The Passing of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

My recollections of Mr. Schlesinger are few, but I have always known his heart was in the right place, even when he did some things I have no toleration of.

He gave us insight into Jackson and FDR, two Presidents who did, indeed, change the world in their outlook. He staunchly supported American Exceptionalism and the power of people to use their rights creatively. He fought to ensure that the Communist Party in America would not be seen as acceptable, and was purely partisan of his old-line fealty to the Democratic Party. He embraced the values that America had to create a new world because we could work together as a People, and he rejected multiculturalism and a host of ills that go with it. In his latter years he staunchly supported the positions he had held and those that he had admired, even when evidence of their lacks came to the forefront. He walked well and firmly as an 'old school' defender of the Nation and his Party and those beliefs.

What he forgot in his views from Jackson was that one never, ever hands permanent power to government to cure temporary ills. Nor is government a means to enforce the public good, but to ensure that the public can be good and cause no ill to the common weal. By supporting those things he helped to lay the foundation of the ever increasing government we see today, and its encroachment upon the Rights and Liberties of the Citizenry. He had sought to help those poor oppressed by circumstances, and forgot that the Republic offers a hand up to those so beleaguered, but never a hand-out to make individuals beholden to the government. In that forgetting he undid much good that he did in life and lost grasp of the world that changed around him in ways he did not like, because of that.

He was a good man, all told, even with the problems caused by his fierce partisanship to his party... even when his party stepped from the Nation as a whole. A true 'Cold Warrior' who supported his Country, even when the commonality was disappearing because of those things he advocated. And a man who held to his beliefs even when they had turned on the Nation itself so that it now finds it difficult to even defend the Republic. For all the good that he did for many, we now pay for the drawbacks of those outlooks upon us to this day.

For the simple problem that We the People are the Government.

Not the Government over We the People.

The first of the 20th century liberals who would forget that the 19th century liberals warned and hard against many things, and that government needed to be checked so that People could be Free.

I honor his life even in disagreeing with what has come of it.