Reading different texts, essays, books, magazine articles that discuss the virtuosity of the American ‘Founders’ is always an interesting and challenging psychological endeavor. The Declaration had many signers but Ben Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and Thomas Jefferson composed the five-man drafting committee. John Adams and Roger Sherman never owned slaves. The other three were either current or former slave masters. By now, those incessantly elevating the Founders to sainthood know that those they speak of with holy reverence were themselves enslavers.
I believe they overcome this contradiction in the same way that so-called progressive social groups and organizations manage to, while promoting governmental and institutional diversity and equality have little if any actual diversity within their organizations not to speak of their personal lives, a sphere over which they have complete control and thus no excuse.
But I was discussing the Founders. There is a new book out. Political libertarians and others harboring similar delusions of the grandeur of the Founders will love it. It is called What Would the Founders Do? The book is full of facts explaining the origins of much of the thought that eventually came to be the basis of law and individual rights in the United States of America. Also in the book are facts detailing the slave trading history of the Founders. Like most libertarians, and their (almost always white) ideological hangers on in both the Democratic and Republican political parties, the author, Richard Brookhiser’s mind, is impervious to the contradiction of owning a slave and the simultaneous promotion of equal rights for all men. Not to mention the glaring discrepancy over the question of women’s rights. The question! The question being, would they be allowed rights; for instance, the right to vote? There are so many points from which to examine the contradictions, hypocrisies and outright lies about what America is and who the Founders were that it is difficult to know where to start and from there in what direction to travel.
I find most urgent and interesting the dilemma of how the historical lies intersect with present day white American identity. The lie regarding the nature of America’s ‘Founding Fathers’ directly influences the actions of today’s politically progressive whites as it allows them something they apparently desperately need. An out. An acceptable prism through which to imagine themselves that is at once, popular and painless. And actually, self-congratulatory.
Instead of analyzing a culture that history teaches us has been rotten from the start, the lie allows those who need it, to imagine the Founders as radical visionaries of freedom and equality, and themselves as political descendants of the Founders. And this is in part, why you’ll often hear otherwise clear thinking self-identifying leftists wax nostalgia about the Founders. They need this lie. To tell the truth about the Founders would be to pull back the curtain on their collective version of history, it would be to tell the truth about this country and more importantly but perhaps less obvious, about themselves.
