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If you know anything about George Washington, you know he couldn’t tell a lie, he crossed the frozen reaches of the Delaware River one Christmas night in a daring move to turn the tide of the Revolutionary War, and he was America’s first president.
But did you know he could predict the future?
Historian Robert A. Strong, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, makes that case in his story on Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address.
Published in newspapers across the country at the end of the president’s second term, Washington began his address by observing that “choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene” and that the new nation would be fine without his continued service.
“But Washington’s confidence in the general health of the union was tempered by his worries about dangers that lay ahead – worries that seem startlingly contemporary and relevant 229 years later,” writes Strong.
Strong describes Washington’s concerns: “Partisanship, parochialism, excessive public debt, ambitious leaders who could come to power playing off our differences, and a poorly informed public who might sacrifice their own liberties to find relief from divisive politics.”
Strong quotes Washington’s choice words about political parties, which “may now and then answer popular ends,” but which can also become “potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
Sound familiar?
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