Trump has a path to victory. He will defend against "Cancel Culture."
The left risks overplaying its hand.
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| Statue of George Washington, Portland, Oregon |
However, this time it is coming from the left. "Censoriousness," they said, "is spreading widely in our culture." It is:
"an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought." Click: Harpers Magazine
Americans are rethinking race and justice. The George Floyd video was a shock and wakeup.Trump's 2016 playbook was to get Americans fighting about race and to frighten Americans with visions of caravans of foreign outsiders: murderers, rapists, drug mules, job stealers, terrorists. That is working less well this year. Polls show Americans are put off by Trump's divisiveness.
Democrats may fail to notice that Trump at Mt. Rushmore posited a new villain, one more dangerous than the laborer from Mexico. It is Democrats themselves, the intolerant, contemptuous left..
Trump described the new left as creating a dystopia of intolerance. They hate you and your values, he said. They don't respect your heritage and they want to corrupt your children. The proof: they want to tear down monuments to people you respect.
Democrats may want to dismiss this as ridiculous. Surely no one truly believes Democrats--Biden, especially--wants to tear down monuments to George Washington. It is no more silly than caravans of people at the border, or Obama's birth certificate. Trump understands television and symbols. Images like the one above are easy to understand. Trump calls that "Joe Biden's world."
Democrats may fail to notice that Trump at Mt. Rushmore posited a new villain, one more dangerous than the laborer from Mexico. It is Democrats themselves, the intolerant, contemptuous left..
Trump described the new left as creating a dystopia of intolerance. They hate you and your values, he said. They don't respect your heritage and they want to corrupt your children. The proof: they want to tear down monuments to people you respect.
Democrats may want to dismiss this as ridiculous. Surely no one truly believes Democrats--Biden, especially--wants to tear down monuments to George Washington. It is no more silly than caravans of people at the border, or Obama's birth certificate. Trump understands television and symbols. Images like the one above are easy to understand. Trump calls that "Joe Biden's world."
Today's guest post describes what the history professors of my youth cited as an easy, morally pleasing temptation to understand the past as an imperfect version of the present. They warned that we are not smarter than the people we study. My professors did not use the word "presentism" but Michael Trigoboff does, in the context of what to do about monuments to people with histories we now call "complicated." Michael Trigoboff teaches Computer Science at Portland Community College after a long career in the software industry.
Guest post by Michael Trigoboff
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| Trigoboff |
It is fashionable these days to judge people of the past by our current moral standards. This practice has a name: presentism. Presentism is endemic in our country at the moment.
Some political activists on the left look at Americans who owned slaves, then judge and “cancel” them. Some statues are torn down and defaced. Thomas Jefferson is a target. George Washington is a target. Even Abraham Lincoln is a target.
Yes, America participated in the slave trade, but so did many other places in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil was a major participant, as were many islands in the Caribbean. Slavery was a way of life for many regions and cultures. Where did the slave traders buy the slaves that they transported across the Atlantic and sold? Africans captured and sold those people to the slave traders. There was an African slave trade centuries before Europeans ever knew about the existence of the Western Hemisphere.
The practitioners of this current wave of presentism are applying standards to Americans that they do not apply to anyone else. This is totally unfair to the founders of our country, who were no worse than people anywhere else at that time. The New York Times' egregiously erroneous 1619 Project is a prime example of this faulty reasoning.
Moral standards evolve. As regards slavery, our founders were embedded in the culture of their time. Yet those same people were at the forefront of other innovations in political thought, innovations that led to the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Faulting them for not totally living up to standards they had just created ignores and dishonors the genius involved in that act of creation. Even at the time, they were aware of their contradictions, and the Constitution is full of the awkward compromises that attempted to navigate those contradictions.
Our founders deserve to be judged in context, by the standards of their time. The country they created has had the mechanisms within it to move towards a fuller realization of the principles articulated in The Declaration.
Someday in the future, moral standards will have evolved further, and we in the present will be found to not have lived up to those new standards, which we have no way of knowing about or understanding. That will be as unfair to us as some of us are currently being towards the founders of this country.
Presentism allows people the glorious feeling of moral superiority. See how good we are!
Someday people will look at them and wonder how they could be so debased.
