How False History Props Up the Right

August 17, 2013

Exclusive: The Right’s policy nostrums are failing across the board – from free-market extremism to austerity as a cure for recession to continuing the old health-care dysfunction – leaving only an ideological faith that this is what the Framers wanted. But that right-wing “history” is just one more illusion, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

There is a logical way to think about governance – one that was shared by the key Framers of the U.S. Constitution – that the federal government should have sufficient authority to do what is necessary to fulfill the goals that the document laid out about promoting the general welfare and protecting the nation.

Put differently, the actual “originalist” thinking behind the Constitution was what might be called “pragmatic nationalism,” not what today’s Right tries to pretend it was, an ideological commitment to a tightly constrained federal government hemmed in by a strong system of “states’ rights.”