Every group claims Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Douglass. Every group says the other produced Calhoun and eugenics.
The more I learn from different traditions, the more I find each group claims that their intellectual and cultural forebears are the people everyone likes and says the others descend from the ones everyone dislikes. I grew up in liberal, progressive households and schools. I learned that people who worked for liberty and freedom, and who fought against slavery and tyranny were the ones our traditions descended from. I learned that conservatives and libertarians just wanted profit. They would sacrifice the things we valued, like liberty and freedom, in favor of helping themselves. Hence, they were responsible for slavery and laissez-faire practices that caused hunger and poverty. I didn't learn to see the world from their perspectives. When I started to, in recent decades, I…
