The question goes to the heart of the faith which has animated liberal thought toward race since long before it was formalized in the New York Times’ 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory—a belief not just that America has sins, or was imperfect, but that America was and is uniquely sinful and worse than everyone else.
In this version of American history, the truth of 1776 is not merely that the Founders were forced to make pragmatic compromises with reality and take time to achieve the aspirations they set themselves. It is not simply that Thomas Jefferson, despite his repeated personal desire to do so, failed to see the elimination of slavery in his lifetime. No, the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory’s historical claim is much bigger than that. They claim that Jefferson and the Founders never cared to see the end of slavery at all, and above all, they claim that the American Revolution itself was fought specifically to entrench slavery, driven by fears that Britain might abolish it.
As has been noted even by a number of liberal and partisan Democratic historians, these claims are total nonsense.
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Indeed, the period around 1776 marked a pivot point that set off a wave of abolitions around the globe. In his 2011 book Better Angels of our Nature, scholar Stephen Pinker illustrates this trend perfectly with a graph charting the progress of abolitionism worldwide:
So, the 1619 Project claims that America was founded on Slavery and was / is only successful because of Slavery. After all, if you’re trying to rejigger the Present, you have to rewrite the Past. Then you have your chance to re-write the Future – along with your fellow Progressive travelers. Which they are doing and expecting the rest of us to believe it.
But that isn’t Past Reality – in 1619, we were still a British colony and under their control. A slave ship arriving on our shores was not out of the ordinary in that time period – slavery existed all over the world at that time and not much in the way of getting rid of it until a singular event occurred…
…the formation of “these United States” and based on the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence became known – see the above chart.
Progressives base their history by taking their current morality (and agenda) and then demand that the past fits it. When it doesn’t, the Identity Politics kicks in and declares that anything that doesn’t fit THEIR worldview MUST automatically be sinful, wrong, and must be erased.
Sinful – isn’t that kinda rich? After all, for most Progressives, God is just a fantasy for the rest of we rubes; if there is no God, how can there be sin (all references to Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, which was dedicated to Lucifer, to the contrary)?
(H/T: AMAC)
