From the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Here's your host, Scott Bertrand.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome

into another edition of The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. On this episode, we'll hear portions of a

symposium panel put on by Hillsdale College featuring members of Hillsdale's politics department.

Matthew Whitaker, former acting attorney general of the United States, and his new book Above the Law,

the inside story of how the Justice Department tried to subvert President Trump.

And David Whalen from Hillsdale's English Department will introduce us to Walker Percy.

First, Hillsdale College has launched an online symposium titled the coronavirus and public policy.

You can find it at symposium.hillsdale.edu, symposium.hillsdale.edu.

Each of the online symposium's five sessions addresses a specific aspect of the coronavirus's impact on America.

Today we hear from a panel discussion from Hillsdale's

Politics Department on the coronavirus and the Constitution. First, Dr. Kevin Porteus,

professor of politics, talks to us about the problems and dangers of referring to coronavirus

as a kind of war. The first problem is that wars traditionally, of course, lead to expansion of power. Now,

the traditional American way of war was to build up the government to win the war and then dismantle it.

So that during the American Civil War, within a few years after the end of the war, about all that

was left was veterans' pensions in the

Freedmen's Bureau, most of the infrastructure that had been built up to when the war had been

dismantled.

After the First World War, progressives were forced to watch in a kind of horror as Republicans

in the 1920s under Harding and Coolidge dismantled much of the administrative apparatus

...