(The premise for this collection is here.) Here’s the blog post from 2011 in which I first realized that my broad-spectrum criticism of American founding history — from the rise of the postwar liberal consensus in the scholarly profession itself to the history-tourism industry to bestselling founding-father books to political speeches and so on — is really about a failed American civics. And that instead of blaming the people for supposedly not knowing anything, we should be blaming the intelligentsia that forever bemoans the people’s supposedly not knowing anything. I think this one may have especially weird resonances, post 2016: “The Constitution, the Citizens, and the Futility of Teaching Civics.”
Next in the series is here.
William Hogeland 