Fundamental problems with the thinking of Karl Marx

“Ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.” - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

Animals, Harari argues, can only talk about things you can point to. “No animal,” goes an old saying, “can say, ‘My parents were poor but honest.’” Animals are natural materialists.

1. Marx’s Dialectical Materialism is founded on his Labor Theory of Value. Only the physical things made by the hands of workers have value, and only the laboring proletariat should get the money in our society. (As a businessman remarked, this ignores management, distribution and marketing.) The bourgeoisie and their fictional capitalist corporations are robbing workers of the value produced by their hands.

On the one hand Marx is reactionary, his objection to “capital” (Das Kapital) a reversion to medieval prohibitions on “usury.” On the other, Marx is engaging in the fundamentalist oversimplification of valorizing the “materialism” of limiting thought to those things you can point to.

A digression: In 2012 I bought an iPad 3. It couldn’t perform the videophone function of FaceTime. Before long, a free software update from Apple enhanced the usefulness of my purchase. According to Marx, the hundreds I paid for my iPad should have gone to the workers at Foxconn who made it. In reality, which has an antiMarxist bias, without the thousands of hours of design, the iPad would just have been a paperweight. Ditto for the additional thousands of hours for iOS, the software (FaceTime, etc.) which enables Personal Electronic Devices to actually do things. Add software development and design to “management, distribution, and marketing.”

2. So, based on the fallacy of The Labor Theory of Value, what is the place of everybody else — the bourgeoisie, the middle class — in the Workers’ Paradise Marx envisioned?

There isn’t any. Marxism is eliminationist. Marx’s abstract theory, in real life, implies Ethnic Cleansing. In any case where someone not a laborer has the good things of life, it’s unjustified “privilege.”(1)

Moreover, political democracy is about all the people. Civil rights is about all the people.

Marxism’s unrelenting bias against everyone except the One Favored Class — its class warfare aspect — means that Marxism is essentially discriminatory in its very nature.

It is no accident that no Marxist regime has ever been democratic; or that Marxist regimes, with respect to civil rights, have consistently been autocratic. The late Soviet Union; North Korea; Maoist China, the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).

Marx’s thought was in its very nature arbitrary and bigoted. In the founding of societies its emergent property was autocracy.

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(1) In my experience, no one will listen to criticism of “Check your privilege,” even though “privilege” arguments are concealed Marxism.

Epistle to the Christians

 First, a little background. When I was four my father began college on a pre-sem track. Seven years later he was ordained a Protestant minister and began his life career as a pastor. My comments on Christianity are from the status of a PK (Preacher’s Kid).

I’m a secular student and follower of Yeshua. Because he lived in the Hellenistic Near East of the first century, the world knows Yeshua by the koine Greek form of his name, Jesus. The Hellenistic town Sepphoris was less than an hour’s walk from Jesus’ boyhood home, Nazareth. Jesus grew up and lived out his life in the concept-rich environment of the Roman Empire. (I’ve already used a number of Graeco-Roman terms - comment, status, concept, Christianity.) His crucifixion was formally authorized by a colonial Roman overseer.

Jesus belonged to a third-world African culture and spoke a third-world language related to Arabic, but the entirety of the scriptural writings about him were in one of the languages of his European overlords, the koine Greek of the first century. For example, the word Christ was no more a word in Jesus’ language than Caudillo is in ours.

Jesus’ culture was no more likely to wonder if a person who had a mother and father, and siblings, was divine than ours is. His monotheistic religion, Judaism, had a built-in antipathy to adding another god, however that might be done. The Europeans did impute divinity - it was claimed that Emperor Caesar Augustus was divine, for example.

So Jesus’ alternative name, Christ, and the “Christian” doctrine of his divinity, came from the European overlords of Palestine who wrote his story and wrought Christian theology, creating an organized religion as Judaism, Islam, etc., have their organized religions.

