How Could the Founders Have Done Better? By Michael Anton for American Greatness
In a regime of equality, excellence and superiority are allowed to thrive while the ordinary virtues of frugality, industry, piety, and fidelity are protected.
hile I’m honored by the suggestion that I’m taking part in a renewed Jaffa-Bradford (or Jaffa-Kendall)-style debate, I make no such claim for myself.
Paul Gottfried is a bit coy when he says that Brion “McClanahan and other paleoconservatives have not rushed to acclaim the [1776] commission’s work.” This is true but skips over the fact that McClanahan didn’t merely decline to acclaim the Commission’s report but, indeed, savaged it—a fact Gottfried acknowledges in his prior paragraph. Speaking only for myself, silence would have been met with silence. To repeat this point for the nth time, I have no wish to fight this fight—especially not now.
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But to repeat another point, to which I have yet to receive any kind of rejoinder, let’s remember that the 1776 Commission Report is a patriotic account of America deliberately published under the auspices of the president of the United States at a time when nearly every institution in our country—governmental, economic, societal—is fanatically anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-white. Try to imagine the Biden, or the Obama, or even the Bush Administration publishing such a document. It is impossible. Forest, trees.
The message of the day from every commanding height in our society is that America is evil. The current president of the United States embraces that view openly. The man he served as vice president made some effort to hide his agreement while in office but, now safely out, vents spleen. The effectual truth is that attacking the Commission’s report, whatever one thinks of it, is therefore to side with America’s enemies. It may matter, on a theoretical level, that your reasoning is entirely different from her enemies’. But on a practical level it matters not a whit. The bright line of the current year is “America, pro or con?” I didn’t make the times Schmittean, though I do get blamed for noticing that they are.
