Ilana Mercer understands that the Progressives are anti-Jeferson:
The Declaration of Independence – whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate tomorrow – has been mocked out of meaning.
To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn't feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.
Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked "through the night" to set the full text on "a handsome folio sheet," recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in "Liberty and Freedom." And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the "people be universally informed."
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 mind of a McCain, an Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment "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 17th and 18th centuries.
By "all men are created equal," Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a "Natural Aristocracy," did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to health care, education, amnesty and a decent wage, à la Obama.
Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of "all men" to be secure in their enjoyment of their "life, liberty and possessions."
This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define "liberal," Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the 18th and early 19th centuries. But she then settled on "progressive" as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.
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