Lincoln: Why the Founders Didn't Abolish Slavery at the Outset

From the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man, he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this Government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our Constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more; and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard. (Emphasis added)

Thus when The Atlantic titles an article Slavery Made America, it is at best a misleading half-truth. When the series of articles of which this is a part give no voice whatever to Lincoln's dissenting opinion, that influential publication breaks journalistic faith with the American public. When The Atlantic insinuates that the Founders were morally compromised hypocrites (see the opening portion of The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff), it slanders courageous, principled leaders to whom it, and we, owe much.

The Opinions in this Article are those of the Author and Do Not Necessarily Reflect the Opinion of The Atlantic or Its Staff

Earlier this year The Atlantic published the following assertion:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. ...

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

The article does not contain the kind of caveat expressed by the title of this post. The Atlantic editors do not caution that the above opinions are not necessarily their own, or those of the magazine. Yet Wikipedia currently asserts:

The Atlantic is an American magazine, founded in 1857 as The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts, now based in Washington, D.C. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine and quickly achieved a national reputation as a high-quality review with a moderate worldview—a reputation it has maintained for over 150 years. (Emphasis added)

For American citizens there could be no greater attack on the principles of liberty, justice, and equality than the above passage. What is celebrated while "scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July" are the noble principles which this country proclaimed to the world on that date. What is celebrated is the greatest document in the history of liberal democratic government, the Declaration of Independence.

The author proceeds by innuendo and insinuation. He does not openly state that the principles of equality, liberty, and freedom from tyranny are negated by his litany of American sins. Instead, he casts cowardly aspersion on public-spiritedness, "integrationists," and democratic dispositions, if not on the very idea of principled action itself. How could the editors of The Atlantic be comfortable with this?

The very first post on this weblog, The Liberal Founding, contained a response to a similar critique of American principles by none other than the President.* The response began:

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world. - Historian Fritz Stern, refugee from Hitler Germany

Dr. Stern and a number of other signatories continued:

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists.

The author given platform by The Atlantic's hapless editors found it necessary to trash the Declaration (and by implication the Constitution) in order to construct an argument for "reparations." Be not afraid. This American Scripture** continues to have "the respect of much of the world ... [because] Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless."

A closing note concerning language and propositional assent. The author of this article in The Atlantic is apparently summering in France (or not: "Je vais retourner en aout."). Question: Does "white guilt" apply to the French? Certainly, if there is something uniquely evil about white folks that causes them, alone, to commit slavery, then it applies equally to the French, the Afghans, the Iranians, and so on around the world.

The problem is that attributing unique evil to a given race is classic racism. If this is what The Atlantic's editors meant when they published an unexplained reference to "white guilt," they have, according to standards articulated by Atlantic contributor James Fallows(***), violated the principles of responsible journalism. Fallows recently observed, concerning another article:

I’m sure that fakery has occurred. But the claim that it has is as serious as they come in journalism. It goes at our ultimate source of self-respect. As when saying that a doctor is deliberately misdiagnosing patients, that a pilot is drunk in the cockpit, that a lifeguard is purposely letting people drown, you might be right, but you had better be very, very sure before making the claim.

As when tossing out an unqualified reference to "white guilt."

In How to Think Straight: An Introduction to Critical Reasoning, Anthony Flew cited the Marquis de Vauvenargues:

“Obscurity is the kingdom of error” and “For the philosopher clarity is a matter of good faith.”

The Atlantic article claims that "white supremacy" is "fundamental" to America, and insinuates that principled Americans such as Fritz Stern are wrong in their faith that it is "freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen" which established the nation and continue to shape it. The article's mishmash logic and language of innuendo and false equivalence further this unprincipled objective. Thus do the media, today, "undermine American democracy."


(*) The post erroneously refers to then presidential candidate George H. W. Bush rather than Reagan. 

(**) Pauline Meyer's book, American Scripture, about the Declaration. "The spreading ideas of natural rights and individual liberty distinctively altered politics, economy and society."

(***) Fallows is the author of Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy.

Did You Feel Guilty When You Celebrated the Fourth This Year?

No. You didn't. And the guy who conducted the "Reparations" faux civil rights campaign, in the pages of The Atlantic, is summering in Paris.

In The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates announces: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Coates' "White Supremacy" / "Reparations" series of articles appeared to be in the great call-for-renewal tradition of the suffragists and of Martin Luther King's campaign to end Jim Crow. Au contraire. It was civil rights theater. Civil rights spectacle. Designed to increase the circulation of The Atlantic, and to solidify Ta-Nehisi Coates' standing as a premiere print-media commentator.

