enjoyed this course and are disappointed that it's over, we have good news. There's an entire catalog of politics and history courses available to you for free at Hillsdale. Edu course. That's Hillsdale. Edu course. If you'd like to go back to the beginning, take our documentary Colonial America. If you'd like to learn more about how our nation was born, take the real American founding. Disturbed by what happened in the 60s and want to get to the bottom of it, the American left is a great place to start and and one

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of my favorites, the Federalist, which goes through the Federalist Papers and what's considered to be one of the best commentaries on the Constitution in one of the best works of American political thought.

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So go to hillsdale. Edu Course and continue learning with us. For now, let's turn back to Dr. Maclay for the final lectures of the great American story, A Land of Hope. The Path of Renewal, Parts one and two.

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The after effects of the 1964 failed campaign of Barry Goldwater continued to reverberate through the 1970s as the intellectual currency set in motion started to coalesce into something larger. By the late 1970s, the structure of a conservative alternative to elements of democratic orthodoxy were clearly emerging. Not all views would be shared in every way by all parts of these self described conservatives. It was, and it would remain a coalition. Social conservatives who were, for example, concerned about the enforcement of drug laws might well clash with libertarian conservatives who wanted to abolish all such laws. Some conservatives who wanted to see America withdraw from the UN from all multilateral treaties and world leadership more generally, while others insisted American leadership was indispensable to world order. Not all were of the same mind of the importance of religion not all agreed that programs like Social Security ought to be kept or abolished, but there was a rough consensus around certain principles of smaller government with lower taxes, a relatively free economy with a minimum of regulation, and opposition to communism. On all of these points and more, the burgeoning movement found a winning spokesman in Ronald Reagan, whose presidential time had at last come in 1980, after several previous attempts. But Reagan was more than just a vehicle for other people's ideas. Ideas never translate automatically into political political action. They have to be embodied in persons. And Reagan's Persona gave a particular cast to the ideas that he propounded. He was a superbly gifted speaker who had experience as a movie actor and a television performer, so he knew how to perform before the camera. He was entering into a television age. He was the master of no politician before him, and few since have had the same mastery.

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Mr. President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking out there for two or three weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms. You already are the oldest president in history, and some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during. During the Cuba missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances? Not at all, Mr. Truitt. And I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponents youth and inexperience.

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He also was not the usual eat your broccoli kind of conservative. He had been himself a liberal Democrat in his younger days, and he had great sympathy for the New Deal and for the Great Society, for the intentions behind them. He never rejected the example of Franklin Roosevelt, who was a figure that he had highly esteemed in his youth. And that was a measure of how skillful Reagan was at combining his conservatism with the longer American political heritage. This was why the historian Alonzo Hamby called him the Roosevelt of the right, which is a shrewd name that captures a lot about Reagan and places him rightly in the stream of modern history. That's not all there is, of course. He was a clear and unapologetic conservative. During his years as governor of California, he developed a national reputation as a tough negotiator, particularly in facing down the student protests at Berkeley and other California campuses. He also was a bit like Nixon in being a good conciliator, a good coalition builder within the Republican party. He was able to bring together the blue collar urban Catholics and the religious right, often made up of evangelicals who were Protestants, in a winning coalition based around their shared antagonism to the social liberalism of Democrats. At the same time, Reagan made establishment Republicans very nervous in ways they hadn't been since 1964. Many of them opposed his nomination. They preferred George H.W. bush as a more pedigreed establishment candidate. But Reagan easily swept past Bush in the primaries and became his party's nominee. He had to run against Jimmy Carter. Carter was no match for Reagan in the 1980 campaign, and not only because Carter's record in office had been so poor and so difficult to defend. Reagan offered a vision that was more hopeful than Carter's. Reagan understood that he was speaking to an electorate of a nation that was a land of hope. And his rhetoric reflected that fact. He really was the one who conformed most closely to James MacGregor Burns idea of a transformation leader. Someone who could speak to ordinary persons in a direct and compelling way about everything from the problems of the economy to the unraveling of the world order in ways that these ordinary people could grasp and hold onto in their own lives. He did this in a masterfully simple way. At the end of his debate with Carter, he asked the question, are you better off now than you were four years ago? A very simple question that, nevertheless it contains a multitude of implications and forces voters to make the kind of choice that voting requires, an up or down vote, yes or no. And it was hard for anyone honestly to answer that they were better off. Four years after the beginning of the Carter administration and Carter's efforts to accuse Reagan of being an ideologue, Reagan was able to just flick off with an expertly delivered line, there you go.

