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Historical Malpractice

 


Heather Cox Richardson is a favorite among some of my leftist friends.  Her position as an academic offers imprimatur for her wanton partisanship and her acumen as a historical researcher helps her find the cherry-picked details she needs to cover a false narrative with a veneer of historicity.  I don't usually engage because her posts are long enough that it would take too much unpacking to deal with, but I wanted to take a crack at just a part of this one.




Keep in mind that her schtick consist mostly of framing modern Republicans as morally corrupt and modern Democrats as knights in shining armor for all that is good and right, by peppering her argument with so much actual historical facts that you have the feeling of "context" so you don't notice the logical sleight of hand by which her narrative escapes reason and reality.  With that said, here's my summary, responding in snarky kind to her own partisan framing, but faithful to the content of her ideas:

Assume Al Gore's hanging chads, Stacey Abrams, the Mueller report, and every other evidence of Democrats exhausting every legal means to claim an election wasn't legitimate don't exist.  Next, assume Trump's efforts to also exhaust appeals to courts, local officials, his own vice president, and anyone who would hear him that the election irregularities deserved more investigation are not mere partisan rigor, but are, in fact intentionally criminal attempts to use power to extort a victory when he lost fair and square and knew it.  Now, tell the true story of how the 14th amendment came into force and combine that with some news of a paper written by anti-Trump but somehow "originalist" constitutional scholars claiming that the amendment summarily and automatically makes Trump ineligible for future office.

The crux of the historical context goes something like this: Lincoln's VP tried to make executive deals with Southern power brokers to make some sort of reconciliation after the South was defeated.  Congressional Republicans of the day found it so scandalous that the most ardent traitors of the Union would come, with extra clout now that black citizens counted as full citizens, as the 2/3rds compromise lost effect, to wield power in their federal halls that they added an amendment to ban traitors to the constitution from holding office.

And now, here's the pull quote.  See if you can see the trickery at work here:

Republicans in the 1860s would certainly have believed the Fourteenth Amendment covered Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of a presidential election. More, though, that amendment sought to establish, once and for all, the supremacy of the federal government over those who wanted to solidify their power in the states, where they could impose the will of a minority. That concept speaks directly to today’s Republicans.

There's at least two elements to the sleight of hand no proper historian should be attempting but which she does: 
1. Impossible assertion based on anachronistic and utter partisan mindreading--no one can know what Republicans in the 1860s would "certainly" have believed about Trump's defense of the constitution.  And defending it was exactly what he thought he was doing at the time--resisting a stolen election.
2. More importantly, that amendment sought to establish the supremacy of the federal government over what now?  Over the question of whether the states can be trusted to guarantee basic human rights, certainly, but over all power in the states writ large?  The entire concept of delimited powers?  Not even close!  The principle of states rights is NOT what the Civil War did away with.  Federalism is not dead.  The line needed to be moved because the South was abusing the concept of states rights to oppress and maintain power for a minority elite.  But don't throw the baby of states rights out with the bathwater of slavery.
The true principle that a collectivist hack like Richardson will feign to never understand so that she can knowingly demonize her political opponents through her malpractice of history is this: decisions should be made at the most local level possible because those who a problem affects deserve to succeed or fail at its solution using their own resources.  We can't change history--there was a South.  It was slaveholding.  From before 1776 the South was betraying the concept of liberty the nation's founding documents derived their raison d'être and inspiration from.  But let's not pretend that centralized government, frivolous prosecution of electoral opponents, and the channeling of dead Republicans expand anyone's liberty.  None of it is based in truth.  Her point is out of context, and distorted.  Liberty needs the laboratory of strong states to whom all legislative, executive and judicial powers belong EXCEPT those delimited by the Constitution, which is a limit on the FEDERAL government, not the "solution" to those unruly states who just need to get their minds right on what the fat cats in DC believe flyover country should agree with.  We have a Republic, thank God, not a democracy.

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