Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative

In the preface of this book the author states that the components of this book were written over 20 years. Eleven of the 15 chapters were first offered in public in a variety of settings in various parts of the country. From the dust jacket flap: Bradford challenges the efforts of those who today and in the two centuries of our history have sought to distort the principles on which the American republic was founded; who tried with a disturbing degree of success to bend the Constitution into the shape of their own ideologies and beliefs. Upholding the pluralistic vision of the founding fathers, Bradford in these essays exposes and addresses the historical fallacies, intrusive federal policies, and distorted myths that he believes have been used to undermine the nation's heritage as a confederation of independence states. The United States was not founded, Bradford argues, with the idea of creating a society dedicated to either Justice or equality, and all attempts to turn America in that direction have resulted in a perversion of the nation's true origins in the struggle for liberty from the oppression of a remote and sometimes hostile government. The author, Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford (1934 - 1993) was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas. Bradford is seen as a leading figure of the paleoconservative wing of the conservative movement. He died just as the term paleoconservative was being coined and preferred the term traditional conservative. In his preface to Reactionary Imperative, he wrote "Reaction is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous."