Founders' feud

"My country is the world, my religion is to do good."

Given the Tea Partiers' feverish hijacking of American history, with their largely ignorant "WWTJD?" dogmatics ("What would Thomas Jefferson do?") offered as a simple-minded panacea to current problems, it's useful to look back at the complex and flawed human beings who occupied the "origins" piece of our complicated and often painful history. 

For example, "founding fathers" John Adams and Thomas Paine hated each other. Adams called Paine's clarion 1776 manifesto "Common Sense," an "ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass."  Paine's opinion of Adam's tenure in the White House?  "Some people talk of impeaching John Adams, but I am for softer measures. I would keep him to make fun of."

Historian William Hogeland has a fascinating essay (posted at Naked Capitalism & New Deal 2.0) on the roots of this mutual antipathy, entitled "How Thomas Paine and John Adams Clashed Over Income Inequality." He brings Paine, in particular, into clearer focus and in regard to one of our very real and pressing current problems that has not been solved in the ensuing 200-plus years - a problem that, in truth, is getting much worse.

Some excerpts from Hogeland's piece that are especially interesting:

The Paine-Adams antipathy wasn’t just personal. Its sources lay in the founding generation’s deep political divisions over economic equality...

In proposing a new American government, Paine scoffed caustically at the whole idea of balance and the covalence among branches that we’re taught to revere as exceptionally American, but were really derived from the post-Settlement English constitution. Where Adams saw checks and balances as key to liberty, Paine wanted an executive branch subordinated to a hyper-representative legislature (a single house, with no check from any elite “upper” house) and a judiciary directly elected by the people.

Most horrifying to Adams, Paine wanted citizens to have the vote regardless of property ownership...Paine wanted the less propertied and — horrors! — even the unpropertied not only to vote in a free America, but also to hold office.

Paine’s goal in giving the lower sort and the poor access to political power was economic equality. When ordinary Americans held power, they would pass laws promoting the interests of ordinary Americans — and obstructing, not coincidentally, the interests of finance elites... Many historians celebrating Paine’s goals of liberty and independence fail to acknowledge that for Paine, those goals were inextricable from political equality for the people he spoke for: ordinary working Americans. [...]

But unlike many of his populist friends, Paine wanted a strong national government for America...Skeptical of knee-jerk populism, he had high hopes for national finance...Paine’s radical democracy made him an offbeat kind of Federalist...The United States government, in Paine’s vision, would justify its national power by regulating elite finance throughout the states, promoting the interests of ordinary Americans everywhere, and increasing social equality by law. For Thomas Paine, American finance policy must dedicate itself to economic equality.

"American finance policy must dedicated itself to economic equality!" How many of our current leaders are working effectively on that one?

That the grifting, anti-government demagogue, Glenn Beck, would attempt to claim the "Common Sense" mantle of radical democrat Thomas Paine, so to assign non-existent gravity to his own recently-published product is nothing more than misleading mischief. Beck's book of the same name actually IS an "ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass," to borrow John Adams' invective.  IMHO the Tea Partiers' claims to the legacy of  our "founding fathers" have as much credibility as Pat Robertson's delivery of "messages" from God.

 For more on Paine/Adams, read the entire Hogeland piece HERE.    Via Naked Capitalism.