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I mean, it seems obvious to me that you are simply correct here. The founding fathers were by and large racists. America was in fact founded on something reasonably described as white supremacy. The CRT people, speaking strictly about those historical facts, have a point. Rufo won't admit that fact because it badly undermines his position.
What, in your view, is Rufo's position, strictly speaking?
I note that a lot of people here seem very reluctant to draw the above conclusions. Why do you suppose that is?
That's the error. Even if the founding fathers were white supremacists, they were much more other things, and those other things were what the country was founded on. To say "America was founded on white supremacy" is to imply that its foundation is composed mostly of white supremacist ideals.
This must be that nuance @ymeskhout was talking about. You try and sell that line to the public, tell me how it goes.
I disagree.
There's a socio-political token "racism", and there's a socio-political token "Thomas Jefferson", and the idea the Blues are positing is that there's better common ground available burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token and coordinating our cooperation around the "racism" token. The idea you're positing is that you can keep them from burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token by pointing out what an absolutely terrible idea it is. But the Scorpion's response is going to be "lol, LMAO", and at this point you really should know that and have planned accordingly.
The error is acting as though there's a conversation worth having with Blues about "racism" at all, that this is some sort of misunderstanding and a little more nuance (man, I love this word!) will sort it out. Thomas Jefferson was a racist and a slaveowner; why deny it? Because you value the Constitution? Because you think there's a nation here with a rich history that might be a little tarnished, but it's still worth saving? Sure. Sure! If you still believe that, you go give it your very best try. Rufo is, certainly, which is why he's embarrassing himself on camera, trying to deny obvious historical truths in a vain attempt to defend the foundations of liberal ideology, because he knows the nuance you're pitching, no matter how truthful, is as good as slitting his own throat. His answer looks kinda not-great to people who watch the video and can follow the arguments, which is essentially no one. Your way, that clip would be the most famous thing he ever said, permanently.
From a strategic perspective, sure, but as far as the actual truth goes, America wasn't founded on white supremacy any more than it was founded on bloodletting. From a strategic perspective, in a debate you just go for the most slimy manipulative deceitful things you can say that will get your opponent into an inconvenient bind. I responded to your object level statement:
with my own object-level statement, which is that they actually don't have a point.
At the founding, America's legal, social and political systems allowed black people to be owned as property, and the first immigration act specifically discriminated in favor of white people. Several of the founding fathers owned slaves; most of them appeared to hold views on race that would certainly mark them as central examples of white supremacists in our own time.
How is a group of white supremacists intentionally building a new legal system that enshrines white supremacy into law not "founded on white supremacy"?
You can say they were "much more other things". Much more how? It seems to me that this is a statement of subjective value, and there is no obvious reason to expect others to share it. A murderer likely spends a very small percentage of his time killing people, and yet we find that small percentage of killing the most salient aspect of his character. It does not seem obviously unreasonable to take the same approach with slavers.
To say accurately what the US was founded on, we should look at what the system was like before independence was declared and why they declared independence and fought a war against the most powerful army of the time for it.
The founders wrote the Declaration of Independence to proclaim their reasons for claiming it. It's published, you can go read it here. You'll see that it says nothing at all about slavery or race - it's all about civil rights, taxes, and various details about how the government works. Those were their beefs with the British system, not anything about slavery or race.
Indeed, it would be pretty weird for anything like that to be in there, considering that slavery and racism were near-universally approved of in those days. The British certainly had no problem with it at the time, and neither did any of the other colonizing powers. A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.
Indeed it does not. The original draft contained this passage:
...Which was then excised, with the (perhaps reluctant) consent of its author, because it was getting in the way of the independence effort. Faced with a choice between the respective tyrannies of the British crown and chattel slavery, they chose to embrace the latter to better fight the former. The document says nothing about slavery because many of them found the compromise shameful, but it's still the compromise they chose to make.
Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent. I don't see how that proves your point though. They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent. The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective. I'd say it shows the opposite of what you claim - the British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.
Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.
They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.
What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.
That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.
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Absent further information my best guess is that it's the defensive version of Arguments As Soldiers. The concern is that a concession on any ground, no matter how trivial, will threaten to collapse the entire front. Assuming I'm describing the dynamics here accurately, I find the fear very puzzling because it's so easily remedied by just a tiny bit of nuance. I also have to admit I start suspecting insecurity at play here regarding how strong one's convictions are, with the coping mechanism being latching onto as many arguments as possible (no matter how bad some might be).
So what would a more nuanced reply look like? More importantly from a socio-political perspective, what would you expect the response from Robinson and the Blue public at large to such a nuanced reply to be?
