Thread by @ThyConsigliori

20 November 2021 #MAGAanalysis #1AMinuteMen

The 21 Ideas That Formed America – Historical Interlude

This series has garnered some warm response, some quite inspiring. For instance, my friend @edmcnevin1 introduced me to St. George Tucker. Incredible!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Georg…

2) I had never heard of Tucker before, so I've spent good parts of the past two days correcting that gap in my learning. It is what I've found in his work and life story that inspires today's meditation. I begin below with an extended quote...

3) "Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, and sacrificing hecatombs upon her altars; whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies, and hurled defiance in their faces;

4) "whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free, or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite with us in establishing the empire of freedom;

5) "we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained."

6) Here's some context for that quote. It comes from an essay he published in 1796 called:

A dissertation on slavery: with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it, in the state of Virginia.

This document cuts to the heart of the problem of freedom in America.

7) Here we are, Tucker chides us, crying out from our souls to the heights of heaven, 'give me liberty or give me death,' while we hold millions of slaves down beneath us, and commit atrocities 10,000 times greater against them than we suffer ourselves.

8) By the way, I will cut to the chase before we explore much further. The chase? I confronted @shestokas with this very point years ago and he batted my attack off like a shoe fly in the barn. The answer is actually very easy.

9) Our two founding documents, the Declaration and the Constitution attain a state as close to perfection, near perfection if you will, as any two founding documents ever have or will. It would be literally insane to expect execution to follow suit. Well shut me up.

10) In a moment of too-rare wisdom, I instantly surrendered. And bowed. Never one to reject an advantage, @shestokas charged forward. What's more, he teaches, it was those very documents that led us to greater freedoms as we marched through history.

11) Yes, we did have to fight the bloodiest war of history in order to right - in the 13th Amendment - what was left wrong at our founding. But we did. If you've read any Civil War history at all, you know that Abe Lincoln was moved by those documents and gave his life for them.

12) March forward. The 19th Amendment in 1920 giving women the same rights as we Declared for men alone (in practice) in 1776. It took us to the 1960s to correct the wrongs of the previous century in NOT honoring the 13th Amendment in practice. What happened in 2009?

13) Obama is a perfect case in point. He is America's first black President. Does he live up, in execution, to the perfection of his calling? I'd say a lot more than just 'no,' were I to go off on topic. Yet, don't you remember feeling the pride of electing a black man POTUS?

14) Linger on point. No matter how we reject the performance, the so-imperfect performance of a man, given the perfect moment he was handed, we must still be proud of that perfect moment. Tucker talks about the same thing.

15) Tucker talks about the perfection of our Declaration and Constitution, and centers in on three rights: life, liberty, and property. Then, in this perfect moment winning these historic treasures for ourselves, we denied them utterly to a class by their complexion.

16) Tucker cannot get over the tragic irony of our unforgivable hypocrisy. And especially in that moment when we could have, should have, and will most certainly pay the price for as he foresees. So, why didn't we seize the moment?

17) If you're interested you can read it for yourself in a letter from Thomas Jefferson, to Tucker, after fellow Virginia slave-owning Tucker had forwarded his dissertation. It's painful, but you should read it for yourself.

founders.archives.gov/documents/Jeff…

18) It's impossible to present even a short list of the prices paid for our failures of execution. There are two we can focus on, though. Look again at the Civil War. Lincoln's number was 87, four score years and seven. We missed, say, an 80-year window to resolve slavery.

19) The number I always hear is 650,000 souls lost. Who knows, huh? To count the next cost of our two, today, we have label something else. Let's try out:

The Era of Jeffersonian Small Government

It was those same 80 years, and then done, gone to this very moment.

20) Here's what happened. Lincoln and his fellows, in honor of the government formed in 1776, wiped out its basic logic, inverting it. Prior, the government could only get its power from the people. After, it has enjoyed power over us, ever since.

21) If you doubt this, you should read Justice Rehnquist's extraordinary analysis in his book: All The Laws But One, sometime. Please remember, Lincoln executed our first Income Tax. It was deemed unconstitutional, later, and struck until 1913 and the 16th Amendment.

22) I've struggled with the timeline many times. When was real America, Jeffersonian Small Government America actually lost? I always used to say 1913. I'm now thinking 1861. Just 85 brief years. That's it. And the entire time...slavery in play wreaking havoc.

23) Now let's flip the argument. There was no way to doubt American greatness by all kinds of definitions until well after the fall of the USSR and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Not giving any credit to Bush 41, that means Reagan, baby!

24) And then came Trump. In 2015 when he started diagnosing our fall from greatness it was like a slap in the face of the great sleeping true American Giant. Wake up, America. It's time to be great again!

25) On the MAGA timeline, Trump had to address how Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama had done to weaken if not destroy American greatness, and he had to turn the clock back to the very foundations of our greatness in the first place.

26) Consider Trump's extraordinary dedication to originalist Justices in the mode of Antonin Scalia. With that focus on our Constitution as the founders intended it, Trump united the Republican Party and brought out millions of brand new voters.

27) Now, we've certainly taken a shellacking since our 2020 landslide victory was stolen. Yet, this too is part of our MAGA awakening. We see not only the evil and stupidity of Biden and henchmen, we see most of all our own perfidious, traitor Republicans across the land.

28) Can we win this fight? Well obviously we can't not! But we have to take the long view that @shestokas teaches us. We see our so-imperfect execution of such amazingly perfect opportunity, pick ourselves up again, and place beady eye on next target. That's what you do.

29) And that's why @shestokas' 55 words, my 6 points and 21 ideas are so important. The point the way backward to the perfection of our beginning and forward through all our imperfections to just slightly less imperfect future execution...continuously.

30) Unlike Washington, neither Jefferson nor Tucker ever gave up their slaves. But ultimately, following Washington's decades' old lead, we did, America freed our slaves. And we shall learn to live up to our calling and our mandate, ever less imperfectly.

Today’s #MAGAanalysis ends at #30.

And if you found it worthy, you won't go wrong in considering @KateScopelliti's and my book.

amazon.com/America-First-…