America’s Original Sin: Hypocrisy in Slavery

I know I’m not white supremacist, so I don’t usually pay attention to someone calling me that. What others say about me is meaningless unless it hits home. I was trying to address the underlying sentiment that white supremacy persists today, and the vehement response I received blew my mind. I agree that the inherent white supremacy that was present at the founding of the nation was its undoing. I disagree that it persists today.

Some have even tried to insist that white supremacy is inherently Christian. The attack is astoundingly absurd. I think those are false equivalencies that many try to disparage all things they dislike with terms they know the vast majority dislike. It is a rhetorical tool.

The fact that they subconsciously understand that the label will pack a punch is almost proof enough that the idea doesn’t persist. Calling someone a white supremacist 200 years ago might have received a nod and a look of curiosity as if no other idea belonged. Today it doesn’t.

That is real progress, and yet now I am to believe that Christians, who largely led the abolition movements around the world, including in the United States, are somehow to blame for the problem in the first place?

Reiterating, the rhetorical tool of calling things white supremacist only works when the majority understand that as a pejorative, and it starts to lose is effect when millions are mistakenly characterized that way and begin to ignore those throwing the term around. The same goes for racist, misogynist, xenophobe, and others. They are unhelpful terms which do not even begin to describe the vast majority they attempt to label.

They are used by those who hold influencing power over the left. They are intended to dehumanize their political opposition. When I see someone who is otherwise intelligent, well=traveled and wise adopting those terms, it bothers me.

Do they honestly think there is some abiding racial supremacy as an undercurrent in our society that explains all bad things? Are they willing to consider that there could be many nuanced and subjective issues and experiences that trouble everyone individually? Perhaps that politically charging every issue can create resentment and radicalize people into camps they only associate with for some perceived protection?

I think it goes without saying that the right’s reactionary politics to the left’s continued identity politics is going to wreak havoc. Some may be good, but the majority of it will not be. The left will blame the right, but pretend that none of their own supported policies and agendas had anything to do with it.

Claiming ignorance does not absolve them of guilt.

With that said, it is the right’s ignorance which set them up for this. There has been an underlying problem in our nation from the moment of its inception. When the founding documents outlines the way to individual freedom and clearly set boundaries against the government, it left a glaring error which allowed for the document to be undermined en route to the largest and most intrusive government the world has ever known.

Slavery.

How could a document set to make all men free, ignore an entire minority who lived in the least free conditions among those already within the borders?

I don’t mean to disparage the founding fathers. They were men of their time, and the founding documents did outline one of the greatest experiments in freedom that the world has ever known. Some of them were even quoted as understanding that the existence of slavery could not persist if the nation was to remain free.

That means they were also savants.

When a conservative tries to quote the constitution as if it is a bulwark against the state, they have to rationalize the entire federal apparatus. As Lysander Spooner put it, probably poorly paraphrased, it either authorized the government we have, or was powerless to stop it. I agree with him that it has not stood the test of time. The question is…why?

All men might have been created equal, but the document didn’t treat them that way. Freedom may be the best way to exist in society, but freedom didn’t actually apply to all.

When conservatives cite those founding fathers, they often invoke hatred from the left because of this glaring oversight. It isn’t that the documents were wrong, but that they were insufficient. Further, it is absurd to assess the past by the standards of today, but it is equally absurd to remain naive of the resentment born from hundreds of years of oppression.

That single oversight led to the splitting of the nation on a very important issue. Lincoln eventually spearheaded the war over an ideological split, and prevailed in preserving the Union, but at what cost?

In order to achieve that victory, almost every tenet a constitutionalist pretends is valuable was usurped, undermined, or outright ignored in pursuit of the federal goals. The groundwork was laid for the entire framework of the constitution to be eroded for all Americans. It is not that the slaves were made equal to free men, but that slowly, all free men have been made equal to slaves.

In reality, conservatives have given up what they hold most dearly, because they were unwilling to pay attention to the very real plight of those who were ignored at the founding of this nation, no matter the rationale.

Now we live in times where simply voting for a guy who says some inappropriate things somehow makes you equal to a white supremacist. Since conservatives have long abandoned anything resembling an intellectual pursuit, they are entirely incapable of controlling the tragic reactions that will arise from within their ranks. Those same conservatives will correctly blame the left for their own violent movements, like BLM and Antifa, as the reason for the reaction, and they will lay the guilt at the foot of the establishment academics and bureaucracies for ignoring the right for so many years in America.

Those conservatives will be correct.

They will also have failed to recognize that their own unprincipled stance on anything in the last century has made the left’s spiral and their own partisan reactions possible.

What kind of small government conservative could actually support any president spending like Trump, or even Bush for that matter? What kind of constitutionalist stood quietly by while numerous wars were being fought, without the only mechanism for legally fighting them ever having taken place (congressional declaration).

If they had an intellectual principle at all, they would have looked like Ron Paul. Instead, we get this weird moulage of garbage, death, big government and a shredded constitution on the working room floor.

America was founded on the element of freedom and that made it the greatest nation in the world. The fault was not in freedom. What will ultimately cause the undoing of the greatest nation in the world is that it didn’t take freedom far enough, fast enough, or seriously enough.

It may not be too late, but as voices like mine are being slowly cancelled and pushed off into dark corners of the internet, the chances are looking very bleak.

I intend to do everything I can to save it. My sons deserve a chance in a better world. That world won’t be spoon fed to anyone. It won’t be foisted on anyone. It simply cannot come from a top down approach. It has to be organic from the bottom up. Conservatives, in principle, would all be libertarians. Most of them would be Agorists. Now, eventually I’ll probably write my own peaceful resistance manifesto, but in the meantime Konkin’s “New Libertarian Menifesto,” will have to suffice.

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