What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks & Romans | Thomas E. Ricks Unless we can return a little more to first principles, & act a little th November 24 , 2020 more upon patriotic ground, I do not know . what may be the INTRODUCTION issue of the contest. — George Washington Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. Ricks covered the US military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize–winning teams, he covered US military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including First Principles, Churchill and Orwell, The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. WHY DO I CARE? We are living through a difficult time in our country. While conflict and division can be seen as healthy responses to societal ills, some amount of national consensus is needed in order for a free people to govern themselves. The problem we have today is not so much a lack of agreement as it is a deterioration in our discourse, coupled with an unwillingness to compromise in the service of the greater good. As Thomas Ricks points out in First Principles, Thomas Jefferson felt similarly despondent about his own time, writing that there were “three epochs in history signalized by the total extinction of national morality.” The first two were in ancient times, following the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, he thought, and the third was his own age. I feel the same way about our national culture today. We are more selfish, more money driven, more cynical, less civilized in our discourse, and less willing to hear one another out than at any point in my lifetime. Nowhere has this been more readily displayed than in our national media organizations and on the social media feeds of our fellow citizens. I am shocked at how we celebrate vulgarity in the langue and actions of our national leaders and media personalities. Just as we have convinced ourselves of the lie that objectivity is a chimera, so too have we seemed to adopt the view that civility is 1 deception. The idea that authenticity is synonymous with partisanship and rancor is a concept that needed time to take hold of the public consciousness and it has done so surreptitiously. I lament it, and the approach take on Hidden Forces is a directly rebuke against it. Today’s conversation is important, because in an environment where people feel increasingly disillusioned and lost, returning to first principles can often provide the best way to reorient and find a new way forward. As American novelist Ralph Ellison once remarked, “Whenever we as Americans have faced serious crises we have returned to fundamentals.” Self-government is hard. It requires a sense of enlightened self-interest and a sense of belonging that inspires acts of sacrifice towards the greater good. Both have been arguably lacking in recent decades. When George W. Bush told Americans to go shopping in response to the 9/11 attacks, that we need not worry, that our military and intelligence services would “do whatever was necessary to protect the nation,” he didn’t do us any favors. The 2008 financial crisis and its purported solutions emendated from a similar aloofness towards the duties of citizenship and public mindedness. For decade after decade, we have been filling the empty hole of national purpose with money and material comforts. We have reached a dead end. The hole has grown bigger and the money is rapidly running out. If we want to find our way out of this hole we’ve dug ourselves into, we need to remember what it means to be an American and put some historical context around the challenges we face today to understand that they are not insurmountable. But we will need to work together and each of us will need to do his or her part. It’s up to us. In a democracy, there is no one else. BACKGROUND & PROCESS: Background — Q: Could you tell me a bit about your background? Q: When did your interest in history begin? Q: How much of your interest in history comes from books and how much of it is from lived experience? Personal Life — You seem to have lived a very interesting life full of first-hand experiences of the world. Q: What was it like living in Kabul as a teenager and going to school there? FIASCO — As you know, I think that you have written the definitive book on the occupation of Iraq and the blunders that contributed to if not caused the subsequent insurgency that followed the occupation. Q: What was your experience covering the war, while also writing FIASCO? Q: Where do you think we would be today if either we never invaded Iraq or if we had not tasked the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to proceed with de-Ba’athification of Iraqi political institutions? Military History — Q: Is this your second non-military history book? Q: What drew you to military studies in the first place? Inspiration — Q: What inspired you to write this book? Q: How much work went into it? Q: What type of research material did you rely on most? Method Writing — Q: What was it like researching this book? Q: Do you feel like it brought you closer to the founding generation in the process? Q: How wild do you let your imagination run when studying a historical period like the 18th century, where the characters inhabit a world so different from our own? Q: How does that process help you when writing about the period? 2 WASHINGTON, ADAMS, JEFFERSON, & MADISON: Choice of Founders — Q: How did you come to settle on Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison? Q: What were your opinions of these three before beginning the research for the book? Q: What was your opinion after completing it? Like & Dislike — Q: What caused you to lose respect for Adams and Jefferson? Q: What drew you closer to Washington and Madison? Q: What did you mean when you said that if Washington was Cato, Adams was Cicero? Influence of Madison — Q: How much of the constitution is really Madison? Q: How would you describe Madison? Q: How important is it that Madison went to the College of New Jersey, what is today, Princeton? Q: What drew Madison to political theory? Q: What was his relationship to Jefferson like? Q: Who did he look towards for inspiration? Figure of George Washington — Q: What makes George Washington such an important figure in American history? Q: How does he compare to the rest of the founders? Q: How important was his experience as a land surveyor in aiding his leadership of the continental army? Q: How important was it that he was adaptable (e.g. adopting a Fabian strategy rather than rely on pitched battles and frontal assaults)? Q: What other special qualities and gifts that Washington have that made him uniquely suited for the role he would eventually play as both general and president? Jefferson & Epicureanism — Q: How would you describe Thomas Jefferson? Q: What was it that attracted Jefferson to epicureanism? Q: Would he have been considered a playboy in today’s society? Q: How much did he share in common with Benjamin Franklin? Frontier Culture — Q: What does it say about Jefferson that he did not travel once beyond Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley—that he never personally experienced the American frontier? Q: Was it yet another sign of his cosmopolitan nature? Misunderstanding — Q: What do you think is one of the most common misunderstandings we have today about the founding fathers? Experience of Slavery — Q: How much time and effort have you put into understanding the reality of slavery as it was practiced in the Americas? Q: How much do we know about the reality of what life would have been like for the typical African slave working at Monticello, for example? Q: If you or I had been invited for an extended stay at Monticello or a host of other plantations in one of the southern states, what would that experience have been like for us? Justifications for Slavery — Q: How can we bridge the gap between the words in the declaration of independence, and the deeds of some of the early founders who profited from human bondage? Q: What role did Greco-Roman history play in providing justifications for slavery? Q: How did these justifications mischaracterize the nature of slavery in the ancient world? MIND OF THE FOUNDERS: Intentions — Q: What were the founders’ intentions when they sat about to write the Articles of Confederation and then the American constitution and bill of rights? Q: What question was foremost on their minds? Q: What concerned them most? Q: What were they most afraid of? 3 Articles of Confederation — Q: What did the founders learn from Shay’s Rebellion and the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation? Results — Q: Would the nation’s founders recognize the nation we have today? Q: Is this what was designed or what they intended? Form of Government — Q: Why did they settle on republican democracy? Q: How unique is the American model relative to those of other countries? Rome’s Place — Q: What place did Rome’s decline and fall hold in the founders’ sense of political history? Q: How much of Rome’s government did they wish to emulate and how much of its history served as a lesson about what not to do? Endogenous vs.