Americans got it. They humored him. They watched his puff-ball televised "interview" with Jeffrey Goldberg. They responded in the hundreds to the comment site set up by The Atlantic. And they had the grand hot dogs, baked beans, cherry-bomb-detonating Fourth they usually do.

And that's a good thing. There's much to be said for the wised-up, ironic response to egregious dastardy. Very little that is good, constructive, and bettering about "this good free country of ours," escaped the wide swath of destruction, wreaked by Mr. Coates' campaign to seek justice for the "crime that implicates the entire American people."

This is how Coates, by implication, invalidates his nation's inspiring founding:

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

By contrast, Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

One of the great glories of being human is that the good men do lives after them, while the evil is oft interred with their bones.* Lincoln was stirred by the poetry of the Founding; Coates is deaf to it. All he sees is the Founders' personal flaws. Our wisdom literature is profound when it says, "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest; ... if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."

That is how you get a better world. That is why I am glad we Americans went right ahead and celebrated the Fourth, even though Ta-Nehisi Coates said we shouldn't.

And to what purpose Coates' reckless act of destruction? By his logic we would be hypocrites to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.**

"Ben," one of the commenters, noted:

The article's prognosis doesn't follow from its diagnosis. Given that ... African-Americans were systematically denied economic participation and security, and that that oppression continues to happen in ever-changing forms in the present day, the solution is: . . . a national dialogue? About coming to grips with America's past? So we don't have "a la carte patriotism" anymore?

No. What is needed to combat what the article documents is for African-Americans to meaningfully participate in the day-to-day political economic life of the US. But that would require an analysis of political dynamics and economic institutions which the article is completely silent on. What forms of economic organization for African-American workers that would allow capital accumulation without having to go through multi-national institutions that are racist and, in any case, constructed to steal as much as possible from the non-elite? What kinds of political behavior, both inside and outside the electoral system, would be most likely to get that system to change in favor of more equitable treatment?

Calling for a national dialogue and an honest accounting with America's past, with George Washington the slave owner, is not about answering the above questions. It is treating cancer with prayer.

I suspect Coates knows this. And I don't want my hunch on why he didn't publish that article to be true.

From a previous post:

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them." (Emphasis added)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations series bore little resemblance to our nation's civil rights campaigns. It was more like trolling.

America, your ironic response to someone who threw "white guilt" in your face was wise and good. May you still be able to recognize, and honor, a real civil rights campaign when one appears.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. - Proverbs 29:18


(*) Apologies for egregious misquote of Shakespeare. - Act 3, Scene ii, "Julius Caesar"

(**) Wikipedia mentions: "A tape recording of several of [Martin Luther] King's extramarital liaisons, excerpted from FBI wiretaps . . ."

An Open Letter to James Fallows

Mr. Fallows:

You recently wrote:

The real importance of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Reparations article, which is still attracting deserved attention, is that it is not mainly about repayment in a literal, financial sense. Instead, as I understand it, it’s about a larger historical reckoning or awareness. “Truth and reconciliation,” you might call it.

In other words, the value is the moral case—that America has not, as you imply in the following paragraph, "attempted to face its past." But what Coates means by asking Americans to recognize the implications of their history rejects Lincoln's view, which is that that history is of a nation "conceived in liberty." In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." His discussion of the case for reparations asserts (contra Lincoln, as we shall see below) wasn't just an inescapable historical circumstance which existed at the founding, and alleges "white guilt":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

In the guise of historical reckoning—as if we didn't know that many of the Founders had slaves—Coates asserts that this fact invalidates the principles Lincoln praised:

Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

Coates, by contrast, seems to believe that this is hypocrisy:

The Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. (Emphasis added)

This is well-known invalid inference. To believe that the character of the person—in this case, the Founders—presenting the argument invalidates the argument (as when Hitler dismissed Relativity as "Jewish science") is classic ad hominem.

This is an example of the first way in which Coates' reparations articles constitute terrible journalism: Argument by fallacy.

