That is not the way it works.

I have been kind of out on a limb with some comments I have made recently about the framers of the US Constitution.  I do not see them as moral exemplars.  I do not see them as good guys at all.

I have been trying to tell people who are, like me, quite concerned over the possibility of a return of Donald Trump to the White House, that it is not actually the case that his candidacy represents a departure from what this country is all about.  On the contrary, the policies of Mr. Trump and the Republican party represent a return to the principles this country was founded on, and those are not good principles!

Here is what I mean.  Take the general trends of the current Republican party:

• Not wanting to have democracy.
• Limiting women's rights.
• Allowing child labor.
• Making it more difficult for people of color to vote.  And allowing legislatures to racially gerrymander legislative districts so that the influence of voters of color are diluted.

All of that (and more if I thought long enough) are an actual return to the principles this country was founded on.

• Slavery was permitted,
• For congressional apportionment slaves were 3/5 human, and indigenous persons were not counted at all.
• It took 131 years from the ratification of the Constitution for women to get the right to vote, 76 years to end slavery, and 176 years to guarantee the vote for people of color.
• Only white, property owning males could vote.  (My wife pointed out that with that one you get a trifecta of racial, gender, and economic injustice.)
• The protections of the bill of rights did not apply to everyone.  I mean, people of color were not given the right to bear arms originally.
• They created a system where the president could lose the popular vote and still win.  That was not about fear that the illiterate and crude would prevail.  It was about one thing--RACE.  The 3/5 compromise gave us a possibility of a president who did not win the popular vote because of fear that white men would not get their way.

Funny thing but if you buy into the idea that the electoral college was designed to protect us from the "unfit, unstable, and unhinged," (to quote Nikki Haley,) the reality is every time we have had a president who has lost the popular vote they turned out to be unfit and ended up doing a very poor job.  So no matter what you think about why the electoral college was created, it has done the country nothing but harm.

All of this (and again, more if I think about it) tracks right along with what conservatives are doing now.  The Dobbs decision which overturned Roe v. Wade, is the first time I am aware of that a constitutional right got taken away.  The sweep of American history has been the expansion  of rights, not only in terms of what they were, but who they applied to.  Right now, the agenda seems to be the contraction of rights.

My view of the history of this country is that people have worked hard to correct its moral defects.  Not enough has been done.  But there have been good faith efforts to expand liberty.  Now we are in the throes of a concerted effort to take liberty away from people, and I think if it went the way conservatives want, we will end up with the 2020s looking like the 1790s.

People do not like it when I write about this.  People tell me, "You have to judge them by the standards, the morality of their time."  My position is we cannot do that, we cannot afford to do that, for the following reasons.

1.  Morality never changes.  Understandings or perceptions of morality may change.  But morality itself does not.  I spent a couple of decades teaching ethics students that there is a difference between perceived morality and actual morality.  I will return to this below.

When we properly look at morality, the best principles which we have to delineate it do not change.  It was New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow who helped me understand this. He suggested we cannot judge the framers of the Constitution by the morality of the time because every person they oppressed was created in the image of God as much as they were. 

2. You cannot judge them by the moral standards of their time because once you do that, everyone gets a pass.  Rachel Maddow suggested in her book Prequel, that Adolph Hitler said when asked where he got his ideas about white supremacy that he was largely influenced by the framers of the US Constitution.  He said that his actions and attitudes toward the Jews were the same as the American fathers' actions and attitudes toward slaves and indigenous peoples.  American historian David Stannard says 100 million indigenous people died as the westward expansion of the United States occurred.  That is like 16 holocausts!

I do not think you can judge Thomas Jefferson by the morality of his time and not offer the same grace to Adolph Hitler.  I think if it is OK for the American founders you have to, in order to be consistent, give a pass to Josef Stalin as well, who killed 6-9 million people.

3.  You cannot judge them by the morality of their time, because, if you do that, you are arguing that things which were at one time morally right, later, somehow, become morally wrong.  What changed that slavery was morally acceptable in 1789 but then it was unacceptable in 1865?  The problem of when a behavior crosses the line, the exact same behavior, from morally acceptable to morally unacceptable, seems to me to be an almost impossible question to answer.

4.  If you judge them by the morality of the time, it seems to me that a logical consequence of that is endorsing what they did, even if the endorsement is only tacit.  People have suggested that it took time for all of this to develop, as I said above, 76 years, 131 years, 176 years.  I do not see how one can accept that without saying there is some legitimate, yet inexplicable reason why white men deserved to go to the front of the line and get their rights first.  Saying this took time reinforces the notion that what they did to women, slaves, and indigenous peoples was appropriate.  If that is the case, why change anything?  If it took 76 years, 131 years, and 176 years to change things that they had the option of changing from day one, that is not a good commentary.  And suggesting we needed slavery for a time, as Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton did recently, because that built up the country's economic power, amounts to saying it is OK to deny people's rights to help rich people make even more money.

I am not saying let's tear the whole thing up and start over.  That might be necessary, I do not know.  I am saying there is this national mythology that the framers of the constitution were good guys and some sober honesty about that might be helpful.  Even progressives want to buy into the national mythology and venerate the framers of the Constitution.  I am just saying I do not want to venerate them at all.