Yeah, AFAIK it’s not like there was any current effort to ban slavery in the states where it was legal. The Confederates looked down the road and said “at some point, there will enough free states to pass an amendment to ban slavery, so we need to get out now while we can”. What compromise (beyond allowing slavery in half the new territories) was going to satisfy them?
I bet Andrew Jackson could have done something about it.
One can be an honorable man and still be a traitor to one’s country. Even generals.
There’s nothing honourable about being a racist. There is nothing honourable about a torture camp.
Kelly is only honourable concerning things wishes to be honourable about.
He is just another piece of shit hiding behind a uniform.
Expansion of slave states to every corner of the nation, and Lincoln resigning before his inauguration speech.
That’s what “compromise” looks like to a Republican. When they look up "compromise’ in the dictionary, they see “Total and complete capitulation to my point of view”.
I guess The Missouri Compromise doesn’t count.
This is obviously a semantic issue, but… I don’t think it’s impossible to be both honorable and very very racist. Or honorable and very very sexist. Or (just about any human virtue) and very very (just about any form of vile bigotry).
That said, I also agree that it is offensive and blindered to discuss people like Robert E Lee or Jefferson Davis and have one’s first reaction be “oh, they were so honorable”. These are people whose most significant historical act by far was to engage in rebellion for the purpose of continuing to be able to own other human beings as property. That should never be glossed over.
In other words, my response to someone claiming that Robert E Lee was “honorable” would not be “no he wasn’t” or “you can’t be honorable and racist”, it would be “who cares? maybe he also had a lovely singing voice, but that’s not relevant to how history must judge him”.
There certainly was. That’s what the abolition movement was all about. There wasn’t much progress on that front (at least after the Missouri Compromise), but the effort was certainly there.
The WSJ called for him to resign and for an investigation into collusion between the DNC and FBI. The claim that Mueller should resign is based on his supposed inability to be neutral about the FBI because he used to run it, not because he is alleged to have colluded with it. That’s a pretty significant distinction.
This is all a bit weird, anyway, because the WSJ’s editorial page has actually been pretty anti-Trump since the election (not that it’s been favorable to Democrats though).
Not to mention the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the whole platform of the Whig and then the Republican Parties, and even the policies of Abraham Lincoln in the early part of his Presidency. And while it happened after the end of slavery, the Compromise of 1877 basically handed the South back to the same people who had run it before the Civil War, with dire consequences for the black population.
When it comes to the issue of slavery and black civil rights, the United States, from its very birth and for at least the first century of its existence (and well beyond, IMO), might as well be nicknamed Compromise Nation.
Borowitz says “Why couldn’t the slave owners and slaves come up with a form of slavery that they were both happy with?”.
Depends on how you define honor. Unless we define racism as representing everything evil, such that those who are racist are stupid, insane, dishonest, and probably perverted too, then I’m not sure what honor has to do with racism. Were there no honorable men before 1980?
Kelly’s comments were moronic in the extreme, so I don’t take issue with your characterization of his comments, I just don’t know what honor and open racism have to do with each other. Closet racism can be dishonorable, to be sure, because it involves deception and cowardice. But I’d say that 95% of history’s most respected military minds were racists and nearly 100% nationalists.
One point Kelly did make that was valid, trying to judge historical figures by current moral values. Robert E. Lee supported his state over country, because he thought that was his patriotic duty. That was actually the moral thing to do in his day. Most people back then were loyal to their state first, country second. At the time of the Civil War, there were people alive who had lived in a time when the states actually were independent entities with every right to not join the union.
Or it could be that he was using one of the numerous ready rationalizations for keeping his slaves. People who find doing right thing inconvenient have always been able to rationalize not doing it.
That’s been common folklore for a long time, but I wonder how factual it is.
I think it’s fair to call torturing (Lee had his slaves beaten, whipped, and worse) and enslaving people (Lee allowed his army to capture and re-enslave free black people when they took or retook territory) dishonorable actions.
I don’t judge him by “current moral values”, but by the values of the time – more than half of the populations of many Southern states almost certainly recognized the evil of slavery. Certainly more than half of the population of the North. Slavery wasn’t acceptable according to the “values of the time”, unless the only opinions that count as the “values of the time” were those of Southern white men.
The moral thing to do would be to decide which side had the more moral position, not to slavishly support the state over the country. Not to Godwinize, but most Germans supported Hitler and I don’t doubt that many of them did so because they felt it was their patriotic duty. That doesn’t mean they were morally correct.
Okay, so two different things going here:
Honor- hateful actions and honor are not incompatible. Many cultures have strict codes of honor, and yet at the same time are pretty barbaric. Feudal Japan comes to mind. From all accounts, Robert E. Lee conducted himself according to the morals of his time and his place. In warfare he was respected by the enemy, and was treated with honor by his opponents after the war. He returned that courtesy by working within the political system and urging his countrymen to do the same. No, his views were pretty reprehensible even after the war, but far more moderate than most southerners and he may have contributed to reconciliation.
Morals- Slavery was recognized as immoral even then, even among most southerners, I think. By the time of the war, all that was left was rationalizations and defensiveness. On the issue of state over country though, I think Lee was on solid ground given the way Americans thought back then. Comparing it to Germany is kinda weak, since Germans didn’t have a larger loyalty to appeal to. To use a modern example, are Chinese who support the current government immoral? Probably, but they don’t have a lot of options. Who is going to back them? Not Western countries.
Of course it’ll be too late. The tendency is to assume that it can’t happen here, to us, or that things can be managed if they go ‘too far’.
John Boehner, Jeff Flake, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and a host of others all believed that they could use conservative rage to their advantage and just turn off that switch when it suited them. A funny thing happened, though: as the party got dumbed down, so did their political campaigns and their message. It became an echo chamber and it became the mainstream. Laws of diminishing returns: what once worked, the rage that used to be good enough stopped being good enough. More rage, more unreasoning disagreeableness is the answer. It will only get worse.
By the time people figure out it’s too late, it’s already too late. At that point, it becomes a matter of trying to adapt to the new normal without being devoured by it. Right now it’s the GOP’s problem; it’ll be everyone’s problem eventually.
I pointed out in another thread, where I was accused of being a chicken little because I encouraged vigilance, and a refusal to accept things as normal, that millions of people went to the voting booth last fall and voted to make the sky fall.
They want it all crashing down, because they think that somehow that’s gonna be a reset, and allow them to go back to being on top.
and so you agree that Democrats should also avoid appeals to racial resentment? Because leaving the morality aside, those are forces that cannot be controlled.
I’m having trouble parsing that.
If you are saying that democrats should avoid perpetuation resentments based on race, I would agree, that’s the republicans platform.
If you are saying that democrats should avoid mentioning race, or the effects of race, then that’s just a bit stupid.