From Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope:
“It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.”
Now this is just historically wrong. The Founders did believe in absolute truth and further believed that having a free society required it. (See, for example, the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.) The notion that belief in absolute truth is the foundation instead of tyranny is wrong historically, philosophically, politically. It is, however, postmodernist cant. It is how postmodernist professors sell relativism to ignorant and want-to-please college Freshmen. But it is demonstrably wrong (though showing something is wrong is hard to do to someone who has swallowed the relativist bait).
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HT: Caleb Jones. Tomorrow I will post what he says about this point.
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