/******/

My epistle to the Christians objects to organized Christianity, on the grounds that it is intellectually unsupportable; is reactionary in a world of democracy and civil rights; and is unChristian in major beliefs, particularly rejecting Yeshua’s teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good in favor of a jealous God, a God of wrath who is angry, punitive, and vindictive.

1. Christians’ intellectual problems begin with the oxymoron “literal interpretation,” failing to understand that their scripture is one of the longest, most complex texts in existence. Such a text can’t have a single literal transparent meaning. Jesus himself reinterpreted the fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy,” saying “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

One viable approach to the scriptures is that it is the felicitous outcome of a Semitic tribe, related to the Phoenicians who invented our alphabet, deciding to become the people of the book. They wrote down the best of their thought. Then, for centuries, public intellectuals they called prophets looked at where their predecessors had been - and raised the consciousness of their culture. “Write the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that it may be read readily”, wrote Habakkuk. “The vision will come - Wait for it, it will not be late.”

2. There is no democracy, no leaders chosen by the people and responsible to them, in the Tanakh, the Israelite scriptures Christians call the Old Testament. Much of it presents God in the autocratic terms of the kings, shahs, rajahs and emperors of the time, demanding fear, unquestioning obedience, and fawning worship of sinful human beings. Sometimes sin is presented as a violation of the rights of God.

Christian theology presents humans’ capacity for sin as exceeding humans’ capacity to make amends. That theology portrays us as inheriting the original sin of Adam, and as such, born guilty.(1) Under this outlook, salvation is an unreturnable favor, coming from God, and putting humankind permanently in the one-down position relative to him.

This is unhealthy; and the founder of “Christianity” disagreed with it in the parable of the prodigal son. Raised on the estate of his wealthy father, this son obtains his inheritance in cash, goes to a city, and blows it all on an extravagant lifestyle, becoming a beggar. Then, Jesus said, “He came to himself.” He returns to his father’s estate, hoping that there he will be better than a beggar, and to his surprise, his father welcomes him with open arms and prepares a feast.

Frankly, this upends Christian doctrine. There is no sin, but rather correctable error. The son, representing fallible humankind, does correct the error by his own action, able to recognize his mistake, and change the course of his life. In doctrine, there would be “salvation” — sin, rescue by a Power to whom one would be in debt, and at best forgiveness. Interestingly here the father, representing God, is focused on the joyful future with his returned son, not the past, thus does not need to forgive. No sin; no salvation; no lingering taint implying ongoing subservience.

3. Doctrine is “unChristian”: Rejects the founder of Christianity’s” teaching that God is kind, generous, loving, and good, and other important teachings.

I once asked a Christian teacher why God is often portrayed as dominating, demanding, punishing those who disobey him in fearsome ways. They said, “God is so great that he gets to do whatever he wants to do.” Again, Jesus of Nazareth disagreed, saying, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, … know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

God’s greatness, it is implied, requires him to be better than we are.

It seems to me that organized Christianity has never bothered to explore the implication of their term, God the father who is even better than earthly fathers. In this context, language should change: “Lord” is inappropriate, and “every knee should bow,” and even “worship,” if applied to the creator rather than the creation. On the other hand “Jesus wept,” which according to theology would betoken an incidence of a Weeping God, is well worth pondering. At my grandson’s christening a priest cited a Concerned God passage from Ezekiel, which I paraphrase from memory: You say that I am unfair. But I am not pleased by the death of him that dieth. Wherefore turn ye from the way of death to the way of life, that ye may live life alive.

I understand, from the example of the prodigal son, that Jesus had progressed beyond the doctrine of original sin, but the Greek Paul and the Roman St. Augustine bore false witness to his teaching on this matter.

/******/

Other matters — I found the Jesus Seminar persuasive on a number of matters: Jesus did not predict his death and resurrection; he did not utter the “I am” statements in the Gospel of John; Jesus’ family and disciples knew him to be a perfectly ordinary human being.

In Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe - The one-time theologian Thomas Cahill writes: “Though the idea that Christ died to repay his Father for human sin is still a favorite theory of many (especially evangelical) Christians, it is a doctrine that no one can make logical sense of, … it necessitates a sort of voraciously pagan Father God steeped in cruelty and, in the case of Jesus’s horrific death, his son’s blood.” p. 199

/******/

(1) In Romans 5:12 the Greek St. Paul wrote, according to the Geneva Study Bible: “Wherefore, as by one man [Adam] sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: From Adam, in whom all have sinned, both guiltiness and death (which is the punishment of the guiltiness) came upon all.”

Liberalism, underlying theme of modern civilization, misunderstood and widely under attack at the moment

The previous post described the American Founding as a liberal event. A working hypothesis: Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, are liberal. While the left and the right are ideologies, belief systems, the catechisms of vested interest political parties, liberalism is an information system, dedicated to getting things done. Ideology is the deformation of thought and language in the service of power; liberalism is the methodology of the good life: its keyword is efficacy, not power.

The ancient foundations of liberalism are the Roman concept of universal justice, the Greek concept of an independent nature, and Jesus of Nazareth’s teachings of cooperation, altruism, care for the neighbor, and passion for optimum outcomes. The spirit of liberalism slowly grew throughout the Middle Ages; its emergent first step the Renaissance; and got a second wind with the scientific revolution, producing the Enlightenment and its world-changing manifestos, the Declaration and Constitution.

Corollaries: The irony that one of the political parties emerging from the enlightenment liberalism of the Founding uses “liberal” as a derogatory epithet. The irony that the media describe the antiliberal left as extreme liberalism. The irony that the academic humanities do not reflect the liberalism of scholarly endeavor, but embrace anti intellectual ideological dogma, such as the unconstitutional content-based censorship of “no-platforming.”

The proposed Great Synthesis, Democracy, justice, science, and scholarly endeavor, are liberal, leads us to consider whether what applies to one, such as scholarly endeavor, may apply to others. Examine Immanuel Kant’s observation that the one indispensable intellectual property is “a good will,” since all the other intellectual attributes may be subverted to unintellectual ends. Where there is not a good will: A small-d democrat who is not public-spirited; a justice who uses the courts to thwart government by consent of the governed by furthering voting restrictions; a scientist who, instead of honoring feedback from reality, tries to fudge the data; an academic who, instead of fighting to create a space for passionate discussion among informed people who disagree, dictates that only that which is true shall be given a platform in the university.

Liberalism is not partisan, not political; it is the practical, neutral, methodology of the good life, the bedrock of modern civilization. The current mischaracterization and widespread attack could undermine that civilization in ways few of us would want.

The difference between liberalism and left-progressivism, updated

 

Part I:

Since “liberal” and “left” are often treated as synonymous, Historian Fritz Stern’s discussion may be useful:

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich and became an American historian.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to Ronald Reagan's derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . 

[I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” 

It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best … a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” ... In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.” - This from Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known

Stern is saying that the Founding was a liberal event. Liberalism is the raison d’etre of the United States. It’s in our DNA. Enlightenment liberalism proclaimed the Rights of Man — immunities which no government can abrogate. Liberalism declared that all are created equal, which over time finally rendered slavery unthinkable, something no society prior to liberal modernity had done.

Part II:

How my own life history taught me that “liberal” and “left” are not alike:

I went to high school during the second Eisenhower administration, and to college during the first Kennedy administration. I thought of myself as liberal/left, and at that time the public understanding of these terms was not as divided as it is now.

By the time I reached middle age, I realized that the left was telling me that white was bad, male was bad, European was bad; and I began searching for a political philosophy that did not require me to hate myself.

I learned that liberalism, unlike the outlook of the left, does not care about identity. If, as the Declaration proclaimed, all are created equal, immutable characteristics that we are born with and can’t change don’t matter.

Can there be anything more unjust than considering a newborn baby guilty because of its race and gender?

