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.
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.