Thank you for the scholarly elucidations. Please keep up the good work.
I have a feeling that few Americans have had an actual opportunity to study the underlying forces at work when the Constitution was created. Regurgitation of selected “salient facts” was more important as I recall. Thoughtful discussions were absent, or buried in dense required reading tomes with little or no time to digest them in the course syllabus time frames, or ignored. As busy adults with families there’s limited time to digest much more than skewed Cliff Notes versions, like those promulgated by the Heritage Foundation leadership under the color of “we’re in this together.” The people are uneducated, not dumb. Counterpoints and clarifications like you are creating is needed.
Self interested lawyers, and the courts and SCOTUS have perverted and obfuscated its roots with legal parsing and hair splitting arguments over decades to the point that it’s hard to recognize the original thrusts. Sadly, Leonard Leo and his FEDSOC minions are perverting it further with unchallenged “originalist interpretations” muddled with dominionism as if religion was and remains the driving force underlying American democracy, merely because they gerrymandered the electorate to the point that the electees no longer represent the majority.
Again, perhaps an outline can lead to a digestible elevator speech presentation. It’s necessary.
Terrific writing Robert. One of the greatest examples of revisionist history imaginable that has been foisted on us to date is that our ‘founding fathers’ were representative of the Christian nationalists sitting now in our bicameral congress as Donald Trump’s Republican MAGA fascist cult member minions. First, Roberts is now attempting to conjure a religious beginning to our founding documents, but nothing could be further from the truth. Religion does not appear in the Constitution. It is only there in Roberts’ imagination, yet he tries to convince the citizens of the United States that it’s just fine to intersperse religion into the Constitution. The Constitution of the United States of America, is not, and never was intended to be a document governed by any kind of religious dogma. Nearly every one of our founding fathers believed that a God ‘may’ have created the Earth but if so, the writers of our Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were left to manage it. Thomas Jefferson was the major writer of the Declaration of Independence and was on diplomatic duty in Europe when the Constitution was written. Nonetheless, he wrote many letters regarding his opinions that included the government could not even imply that “good citizens or patriotic citizens” were religious. The word ‘God’ is not in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was a deist who supported the Unitarian church — but never joined it — saying he thought it would become the general religion of the United States. Many of the other writers were atheists, deists and Unitarian, but not a single writer was a conservative evangelical Christian nationalist. Despite the fact that the framers of the Constitution were clear about the separation of religion from government, today we have politicians who practice an ultra-right, conservative Christian nationalist religion who want to establish the Kingdom of God by institutionalizing biblical principles as the law of the land. We have justices on the SCOTUS whose judicial thinking includes using their positions of power to impose opinions vis-à-vis overturning Roe, with a majority seeming to be comfortable with a future that includes laws that have stripped Americans of their rights. They are interested in white Christian nationalism becoming the ‘law of the land’ The laws of the land, according to the founding fathers, should not reference to ‘God’ nor imply having religion. Yet, Roberts is holed up at the Heritage Foundation, conjuring the Constitution having been written and signed with the framers referencing the Christian Bible. The Constitution does not mention God, so why are we allowing folks who are fundamentally evangelical Christian nationalists to make and interpret our laws based on their concept of religious freedom? They clearly want only a religion that considers white Christian nationalism, but they cannot co-opt our government and redefine our founding documents to make them fit ‘their’ creed. Second, there is a major flaw in Roberts’ premise: he claims the problem with our country is that a ‘ruling elite’ has taken over. I have news for him: when the founding fathers wrote “We The People” in the preamble to the constitution in 1787 (ratified 1788), they were the elite intelligentsia. The writers owned businesses, they were publishers, newspaper editors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, bankers; the government was operating at the time, and the group of people who wrote the Constitution were a group of people of substance, and they were running the government. Some of the original writers, including Thomas Jefferson, were working as diplomats in Europe, but they were still plenty involved in writing, negotiating, compromising and getting their ideas inserted into the finished document. When the framers of the Constitution wrote ‘We The People’ as the preamble, they formed a social contract with people who didn’t have the wherewithal to take time away from their labors to spend months writing and negotiating (and compromising) to form the documents that became our founding documents. They did this in service to the people who could not contribute to the writing, but needed the protection of these documents. It was an unselfish work, and resulted in a social contract that has stood until today. Jefferson was concerned with the citizenry being educated to be able to govern. He was also concerned with the importance of a free press to keep government in check. He believed only educated citizens could make the American experiment in self-government succeed, thus established the University of Virginia. If our citizenry is unfit to govern according to the fundamental law of the Constitution, we need look no farther than Republican George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (2002), the main law for US kids in grades Kindergarten through 12th grade until 2015 (civics courses were erased and history was revised during those years). If Trump is elected in 2024, there will be no checks on the Executive Branch. He will fulfill his threat to incarcerate those who have opposed him, including journalists and members of the media, fulfilling Jefferson’s greatest worry. I understand there has been no historical analysis that would give us a research database of who and whom the writers of the founding documents entailed. But there’s enough to know that they were an elite governing body of that period. The founding fathers were not interested in having an elite status that removed government ‘from the people.’ Today, in a poignant example of how effective this social contract has been, the over-whelming majority of American citizens believe the Constitution and ‘We The People’ was written by folks ‘just like them.’ It was not. It was written by the same kind of ‘elite’ public servants who are running our government in today’s Democratic administration. They are educated, as Jefferson wanted. The Supreme Court extremist challenges to the Constitution, and ultra-right wing conservative, evangelical Republicans attempting to hijack Congress are following Trump’s bidding to expand the window of ideas that are politically acceptable, even when they are unacceptable to the majority of Americans. Indeed, a line needs drawn in the sand and the revisionist history nonsense proposed by Roberts at the Heritage Foundation needs confronted. Begin with explaining to Roberts that we cannot find ‘God’ in the Constitution because the Founding Fathers didn’t want God in there. And we don’t want religion inserted now.