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These are the kind of elements of a national health insurance important to the American people. Governor Reagan again, typically is against such a proposal. Governor, there you go again. When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one.

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So the election was not at all close. Reagan won handily, won 44 states, 489 electoral votes. He had long coattails, brought Republicans in with him, particularly in the Senate, where the Republicans gained a majority for the first time since 1954. Meanwhile, on the very day that he was inaugurated In January of 1981, the Iranians released the American 52American hostages from Tehran. Alas, Humiliation visited upon Jimmy Carter in his inauguration address that day. Reagan blamed government itself for many of the nation's problems and proposed that a more open, less heavily regulated, less heavily taxed economy would produce growth. Growth, in fact, would surge and government revenues would increase along with it. This argument that lower tax rates would lead to increased reception revenues was not new. In fact, it had been demonstrated as recently as John Kennedy's administration. But it remained disfavored by mainstream economists who remained committed to the idea that government management of the economy through the manipulation of aggregate demand and incomes in times of economic sluggishness were the key to prosperity and steadiness. Reagan proposed that reductions in taxes and government spending would free up capital for investment in the private sector, and that would lead to growth and job creation. To this end, he proposed a 25% tax cut to be phased in over a period of three years. There were cuts in corporation taxes, capital gains taxes, gift taxes, inheritance taxes, all sorts of taxes. He also came into office promising to rebuild the country's military might that might have seemed to be at odds with a desire to bring the budget under control. There might be deficits. Would these deficits be reduced by economic growth or would they become a drag on the economy? These were quite question marks even for his supporters. At first things went badly. The country went into a fairly steep recession, and this had been brought on by tight money policies from the Federal Reserve that were meant to break the back of inflation and succeeded in doing that, but stalled growth and unemployment was pushed back up to 11%. Reagan faced calls from Republican lawmakers to delay the tax cuts or even to raise taxes, cut defense spending and otherwise respond. But Reagan rode out the recession and by early 1983 the economy was in recovery and soon humming along. By mid year, meanwhile, inflation dropped 4% and below 2.5% by July. The economy grew 4.6% in 1983, 7.3% in 1984 and 4.2% in 1985. Public confidence in the economy was restored and the Reagan Bush ticket would be reelected in 1984 by a truly mammoth margin. 49 states, 525 electoral votes. The most electoral votes ever won by any candidate in American history. But for those whose eyes are not dazzled by the morning light, there was still a dark cloud looming on the horizon. Rampant deficit spending, which had grown despite Reagan's official efforts to rein it in. The cloud continued to grow. By the end of his second term, the national debt had grown from 900 billion to 2.7 trillion, behind that was what Reagan himself confessed to have been his greatest failure. His inability to reduce the size or scope of the government. Blame for the mounting deficits could be spread around widely. Certainly Reagan bore part of the blame. The Democrats in the Congress bore part of the blame. But in any event, the national debt was an unwanted and ominous