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Holder: America Was Never Great
Eric Holder and others on the left slam the POTUS slogan about making America great again with the outrageous claim that America was never great. Their reasoning, according to Eric Holder, harkens back to slavery, women’s suffrage, and the failure to allow gay marriage. Insane.
Was America ever great? It has certainly been a great economic power because of capitalism. Its economic greatness is struggling under regulatory burdens.
America has certainly been a great military power. It fought and won (with help to be sure) WWII despite having to fight on two fronts.
America because the world’s only acknowledged superpower after winning the cold war. America caused the collapse of the Soviet Union through its great diplomatic, economic and military strategies.
What about slavery? Who but a great nation would send many thousands of its citizens to fight a war, the civil war, to save the union and end slavery? Liberal blacks ignore the reality that many white soldiers from the northern states risked and lost their lives in the cause that ended slavery. Even before that, the abolitionist resistance fought against the insidious practice of slavery, including the use of the theory of states’ rights to nullify improper federal laws such as the Federal Fugitive Slave Act. America is great because of the way it got rid of slavery, not because it allowed slavery before that. As for the aftermath, how many non-African countries have elected a black president besides the United States?
Women’s suffrage? America was a relatively early adopter in 1920. France, for example, did not give women the right to vote until 1945. Muslim countries were much later, Kazakhstan in 1994, for example.
Gay marriage? How is that an indicator of greatness, exactly? I don’t see it.
Yes, America has been great. It is great now, but could always be improved. I support the ideal of promoting its greatness: economically, militarily, and socially.
Published in General
We have to first decide whether to judge any historic state of things by later standards rather than include credit for the things that changed because of the courage of whoever was active in the original time frame (not ourselves)…..while still being grateful that some crazy promoted changes were repelled. We only praise the ones we like as if we owned them, but should probably be more grateful to the past itself for those, rather than only scorning the original conditions.
So: Was Rome great? It was murderous in the Coliseum but built the interconnecting roads that allowed the wide and rapid travel of new ideas. Was the British Empire great? And so forth…Most snapshots of any time show a world astride the past and future, trying to negotiate the passage as well as conditions allow. All we can learn from any backwards study are the examples of courage and foolishness, and try to apply those to our own struggle over what to transform and what to preserve.
The need to disparage our past by viewing it through its own lens is a principle reason why the left is dangerous.
Did Eric Holder make this statement recently? I ask because a liberal friend of mine and I had a brief text exchange the other day and she quoted almost verbatim the above statement? I could not believe that someone I know who has prospered in this country in every way, who is privileged and grew up the same way we all did, middle class working parents, no frills.
I just answered my own question! Unbelievable – liberals don’t have one original thought in their heads….
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/eric-holder-when-did-you-think-america-was-great
The point here is that something can be both “great” and “imperfect” at the same time.
America is great, because it is based on the ideas of guaranteed individual liberty, a law-abiding self-governing populace, and subsidiarity in the form of a republic. It has always been that way. The Leftists (including Holder) have tried to undermine those things for decades.
This is how the left thinks about the United States. It’s not surprising really. Howard Zinn’s outlook on our country’s history has been adopted by the entire Democratic Party.
This past week I was looking around for something to watch. I like Aaron Sorkin as a writer (The West Wing series), so I plunked his name into a search box. Up popped The Newsroom, an HBO production from 2012 through 2014. So I watched the opening scene to see if I’d like it.
Here it is. It is so close to the dialogue on Fox with Holder it’s kind of creepy. Democrats are more in lockstep with each other than Republicans can even begin to imagine. Warning: There’s extremely foul language in it, which says a lot by itself about the Democrats. At the end of the clip, the main character explodes with an anti-United States monologue that is chilling to watch. And it’s a pretty good summary of their thinking and philosophies and attitudes. I won’t be watching any more of it than what is in the preview–there’s not a single thing I like about the series from what I saw in this opening.
About that slavery thing:
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
////
Fair enough, but Realpolitik not morality.
That is really cherry picking Lincoln’s speeches. He gave something like 300 pro abolition speeches before he was elected. The South was horrified that he was elected because he was a strident abolitionist.
After he took the oath as the new president, he was overcome with the job he had ahead of him. Saving the union was paramount in his mind when he made the speech you’ve quoted and when he wrote the First Inaugural. Naturally. It would have been for any of us.
This quote from the Second Inaugural more closely expresses his views on slavery, views he held throughout his adult life:
Many people were worried about slavery bringing down God’s wrath upon the country. And who could blame them? The most powerful story in the Bible is about Moses, the slaves, and the pharaoh. Lincoln was sincere.
As James McPherson has written in his many books on the Civil War, yes, the South had the right to secede but for just cause, and keeping slaves was not just cause.
I don’t question his views on slavery, I just think that what what motivated him to action was a different thing.
What motivated him to action was the attack on Fort Sumter, a federal property, and the pressure from the northern states to respond.
He was a human man, caught in a horrific situation. He (a) didn’t want the country to fall apart and (b) wanted to stop slavery from spreading at the very least. That said, as is painfully clear in the First Inaugural, his initial concern as the leader of the entire country, including the slave holding states, was keeping the country together. Slavery took a backseat as soon as he was elected. This happens to all presidents upon their election. During their campaigns, they make speeches that rally their supporters around specific causes, but when they are elected, they find themselves as leaders of the entire country. The election itself changes them. It’s the original wake-up call.
His views changed over the course of the war. That’s what we want in our great leaders–people who can respond to the current circumstances.
