How very sad that the estimable Ken Burns has to explain democracy to Americans! Of course, MAGA won’t watch … and thanks to Trump, it won’t learn in the classroom.
Perhaps the only sense in which Trump provides any semblance of public service is to illustrate essential history that we seem to have forgotten. To rediscover what “independence” meant to the people who declared it and fought for it, it is very well worth reading the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" by the late great historian of the American Revolution Gordon Wood. Wood was killed last month in a tragic accident, but his works and words are very well worth our continued attention.
Again and again, Wood used the words "dependence" and "independence" to show that a demagogue and tyrant like Trump is the opposite of what the brave people of the Declaration of Independence (and the many similar declarations of that time) and the Revolutionary War had in mind. The intimidation and tyranny of Trump is the opposite of the independence and the public service of true public servants for which the generations of the Declaration fought, suffered and sacrificed very much.
"Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution" is another outstanding book (and even shorter and easier to read) by Wood that is perhaps even more worthy of our attention in the time of Trump. It is an outstanding clarification of how Trump (and many other so-called public servants) routinely violate their oaths of office to support and defend our Constitution. Wood shows how our so-called public servants’ often selfish, self-aggrandizing and exaggerated sense of their own importance and its role in our self-government is the opposite of “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as President Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address.
How very sad that the estimable Ken Burns has to explain democracy to Americans! Of course, MAGA won’t watch … and thanks to Trump, it won’t learn in the classroom.
Perhaps the only sense in which Trump provides any semblance of public service is to illustrate essential history that we seem to have forgotten. To rediscover what “independence” meant to the people who declared it and fought for it, it is very well worth reading the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" by the late great historian of the American Revolution Gordon Wood. Wood was killed last month in a tragic accident, but his works and words are very well worth our continued attention.
Again and again, Wood used the words "dependence" and "independence" to show that a demagogue and tyrant like Trump is the opposite of what the brave people of the Declaration of Independence (and the many similar declarations of that time) and the Revolutionary War had in mind. The intimidation and tyranny of Trump is the opposite of the independence and the public service of true public servants for which the generations of the Declaration fought, suffered and sacrificed very much.
"Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution" is another outstanding book (and even shorter and easier to read) by Wood that is perhaps even more worthy of our attention in the time of Trump. It is an outstanding clarification of how Trump (and many other so-called public servants) routinely violate their oaths of office to support and defend our Constitution. Wood shows how our so-called public servants’ often selfish, self-aggrandizing and exaggerated sense of their own importance and its role in our self-government is the opposite of “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as President Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address.
trump’s take on the declaration: https://bsky.app/profile/lucagalletti.bsky.social/post/3mprdryziv22q