aspect to the otherwise highly successful Reagan economic program. The other principal goal of Reagan was to rebuild the nation's standing in the world after the humiliations of Vietnam and Iran. And waging the Cold War with the Soviet Union required a more effective and decisive American policy. No president since Kennedy had proposed to conduct the Cold War in such vigorous terms as Reagan did. In fact, Reagan's rhetoric made Kennedy's look tame by comparison. As he said once, here's my strategy on the Cold War, we win and they lose. That view never changed. All the details filled themselves out in different ways in the first part of his term. In some ways, Reagan, whose middle name was Wilson, by the way, resembled the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson. The Soviet Union was an evil empire. It was the focus of evil in the modern world. He lambasted and mocked communism for its many failures, its cruelty, its inefficiency, its disdain for human rights, its incompetence, its atheism, its drabness. And one speech given at Notre Dame University in 1981, he said, the west will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. Clearly a jibe at the notion of containment. He increased spending on defense, put into production a variety of new defense system, the B1 bomber, the MX land based missile. He built a 600 ship American Navy. And most intriguing of all, he started work on what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative, or sdi, which critics called Star wars because it used lasers and particle beams to shoot down incoming enemy missiles. The critics said it wouldn't work. And even if it did work, it would only fuel another round of the arms race, this time in space. Yet it seems in retrospect that the Soviet leaders estimated they did not have the economic or scientific capacity to compete with such program if it were ever to be implemented. And it contributed in the end to the Soviet Union's backing away from the Cold War. Reagan proceeded to confront Soviet aggression where, if it occurred, in Poland, in Grenada, in Central America, in Western Europe, a crucial showdown. Reagan persuaded his Western European allies in NATO to deploy a new generation of American cruise missiles and Pershing two medium range ballistic missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviets deployment during the Carter administration of SS20 missiles that were targeted at European capitals. Despite enormous public Protests on both sides of the Atlantic. The West German parliament agreed to do this and the deployment went ahead. In November of 1983. The Euro missile crisis, as it was called, was a turning point. And in the Soviet Union, the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev as party Secretary, General Secretary of the Communist Party, there began a conspicuous change in tone of Soviet leadership. Gorbachev wanted to reform Soviet life. He wanted to open it up, he wanted to restructure it. The term perestroika became a common way of describing these policies. He wanted to restructure the Soviet economy to remove some of the dead hand of top down demand economy policies and allow some free market practices to flourish. Gorbachev understood the Soviet economy was a shambles and he wanted to try to find the means to improve the living standards of the Soviet people without a revolutionary change in their economy. And he realized that Soviet Union could no longer afford an arms race with the United States States. Reagan grasped the opportunities presented by this change in power, worked with Gorbachev favorably, although he was insistent that words be followed by deeds. When he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, at the Berlin Wall, he delivered remarks directed to Gorbachev.