A second is numerous passages so convoluted that they demonstrate no conceivable point. They "work" for Coates because his readers, for the most part, seem to accept his insistence that they support one of his themes, such as that "Slavery Made America". An example from that article:

The first 200 pages or so [of James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom] show that the War was about not only the perpetuation of "African slavery," but its expansion. McPherson quotes directly from the mouths of secessionists who have no problem laying out bondage as their primary casus belli. McPherson shows the essential place enslavement held in the economy of the South and in America at large. Thus the conflagration that follows does not appear out of thin air. ...
Conservatively speaking, 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War, two percent of the American population at the time. Twenty percent of all Southern white men of military age died in the War. Until Vietnam, more people had died in the Civil War than all other American wars combined. An interest which compelled that amount of death and suffering must be something more than vague disagreement over a "way of life." (Emphasis added)

Coates' implied conclusion—that the above passage shows that the tragic Civil War body count reveals that "America at large" wanted the "perpetuation" and "expansion" of African slavery—is crackpot.

He doesn't reject Lincoln's explicit statement, in the Second Inaugural Address, that America entered the war to prevent the expansion of slavery:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

He ignores it. (This weblog has documented other instances in which Coates ignores Lincoln's arguments here and here.)

This is the third (and final, for today) example of Coates' flawed journalism: Untrustworthy evidence.

In The Case for Reparations Coates documents criminal exclusion of African Americans from middle class home ownership in Chicago:

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

Coates draws two sweeping generalizations from this. One, which we'll discuss below, is that this applies nationwide. There aren't more liberal areas where middle class blacks live in middle class homes in middle class communities (responsible journalism would call for this to be supported by the various independent nationwide surveys which exist). Coates' evidence, as he published it, is anecdotal.

The other global generalization, which Coates bases on the above flawed evidence, is that adopting middle class values and middle class behavior would have no benefit:

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: “Too many men making too many babies they don’t want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children.” Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: “Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.”) The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance. (Emphasis added)

Coates offers no support whatever for his absolute assertion that better behavior will never bring a better outcome. He just says it.

As for the previous item, a claimed nationwide racist housing policy, one of Coates' "arguments" was:

What are the roots of our housing policy? White supremacy. What are the roots of white supremacy in America? Justification for enslavement.

Argument by extreme. Jonathan Chait was likewise perplexed by this characteristic tendency to pick one extreme or another, denying the middle, where things usually lie: "I was clarifying that Obama (and Bill Cosby) see the culture of poverty as a part of the problem of poverty, as opposed to its entirety, as Ryan sees it, and also opposed to zero percent of the problem, as Coates sees it."

Does anecdotal evidence refute anecdotal evidence? No, but one falsifying example refutes a claimed universal. At a meeting in Salem, the state capital of Oregon, the speaker, a civil rights activist from the East, asked the audience where black people lived in their town. The audience was puzzled. Finally someone said, "No particular place. They live everywhere, like the rest of us." The speaker, surprised, paused, then said, "Keep them there."

Free Speech in a Nation Conceived in Liberty

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a Massachusetts law requiring a 35-foot buffer between abortion protesters and those entering an abortion clinic violated the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. Time Magazine reported:

The court objected to the notion of buffer zones in part because such broad perimeters “burden more speech than necessary” by excluding “petitioners” (“not just protesters”) from public sidewalks, streets, and other public thoroughfares, “places that have traditionally been open for speech ac­tivities and that the Court has accordingly labeled ‘traditional public fora.’”
Buffers zones deprive petitioners “of their two primary methods of com­municating with arriving patients: close, personal conversations and distribution of literature. Those forms of expression have historically been closely associated with the transmission of ideas,” the court wrote.

But the nation which enjoys a formal right of freedom of speech was also "conceived in liberty," and liberty means freedom from coercion if it means anything at all.

The Court slighted the unalienable right of those seeking a particular form of lawful medical care to do so without harassment. Dahlia Lithwick:

Right now, the commentary is pretty predictably split between those who believe that the rights of “peaceful sidewalk counselors” were vindicated, and those who believe those counselors are actually pro-life bullies. The court opts for the gentle counseling characterization, without acknowledging that it was the extreme conduct of the latter group that led to passage of the law, and that, realistically, in the absence of the buffer zone, both types of protesters will be greatly emboldened. I guess from here on in, you won’t know whether you are being intimidated or “gently counseled” until after it’s happened. (Emphasis added)

I have another objection to the way the Court thinks on this issue. Freedom of speech is the right to get the message out. To publish it. It does not include the right to make somebody listen. There's a guy who stands on a corner downtown proclaiming that the city police are communists. I avoid him. It's a free country.

Speech works by the substantiveness of its evidence and the cogency of its argument. Liberty works by the right to be left alone unless one is breaking the law. As On Liberty argues (about page 3), liberty is not only political freedom, it is freedom from "social tyranny.": 

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

Those who oppose abortion have gotten their message out in every conceivable way and made every argument available to their case over the decades since abortion ceased to be illegal.