There’s much more to be said about this, but if it is understood that any analysis which conflates “liberal” and “left” is necessarily intellectually incoherent, that’s a good start.

https://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2018/10/on-difference-between-liberalism-and.html

If the Founders had “eradicate[d] slavery at the nation’s founding” the new nation would would have been much smaller

Alan Jacobs: 

In Rochester, New York, on July 4, 1852, [Frederick] Douglass gave a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” and it is as fine an example of reckoning wisely with a troubling past as I have ever read. He begins by acknowledging that the Founders “were great men,” though he immediately goes on to say, “The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration.” Yes: Douglass is compelled to view them in a critical light, because their failure to eradicate slavery at the nation’s founding led to his own enslavement, led to his being beaten and abused and denied every human right, forced him to live in bondage and in fear until he could at long last make his escape. Nevertheless, “for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

What, for Douglass, made the Founders worthy of honor? Well, “they loved their country better than their own private interests,” which is good; though they were “peace men,” “they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage,” which is very good, and indeed true of Douglass himself; and “with them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right,” which is excellent. Perhaps best of all, “with them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final’; not slavery and oppression.” Therefore, “you may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”

In their day and generation. But what they achieved, though astonishing in its time, can no longer be deemed adequate. Indeed, it never could have been so deemed, because they did not live up to the principles they so powerfully celebrated. They announced a “final”—that is, an absolute, a nonnegotiable—commitment to justice, liberty, and humanity, but even those who did not own slaves themselves negotiated away the rights of Black people. And so Douglass must say these blunt words: “This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

/*****/

I have quoted Lincoln’s observation that the Constitution could not have been ratified if it had an anti-slavery provision, because the states which became the Confederacy would have voted against it.

There was a second choice Lincoln did not mention in the passage cited. Divide the nation into the states which ratified an anti-slavery Constitution, and see the other former colonies proceed independently.

The southern colonies would eventually have ended slavery, and would not have felt that emancipation had been imposed on them against their will.

The United States would not have had a permanent backward, benighted, resentful, reactionary region as it has now; and probably would not have had the worst healthcare and highest prison population of modern industrialized nations.

It would also be smaller. Would the expansion of the Louisiana Purchase have taken place? The expansion to the Pacific, and taking large parts of Mexico such as the Southwest and California?

With a much diminished United States, what would have been the outcome of the two World Wars?

This is why I am a liberal and not a progressive

The following appeared on nbcnews dot com:

“Netflix's 'Trial of the Chicago 7' is very Aaron Sorkin. But at least it's not 'The Newsroom.'

By Ani Bundel, cultural critic

It has been generally accepted in progressive circles that the idealized neoliberalism of the late 1990s has aged poorly. Creator Aaron Sorkin’s excessively sentimental “West Wing” is the poster child for this sea change, aided by his failures since. … “The Newsroom” — which attempted to take the same liberal views and apply them to TV cable news — was worse.”

/*****/

Is this idealism?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.“

If so, I’ll take it over the cynical trashing of Sorkin’s moving dramas. Example: Best Takedowns

Yglesias comments on left critique of functional liberal principles

 Matthew Yglesias: “imo a movement that finds itself defining belief in the importance of clear writing, a sense of urgency, and a desire for perfection as forms of white supremacy is a movement that is asking to lose over and over and over again as its institutions fail to function effectively”

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1331011999074050049

About people coming to America and taking American jobs

Worker spending is a major pillar of economics. Everyone who comes into America and goes to work creates at least as many jobs as they take. With their pay they buy all the things of life, from groceries to cars to houses. This creates or expands industries which employ people. New jobs. This includes our own children (that’s where most of the “job takers” comes from).

Example: America at the founding had three million people. It now has one hundred times  as many, most born here. And one hundred times as many jobs.

So don’t worry about new people taking jobs. They create jobs.

You can count on it.

Scores of liberal signatories question left/progressive tactics

A coming article in Harpers warns Democrats against an illiberal reaction to the anti-democratic pathologies of the Trump regime:

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.
But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. … The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion.

The signatories to this warning against the illiberal, “ideological” faction within the Democratic Party do not name the faction, but it is a group within the party which owes more to Central Europe and Marx than to the Western European Enlightenment outlook of the Declaration and Constitution: left/progressives.

