Condemning 18th century people because they didn’t live their lives by 21st century cultural norms is a silly argument. Plenty of our philosophical and political concepts come from ideas as old as the Greeks. We don’t reject valid ideas because the society that produced them didn’t live by our modern values. Of course they didn’t, they were a different society.
We can’t agree with each other in how we should behave NOW, but we should condemn people from the past because they refused to live by proper modern standards, too?
You think you are so much more enlightened than the past? Guess what? So did they. Every generation, no matter how far back you go, thinks they were the most modern, most enlightened generation in history. And yet a few generations down the road, and they all start to look old- fashioned.
When the Founding Fathers wrote those documents, NOBODY had created a nation based on the concepts and standards that became the American government. Every other government in the world favored the wealthy and well-connected. America would be the first nation where the lowliest citizen still held the exact same rights as the wealthiest.
We haven’t always lived up to that promise, but that promise still remains, and it is still a worthy promise to defend. I hear people celebrating the death of America, without any consideration about what would replace it. Nobody has suggested a better system, and destroying the current system, with nothing to replace it, is ALWAYS a bad idea.
I take it back, you’ve become one with the kool-aid.
Not only having the audacity to think America was the first to do that (lol - they based it on an old Greek model), but it’s so western centric it would make a fascist blush, even though you don’t have the same intentions.
But more than that, even hundreds of years before America existed, there were plenty of people who knew slavery - and especially the kind practiced in the USA at the time - was bad. There were countries where it was outlawed.
You can do all you want to excuse the hypocrisy of those founders, it doesn’t excuse that they were just rich hypocrites who definitely knew better, but chose not to do better.
I didn’t say the FFs were the first do base a government on Democracy, I said they were founding a new, independent country for the first time in recent human memory - for millennia, every other country was either conquered by another power, or was divided or combined through some political sleight of hand. No entirely NEW country had been founded outside of previously undiscovered (by Europeans) islands, and even those were Colonies, not new independent nations. It took discovering an entirely unknown continent for a new, independent country to be founded from the ground up, something that hadn’t happened in Europe for centuries.
The FFs recognized this unique opportunity in recent history, and instead of basing their new government on the systems they were already familiar with (mostly monarchies), they decided to reintroduce the Greek concept of Democracy, and give the people a say in their government.
You can dismiss that watershed moment in political history, but it became the inspiration for countless revolutions and independence movements for the next 200+ years. Every island nation that was once colonized by England, France, the Netherlands, etc, and is now an independent nation, was following the example set by the American Colonies. America, and the Founding Fathers, may not have been perfect in anyone’s mind, but if you live in a Democratic nation, with elections, and just rule of law, you can thank America’s Founding Fathers for establishing that system as normal in the world. It absolutely didn’t exist before the American Revolution. Aristocracies ruled, and everybody else did what they were told. You complain about American slavery, but every citizen of every monarchy at the time was essentially a slave as well, with little to no agency over the arc of their life.
You also missed the point that the “equality” that they based America on wasn’t about race, and I specifically said that. Many slave owners had moral issues with slavery, but allowed their economic requirements (greed) to speak louder than their moral qualms, and looked the other way, often with weak, self-serving excuses. Washington specifically wondered if this was the moment to outlaw slavery, specifically when he was overseeing the ratification of the Constitution. He came to the conclusion that with America as weak as a baby, and hostile nations still preparing to attack, he felt like it was the wrong time to address the issue, and it should wait until America was a stronger nation. While that may have been a valid point at that specific moment, it also allowed the gaping wound of slavery to fester for almost a century, until it metastasized into the Civil War. Kind of a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
On one hand, he wasn’t completely wrong, tackling the slavery issue at the very beginning, when the rest of the government infrastructure was being developed, would have caused a huge controversy that would have resulted in America looking far different, probably divided into multiple weak competing, possibly warring, nations, instead of one strong one. OTOH, it’s no coincidence that Washington’s decision favored his own personal economic situation, with which he was nearly obsessed.
That’s why we can’t look at the FF’s “equality” language through our 21st century sensibilities. Equality meant something different to them than it does to us. It’s what we think about all the time, but in a racial sense, while they were primarily concerned about Economic/ Class Equality, something that should be our current priority as well. They saw Economic Inequality as the mechanism that the wealthy use to control the people, and they didn’t want that for American citizens, and founded our nation as a sanctuary from the enslaving Aristocratic system.
