Thank you Stacey Patton! Ever since Heather Cox Richardson supported Hillary over Bernie and tried to say that misogyny was the big reason people weren’t favoring Clinton, I knew that she was a neoliberal and full of sh*t. She pissed me off then and pisses me off today — and especially because too many people can’t see through the poisonous neoliberal propaganda she spews. Which makes her dangerous. Thank you Stacey for illuminating the shadow side of HCR and speaking the truth! — Molly
I was curious to see what Heather Cox Richardson would write about today.
Not surprisingly, she is doing the classic liberal historian move, which is trying to rescue America's founding by treating slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and women’s exclusion as tragic "contradictions" rather than constitutive features of the American project.
Look at this phrase she uses in her piece: “the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement”
Sticky little problem? Seriously?
Slavery was not a “sticky little problem.” It was THEEEE economic, political, legal, and psychic foundation of the country these men were building. You can't sit there and call the Declaration of Independence “astonishingly radical” while treating the exclusion of most human beings as some damn parenthetical inconvenience.
Basically, her big argument in this piece is that America was founded on equality, betrayed by reactionaries, redeemed by civil rights struggle, and now its all being threatened again. She's saying, yes, the Founders had blind spots, but the idea was radical. Yes, America excluded people, but eventually Americans expanded the promise. Yes, we are in danger now, but we can return to our better angels.
Listen, America was not merely founded on “the radical idea that all men are created equal.” America was founded on a RACIALIZED EXCEPTION CLAUSE hiding inside that sentence. The men who wrote “all men” did not accidentally forget Black people, Native people, women, the enslaved, the colonized, the poor, or the propertyless. They built a political order where equality could be proclaimed precisely because inequality had already been naturalized. Let's start ffs!
And look at this soft line from Richardson: “Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.”
No, girl.
Black people FORCED the issue. Indigenous people resisted extermination. Women organized, sued, marched, got jailed, and fought their way into the polity. This was not America gradually becoming generous. This was America being dragged, screaming and kicking by the people it excluded.
Her piece is a nice comforting civic sermon. It is meant to steady liberal readers on July 4 and remind them that democracy has a lineage that's worth defending. But it is too damn reverent and forgiving. It's too invested in preserving the founders as these flawed prophets instead of naming them as the evil degenerate architects of a republic that made freedom and racial domination grow from the same damn soil.
At the end of the day, Richardson and other liberals wants to say America is betraying its founding principle. I disagree with all of them. America ain't betraying shit. America is returning to one of its founding habits, which using the language of freedom to protect the machinery of white rule.
Richardson and others keep arguing that MAGA is a rebellion against America’s founding promise. Nope again. MAGA is what happens when the people written into the founding finally panic that the people written out might take the sentence seriously.
This kind of liberal patriotism is so irksome and dangerous because it keeps asking us to defend the myth at the exact moment we need to be dismantling the machinery!
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