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Notes -
This sort of reinterpretation is already near-universal. There are a few libertarian weirdoes who think you can have a country of 330 million yeoman-farmers in the 21st century; everyone else invoking the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, etc., is already straying far from the original meaning.
When MLK said:
Do you think he didn't know that a large portion of those "architects", maybe even a majority, were slave-owners at the time they "wrote the magnificent words"? He was clearly already doing a "death of the author"-type interpretation.
That’s fair, but I think that most people do the MLK thing, which is to say, “Yes, the real Founders were hypocrites and not particularly impressive, but the idea of the Founders - the most positive and charitable interpretation of their own words - is a great and morally significant mythos.” Whereas I’m saying, “No, even if those men genuinely believed every word they said and lived their lives as exemplars of those Enlightenment values, those values are bad and not something on which we should try to build a society. In fact, to the extent that the Founders were hypocrites, this is actually a point in their favor, because it implies that on some level they understood that their lofty ideals were not a reliable guide to actual living.”
Which enlightenment values are you in favor of throwing away?
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