Opinion editor
opinion@dailylobo.com
There’s been an article floating around Facebook and Twitter, courtesy of addictinginfo.org, about how the Founding Fathers were really the “Founding Liberals,” and how Democrats — not Republicans — have the right to claim that founding legacy for themselves. The article mentions how the Founders were supposedly proponents of everything from big government to health care mandates, were extremely distrustful of corporations and big business and how they would have had no problem levying high taxes upon the people.
Naturally, I’m here to try to nip this one in the bud, and to shed some light on the problems with this revisionist history. There are, of course, too many issues with the article’s interpretation of American history to address in a single column, but I’ll hit the two main points that I found the most important to correct.
First, though the Founding Fathers were indeed liberals, it’s important to remember that modern American liberalism, a brand of social liberalism, is not the same thing as Enlightenment-era liberalism, deriving from thinkers such as John Locke. While modern and Lockean liberalism both believe in the potential of individuals and the need for strong personal liberty, they go about securing that liberty by greatly different methods.
In both iterations of liberalism, the person is seen as possessing “unalienable rights.” But, whereas such rights derive from the person and the person alone in Lockean liberalism, a person’s rights must be carefully legislated and regulated by the government in modern liberalism.
Modern liberalism is based upon the idea that to reach one’s full potential, one must be guided and aided by the government in the form of legislation designed to grant liberty. This is known as positive liberty.
Lockean liberalism is based upon the idea that people are actors that can make the best choices for themselves and must be free from excessive government influence to live their lives fully.
This is called negative liberty.
The Founding Fathers also differed from modern liberals in that they were suspicious of government overreach. Big government, in the form of excessive government restraint by the British monarchy, was seen as a threat to their highest ideal of individual liberty.
An interesting side note is that the concept of excessive government doesn’t even exist in modern liberalism. The modern liberal idea of positive liberty means that more government results in more rights and more liberty, so everybody wins.
It’s also important to note that this distrust of government led to the Founding Fathers embracing republicanism and making sure that the Constitution proper and Bill of Rights legislated and regulated the government of the United States, not its people.
Once again, this doesn’t sound very much like modern liberalism.
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Next, the article claims that the Founding Fathers were proponents of big government through their advocacy for a strong federal government established by the Constitution that replaced the unfunctioning Articles of Confederation.
The article states that the Founding Fathers are surely the ancestors of big-government modern liberals because they created a central government that had the power to levy taxes, negotiate treaties, regulate commerce and direct foreign policy, to name a few things in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
This claim quickly falls apart when presented with the fact that, while the Constitution gave the federal government massively expanded powers compared to the weak Articles, the Constitution also contained numerous checks on the federal government and made sure there was a shared layering of power between federal and state governments, something has been increasingly stripped away since the Progressive movement a century ago.
The Founding Fathers clearly expanded government, yes, but they expanded it from a confederation with almost no central government to a small republican government controlled by the rule of law in the form of the Constitution. This is nowhere near the big government ideal embraced by modern liberals.
More than any of these factual errors, though, it disturbs me that such a blatant example of revisionist history and partisan propaganda is presented as concrete, indisputable historical fact.
It’s especially problematic since many Americans appear to know so little about their own government, and need to take some refresher courses in civics.
But twisting that valuable civics education to fit a partisan agenda on either side ultimately only serves to help perpetuate the two-party electoral struggle, and that doesn’t necessarily translate into serving the people. Remember, political parties were never intended to be part of the American system.
Essentially, an effectively voting citizenry is a genuinely educated and informed citizenry. And “effectively voting” doesn’t mean “voting blindly in step with your preferred party to wipe out all political opposition.”
Rather, it means voting in the best interests of the American people, guided by a correct understanding of how the Founding Fathers originally set up the government to benefit them.
