Re-capping what I said on the blog “Boston 1775”

I find the fetishism surrounding the US founding politicians to be very strange. Certainly many of these men were ambitious, smart and dedicated people. As a historian (albeit of Early Modern European history) I am interested in the social, economic and intellectual movements that these men were are part of and how they individually impacted early American events. But why this recent need for today’s politicians to speak of them in language bordering on hagiography? How does it prop up their own ambitions or the planks of their own party? I’m trying to move beyond being creeped out by all of this and finding some kind of analysis to explain it, and can’t.