6 comments:
While Michael Trigoboff's article rightly pinpoints the dangers of applying today's morality to the early happenings in our nation he also includes a few conclusions that are misleading. The founders of our nation knew full well the immorality of slavery but could not possibly have induced the southern states to join in a union if slavery were abolished from the get-go.Someone and to pick the cotton and tote that bale! One particular statement he rashly included, and I quote, "The country they created has had the mechanisms within it to move toward a fuller realization of the principles articulated in the declaration." One has to wonder if Mr.Trigoboff "mechanisms" that would enable our nation to "arrive at a fuller realization" was a bloody Civil War, still rated near the top for pure savagery and mortality totals. (And a war that still rages, fueling bigotry and hatred in our nation) He also mentions that other nations at the time were also engaged in the practice of slavery, such paradigms as Brazil for instance, and several Caribbean based nations. I submit that all of these nations today would several stars on Trump's list of xxxxholes of the world. Though I agree that there is danger in equating many of today's standards to the time of our nation's birth, slavery, which had been pretty much abolished all over the world some forty to hundred and fifty years earlier, is a stain on our national honor, especially in that when Vermont was briefly a sovereign nation, it was banned as early as 1776. While I agree with many of Michael Trigoboff's assertions, some of his exculpatory premise is specious,
Bob Warren
Bob - Thanks to you, my vocabulary has grown, having had to look up "exculpatory" and "specious" :-)
You two saved me a lot of time writing a response to yesterday's post since you both covered a lot of the same territory. Cultural and historical context seems to be as important as it is misunderstood.
Somewhat off-topic but related: Many years ago I toured one of the infamous "Slave Castles" on the coast of Ghana, where for hundreds of years, slave ships loaded their human cargo headed for America. Standing where they were held and walking the gauntlet where they walked was almost physically sickening. The entire supply chain required an unfathomable level of complicity across nations and people-groups. Africans capturing and selling Africans, until the sellers became the sold. Even as the Ghanaian guide dispassionately told the story - there was no sense of judgement or moral reprehension. They were just facts. Of course he was not a product of slavery and was not oppressed by its history. Perspective is everything.
Bob,
I think that the underlying basis for our disagreement lies in our different attitudes towards this country. I love this country, flaws and all. Your attitude towards this country seems significantly more negative than that.
We are of course, in this free country, both entitled to our different attitudes.
In my weekly column for the Ashland Daily Tidings, I more than once made the point that, a century from now (if human civilization survives global warming), the current widespread acceptance of war and the public honoring of those who engage in it will seem as morally benighted as the acceptance of slavery does to us. And we need to be careful about exempting historical figures from moral taint. Bob Warren cites Vermont's praiseworthy outlawing of slavery in 1776. But if the moral litmus test we apply were not racial justice but gender justice, those good Vermonters would fall short along with all the other males of their time. Women didn't begin to get treated as equals in this country until the last century.
That said, we shouldn't exonerate wholesale any more than we should condemn wholesale. Almost all of us are a mixed bag morally, and people then as now lie on a spectrum of moral sensitivity and moral responsibility. Let us eschew moral self-righteousness and with some humility use our discriminating intelligence.
The fact that slavery, among all races, including indentured servitude, has existed for thousands of years doesn't excuse man's inhumanity to man. As the Leonard Cohen song proclaims "Old Black Joe is still pickin' cotton/For your ribbons and bows/Everybody knows. Wage slavery and its current form, prison labor, (still protected by the constitution's 13th amendment) all continue to this day.
Ultimately, racism has little to do with "race" per say. It has to do with the subjugation of a vulnerable population with easily identifiable physical characteristics (for African Americans, skin tone) for the purposes of predatory capitalist exploitation. Racism is thus a "tool," a concept invented to justify exploitation for financial gain.
"When myth dominates, disaster descends" (Chris Hedges). Trump's Mr. Rushmore speech was a saccharine, sentimental and nostalgic look at an America that never was. There is something quite sweet, childlike and naive about the simplicity of Trump's base. Would they only realize that there are those who would use the myth of America, against their own best interests. That myth, as Sheldon Wolin has described is a belief that "their own nation is privileged by a god who inspired the Founding Fathers and the writing of the nation's constitution; and that a class structure of great and stubborn inequalities does not exist. The irony of the backdrop
of Mount Rushmore should not escape us: the faces of our most important presidents carved into a mountain named after a lawyer sent out to check gold mining claims for wealthy investors.
Andy Seles
Recommend this podcast, exactly on target. Mr Warren, you should listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-brain/id1028908750?i=1000480225284
I have an actual monetary bet on this election, but “cancel culture” is the only thing that could *possibly* lose it for me.
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