this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
683 points (98.6% liked)
Political Memes
5483 readers
2165 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, the point I'm arguing is against you here:
Sorry that actual primary source evidence doesn't mean anything to you?
“By saying all men were "created equal" Thomas Jefferson intended to abolish the system of hereditary aristocracy, where some individuals were born as lords and others were ordinary.”
Ok. Landed white male aristocracy.
Then there was black people not getting to vote.
Women couldn’t vote.
If you didn’t have enough property you couldn’t vote.
Native Americans weren’t citizens until the 1900s. Don’t forget the awful treatment and suffering they received at the hands of Jackson.
Let’s not bother discussing how long many of the founders owned slaves, despite their “enlightenment”, and how long it took them to free them. If they did.
That’s just off the top of my head. Sure seems like landed white males were still top of the heap as far as the founders went.
E: that’s framing for you. A bunch of (often rich) white guys wrote the rules for white males to still be in charge. Enlightened or not, that’s how the country started. We have improved on their work in many ways, but as I stated originally, we need to take the shiny veneer off and look at who they were and what they really did. None of this is untrue.
Jefferson also believed in a 100% inheritance tax, so I'm pretty sure you can remove 'landed' and 'aristocracy' from the ideals intended there.
Each state set its own requirements for voting, and several Founding Fathers were advocates for total legal equality.
This is undeniably true. None of the Founding Fathers were feminists.
Each state set its own requirements for voting, and a number of states had no property requirements.
Genocide Jackson wasn't a Founding Father. Citizenship was not automatic for Native Americans until the 1900s due to the strange state of semisovereignity most Native American tribes have.
Yes, let's not forget the terrible slaver John Jay, who founded the foremost abolitionist movement in the US at the time, or Franklin, who advocated for total integration of white and black populations, or Hamilton, who was instrumental in New York adopting a hard abolitionist stance.
Cherry pick much? You picked exceptions while ignoring the rest. At no point did I use absolutes like “all” founders were idiots or something. Yet you cherry pick and suggest that invalidates my points. Good grief.
Whatever. I’m done. I stand by my point: understand the founders in their time, understand their flaws, understand that we have polished their images while ignoring flaws and context to make them heroic. They were humans. That’s all.
I'm sorry for contesting your points with the facts of the matter and pointing out that the literal majority of the Founding Fathers don't fit your claim.
Yes, they were flawed and human. Flawed and human advocates for Enlightenment-era ideals which are very far from the "White Male Landowning Aristocracy" idea that you accused their ideals of being founded on.