Saturday, January 16, 2010

Favorite Founders

Apparently the interview below is supposed to show how stupid Sarah Palin is. When asked who was her favorite Founding Father, she started talking about how she liked how they got along as a group. They had a diversity of opinion but were able to communicate and compromise without as much partisan infighting as today.

Quite frankly, I think governor Palin was right. It was not the men, but the way they were communicating that made the difference.

The founders had a classical education (the Trivium). Their education seemed to have distilled out the cynicism and traps that were used to support emperors and monarchs.

With a sound logical foundation, they were able to create an ideology of liberty. I like to call the whole framework of discourse along with the ideology of freedom: "Classical Liberalism."

Modern Liberalism began when American intellectuals imported the ideas of the French Revolution (eg. the gap between left and right) and the new dialectical methodologies of Kant and Hegel. Southern Democrats were interested in finding ways to preserve slavery, Northern intellectuals were simply following fads of the elite.

The sites Affirmative Rationality and Plusroot.com are trying to address this underlying system of logic.

Anyway, it's great that people are once again engaged in researching the US Founders. My favorite founder is Benjamin Franklin. The video says that there were six founders. I am not sure where they got that idea. There was a large number of people involved in the discourse that rise of classical liberalism.

So, I enjoyed watching progressive intellectuals show their knowledge of our country's history ... although, I was led to believe that came some four score and seven years after the founding of the nation, but Mika Brzezinski is a leading progressive mind. I must be wrong.

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