One of those weekend news stories broke yesterday; poopdogcomedy posted a diary about it. I ran across it via the BBC.
If anyone thinks the departure of Trump from the White House will magically bring the Republican Party to its senses, guess again. Tom Cotton shows there are plenty more in the party peddling the same divisive death cult Kool Aid Trump is pushing.
To be fair, Cotton didn’t actually say slavery was a necessary evil — he blamed it on the usual suspects:
As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
emphasis added
Translation: The founding fathers knew it was a bad thing, but only temporary, and was needed to make America great. So they got rid of it when the time was right.
Sure they did.
You could also argue that Hitler and the rise of Nazi Germany was a necessary evil, because Jews would never have come together to found Israel without the Holocaust.
(Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply when talking about actual Fascists and white supremacists as we are here.)
It’s amazing how Cotton slides right past the Civil War: thousands dead, followed by over a century-plus of continued racism in the country. Also amazing is how Cotton implies all of the Founding Fathers were okay with slavery, and that none of them had any objections to it.
Well, it’s only amazing if you ignore the history of the modern Republican Party since it embraced the Southern Strategy.
The sentence quote about slavery is grabbing the headlines, but there is so much more to this story.
What has gotten Tom Cotton’s knickers in a twist is the 1619 Project. As the Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports,
While labeling 1776 as the nation’s “official birth date,” the 1619 Project seeks “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
Timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves in the Virginia colony, the 1619 Project was launched last year by the Times.
Arguing that it is “finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”
The project’s mastermind, Nikole Hannah-Jones, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
A curriculum based on the project, which includes essays, poems, photographs and short fiction by a variety of contributors, was also created.
The result of a partnership between the Times and the nonprofit Pulitzer Center, the curriculum is intended for use in primary and secondary schools nationwide.
Tom Cotton has responded with the Orwellian-titled Saving American History Act of 2020.
Washington, D.C. — Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants.
Under the bill, the Secretaries of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture would be required to prorate federal funding to schools that decide to teach the 1619 Project—determined by how much it costs to plan and teach that curriculum. Any federal funds intended for low-income students or special-needs students are not affected by this legislation.
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded. Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage,” said Cotton.
Cotton is a master of Orwellian doublethink.
“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch,” Cotton said Friday. “America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”...
...“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said...
So of course he is trying to block an effort to do just that, because NY Times, liberals…
“It won’t be much money,” Cotton said. “But even a penny is too much to go to the 1619 Project in our public schools. The New York Times should not be teaching American history to our kids.”...
...“Curriculum is a matter for local decisions and if local left-wing school boards want to fill their children’s heads with anti-American rot, that’s their regrettable choice. But they ought not to benefit from federal tax dollars to teach America’s children to hate America,” he said.
One of the cornerstones of the American Revolution and Founding Fathers hagiography is that they were all patriots selflessly devoted to the ideals of Freedom. The suggestion that they were also fighting for wealth and power somehow gets left out of the story.
“Think about the children” and what they are deemed able to handle has to be reconciled with the problem of children becoming adults who need to know the whole story. To quote from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette again,
...Brian Keith Mitchell, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock history professor, said the 1619 Project separates rhetoric from reality when it examines the Founding Fathers.
“The concept of us having a nation conceived in liberty and justice and freedom, I mean it was sort of a farce,” Mitchell said.
He also dismissed claims that the 1619 Project is racially divisive.
“How would teaching what actually happened be divisive?” he asked. “The whole point of … being educated is to have correct information.”
It’s hard to overstate the role of slavery in the American story, he said.
“It’s instrumental in the formation of wealth here, instrumental in the mobility of our nation. The buying and selling of slaves and the things that they produced were the cornerstone of American capitalism,” he said.
“There would not be an America, at least not a First World America, without slavery,” he said.
Note: admitting a connection between American capitalism and slavery is a red flag to conservative ideologues who have as a strict article of faith that capitalism and democracy are synonymous with freedom. Cotton is attempting to preserve that mythology at the cost of educating children with the truth.
“The 1619 Project is left-wing propaganda. It’s revisionist history at its worst,” he [Cotton] said in an interview Friday….
This, after all, is a man who belongs to a party currently under the leadership of a man who “loves the poorly educated.”
There is this difference between Trump and Cotton. Trump will say or do anything to stay in power to avoid looking like a loser. Cotton apparently believes this stuff. That makes him far more dangerous. His bill probably stands no chance of becoming law… but then who thought Trump would ever end up in the White House?
99 days…
NOTE: Tom Cotton is running unopposed for reelection by any Democrat because the Democratic Party in Arkansas is apparently totally incompetent. It’s hard to believe that’s the state where Bill Clinton rose to prominence. WTF happened? For those who don’t want to vote for Cotton, Ricky Dale Harrington Jr. is running as a Libertarian…
Bonus reading: Eric Boehlert calls out the NY Times’ continuing efforts to normalize the Republican Party.
UPDATE: Cotton is denying that he believes slavery was a necessary evil.
TPM has the details:
Cotton’s office denied to TPM in a statement on Sunday that the Arkansas senator believes that slavery was a “necessary evil.”
“As his quote makes clear, that view was held by some founding fathers,” Cotton press secretary James Arnold told TPM. “Reporting to the contrary is politically motivated and dishonest.”
Gee Senator — you don’t believe it yourself? Would it possible to for you to say the Founders were wrong about something?