If Our Founding Fathers Were Alive Today…
If Our Founding Fathers Were Alive Today…
“If the Founding Fathers were alive to today they would”… (Insert your non-substantiated belief here: ______________ to complete your specious argument.)
“The Founding Fathers believed…” (Insert what your non-substantiated belief here: ________as to what the Founding Fathers’ believed to prove your specious argument.)
By observation and listening to the inflammatory rhetoric on what is now euphemistically called “conservative talk radio”, or the insane ramblings of certain members of the Tea Party, invoking the Founding Fathers seems to be the default position when their narrative does not hold up to critical analysis.
As a classical conservative, I believe that our Founding Fathers were noble men of stature, but not always civil or honorable in their discourse between each other, nor do I believe they should be elevated to the status of secular sainthood. They were the product of their times.
However, only those with slighter minds would ignore the wisdom of the past, but this constant and unrelenting reliance by proof-texting their words from an incredible body of works and writings they left for posterity to ponder, is nothing more than intellectual bankruptcy, slander and defamation, and is insulting to their names.
As a classical conservative I would argue that it is sheer sophistry to treat these men from the Enlightenment Era, confronted with the awesome task of forming a totally new form of governance in which they threw off the shackles of mysticism, as a single homogeneous group.
The Founding Father’s opinions changed over their lifetimes, and as such, because an individual can quote an opinion from one of the many men we collectively call the “Founding Fathers” to support a ridiculous argument, does not mean you’re reflecting their opinion because it agrees with a fallacious opinion in the 21st century.
Many rational thinking conservatives have changed their minds on several policy issues that now confront the body politic in this day and age, that adherents to the current rabid strain of modern conservatism and their “true patriot” juveniles, believe are written in stone for all eternity, and have either continued to ignore, or have simply refused to engage in discursive and political dialogue, completely unaware that that their pedantic and dogmatic positions have become self-destructive; locking themselves into an contradictory box from which even Houdini could not escape from. And, quoting the Founding Fathers will not save them.
Over time, the Founding Fathers became self-aware of their extreme differences between their rhetoric and reality.
Time may be infinite and absolute, but political ideas by definition are finite and fleeting.