@curtosis @mattyglesias Fair enough. I do believe there was a strong tension at the founding between genuine enlightenment idealism and pragmatic fear by the wealthy, of the masses broadly, of slaves and moralists who would pursue abolition or otherwise undermine their right to property in human bodies. My “as designed” pretends there was only the former, but the latter explains a lot of the document’s pathologies, biting as hard now, 250 years later, as ever.

@curtosis @mattyglesias I agree that the reconstruction amendments were an attempt to expunge the slaving in favor of the enlightenment, a second founding it is called, but more in aspiration than in practice. In practice, those amendments did alter the country completely, cementing the supremacy of the Federal government and Constitution and in theory the rights it guarantees to all. But they fell far short of expunging the document’s more subtle poisons.