I mean, the assumption you're working from here seems to be that Ruso is a radical who's painted himself into a corner by refusing to concede any ground, no matter how small. It seems obvious to me that you're correct about him painting himself into a corner, but the part I think you miss is that he's not a radical, and in fact he is doing his very best to keep the peace, including by standing up for obvious lies.
There's a socio-political token "racism", and there's a socio-political token "Thomas Jefferson", and it seems to me that the idea the 1619 people are offering, and Robinson is endorsing, is that we'll reach common ground and a path forward by burning the "Thomas Jefferson" token and coordinating around the "racism" token, which they coincidentally maintain absolute, unquestionable control over and have abused daily for longer than any of us have been alive. You seem to be positing that we don't have to burn it, maybe just singe it a bit, and to your credit there's a lot of people in this thread laying out "nuanced" takes. One notes that they're offering them here, in a pseudonymous backwater of the internet that's been successively purged from like five other places by the very forces their nuance presumes won't object to claims that maybe White Supremacy isn't actually the worst thing ever.
The thing I don't think you appreciate is that Ruso is a moderate. What he's lying for is conciliation and peace. When the "Thomas Jefferson" token burns, which it absolutely will sooner or later, cooperation isn't going to reorganize around the "racism" token. Cooperation isn't going to happen at all. There is no future where we finally beat Racism and the scores come up and the crime rates normalize, not under anything remotely resembling current conditions and assumptions, and I think if you are honest with yourself, you probably know that. You should know that those unpleasant realities are not the fault of people like me, and that people like me are done being used as a scapegoat for them. Consequently, the racial animosities Robinson and the 1619 people are stirring up are here to stay for at least another generation, and the plan with the highest likelihood of dealing productively with that fact is probably Ruso's. The alternatives all appear to be various routes to, in the parlance of the community, coordinated meanness. Or at least it seems so to me. Maybe your view is different.
I'm comfortable conceding that Jefferson was a racist white supremacist straight-up because I don't give a shit about Jefferson. I don't value him or the Constitution he wrote or the nation he founded, the corpse of which I'm unhappily stuck in. I'm happy to embrace honesty and watch the counterfeit common-ground burn, because nothing I value is founded on it. I'm not counting on Ruso's plan to win, because I already assume that the moderate solutions are dead-ends. But you give the impression that you believe that the common ground is going to keep being there in the future, and I find that odd.
No doubt very similar to the fanfare and adoration the 1619 project received when it ran with a similar premise. There won't be a shortage of dramatic headlines from bad faith actors crowing over how Rufo Admits CRT is RIGHT! I don't deny that.
In the rest of your post, you're making what is essentially a game theory argument for why the defect strategy is justified both morally and strategically. I concede your explanation for why Rufo is lying to be valid and an important point to keep in mind, and it would be inappropriate for me to respond to that with a deontological appeal to honesty. Instead, though I'm not sure what goal Rufo is really pursuing but in the process I assume he's alienating plenty of fence-sitters with this obstinate strategy of refusing to concede banal truths.
The closest parallel I can think of is probably the trans discourse which seems to me to have gone through an obvious vibe shift this year where criticism from non-conservative voices has gotten much less hesitant. I gather at least some of it was probably the result of people tired of having been lied to about obvious topics for so long.
[btw I'm not sure what you mean about Rufo being a radical vs moderate, those terms don't really mean anything to me.]
Well, that doesn't sound so bad. Who cares about headlines? If that's what's at stake, why do people care so much?
...To speak more plainly, yes, that does seem like the likely immediate outcome. The long-term outcome that seems more relevant is that the CRT wins this argument, and we move significantly further from the happy futures.
Say rather I'm pointing out the incentives that currently exist. Specifically, I'm pointing out that moderate positions don't appear to be able to survive in the wild without deception, both of oneself and of others, while honesty leads to the embrace of extremism. I'm not endorsing lying, and in fact I argue that honesty is likely better for everyone involved. I do think it helps to understand why they think the lies are necessary, though.
There was a really good article I read here once talking about what amounted to a truce on race in the 90s-2000s, where white people tacitly agreed that racism was Very Bad, and black people tacitly agreed to stop constantly making accusations of racism, and the idea was that we'd try to fix the problems rather than arguing over who's fault they were. Only, it didn't actually work, because the problems didn't get fixed. Policy Starvation kicked in, and here we are.
