Rep Valarie Hodges’s intentions in introducing HB352 are laudable, but if enacted it will keep Louisiana trapped in the same downward political/ideological spiral we are now stuck in.
As a way of combating Marxist-Woke totalitarianism, the bill mandates ‘the teaching of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address and the concepts of national sovereignty, American exceptionalism, globalism and immigration policy’. The problem is that some of those documents have led us to the point we are at now.
The Federalist Papers, for instance, are not disinterested treatises on how to create a limited government for a confederation of independent States. They are propaganda pieces written to sway the peoples of the original 13 States to approve a new plan of government, written in secret, that was far more centralized than the Articles of Confederation they were living under. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay did their best to sweet-talk those jealous of their local customs and liberties to accept the proto-Leviathan the localists were very suspicious of.
And these localists, the Anti-Federalists, are the ones who have turned out to be right. Who can take seriously Madison’s famed ‘extended republic’ theory (Federalist No. 10) that was supposed to keep dangerous and corrupting combinations and factions out of Washington City? Or Hamilton’s assertion that the judiciary would be the weakest branch of the new federal government (Federalist No. 81)? On and on we could go with taxes, executive power, etc.
There are even larger problems with lionizing President Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address.
Do you think the federal government is too large and too powerful? That the States should have more authority over more matters? Lincoln will not help you. His belief was that the federal government created the States and that they are subservient to it in all matters (which is the opposite of the reality).
Do you want racial harmony? Lincoln will not help you. He believed in the unchangeable inferiority of Africans vis-à-vis Europeans. Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation was in part an effort to stoke an armed uprising amongst the slaves on the Southern plantations during the War – again, not a helpful image for our day and time when we are trying to prevent Antifa and BLM riots.
On that last note, anyone who has read Professor Mel Bradford’s masterful takedown of the Gettysburg Address will understand that the ideas in that speech fuel much of the ideological radicalism we are witnessing today. So, once more, in opposing violent revolutionaries, Lincoln will not help you.
We applaud Rep Hodges for showing some initiative in pushing back against the Marxists in the education system, but her selected mix of documents is only going to make matters worse. She and others need to add at least a couple of others.
First, without a doubt, is a collection of the Anti-Federalist Papers. Students need to see the other side of the constitutional debate, those arguing for real protections of local rights, the shortcomings and dangers of the Philadelphia charter, etc.
Second is a book by Prof Bradford that contains the aforementioned essay of his on the Gettysburg Address (‘Lincoln, the Declaration, and Secular Puritanism: A Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution’), A Better Guide than Reason: Federalists and Anti-Federalists. In a review of this book, Dr Clyde Wilson writes,
. . . Bradford, in a stunning feat of intellectual courage and originality, has done nothing less than to provide us with the necessary means to rediscover our founding, the original basis of our commonwealth.
Under Bradford’s direction, we can grasp for ourselves the identity of the American people at the founding of the Republic, free and clear of the obfuscations and misrepresentations piled up by succeeding generations of partisans. He has made it possible for us to see clearly for the first time in more than a century the nature and import of that process by which the scattered English inhabitants of North America articulated themselves into a republican realm. He tells us in a full-blooded and circumstantial account what our forefathers were like, what they believed and why, what they meant and what they did not mean in the great documents to which they pledged their lives, fortunes, and honor.
A better endorsement for a civics or history textbook would be hard to come by.
If Reps Hodges, Garofalo, and others in the Louisiana Legislature really do want true history taught in Louisiana’s schools, they need to make sure the right material is getting into students’ hands. HB352 is a good idea, but without something to balance out its ideology, it will do more harm than good in the long run.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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