Ilana Mercer penned an excellent article on why most Americans have lost their way-
American Thinker-
From the article-
“Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the collective mentality of contemporary Americans and their leaders “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig — an American Whig whose roots were in the English, Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Come to think of it, Jefferson would not recognize England as the home of the Whigs in whose writings colonial Americans were steeped — John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon, and others.
The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, explains David N. Mayer in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.”
-“Indeed, especially adamant was Jefferson about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”
So with that I think we can see that if Jefferson and for that matter most if not all Colonial Americans ,if alive today,would be shocked and appalled.
Not at the creeping tyranny of government,but the fact that we allowed it to happen –
“A Republic mam,if you can keep it”-Benjamin Franklin
