I generally don't hear it acknowledged in the conversatioms about these figures by people who criticize them. Anecdotally I don't hear it from some younger reltives of mine. It's just a feeling I get.
I don't know that it's not being taught but the attitude seems to be that a person who owned slaves shouldn't have their accomplishments and contributions acknowledged or that those contributions are taken for granted.
The disagreement is on one side of the argument, so it's not surprising that the other side isn't brought up in your casual conversations. Taking that to mean that kids aren't taught anymore that the founding fathers had positive qualities is a misjudgement of the situation on your end.
My younger relatives are early 20s so I'm not talking about children here and we're not having casual conversations.
A symptom of what I'm talking about about is the example I gave of George Washington. A great majority of the admiration I have for him is vested in his decision to relinquish power after two terms as President when many feel he could have gone on to be a life long President and how that set the precedence for the peaceful transfer of power. I've found that aspect of his character to be completely disregarded and taken for granted. It's not that they think owning slaves is a bigger negative than that positive, is that they don't even entertain that it's a point in his favor, like the peaceful transfer of power was a foregone conclusion.
I really do think that's an over correction. Some correction of his myth was definitely needed so I'm not saying this is completely wrong but I think the correction is more needed in the way we think of historical figures as good guys and bad guys instead of some mix of both, as we all are. Instead, the founding fathers seem to have just been moved from good guy to bad guy.
Now, I don't know what's actually being taught but I do see the result, which is all I'm speaking to.
I hope they are, but yet some large number of people who want to post stuff online are promulgating a ridiculous one-sided view. That the United States is essentially a slave state, and that all of the wealth was created on the backs of slavery, and thus all of that wealth should be given over.
The fact that this sort of dreck isn't widely debunked and ridiculed whenever it appears is kind of mind boggling. Yes, some very bad things happened. But by the same token, the founding fathers weren't B-movie villains doing bad things for the evulz!
> That the United States is essentially a slave state, and that all of the wealth was created on the backs of slavery
I mean, all of that is true.
Nobody thinks that the founding fathers were B movie villains, only that they were overwhelmingly a set of people looking to maintain and increase their power leveraging their ability to own people like cattle, and steal land from the people who were already here as an economic concentrate and multiplier.
Treating them as infallible gods who were uncompromisingly dedicated to the public good holds our country back from what it could be.
I'd recommend An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles A. Beard as a introduction into how the constitution was designed to reinforce the power structures holding up the people who wrote it.
For the US as a whole? No way! If it were true, the economic might of the South would have overwhelmed the North. The opposite was true. Slavery held the South back, economically. You've been fed some propaganda lies, there!
You can't even get slaves to reliably do high value-add work which requires attention to detail, even on pain of death. It turns out that to do this sustainably, you pay them bomuses. This was especially the case in the US South. Certainly the Germans found this out as well, in the 1940's. (Through failure, in that case.)
(Skeptical? Read yourself some books by distinguished African American economist Thomas Sowell, then get back to me. He used to be a Marxist, then became disillusioned and started debunking their lies and deceptions. Think about it, if slavery were some miraculous universal engine of productivity, wouldn't startups be doing it?)
Treating them as infallible gods who were uncompromisingly dedicated to the public good holds our country back from what it could be.
Sure. However, throwing out certain principles which make our society great will hold us back and throw us further backwards as well. Instead of being told the truth about how civics really works in the US, students are being propagandized against this.
Speaking as an Australian, I've always thought that the British were not actually that bad–at least in their treatment of those people whom the American founding fathers cared about.
Australians never had to fight for their freedom from the British, we were given it. In fact, the British Empire offered the self-governing dominions – of which Australia was one – effective independence in 1931 (by the Statute of Westminster), and it took Australia 11 years to actually accept that offer, which just goes to show how eager Australia was to be independent.
You read the US Declaration of Independence, and you'd think that life in Canada and Australia and New Zealand must be absolutely horrible, and yet the actual experience of that life is that it compares favourably overall to life in the US. You can point to some things those countries maybe do worse than the US does, but you can equally point to other things those countries arguably do better. (And a lot of that comparison comes down to personal value judgements about how much priority you put on various pros and cons.)