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General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev. Open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall.

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Of course, Gorbachev did not oblige him in this regard, but he did negotiate a treaty to abolish intermediate range nuclear missiles. The first time the two nations had agreed to eliminate an entire class of weapons. A move that would have been unthinkable without Reagan's firmness in the Euro missile crisis just 18 months before. And Gorbachev began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan to end the war. There was the end of the Cold War in sight. Maybe so. Maybe it was realistic to hope so. Historians argue about whether Reagan is the most important actor in this unfolding drama, whether Gorbachev. It's probably the case that both were transformational leaders, that both needed one another. There had to be a man like Gorbachev who was willing to consider reform, who was willing to break through the ossified structure of an inert Soviet empire to try to make changes for the better. But there had to be a Reagan. There had to be someone whose clarity and determination and confidence, whose success in restoring the American economy and military strength limited the options available to garbage off.

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This show is a part of the Hillsdale College podcast network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device, and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to Podcast Head Hillsdale Edu subscribe that's Podcast Hillsdale Edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with with the Hillsdale Dialogues each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale Eduardo that's podcast Hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.

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Life was never going to be easy for Ronald Reagan's successor, and George H.W. bush did struggle a bit to get out from under his predecessor's shadow. Which is not to deny that Bush was an exceptionally accomplished man, with a long resume of accomplishments and a great record as an excellent vice president. Under Reagan, he was pedigreed. He had experience that the other candidates could only envy. He didn't have Reagan's immense rhetorical gifts. He could be eloquent when he needed to be, but it did not come easily to him. However, he led the nation and the world expertly through a series of foreign policy shocks that would have flummoxed many others, in fact, most other leaders. He deserves more credit for this than he gets. It was Bush, after all, and not Reagan, who saw the nation through the end of the Cold War. By the time he came into office, Reagan and Gorbachev had changed the temperature, changed the climate of world politics, changed the chemistry of world politics, and so that challenges to communism all over the world were popping up not only in the Soviet bloc, but in China. The Communist government in China had a very strong challenge to its legitimacy in the spring of 1989 by pro democracy forces that were so large and general as to threaten the stability of the regime. The government was able to hold onto power only by brutally putting down the demonstrations, using tanks to subdue unarmed crowds in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. But the Soviet empire in Europe and in Russia was unraveling, starting in Poland. The Communist Party lost power in each of the Warsaw Pact countries, climaxing on November 9 in East Germany, where leaders found themselves powerless to stop crowds in east and West Berlin from uniting to tear down the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers, pickaxes and chisels. Within a year, East Germany would vote to reunite with West Germany. And Soviet objection was nowhere heard. In the blink of an eye, the Soviet presence in the Eastern and Central Europe was gone. The sprawling empire that was the Soviet Union itself was also disintegrating. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia declared their independence and gradually the other republics dissolved the Soviet Union. As of December 1991, the Communist Party was abolished and statues of Lenin and Stalin were toppled by enthusiastic crowds. Who could have imagined this even five years before, other than Ronald Reagan? Perhaps Bush's demeanor during all of this was so sober and cautious that some journalists wondered why he wasn't excited about it. They would ask him, why aren't you more excited? Bush says, I'm not an emotional kind of guy. When his advisors urged him to go to Berlin at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush dismissed this gesture by saying, what would I do? Dance on the wall? The serious point here is that Bush understood that there was no value and in fact maybe much detriment to the idea of rubbing it in, of gleefully celebrating and humiliating the opposition. It was admirable governance, even if it wasn't particularly smart as politics for Bush not to gloat in public about victory in the Cold War. And it may have helped prevent a decisive hard line backlash in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Also, Bush was sober about it because he realized at the end of the Cold War, although a great good was not going to be an unmixed good because profound changes were going to come. Indecisiveness, instability, things that were hard to predict. There would be great opportunities as well as great risks. So he wanted to proceed as cautiously as possible. The realization that had already dawned on him began dawning on others that the Cold War in had been a kind of center of the universe around which most of the important aspects of American life and not only foreign policy had revolved. Even the nation's self understanding as a democratic opposition to totalitarian communism had depended on the existence of the communist opposite. The Cold War had caused Americans to accept, embrace, adaptations to and even distortions of the original design of the American republic in order to perform the larger role in the world that had