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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I'd say that, historically, for some, the dream of America was to have your own little kingdom of sorts, a small slice of bountiful heartland to call your own. This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it. That America had so much land for the taking made that dream possible.

This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it.

Jefferson thought that farmers were more virtuous and more suited to democracy.

Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subserviance and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. - Notes on the State of Virginia, 'Query XIX. Manufactures’.

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