It is appalling that the Court thinks they also have the right to get up in the face of people who already bear the burden of a painful decision.

Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates' "White Guilt" vs Liberalism and the Unencumbered Self

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." Continuing to harp on blame, his discussion of the case for reparations alleges "white guilt":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates "logic." If membership in a constructed group is ascribed to a person, that person is responsible for what that group did in the past. Another example:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

It is true that scripture (in some places) supports this "reckless dispensation of guilt"*, which blames descendants for a situation which they had no part in bringing about:

Exodus 34:6-7 - And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, [7] Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, ... that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.  (Emphasis added)

But as has been said earlier in these articles, this sort of illiberal thinking belongs to a reactionary interpretation** of religion (Instead, says Ezekiel below, I will judge you ... every one according to his ways), not to public or political reform.

The first post in this weblog asserted that America was founded on liberal principles. According to Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, one of the meanings of "liberty," and a principle of liberalism, is "the unencumbered self.":

I REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels "the unencumbered self." The unencumbered self is free and independent, "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself," Sandel writes. "Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice . . ." (Emphasis added)

Sandel, arguing for collectivism instead of autonomy, continues: The unencumbered self reflects a deracinated liberalism that "cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize" — "obligations of solidarity, religious duties, and other moral ties that may claim us for reasons unrelated to a choice," which are "indispensable aspects of our moral and political experience."

For reasons unrelated to a choice. This is the antithesis of the free American spirit, with its characteristic lack of servility.

Kennedy argues that Sandel's theme (which essentially parallels Coates' theme) promotes "identity" at the expense of the liberty of the single person:

Sandel's objection to those who, like me, seek the unencumbered self is that they fail to appreciate loyalties and responsibilities that should be accorded moral force partly because they influence our identity, such that living by these attachments "is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are -- as members of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic." (Emphasis added)

Curiously, such particularist arguments for "identity" resemble Hegel's line of reasoning in support of German nationalism:

The self-consciousness of one particular Nation is the vehicle for the ... development of the collective spirit; ... in it, the Spirit of the Time invests its Will.  Against this Will, other national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World.

Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

Coates, by contrast, seems to believe that this is hypocrisy:

The Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. (Emphasis added)

The skidding logic of this passage is prime Coates-think. Somehow, what the South wanted in the 1860s (and the North sacrificed its sons to oppose) becomes what the Founders really intended (and Lincoln's disagreement is so trivial that it need not even be mentioned, much less refuted).

Jonathan Chait was likewise perplexed by this characteristic tendency to pick one extreme or another, denying the middle, where things usually lie: "I was clarifying that Obama (and Bill Cosby) see the culture of poverty as a part of the problem of poverty, as opposed to its entirety, as Ryan sees it, and also opposed to zero percent of the problem, as Coates sees it."


The Harsh Illiberalism of The Case for Reparations:

Fritz Stern explained the title of his The Failure of Illiberalism:

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

Coates, in his unsupported, sweeping, use of such terms as "responsibility," "crime," and "guilt," exemplifies the illiberal mindset, which is "not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others." Such bad writing, when making a case for reparations, was a fatal error.


/************************************************/

(*)Frederick C. Crews, Follies of the Wise, quoted in Tikkun, 1994

(**)Eze 18:25ff:

Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not fair. ... Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.
Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. ... Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. ... Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?
For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.

Reparations: Americans Still Don't Recognize Attacks on Liberal Values Phrased as Left Ideology

Political articles in the United States are generally written from the perspective of the left, or of conservatism, or of liberalism. Left and conservative are belief systems or ideologies; that is, positions are often held because of values other than truth or correspondence-to-reality (such as conventional wisdom, orthodoxy, or political correctness). Liberalism, our earlier article The Liberal Founding posits, is an information system, somewhat in the model of its immediate predecessor, the scientific revolution of the latter half of the Seventeenth Century.

A defining characteristic of left thought is its groupy outlook. Politics is a matter of an oppressed group, seen as virtuous; and an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil. Thus what any given left attempts to do is to battle, punish, or eliminate an evil group. The Marxism-Leninism of the late Soviet Union, having complete control, exiled, imprisoned, or executed virtually the entire middle class in its territory within a few years of the revolution. Similarly, Maoist communism, in a bloodbath, eliminated the Chinese middle class.