Liberalism, like democracy, is about cooperation. Its most famous three words are, “We the People.” Liberalism gives the citizen the maximum possible amount of freedom (“pursuit of happiness” is a fundamental right) and asks citizens to be public spirited and give some of it back.

Left/progressivism, like its Marxian forebear, is about enmity. Marx declared that the very existence of the bourgeoisie constituted a fundamental wrong to the workers. When left/progressivism says “white privilege” it implies that white people are in an equally problematic relation to African Americans. In both cases it is not clear how the wrong can be expiated — what the path to redemption might be. “Ye have the poor always with you,” said Jesus of Nazareth 2000 years ago, but the privilege “argument” would seem to require a society in which no one is ever disadvantaged.

Huffington Post recently wrote, in 6 Things White People Say That Highlight Their Privilege, “If you want to be an ally in the fight against racism, start by acknowledging your white privilege.” The scores of Harpers signatories(1) wrote, “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion.”

As liberals in the Democratic Party would say, if they dared face the consequences, you can ask free citizens, who are exercising their “pursuit of happiness,” to be concerned about the everyday racism experienced by African Americans. But you cannot order them to do that. And you certainly cannot declare them guilty if they don’t (That is the business of the courts.). In a liberal society, political movements are not allowed to coerce.

It is likely that the Democratic Party’s fecklessness in the face of the present crisis of democracy is because the liberal wing and the left/progressive wing cannot both belong under the same umbrella. The Democratic Party cannot long endure half democratic and half coercive.

/*****/

(1) Among the signatories:

Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Margaret Atwood
Noam Chomsky
Francis Fukuyama 
Todd Gitlin
Wendy Kaminer
Randall Kennedy 
Dahlia Lithwick
Winton Marsalis
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt
Jonathan Rauch
Salman Rushdie
Gloria Steinem 
Fareed Zakaria 

Self-validating arguments

I recently criticized “white privilege” on social media because it damns people for immutable characteristics, and because arguments which can’t be countered by evidence and reason are necessarily fallacious. “No one should be persuaded by it.” The “argument” is a gotcha: “Check your privilege” and assent to an ideology’s charge of racial guilt. Or be accused by that ideology of the guilt of refusing to take responsibility for “privilege.” A similar situation just appeared in Quillette.

Rob Henderson:

Consider the way charges of “racism” have been used to target individuals. People used to appropriately get rebuked or fired for expressing racist views. Today, though, people are getting cancelled for not supporting the claim that America itself is irredeemably racist. Never mind that such a position is in fact a Kafka trap: Danger awaits no matter how you respond. If America is a racist country, and you agree, then you are admitting that more purging and re-educating must be done. However, if you disagree, proponents of cancel culture take this as evidence that you and others like you are more racist than you realize, and thus more purging and re-educating must be done.

Ideology is the deformation of thought and language in the service of power. It is a belief system, whereas legitimate conceptual systems such as liberalism are information systems. Left/progressive ideologies say “America itself is irredeemably racist” and “confess your white privilege.” But they refuse to enter into debate. Instead of examining countervailing argument on its merits, they treat any attempt at refutation (“if you disagree”) as proof of guilt.

There’s a further problem on social media, where indicating agreement with the seductive falsehoods of left/progressivism — “white privilege” or “America is irredeemably racist” — is virtue signaling. Mindless agreement proves one is on the side of the angels. No debate is necessary, and no evidence or reason will be listened to.

This illustrates a fundamental difference between liberalism and left/progressivism. Both agree that a statement such as “black (derogatory characteristic)” would be racist. But liberalism holds that statements such as “white guilt” and “white privilege” are equally wrong. The left thinks that there is good racism (“white privilege”) and bad racism. Liberalism hold that all racism is wrong, because it does not accept moral double standards.

The Defeat of the Constitution

Waking up several mornings ago, I finally realized what it is: A Constitutional nation would never have elected the continual travesty that is Donald Trump.

