A Second Look: James Madison & the Tea Party

The current government shut down over the Affordable Healthcare Act speaks directly to issues found in the nation’s beginnings. Among the many ironies of Tea Party foolishness is that while its adherents are enemies of federalism and shape minor deities of the nation’s founders, the nation’s founders very purposefully opted for federalism. This post from […]

James Madison and Madison, Wisconsin

Conservative deification of the Founders regularly overlooks their choice, in a constitutional, federal government over the prior confederation, of stronger, more centralized national government. In argumentative recourse to the Federalist Papers, conservatives neglect, as history does, the Anti-Federalist Papers. The Federalists won the day. It was their constitution, with the addition of a Bill of […]

Benjamin Franklin & U.S. Grant on the American Constitution

Harvard historian Jill Lepore had an excellent piece int The New Yorker a week ago on “the Constitution and its worshippers.” In it she quotes from the speech the frail Benjamin Franklin had delivered for him just before the signing of the document on September 17, 1787. We have a record of it from the […]

Founding Fathers Not Partiers’ Cup of Tea Only

Among the many mistaken and, frankly, repellent notions of today’s Right is its nearly constant invocation of the nation’s origins and its founders as somehow ideologically ancestral only to them. Here is a very fine reminder that the truth is very different, from Ron Chernow’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. Op-Ed Contributor – The […]