Preserving the American Idea?

The Claremont Institute has raised a lot of money with the slogan “Recovering the American Idea.”

What that means precisely is open to debate. What idea?

Of course, if you’ve followed my work for any amount of time you know that their “idea” is Lincoln’s “proposition nation” myth. They proudly point to his interpretation of the Declaration as the key to understanding America.

The left does, too, which is why I constantly describe these nincompoops as the other side of the leftist coin.

Heads they win, tails you lose. “Conserving” the left’s interpretation of America isn’t really “conservative.” See their love affair with Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Though you could make a case that those who cling to their United State and their White Fragility are, in fact, conserving the Great Society and the 1960s.

What was the American War for Independence really about? Preserving something tangible: the ancient constitutions and the real property of their forefathers, not some “idea” that “all men are created equal.”

We know this because they said it, even Jefferson. His Summary View is much better than the Declaration. Written in 1774, the document clearly outlines what the founding generation wanted to preserve before the War. Hint: it wasn’t some proposition nation.

The Claremont Institute can create new fellowships with Jeffersonian sounding names, but as long as they keep pumping out “Lincoln Fellows” and “John Marshall Fellows” and teaching the proposition nation, they are no better in principle than the leftist nationalists they say they oppose. Their objections are a matter of degree, not substance.

I discuss Claremont and Jefferson’s Summary View in Episode 502 of The Brion McClanahan Show.