when history is inconvenient, rewrite it
By Liberal Librarian
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Yes, the slaves were eventually freed because, according to DeMint’s conflation of history, it was in the Constitution that “all men are created equal and have inalienable rights”. They were also freed due to the efforts of William Wilberforce, noted English anti-slavery campaigner, who just happened to die in 1833, thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation and the `13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. Government had no role in the freeing of the slaves. It was all people power!
But, wait, why did we need amendments to the Constitution if the freedom of slaves was in it from the start? Because, of course, nothing of the kind was in the Constitution. Slavery was allowed to continue, and the slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of the census. I’m sure they were very glad to know that not only were they not full human beings under the Constitution, but that even that diminution of their humanity allowed slave states to have an outsized influence in Congress, since those slaves counted towards apportionment of House seats.
But human beings are funny creatures. When faced with new facts—and thus having to change their thought processes to conform to new information—many people instead choose to continue in their previous belief systems; to do so, however, they have to twist existing knowledge into such baroque shapes to give themselves comfort that any outsider is at a loss as to how to respond to such obvious idiocy.
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Yes, the Democratic Party, at least its southern franchise, was the party of racism and Jim Crow. Until, after much work, it wasn’t. The inconvenient truth which the modern GOP wishes to gloss over is the fact that after civil rights for African-Americans became a major plank of the Democratic Party, those southern Democrats began defecting in droves to the Republicans. At first, they kept on voting Democratic locally while giving more and more of their votes to the GOP nationally. But, by the 1980s, even that pretense was gone, and whole swathes of the South turned Republican for the first time since the 1870s, when freed slaves for a brief shining moment held political power.
Yes, Jackie Robinson was Republican. Until he wasn’t. Until he saw that the Party of Lincoln was turning into the Party of Thurmond.
And, about Lincoln. If seances were real and one could commune with the dead, what would Abe think of the party he propelled onto the national stage?
Read More: http://theobamadiary.com/2014/04/10/when-history-is-inconvenient-rewrite-it/
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