Happy Fourth of July!

1. Here are BIG THINK comments on the Declaration and all that.

2. There are some good comments below on the statesmanship of Eisenhower’s farewell speech that includes the stuff about the military-industrial complex.

3. My objections are to the perspective that develops when that stuff and Carter’s “Malaise” speech are regarded as the twin peaks of recent presidential rhetoric.

4. Eisenhower was quite a prudent president, and Carter wasn’t. But what we’re really thinking about here is 1960 and 1980 and what followed those years.

5. Dwight and Jimmy were displaced by what we might call “Declaration-of Independence” visions that improved America and the world.

6. JFK and especially LBJ, whatever their many faults, gave us the vision of CIVIL RIGHTS. That vision really did give our country a new birth of freedom and saved the South—both black and white Southerners—from the injustice of racism.

7. Reagan gave us the vision of America as defender of the liberty of the individual and the truth about the human soul—the Declaration from a very elevated vantage point.

8. It’s true enough the vision of liberty can become unhinged and destructive—as it did in the late 60s and in Bush the younger’s second inaugural.

9. That’s why we say things are always getting better and worse, and I’ve already talked up selective nostalgia for 1959 and 1979.