This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," July 21, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK LEVIN, HOST: Hello America, I'm Mark Levin. This is LIFE LIBERTY & LEVIN. Welcome. We have a great guest, Dr. Charles Kesler, how are you?

CHARLES KESLER, PROFESSOR OF GOVERNMENT, CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE AND CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY: Mark, good to see you.

LEVIN: It's been what? Twenty or thirty years?

KESLER: I've been following you.

LEVIN: Thank you. And I, you. And it's a pleasure to have you here, Professor, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute; editor of the Claremont Review of Books, considered the greatest publication on book reviews. I read it and I love it.

Also, you're a Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. But the reason I wanted to have you here today is to talk about the Declaration, its relevance to today. A lot of discussion about racism and slavery, a lot of discussion about centralized government and the administrative state versus, say, capitalism and federalism, and you're an expert in all these things. And you've written about these things that you've been teaching for decades about these things.

Let's start with the Declaration of Independence and its relevance to today. What is this natural law, natural right reference in the Declaration? Why is that so important?

KESLER: It requires an explanation today, in a way it didn't really in the 18th Century, because we're not used to the idea that you could derive right and wrong from nature, from the way things are. That nature is that part of life, which we don't create, it's not -- humans don't make it.

And the nature of a thing is what it has in common with others like itself. So, the nature of trees and puppies and rabbits and human beings have a nature to, and it's also the essence of what these beings are, that we don't make, and that have that form a kind of species, there's a bunch of them, but they are different kinds.

So, human nature, the notion that you could derive from human nature, the rules of right and wrong, how we ought to treat one another based on what we are. That's really what natural law and natural right, natural justice are all about.

In modern philosophy courses, this is a very unpopular notion. In the university and in the culture as a whole, it's a very unpopular notion, because for a long time, we have thought that you can't derive an ought from an is, you know, a value from a fact, these were supposed to be two completely different universes.

And the founders didn't think that and no one in philosophy thought that really for thousands of years before, essentially the 19th Century when that became a popular line of argument.

And so it means based on what we are, you could derive from our human nature, a rule about how we ought to treat each other --

LEVIN: The Golden Rule.

KESLER: And it is "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you." Because we are the same kind of being, I have no natural right to rule you. I have no natural authority over you. Because we are equals.

I do have some kind of natural authority potentially over horses, dogs, cows and other parts of nature that are subhuman. And of course, you have authority over yourself. But you don't have authority over others, like yourself, rational beings who are your equals.

And so that means, I don't have any authority over your life, your liberty, your property, and if I -- and there's no natural government, so any government that we justly can operate among ourselves has to be agreed to by consent of equal human beings.

LEVIN: And isn't that the significance of the Declaration, certainly at that time, there they are really, the Revolution it started. They meet at the Second Continental Congress and they're declaring to the world why they have to stand up to the most powerful military in the face of the Earth and they talk about natural rights, natural law, unalienable rights, God-given rights, which is your point, not government given?

KESLER: No.

LEVIN: This foreign government, this monarchy can't control them. As a matter of human right, it can't control them. You have to consent, as you said. And so, they were promoting representative government. And is this not the basis ultimately of our constitutional system?

KESLER: Yes. I mean, the Constitution is in a way a means to the ends that are outlined in the Declaration, protecting our rights, securing our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Levin -- oh I am sorry, happiness.

That's -- that is -- those are the goals of government, or safety and happiness, which are also the ultimate goals of government, which the Declaration speaks about. How are you going to secure all of those things? You need a form of government and the Constitution is what that is. It's our form of government. It's our highest law, the supreme law of the land, meaning the supreme human law.

But there is a natural and perhaps Divine Law of Justice, above that human law, which the human law is trying to -- is trying to achieve. It's looking up to and aspiring. It's perfect justice, you never can achieve perfect justice with imperfect human beings and imperfect governments.

