Let’s listen to John Adams
Commenter “Wolla Dalbo” writes:
Despite our Founders deep knowledge, real world experience and street smarts, their very informed, widespread discussions and debates about how to set up our government, when you think about it, our Constitution and our government, in essence, just assume and rely on the good faith and fidelity of our leaders for them to work, there are no really effective, built in mechanisms to prevent a leader from becoming a tyrant, and those weak tools we do have, also assume that a vigilant and courageous Congress will invoke and implement them.
The assumption is that our leaders””people who we just assume understand and love our country, its history, traditions, and form of government”“will generally obey both the spirit and the letter of our Constitution, our laws, and our traditions, and have the vision and guts to implement them, no matter what.
I agree about the Founders’ deep knowledge—wisdom even. But if they set up the government the way they did, it was not because of any sort of naivete or vague hopefulness about government or its leaders, it was because they realized that there is no way to protect people who have lost their own wisdom and judgment about these things. The Founders tried to put in all the built-in, automatic stops to tyranny they could devise, and they were tremendously clever and creative about it. But they also realized that the task of protecting people was impossible, and that the temptation to go the way of tyranny would be great. Perhaps even unstoppable.
But they tried their best. Maybe even the best anyone could have done.
I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. ”¦ Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.
From the same letter:
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the People, who have… a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free ‘government’ ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among people.
That last sentence is perhaps the most important. But they’re all pretty important. Adams’ thoughts on this should be prominently displayed and taught in every classroom. But even I, who had a more traditional, old-fashioned education, never learned this sort of thing. Was it thought too difficult, too boring, for kids? Or had the educational system already been taken over by the left, even way back then (remember, I grew up in NYC, where the teachers’ unions were already leftist)?
I agree with you about the quotes Neo. I also believe that it is no accident that these truths about our national roots have been omitted from public education. For that matter, history was replaced with Social Studies even when I was in school (mid 1960’s) It’s the Gramscian March you have posted about in the past. I add the following quote to this discussion:
George Washington and Religious Liberty
In his Farewell Address, George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens.”
I was in Philadelphia with my family last month and we stopped by the Independence Visitor’s Center, where we caught part of a (well-made) short film on the establishment of the Constitution. The film ended with Benjamin Franklin directly addressing the audience with a quote that has often been attributed to him. “You have a republic, if you can keep it.”
The story is that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. He is said to have answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
As corny as it sounds, it was actually a bit sobering and thought-provoking to hear the character of Ben Franklin address those words to the audience sitting in that theatre, just across the mall from Independence Hall. Particularly in light of the the administration we have endured for the past six years.
CV:
I think about that Ben Franklin quote all the time. ” Whether we can keep it” has become very much in doubt during my lifetime.
When I was in grade 1-12 (during the mid 50’s to late 60’s) I was never taught much about the Founders either (lots about the Pilgrims and Paul Revere though!) In hindsight, I agree that the Gramscian tide had already seeped into the public school system by then.
I went to a small rural school in south central Iowa. In 8th grade and again in 12th we had to attend civics class. We learned the purpose behind the articles and the amendments. Our teachers taught us, as did most of our parents, that the federal government had limited responsibilities in order to check its power over the people, and that the founders warned against government tyranny.
I know that this is true, but to a lesser extent, in Iowa schools today. Now in most school systems civics is first taught in the 6th grade.
One or more of the Founders also remarked that our Republic would only work and could only survive if our citizenry were an educated, religious, diligent, and moral citizenry, statements that I never recall being brought to my attention, much less discussed, in school.
Read Ron Chernow’s “Washington, a Life”. It should be required reading.
I am continually humbled by our Founders’ wisdom…
To a self-empowering Leftist, John Adams is a thought-criminal.
And from bernie sanders :
“the American people voted for a very different agenda from what they want and need” !!!!!
I am still trying to get my mind around an individual that can speak like that !!!!
To borrow from his ethnic group “Ov vy”
MollyNH,
Its the What Is Wrong With Kansas meme. The left knows what is best for you, and only big goverment can provide you with what you do not know you need you big dummy. Btw, I would pay good money see Joni Ernst debate
Oops… debate the Massachusetts squaw.
