I'm John Baxter, visiting with Ben Crenshaw, who's an instructor at the Declaration

of Independence Center at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, Mississippi, as well as a student

and PhD candidate at Hillsdale College in Southern Michigan for politics.

And Ben reminds us all very helpfully that we're coming

to an anniversary of the Constitution. In the Constitution are many chambers, and we're going to

enter one chamber, which can be described as the legitimacy barrier. This is to convince

citizens who are virtuous, will assume that,

that they have a voice in a vast republic or a small republic. And the legitimacy barrier in the

Constitution, if I follow your case carefully, Ben, is between the federal government in

Washington, D.C. and the state governments in the capitals.

And that is the legitimacy barrier. What is the challenge of it, Ben? And then we'll get to the

constitutional grain. Barrier first. What is it?

Yeah. So there is, you know, this is one issue with the authors that I was seeking clarity because there's this, this common way of thinking in American political life and, and rhetoric to talk about the distinction between the private and the public sphere.

And the private sphere is that of the family and business and civic institutions and education and so forth, kind of civic society, the engine of, you know, prosperity and GDP and so forth.

And then there's the public sphere, which is politics.

So there's a division between the private and the cultural and the public and the political.

And the whole idea is that politics is cordoned off into this public sphere of limited function, limited reach, and so forth.

So if the federal government starts kind of jumping that barrier and invading

your say dictating what parents can teach their children or, or, you know, whether or not

there should be some kind of transgender sex ed and, you know, local public schools and whether or not parents can take

their kids out of that and so forth. These are the issues that come up when we talk about

this barrier. And my argument to Hale and Landy is that, you know, there is a tradition

...