But you have to be conscious of your obligations to try to do justice. And that's what leads to the creation of the Constitution. It's what leads to -- throughout American history, reform movements of various kinds to abolish slavery, for example, to bring positive law and the community into line with natural law with the way it should be.

LEVIN: Let's break this up into a few pieces here, Declaration, the Constitution. A key as you were saying earlier is the individual, individual liberty. In relation to that, what is the civil society -- now, we have talked about the Declaration, the Constitution, the civil society, I'm getting to a point, what is the civil society?

KESLER: Well, civil society is what exists, you might say, between the individual and the state or the national government, in the case of America. Civil society is what individuals by their own voluntary transactions and by mutual consent how we cooperate with one another. We form churches, we form townships, or local communities. We form stamp collecting clubs. There are all kinds of things.

LEVIN: Businesses, whatever it is.

KESLER: Which pursuing our own views of our interest and our happiness, we are free, the government leaves us free to construct a whole rich tapestry really of ways we relate to each other.

And the government has nothing to do with them unless they break a law or unless they are engaged in some nefarious activity or another. But the idea I mean, in China, you know, you're kept under kind of constant surveillance. I mean, there are cameras in the churches designed to make sure that nothing that's preached goes against the government line.

And in America, one of the glories of a free country is the government is not always surveilling you, watching you. And it presumes that you, as a free person can run your life on your own for the most part in conjunction with other free peoples that you want to associate with.

LEVIN: So the Declaration talks about the individual, the civil society and it talks about life that goes on all around us. The Constitution really is focused on a little piece of that -- government.

KESLER: Right.

LEVIN: The Federal government. State governments are essentially left alone. So, a little piece of that. That little piece is getting bigger and bigger, bigger and bigger as we move into an increasingly post- constitutional period.

KESLER: Yes.

LEVIN: Which is compelled by the progressive movement. And so more and more of the civil society, private lives, individual lives are being devoured by a government that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger beyond its constitutional limits, correct?

KESLER: Yes, I mean, the Constitution did take away some powers from the States and put them in the Federal government, but it constructed a system of federalism to balance those two levels of government.

With the progressives, you have a kind of counter revolution against the American Revolution, and all of the things that the Declaration endorsed, progressivism essentially negated or countered.

So the notion that rights are based upon your individual status as a human being, the right to preexisting government that they come from God or from nature, that's rejected by progressivism. You get your rights from the stage of civilization and the kind of state that you have.

The notion that government should be limited to the protection of these rights and should and can be a danger, and so it has to be kept under control by an active public, that too, is rejected. The notion is that government is not opposed to your rights or potentially opposed to your rights. It is an expression of your rights.

And so the most important rights are not any rights you might have as some kind of an individual preexisting government which, in a way, progressivism denies as even a possibility. The most important rights you get come from the government. They give -- you get -- we give the government power, it gives us rights. That's the social contract, the new social contract, the New Republic, that progressivism built.

And it's been a very intoxicating bargain. And for a lot of Americans, you know, increasingly in the 20th Century and now in the 21st, it's been hard to resist the notion, "What could go wrong?" The government becomes more and more powerful, and it gives us more and more rights. What's not to like about that?

I think we've lost touch with common sense and with the founders, common sense understanding that government is ran by human beings too, very imperfect human beings and it can -- the more powers it accumulates, the more dangerous it can pose.

LEVIN: Centralized power versus dispersed power.

KESLER: Right.

LEVIN: But when we come back, I want to ask you about this, how does progressivism and constitutionalism coexist? And over the long haul, can they?

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEVIN: Professor Kesler, constitutionalism, which is intended to protect the individual, limit the Federal government, certain specific powers, no doubt. And progressivism. The early progressive trashed the Declaration and trashed the Constitution. Is this the battle we have today? And how do they coexist these two different completely different ideas?

KESLER: Well, we really -- America is in a very odd and perilous condition because, in a way, we have -- we are one country with two Constitutions. And one Constitution is the original Constitution as amended. You might call it the Conservatives Constitution. And the other constitution is what the liberals call the Living Constitution, a phrase that Woodrow Wilson was among the first certainly to use.