Some of the complaints in the US Declaration of Independence are really quite pathetic. They complained about cultural rights for French Canadians ("For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province" is complaining about the British allowing French Canadians to keep the French legal system, which they viewed as important in preserving their culture). They complained about the British government imposing limits on European settlement in Native American lands. Some of their examples of "tyranny" were arguably good things.
Of course, the British were bad, in a lot of ways – colonisation, slavery, genocide, theft of land from indigenous peoples – but can you really argue that in those ways the Americans turned out better? If you want to look at slavery in particular, the British Empire officially abolished slavery in 1833, it took the US another 32 years (and a terrible war) to reach the same outcome. I think it is likely that if the American Revolution had never happened (or had been a failure), the abolition of slavery would have reached the American South earlier. So was the American Revolution then really about freedom?
If Americans are finally realising that much of their national mythology is unbelievable, is that a bad thing? I wouldn't say that Australia has no national mythology, but I feel like it is a lot thinner than America's, and maybe that's not a bad thing? Maybe the thinning out of American national mythology is something to be welcomed?
Some of the complaints in the US Declaration of Independence are really quite pathetic.
Straw-manning. The important parts are in the US Constitution and comprise the important core principles, particularly the Bill of Rights. Australia is pretty decent, because Australia is pretty comparable in that regard. The rest is a boondoggle, and frankly not worth responding to.
Maybe the thinning out of American national mythology is something to be welcomed?
Not if it's a veiled attack on the principles. I'm not against lampooning the Founding Fathers. However, let's keep an accurate account of how they furthered certain universal principles. Let's not throw them away, and somehow declare the US is filth from top to bottom. It's clearly not. It's clearly got a lot going for it, just like Australia.
> The important parts are in the US Constitution and comprise the important core principles, particularly the Bill of Rights. Australia is pretty decent, because Australia is pretty comparable in that regard
Australia's constitution doesn't have a Bill of Rights.
And why focus on the Constitution over the Declaration? The Constitution wasn't even adopted until 7 years after the Revolutionary War was over.
> Not if it's a veiled attack on the principles.
Which principles?
In many cases, those who criticise America's founding fathers do so, not because they reject worthy principles, but because they see the contribution that those men made to those principles as being overstated.
Australia's constitution doesn't have a Bill of Rights.
Is this deliberate intellectual dishonesty? How is Australia not having a section named "Bill of Rights" even relevant? What's actually relevant once again are the human rights which are protected and how well they are protected. Those are the foundation: the principles.
And why focus on the Constitution over the Declaration?
Again, those are the foundation. Those are the core principles: rights enshrined in the constitution.
In many cases, those who criticise America's founding fathers do so, not because they reject worthy principles, but because they see the contribution that those men made to those principles as being overstated.
The Founding Fathers stated the principles. It's up to us, now, to live up to them, better and better. Unfairly attacking the Founding Fathers doesn't really further that. That's just fodder for propaganda, for those who have an axe to grind against the United States. Only a fair and rational reading of history will get us closer to the truth.
> Is this deliberate intellectual dishonesty? How is Australia not having a section named "Bill of Rights" even relevant. What's relevant once again are the human rights which are protected and how well they are protected. Those are the foundation: the principles.
It is a very common criticism of the Australian constitution that it lacks anything comparable to a "Bill of Rights". It is not just that it doesn't have a section by that title, it is that the content is largely missing. The Australian constitution is largely lacking protections for individual rights.
It is a very common criticism of the Australian constitution that it lacks anything comparable to a "Bill of Rights".
It's a very common criticism of the US Constitution, that there isn't a direct enshrinement of "innocent until proven guilty." Again, that's not what matters.
Do you, or do you not have rights as an Australian? Again, it's the principles in practice. If you answer yes, you've lost your argument. If you answer no, I should think you're lying.
Constitutionally entrenched rights are quite limited. There is the implied right of political communication, which is a lot less expansive than the US first amendment – it only covers political speech, non-political speech is not protected. Also, as the word "implied" specifies, it is not something explicit in the constitutional text, it is something the High Court has read into the constitution through its case law
There is a prohibition on establishment of religion or religious discrimination by the federal government (section 116). There is a right to jury trials in federal cases on indictment (section 80).
