October 16, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Myth of Equality, Racism, and the Destruction of the Republic

Friends,

Recently, I had a discussion with an old high school classmate about the essential nature of the American Founding, whether or not our republic was created based on the bandied-about idea, the proposition, that “all men are created equal.” My classmate insisted that our Founders and Framers established a nation with the enunciated principle and goal that everyone should have full equal rights and that our 231 year history is an unfolding chronology of the ongoing battle for those “equal rights” promised in our Founding documents. Like many other Americans, my friend cited most particularly the famous words about “equality” from the Declaration of Independence.

The real problem is this: if what my friend declares is what the Founders and Framers intended and understood when they used those words, why don’t we read about it and see it being implemented or at least attempted, over the first eighty years and during the administrations of the first fifteen presidents of the American republic—several of whom had been intimately involved in the very creation of our republic? Indeed, the overwhelming evidence—taken from letters, broadsides and diaries of the period—indicates the contrary. Those words and that invocation were not meant to be a clarion call or to set up some “proposition nation.” That is, the American republic was not created based on the “idea of equality”—far from it.

As I have cited previously, fuller textual and contextual analyses by such scholars as Colgate University Professor, Professor Barry Shain, in his exhaustive study, The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations & Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congress, and the late Dr. Mel Bradford, in his closely-argued, Original Intentions, demonstrates that the American republic was created and seen as a confederation of independent states, each with its laws, traditions, customs and institutions.  

Certain very limited and specified powers and authority were granted to the new central government by the states, with additional protections against potential future Federal government overreach contained in the first ten amendments—The Bill of Rights—to the Constitution; indeed, North Carolina and Rhode Island were very hesitant to associate with the new confederation without those more explicit protections. And several of the new states entering the Union specifically retained the right, with language included in their entry documents, of withdrawal—secession—should that Union seriously violate the agreed-upon understandings.

The overriding and major concern for the former thirteen colonies—the primary object—was the protection of their own rights and authority within the new union, and it was only in that framework they believed that “liberty,” or, rather, “liberties,” could be adequately protected.

Each of those former colonies had been established and created by immigrants from the Old World, largely families and communities migrating together in waves, looking for new and cheaper lands where they could farm, practice a trade, and raise their children, and taking with them the beliefs and traditions inherited from their ancestors. Certainly, there were those like the Pilgrims of Massachusetts who brought with them a religious conception of a “shining city on a hill” or a “commonwealth of the Saints,” but the vast majority of the settlers came not to create an egalitarian Utopia on earth, but a better and “more perfect” continuation—but still a continuation—of the traditions and beliefs they held and had carried with them.

Just the other day VDare.com writer, James Fulford, came across an interesting article by the late Dr. Laurence Auster. Auster’s essay was written just prior to all the recent controversy over Confederate symbols and monuments, and Fulford cites him to the effect that, “if Confederate symbols are taken down, then logically all other symbols and monuments to nearly all historical American figures must come down, as well.” In short, if the criterion for taking down monuments, changing names and erasing “hurtful” symbols in the American past is the individual’s acceptance, even tacitly, of slavery, or the acceptance, even tacitly, of that giant ideological bugaboo, “racism,” then all other symbols, monuments, memorials, titles, whatever, connected to “racism” (and thus to identified “racists”) must also be purged—Columbus, Woodrow Wilson, the Franciscan missionaries in the Southwest, and so on, ad infinitum. They all are connected, they all are racist.

I still have to wonder why more “mainstream” politicians, who at least seemed to be rational only a few years ago, cannot understand this slippery slope. Has the cultural Marxist infection of our society, politics, and culture progressed so profoundly and become so established as normative that they cannot see what is occurring?  How can they justify joining the hysterical chorus of ideological zealots who advocate taking down and removing not just one set of monuments, but, essentially, nearly all monuments and symbols of American history and the past of the American republic, which are now identified by the cultural Marxists as stained with the ineradicable social sin of “racism”?

The answer, I suggest, lies with the belief, so forcefully imposed on us by our educational system and drummed into our thinking by our entertainment industry and by our politicians, that we are a nation, a propositional nation, based in and established on the myth that “all men are created equal,” with equal rights. And, most importantly, that striving for universalized equality involves a continuous struggle against any and all barriers and impediments to its realization. It is that template precisely that has been seized upon and artfully employed by cultural Marxism during the past half century or so to effect the present, seemingly overwhelming campaign to denude the nation not just of those symbols that somehow speak against the egalitarian myth, but as well to uproot the very traditions and beliefs that those monument and symbols represent.

Here (below) is a portion of Fulford’s short essay. I invite you to check out the links. His listing of the first fifteen American presidents—all of whom are accused of being at least tolerant of slavery  and thus “racists”—should cause any proponent of the Egalitarian Myth to reconsider his arguments—but, alas, it probably won’t, as facts have little meaning or relevance to the PC “social justice warriors” and their politician camp followers.

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

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http://www.vdare.com/posts/laurence-auster-on-the-confederate-flag-etc-liberals-will-only-be-satisfied-when-historic-america-has-been-eliminated

…as far as I know, every President during the period of slavery has been attacked as racist. Here, from the website African-Americans & the Presidency, is a list of all the Presidents up Abraham Lincoln. Sample headline–William Henry Harrison, who only lived nine days in office before dying of a fever: The Brief Reign of a Pro-Slavery Whig.

·          President George Washington

·          President John Adams

·          President Thomas Jefferson

·          President James Madison

·          President James Monroe

·          President John Quincy Adams

·          President Andrew Jackson

·          President Martin Van Buren

·          President William Henry Harrison

·          President John Tyler

·          President James Polk

·          President Zachary Taylor

·          President Millard Fillmore

·          President Franklin Pierce

·          President James Buchanan

Of course, Washington, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have all come in for a lot of hate recently, but so, as Auster suggested, has the American flag, the United States Constitution, and National Anthem.