The Founding Fathers

When Giants Strode the Earth

by Martin Willett

Isn't the veneration that Americans have for their Founding Fathers irrational and sacrilegious?

Ask an American to describe any modern day politician and he'll say he's a bum, out for himself, no good, a crook, dishonest, motivated by selfish greed alone and devoid of true principles. Ask him to describe the revolutionary leader of a guerilla army and you'll get a much stronger torrent of abuse that will probably include references to crimes such as murder and making allusions about insanity, bestiality, incest and Satanic possession. And yet ask him to describe the Great Leaders whose faces adorn American statues, mountains and banknotes and whose names are immortalized in a thousand streets, avenues, counties and high schools and you will think they are describing a different species of being all together. How can these paragons of virtue have been mere men? How can they have been politicians?

The Founding Fathers have far more in common with angels than with mortal men, still less of politicians and leaders of revolutionary forces. Can this ever be a healthy state of affairs that the people are taught to regard the present generation of politicians as devolved demons and previous generations to be a kind of demigod?

Quote Franklin or Jefferson at an American and they will react as if the words were holy writ. Let them hear a speech by a modern politician and they dissect it for spin, lies and vested interest, often when there is none to be found. Does it ever occur to them to use the same kind of analysis on the words and deeds of The Great Ones?

Libertarians are especially prone to venerate the Founding Fathers in a way that is both nauseating and clearly blasphemous. Are these people some kind of repressed monarchists? Wouldn't they happier if they could actually worship these blessed ancestors as gods?

One of the Founding Fathers utters a pithy phrase and they wear it on a t-shirt and carve it on the monument next to their state capitol. A current day politician utters a pithy phrase and they say a spin doctor wrote them a cynical soundbite. To get things back into their true perspective you have to apply the same set of standards to politicians of all eras, all nations and all parties. You have to be prepared to find modern figures great, even while they are still alive, and to find the men of the past to be imperfect, vain, out for themselves and for the vested interests they have chosen to ally with.

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