Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Home – American Heritage News – To Save America, We Must Reconnect With the Founders’ Moral Imagination

To Save America, We Must Reconnect With the Founders’ Moral Imagination

Matthew Mehan, author of “The American Book of Fables,” joins Bradley Devlin on a new episode of Signal Sitdown to discuss the “moral imagination” of the Founders and on the need during America 250 for the nation to have a “shared memory.”

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Bradley Devlin: Why did you write this book?

Matthew Mehan: So I am a weird—I’m an odd duck in that I have both a lot of political training—political, philosophical, history, and civics training—but I also have literary training, and the two of those things kind of bounce back and forth, and so you start to think about what is the role of a man of letters in a republic.

And it turns out that it’s a very sort of underpracticed art to give the right kinds of images that bring the right sort of ideas, habits, customs, principles, ways of being, and memory. That’s a major task that today’s poets don’t really do. And if they do it, they’re usually doing something wrong, or in error or deliberately subversive, which we can talk about later, I guess.

But that just basically—I kind of wanted to come to the defense. Blood rushes to a wound, and this is something that needed doing, and so I did it. That’s the simple answer. And then A250, the Semiquincentennial—go big or go home for America’s 250th.

Trump’s Border Czar Has a Smart Surprise for Sanctuary Cities Trying to Hide Criminals

The Newsom Nightmare: Why California’s Elites Refuse to Face Reality

US Supreme Court Turns Down Virginia Gerrymander

I wanted to basically, you know, drop a major heirloom, a kind of celebratory monster coffee-table epic, on the American family.

Bradley Devlin: Why fables? What’s important about a fable?

Matthew Mehan: So one of the things I did to prep for this is I actually did study fables. I went to conferences like a good little nerd and read—you know, read up on—They have conferences—

Bradley Devlin: On fables?

Matthew Mehan: Very rarely. And sometimes you have to organize them yourself. But yes, I did. And then also I wrote for The Heritage Foundation, actually. I did a white paper on the founding imagination. What does the founding generation—what was in their imagination?

And it turns out what’s in your imagination is very much the ingredients for whatever stew of a decision—i.e., your prudence. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna found a new nation? Are you going to have a revolution? What........

© The Daily Signal