Comment by rayiner
6 days ago
> Just that those making the constitution weren't that good at it.
They were exceedingly good at it. In my country’s constitution we have all sorts of things from the american constitution, like due process, because we literally have no indigenous words for these concepts.
They were extremely good, but they were not near angelic geniuses gathered together and possessed of greater wisdom and capacity by virtue of that gathering than any people ever before or since, which is what many people who like to talk up the founding fathers would have.
They wrote the most influential constitution in the world which has governed the longest-lived extant republic. Most who claim to be smarter have offered mere ideas, never implemented in a real country. Such academic notions often self-destruct when confronted with reality. (I’m reminded of Ashraf Ghani, the professor who “wrote the book” on “Fixing Failed States.” When he was elected President of Afghanistan to actually put his ideas into practice, it was a disaster and resulted in the Taliban reconquering the country. Ideas without implementation are worth nothing.)
And some other country might be liking those Founding Fathers concepts' even more.
So? Doesn't change the fact that they weren't very good with not letting class/race/gender/etc position influence their policy making.
And that's the claim we're discussing whether they've been good at, not whether they came up with some good new concepts like "due process" and "the right to free speech".
They had "due process" but they also had slavery.
They had "equal rights" and voting but not for poor not land-owning plebes or women.
They had "free speech" but also McCarthyism.
Their constitution didn't prevent laws describing how e.g. blacks can't sleep in the same hotels or go to the same schools as whites to be applied and be considered compatible with it.
And didn't prevent a globally huge per capita prison system, primarily targeting blacks, even today.
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> Such mass fratricide for the sake of non-kin was completely unprecedented in history. Africans never did that. Middle Easterners never did that. Asians never did that.
That also means that only in America brother fought against brother to preserve slavery. Not something to brag about.
Most of these other countries were able to abolish slavery* without having half their population preferring fratricide over freeing their slaves.
Even in the New World other states just abolished slavery with far less bloodshed. Example A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism_in_Brazil
> One where (mostly British) Americans killed hundreds of thousands of their own cousins to free enslaved people belonging an entirely different ethnic group
A quote from The Great Emancipator's inaugural address: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." [1]
Abolition wasn't the war aim at the outset. Preserving the Union was Lincoln's goal. He did everything he could to prevent the slave states from seceding.
Abolition became a goal halfway through the war.
"The abolition of slavery became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in rebel states to be free". [2]
Which makes sense. If half your countrymen are driven to take up arms against the other half just to keep some people in bondage, you may as well end that evil institution. Otherwise they're bound to try again.
*With varying degrees of success in the actual implementation.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Secession_and_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
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Your second paragraph does not make the argument you seem to intend. Most other places in the world did not require an incredibly bloody civil war in order to (partially) abolish slavery.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45407005
What’s the endgame of your argument here? It reeks of American exceptionalism of the type where its citizenry is not allowed to critically assess the effectiveness of its systems because other systems are somehow worse in some facets. This entire response is whataboutism.
Should disenfranchised Americans simply roll over because there are people more disenfranchised in other places in the world? Are some forms of disenfranchisement more acceptable than others? E.g. as long as we can narrowly interpret the words of the founding fathers (originalism) to be in favor of it?
>You’re complaining about where the founders didn’t follow their principles to their logical conclusions. But you overlook that you’re using the founders’ own principles to criticize how they fell short
Which is irrelevant, since it's not their influence on modern principles and their related concepts that's in question, but to whether "a constitution interpreted precisely as written by wealthy, landed 18th century white men disenfranchises every person who is not a wealthy, landed 18th century white man, roughly in proportion to how much they share in common with such a person.
It's precisely to the degree we don't interpet the consitution "as written by wealthy, landed 18th century white men", and, for example, extend it to women, blacks, the non land-owning poor, etc, that's
So, again: if you lived in a place that interpreted the constitution exactly in the way the "wealthy, landed 18th century white men" wrote it and interpreted it, e.g. as not incompatible with no-universal vote, few women rights, slavery and seggregation, and no free-speed by the way, would you be disenfrancized or not?
It's not the "Fathers" that de-disenfranchized the modern masses. It's people (including blacks) fighting, establishing newer protections, ammendments, and laxer interpretations, contrary to what the "wealthy, landed 18th century white men" constitutional practice was.
> You can’t even articulate the complaints you’re making using concepts indigenous to Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.
Ah, moving the goalposts again, from just the Constitution to also including Europe (which hopefully I established did many of these things first, and some better, and some much much earlier), the new ask being to find similar things "indigenous to Asia, Africa, or the Middle East".
Which exist. Even in ancient practices. And not just Greeks and Romans. Public deliberation, assemblies, and criticism of those in power have been found as practices all around the world, from egalitarian indigenous societies, even when not having a shorthand rallying cry like "free speech".
>You talk about slavery. But the countries those slaves were from enslaved their own people and sold them to America. Those cultures didn’t think slavery was wrong.
That's not an argument about how those "wealthy, landed 18th century white men" didn't still disenfrachize slaves. It's an excuse about how some other groups did it too. It might have been relevant response, had I claimed those other groups didn't disenfrachize slaves. But I didn't.
>It was the “0 to 1” step that was the hard one from which everything else followed.
Finally, that's an actual argument to the issue under discussion.
May I paraphrase it as "Sure, the founding fathers e.g. disenfrachized blacks etc, but their principles created the foundations for e.g. eventually abolishing slavery (that's an important 0 to 1 step)"?
And yet, tons of other places have either abolished, or practically zeroed, slavery, long before the Constitution was created. Didn't take a whole bloody war to achieve that either.
And we have no reason to believe the same modern changes wouldn't have happened without the Constitution, since parallel developments happened anyway, from Swiss cantons to the British Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, and the rest.
If anything the US in 1787 weren't ahead of the global curve. They were behind the other emerging constitutional states in accepting and even actively establishing constitutional support for slavery (like with the Three-fifths compromise and the Fugitive Slave clause). Even Japan had abolished slavery earlier!
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