In response to the Caldwell County Republican Party post: : These 2 Republican responses from the forum are dismaying. They show that our school system is not familiarizing citizens with crucial historical documents, including the contexts within which they were composed and to which they refer. Let’s start with the Founding Fathers generation, who were NOT trying to resurrect an ancient Greek democracy. Read the Federal Papers, particularly Federalist #10 and #50. Read the Declaration of Independence. Then read a different view of the American vision – of government, of citizenship, of the common good – in 19th century writers such as Emerson, and expressed so memorably in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. A “republican” form of government is representative government, and our checks-and-balances distribution of power is designed to manage the effects of “factions” such that decisions can be made, but not in a way that allows a majority to tyrannize over a minority. Which is why Wyoming has as many senators as Texas despite a huge disparity in population. The privileged ideal of Enlightenment thinkers (our (“Founding Fathers”) was “community,” the right of a people to define themselves as a “people” and determine their chosen form of government. Thus…“We the People”. The privileged ideal in the 19th century -- the one that generates the great Amendments, including the abolition of slavery and, a bit later, a woman’s right to vote – is the “individual” or “self,” particularly as Emerson understood that idea. Which brings me to the “Bill of Rights.” To say that these rights actually come from the “Creator” is to confuse the rhetoric of the document with its content. In fact, many (if not, arguably, most) of its authors were Deists, some were agnostics, and some were aggressive religious skeptics. Both Franklin and Jefferson, for example, worried about the religious rhetoric in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration. Why? Because we use religious rhetoric to emphasize how “self-evidently true” we take our human propositions to be. We don’t necessarily believe, let alone present arguments for, the idea that God has given us a political document as, for example, He may have given Moses the Ten Commandments. But Franklin and Jefferson were worried about this tried-and-true rhetoric – Kings were great at abusing such rhetoric while they burned opponents at the stake – because they wanted to separate Church and State. It looks to me like one of the discussion’s respondents has read only the Mayflower Compact which, after all, created a powerful theocracy – NOT A REPUBLIC – in which everyone “submitted to and obeyed” the Church Elders (self-appointed Visible Saints). Ask the folks hanged at Salem in 1692 as witches about how a merging of Church and State worked out for them. (Citizen, 2015).
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 18:10:53 +0000
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