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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   3280 thread views

History Classes Are Mostly Useless

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: Americans are rather ignorant about history. Moral reasoning by historical analogy is bad. Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions. These facts suggest that the utility of history courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.

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They are told this to be spared from the more grounded idea that the American Revolution was a bid by the colonial intelligentsia to gain power by waging war against their rulers, and that the Constitution was something they made up to rile colonists up despite local colonial legislatures and parliament already trending towards whatever it proposed at the time.

I don't think this is really true. The Constitution was not written until several years after the end of the war with the UK, at which point the goal was not to rile anyone up, but to place the governance of the country on a stable and permanent basis. In addition, it was not simply 'made up' as a political ploy. We can go and read the personal letters and writing of the drafters of the Constitution, and it's quite clear that they took the document and the issues involved quite seriously and were sincerely concerned for the long term future of their nascent country. And I think it's a little facile to suggest that Parliament and the colonial legislatures would have arrived at the same place. The UK still, over 200 years later, does not have a written constitution and does not explicitly guarantee many of the rights in the US Constitution.

The UK still, over 200 years later, does not have a written constitution and does not explicitly guarantee many of the rights in the US Constitution.

The US did not guarantee the rights in the Constitution until well into the 20th century. The Bill of Rights was de jure unenforceable against State governments until the Civil War (and given the limits on the power of the feds viz-a-viz the States, which were taken seriously back then, the States were far more dangerous to individuals). The Bill of Rights remained de facto unenforceable during the Jim Crow era - the Slaughterhouse cases was the line of doctrine justifying this. Given the politics of the founding, I think both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists would be horrified by the degree of centralisation required for the Feds to effectively guarantee individual rights against the States.

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