seemed necessary. But now that it was gone, what should happen to those Adaptations Was the greatly enlarged national security state that had been created by the Cold War? Was that still necessary? The answer to that depended on what one thought about other prior questions. How would the post war world order itself? Would the new order be an American led? One in which the nations of the world would strive towards ever more democratic and republican values? Would it be a harmonious association of diverse peace loving nations living under the aegis of the United Nations? Would it be a cosmopolitan order in which a global economy would supersede national economies? Or would it be an order in which national cultures and national economies and national identities would be restored rather than disappearing and the world would revert to the idea that the nation state was the most important entity of human combination, the entity that had ordered the life of Europe for much of the 19th century. There were going to be new sources of conflict in the world after the Cold War. Conflict wasn't going to just cease. What would these new conflicts look like? What about the relatively new problem of terrorism, global terrorism and rogue states, that is states that acted as renegades intent upon destabilizing the modern world order? Would the United States still need a huge, expensive and intrusive national security apparatus which had been built up with the menace of the Soviet Union in mind, but would still need to be deployed to deal with other kinds of threats, such as the asymmetrical threats of rogue groups, non state actors using unconventional weapons? All of these questions were highly pertinent, especially when the question about America's proper role came into the picture. America's proper role in the world. Bush was keenly interested in the fashioning of a new World order that would be prosperous, law abiding, democratic. Even as the Soviet empire was imploding in Europe, another conflict was unfolding in the Middle East. One that, although unexpected, fit very nicely with the paradigm that Bush was attempting to establish. In August of 1990, Iraq's President Saddam Hussein suddenly invaded and occupied the neighboring state of Kuwait, neighboring Kingdom of Kuwait, an oil rich kingdom. Not only was this act a potential threat to the Western oil supplies, but the violation involved in the invasion went against all the rules of international order and international relations. The rules that Bush had wanted to establish as the etiquette of the New World Order, as the rule book for the new World Order. The United nations condemned the act, but the words had no effect. If it was going to be answered, if there was going to be an answer to Saddam Hussein's actions, it would have to come from the United States and it would have to be an Effort to roll back the invasion of Kuwait. Bush went ahead and did this. He received congressional approval for operation Desert Storm. He was widely opposed in the Congress. But mindful of Vietnam, Bush devised an invasion that was very targeted, that used overwhelming force to produce a quick victory, and defined a clear exit strategy. So Bush stopped short of occupying Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, because he reasoned that the war had been premised on the limited goal of reversing the incursion into Kuwait by Iraq, and it did not involve the overthrow of the Iraqi regime. This was clearly the containment doctrine operating that had been in place for so long in American strategic thinking. If the invasion of Kuwait was a perfect example Of a blatant violation of the new world order that was emerging, then the work of Desert Storm. Operation Desert Storm was a model for the proper response. In many ways, the action taken in Operation Desert Storm reflected a world picture that corresponded to the influential writings of political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote an essay, a startling essay in the year 1989, when the cold war was beginning to come to an end, Entitled the End of History. And the End of history, for him, did not mean that historical events cease. It meant that there had been a long process in history, historical progress, wherein a procession of human, political, social institutions had moved through various phases of development and had now reached a terminal point. The failure of communism, the only alternative to liberal democracy, Marked liberal democracy as the winner, the one regime still standing when all the others had been defeated and exhausted. So it was appropriate that America was taking the lead in Kuwait, not as a sole actor, but as an organizer of a coalition, of a coalition of the willing, as Bush called it, Enforcing the rule of the new world order. That was a borning. But this view, envisioning Western modernity As a kind of steady march of global triumph, Was far from being the only view of this emerging world order. In 1993, a much more detailed and far less optimistic view was put forward by another political scientist, Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who published an article in Foreign affairs that year Called the Clash of Civilizations Question mark. In it, and in a more detailed book that followed, Huntington put forward the argument that the end of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union Was the end of a particular kind of conflict, the ideological conflict that that particular antagonism had represented, and that it would be followed not by more ideological conflicts, but by cultural conflicts, that is to say, conflicts between civilizations. The most important distinctions among peoples, he said, Are no longer ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. By which he meant they were Conflicts between distinctive ways of life, historically rooted, religiously motivated. These conflicts in the future were likely between Western civilization, meaning the United States, Western Europe, and possibly Japan, or certainly Israel, the British, former colonies, so on. On the one hand, the Muslim world of the Middle east and Asia and the sinic world, that is the