There's been a little spat in intellectual conservative circles lately. I caught up with it by reading Michael Anton, who was criticizing Paul Gottfried who was criticizing Brion McClanahan who was criticizing Trump's 1776 Commission report. Or the other way around.
McClanahan didn't like the 1776 Commission report because it advanced the "proposition nation" notion that "all men are created equal" that was advanced by President Lincoln. The Founders, he writes, were not particularly interested in phrases from the Declaration of Independence.
In McClanahan's view the Americans involved in the Founding of the Constitution were interested in state sovereignty and that "the people had a right to “alter or abolish” either a state government or a central government." Nor was anyone that interested in the "proposition" that "all men are created equal" in the 1850s.
The question is whether this is an original sin or not, whether the Founders should have known that slavery was the great sin of the ages etc., and whether the Founders are to be eternally banished for not endorsing the modern agenda of rights including votes for blacks and for women.
I think all this misses the point. First of all, back at the Founding, the various actors were politicians, playing both ends against the middle as politicians did then and do now. A lot of people wanted a Constitution, and so they looked to what would get a Constitution written and ratified.
By the 1850s there were different issues moving men's minds, and so the argument was different. And in the Civil War and afterwards the various participants were creating narratives to justify the war and the regime that came after it.
The ruling class of the Founders was pretty well a ruling class of landowners, and in the South those landowners were slave-owners.
By the time of the Civil War a new ruling class was arising in the North, around the new economy of industry and steam transportation.
Our present ruling class is an educated upper class of credentialed bureaucratic careerists, and they naturally think that the old landowners and the industrialists that replaced them were moral cretins compared to themselves. So any pejoratives or insults that diminish the guys of the old era are just part of the narrative that extols the present rulers as moral and political giants.
In our time we are faced with easing our present corrupt ruling class out of its sinecures and power positions and encouraging them to get a real job. One of the things we need to do is create a new narrative that damns the present rulers into the moral basement as people who have created "human rubble" with their failed government programs and created a new lower class where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. That's how you play politics; you try to put your adversaries on the back foot.
In other words, one of the things we need to do is to create moral fairy tales that teach the young'uns to hate the moral turpitude of the present rulers just as the present rulers regale the kiddies with their moral fairy tales about racism and white supremacy as Literally Hitler.
I have a fantasy that helps me get up in the morning. It is that we are transitioning to a new era in which the ordinary Commoners that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, are reaching critical mass and are beginning to demand that the rulers take account of their needs and their right to live their lives according to their beliefs.
My fantasy is that if you want to understand Brexit in Britain, and Trump in America, and the movement of the white working class in Britain from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party and the movement of the white working class in the US from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, then you need to understand the phenomenon of the rise of the middle-class Commoner.
There's a good piece by Melanie Phillips on Substack about the recent by-election in Britain where a solid Labour constituency just elected a Conservative woman to Parliament. She points out that in Britain the "working class people are deeply attached to their country as the place where they know they share basic values, traditions and assumptions[.]" But the Labour Party
had become instead the party of the educated metropolitan upper middle-class, which was committed to liberal universalism and trans-national “human rights” law and up-ending basic values such as the traditional family or even what is to be a man or a woman — and which denounced people like themselves as racist and privileged, simply on the basis that they had a white skin. It was no longer the Labour party; it had become the North London Dinner Party.
Sound familiar? That's exactly what we have here in the US. We are ruled by an urbanist educated elite that doesn't get that the world is full of people that are not like them, and have a right to live their lives just as much as educated liberal activists.
My view is that all the talk about the Founders and racism and equality misses the point; they are old narratives heading for the scrap-heap of history.
What we need is a narrative that glorifies ordinary middle-class Commoners living ordinary lives. And I believe that the narrative has to start with the proposition that you can take your pejoratives, your accusations of racism and white supremacy and patriarchy and put them where the sun don't shine.
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