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Sean's avatar

Like reconciliation after the “countermeasure“, it’s too late for Palestine & zionists.

But here in blue New England, we had better not forget we are “American“ pilgrims.

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Dean V. Williamson's avatar

Your suggestion, I think, is that we could stand for a new revolution in individual rights--or at least a renaissance in appreciation for threats to individual rights ... in blue New Inger-land?

That may not be your suggestion, but my suggestion would be that we could stand for such a renaissance.

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Dean V. Williamson's avatar

Well, there is a lot of going on in that essay.

The author of "Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul" may have given his book a big title, but he didn't illuminate the really big issues.

I picked up that book, because I was interested in this larger question of how it was that the experience in the West in the 17th century seemed to have led to revolutions in individual rights and to important advances with constitutionalizing of government.

One idea I did get out of my reading was the fact that in Inger-land, the forces of anti-clerical Reformation ended up merging the power of the state and the church. Most notably, the head of state (the king) also ended up becoming the head of the Anglican Church. And what were the consequences?: The king now had more ways of dealing with his political opponents. and the king did abuse his new authority. The English Civil Wars resulted in constitutional remedies to that.

English colonists, meanwhile, also had their own problem with the power of the church being concentrated with that of the state. Indeed, the Puritan vision explicitly involved concentrating the two, but the colonists ended up moving away from that and developing their own explicitly constitutional remedies.

Now, if we could all just appreciate our neo-Puritanical experience and reappraise the status of individual rights in the here and now.

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