world of China and its ancillaries. And there were other civilizational possibilities in his argument. This thesis was highly controversial, and he was at great pains to try to persuade hostile readers that he was not advocating for this clash of civilizations. It was not something he wanted to see happen. He was merely describing what he believed was going to happen, what was likely to happen. He cited wars such as those in the Balkans following the breakup of Yugoslavia and between India and Pakistan as evidence for this coming era of civilizational conflict that he was predicting. He also argued that the widespread Western belief in the universality of the West's values was naive and ethnocentric. The continued insistence on this imposition of democracy and other universal norms universal norms, he would put in quotes, as a condition for participation in the world economy, would have the opposite effect of stirring up resentment in these other civilizations. Well, the debate that has ensued about this over the succeeding quarter century or so has included a great many other voices, but it hasn't greatly improved on the formulation of alternatives that Huntington and his many critics and opponents have enunciated. We are still in the process of working out how the post Cold War world should be ordered and what the United States place in it should be. Is the world headed towards a global future in which the independence and importance of nations, ethnicities, tribes and lesser scope cultures is destined to be submerged by global trade, global travel, global finance, global governance? Or will these particularities of human association reassert themselves as Huntington predicted they would, as culture and historical identity prove to be more powerful than economics? Or more likely, will there be a messy interplay between these factors, with each one having some inertial force behind it? Consensus about this is far away, even now. If there's one generalization you can make about the texture of the post Cold War American political world, it would be how elusive and difficult to sustain our moments of national consensus have become. The historian Daniel Rogers has called this the age of fracture, in which all shared narratives are called into question and we've abandoned the search for common ground in favor of focusing on the concerns and perspectives of ever smaller groups and more exclusive categories of experience. The commonalities of old seem to have fragmented into a thousand subcultural pieces. We, we often Imagine that the past was more unified than it was. Certainly no one who has sat through all the lectures in this series can believe that the past was unified. And yet it does seem that the all encompassing status of the Cold War did, through presenting itself as an existential threat to the nation's survival, engender a kind of unity, and that that mantle has now been thrown off. And we're searching for the elements of commonality that the Cold War provided for us without our having to think much about it. I would argue that the past three presidential administrations since the end of the Cold War have all, in various ways, the Clinton administration, the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration. Of course, now, at the time of this taping, we have the still relatively new Trump administration. That is too new for us to say that it's ineffective in the ways that I think it's fair to say that the other three have been ineffective in the sense of arriving at a consensus for the nation and solving the problems that are presented to the nation by the conditions of post Cold War life. I'll close with one example of those, couple of examples really, but of problems that we have not seemed to be able to rally around the solution of in post Cold War America. One is the growing alienation of the American people from their own institutions. The Gallup organization provided strong evidence in a 2016 poll that Americans confidence in 14 key American institutions. The Congress, business, television, newspapers, labor unions, the medical system, the police, banks and educational institutions, and all of those categories. Confidence has plummeted and now stands at about 32%. It's significant that since 2007, more Americans identify as independents than as Republicans, and by 2013, more Americans identify as independents than identify as Democrats. By 2017, a full 37% of registered voters decline to identify themselves with either political party, either the mainstream political parties. There's a lot of reasons for this disaffection, but surely distrust of the established political parties is one of them. Chief among them. This is not the first time in American history that the inability of the American political leadership in Washington to work together to solve the country's problems has been so flagrant. But the examples of the past suggest that we should not be complacent about it. Examples of the past suggest that it often takes the hard, rude shock of implacable events and the need to respond to them to bring about good, constructive action. Will it be the same for us? Let us hope not. But wishful thinking alone will not make it so. The country faces a number of very difficult problems that are not only not solved, but being exacerbated by the inaction of Washington. Let me just give you one example picked precisely because it's so uncontroversial. No one disagrees with what I'm about to say. It's a problem sitting in plain view which neither political party nor any organized part of the electorate seems inclined to address itself to. And that is the mounding national debt and the consequent imperilment of the nation's public credit, all fed by a seemingly endless and unstoppable parade of annual budget deficits. We're rather inured to this now, but it was not until 1981 that the United States accumulated its first trillion dollars of debt, cumulative debt. That's not debt in one year. That's debt Cumulatively, the time that this lecture is being recorded, the debt stands at approximately $22 trillion, as paired against a $20 trillion gross domestic product, which means that the United States