Traditional American values are unethical

[Cleita]

In ancient Greece, democracy was really meant only for certain tribes of property owning men. Anyone else was the property of the free, democracy enjoying males, whether wives, children, serfs or slaves.

Traditional American values are unethical because they are rooted in class elitism, racism and sexism much as democracy was in ancient Greece. Our founding fathers, who penned the Constitution of the United States, were steeped in this tradition. In the same way, the founding fathers wrote the Constitution to benefit the white gentleman farmer and plantation owner preferably of English ancestry.

Since Native Americans and African slaves were considered inferior human species, it didn’t cross their minds very often that these people could also be entitled to the same rights they enjoyed. When they said “all men are created equal”, it was really an exclusive club and didn’t embrace all of humanity including women.

Even the women of their station, who were acceptable as wives and mothers of their children, were considered inferior in intellect and therefore not to be trusted with a vote. Instead they were treated as another child, economically dependent on them and protected from harm, but not allowed to make any decisions about their lives without the approval of a father, husband or brother.

Immigration was allowed only because the elitist, white Americans needed a working class when owning another human being as a slave became distasteful, first in the north and forced upon the south after the Civil War.

These are the traditional values embraced by the Republican Party handed down from generation to generation. Democracy to them is really an elite club of white men and those who walk in lockstep with those privileged white men. Anyone else is here to serve that elite club.

This is why the Republican administration in power today wages war on other nations with impunity. Of course they are entitled to anything those invaded nations own. God put all that oil in the Middle East for entitled white men to take for their own use. This is why there is no really meaningful action taken about illegal immigration. Those entitled Republican business owners need the cheap labor without having to give back anything in return, like decent wages and benefits.

The bread and circuses inauguration display today only confirms this attitude. On a day when American lives are being lost because of a war born of greed and entitlement, when innocent Arab lives are being ruined and lost, the balls, cocktail parties and celebrations will go on because the people who considered themselves entitled to all that the world has to offer are dancing on the graves of those whose lives they have treated like a cheap commodity.

We need a real moral majority to bring us into the twenty-first century, not a repeat of Roman, elitist imperialism.

[Redleg]

1. Specifically, which traditional American values do you speak of?

EOM

[Cleita]

2. Access to the American dream, which is only available

after the entitled people have taken what they think is theirs. The fact that we have homeless, people who don't have access to health care and an exploited underclass of illegal immigrants is only a start.

[Redleg]

3. I'll buy that. The American Dream is a myth as far as I'm concerned.

Only Republicans and Readers Digest talk about it as reality.

[imenja]

4. a few corrections on slavery, liberty, and the founders

It's not accurate that the participants at the Constitutional Convention did not consider African-Americans. Many of our founding fathers were indeed concerned with slavery and saw an contradiction in proclaiming liberty in a land of slavery. The American Revolution was a turning point in discussion of slavery. Many, including Thomas Jefferson, faulted the tyranny of King George for imposing slavery on the English colonies. John Quincy Adams observed: "The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the Declaration himself." (http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=10). America seemed poised to end slavery following the Revolution, but the invention of the cotton gin in 1783 reinvigorated the institution because suddenly American short staple cotton was now a viable export to British textile mills. Northern states continued their gradual emancipation plans, while slavery became further entrenched in Southern states, whose legislators took measures to eradicate all debate on the issue (e.g. the gag rule).

A historian of the American Revolution, Bernard Baylin, notes that the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were profoundly radical, even if it's intentions were not. The proclamation that "all men are created equal" spawned a "contagion of liberty" that would ultimately be impossible to contain (Bernard Baylin, _Ideological Origins of the American Revolution_). A group of slaves who met in New Hampshire in the 1790s invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to challenge their own bondage. Women at the first convention at Seneca Falls would similarly appropriate that language to demand an end to their own subservience.