And as between the Conservatives Constitution and the Liberals Constitution, we are continually being whipsawed from one view of justice and one understanding of what government is for to another very opposite one.

But in the beginning, up until the middle let's say of the 20th Century, it was thought that the two Constitutions could sort of coexist, because they were gradually converging. Because the Living Constitution as the original progressives talked about it was an evolutionary product, not a revolutionary one. But one that would gradually over time, grow up around and incorporate anything in the old Constitution that was valuable and worthy.

And so, they didn't think that there was really that the two Constitutions would ever come to a fight, because they would grow together. But then the 60s happened. And instead of growing together, the liberals radicalized and the conservatives in reaction to them in their own way radicalized. And instead of a surrender of the old Constitution, you had a fight going on, you had a cold Civil War, as Angelo Codevilla in the Claremont Review, have called it.

And now, the contradictions between individual rights and group rights between a permanent frame of government and an ever changing frame of government that has, you know, is in a permanent state of transformation as Barack Obama, you know, when five days away from the election, he said, "You know, we're approaching -- we're five days away from a fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

But that's what liberalism, that's what the Living Constitution is all about. It's nothing but transformation.

LEVIN: So, if it's nothing but transformation, that's a long way from the Constitution. And so my question is, where does it take us? Where is their blueprint? If it's not the Constitution, it's something else. They just do this on the fly?

KESLER: Well, in their mind, it takes us toward an ever more perfect social democracy. I mean, to put it in its most harmless form, in which each of us would be transformed into a more and more -- basically a more and more perfect human being in a more and more perfect society. And it's an endless process.

LEVIN: Let me just ask you there. This endless process. But in order to get there, as Hagel would say and Marx would say and probably Rousseau would say, you have to surrender your free will. Right? You have to surrender your individuality to the state.

Because you really can't realize the full extent of your humanity unless you're part of the general citizenry, part of a bigger picture, correct?

KESLER: Yes. And what you see in the phenomenon of political correctness, which is so powerful, I mean, it in a way came from the universities. But now, it is utterly dominating American politics, too.

I mean, if you look at the Democratic presidential candidates, you look at the squad in Congress, their agenda is driven by political correctness and political correctness means you hate and cannot tolerate the imperfection, the moral imperfection of your fellow Americans, of your fellow American citizens, the deplorable, the irredeemable, who have not evolved.

We're all supposed to be evolving together into a more perfect union as President Obama like to say, but the fact that we're not, the fact that there are these recalcitrant people who insist on ruling themselves and having a different kind of government fundamentally than the kind that we want and that we think history promises, the left is not prepared for that. And it sees no reason why it should tolerate that.

In that sense, it's become a kind of -- in a strange way, it's become an established religion. I mean, a sort of medieval established religion, there's an inquisition, there's an index of forbidden books and forbidden thoughts, which you're not supposed to read or think.

And there is a strict moral patrol to make sure that you are not caught thinking things you shouldn't be thinking or saying things you shouldn't say. And it's the antithesis of freedom in the old fashioned sense of it, and what happens to your rights? You have no right to be politically incorrect. That's the whole point.

You have no right to think differently from the progressive menu of the day, and it as -- you know, Americans have reached or I think are reaching a breaking point where even a lot of old fashioned sort of liberals, First Amendment liberals, there are still a few of those around free speech liberals are looking around them and saying, "We don't recognize the America that these people are leading us towards." It doesn't seem to be a free country anymore.

LEVIN: When we come back, I want to tackle this question of racism, slavery, the American founding up to today. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AISHAH HASNIE, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: This is a Fox News Alert from "America's News Headquarters." I'm Aishah Hasnie. Tens of thousands of people losing power in several New York City boroughs amid triple digit temperatures. There are reports of 35,000 people without power in Brooklyn. The utility company Con Edison cutting their power temporarily in order to make some repairs. There are also reports of blackouts in Queens and the Bronx.

