Is the “American Tradition” a mandate for the realization of the program of contemporary American Liberalism? Of course not; but the Liberals are very busy-busy these days insisting—alike in serious scholarly works and in their mass propaganda —that our tradition is just that, that the “principles” of our forebears coincided precisely with those of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and that, in consequence, anyone who refuses to embrace those principles is ipso facto a bad, not to say subversive, American. And unless some other people get busy-busy exposing the Liberals’ fibs and half-truths about our traditional way of life—our way of life as it has actually been lived, and not merely as it has been written about by star-gazing intellectuals—and about the ideas most Americans have actually acted upon down through the decades, it is soon going to be too late to do anything about it.
Let us make a sampling of the samplings, summarize the stories and note the “traditions” they point up:
Comments