The ideas launched through the Revolution were of great importance and contained the seeds that would eventually lead to political equality. It's important to remember that eighteenth-century societies were entirely hierarchical. To proclaim equality of any kind was a profound development. That the founders understood that equality in narrow terms does not mean the values and ideas themselves are anti-democratic or unethical. I have advocated for some months now that the Democrats should reclaim the language of our founding documents and use it to critique Republican dominance and class rule. It is the implementation of those ideas that is unethical, not the principles themselves.

[Cleita]

5. Regardless of the consideration of slavery as maybe

not so enlightened by some of the founding fathers, many of them continued to own slaves, and they never recognized the fact that the freed slaves were their equals. These attitudes are still present today. If they weren't, we wouldn't have Aryan White Supremists. Those attitudes have been ingrained since the days of slavery.

Even white immigrants were considered not so equal. This is why we have an electoral system because they felt they couldn't trust them with a popular vote because god forbid if the propertyless sharecroppers and working class should vote for someone else than someone they thought should be in the government, one of them.

Also, how do you explain Native Americans being crowded onto reservations so the entitled white settlers could develop the best land for their use?

[imenja]

10. of course

I don't dispute any of that. What I am reminding you is that you need to put this in historical context. You are looking at this entirely from the perspective of a 21st century American. To understand the importance of history you must consider the context and point of view of the historical actors themselves. That is certainly not to dismiss the immorality of their actions, but you, I believe, are wrong to reject the ideas our nation was founded on as by nature unethical. The ideas of the American Revolution and the French Revolution that followed were of profound importance and would lead to the emergence of ideas of equality for the first time in Western history. That is no small achievement, and they must not be dismissed. Would you have preferred that absolutist monarchies that allowed no political representation and never imagined any kind of equality remain the prevalent form of rule? The ideas of the Age of Revolution (and in this I include the Haitian Revolution and Latin American wars of Independence in addition to the two mentioned above) changed our notions of human equality and political participation for good. It is for our generation to improve on it, not reject it's lessons.

A side point: the Civil War was itself the result of a profound contradiction between slavery and liberty than ran throughout American society. As the historian Barbara Fields observes (herself African-American) the cause of the Civil War was the proclamation of the American Republic with slavery existing within it's borders. Slavery was a great contradiction to the ideas of the Republic and many Americans recognized and discussed that with some frequency. That contradiction would tear the nation apart, though as you rightly observe, slavery would not be replaced with equality. Let us work to see that it finally is.

[Cleita]

13. My point is that in the twenty-first century many Americans

still believe in the same values as eighteenth century Americans. It's time to change those beliefs. There wouldn't be a Bush administration today if these attitudes and beliefs had been challenged for their basic immorality back in the nineteenths and twentieth centuries.

[imenja]

15. they were challenged

Think of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Angelina and Sara Grimke, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, WEB Dubois, Eugene V. Debs, and countless other Americans. Class rule, however, persists. You imagine the possibility of a mythical historical past. America was not and never has been a utopia. No such utopia has ever existed, among any people. Challenges to patriarchy, white supremacy, and class rule have been voiced at all times in our country's history. It is for our generation to put those challenges into effect. I maintain the answer is in loudly proclaiming the ideas of the Revolution and insisting they be implemented to their fullest rather than forgotten. I feel quite certain that none of the founders imagined the corruption of our current political system and are today turning in their graves as this spectacle of coronation unfolds.

[Cleita]

16. American acceptance of this status quo means

not much will really change in the future even if JC came down again to fight for equality, freedom and justice. I'm glad now that I will die sooner rather than later. I'm tired of things remaining the same, especially the bad things.

[imenja]

17. accepting defeat is acceptance

There is no difference. How do you think injustice prevails?

[imenja]

18. change

You have a good heart and a strong sense of moral outrage toward injustice and inequality. I don't know your age, but I trust you can find a way to have some impact on changing things. It's likely you do so already when you write your congresspeople and Senators about issues that disturb you. We need to each continue to do our part to change things, then we will have a better society

[K-W]

6. Some values associated with America are bad, some are good.

What on earth is the point of trying to declare it generally good or generally bad?

