The first part is true. We diverged from the path when old laws turned into sacred things that could not be debated, questioned, or changed. “Because we’ve always done it this way” is a dangerous mantra.
The second is feeding off the idea that because they didn’t fix everything they were truly evil, yet many of the same problems existed before and after them to this very day. So we’re not that much better and shouldn’t judge with such absolutism. Hell, if they hadn’t taken action in their time against oppression and tyranny it’s hard to say what kind of world it would be now. I wonder what it was like to be at the edge of authoritarianism and have to make a choice between ignoring it, coping with it, embracing it, or fighting it. Good thing we don’t have those problems now, huh?
Point is, if you’re going to judge the past, be sure to judge it from its own relative viewpoint and not from centuries later, and definitely not in a few one liners that would make grade school history look like graduate school level. Slavery is a big one that’s used against them a lot. What if some of them were full abolitionists that disrupted the Revolution efforts in order to push against colonies that used slaves much more than others? One, they wouldn’t have succeeded, and two, the colonies wouldn’t have united against a common foe.
And who knows, maybe that alternate future does work out after a century or two in some other way, but it’s a far cry from just a simple “why didn’t you stop slavery while you were at it?” There’s reasons why some battles were chosen over others at that time. Some progress is better than none, or worse, regression.
There are a couple of things to be said about “judging the past”.
The first is that we can absolutely judge the past on its own terms and arrive at a scathing condemnation of the Founding Fathers as slavers at the terms of their own time. This is what contemporaries of Washington did in the case of Ona Judge, the runaway slave for whom Washington stayed salty all his life for not being able to get back because of actions of New Englanders who basically decided to tell him and his nephew to fuck off. Then there is of course the small issue of the Haitian Revolution and what it reveals about what was morally possible at the time.
The second thing to say is that “judging the past” is not an abstract thing, it is a thing we do today and that has political implications today. Every “originalist” fuckface is also “judging history” and accepting the founding daddies as basically fundamentally right and righteous. That is a political function of today with very real implications today. We can choose to counter the “originalist” judgements with “fuck your founding daddy issues” anti-judgement and that way create a new political reality for now.
History can be academic, in which case nationalist desires about proving these or those people noble founders of a superior system are just plain unscientific, or it can be public history in which case it is about meaning creation for the today. And such meaning creation has to judge the past with our own morals, because it is a meaning that is about us and our future.
And by the way, when I say “us and our future”, I need to clarify: I’m Greek-Canadian. My interest in US history and political culture is that of the keen interest of the neighbour to the internals of the crack house. If you guys keep fucking up, that has real consequences for both Canada and Greece/Europe, so it matters.
I appreciate your points, and questioned even posting because one cannot cover the topic well enough in a discussion arena when there are volumes and papers galore about the issues, struggles, and morality of actions taken or not taken. I just think the simplistic attack on the founders because of slavery avoids any good that came from their actions.
And I should note that there are two parts to the founders - the ones who started the rebellion tried to united the colonies for independence, many losing everything they had, and the later ones who tried (several times) to put together a new form of government. This thread post is mainly attacking the latter really, but some of the survivors of the first were part of it too. Sometimes such attacks feel as if they border on some conspiracy level, where the founders had a grand plan that is still in place, when in fact it was more trial and error and changed many times in the past few centuries, some better than others. If anything (and I think this goes along with your last point) we’ve stagnated for too long and the rot that has been growing for a while (but not placed there purposefully as if some like to think).
They also didn’t want you to worship them. They also weren’t an organized hive mind. They were at each other’s throats half the time.
They were a bunch of 1%ers prattling on about how “all men are created equal” yet had no problem owning slaves. Yep.
They didn’t give a shit about freedom, they were just pissed they weren’t kings themselves. In their wildest dreams they probably never imagined the system they designed would benefit the rich as much as it does today.
Yup, as originally implemented it was the capitalist oligarchy that the current 1% want to turn it back into.
The Constitution of the United States recognizes that the states have the power to set voting requirements. A few states allowed free Black men to vote, and New Jersey also included unmarried and widowed women who owned property. Generally, states limited this right to property-owning or tax-paying White males (about 6% of the population).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_the_United_States
Waahhh we could have done it better just look at . . . Okay wait . . .
Hangon
huh, a bunch of literal SLAVE owners… I’m glad they’re dead… more slave owners need to die.
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