On the idolatry of the Founding Fathers:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There is a certain strand of politics in the United States that reveres the generation of George Washington as a group of demigods. The Constitution is revered not as a political document but as a religious text, whose dicta are sacred, and like a religious text these adherents have seldom read the document themselves but prefer to go by how others tell them it is so and are profoundly ignorant of the document itself. This is the view whereby if George Washington or James Madison used the word "it's" in a sentence instead of "its" that the sacred abbreviation of it is must be used, not written out as it is and that it is an absolute sin to notice anything else about the word, its purpose, or even how that word was used in practice.

This view attributes to the Founding Fathers some unique vision, being a Vanguard and Central Committee of a revolution, forming a new blazing of the New Man out of the ashes of the old. The problem is that this is all for lack of a politer term Bullshit of Augean proportions. The Founders were first of all human beings. Like all human beings they ate, slept, drank, shat, and fucked people (and the slaveowners, the ones not impotent, raped their slaves, it was the habit of the time. If that word offends those who think that being a Founding Father mitigates the horrors of slavery, let that be so). They lied, they understood how to be disingenuous, and they were above all politicians who understood that politicians work best when in secret and able to lie like Ananias. The Founders were men, and they were politicians, not some unique coalition of Gods on Earth, working out the greatest of all ideas of human history.

Two, this view is patently false in terms of the Founders themselves. They all to an extent admired the idea that the government that governed best governed least....and then the Constitution was rigged to be ratified well short of the existing Articles of Confederation and the US Army's first real battle as a proper army was to suppress at bayonet point a tax revolt by people being charged an arm and a leg. The Founders created the concept of Sedition Acts, whereby government was free to declare speech anathema and persecute it. The Founders shamelessly abandoned their own ideas of law and order for sheer personal gain like politicians from the dawn of time. Jefferson gained huge chunks of the North American continent, and Jefferson also gutted the US military. All the Founders advocated genocide against Natives, all of them saw black people, even educated, intelligent blacks like Phyllis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker as inferiors. The Founders were directly invested in the very Indian land they tried to grab through crude, brute force during the American Revolutionary War, it was no honest ideological war but like all wars one of personal gain and profit, with the victorious side claiming the highest of motives (just ignore that the third of the population that was Loyalist and the Indians allied with the United States during the Revolution learned what that highfalutin' rhetoric really meant).

Three, this system created by the Founders collapsed less than eighty years after its founding in the wake of a log-jam created by the cowardice of the Founders themselves in refusing to accept that what was good north of Mason and Dixon's line was also good south of it. That was the most atrocious and horrible failure of society in US history, and even then the claim that something good came out of it is an attempt to find a rose in a pile of bullshit, as that claim was more or less rendered invalid after the second President after the failure spent a decade trying to avert the deep waters that enclosed over that reform to deafening apathy. That failure was directly due to the cowardice of Washington's generation.

So if we are to take as Gospel truth in the 21st Century the writings of a bunch of landowning politicians from the 18th, who had no respect whatsoever for their own words in their own lifetimes, and who had an incorrigible cowardice when the right thing to do was demanded of them, then we have every obligation to respect the Founders' ideas as much as they respected their own ideas. The Founding Fathers were men, not the Apostolic Fathers of the Church.

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Why is it that everyone has all of a sudden devoted a significant fraction more of their time writing about what other people think? Isn't writing, as a form of communication, simply for telling people what you think?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Because writing about what other people think is easier than coming up with ideas of your own. Writing as a medium was originally used to ensure that accountants had the right tools, so I'd say that "yes, now it is." ;P

straw men

[russj.livejournal.com]

Because it is easier to argue against straw men then against what other people really think.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

"This journal is the collective property of the Superhuman Crew, a group of people that are aware how insane we sound to be saying this sort of thing....and really not that interested in criticism of our insanity. "

What is the point in discussing things with you?

Is your point that the constitution isn't a religious text?
Sounds good to me.


That the founding fathers were horrible people and we should gut the constitution?
Zzzzzzzz.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

My point is that we owe the Founders' ideas the same respect that they gave them. If they were free to disregard them, we are under no obligation to treat their ideas with more respect than they themselves gave them.

[ledzilla.livejournal.com]

Oh, but we are under an obligation, an obligation to do better. Otherwise words are just words. So far we fail too. Why did they have to make it so hard...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Rhetoric is always just words, you will almost never find people who will live up to it. If having a silver tongue is all it takes to do good things, then any damn fool who steals someone else's words without acknowledging it can do that. The way I look at it is that what people say means less than what they do.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Or for the more clear and positive statement-we defend the Constitution and rule of law in themselves, not because of what long-dead people said or did about them or failed to say or do about them. If the USA is rule of law and not of men, then "not of men" must include the men who set up the laws. Otherwise you get a cult, not a political system.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Otherwise you get a cult, not a political system.

Isn't that exactly what you are advocating?

Fuck the law it was written by a bunch of assholes anyway?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, I'm advocating a basis for respecting the Constitution that's not based on an abstraction that doesn't admit the Founders did *not* follow the laws they themselves designed. Rule of law is a principle, if we root that principle in real people then we can easily use the Founders to justify tyranny. If, however, the principle matters then it transcends them and is not required to focus on them.