This personalistic approach contrasts with the methodology of modern liberal societies, which seek to build good institutions, enact good laws, secure the civil liberties of the citizen, and discover policies which advance the public good.

From earlier post Liberal, Left:

1. The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
2. The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
3. The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
4. This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
5. “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
6. In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group. 
7. This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
8. The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
9. This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
10. The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.    

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations is in many ways a classic example of anti-liberal, anti middle class left argument. The preceding article describes the groupy quality (3) of Coates' thinking:

An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)

There is also the simplistic thinking of (6) above, which attributes to everyone considered to be a member of the oppressor group the supposed characteristics of the group:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Coates gives us an example of the left theme, "an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates appears to be more interested in punishing the guilty (7) than in constructive reform:

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. [J. D. Vance]: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

In a 2008 autopsy of the last campaign for reparations (roughly fifteen years ago), Walter Olson wrote:

To the extent the reparations movement had used its brief time on stage to encourage national introspection, Americans had reached a different conclusion from the one that the activists had hoped for—a rough consensus, in fact, that whatever the right approach to the nation’s perennial problem of race relations might be, ventures into anger-mongering and random expropriation weren’t it. (Emphasis added)

The final problem with Coates' modeling his argument on left ideology is that it is in the nature of ideology to be misleading or flat-out wrong, because ideology inherently rejects feedback from reality. Daphne Patai once said, "The whole point of being an ideologue is that new information doesn't disturb your worldview." In Coates' "white supremacy"/reparations articles there is a characteristic mixture of ad hominem, false equivalency, fallacies of distribution, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and vagueness:

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable . . .

It appears that Coates' articles concerning "white supremacy" and reparations are meant to appear to be in the great tradition of American reform, like Martin Luther King's successful civil rights campaign. But as noted in these posts, Coates' language is strikingly different from that of MLK and other reformers. Liberal campaigns appeal to "the better angels of our nature." Coates, victim of the left theme of incorrigible evil groups, can't pull that off. "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory."

(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’

What Will Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations Articles Accomplish?

The realities of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations are beginning to sink in.

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable and would take an inquiry into reparations spearheaded by someone with Conyers’ politics as seriously as Coates would take a tea party investigation into Benghazi.

Coates repeatedly fails to make the argument for reparations. Vance:

After considering the victims of predatory lending (people who, by the way, later won a lawsuit), Coates notes that of all the recently vacant houses in Baltimore, 71 percent are in majority-black neighborhoods. The implication here is that banks unfairly targeted black people for foreclosure. Baltimore is 63 percent black, though. So this is largely demographics, not racism, at work. Coates again scores an emotional point. But if his goal is to show America owes reparations, then barely disproportionate vacancy statistics and a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit by black homeowners don’t support his argument.

Coates fails to clarify what reparations would accomplish, or show how a reparations policy would be workable. Antle again:

When it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

/**************************************************/

The people of a country ought to fight to defend their laws as they would fight for their city's walls. - Heraclitus

There is another, more fundamental problem. Two types of Europeans came to America and settled there: The idealists and the adventurers. A previous post, The Liberal Founding, argues that the idealists were the ones who “transformed the world.” Coates doesn't seem to understand either the idealists or their principles. In Black Pathology Crowdsourced, he quotes a passage from Yoni Applebaum to the effect that the principles and values of a street subculture are equivalent to the principles and values of the American idea:

Culture of Poverty is a label attached to a wide array of behaviors. There are behaviors—physical assertiveness—well-suited to that environment that may tend to inhibit success elsewhere.

The problem is that such a culture is dysfunctional, not that civil society frowns on it. Where "physical assertiveness" prevails, the young and strong push everybody else around. Women, children, the elderly and the disabled are marginalized. Because social capital requires an atmosphere of cooperation and trust—so that people can work together—social capital itself never develops. "Physical assertiveness" is a major cause of poverty, but Coates clearly appears not to understand this. He thinks that when his fellow citizens celebrate the American Revolution on the Fourth of July, it is about national chauvinism (or as he sometimes calls it, "white supremacy"). Thus, in The Case for Reparations, Coates asserts: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Martin Luther King appealed to the principles of American ideals when he said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" Coates dismisses the principles and rejects the idea that his fellow citizens might be deeply moved by the thought of liberty and equality and justice. To Coates this is just hypocritical, "denying the facts of our heritage." 

An earlier post argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress."

If the mind behind "The Case for Reparations" is one which cannot be moved by ideals which have inspired the rest of the world, that may be a cause, more for pity, than exasperation.