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Once again, tens of thousands of people losing power in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

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LEVIN: Professor Charles Kesler, we hear a lot of talk today about slavery, systemic racism, more than I can remember 20 years ago. It seems to be a crucial part of the radical progressive agenda.

First of all, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution. Does the Declaration promote slavery? Does the Constitution enshrine slavery?

KESLER: Well, the best line about the Declaration, I think, was spoken by Bernard Bailyn, the great Harvard historian of the Revolutionary Period, when he said the Declaration of Independence did not solve the problem of slavery, it created the problem of slavery.

And what he meant by that is, there have been plenty of republics in human history, particularly in the ancient a world that had slavery as a fundamental institution of the republics, of their way of life, and they saw no contradiction between the two.

But when you start a Republican form of government and a way of life, by saying all men are created equal, you make slavery problematic. You make slavery wrong and a problem because the country that declared its independence also, of course, did have slaves in almost every state of the union at that point.

But the moment that it declared its independence in the name of human equality, it made that slavery a contradiction and a problem that would have to be dealt with in some way.

The Constitution being a bundle of compromises among 13 states that had different opinions about some things compromised also in the issue of slavery. For example, the new Congress to pass any laws interfering with the International Slave Trade for 20 years; fast forward 20 years, the very first day that it was possible for Congress to pass a law interfering with the International Slave Trade, they did. They made that trade illegal, the very first day they were constitutionally able to do so.

The founders in wrestling with the question of what to do about slavery in the Constitution, they all -- every founder you've ever heard of virtually had the same opinion, slavery was unjust, the question was, what to do about it? How do we get rid of it?

And on that, there was disagreement and in a way, the disagreements were compromised by the assumption which was shared widely in the founding generation, that slavery would be put on the road to extinction, that eventually, the states by themselves would emancipate the slaves in their states and abolish the institution. And that's exactly what happened.

In the next generation after the founding, slavery was abolished in every state, in New England, and in New York, and coming -- working its way down, in effect. But then something happened that they had not anticipated, namely, that process of emancipation in every state halted at the Mason- Dixon Line, and rather than proceeding to Virginia, and to Kentucky, and the border states, and eventually all the way down, beginning in the 1820s to 1930s, there was a resistance movement, an argument for slavery not anymore as just a necessary evil, which was the old argument for slavery, but that it was a positive good.

And so at that point, the tragic sequence of events began which culminated in the in the coming of the Civil War. But the Constitution itself doesn't mention slavery as such. It contemplates, I would say its eventual extinction, and nothing in the Constitution had to be changed to accommodate the results of the Civil War.

I think an interesting question is to think about racism as opposed to slavery. Because the argument now in a way is the racism is the sin, not slavery, and that our original sin was not the bondage of part of humanity, but thinking ill of a part of humanity or other parts of humanity.

LEVIN: And we hear this all the time that the founders were racists. The nation was founded on a racist concept, that the racism is still systemic and pervasive in the country, you know, despite the Civil War and the end of slavery.

You have the Supreme Court in the Plessy decision and other decisions. You've got Jim Crow in the south and I had Shelby Steele here. He acknowledges all of this, and says it was horrendous. But then he says, "We're free." He is talking to his fellow Africans -- were free. Be free, live free, do what you want to do.

But when you watch the media today, and you watch the individuals the President was talking about today, it is this constant drumbeat. And I'm starting to think and I want your opinion on this when we come back, it's not about racism at all. It's about progressivism.

If you don't agree with the progressive ideology and the agenda, a more centralized government and redistribution of wealth and so forth, and so on, that you must be a racist. I'd be interested in your take on that. We'll be right back.

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LEVIN: Professor, I ended that last segment with the notion that really, when we talk about racism, we're not really talking about race now. We're talking a radical progressive ideology. And if you reject it, or you challenge it, somehow the word "race" is introduced, as if you don't agree or embrace this ideology and don't conform to the agenda, then you're racist. Am I wrong?

