Be careful about moving country backward

We're taking our country back!

To Where? To When?

Should we return to when the top income tax rate was 91 percent when we had the greatest economic expansion in history? When banks couldn't hedge their bets on subprime mortgages that now have led to millions of homeowner evictions? Or to an era when manufacturing literally gave jobs to millions, exported products to the world, when the United States led all nations as a creditor rather than a debtor nation?

Or, should we go back even further to a time when this country was fighting the British Empire to be independent, free, and to live separately from oppressive colonial rule? The omnipresent media-seeking Tea Partyers consistently refer to our Founding Fathers and the Revolution that gave this country birth: But let's look at the writings of one of them, James Madison in “The Federalist Papers”:

One of the most famous of its essays is The Federalist, No. 10. In it, Madison questioned whether the Constitution can literally protect the liberties of its citizens by electing a destructive government composed of what he called a faction. According to Madison, this would be “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

Factions, Madison added, become especially dangerous when they form a majority of the population. James Madison wrote key parts of the Constitution, the American doctrine that has been the harbinger of democracies all over the world.

Why would we want to return to a time when kings were gods, despots ruled, and civilizations destroyed?

James D. Cook

Streamwood