Thanksgiving reflections on the American political tradition.
25th November 2010
Thoughts worth pondering.
It is rarely noticed, for instance, how much the Preamble shares, in terms of both form and content, with earlier documents in American political history — documents, even (somewhat awkwardly for our anti-Preamblists), which go no further than doing what the Preamble does. That is to say: casting an eye across the centuries of political arrangement in North America, it is something of a puzzle to discover several documents of high importance, which appear to anticipate in framework and substance, the political work done later in the Preamble — at least, it is something of a puzzle if we accept the “throat-clearing” doctrine of the anti-Preamblists. It seems that at certain crucial moments, when our ancestors were bent over the problems of constituting political structures for themselves, they produced documents that accomplished little more than a good clearing of the throat.