That's basically it, most of the provisions in the 2nd through 10th, and 13th through 15th amendments have no analogue in Australian constitutional law.
Constitutionally entrenched rights are quite limited.
A coworker of mine once referred to Australia as "that policed state." I guess that's why.
something the High Court has read into the constitution through its case law
Have you just given a complete accounting of that? Are you saying that no principles from the Magna Carta come down to you through Australia's legal heritage in the commonwealth?
Do you, or do you not have rights as an Australian? Do you, or do you not enjoy the benefits of rule of law? Do you have protected property rights? Can you reliably conduct business? Do you or do you not have rights?
You try and weasel out of this, with your use of the qualifiers "establishment" and "entrenched."
Well, if your position is that you don't actually have rights, that the government can take those things away from you on a whim, then you've lost your argument, because that, right there, is what is so great about the US Constitution. There are certain things the government is not allowed to do to us, which guarantees our freedom. Is it perfect? No, but it gives us a fighting chance.
On the other hand, if the case law basically amounts to your having rights, then your argument in the thread above also falls apart, because then Australia has the same things in principle that the US Constitution has.
So which is it? (Hey, I'll also accept a nuanced alternative between!)
I would feel sorry for you, if in principle, you do not have actual rights, and the government could play whatever games it wanted with you. That's basically the situation in China. (My wife is from Fujian, so I have a pretty nuanced view of the Chinese system.) And yeah, the US isn't perfect.
But here, we at least have a fighting chance. Just by existing in that state, the United States keeps the world as a whole from sliding further towards tyranny. IMHO.
(Another point of history: When Hitler took power in Weimar Germany, the Nazis already had most of the legal framework for totalitarian rule in the laws as written. As it was, all of the laws touching on human rights had an out for the government, in case of emergencies. I hope you Australians aren't in that situation. It's not as if we in the US are completely free from shenanigans like that, as the Korematsu ruling illustrates. Though some of the current justices have said they'd do something about it, if they got the chance.)
> Do you, or do you not have rights as an Australian?
It isn't a black-and-white thing "you have rights or you don't".
Constitutions serve several purposes – to lay out the basic structure of the national government (the executive, legislature, judiciary, etc); in a federation, to establish the division of powers between the federation and its constituents (states/provinces/etc); to establish procedures for amending the constitution; and to protect individual rights.
Different constitutions differ on how much they have to say about that last topic. Some constitutions say a lot, others little. The American constitution originally had little to say on that topic, but then the Bill of Rights and Reconstruction amendments added a lot. The Australian constitution is somewhere between the two: it has a bit more to say than the original (pre-Bill of Rights) US constitution had to say, but a lot less than the current US constitution has. Protection of individual rights is not an either-or, it is a matter of degrees, and the Australian constitution provides significantly less of a degree of it than the US constitution does.
It is however possible to have rights in practice without them being guaranteed constitutionally. In Australia, there is no constitutional right to freedom of non-political speech, but in practice the law allows a wide freedom for that–but not unlimited, and narrower than US law does. Part of it not being a constitutionally entrenched right, is that Parliament could change the law tomorrow to significantly narrow it, and one would have no recourse against such a law through the courts.
You seem to view constitutional law as being all about individual rights, when there is a lot of constitutional law which has nothing directly to do with that topic.
You seem to view constitutional law as being all about individual rights
No. I view the important parts as the individual rights. This is the reason why the United States wins: It guarantees individual rights. If Australia does that as well, then this is why it also wins. If it's just pretending, then it may not win in the long run.
> And why focus on the Constitution over the Declaration
Because the Constitution — in initial form, the second adopted plan of government — represents more than the freestanding propaganda of the DoI, but real experience-based thinking about how to balance principles in tension with each other in practical government.
I don't think the US Constitution is anything particularly special. I've never understood how some Americans seem to be in love with the document. Thankfully nobody feels that way about Australia's constitution.
