infobong.com

Barry Gewn has an interesting piece titled "Forget the Founding Fathers" in The New York Times that aims to provide an overview of approaches to American history. Despite its flaws, I found this piece kind of valuable; the only history class I took as an undergrad was "history of rock," so I've never really been exposed to the various discussions about histories of the US. However in some places, the essay seems to contradict itself. Gewen contends that multicultural approaches to American history lost favor when, "Battered by political correctness, basking in Reaganesque optimism and victory in the cold war, the country in the 1980's and 90's was ready for a reaffirmation of its fundamental values." However, he doesn't enumerate what US "fundamental values" are or point to any evidence that there are values shared by the population through the sweep of history. Presumably, the fundamental values he alludes to are the values of the white power elite, which only re-enforces the argument of the multiculturalists.

It shouldn't be surprising that a piece in the Times is sympathetic to a neoliberal point of view, however. Critiquing Richard Hofstadter, he writes, "Though the book appeared in the late 1940's, at the onset of one of the greatest economic booms in American history, Hofstadter was still complaining about ''bigness and corporate monopoly,' misguidedly declaring that ''competition and opportunity have gone into decline.'" I suppose one could make a convincing argument that the corporate capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s where more competitive and provided more social mobility than the oligopolies of today, but Gewen seems unwilling to acknowledge critiques of corporate power.

The article is ostensibly about the "Founding Fathers," and one area I hoped it would touch on was ignored. I hoped it would discuss how the framers of the US Constitution function in popular memory today. The Christian Right often deploy popular understandings of the framers in order to situate their political goals within imagined traditions. I frankly don't understand how the right can ingenuously claim that the framers intended to establish a "Christian nation" unconcerned with individual liberties, when the framers were largely deists and certainly classical liberals. The establishment clause of the First Amendment seems proof enough that the framers were suspicious of religious influence on the state.