KESLER: Yes, I mean racist is now an all-purpose accusation and racism is an all-purpose epithet.

I think, you know, it has to do with your view of human nature and the world. From the founders' point of view, from the common sense point of view, you expect people by nature to prefer their own. You prefer your own children, over other children, your own family, over others, you prefer people you know over strangers, you prefer those who are closer to you and more like you to those who aren't. And that was regarded as the starting point, as it were, a moral growth and moral life.

I mean to grow, you have to learn to work with others who are not your friends and not just like you, but it takes a process of trust building, that people who are different from you can be your allies, your friends, your fellow citizens.

But it takes a process of trust building, that people who are different from you can be your allies, your friends, your fellow citizens. You can die for them in political -- in war, and stand by them as kind of -- as a band of brothers to use that language.

All of those great World War II movies which showed the platoons, you know made up of the Italian, American, the Polish-American, you know, the Mexican-American and so forth were living examples of and miniature of how moral growth and political life were understood to work in the past.

You find that you can work with people in larger and larger circles, you expand yourself and your circle of trust outward to from city to county, to state to nation, and that was regarded as a process that every generation would have to repeat, because you're starting from a human nature that is selfish and prefers people that are more known and more trustworthy to others to strangers, who are neither.

Liberalism today, political correctness today begins from the assumption of human perfection, you know, that we're at the end process of a historical progressive evolution. And any preference for one zone is regarded as original sin as a defect, which must be obliterated.

And so there can't be any redemption for that sin, there can't be any absolution for it. It has to be -- it's unforgivable, and it has to be stamped out in some way. And so the modern accusation of racism is essentially an accusation against human evil, imperfection, selfishness, preferring your own. And as such, it is an endless indictment.

LEVIN: And yet Professor, which ideology pushes group identity? Which ideology uses the power of government to group people based on race, based on sex, based on what you do, what sex based on different categories set up by politicians and bureaucrats? Is that not the progressive?

KESLER: Yes, it is. And there's something of a contradiction there. But if you take the high progressive point of view, right now, the politically correct point of view, let's say, their argument is that there's no such thing as a natural individual. We're all by nature members of groups. There is a need for groups to raise their consciousness and understand that other groups like themselves are also oppressed and need government assistance and recognition to escape that oppression. That's intersectionality, this terrible word which has become so common these days.

You know, it's amazing. I teach freshmen in American Government and the first day of class, they already all know that word, intersectionality and so forth. They've learned it in high school or someplace long before they got to college. It's very interesting and surprising how pervasive that moral education is.

I mean, maybe it's an immoral education, but it's still, it seems to be everywhere. But that is -- the meaning of racism now is, the goals are continually being moved and redefined by what progressives think is the worst outrage of the age. And that's why Martin Luther King, preaching color blindness would -- is considered a racist today, on many campuses, because colorblindness is regarded as a privileged white male idea designed to disguise the very structural racism and the kinds of things, you know, the inner biases that we don't realize, but are still there and need to be expunged somehow.

All of that, unfortunately, has polluted the conversation in America about these things.

LEVIN: When we come back, I want to ask you about immigration. What's the purpose of immigration historically? And is that the purpose of immigration today?

Don't forget folks, you can check me out most weeknights on Levin TV. Please join us. Give us a call at 844-LEVIN-TV, 844-LEVIN-TV or go to blazetv.com/mark, blazetv.com/mark. Oh and yes, don't forget to get your copy, "Unfreedom of the Press." We'll be right back.

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LEVIN: What's the purpose of immigration?

KESLER: Well, it has several purposes, I guess you can say. I mean, it's to refresh and repopulate the country, but it's not designed to change the country in a fundamental way. I mean, the way that Americans in past generations thought about the problem of immigration was that America was always an extraordinarily open country.

We had open borders, basically for a hundred years. We had no immigration laws for a hundred years or so.

LEVIN: Huge country. Very small population.