Both constitutions contain racially discriminatory clauses, although in both cases they are either repealed, spent, or disregarded in practice. At least in Australia's case there is talk about removing the last of those. To fully remove those clauses from the US Constitution would require moving away from the "stick-amendments-on-the-end" model to actually changing the original text.
And that odd approach of sticking the amendments on the end instead of changing the actual text is probably one of the most distinctive aspects of the US constitution today. It achieves nothing except making the document harder to follow. Can you imagine how difficult it would be if other legislation was maintained in that fashion?
I think the decision in the US constitution to replace the Westminster parliamentary system with a presidential system was a step backward. Donald Trump is a good example of what a presidential system can lead to. Parliamentary systems like the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand avoid that because you can't become the leader of the country without a majority support from legislators, which makes it much harder for fringe/out-there characters like Trump (or Jair Bolsonaro).
It is nothing about being a monarchy vs a republic. You can have a parliamentary republic in which you have a non-political president appointing a political prime minister who commands support from a majority of the national legislature – that's exactly the system used in Ireland, Germany and Israel, among other countries. It is also what was proposed in the failed 1999 Australian republic referendum, and I'm sure eventually Australia will become a republic and it will be a parliamentary republic not a presidential one–the failure was largely due to a dispute about how to elect the President, but I think everyone wanted a non-political President appointing a Prime Minister, not an American-style political President–the dispute was just about whether to have that President elected by Parliament, as in Germany and Israel, or elected by the general public, as in Ireland.
(Israel did briefly experiment with something closer to the American system, in 1996–2003, with direct election of the PM, but the experiment was abandoned and is generally considered a failure.)
> Can you imagine how difficult it would be if other legislation was maintained in that fashion?
Pretty much all of it is.
But much (but not all) other adopted legislation in the US consists largely (but also often not entirely) in its raw form of English-language patch instructions for codified law like the US Code. So the legislation itself is added to the cumulative register, but then the main effect most people are aware of is a change to codified law. (Actually, that's true of Constitutional amendments to, but the diff is invariably in practice “the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified ...”; there's nothing stopping the diff from being more in edit form if desired.
But even though most of the text of most legislation is that way, there is lots of uncodified law, too.
(My understanding is that the UK still mostly does uncodified lawn though it does sometimes include specific amendments to earlier named acts in later ones.)
Honestly, though, on a document the size of the US Constitution, there's little impact (and given the original open-ended model, though newer amendments tend to be proposed with expiration dates for ratification that limit the potential problem, the diffing instruction approach would be problematic since the target of the alteration might be reorganized between proposal and ratification.
> I think the decision in the US constitution to replace the Westminster parliamentary system with a presidential system was a step backward.
The US Constitution didn't replace a Westminster-style parliamentary system with a presidential system; the system the US had under the Articles of Confederation wasn't a Westminster-style parliamentary system.
My point is that how the US Code and how the US Constitution are amended is fundamentally different: amendments passed to the US Code say things like "insert this section here", "delete this section", "replace this one with this one". And then the edits are applied, and the US Code is published with that edits applied. The amendments of the US Constitution aren't even made in the form of textual edits.
> My understanding is that the UK still mostly does uncodified law
Even though UK law largely isn't codified, they still mainly print Acts in consolidated form – repealed sections are omitted, amendments are incorporated into the text, etc. The main thing that stops it being a code is you have lots of acts on different topics listed alphabetically, whereas codification would imply merging all those into one big act (or a few big acts) with its contents being organised topically
> The US Constitution didn't replace a Westminster-style parliamentary system with a presidential system; the system the US had under the Articles of Confederation wasn't a Westminster-style parliamentary system.
Actually in a lot of ways the Articles of Confederation was closer to a Westminster style parliamentary system than the US Constitution is. The defining feature of a parliamentary system is the executive is practically subordinated to the legislature, rather than being an independent seat of political power. The Articles of Confederation had that – the national executive was quite limited in extent (there was a treasury, the army, navy, foreign affairs, and the postmaster-general) but it was wholly subordinate to Congress and had no independent seat of power.