While we look back with acorn at the FFs for the way they failed to address address racial issues at the start, they in turn, would look at us with scorn for not protecting our country from the ravages of Sociopathic Oligarchs, the very threat that they founded this country to avoid and prevent. And here we are, letting them take our entire country, because we were too intellectually, politically, and morally weak to resist the MAGA Traitors from the start. Our Founding Fathers may have been slaveowners, but they wouldn’t have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs take our nation from us.
We have been carefully socialized in a Pavlovian manner, to respond certain ways to racial issues ( and gender issues, religious issues, etc), and it keeps us at each others’ throats, and it’s all just a distraction to keep us from addressing the real problem that the Founding Fathers made their priority - ECONOMIC EQUALITY. The wealthy know this, and it’s time the rest of us got on board, too, and stop complaining about each other.
So, yeah, the Founding Fathers weren’t perfect humans, what’s new? Neither are we, for all of our bluster and self-righteousness about their shortcomings. If we are waiting for perfect people to be our leaders, then we are doomed to be ruled by psychopathic political philosophies like MAGA.
The bottom line is that whether we adhere to it as tightly as we should, the concept of founding a country on equality and personal liberty is still a valid one. We shouldn’t dispense with the entire system simply because bad people have figured out how to abuse and exploit the Good Faith efforts that such a system relies on.
Instead, we should rededicate ourselves, and our nation, to a Good Faith return of our nation to those positive, humane, moral values, and crush the the Conservative Propaganda Machine’s Bad Faith efforts to redefine their evil values as normal. The America of our Founding Fathers may not be perfect, but it’s better than whatever the treasonous MAGA Nazis have in store for us.
First of all, I never said the Native Americans were “insignificant,” YOU did. I don’t feel that way, and I would never say that, and I seriously don’t appreciate you putting those ugly words in my mouth. that’s a MAGA debate technique, putting words in someone else’s mouth, and then condemning them for it.
I don’t deny at all that the indigenous people took the same hit they always take when the new people show up to town, and it is entirely indefensible.
True, my entire diatribe about the founding of America ignores the issue of the Native Americans, because frankly, candidly, I don’t know what to say about them. Along with slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans is one of the two indelible stains in our history, and I can’t/ won’t defend it because it is indefensible.
It’s an even more frustrating issue to discuss because it is even worse than slavery. At least slaves had a monetary and economic value, so it was worth treating them with some basic humanity, but Native Americans were different. They were in the way, and wouldn’t move without a fight, so the only solution that they bothered with was to wipe them out.
Ironically, without anyone’s knowledge or efforts, it began with the first European explorers, who brought multiple diseases, which ran rampant through the entire population on the continent, killing as many as 90% of them before the Pilgrims showed up in 1620. That’s why the Native Americans were so willing to help the Pilgrims - they needed help, too. Ultimately, of course, this was more or less forgotten, and any potential friendship turned ugly.
So yeah, the Native Americans were “sidelined” in the founding of America (that’s a good word for it), and I don’t defend it in any way. I loved history as a kid, and I was ALWAYS uncomfortable with the way the Native Americans were portrayed in films, and when Brando sent Satcheen Little feather to refuse his Oscar, and everyone was outraged, I got it. Whenever we discussed Native Americans in school, and they conveniently tried to skip past the genocide issue, I would always ask uncomfortable questions about it. I was very aware that the Native Americans were kept in this dark corner of our nation’s history, and barely acknowledged.
And it has only gotten worse. When I was a kid, our history curriculum always had a section on Native Americans every year. When my son went to school (in a different state than me), they never talked about Native Americans at all. I don’t recall him ever learning about Native Americans in school a single time.
American education has always glossed over the plight of the Native Americans, and now they want to do it with Black History, too. I agree that we have neglected the Native Americans and their unique position in our society, and that we have to do a lot more to help them and try and make up for our national crimes, as much as possible.
You are 100% correct, that the Founding Fathers, and every single presidential administration since then, no exceptions, have continued to badly drop the ball regarding Native American affairs for every moment of our 250 years, and we have to do better by them.
BUT…
The bottom line is that none of that changes the fact that the CONCEPT of founding a nation based on equality and liberty is still better than founding it on the basis of military power and the ability and willingness to kill all the citizens if they don’t obey.