Imagine the throttle lever of some vast steam-powered ship, a three-foot steel bar mounted to the floor. Push it forward, the ship speeds up, pull it back, the ship stops. Moderates are the people arguing over whether the best results will be secured by pushing the lever forward or back, or by how much. Extremists are the people who think the best results will come from ripping the lever off its mounting and wielding it as a club. System as a tool for mutual benefit, versus system as a weapon for mutual combat, no?
Rufo and Robinson are both moderates; they are trying to use the rules-as-written to secure what they consider to be positive, stable outcomes for everyone. They're trying to maintain something that at least roughly resembles what's commonly understood to be the status quo. The reason that last sentence is stacked with so many qualifiers, of course, is because that our common understanding of the status quo is mostly built on lies exactly like the ones you're chiding in your original post. The system (both the academic/educational system they're fighting over here, and our society more generally) runs on selective falsehood. Operating within its constraints consists of selecting which lies one will call out and which one will ignore, and especially on not breaching the very important lies all the serious, responsible people have collectively agreed to never, ever talk about.
Being moderates, both of them are liars: Rufo is lying about the past, claiming that Jefferson wasn't a white supremacist, and Robinson is lying about the present, claiming that Jefferson's white supremacy is at all relevant to the current situation. I'd argue that the significant difference is that Rufo's lie, if carried off, moves us away from serious conflict, while Robinson's lie moves us toward it, but I don't expect that argument to be persuasive to anyone on the other side; of course I'm going to argue that the lie that puts the burden on the other side is "better", while they're going to argue that the lie that puts the burden on my side is better; that's how people are. Of course I think I'm right and they're wrong; doesn't everyone? Charity doesn't solve the problem; it reveals the fact that there is no solution, at least in the general case. Hence blossoming extremism of various flavors, as we realize that compromise is not essential or often even possible, and so become more accepting of its absence. Or alternatively, as we grow disillusioned with the known lies of moderation, and turn to the untested claims of extremists.
Not so! Just insist that Robinson be honest as well, and recognize that selective honesty is not honesty. Or do you think that it is acceptably honest to start the conversation at "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?", as though this were an isolated trivia question?
Well, take a look at the responses here; the moderate voices are the ones defending Ruso's equivocation, aren't they? "The Truth, at any cost" is not a moderate, fence-sitter ideal; they don't want large-scale upheaval, and most of them would like to bypass the whole question. It seems to me that Ruso's approach is more likely to get them there, were it to work. They could go back to talking about how Racism Is Very Wrong And We Must Fight Against It, and also about how Jefferson was a Great Man Who Founded Our Nation. What could be more moderate and fence-sitting than that?
In any case, how do you differentiate between Ruso losing the uncommitted by being a jerk, versus losing them because he's simply been shouted down? The argument you're making seems to be that nuance would have improved Ruso's actual position, helped him achieve his goals more easily. The space Ruso is operating in is quite large, and there's a lot of people in it. Can you point to some doing a better job that Ruso at what appear to be Ruso's goals? If Ruso is Trump, all sound and fury even at the compromise of the core mission, who's De Santis?
This post explains, with impeccable clarity, a dynamic that is prevalent but elusive to describe. I guess you could group it under the penumbra of kayfabe. I admit that it's a bit naive and colloquially autistic for me to plow through with a whole "akshually, logic" analysis without better acknowledging how much the treaty theatrics are pulling some of the incentives levers out of frame.
What did I say that would make you think I would be in favor of selective honesty? Of course I want him to be honest too. That said, I don't think you're characterizing this exchange fairly. First, that's not how Robinson started the exchange as I already pointed out, it started when Robinson explicitly asked about Rufo's CRT criticism. But assuming Robinson did indeed start the conversation with "Was Jefferson a White Supremacist?" whether or not it would be considered honest would depend on some context. If it was a panel discussion on "The Legacy of the Founding Fathers" then I think it's perfectly fair, if it was in the context of "Is The United States a Force For Good" then I would find it extremely slimy.
This is mostly an empirical question, and I admit I don't have enough evidence to adjudicate. The other high-profile individual operating within the vague "wokeness has gone too far" that could be a contrast is probably Jonathan Haidt, but that answer probably just shows how ignorant I am about this question. A lot of my response would be necessarily leaning upon (potentially delusional) optimism of wanting the 'good guys' to win (read: the honest ones, regardless of partisanship). Rufo is slightly more famous than I am, and fame is a necessary condition for any activist hoping to leave an impact so he's already way ahead and much better positioned to evaluate his decisions. There could be something similar to how the candidates that can win the general are the least likely to win the primary, but that's going to boil down to an empirical question I'm not equipped to handle.
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