The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Whose ‘Democracy’ Is This?

Posted on | June 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Whose ‘Democracy’ Is This?

Since January 6, every liberal on cable TV news has been declaring that “our democracy” is endangered by Trump voters who don’t believe Joe Biden won the election fairly. The latest outburst, by New York Times columnist Mara Gay, depicted the American flag as a racist symbol of this alleged threat to “our democracy.” Having spent some time studying this problem, I finally located the root of the error:

Our liberty as Americans did not begin with the Declaration to which John Hancock and others affixed their signatures in July 1776. Rather, our rights can be traced to England as far back as the reign of King John, whom the barons compelled to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Over the course of the ensuing four centuries, before the first permanent English colony in the present-day United States was established, the limitations of royal power and the rights of His Majesty’s subjects had been developed in English law. It is this history that explains why, when the American colonists began to assert their right to self-government in the 1760s, their rallying cry was “No taxation without representation.”
Have our schools stopped teaching this history? When I was a schoolboy, our teachers made this point clear to us: the Stamp Act of 1765 was the spark that lit the flame of American liberty because it was understood by the colonists as a violation of their rights as Englishmen. . . .

Read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Category: American Spectator, History

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