Somewhere between the end of World War II and now, we lost the authenticity of character that defines a democratic people.

Despite all the criticism of the president*, we are failing to adequately describe the calamity of the “extinction level event” his illegitimate ascension to power is to America, the world, and civilization.

The left during the McCarthy hearings recognized, and opposed:

End justifies the means rationalization 
Groupthink 
Guilt by association 
Conformism.

Today, the rejection of groupthink is a sin against solidarity. We now understand liberalism so poorly that the democratic press speaks of AOC and the Squad(1) as the most liberal segment of the House when they are clearly antiliberals whose deepest affinity is to Marx, not the Constitution (which The Newspaper of Record, in the “1619 Project,”(2) described as hypocritical).

Today, collectives are thought of as liberal, although they are based on “moral ties antecedent to choice.” But when de Tocqueville surveyed the young American democracy, he marveled at our penchant for forming “voluntary associations.”

Nations which admired us when Obama was President (which, it was thought, would be “transformational,” — McConnell made sure that didn’t happen, and we let him) they now pity us.

We have fallen so far that the “news” gives no inkling, for all its 24-hour coverage, that the left is not liberal. Today the news has no opinion, although it has constant insinuation. Once, as Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” said half a decade ago, Edward R. Murrow had an opinion, and that ended McCarthyism; Cronkite had an opinion, and that ended Vietnam.

Today forty percent of us will follow Trump come hell or high water, will follow him if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue at high noon, will follow him into the grave.

That’s not a metaphor.

/*****/

(1) “What makes "The Squad" such a tantalizing and obvious political target for President Trump is that all four are on the wrong side of every major 2020 issue. From their calls to “abolish ICE” and the Department of Homeland Security, a position that even the ultra-progressive Center for American Progress suggests is bonkers, to their support of the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all, impeachment for Trump and outright disdain for Israel, they are the 2020 gift that keeps on giving for the Trump White House.” - https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/456033-trumps-greatest-allies-for-a-2020-win-aoc-and-the-squad

(2) Andrew Sullivan: “The original ideals were false, and then the country was founded on “both an ideal and a lie.””

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ White Supremacy argument, and more recently, the NYT in its 1619 Project, have argued that America was born in sin.

Andrew Sullivan noted that the Times wrote, “Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.”

Coates wrote, “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.”

In asserting these claims, they reject The Great Emancipator’s defense of the Founding.

Lincoln used textual analysis to demonstrate that the Founders were confronted by "the necessities arising from [slavery's] existence." He goes on to show that they carefully crafted the Constitution, therefore, to accommodate slavery (for the time being) without legitimizing it:

It is easy to demonstrate that "our fathers, who framed this Government under which we live," looked on slavery as wrong, and so framed it and everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far as the necessities arising from its existence permitted.  ... If additional proof is wanted it can be found in the phraseology of the Constitution.  When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning  In all matters but this of slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language.  But the Constitution alludes to slavery three times without mentioning it once  The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical.  They speak of the "immigration of persons," and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so.  In establishing a basis of representation they say "all other persons," when they mean to say slaves--why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say "persons held to service or labor." If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction.  Why didn't they do it? We cannot doubt that it was done on purpose.  Only one reason is possible, and that is supplied us by one of the framers of the Constitution — and it is not possible for man to conceive of any other — they expected and desired that the system would come to an end, and meant that when it did, the Constitution should not show that there ever had been a slave in this good free country of ours.” (Emphasis added)

/*****/

In other places Lincoln pointed out that the Constitution could not have been ratified if it had an anti-slavery provision;(1) and he documented that by his own research those Founders who held office in the new country preponderantly took anti-slavery positions in the course of their official duties. “They expected and desired that the system would come to an end.”

To the best of my knowledge, neither Coates nor the Times addressed Lincoln’s powerful rebuttals of their assertions, leaving the voting public with a very incomplete impression of what the Founders achieved.

/*****/

(1) “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 …” — Lincoln-Douglas Debates