has a debt to GDP ratio that is negative, which means that the nation's debt is now larger than its economy. We're spending more than our economy generates, not just more than what we take in. This is not a problem if it only happens once in a while, and it has happened before in American history, just after the Second World War. There are exigent and very persuasive reasons why it needed to happen at that time. But it does become a problem if year after year, billions, trillions of dollars are added to the national debt by budget deficits that are unaddressed for no compelling reason. The nation's not at war, nation's not dealing with some catastrophic emergency, and yet the nation stands. My projections are anything likely to undershoot the mark to add a trillion dollars a year, at least for the foreseeable future. Projected deficits from the present through 2021 come to over a trillion dollars a year for each year. And no one doubts that these trends have I had gotten, you know, depressed enough? Well, let me continue. In addition, no one doubts the current trends, unless changing dramatically, will put the United States in a condition where each year's budget will be eaten up entirely by the servicing of the debt, leaving governmental functions paralyzed. Of course, it's a fallacy to assume that current trends will continue unabated. They never do continue exactly as they're going. But by the same token, it would be folly to assume or imagine that things can't get worse and unexpectedly so and dramatically so. And this too is not a controversial statement. The problem is not a controversial problem. Everyone knows that the growth of the national debt is potentially utterly debilitating to everything that we want to accomplish in this nation. Unlike other issues, immigration, trade, economic growth, health, environmental issues, we can all debate those, but there are all sorts of different positions about them. But the position of the national debt is undebatable. There's very little fundamental disagreement about it. Everyone knows the problem exists, it's a serious problem, and yet nothing is done about it. But that's no justification for despair or even for pessimism. This is still what it has always been, a land of hope. Emotions like despair are luxuries for a democracy like ours. We can't afford to indulge them if we're to stay one. But it is a reason for increased civic attention. It's said that we get the government we deserve, and in the long run there's truth in that saying. It's important to remember that if you look at figures on private spending, on household debt, for example, it has risen too, to an all time high and the fifth consecutive year of growth. So it's clear that governmental debt is not independent of our own profligacy. It's not just a problem in Washington, it's a problem of all of us. We'll need, among other things, to recover the wisdom of our forebears regarding the corrupting effects of debt, both personal and private, and the importance of cultivating virtue, both civic and individual, as essential preconditions of our self governing life. This is not beyond our power. We are still a land of hope. One of the chief uses of the study of the American past, and that's the task we've taken up in this series of lectures, is precisely for the examples it provides and the inspiration it imparts. American society has in fact, faced far worse problems than we face now. And we can take heart and gather sustenance and courage from that fact. The study of the past should not be a merely ornamental thing. And my use of that term ornamental, I hope, remind some of you of the first lecture where I talk about the wonderful epigraph of the book written by John Dos Passos, the American novelist, because he uses that term to say the past, in times of peace and ease, can be an ornamental thing, but not in times of change. I think that's a true statement and I would encourage you to go back and look at that whole epigraph page. Read the whole thing. I think in a lot of ways it encapsulates the takeaway from this course. The thing that beyond all the specifics and all the stories and all the characters and individuals that march through the pages and have marched through my words. It's to take away the essence of the matter. De Spasmos especially, is acute in reminding us that we should not fall into that idiot delusion, as he says, says the idiot delusion of the exceptional. Now that blocks good thinking. The idiot delusion of the exceptional. Now we should be brought up short by these words because they describe us so well. They describe us even better than they describe the people in 1941 for whom Dospasos was writing. We suffer from this delusion. We suffer from the assumption that our times are so extraordinary, are so exceptional, are so without precedent in any human experience, that there's nothing to be learned from prior times. There's nothing to be learned about the prior history of our civilization or any other civilizations. But that is not true. It's profoundly untrue. In fact, Dos Passos says, and I quote him one more time, one last time, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions, that is the time we most need to look backward as well as forward. And he was right about that. And one of the chief things we should look backward to recover is our sense of America as a land of hope, enduringly so, hope manifesting itself in different ways, different specifics, but always with a view towards the possibility of renewal, the possibility of a fresh start in life, the possibility of transcending the conditions into which one is born to achieve something new and something great. Thank you very much.

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Much.

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Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit Hillsdale. Edu Course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis Story, Classic Children's Literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides for fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at Hillsdale. Edu Course today. That's Hillsdale Edu Course. Thanks for listening. SA.