Condemning 18th century people because they didn’t live their lives by 21st century cultural norms is a silly argument. Plenty of our philosophical and political concepts come from ideas as old as the Greeks. We don’t reject valid ideas because the society that produced them didn’t live by our modern values. Of course they didn’t, they were a different society.
We can’t agree with each other in how we should behave NOW, but we should condemn people from the past because they refused to live by proper modern standards, too?
You think you are so much more enlightened than the past? Guess what? So did they. Every generation, no matter how far back you go, thinks they were the most modern, most enlightened generation in history. And yet a few generations down the road, and they all start to look old- fashioned.
When the Founding Fathers wrote those documents, NOBODY had created a nation based on the concepts and standards that became the American government. Every other government in the world favored the wealthy and well-connected. America would be the first nation where the lowliest citizen still held the exact same rights as the wealthiest.
We haven’t always lived up to that promise, but that promise still remains, and it is still a worthy promise to defend. I hear people celebrating the death of America, without any consideration about what would replace it. Nobody has suggested a better system, and destroying the current system, with nothing to replace it, is ALWAYS a bad idea.
I take it back, you’ve become one with the kool-aid.
Not only having the audacity to think America was the first to do that (lol - they based it on an old Greek model), but it’s so western centric it would make a fascist blush, even though you don’t have the same intentions.
But more than that, even hundreds of years before America existed, there were plenty of people who knew slavery - and especially the kind practiced in the USA at the time - was bad. There were countries where it was outlawed.
You can do all you want to excuse the hypocrisy of those founders, it doesn’t excuse that they were just rich hypocrites who definitely knew better, but chose not to do better.
Completely missed the point.
I didn’t say the FFs were the first do base a government on Democracy, I said they were founding a new, independent country for the first time in recent human memory - for millennia, every other country was either conquered by another power, or was divided or combined through some political sleight of hand. No entirely NEW country had been founded outside of previously undiscovered (by Europeans) islands, and even those were Colonies, not new independent nations. It took discovering an entirely unknown continent for a new, independent country to be founded from the ground up, something that hadn’t happened in Europe for centuries.
The FFs recognized this unique opportunity in recent history, and instead of basing their new government on the systems they were already familiar with (mostly monarchies), they decided to reintroduce the Greek concept of Democracy, and give the people a say in their government.
You can dismiss that watershed moment in political history, but it became the inspiration for countless revolutions and independence movements for the next 200+ years. Every island nation that was once colonized by England, France, the Netherlands, etc, and is now an independent nation, was following the example set by the American Colonies. America, and the Founding Fathers, may not have been perfect in anyone’s mind, but if you live in a Democratic nation, with elections, and just rule of law, you can thank America’s Founding Fathers for establishing that system as normal in the world. It absolutely didn’t exist before the American Revolution. Aristocracies ruled, and everybody else did what they were told. You complain about American slavery, but every citizen of every monarchy at the time was essentially a slave as well, with little to no agency over the arc of their life.
You also missed the point that the “equality” that they based America on wasn’t about race, and I specifically said that. Many slave owners had moral issues with slavery, but allowed their economic requirements (greed) to speak louder than their moral qualms, and looked the other way, often with weak, self-serving excuses. Washington specifically wondered if this was the moment to outlaw slavery, specifically when he was overseeing the ratification of the Constitution. He came to the conclusion that with America as weak as a baby, and hostile nations still preparing to attack, he felt like it was the wrong time to address the issue, and it should wait until America was a stronger nation. While that may have been a valid point at that specific moment, it also allowed the gaping wound of slavery to fester for almost a century, until it metastasized into the Civil War. Kind of a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
On one hand, he wasn’t completely wrong, tackling the slavery issue at the very beginning, when the rest of the government infrastructure was being developed, would have caused a huge controversy that would have resulted in America looking far different, probably divided into multiple weak competing, possibly warring, nations, instead of one strong one. OTOH, it’s no coincidence that Washington’s decision favored his own personal economic situation, with which he was nearly obsessed.
That’s why we can’t look at the FF’s “equality” language through our 21st century sensibilities. Equality meant something different to them than it does to us. It’s what we think about all the time, but in a racial sense, while they were primarily concerned about Economic/ Class Equality, something that should be our current priority as well. They saw Economic Inequality as the mechanism that the wealthy use to control the people, and they didn’t want that for American citizens, and founded our nation as a sanctuary from the enslaving Aristocratic system.
