I’m pretty comfortable with myself
My name is Brian and I’m an American Neanderthal.
Yes, I’m a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather. Ape-like. Primitive. Slanted forehead. I have not “evolved” enough.
I’m a non-progressive.
James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s Founding Fathers gave us a charter for limited government that has allowed the development of the freest and most prosperous nation in human history.
As to my country, I seek to have a clear understanding of what the Framers were wanting to achieve when they wrote the Constitution of the United States.
The Progressives
Though the constitution is our inheritance, Americans have been living under the offspring of the Progressives for a century now. Slowly, imperceptible to most, they are increasingly controlling our lives. We Neanderthals see it.
“Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice … All that progressives ask or desire is permission – in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word – to interpret the constitution according to the Darwinian principle …”
Who said this? President Woodrow Wilson in 1912.
Wilson also said that we need to get “beyond the Declaration of Independence.” He was OK with the list of grievances against King George the III as a practical matter, but he had a problem with the preface: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God … We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”
Woodrow Wilson was uncomfortable with the universal and timeless principles in the preface upon the which the Declaration rests – that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (self-evident through natural law) come from the Creator and not the State. He naturally struggled with the core principles of the United States Constitution, our national charter which springs from the Declaration of Independence.
The State as God?
Ideas from Germany in the 1800′s began to seep into American intellectual life. The 19th German philospher Hegel (career in the early 1800′s) strongly influenced the Progressives (“the state is the divine idea as it exists on earth”). These seed-ideas have slowly grown throughout the 20th century and are beginning to flower in the early part of the 21st century.
America is currently on a path that is taking us to a burgeoning regulatory machine overseen by a legion of czars and bureaucrats. Instead of limited “government of the people, by the people, for the people (Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address),” this leads leads us to the Administrative State - the “experts,” professional, political bureaucracies as used around the world.
It’s not the American Way.
The preservation and development of American society is worth the prejudice and condescension we Neanderthals endure. I realize I’m a source of embarrassment to many in the Boston-DC corridor, Chicagoland, and many on the Left-Coast. Europeans smile. Sophisticated. Suave. Smooth. “Sexy.” Paragons of chicness. They’re all thunderstruck about us American Neanderthals.
We’re focused. Our quest is for a more perfect union built upon the Founding Principles. So we won’t be participating in any government-sponsored 12-step recovery program. The DC-based political class will just have to deal with it.
I think the American Neanderthal is getting more comfortable with his identity by the week!
Some recommended American Neanderthal Reading: We Still Hold These Truths and American Progressivism: A Reader
Ideas are like seeds, they spread and develop. We only hurt ourselves by not appreciating their power. See previous post IDEAS: Supreme and Far-Reaching.