Such generalizations are pointless at best and deceptive at worst.

[Cleita]

7. Who are the ones who talk up traditional values?

They are the ones who don't have any real values except what benefits them. They are the political and religious right wing. I am suggesting we talk about what should be real American ethics. Yes, there are many good Americans out their who preach true ethical values but their voice is being lost in the wilderness of racism and sexism..

[IrateCitizen]

9. Exactly. Early American "values" reflected European attitudes...

By that, I mean that they reflected a deference to wealth and privilege (especially as borne out by the Federalist Party during the first 12 years of the Republic), and especially because they maintained a sense of superiority of the white race and its "civilization". Actually, that second part carried through all the way to... well, today.

Also inherent in the European attitude is a complete disconnection from the earth, something that contrasts with the Native American civilizations encountered by the early colonists. Now, while we may have a greater environmental awareness now, we still lack the sense of reverence for the earth that is truly necessary to be a viable steward of it for future generations. Part of this was due to the fact that the "New World" was a largely unspoiled one, with seemingly limitless resources (a probable source of the difference between US and European environmental ethic today). Another part of it is the fact that the Native Americans had a much closer relationship with nature for their very survival. Finally, religion played a role, since Christianity sets man AGAINST nature from the very beginning, while the Native Americans effectively worshipped nature itself as their Pantheon of Gods.

Now, I've read accounts of founding fathers' attitudes toward slavery, and they were quite mixed. We all know about Thomas Jefferson owning slaves -- and even having children with Sally Hemmings. There was also Patrick "Give me liberty or give me death" Henry, who was a slaveowner who talked of the "evils" of slaveowning, yet made no move during his life to free his slaves. To his credit, for everything else he seemed to be on the wrong side of concerning democratic practice, John Adams openly advocated the ending of slavery. So did Benjamin Franklin, actually joining with the early abolitionists toward the end of his life.

We can all agree in retrospect that slavery was a barbaric practice. I'm certain many of us, had we lived during that time, would have denounced it. However, if any of us were in a position in which we owned slaves, and they generated most of our wealth, we might be reluctant to relinquish the wealth and privilege we had based on the moral implications of slavery. It's kind of like how all of us like to talk about a lot of modern moral implications surrounding the American "way of life", but we're loathe to give up many of the trappings of that life out of principle because we know that they are morally unsound.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[IrateCitizen]

11. That was the EUROPEAN status quo, back then...

It was NOT necessarily the UNIVERSAL status quo. That's an important difference, since the US is essentially an offshoot of European culture.

Please take a look at my post #9, above.

[Cleita]

19. Kick

:kick:

[Cleita]

12. Agreed, but the fact that these values are still being

practiced by a certain faction of Americans in the twenty-first century really speaks volumes as to why Bush is still in power. It is time to clean our house and this time we need to go into those dark corners of the American psyche to brush all these bigoted American family values away.

For god's sake this is why Rush Limbaugh has a following of dittoheads. He appeals to this bigotry in white Middle Americans.

[imenja]

14. Republican party vs. Democratic party, in history

Another point: Your assessment that the ideas of inequality have been handed down by the Republican party from generation to generation (and yet you do not mention the Democratic party) is inaccurate, at least in what it omits. In the nineteenth-century, the Democrats were the party of slaveholders. The Republican party emerged out of the Kansas-Nebraska controversy as a party founded on one issue: Free Soil, arresting the spread of slavery into the newly acquired territories. The election of 1860 was nearly entirely sectional, the North voting Republican (Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot in some Southern states) and the South Democrat. Democratic support for slavery, Lincoln's Free Soil platform, and the actions of the so-called Radical Republicans during Reconstruction is the historical basis for Southern support for the Democratic party. As I'm sure you know, that changed with LBJ's support of civil rights legislation. Both parties are complicit in supporting inequality, though you will find no argument from me that the current day Republicans are far worse in this regard.