America Is Both
The truth of our 250 years of history is not "somewhere in between."
There is no sentence in America more famous than “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,” Declared before the world 250 years ago. In second place is simply the phrase “We, the People.” In both cases, much of the text around these famous words is forgotten, along with its significance. But the ideas that we are all born equal, that we have inalienable rights, that the People are sovereign: these are at the core of the American democratic religion.
Ours is a religion of saints and martyrs. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington always vie for the highest seats, with Lincoln always close behind. Madison is the saint of institutions and political architecture, FDR perhaps the last elected official to truly gain that status.
After centuries of white men and presidents, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were added to this canon of American saints—at some point and in some regions of the country. But a canon of saints is precisely what continued to get handed down. Perhaps some schools in some districts took some time to dwell on the unsaintly qualities of some of these figures, or the systematic character of certain persistent evils in our history.
Yet by and large they have not and still do not. Americans have always taken our history with a heavy dose of hagiography. And so American children who grow up with enough intellectual curiosity to read history with clear eyes frequently end up feeling betrayed by the lies their teacher told them. An all too common story for left-liberals is pure disenchantment. Adults on the right, meanwhile, double down on the mythology at the expense of reality. …
Continue reading this article by Adam Gurri, “America Is Both,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/america-is-both/