Do We Have Two “American Foundings”?

The good news? Progressives admit we’ve won.

The bad news? Progressives have changed the game, the field, and the rules.

What do I mean by this?

You see, progressives have decided that our side was correct about the founding, the Constitution, federalism, secession, the nature of the Union. All of it.

But it doesn’t matter. Originalism–real originalism–is dead, and has been replaced by “14th Amendment Originalism.”

The original Constitution was overthrown during the second American revolution of 1868.

This isn’t new, of course. The progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard suggested that the United States underwent a revolution in 1861. Southerners said the same thing for years.

Progressives on both the left and the right, and that includes West Coast Straussians, have decided this is fantastic.

That old worn out Constitution was replaced by the Lincolnian revolutionaries and the 14th Amendment which gave us “equality” as a “conservative” principle.

When the left and the right are saying the same thing, like this Jamelle Bouie piece at the New York Times, what are the Lincolnians really conserving?

To Bouie and the “14th Amendment Originalists,” its the Lincolnian proposition nation, a position that Gary Wills said “revolutionized the Revolution.”

Even by that statement, Wills admits that Lincoln made up history in 1863, the same thing that the “proposition nation” people have been doing since the 18th century, for as Bouie points out, there were those that considered the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration to be the most important statement in the document.

Not to virtually everyone in the real founding generation, which does not include some unknown abolitionists who decided to reinvent the meaning of the Declaration. Lump Lincoln into that group by the War.

What does this mean? If you start with Lincoln, you get 19th century leftistism, the same thing “conservatives” are now trying to “conserve.”

I discuss these issues on Episode 867 of The Brion McClanahn Show.