The cult is that Washington and company were saintly Gods enlightening mortals with ideas that never failed and immune to human failings and perfectly following their own ideas.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

You better come out and say it the because all I've gotten from your responses thus far "is we need to respect the constitution in the same manner that the founding fathers did. which according to you is not at all.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

All right, I'll repeat myself-we owe the Rule of Law a higher standard as a higher law than what long-dead men did with it. The principle is beyond its inventors.

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Cut?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Done.

[404.livejournal.com]

People parse the Constitution out, word by word, because... words count? We have this thing called the judicial system, and the Supreme Court, whose job it is to read those tiny little words and punctuation, and make long term decisions from those insignificant little words on that piece of paper.

The founders were a product of their time. Ok, and?

Should we not deify them? Ok, but can't we appreciate the fact that given those men we have built a nation that has survived and thrived for hundred of years, or is it, as I guess you think, in spite of them.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Hundreds of years? No. 222 years. Their first attempt at a system failed rapidly, the second collapsed and had to be reconstructed and redefine itself. Their achievement was real, but we have no obligation to make them saints and gods when they themselves would not have done so. The Court has no direct mandate in the writings of the Founders for judicial review, that power came about because Jefferson buggered his patronage system.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

"The Founding Fathers made mistakes in implementing the Constitution they created for specific reasons, so we should feel free to make the same mistakes."

Or we can not make the same mistake twice. Also an option.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

More accurately they never intended to implement the Constitution they designed if it was their own ambition the Constitution would impede. Meaning the slavish devotion to the writings of the 18th Century flounders on the actions of the 18th Century.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Their writings contained principles that, if you're advocating principle over the person, should be given real weight as opposed to the men themselves who were, like all of us, fallible.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To an extent, yes. If the argument is rooted in the principle. If, however, the person writing them is invoked any mention of Jefferson's fondness for small government to justify budgets with enormous military budgets and gutting all social spending can be countered by Jefferson's destruction of the US Army and Navy both. Understand that I am only saying the Founders were human, and that treating them as prophets and infallible does them no service.

They were plenty human enough to disregard their own principles for convenience, so simply saying "X says so" cannot work unless we're talking theology, when God is the X and not humans. As the Founders are not in fact Gods or angels....

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Justice Scalia suggested recently that the founders wanted gridlock, and that it's not a bad thing; gridlock was written INTO the Constitution. But I find that odd for a country in the 21st century: consider the war powers section. In a nuclear age, when missiles are only 29 minutes from their silos in Russia, how would the President get a declaration of war from Congress, in the strictest sense and meaning of the War powers granted to the President.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

Show me the text where Scalia made that suggestion. I want to judge whether or not he's full of shit.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=8bbe59e76fc0b6747b22c32c9e014187

Go to the 37 minute mark.

[yahvah.livejournal.com]

I don't like his marginalization of the bill of rights, but what he said about gridlock is the separation of powers in the legislative and executive branches was designed as such to protect against faction. In that regard, his emphasis isn't without merit, but his marginalization of the bill of rights doesn't surprise me. In THAT regard, I can't stand him. I've read his opinions of the ninth amendment, and obviously he has no regard for natural rights, or else he'd have not stopped at the federalist papers, and he would've gone on to Madison's notes and speech on the bill of rights. I'm so damn tired of reading self-righteous judgment of the founders as if they had total control over the population and could get the perfect, equitable system with no problems whatsoever.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Saying they wanted gridlock is admitting they deliberately set out to fail. Why this is admirable is a good question.

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

There is a certain strand of politics in the United States that reveres the generation of George Washington as a group of slave owning demigods.

Fix'd.

Happy Birthday Underlankers

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

Re: Happy Birthday Underlankers

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I did not realize that it was both of your birthdays today. Happy birthday! The two of you are only 20 years apart in age.

Re: Happy Birthday Underlankers

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And a Happy Birthday to you as well. ^.^

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Benjamin Franklin

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

As a shining counter example to your claim that "All the Founders advocated genocide against Natives," I point to the inventor of the Franklin stove. His efforts to protect Natives from the Paxton Boyz shows an opposition to genocidal tendencies. Jefferson's policy of using liquor debt to obtain Native territory is rather abysmal, but definitely not genocidal. You bring up his acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, but that was foisted on him by Napoleon.

Getting back to Franklin, although he is held in high regard by the apostles of the Free Market, he had enough sense to not be suckered into repeating the mistakes of previous generations.

Re: Benjamin Franklin

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, every single one of them made comments that make Heinrich Himmler look like a member of the sunshines and rainbows Care-Bear brigade, while none of them objected to use of what would these days be called war crimes if Indians were subjected to them. The Founders also predated the totalitarians in masking their genocide and ethnic cleansing, the grinning skull of modernity, in the smiling face of legality.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Is there anything in particular you would say we need to amend in the Constitution?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, for a start creating recognized, legal procedures for political parties instead of a system designed for no parties would be a big help. I'd also update the procedure on how to declare war to involve both the Congress and the United States, and would retool some of the details in the election process (such as making gerrymandering illegal, though that'd be almost impossible to enforce in real life at least the principle would be there).