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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
I was thinking this morning how tragic it is that there are those who look at our past and choose to blame certain groups (Progressives/Democrats blaming Republicans/Conservatives) by telling lies about the past: pointing fingers about whose “fault” it was 100 years ago for the conditions of slavery, and infantilize blacks today for what happened during the same period. As you point out, it would be a great benefit to this country if we could all take responsibility for our past mistakes and all take responsibility for moving the country forward. But I dream . . .
What I was trying to get across, but I was not stating nearly as well.
Thanks for the, um, helpful advice. As for what I said — the part you saw fit to clip:
I don’t think there’s anything inherently bigoted about people wanting to be able to afford a single-earner, single-dwelling lifestyle, with job security for the single earner.
It is true that during segregation, whites earned these things partly at the expense of blacks, but it’s certainly not necessary to want these things at the expense of the darker-hued. Nor is it necessarily bigoted to think that many women — particularly lower-class women whose jobs may be less fulfilling — would rather be homemakers than working the jobs they currently have, if they thought they could afford it.
That said, given America’s history, it’s also understandable why desiring these things might raise the question of bigotry in some minds. Similarly, saying America was great all the way till Obama and Holder, two black guys, arrived on the scene might also raise the question of bigotry.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
How the left can hold such views is beyond me. One of my direct ancestors fought for the North in the Civil War. If America was not great, Eric Holder would be fetching my coffee and calling me “massa”.
It does seem like a classic case of making the perfect the enemy of the great.
More than that though, understanding greatness requires a mature relationship with the past. Young people are not known for their mature relationships. They are more likely to fall in love and then discover some kind of ‘deal-breaker’ detail that means that it couldn’t have been love in the first place.
America has always been great, mostly ahead of the curve, but sometimes not; she is mine and I am hers and we grow together.
Holder was a radical in college including taking over administrative offices. Then he became a multimillionaire by being in government and law. I feel like his rhetoric is more about whipping up votes for statism because he makes money off of it. All of his friends do too. Government parasites. Maybe superficially they think it makes things better.
I think that the attribution of this to “realpolitik” is wrong.
You can look up several definitions of “realpolitik,” but I think that this is one of the best ones, because it carries the connotation to the correct point: “Realpolitik is a political system that’s not based on beliefs, doctrines, ethics, or morals, but rather on realistic, practical ideas” (here).
This is not what Lincoln was doing. Certainly, he was flexible in implementation, but he was rock solid on morality.
I’ll need a second comment to cover this. [Cont’d]
[Cont’d]
From Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, 6-16-1858, Springfield, IL:
[Cont’d]
[Cont’d]
And from his Cooper Union speech, 2-27-1860, New York City:
Zafar, you may not have known about this. Your argument is precisely the sort of error, based on a lack of historical knowledge and perspective, that Holder has made.
I’m sorry, but leaving slavery be where it is in the country while stopping its spread into new states is realpolitik rather than principle. Though perhaps realpolitik is not the right word. Practical? Realistic? Reasonable?
And the realpolitik of it was not so much about slavery but about power : preserving the union, whatever the price, and ensuring that his side dominated. Or that’s how it seems.
I’m not calling him a bad man, or even saying that he was indifferent to slavery’s evil – only that this was not what drove him.
I am reading a biography of Lincoln, and it’s quite a surprise. I haven’t read all the comments, but Lincoln was doing his best to keep a war from breaking out–preserving the union–and he was prepared to delay emancipation as long as possible to avoid war. He gave many speeches that nearly made me cross-eyed, with his suggestions for what to do about states that had slavery, those who didn’t have slavery, those who could have slavery, those who might want slavery and those who might not. We can judge the practicality of what he did–and ultimately he did want to end slavery–but he knew it couldn’t happen right away without destroying the country. I tend to agree with Zafar’s comment #40.
Let’s remember, he even considered sending the blacks to Africa. Whether that was serious or not, I don’t know. I do believe he was trying to find a way to free slaves and save the union.
(I’m still at the part before he became president, so that’s all I can share!)
What drove him was the desire to end the evil of slavery, while being sufficiently realistic to understand that this was not an easy task to accomplish, and that it would not be completed overnight.
The way we speak of Lincoln now is the way people thought of him then too – he could never do enough to end slavery but could always do too much to misuse and corrupt the presidency. He was in an impossible position, and we are still paying for the freeing of the slaves.
Curious. What do you mean by the statement in bold?
There are people in the South who are still angry, there are free descendents of slaves who feel owed and our race relations are…well the fact that we speak of ‘race relations’ sort of indicates the problem. Beyond that, Lincoln bent the presidency out of proportion to the other branches and out of whack with the Constitution As Written which contributed mightily to people’s comfort with the idea of a ‘living Constitution’.
And I don’t know that anyone could have done better, so this is not meant as a Lincoln sux comment.
And of course he didn’t have the benefit of my infinitely wise counsel.
I agree, which is why I used the phrase “realpolitik with a moral purpose “. Lincoln did what was possible and practical, but the ultimate end was the preservation of the union and the ending of slavery. If you think about it, Lincoln fought the Civil War on the basis of all three conditions he mentioned in @zafar’s quote of Lincoln: From 1861 through most of 1862, he fought the war to preserve the union without freeing any slaves. From the latter part of 1862 with the issuance of the emancipation proclamation, he fought the war on the basis of freeing some slaves, while leaving others in slavery. And with the thirteenth amendment, all the slaves were freed. Still, had the war been won by the northern states without any slaves being freed, the admission of more free states to the union coupled with the restriction on the expansion of slavery would have meant the eventual abolition of slavery by legislation, not war.
I read an interesting quote years ago in a letter someone in England had received from his American relative toward the end of the Civil War. Paraphrasing, the letter writer said, “It feels as though we have lived a lifetime in these four years.”
More has been written about the Civil War than any other war in human history.
It’s hard for me to admit that someone is truly smarter than I am, that given the same facts, someone else could come up with a better conclusion. :-) But I have to say that Steven Spielberg is smarter than I am. :-) His movie Lincoln focused on Lincoln’s pushing the Thirteenth Amendment through while the war was waging. It was one of those facts about the war that I had buried in my head along with a million others. I had not realized its significance until I saw that movie. The movie is worth watching for the music alone, but I have seen it three times now, and I can’t get through it without tears of gratitude that Lincoln was elected.
You put it better. TY!
Thanks for explaining.