“propagandistically-proselytizing “ That has to be one of the best phrases I’ve ever read and very appropriate for the style and presentation of the preached garbage being put forth from the far-right Christian fanatics and the strict constitutional originalist (in their opinion) conservatives.
Kevin D. Roberts certainly cherry picks his recollection and telling of American history, taking advantage that few outside of think tanks and academia know the details of the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, mischaracterizing his current “ruling elites” in comparison to the British monarchy, and misconstruing the definition of a republic. Focusing on the minor details, however truthful, only muddies the waters of his ideology.
“…..manipulating average citizens with misinformation and writings and speeches that arouses their emotions and shuts down their thinking.” is a classic methodology of a fascist regime. It amazes me that their solution to reestablishing a freely elected republic is to destroy an elected republic form of government, established by the people, for the people, replacing it with their ideological version of a white male property owning wealthy elite conservative controlled dominionism believing freedom limiting government run by a select few for their financial and political benefit.
Brilliant, as usual.
Thank you for the scholarly elucidations. Please keep up the good work.
I have a feeling that few Americans have had an actual opportunity to study the underlying forces at work when the Constitution was created. Regurgitation of selected “salient facts” was more important as I recall. Thoughtful discussions were absent, or buried in dense required reading tomes with little or no time to digest them in the course syllabus time frames, or ignored. As busy adults with families there’s limited time to digest much more than skewed Cliff Notes versions, like those promulgated by the Heritage Foundation leadership under the color of “we’re in this together.” The people are uneducated, not dumb. Counterpoints and clarifications like you are creating is needed.
Self interested lawyers, and the courts and SCOTUS have perverted and obfuscated its roots with legal parsing and hair splitting arguments over decades to the point that it’s hard to recognize the original thrusts. Sadly, Leonard Leo and his FEDSOC minions are perverting it further with unchallenged “originalist interpretations” muddled with dominionism as if religion was and remains the driving force underlying American democracy, merely because they gerrymandered the electorate to the point that the electees no longer represent the majority.
Again, perhaps an outline can lead to a digestible elevator speech presentation. It’s necessary.
