Read on Twitter
I probably shouldn't have looked it up and I definitely shouldn't be tweeting about it, but I looked up the 1776 Commission and the honesty of its dishonesty is somehow refreshing.
Better thinkers than I have already debunked this paragraph so I'm focused on how it happened.
Better thinkers than I have already debunked this paragraph so I'm focused on how it happened.
Sure, that paragraph is brazenly dishonest - but what is the lineage of its dishonesty? The page it comes from helps with the context. Two things jump out to me: "all men are created equal" and Lincoln.
My American history is spotty, but I read a lot of 17th and 18th C philosophy and if you read the American Declaration of Independence in that context, it's pretty standard social contract language. Men having been "created equal" is in most of those - Hobbes included.
"Created equal" in that context is a reference to the state of nature and their ability to dissolve those bonds and govern themselves as they please. The statement is completely compatible with slave-owning and that kind of language can even justify slavery.
Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, reinterpreted that statement. Four score and seven years later, scientific racism meant that human equality - even in the state of nature - was radical so Lincoln read it in that way to create an abolitionist narrative about America's founding.
But then the Dinesh-D'Souza-GOP-abolished-slavery types get a hold of that narrative and write the 1776 Commission report. A narrative that once helped abolitionism, now helps the whitewashers who want to silence the 1619 reckoning.
Marx's 18th Brumaire is about how radical revolutionaries become reactionary; Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment is about how progress is often a double-edged sword.
A study of the afterlife of abolitionism in that spirit would be quite... fascinating.
A study of the afterlife of abolitionism in that spirit would be quite... fascinating.
