Peter
Schramm, president of the Ashbrook Center, posted the comment below on the Center?s
blog ?No Left Turns.? While he is
not commenting on the NC History controversy directly, his comment is directly
relevant to why the founding
and our founding documents are relevant to today’s politics. In
fact, Professor Schramm believes that Xenophon and the Greeks are also
relevant today. Note the observation of
one of his students in the second paragraph. I wish NC high schools students were given this kind of
education about politics, but of course that would mean that their teachers
would have read and understand Xenophon. I suspect that he is an author not taught in any education school in the country.
Schramm?s
advice to Republican politicians in the last paragraph is also spot on because
it advises them to break out of the progressive?s mindset (see my previous post) that so many of them
are trapped in and teach the true meaning of American politics.
The
news of the day and the week and the month is a dysfunctional Congress, a hyper-partisan
Congress, a broken system without leadership, even brain-dead politics. John Podesta,
a Democrat and an Obama man, said to a British paper that the health of US
politics “sucks”. Evan Bayh agrees.
This, of course, is wrong. This WSJ Editorial is closer to the truth:
We are in the middle of the fourth Liberal crackup and the so-called mess is
not unprecedented in American politics.
Equally
pregnant with meaning, a student said something interesting to me yesterday. He
said he now understood why the first book Ashbrook Scholars read as freshmen is
Xenophon’s “Education of Cyrus”; the class is Understanding Politics.
Other things aside, men are hard to govern, Xenophon begins. Then the student
said that American men may be especially hard to govern. I said, yup, not bad,
that’s why you to try to understand the American mind and read the Constitution
the second semester; the class is called Democracy in America. Our current
politics isn’t brain dead politics at all and the system isn’t broken. It’s
working exactly as it should. It is supposed to be messy and inefficient; it’s
supposed to be difficult to form a majority and even once formed, it should be
difficult to govern. That majority had better be a constitutional one, or the
people will not be amused. The people prefer self-government to being pushed
around by haughty lefties. Yet they are open to being persuaded, they are
willing to have conversations about things; but they are unwilling to be called
names, or to have “the system” decried.
Now–over
the next year or two–we will find out if the Republicans can explain to folks
why this is a good thing, and why politics is much more than “public
policy” and “problem solving” as the progressives would have us
think. If Republicans can do this–use these interesting times to make a
powerful argument for limited constitutional government and why it is a fine
thing–they will prosper, as will the American way of self-government. In the
meantime, those Democrats who claim to be in the majority (and claim to be
representing the interest of the people) but continue to whine about how they
cannot get anything done will continue to suck pond water.