While we look back with acorn at the FFs for the way they failed to address address racial issues at the start, they in turn, would look at us with scorn for not protecting our country from the ravages of Sociopathic Oligarchs, the very threat that they founded this country to avoid and prevent. And here we are, letting them take our entire country, because we were too intellectually, politically, and morally weak to resist the MAGA Traitors from the start. Our Founding Fathers may have been slaveowners, but they wouldn’t have let the Sociopathic Oligarchs take our nation from us.
We have been carefully socialized in a Pavlovian manner, to respond certain ways to racial issues ( and gender issues, religious issues, etc), and it keeps us at each others’ throats, and it’s all just a distraction to keep us from addressing the real problem that the Founding Fathers made their priority - ECONOMIC EQUALITY. The wealthy know this, and it’s time the rest of us got on board, too, and stop complaining about each other.
So, yeah, the Founding Fathers weren’t perfect humans, what’s new? Neither are we, for all of our bluster and self-righteousness about their shortcomings. If we are waiting for perfect people to be our leaders, then we are doomed to be ruled by psychopathic political philosophies like MAGA.
The bottom line is that whether we adhere to it as tightly as we should, the concept of founding a country on equality and personal liberty is still a valid one. We shouldn’t dispense with the entire system simply because bad people have figured out how to abuse and exploit the Good Faith efforts that such a system relies on.
Instead, we should rededicate ourselves, and our nation, to a Good Faith return of our nation to those positive, humane, moral values, and crush the the Conservative Propaganda Machine’s Bad Faith efforts to redefine their evil values as normal. The America of our Founding Fathers may not be perfect, but it’s better than whatever the treasonous MAGA Nazis have in store for us.
A whole speech just sidelining the Native Americans as insignificant.
Wow.
PS: it’s the “conservative propaganda machine” that defends the founders as justified in everything.
First of all, I never said the Native Americans were “insignificant,” YOU did. I don’t feel that way, and I would never say that, and I seriously don’t appreciate you putting those ugly words in my mouth. that’s a MAGA debate technique, putting words in someone else’s mouth, and then condemning them for it.
I don’t deny at all that the indigenous people took the same hit they always take when the new people show up to town, and it is entirely indefensible.
True, my entire diatribe about the founding of America ignores the issue of the Native Americans, because frankly, candidly, I don’t know what to say about them. Along with slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans is one of the two indelible stains in our history, and I can’t/ won’t defend it because it is indefensible.
It’s an even more frustrating issue to discuss because it is even worse than slavery. At least slaves had a monetary and economic value, so it was worth treating them with some basic humanity, but Native Americans were different. They were in the way, and wouldn’t move without a fight, so the only solution that they bothered with was to wipe them out.
Ironically, without anyone’s knowledge or efforts, it began with the first European explorers, who brought multiple diseases, which ran rampant through the entire population on the continent, killing as many as 90% of them before the Pilgrims showed up in 1620. That’s why the Native Americans were so willing to help the Pilgrims - they needed help, too. Ultimately, of course, this was more or less forgotten, and any potential friendship turned ugly.
So yeah, the Native Americans were “sidelined” in the founding of America (that’s a good word for it), and I don’t defend it in any way. I loved history as a kid, and I was ALWAYS uncomfortable with the way the Native Americans were portrayed in films, and when Brando sent Satcheen Little feather to refuse his Oscar, and everyone was outraged, I got it. Whenever we discussed Native Americans in school, and they conveniently tried to skip past the genocide issue, I would always ask uncomfortable questions about it. I was very aware that the Native Americans were kept in this dark corner of our nation’s history, and barely acknowledged.
And it has only gotten worse. When I was a kid, our history curriculum always had a section on Native Americans every year. When my son went to school (in a different state than me), they never talked about Native Americans at all. I don’t recall him ever learning about Native Americans in school a single time.
American education has always glossed over the plight of the Native Americans, and now they want to do it with Black History, too. I agree that we have neglected the Native Americans and their unique position in our society, and that we have to do a lot more to help them and try and make up for our national crimes, as much as possible.
You are 100% correct, that the Founding Fathers, and every single presidential administration since then, no exceptions, have continued to badly drop the ball regarding Native American affairs for every moment of our 250 years, and we have to do better by them.
BUT…
The bottom line is that none of that changes the fact that the CONCEPT of founding a nation based on equality and liberty is still better than founding it on the basis of military power and the ability and willingness to kill all the citizens if they don’t obey.