04-09-2018, 03:19 PM
(04-08-2018, 11:31 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(04-08-2018, 01:50 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The 2016 election, if not the result of political shenanigans, is the result of a demagogue making promises that he can never achieve. The 2020 election will make the current President electorally accountable.
A scenario in which farm income plummets and the stock market loses half its valuation could give America this sort of election:
Donald Trump (R, inc) 54
conservative Mormon favorite son (I) 6
the new FDR (D) 478
This prediction depends upon some contingencies yet to happen that I cannot rule out.
FDR would be a Republican today. I'm surprised blues aren't calling for the removal of his monument too like their doing with Jefferson.
Jefferson had slaves (even if he was a relatively-gentle slave-owner). FDR may have emancipated even more slaves than did Lincoln, and from even-worse slavery. The Nazis may have been the worst slave-masters ever, and the thug regime in Japan was nearly as horrible.
Jefferson's soaring rhetoric on freedom may have been hypocritical, but that sort of rhetoric came of use to those who intended to abolish slavery. As I approach old age I take another look at hypocrisy; hypocrisy is the intermediate stage between complete denial of moral truth and the acceptance of that truth in full. Hypocrisy is an attempt to deny parts of a great virtue.
Let's remember that Jefferson did something that many Southern slave-masters did: they owned a black woman whom the man treated much like a wife, had children by her, treated his children indulgently, and paradoxically used the institution of slavery to protect his 'property'. After all, it wasn't much of a crime to kidnap a free black man and consign him to slavery -- but it was a great crime to steal a slave from an owner. But it was usually 'free men of color' who did this.
Sally Hemings, Jefferson's quasi-wife, was very light-skinned (3/4 white, and people 3/4 white and 1/4 black can look very light)... and was a cousin of the white wife that he survived. She was also very intelligent, and for someone as brilliant as Jefferson, that mattered greatly in companionship, and probably even more than did skin color not quite in the white range. Jefferson had children by Sally Hemings, and they were 7/8 white. Some of them passed, and Jefferson emancipated them and gave them passage to the western frontier.
I do genealogy, and Thomas Jefferson is a distant relative. (It is too bad that the genealogy site Rootsweb.com on which I have this is down, or I might show the connection). I cannot conclude that the children of Sally Hemings are anything other than his. What Jefferson did was what few white slave-owners did; he did what many free black men did.
Back to the topic of hypocrisy: there are but two sorts of people free of it: saints and thoroughly-evil people. It is regrettable that for every Francis of Assisi there are dozens of the likes of the late (executed) serial killer Alton Coleman, a horrid person who never claimed to be anything humane or decent... or even innocent. People can improve from their own, or at least ancestral hypocrisy. People rarely go from evil to good.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.