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Beto O'Rourke took the measure of America and found it inadequate.
"This country, although we would like to think otherwise, he sang last weekend, was based on racism, persisted through racism and is now racist."
It is now a dominant sentiment in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders said earlier this year that the United States had been "created" largely "on racist principles".
The New York Times launched its so-called 1619 project, marking the 400th anniversary of the importation of African slaves.
The series seeks nothing less than "to reframe the history of the country, to understand 1619 as our true founder and to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans in the center of history, we tell ourselves who we are.
It is certainly true that an American nation existed before the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and that slavery was its great sin, permutations being still felt today. But to pretend that racism is the very essence of America and is one of the founding principles of this country is an odious and reductive lie.
This does not explain why any reference to slavery has been removed from the Constitution. James Madison, according to his notes at the drafting convention, "found it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property among men".
The carefully used term was then used to strengthen the position of opponents of slavery, from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass. The great black abolitionist asked, "If the Constitution was meant to be, by its authors and adopters, an instrument of slave possession," how could it be that "neither slavery, nor the Slavery, nor the slave. . . to be found anywhere in it?
The notion of slavery as a founding principle does not explain the passage of the North West Ordinance of 1787, prior to the enactment of the Constitution, setting out the conditions for colonization between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. It stipulated that "there will be no slavery or involuntary servitude in the said territory".
This does not explain why the Constitution allowed the ban on the slave trade from 1808, when it was effectively banned.
Of course, in crucial respects, the Constitution was a compromise with the slave owners. It is not clear why it would be better to consider that, in the absence of such a compromise, the slave states might have gone their own way to create a gigantic nation-state wholly devoted to slavery and not to a North become more anti-slavery. -ln slavery over time.
Rather than improving the moral status of slavery, the Foundation tended to undermine it.
"The revolution ended abruptly and effectively the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery, as well as other forms of serfdom and lack of freedom, to exist without challenge. serious throughout the colonial period, "writes historian Gordon Wood. In his opinion, this sets in motion the "ideological and social forces" that ultimately led to the civil war.
In general, it is a mistake to treat the United States as an exception to their racial attitudes, when it was truly an exception in its (imperfect) embrace of freedom.
"Europeans have not outdone others by enslaving people or treating slaves viciously," commented the late historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. "They surpassed others by creating a Christian civilization that eventually sparked the moral condemnation of slavery and spawned mass movements against it. The perception of slavery as morally unacceptable – as a sinner – only became widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century.
"Today, we wonder: how could Christians or a civilized people live with themselves as slave owners?" But the historically relevant question is this: what, after millennia of general acceptance, has made Christians – and, subsequently, those of other denominations – judge the law? slavery of an enormity not to suffer? "
It's not a question that anyone running for the Democratic presidential primaries or the New York Times is inclined to ask.
Twitter: @RichLowry
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