Fascism: Goldwater + Gingrich = Trump | 13 comments (13 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

A Follow-up on Remarks by Tom Cotton (none / 0)

What's In A Name?

"The NYT's 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom & equality on which our nation was founded.

Federal funding shouldn't help indoctrinate young Americans w/ this left-wing garbage."

From another thread - Fascist Propaganda: Symbolism of Frankenstein

Interview with George Will | Columnist |

Why should I care about Jefferson?
A late-20th-century America is concerned about its identity, and it's come to be aware of the fact that we are a creedal nation--and he gave us our creed. He made it accessible. A lot of nations emerge from the mists of history and their basic identity is tribal, it's rooted in groups. Ours is rooted in a great ascent, an ascent to certain propositions. We are, as Lincoln said--Lincoln being the greatest student of Jefferson of them all--"a nation dedicated to a proposition." Jefferson wrote the proposition.

How do you reconcile a man who could write the sentence, with a man who owned more than 200 slaves and never saw fit in his lifetime to manumit them?
Jefferson was a man of his time and his place. And in 18th-century Virginia, property in human beings was the fabric of society. Still, Lincoln, the man who was to end that institution, said, "All honor to Jefferson," because Jefferson had taken what was a merely national struggle, the American struggle for independence, and cast it in rhetoric that made it a human struggle. And by doing so, he sowed the seeds of the end of the peculiar institution of slavery.
"I think Jefferson was torn and the nation has been torn and will for the foreseeable future be torn by this legacy."

Do you think that there is an American fault line along which this question of race lies and that Jefferson himself embodies that tension?
I think Jefferson was torn and the nation has been torn and for the foreseeable future will be torn by this legacy. But what, to me, is more remarkable than the fact that Jefferson kept his slaves, is the fact that he was putting down political markers expressing commitments, affirming values, rooting the nation in commitments that were bound to be resolved one day. He didn't know they'd be resolved in four years of fire and bloodshed. But he knew, it seems to me, he had to know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences of Jefferson's ideas had to be the end of slavery.
"And he emphatically said yes to life...."

Do you find in Monticello a metaphor for the man who attempted to build it and for the nation?
Exactly. What Jefferson exemplifies in his person is the fecundity of freedom, the tremendous possibilities, the unknowability of freedom and its consequences. Diplomat, executive, educator, mathematician, inventor, architect, agronomist, ethnologist--the list goes on... It was a polymath. And he emphatically said yes to life--in all its capacities--in a way that, in an era of specialization and intellectual compartmentalization, no one has the self-confidence to do in the late 20th century. In the late 18th century, a man could say, basically, "I have brought into my compass all of human endeavor." What a wonderful sense of serenity and confidence and power he must have had.