… is from page 180 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:
Independence, declared David Ramsey in a memorable Fourth of July oration in 1778, would free Americans from that monarchial world where “favor is the source of preferment,” and where “he that can best please his superiors, by the low arts of fawning and adulation, is most likely to obtain favor.”
DBx: And yet here we Americans are in 2025 with a national government that, with abandon, doles out favors such as tariffs and subsidies – and threatens punishments, such as are delivered with the hammers and tongs of the regulatory state and through lawfare.
Blame belongs both to Democrats and Republicans. For more than a century now the Constitutional architecture has been rearranged to give the government generally – and the executive branch in particular – ever-greater discretionary power. The naive belief (and no belief can be more naive) is that as long as those persons wielding power hold their offices through some connection to the results of majority-rule elections, the power-wielders will pursue ‘the will of the people’ which, being vox populi is as near as possible to vox dei. And these power-wielders, being invested by their democratic elevation with superhuman knowledge, wisdom, and goodness, it would not pay the venal amongst us to petition or plead with them for special favors.
Far too many Americans – always obsessed with achieving, by whatever means, the political object du jour– over the past century-plus have increasingly abandoned the noble, liberal ideas of America’s Founders.
