The bluff from Muh Values Republicans is that nobody will ever actually dare to trace the core ideals of our nation back to George Washington, where their political philosophy is clearly rebuked and rejected anyway.
You can know that Jeffersonian newspaper propaganda wasn’t the wellspring of original American ideals because of chronology and the prefix in the name “Antifederalist” alone. It’s not rocket science.
Since the first administration under the Constitution, democracy lovers have consistently undermined the American national project by flattering humanity as naturally good and then promising wondrous moral effects from individuals having the liberty to pursue their inclinations.
#NowReading The Third British Empire by Alfred Zimmern
"…the larger League needed to maintain law and order throughout the world and to provide a secure basis for the economic interdependence which grew up, under the tutelage of British sea power, in the nineteenth century.”
The British Empire of to-day is not the British Empire of 1914. It is something new—how new neither the outside world nor even its own citizens have adequately realized. —Zimmern
#NowReading Profits Without Production (1983) by Seymour Melman
Whatever the maneuvers for financial and market control that went on in the boardrooms of industrial capitalism, no one doubted that investing in and efficiently operating the means of production, especially those of basic industry, was the high road to wealth and fame.
Melman
By the 1960s the ideal type had become the financier-strategist, the shrewd, nimble operator who combined disparate firms into conglomerates that maximized the short-term profit-taking opportunities afforded by tax laws, securities transfers, the milking of production assets