Kind of sounds like we need to stop giving judges so much power.

Cherry pick much? You picked exceptions while ignoring the rest. At no point did I use absolutes like “all” founders were idiots or something. Yet you cherry pick and suggest that invalidates my points. Good grief.

I’m sorry for contesting your points with the facts of the matter and pointing out that the literal majority of the Founding Fathers don’t fit your claim.

Whatever. I’m done. I stand by my point: understand the founders in their time, understand their flaws, understand that we have polished their images while ignoring flaws and context to make them heroic. They were humans. That’s all.

Yes, they were flawed and human. Flawed and human advocates for Enlightenment-era ideals which are very far from the “White Male Landowning Aristocracy” idea that you accused their ideals of being founded on.

“By saying all men were “created equal” Thomas Jefferson intended to abolish the system of hereditary aristocracy, where some individuals were born as lords and others were ordinary.”

Ok. Landed white male aristocracy.

Jefferson also believed in a 100% inheritance tax, so I’m pretty sure you can remove ‘landed’ and ‘aristocracy’ from the ideals intended there.

Then there was black people not getting to vote.

Each state set its own requirements for voting, and several Founding Fathers were advocates for total legal equality.

Women couldn’t vote.

This is undeniably true. None of the Founding Fathers were feminists.

If you didn’t have enough property you couldn’t vote.

Each state set its own requirements for voting, and a number of states had no property requirements.

Native Americans weren’t citizens until the 1900s. Don’t forget the awful treatment and suffering they received at the hands of Jackson.

Genocide Jackson wasn’t a Founding Father. Citizenship was not automatic for Native Americans until the 1900s due to the strange state of semisovereignity most Native American tribes have.

Let’s not bother discussing how long many of the founders owned slaves, despite their “enlightenment”, and how long it took them to free them. If they did.

Yes, let’s not forget the terrible slaver John Jay, who founded the foremost abolitionist movement in the US at the time, or Franklin, who advocated for total integration of white and black populations, or Hamilton, who was instrumental in New York adopting a hard abolitionist stance.

Nobody here is contesting the effect they had on the formation of this country, yet for some reason you want to argue that point.

No, the point I’m arguing is against you here:

Those “ideals” revolved around landed white males

Feel free to pile on some quotes if it helps you look the other way.

Sorry that actual primary source evidence doesn’t mean anything to you?

I am so shocked. /s

I don’t really mind loyalists. There’s not some great moral difference between them and the revolutionaries like there was between unionists and confederates. Both were, deep down, fighting for their own best interests.

I agree, at least to a degree. There’s a right side and wrong side to the argument, but it’s not the kind of stark moral contrast the way there is between Unionists and Confederates. It’s more of a “Are you really so uncreative as to be unable to see that being ruled without a say in your own governance is some feudal shite?” than a “Jesus fuck you are fighting for the worst institution known to man.”

It’s not like the property and slave owning founders were particularly concerned about anybody’s oppression but their own.

4 out of the 7 Founding Fathers were staunch abolitionists (Jay, Franklin, Hamilton, Adams). 1 became an abolitionist later in life (Washington). 1 turned against slavery half-heartedly (Jefferson). Only one was an ideological slaver (Madison).

Again, you are framing their words in your mind today and ignoring the context they were written. For instance, “all men are created equal” was intended to give all white males a shot at “equality” in reference to hereditary white aristocracy, not people of other colors. We have revised that to mean literally everyone.

How many quotes of the Founding Fathers would it take for you to admit that there were a non-negligible number of them who believed in the Enlightenment ideals that were expressed in our founding documents? 5? 10? 100? Perhaps there is no number sufficient, and your mind is made up regardless of evidence. If that’s the case, it would be very helpful for you to state as much now.

You offer up quotes to prove how great they were but in the next breath say they were flawed while using those quotes as a rebuttal to my statement pointing out that these men were flawed.

Men can be great and flawed. Men can champion great ideals and be flawed. I don’t know why that’s so troubling to you?

