"...Views like Matthews'--and his citations show how many contemporary academic historians are pushing them--cannot form the basis for renewing our allegiance to the United States. They are parallel, in a bizarre way, to the views of the southern slaveholders in 1861 who said that they had to rewrite the American Constitution to make sure that it protected slavery anywhere within the new Confederacy. They, like he, were arguing that because that document (as they understood, better than he) did not reflect their values on this issue, it deserved no respect. For those of us who believe that the American tradition, however flawed, still provides the only way forward for our diverse nation, this is frightening. And it is all the more frightening because it represents a trend among the Left, which, so far, is definitely the losing side in the present crisis. Like the white Southerners in the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Left today is not moving towards more centrist positions to broaden its appeal. It is doubling down on identity politics and the rejection of American traditions, just as they did on white supremacy...." DK
Matthews' views, it seems to me, are much more similar to the radical abolitionists' views, on the very far left actually, whose position Lincoln ultimately represented, than to Southern white slaveholders who were on what passed for a right back then here.
It was a view (abolitionism) of the utopian and counterfactual letter of the constitution, "we hold these truths...", without an accompanying sense of its actual, cultural, and practical meaning, not to say also its long and confused philosophical history and implications, to the framers.
The only way to honestly use the constitution, to uphold or to criticize it, or to criticize or affirm those who either oppose or venerate it, is to see it within the fractured but traditional Western Civilization worldview of its framers, and to see it as founding document no less than harsh radical polemic.
Professor Kaiser is unwilling for what I guess are a variety of reason, and Matthews is unable, to do that.
The only way to honestly use the constitution, to uphold or to criticize it, or to criticize or affirm those who either oppose or venerate it, is to see it within the fractured but traditional Western Civilization worldview of its framers, and to see it as founding document no less than harsh radical polemic.
Professor Kaiser is unwilling for what I guess are a variety of reason, and Matthews is unable, to do that.
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