Ellis claims Barack Obama’s call to rise above partisanship hales back to the true intention of the Founding Fathers.
Bullshit.
Our Founding Fathers crafted the body of our Constitution as a bulwark AGAINST too much democracy, per the excellent revisionist history of the Constitution’s creation, “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution,” by Woody Holton.
(Page 273: “The Framers designed the Federal government to be much less accessible than it seems.”)
Yet, our idiotic American public puts the entire Constitution, a now-antiquated document, on a ridiculous pedestal. And, even the Bill of Rights is lacking things like an explicit right to privacy amendment like that found in post-WWII Western European constitutions. We don’t need a professional historian making things worse.
Beyond that, it’s arguable the Founders meant a party of debtors, if anything, when they spoke against “party” and “faction,” while they themselves represented the “investor party.” Joseph Ellis could stand to read Holton’s book.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Historian Joseph Ellis needs to do a little history reading
Posted by
Gadfly
at
1:59 PM