When American narratives collide

[Zorro]

Conservatives have the Founding Fathers' story; liberals have the arc of history. Which will prevail?

The most famous speech in American history begins this way: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln's eloquence at Gettysburg was lyrical but not historically accurate. For no such thing as a "new nation" had been proposed in 1776; only a temporary union of sovereign states, declaring their independence from Britain, then presumably going their separate ways.

Indeed, the magic words of the Declaration of Independence to which Lincoln referred, Thomas Jefferson's words starting with "We hold these truths to be self-evident," located sovereignty in neither the national nor state governments but in the souls of individual citizens. Taken literally, this was a recipe for anarchy. Taken seriously, this meant that any robust expression of government power was put on the permanent defensive. Government was "them," not "us."

During the summer of 1776, then, the libertarian and anti-government values currently embraced by the "tea party"conservatives were, in fact, central features of the founding moment of the United States. While evangelicals will have a very hard time claiming Jefferson as one of their own, the original ethos of the American Revolution is, at least rhetorically, compatible with the political agenda of the contemporary conservative movement.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ellis-tea-party-jefferson-washington-20120506,0,3930576.story

[saras]

1. That's the kind of crap you get when you forget that narratives are fiction and rhetoric is lies.

People who create a government are not, by any stretch of the imagination, anti-government. That's just stupid. If they were anti-government, they wouldn't have created one and given it so much power.