Please read about these people,

Jesus, fuck. You think I haven’t?

Game of Thrones, Season 4

Those ideals are largely enlightenment-era ideals which still resonate today.

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights & previleges, if by decency & propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

• George Washington

Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity? Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?—Pharisaical Britain! to pride thyself in setting free a single Slave that happens to land on thy coasts, while thy Merchants in all thy ports are encouraged by thy laws to continue a commerce whereby so many hundreds of thousands are dragged into a slavery that can scarce be said to end with their lives, since it is entailed on their posterity!

• Ben Franklin

It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused.

• John Jay

The origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man or set of men have, to govern others, except their own consent?

• Alexander Hamilton

The Founding Fathers were deeply imperfect men who were, in many ways, products of their time. But as far as ideals and not specific policy positions go, they’re worth the naming.

I would argue that forced labor without profit motive or ownership of a person is so far removed from slavery as to not warrant the term. Community service is slavery under that definition (and, in fact, challenges on the basis of the 13th have been [unsuccessfully] leveled against community service), yet I think few of us would view some rich twat getting a hundred hours of community service for a DUI to be slavery in any form, even on a purely technical level.

Labor as punishment is not effective or worth keeping as a tool for ensuring the compliance of a free citizenry by its government, but I also don’t think that it is inherently slavery. My point thus is that the 13th Amendment was not meant simply as a punishment, but as a genuine attempt (emphasis on ‘attempt’) to end slavery as an institution.

Be the trendsetter you want to see in the world o7

This work throws the light of historical materialism on Babylon itself. For so long the oppressed have been the objects of investigation by Euro-imperialist sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc. — all to further pacifying and controlling us.

Now it is time to scientifically examine the oppressor society. While we discuss Third-World struggles and movements, this is not a critical examination of these political developments. This is a reconnaissance into enemy territory.

lol

Maoists can’t help but layer on the melodrama while writing up screeds on how the white working class is actually a ‘labor aristocracy’, huh?

Nixon aligned with racists and capital with the Southern Strategy, but the evangelicals being an essential part of the coalition was the work of Reagan and his era.

I have, several times. You ignored it every time.

Wow, goodness me, you must be posting invisible comments in this thread!

I don’t know, it seems pretty great to have a rebuttal that half-baked edgelords can’t formulate an answer to.

“American exceptionalism is when you think that America, a country founded on a handful of documents, relates to the ideals expressed in those documents.”

Only for Soulslikes and fighting games 😔

Republicans didn’t end slavery. Slavery was enshrined in the 13th amendment to the constitution by Republicans. They did free black slaves as a punitive fuck you to the Confederate States. But it’s not the same thing.

The language and actions of the Radical Republicans in the 1860s and 70s show a sincere desire to abolish slavery in all of its forms. The ‘exception’ granted in the 13th Amendment was intended to retain punitive measures for criminals rather than reconstruct a form of slavery. It didn’t work out as cleanly as was hoped.

To be entirely fair, it was a bit slower than that. The Republican Party was the party of urban folk and free farmers up until the late 1870s, and shifted to the urban elite and middle class by the 1890s; while the Democrats shifted to favor rural elites and (white) yeomen farmers. Teddy Roosevelt was really the last gasp of progressivism in the Republican Party, which had been steadily been souring on labor, while Wilson shifted the Democrat party to favor white wage laborers as well as farmers. Truman (a Democrat) had taken a firm pro-civil rights stance in the 1940s, and as late as Eisenhower in the 1950s there was broad anti-conservative support in the Republican Party.

The tumult of the 1960s really just set everything in stone - capital siding with conservative elements, and labor with liberal elements. And then, in the course of the 80s, aligning the racists and capital with the previously-apolitical evangelicals, which delivered a ‘winning coalition’ to a previously-struggling Republican Party.

♪ "Whatever happens, we have got♪

♪ The Maxim gun, and they have not!" ♪

[WW1 starts]

[screaming internally and externally]