George Mason: For Better or for Worse, the People Decide

George Mason Memorial in National Mall – Washington DC United States. By Orhan Cam @ Shutterstock.com

William Murchison, writing at The American Spectator details how George Mason, writer of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and one of America’s founding fathers impressed upon Americans to preserve their founding principles of liberty. Murchison writes:

What we can all say with resonant voice and unflinching confidence about the Nov. 6 elections is that… is that… that most things aren’t going to be very different on or after Nov. 6 with respect to life and social morale and public policy, for the very good reason that modern Americans can’t decide what they want in terms of life and social morale and public policy.

The state of both parties seems to me proof of this outrageous proposition. We’re split: if not precisely down the middle, as some polls indicate, at least into portions equivalent in size. The Democrats think the government should direct or run most enterprises. The Republicans want less government bossing-around, more personal choice — until, that is, it comes to moral and religious matters. Here, the Democrats want more choice, the Republicans less. We don’t fit together terribly well. We generally can’t even talk to each other.

The media tells us all of this with great monotony. What’s the point, therefore? That we’re just going to go on beating each other over the head?

It could be so, without the intellectual intervention of the great Virginian George Mason of Gunston Hall.

I do not know how widely Mason’s name is admired, far less recognized, in an age fond of dismissing the country’s founders as self-serving white elitists — hardly worth calling to mind amid the seeming wreckage of their work. But this is nonsense, particularly so in the case of George Mason, who in 1776 drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, setting forth the principles that would issue a decade later in adoption of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

For all the media-encouraged conversation about anarchy versus authoritarianism as the stark choice before the voters, the old rules hold good. For better or for worse, the people decide.