Another Reactionary’s Flawed Framing of American Ideals

In Did we ever believe in the American Revolution’s ideals?, Michael Leroy Oberg, Professor of History at the State University of New York, College at Geneseo, argues,

I no longer look to the Revolution for the ideals I want to see realized. The Founders left me little to celebrate, other than a flawed framework for government that has, despite its defects, endured for more than two centuries. For millions of people around the globe — Native Americans, Africans and African-Americans, those on the receiving end of American empire — the American Revolution unleashed a force that has done far more evil than good. Perhaps someday we will live in a society where all people are truly equal. Perhaps, and on the other hand, alongside our proclamations of liberty and justice for all, our racism and our violence, and our exploitation, erasure, and injustice, we are closer to the Founders, warts and all, than we care to admit.

But can the “racism and our violence, and our exploitation, erasure, and injustice” really be laid at the feet of “liberty and justice for all?” Here is an expanded version of some comments I posted to the article:

The trick to repudiating American ideals is to point to all of the ways that they were not lived up to, and then repudiate the ideals rather than the scoundrels who betrayed them. Why not point to the way we did? Like women's suffrage, ending Jim Crow and legalized segregation, marriage equality, free speech and, above all, the abolition of slavery—the Declaration’s finest hour? Like that the Founders gave us the intellectual ammunition against slavery even though many entered the Revolutionary period themselves owning slaves, thus opting for the “greater good” over their own personal curcumstances? That’s heroic. *

Posting ideals is a start. The hard work is convincing people, one mind at a time, of their rightness. That’s a long hard slog. Despite many owning slaves, the Founders signed on to the most anti-slave ideals ever formulated. 

The rejection of American Ideals has a much more sinister purpose than merely smearing Americanism. A counter-revolution against America goes back to the Founding. It involves first radically reinterpreting America from liberty to democratic—putting democracy before liberty, freedom, equality, effectively nullifying the last three. Second, reframing equality, replacing the freedom and justice of political equality with the tyranny of economic equality.

Why? The Founding ideals are the bane of tyranny of all stripes. Theocracy, absolute monarchy, and all forms of socialisms right up to today’s democratic variety cannot get a foothold against the ideals of inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, earned property, and the pursuit of happiness. Those ideals must be repudiated for tyranny to take hold. 

American ideals are Enlightenment ideals. The fight for those ideals started before the American Revolution and continued afterward, from the fight against slavery to the fight against the “new” Democratic Socialists. All Oberg’s analysis shows is that the fight is not over. America’s ideals are the antidote to tribalism, racism, conquest and plunder, slavery, and other injustices. If there are people who still don’t share fully in the promise of liberty, freedom, equality, and republican democracy, the Declaration’s ideals are the solution, not the problem. The people who most need what the Founding Fathers created are precisely the groups that got screwed the most, including African-Americans and Native Americans, because groups are made of individuals and you can’t protect groups without securing individual rights. I embrace the ideals of American Revolution. I’m a radical champion of them. I will fight to my last breath against the reactionaries. Don’t let the counter-revolutionaries take away inalienable individual rights and limited rights-protecting government, whoever they may be—socialists, theocrats, democrats. The alternative is tyranny.

As Harvey Milk, one of the early leaders in the “Gay Pride” fight for equal rights for gays, said at a 1978 speech,

In the Declaration of Independence it is written 'All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights . . . .' That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.

And neither can Professor Oberg.

There is a lot to challenge here. But I want to specifically address these comments by Oberg:

I live now on land taken through fraudulent transactions by the state of New York from the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Iroquois Longhouse. . . . And [President Trump] wastes no opportunity to rub the noses of native peoples in the fact that what was once theirs belongs to them no longer. 

I submit that describing North America as “once theirs” is a blatantly racist premise--and hypocritical. A race can’t own a continent, to the exclusion of other peoples. The hypocrisy comes in when in the same paragraph Oberg damns Trump for his anti-immigrant stance. You can’t have it both ways. Either America is a nation where people of all backgrounds can come and live in peaceful coexistence, their inalienable rights protected, or it isn’t. If it is, then white people of European descent should be just as welcome without being labeled “white supremacists.”

* [I put greater good in scare quotes because there is no greater good than an individual human life. By putting their ideals above their actions even though they are contradictory, the Founders acted incredibly selfishly and in accordance with their sacred honor.]

Related Reading:

On Liberty vs. Democracy: My Comment on a Great QUORA Answer

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence—Onkar Ghate

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty – Timothy Sandefur

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?--Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

“I Have a Dream”: Martin Luther King Urges Consistency to Founding Principles