Both constitutions contain racially discriminatory clauses, although in both cases they are either repealed, spent, or disregarded in practice. At least in Australia's case there is talk about removing the last of those. To fully remove those clauses from the US Constitution would require moving away from the "stick-amendments-on-the-end" model to actually changing the original text.
How does that even matter? That's like complaining that a log-structured file contains the old value. What, are you going to complain that blockchains have old transactions in them? This is the same false propaganda-logic people use to justify destroying statues.
Log-structured filesystems and blockchains have technical benefits for certain applications.
What are the technical benefits of the "stick-the-amendments-on-the-end" model used by the US constitution, as opposed to the "change-the-original-text" model used by most other contemporary constitutions (including even many US state constitutions)? I can't see any.
> What are the technical benefits of the "stick-the-amendments-on-the-end" model used by the US constitution, as opposed to the "change-the-original-text" model used by most other contemporary constitutions (including even many US state constitutions)?
The technical benefit is that the the multistage amendment process, with long ratification windows (originally typically unlimited, though 7 years is typical now; normal legislation, including most state Consitutional amendments, have much shorter windows because even if they are multistage it's usually a second vote of the same legislature or a single ratification vote of the people), creates a greater risk for crossing amendments with unintended consequences. Simply stating the final effect has less possibility of unintended consequences.
I don't think that would be a big issue in practice. Most amendments address different subject matter and so would be unlikely to produce a "merge conflict".
And in practice all amendments are proposed by Congress, and Congress always knows what amendments are already pending, and should be able to foresee any potential "merge conflicts" and address them. You can always use conditional patch instructions: "Replace section A with B; however, if amendment C has entered into force before this amendment, instead replace section A with D". There are other tricks too, like one proposed amendment inserts section 29A and the next inserts section 29B, and maybe if the first one never gets ratified but the second one does you end up with a section 29B without there ever being a section 29A.
(Technically there is a process where a convention proposes amendments independently of Congress – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendmen... – but it has never been used, and who knows if it ever will be. Anyway, the same point applies to such a convention – it knows what amendments are already pending so it can write its proposed amendments to include solutions to any merge conflicts)
I think the real explanation – the US constitution is really old, a late 18th century document, before a lot of the contemporary English-language culture around maintaining legislation had developed. And now it is the way it is, and nobody wants to change it. But if they started again tomorrow it is unlikely they'd organise the amendments in the same way. And a lot of US state constitutions are newer, and they are maintained in the more usual manner precisely because they were adopted after the usual manner was invented.
Sorry, but you're the one making claims of effect. I'm taking the position that it's a triviality, so the burden of proof is on you. What are the disadvantages? As I've already predicted, one option is that you're going to come out with some symbolic/propaganda woo.
What really matters is who protects human rights better, and who is better at the rule of law and individual freedom. From what I can see, and from what you yourself have said above, there's not that much difference.
Again, it's the principles that matter. The principles in action, more specifically.
I've already said – it makes the document harder to follow and harder to understand. I don't see how that's a mere triviality. The ability of citizens to understand the law is a valuable thing, and especially when dealing with the most foundational law of a legal system, its constitution.
> The principles in action, more specifically.
Principles and their application matter, but form matters too. I'd agree that principles and their application are more important than form, but form still matters. Imagine you had a constitution with the best possible principles and the best possible application of those principles, but the text itself was significantly harder to understand than it could be – changing the text to make it easier to understand would make that constitution even better.
I've already said – it makes the document harder to follow and harder to understand. I don't see how that's a mere triviality. The ability of citizens to understand the law is a valuable thing, and especially when dealing with the most foundational law of a legal system, its constitution.
AFAIK, this circumstance has no significant effects of this kind. Still, the burden of proof is on you, and all you've provided is an opinion.
Principles and their application matter, but form matters too.
Woo.
It's better, in my opinion, that people know the messy history and can see it in the law. This way, they can know the nuanced history of how we all got to the present day. Otherwise, dishonest "activists" might try to sell young people some B-movie version of history.
You've fallen into the trap. You just admitted that your "effect" is not any kind of proof, just an opinion. On the other hand, my opinion has no material effect on my position that your points are trivial, woo, and the bandying about of opinion. That was kind of the point, of my using the word opinion.
