Just two days ago
here. A taste, quoting Bloom:
Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States
has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation
in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning
is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately
comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings.
America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom
and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on,
there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of
justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this
consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning
of freedom and equality, not about their rightness…
But the unity, grandeur and attendant
folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions
in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life
and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry
tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously…The leading ideas
of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths
or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas,
1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and
optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly
Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy,
individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past
as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a
hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist
debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there
was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the
Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or
superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,
1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of
the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North
(incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and
idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the
Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in
promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American
principles are, racist…
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our
political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it
or seriously critical of it.
The ellipses [...] are from
Legal Insurrection, not mine.
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