The Revolution was fought, in part, by slaveowners. It was not, for most of its participants, fought *for* slavery. The Constitution was written, in part, by slaveowners. It avoided disrupting slavery. But it was not written *for* slavery, nor to increase its power vs 1786.
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14. For Republicans, by contrast, the party ceases to have any reason to exist if we buy into the progressive premise of an endless struggle of group identities, rather than adhering to the tried & tested Lincoln formulation of a government of universal, individual principles.
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15. This is why so many conservative intellectuals recoil at Trumpism, aside from Trump's persona: because it cedes the first principle to progressivism, rather than wielding the legacy bequeathed us by Washington & Lincoln. In that sense, both fights are the same fight.
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16. The conservative reaction to the 1619 Project cannot be understood outside the context of that ongoing debate over whether the classical liberal doctrines of 1776, 1787, & 1865 were, and remain, the legitimate ideological backbone of the American way.
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17. You need not to be any more a friend of slavery than Abe Lincoln was to adhere to those ideas; without them his cause would have failed, as would MLK's. A society without neutral, universal principles has no language with which to persuade the majority against its interests.
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18. Of course, classical liberal principles alone did not defeat slavery, nor Jim Crow; there was also an older, shared language, that of Christianity, in which to reproach the majority in the name of its own principles. Today's Right critics of Lincolnism get this half right.
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19. If we lose the shared language of classical liberalism, then both Right & Left are left with no better choice than to choose the strongest fighter for their tribe. Most of human history goes this way, & we know where it ends.
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20. Lincoln saw the American Founding as legitimate, and in its legitimacy he found the tools to defeat slavery. His example even helped inspire more illiberal regimes, from Egypt to Russia to Brazil, to abandon servitude.
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21. Progressivism, lacking such touchstones of external legitimacy, can never impose on its own constituencies such a demand. It can only follow the logic of the tribe, by which the favored in-group is to be rewarded by sacrifice of the out-group.
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22. For all these reasons, any effort to delegitimize the very ideas that were used to dismantle American slavery & segregation should be regarded with suspicion. That doesn't mean we bury the reality or history of enslavement; Lincoln & Douglass faced it graphically.
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23. But it does mean that we still hold those same truths to be self-evident. And we still see America as the shining city on the hill because it was founded on them. America was never without sin, but the nature of our Founding is what allowed sin to be condemned as such.
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24. In short: slavery is the "yes, but" of the American Founding. It is no basis to discredit its greatness, but rather the reason why the Founding principles remained vital to keep examining.
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25. If you get that wrong, if you embrace instead the collective & the group over "ALL men are created equal" no matter who their ancestors were, then you will always be against the friends of liberty wheresoever they are found. Individual liberty was good then, and it still is.
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End of conversation
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