Partisans from across the political divide routinely pay lip service to America\u2019s founders. It is impossible to go very long\u2014particularly during an election year\u2014without hearing politicians and their supporters of all stripes enlist \u201cthe Founders\u201d in the service of their causes.<\/p>\n
Sometimes such invocations are justified.\u00a0 More often\u2014much more often\u2014than not, however, they are nothing more or less than window dressing for positions of which the Patriots of 1776 could have scarcely conceived.\u00a0 And if they could have conceived these ideas, they would have recoiled in horror from them.<\/p>\n
Contrary to what \u201cthe Founders\u201d suggests, the men and women who gave birth to America composed anything but a monolithic group. Granted, racially, ethnically, and religiously, they were overwhelmingly of the same stock. Intellectually, on the other hand, they composed quite a diverse bunch.\u00a0 As historians as disparate as Bernard Bailyn and Paul Johnson have shown, the eighteenth century American mind was a river with many tributaries flowing into it.<\/p>\n
Still, its intellectual variety, though dramatic, was held together by a consensus of a sort.\u00a0 The minds of \u201976, for all of their differences, ultimately converged around the idea that liberty is something to be prized.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, coming out of the English tradition as they did, they agreed that the term \u201cgovernment,\u201d for all of its grammatical unity, should no more refer to a single entity than the terms \u201cworld\u201d or \u201cweather.\u201d\u00a0 That is, those who declared and achieved American independence knew that in the absence of a self-divided government, a government comprised of many sovereigns, there could be no liberty.\u00a0 They knew that liberty, as they understood it, demanded as wide a diffusion of power and authority as the government could survive.<\/p>\n
This is why the Founders decided upon the Constitution, a system of federalized arrangements that relegate the federal government to a standing of secondary importance vis-\u00e0-vis the states.<\/p>\n
In navigating their way around the challenges of everyday life, Christians ask themselves one very straightforward question: what would Jesus do?\u00a0 To determine who really is and is not committed to preserving the legacy of the Founders, I suggest we ask ourselves a similarly direct question: what would the Founders do?<\/p>\n
Let us be bold.\u00a0 Let us be honest.\u00a0 Let us consider the following issues in light of how the Founders would have approached them.<\/p>\n
Would the Founders have supported \u201cuniversal heath care?\u201d<\/p>\n
Would they have supported any national income tax, regardless of the rate at which it is was set?<\/p>\n
Can we imagine the Founders thinking it desirable, much less permissible, for any politician, let alone the President, to redistribute the wealth and incomes of citizens?<\/p>\n
Would the Founders have looked upon a federal government that confiscated and expended the resources of its citizens for \u201chumanitarian\u201d purposes as anything other than an enemy of humanity?<\/p>\n
Would the Founders have endorsed limitless waves of immigration from any part of the planet, but particularly the likes of which have been stemming to our country from the non-European countries of the Third World for the last nearly 50 years?<\/p>\n
Would they have promoted the exportation to the rest of the globe, via the military, of something called \u201cAmerican values?\u201d<\/p>\n
What would the Founders have thought about the national government undermining individuals\u2019 freedom of association and assembly by preventing them from discriminating against others (as if this freedom isn\u2019t inherently discriminatory)?<\/p>\n
What would the Founders think about Washington D.C. telling employers how little they are permitted to pay their employees and who they can and cannot hire?<\/p>\n
What would the Founders think about the national government telling private property owners how much they can charge their tenants?<\/p>\n
What would the Founders think about a national government that tells citizens how long them must wait before they can exercise their Second Amendment rights by purchasing a firearm?\u00a0 What would they think about its limiting their choice of such purchases?<\/p>\n
What would the Founders think about a national government that waged war against half of the country because it dared to assert its sovereignty by attempting to secede from the union?\u00a0 What would the Founders think about a country that now associates the word \u201csecession\u201d with what it calls \u201cextremists\u201d and \u201cfringe elements?\u201d<\/p>\n
These questions are not at all difficult to answer. Whether we agree with the Founders or not isn\u2019t the point.\u00a0 The point is that we know just how they would reply to these inquiries.<\/p>\n
What this in turn means is that if we take exception to the Founders\u2019 vision, we cannot pretend to like them. We cannot continue to invoke them.<\/p>\n
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Partisans from across the political divide routinely pay lip service to America\u2019s founders. It is impossible to go very long\u2014particularly during an election year\u2014without hearing politicians and their supporters of all stripes enlist \u201cthe Founders\u201d in the service of their causes. Sometimes such invocations are justified.\u00a0 More often\u2014much more often\u2014than not, however, they are nothing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n