Today the Republican Party read the entire US constitution. They claim that the framers created a great document that was a force for good.
I say that the constitution, as it was passed, was evil and racist. Not only did it fail to outlaw racially-based slavery (thus condemning millions to lives of pain and misery), it PROTECTED SLAVERY.
And these are just the most obvious ways the constitution protected slavery.
Our current form of government was racist and evil from the start. Today the Republicans celebrated and endorsed racism and evil. Anyone want to claim that the US constitution was not racist and evil?
The Republican Party cannot claim they did not know the constitution protected slavery since they read the entire document. We can only conclude that they knew exactly what they were celebrating. The Republicans have taken the first step to bringing more racism and evil back into the world.
Another form of prejudice – by no means as pernicious as racism, but still unfair-- is “presentism,” judging people and writings and ideas of times past by today’s standards, to a degree that assumes they somehow should have known those were the right standards. The U.S. Constitution was a radically progressive thing for its time.
Our descendants one day will look back at 2011 as a cruel and barbarous age, when dogs were enslaved and women free.
Art of the possible, the perfect is the enemy of the good, etc. The slave states would not have joined in any national government that presented any potential threat to their peculiar institution, no one was in a position to make them join, and it’s not as if not forming a more perfect Union would have freed any slave on the continent. North America might have ended up as fragmented as South America, and any widespread abolitionist movement would have provoked the independent slave states to seal their borders tight as North Korea’s.
The Republican Party celebrates and endorses racism and evil as expressed in the constitution
And - far worse - the President takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend this foul document. Simply shocking.
Thank God for Democrats in Congress who courageously turn their backs on this evil legacy.
Even that requires qualification. The first abolitionist organization in America was not formed (by Quakers) until 1775. Jefferson – a radical for his time and place – believed in principle that the blacks should be freed, but also that, being freed, they would have to be deported . . . somewhere . . . being just too different (read: inferior) to share the same republican society with white people as equals. (His attitude towards Indians was entirely different – he anticipated and welcomed a racial merger with them.) And then there was the whole “wolf by the ears” problem – white people in slave states, not just slave owners but all white people, lived in constant fear of a slave uprising leading to mass butchery of whites (the kind of thing that actually happened in Haiti in 1791), and feared any threat to slavery as tending in that direction, and therefore regarded abolitionists with the kind of horror directed at Communists in the 20th Century.
Huck Finn publishers cannot bring back Jim Crow. The Republican Party can, and now that they aligned with the Tea Party*, bringing back Jim Crow is clearly one of their plans.
its been clear since Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
It’s been clear since Nixon that they will exploit white racial resentment rhetorically and imagistically to win votes, and maybe try to roll back affirmative action and cut HEAD START and things out of the budget. But Jim Crow has the same resurrection prospects as the Nuremberg Laws.
They did know better. That’s just engaging in the standard attempt to whitewash our ancestors by pretending that knowing evil was only invented some time in the 20th century and that our ancestors were completely mindless and ignorant. Which makes them look like “moral” morons, so it isn’t much of an improvement anyway.
Just like modern people, the people of the past did things they knew were wrong, and they did it all the time. These are people who declared that all men were created equal and then treated some as slaves and others as inferiors; that’s hypocrisy, not ignorance.
Then our descendants will be monsters, and morally inferior to us because women are people and dogs are not.
We are morally superior to our ancestors. It’s called progress.
