The Clare Spark Blog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSM5MpKSnqE. (The Beatles: Come Together) This blog is about the confusion bequeathed by “progressives” to partisan politics; namely the labeling of “Left” beliefs to both social democrats AND to revolutionary socialists. This is impossible because social democrats co-opted many of the demands of socialism/communism while defanging the threat of transformed property relations. Both conservatives and liberals perpetuate this confusion, prefigured by those (sort of) Jeffersonian/Wilsonian democrats Charles and Mary Beard in their popular two volumes on The Rise of American Civilization (1927):

1. In their ambivalent discussion of the antebellum South, the Beards found it good because of the aristocratic flavor to Southern civilization, but the South was bad because of slavery. (The Democratic Party is still elitist, favoring the administrative state and the “money power” while simultaneously deploring, as moderates, its excesses.)[Update, 6/4/18: I was wrong about the Beards favoring the South. As Jeffersonian agrarians they admired farmers and labor (the latter in their fights for free land), but viewed expansionists as imperialists (especially in Volume 2, see below, item #3. OTOH, the Beards loathed the Northern capitalist class, as much as any socialists.]

2. The American Revolution against Britain was good because of the participation of farmers and workers (who later escaped to the West), and with the support of Edmund Burke (in his Whig phase but bad because it trashed British capitalists and (moderate)statesmen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGLGzRXY5Bw. (Revolution: Beatles)

3. Frontiersmen/farmers and hunters were good insofar as they were lower-class escapees from class domination (thus the image of the cowboy symbolizing US history), but bad as expansionists and imperialists (in both Volumes 1 and 2).

The Constitution was all bad, because this coup d’état was put over the (more local?) Articles of Confederation and elevated the class conscious Federalists. Charles Beard had already trashed Alexander Hamilton in his 1913 publication An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Current liberals prefer “the living Constitution,” spurning “originalist interpretations.”