Before his political and activist career, Lincoln had been a small-town country lawyer who had handled a lot of divorce cases (thus the “just cause” language in the First Inaugural). When he was elected, he saw his role as one of mediation, which meant that he had to relate to both sides. That tremendous effort is what you see in the first months of his presidency.
It seems Lincoln saw that his primary job was to defend the constitution and preserve the Union, not to be the arbiter of morality. Would not our nation be better today if politicians were motivated in the same way and not for personal gain?
I did not know that about being a divorce lawyer! Whadayaknow?!!
But I don’t think Abraham Lincoln’s morality is a reasonable proxy for America’s. Though his actions may have been a good mirror for that? And that, rather than Lincoln’s personal particulars, is the issue. Correct?
Doesn’t make America worse than most other countries.
Yes, but the measure for personal gain differs from that for morality. Apples and oranges. I am frankly not at all sure most countries wouldn’t be better places with leaders that put morality over Realpolitik.
I think you turned the conversation toward Lincoln in the quote you cited. You wanted to make us and him out to be hypocrites who really didn’t care about the poor slaves and never did anything to help them. We were self-serving monsters, indifferent to human suffering.
Sadly, most people agree with that today. They love Howard Zinn because he interprets everything through that lens.
I choose not to. Instead, I will train my eyes on the thousands of abolitionists who signed up to fight on the Union side to somehow end slavery. It was their sacrifice that inspired Lincoln as the war went on.
There is good in this country.
Of course! Like in every country. And also evil. Ditto.
I’m sorry, Zafar. I’ve seen the quote you cited a million times, and I took out my anger on you as a proxy for the other million people who cling to that quote as a sign of Lincoln’s supposed hypocrisy. My apologies. :-)
I also think about the “again” in MAGA. If we are already great, why the “again?” I think that the scandal-ridden Obama administration diminished the United States on the world stage. The scandal-ridden Obama administration cut defense spending on weaponry, hurting our military capabilities. The scandal-ridden Obama administration saddled our businesses with nearly debilitating regulations (many of which remain in place). Yes, “again” is appropriate.
Note: I will not use the words “Obama administration” without the words “scandal-ridden” modifying it to remind everyone that the Democratic meme that his administration was “scandal-free” is and was totally false.
I have been watching Ken Burns’ “The West” series on Netflix this week. The conquest of the western United States, as portrayed, is troublesome at times. We humans are quite a mix of noble aspirations, avarice, charity, and prejudice. Yet out of all this there seems to be a greatness that came out of it all. Not perfection, but greatness.
Historians tend to be a negative lot. They could not run a successful business if their lives depended on it. :-)
It was always the case that the fastest route to ending slavery in the southern states was to do it through union action. That was true in 1776 and 1856.
I didn’t know that, either. I’ve always thought of him as a railroad lawyer.
I wondered about it when I saw the words “just cause” in the First Inaugural. It was language I recognized from my parents’ bitter divorce. :-) When I reread the First Inaugural and I got to the paragraph about how things would not be better after the split and how difficult the split would be in terms divvying up the country–I went in search of more biographical information about him as possibly being a divorce lawyer. Sure enough.
America has been a great country and all the mistakes and sins didn’t change that. We keep growing, learning and trying to do better.
I think the MAGA logo referred to undoing the Obama Administration’s policies. Reversing the economic and political damage Obama did.
@sweezle MAGA in my mind means undoing as much of Obama’s “fundamental transformation” as possible.
Eh, MAGA was a campaign slogan, appealing to nostalgia, as slogans often do. Suggesting “again” merely meant before Obama appeared on the scene strikes me as not going back far enough.
I had thought “again” meant the America of boomers’ childhood and youth, the Post-WWII period when union jobs were strong, there wasn’t much competition from overseas, immigration was at a historical low, and a family where Dad was a company man, Mom didn’t have to work and stayed home, and they could still afford a home to raise the kids in, was what normal people aspired to as the American dream.
That America should protect itself from foreign trade is one issue Trump has been consistent on for a very long time. Clintonomics included plentiful free trade agreements, so “again” would at minimum be before then.
Thank you for your opinion. America stopped being great during Obama’s administration. Eric Holder is back reminding us of that.
That “again” is needed is because Obama not only did not promote America as great, he also implemented policies to reduce our economic and diplomatic standing in the world (helpful reminder : Trump campaigned while Obama was in office).
Obama also shirked an obvious role he was elected to promote : further the already considerable progress we had achieved in making our society colorblind.
Making America Great Again according to your interpretation sounds bigoted to me and not related to the events during the campaign.
Then there’s the question of Ken Burns.
Maybe. But realpolitik with a MORAL purpose. Lincoln’s election signaled a growing popular and electoral vote advantage of the northern states over the southern states. Southerners feared this growing advantage could one day lead the more populous states (and more numerous states) in the north to eventually abolish slavery by amendment-something made more likely if Lincoln’s stated policy of preventing slavery from being extended to new territories and states was implemented. This was a major reason the southern states seceded in the first place. Lincoln’s statement is not hypocritical, as he knew- as did the southerners advocating secession- that if the southern states remained in the union, the institution of slavery must eventually die.
As I think about this, greatness is a matter of issues. Here is my assessment. I may be missing some issues.
As for America:
Saying America was never great is similar to the leftist dream of Utopia. Nothing can be great unless it is perfect (Utopia), but no place can be perfect. However, the left promises Utopia, because it’s not simple to fight against someone who claims to be trying to make things perfect.
As for the empirical edvidence aginst achieving Utopia (USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.), it’s either “Don’t believe your lying eyes,” or “The right people weren’t in charge.”