KESLER: Very small population and it's very hard to get here. I mean, open borders, but you had to cross, you know, 3,000 miles of tempestuous ocean to make it. And so not everybody did that. But even then, I mean, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton, they were talking about what are the moral and political qualities of the people who are coming to us. And they had to debate about this.

And Jefferson wanted, you know, farmers and Hamilton wanted people who were interested in manufacturing and finance and other kinds of things, different ideas of what would work best for America. But they agreed, they all agreed that you wanted people with a strong work ethic, who were prepared to -- who spoke English or would learn English, and who would love Republican government, would love to live in a free country, unlike the miserable place they're probably fleeing from to come over here.

LEVIN: And would cut their allegiance to the country they came from and give their allegiance to our country.

KESLER: Yes. And that meant eventually in us, there's a strict sense of that that is that you follow the Constitution, are loyal to the Constitution, will fight for the Constitution and the Republic, and a slightly larger sense that you will, culturally, be an American, which this larger sense became known as assimilation and Americanization, as Teddy Roosevelt called it and some other people as well.

Meaning that you would learn to identify with and to like and to love your fellow citizens and their way of life in general. It didn't mean that you couldn't be -- you couldn't live as a believing Jew or as a Quaker in your own city and Township, or whatever. But it meant that you saw something important in common with people who weren't Quakers, or Orthodox Jews, you could see them as fellow citizens.

LEVIN: What do you make --

KESLER: And imagine sacrificing for them --

LEVIN: The situation today, Omar, Tlaib, others. The Democratic Party really standing for the proposition that they will not secure the border, and that people have a right to be here. When they come here, they effectively have all the rights that a citizen has, more and more there's this -- the distinction between citizen and noncitizen is becoming less and less so. What do you make of that?

KESLER: Well, it's perverse to say the least. I mean, in a way, it's a complete reversal of the understanding of the past. We look upon the immigrants as coming to teach us a higher way of life, somehow.

They come so that we may, in sacrificing for them, elevate ourselves, you know. We can overcome our selfishness, our Americanness by embracing an ever wider diversity.

Now, one of the strange things about that argument, though, is that even on campuses, they talk about diversity and inclusion. These two words go together, but they're different. And the fact that you need both of them is in a way a concession from them because diversity -- you can have so much diversity, you don't have any community left.

So, there has to be inclusion. There's still a community into which you will be included. And what is that community? Well, that is there -- they are very weak on that subject. That's the contradiction or the problem that they face. But they are quite prepared to answer that question.

And, and as you know, the answers will differ from age -- from decade to decade. In some decades, they can be in favor of closing the border and in other decades, opening the borders. It all depends on what advances of the progressive agenda.

LEVIN: I personally find this notion that immigration exists for the purpose of seven billion people outside the United States, if they manage to get into the United States then all of a sudden, their rights are conferred upon them, economic benefits are conferred upon them, is a way to destroy society. We'll be right back.

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LEVIN: Dr. Kesler, you were an early supporter of President Trump before he was President. How's he doing?

KESlER: Well, I think pretty well. He has faced the kind of opposition or resistance that it's hard to believe any -- very few American Presidents have ever had to face. I mean, the only one who clearly faced a worse situation was Abraham Lincoln, I think in 1860.

By the time he was in Washington, you know, half the Union was in secession or would soon be in secession, rapidly be in secession.

The two-year long investigation, the Mueller investigation and all the other investigations is an absolutely unprecedented situation. Not that there weren't things that incoming Presidents like JFK and LBJ couldn't have been investigated for, but they never had to face those kinds of headwinds.

And given all that he has had to face and overcome, I think his administration is going quite well. There's much on the agenda that still needs attention, and I hope that it will be attended to between now and the election and into a second term.

LEVIN: I agree. And maybe some of the Republicans and at some point, the Democrats will help them. Although, don't your breath. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.

KESLER: Mutual. Thank you.

LEVIN: See you next time on "Life, Liberty & Levin."

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