I went to a site that had a puff piece on Bernie Sanders,
actually had to add comment after the article after like minded lefties posted how “wonderful” bernie is
my comment # 12 (11 prior ones praised him)
called him a “dangerous person to anyone that wants to be a FREE individual”
One of the commenters actually posted a remark to the effect that the FOUNDING DOCUMENTS, promise everyone a Government Provided Fair Life because of the phrase, “with justice for all” !!!!!!
yikes ! I learned in HS US history class that the phrase means LEGAL JUSTICE for all, this woman had no clue !!! ( I took the opportunity to post an explanation, she may not wander in there again but
others may show up & nasty mistakes like that need to be corrected .)
The 9th and 10th amendments must come front and center in any effort to put dc back in the small box where it belongs. Wishful thinking I know, but that is what it will take to make life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a reality in our daily lives and the lives of our great grandchildren.
A solid point, Neo.
Individuals can change themselves, but a group of slaves will always rise to the same level of excellence.
I’ve been trying to figure out why some director / producer couldn’t figure out a way to dramatize the conflict that went into the drafting of the Constitution into a movie; something even ignorant Social Studies teachers could use in their classes. After all, they managed to make a Broadway musical out of the struggle to produce the Declaration of Independence! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(musical)
Neo asks,
The answer is “yes”. And educational philosophy had been tending that way in the upper reaches for decades by then, if not fully implemented.
I remember as a child in 4th or 5th grade seeing what were already old books in the back of the classroom or on the teacher’s shelves by and about John Dewey.
I think one was “John Dewey Prophet of Democracy” or some such stirring title. Knowing nothing of what it said or what he stood for I only remember an image I saw and the positive feelings I had toward what I imagined as a kindly old New England individualist of the type portrayed in 1950s movies, and shown on TV a decade or more later when I was watching.
Thus it was a shock when I was in college wandering in the stacks, pausing before some some work by Grosseteste on education (“He wrote on education?” I wondered) and I spotted a book that was obviously critical of Dewey.
I could hardly look at it. It must have been written by some Jesuit Nazi. Pragmatism was as American as apple pie; as were, ipso facto, all pragmatists. Our homegrown Jamesian ideology could not be bad nor could anyone associated with it.
Later however, as I studied Marxism, I began to run across references to American Hegelians, and Dewey’s name came cropping up.
Eventually I actually read some of his philosophical works, and began to see the connection between his processual philosophy and his emphasis on socialization as the primary job of “education”.
“WTF?”
Yeah … WTF
Rorty waxing worshipful on Dewey
https://www.google.com/url?q=http://iwcenglish1.typepad.com/documents/education_as_socialization_and_as_individualization.doc&sa=U&ei=kfJcVKqHHIGtyATC34D4Cg&ved=0CDwQFjAH&sig2=FCx8ehtPd28Zmm_VKNUkTg&usg=AFQjCNGQEcm-oPHZBUxHC3l4LLFbK-naXg
Dewey:
“My Pedagogic Creed
John Dewey
The School Journal, Vol. LIV, No. 3
January 1897”
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/primary-sources/my-pedagogic-creed-0
See also, the second paragraph of 2.4 of this for some insight into the development and spread of the theoretic standpoint of communal interpenetration, so popular with the left: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/
cas–
I take it that you’re assuming that grateful teachers would want to show such an informative, patriotic movie in their classrooms?
My guess if that nowadays many, perhaps most of them, would pass on what for them would be a jingoistic propaganda piece.
There is a reason why Bill Ayres quit his futile attempts at violent revolution and, instead, went into the “education” racket, spending the last few decades authoring textbooks and creating curriculums that are widely used in many teachers colleges, and creating similarly influential model K-12 curriculums and reading lists, and his effort at mass leftist indoctrination of our teachers–at undermining the system from within–has largely succeeded.
By the way, and on the same topic of education, I have been unable to find Dewey’s 1928 New Republic published “Impressions of Russia and the revolutionary world” on university and dedicated to Dewey sites. Mostly dead links.
On what is apparently a homeschooling oriented web site, which I used of necessity earlier, did find some of it, and I think this passage should be of interest:
John Dewey – architect of much of modern American education.
Paragraphing introduced for clarity.