(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



DeSantis, Stephen Douglas, and CRT. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-10-01

There are trolls online who argue that if someone did anything bad while a Democrat, the stain stays with the party even though their faction may have switched sides in the past 60 years. Similarly, they think that if someone did something good while a Republican, the credit stays with the GOP even though their faction was purged almost a century and a half ago. These people have as little awareness of recent history as Rip van Winkle had of the American Revolution, except that unlike Washington Irving's protagonist, they have no grasp whatsoever that something is wrong. Van Winkle did wake up to see the new musket he brought with him had rusted badly.

I finally read Matt Flegenheimer's NY Times Magazine article on Ron DeSantis (9/18/22), and he quotes DeSantis as saying:

Stephen Douglas had been "doing the C. R. T. thing" in his wrongheaded slavery debates with Abraham Lincoln.

If you put Ayanna Pressley in a time machine and had her go back and explain CRT to Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth, and ask her who better represented CRT, they'd say Lincoln.

If you put Christopher Rufo, the prime theorist in the villainization of CRT in the time machine and have them go back and explain CRT by ideology and not party to the theorists who argued that slavery was a positive benefit to the enslaved, they would say that Lincoln was the more "woke."

So what does DeSantis think he's accomplishing by charging Douglas with wokeness? Does he really need the Rip van Winkle faction? Is he so void of any understanding beyond the partisan that he cannot sense the irony in his attribution?

Flegenheimer does include a section where DeSantis speaks of a "misconception" that the Founders desired a "separation of church and state." DeSantis said that our rights come from "God and not from the government." The Declaration of Independence addresses that point directly: "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." While he can argue that the rights came long before the government, he can't argue that the government plays no role.

And the supposed misconception wasn't Jefferson's alone. Many others of the Founding generation spoke in favor of such a separation. I've read the letter FROM the Danbury (CT) Baptist Association that prompted Jefferson's famous reply, and they shared his concern that any government involvement with religion would be detrimental to them and favoring the wealthier churches.

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing of his travels in America, speaks in amazement that members of different churches could get along with each other so well, and a local said to him that it's because of the separation that no church can gain favor with the government and so there's little to fight about. When John F. Kennedy was running for president 62 years ago, he felt he needed to address the issue that he'd be too likely to institute Catholic dogmas in an address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Alliance, where he said that if it came to the point where he'd either have to tell everyone to follow what the Pope said or be untrue to his faith, he would resign.

None of this matters to DeSantis. He argues from Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College, who provides a sounding board for theorists who seem to derive their work from David Barton, although Barton's name never comes up because he couldn't defend his work against accusations of bad scholarship. One source that Arnn passed on to DeSantis argues that "Madison was a freedom man, Obama was a government man." Madison's belief in freedom did not extend to the people he enslaved, and Obama's being a government man doesn't necessarily oppose being for freedom.

Changes instituted after the Founders' generation had passed show that as people got used to the government not siding the rich and powerful allowed them to think that the government could be a positive force in protecting the working class from a wealthy class that thanks to the Industrial Revolution, didn't need government favor. Historian James McGregor Burns speaks of the "negative liberty" of Madison being replaced by the "positive liberty of the Jacksonians."

The first real test of positive liberty was slavery and how much it depended on government favor. There were a number of government policies which stood in the way of freedom for the enslaved, the Fugitive Slave Law being the most flagrant. In the debate over whether to permit further expansion of slavery, The expansion of slavery into the territories was the key feature of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas being the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. By that day, it was becoming increasingly clear that slavery could not expand without some government backing, and the Slave States felt that without some support, they had no future in the Union. Any rational observer from today's world would see the debate in terms of some Whites putting down the Black people, and not which party they happened to belong to. DeSantis's claim that Douglas was the CRT theorist is insane.

Almost from the day the Jacksonians and the followers of Henry Clay brought back the Two Party System after the "Era of Good Feelings" of the Monroe Presidency, a lot of urban liberal voters supported the Democrats, and they were put off by the militant Protestantism that affected the Republicans. Even in the Age of Jackson, many Southerners were uncomfortable with the Cotton Whigs, and most of them didn't grasp why slavery was a bad thing. And of course, after the Whig Party collapsed, even the most aristocratic enslaver couldn't forgive the Republicans for having abolished slavery.

So you had this tension within the Democratic Party for over a century. I read an article recently that said that after the Great Migration, many big city machines saw that if they were to hold onto their stance as speaking for the city dwellers, they'd have to bring the Blacks in the ghettoes into their party. This shift started in the time of Franklin Roosevelt and was nearly complete by the time of Nixon's Southern Strategy.

The Rip van Winkle faction wants to pretend that this never happened--that the Democratic Party is just as responsible for Jim Crow laws now, in an age where a Unite The Right rally can feature Trump supporters waving the Confederate Battle Flag, as it was before the Great Migration began. So the question becomes, to what extent is Ron DeSantis part of the Rip van Winkle faction?

I had mentioned that in the decade before the Civil War, some apologists for slavery spoke of it as a positive good. I attended a lecture where Ibram X. Kendi spoke, and he referred to this belief. It comes from a census report that found a lot of free Blacks in the North had mental health problems. The researcher who found this later realized that the statistics were impossible so he said he was wrong. Yet, the "Slaveocrats" found this theory so essential that they continued arguing for it even without any evidence.

I think the same process affected the people who want a mixing of church and state--they realize that they can't quote Barton as a source, but need to keep the zombie theory walking.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/1/2126397/-DeSantis-Stephen-Douglas-and-CRT

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/