Terrific writing Robert. One of the greatest examples of revisionist history imaginable that has been foisted on us to date is that our ‘founding fathers’ were representative of the Christian nationalists sitting now in our bicameral congress as Donald Trump’s Republican MAGA fascist cult member minions. First, Roberts is now attempting to conjure a religious beginning to our founding documents, but nothing could be further from the truth. Religion does not appear in the Constitution. It is only there in Roberts’ imagination, yet he tries to convince the citizens of the United States that it’s just fine to intersperse religion into the Constitution. The Constitution of the United States of America, is not, and never was intended to be a document governed by any kind of religious dogma. Nearly every one of our founding fathers believed that a God ‘may’ have created the Earth but if so, the writers of our Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were left to manage it. Thomas Jefferson was the major writer of the Declaration of Independence and was on diplomatic duty in Europe when the Constitution was written. Nonetheless, he wrote many letters regarding his opinions that included the government could not even imply that “good citizens or patriotic citizens” were religious. The word ‘God’ is not in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was a deist who supported the Unitarian church — but never joined it — saying he thought it would become the general religion of the United States. Many of the other writers were atheists, deists and Unitarian, but not a single writer was a conservative evangelical Christian nationalist. Despite the fact that the framers of the Constitution were clear about the separation of religion from government, today we have politicians who practice an ultra-right, conservative Christian nationalist religion who want to establish the Kingdom of God by institutionalizing biblical principles as the law of the land. We have justices on the SCOTUS whose judicial thinking includes using their positions of power to impose opinions vis-à-vis overturning Roe, with a majority seeming to be comfortable with a future that includes laws that have stripped Americans of their rights. They are interested in white Christian nationalism becoming the ‘law of the land’ The laws of the land, according to the founding fathers, should not reference to ‘God’ nor imply having religion. Yet, Roberts is holed up at the Heritage Foundation, conjuring the Constitution having been written and signed with the framers referencing the Christian Bible. The Constitution does not mention God, so why are we allowing folks who are fundamentally evangelical Christian nationalists to make and interpret our laws based on their concept of religious freedom? They clearly want only a religion that considers white Christian nationalism, but they cannot co-opt our government and redefine our founding documents to make them fit ‘their’ creed. Second, there is a major flaw in Roberts’ premise: he claims the problem with our country is that a ‘ruling elite’ has taken over. I have news for him: when the founding fathers wrote “We The People” in the preamble to the constitution in 1787 (ratified 1788), they were the elite intelligentsia. The writers owned businesses, they were publishers, newspaper editors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, bankers; the government was operating at the time, and the group of people who wrote the Constitution were a group of people of substance, and they were running the government. Some of the original writers, including Thomas Jefferson, were working as diplomats in Europe, but they were still plenty involved in writing, negotiating, compromising and getting their ideas inserted into the finished document. When the framers of the Constitution wrote ‘We The People’ as the preamble, they formed a social contract with people who didn’t have the wherewithal to take time away from their labors to spend months writing and negotiating (and compromising) to form the documents that became our founding documents. They did this in service to the people who could not contribute to the writing, but needed the protection of these documents. It was an unselfish work, and resulted in a social contract that has stood until today. Jefferson was concerned with the citizenry being educated to be able to govern. He was also concerned with the importance of a free press to keep government in check. He believed only educated citizens could make the American experiment in self-government succeed, thus established the University of Virginia. If our citizenry is unfit to govern according to the fundamental law of the Constitution, we need look no farther than Republican George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (2002), the main law for US kids in grades Kindergarten through 12th grade until 2015 (civics courses were erased and history was revised during those years). If Trump is elected in 2024, there will be no checks on the Executive Branch. He will fulfill his threat to incarcerate those who have opposed him, including journalists and members of the media, fulfilling Jefferson’s greatest worry. I understand there has been no historical analysis that would give us a research database of who and whom the writers of the founding documents entailed. But there’s enough to know that they were an elite governing body of that period. The founding fathers were not interested in having an elite status that removed government ‘from the people.’ Today, in a poignant example of how effective this social contract has been, the over-whelming majority of American citizens believe the Constitution and ‘We The People’ was written by folks ‘just like them.’ It was not. It was written by the same kind of ‘elite’ public servants who are running our government in today’s Democratic administration. They are educated, as Jefferson wanted. The Supreme Court extremist challenges to the Constitution, and ultra-right wing conservative, evangelical Republicans attempting to hijack Congress are following Trump’s bidding to expand the window of ideas that are politically acceptable, even when they are unacceptable to the majority of Americans. Indeed, a line needs drawn in the sand and the revisionist history nonsense proposed by Roberts at the Heritage Foundation needs confronted. Begin with explaining to Roberts that we cannot find ‘God’ in the Constitution because the Founding Fathers didn’t want God in there. And we don’t want religion inserted now.
“propagandistically-proselytizing “ That has to be one of the best phrases I’ve ever read and very appropriate for the style and presentation of the preached garbage being put forth from the far-right Christian fanatics and the strict constitutional originalist (in their opinion) conservatives.
Kevin D. Roberts certainly cherry picks his recollection and telling of American history, taking advantage that few outside of think tanks and academia know the details of the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, mischaracterizing his current “ruling elites” in comparison to the British monarchy, and misconstruing the definition of a republic. Focusing on the minor details, however truthful, only muddies the waters of his ideology.
“…..manipulating average citizens with misinformation and writings and speeches that arouses their emotions and shuts down their thinking.” is a classic methodology of a fascist regime. It amazes me that their solution to reestablishing a freely elected republic is to destroy an elected republic form of government, established by the people, for the people, replacing it with their ideological version of a white male property owning wealthy elite conservative controlled dominionism believing freedom limiting government run by a select few for their financial and political benefit.
Outstanding clarification, all!