At Balkinization, Jack Balkin: The Jefferson Rule: An Interview with David Sehat. From the introduction:
I recently spoke with historian David Sehat about his new book, The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (Simon & Schuster 2015).
JB: Your last book was about religious freedom. Why did you decide to write a book about how the founders have been used (and misused) in American political rhetoric?
David Sehat: People in politics often refer to the Founders to justify their particular vision of religious freedom. My first book called into question that impulse. But as I finished that first book, the 2009 Tea Party began. I found the historical malapropism and anachronism of the Tea Party pretty astonishing, but I knew enough to realize that what they were doing wasn't entirely new. So I decided to write a book about how the rhetoric about the Founders began and to evaluate its consequences over time.
JB: You describe Jefferson as being the first President to really wrap himself in the founding, all the while changing its political meaning to suit his political program. He plays St. Paul to the founders' Jesus. He turns the principles of 1787 into the principles of 1798. One of the big themes of your book is that this general approach to the founders has had unfortunate consequences for American politics from Jefferson's day to the present. Why do you think that's so?
And here is the book description from Amazon:
In The Jefferson Rule, historian David Sehat [Georgia State] describes how liberals, conservatives, secessionists, unionists, civil rights leaders, radicals, and libertarians have sought out the Founding Fathers to defend their policies.
Beginning with the debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the future of the nation, and continuing through the Civil War, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, and Obama and the Tea Party, many pols have asked, “What would the Founders do?” instead of “What is the common good today?” Recently both the Right and the Left have used the Founders to sort through such issues as voting rights, campaign finance, free speech, gun control, taxes, and war and peace. They have used an outdated context to make sense of contemporary concerns.
This oversimplification obscures our real issues. From Jefferson to this very day we have looked to the eighteenth century to solve our problems, even though the Fathers themselves were a querulous and divided group who rarely agreed. Coming to terms with the past, Sehat suggests, would be the start of a productive debate. And in this account, which is by turns informative, colorful, and witty, he shows us why.
Posted at 6:06 AM