“Very important for people to realize that while the founding fathers their achievement was not because they were male but they transcended their sex. They weren’t just chauvinists or racists. They created ideas out of the enlightenment that meant that you would have woman’s suffrage, that you would have civil rights because that was the logic of “all men are created equal.” They didn’t have to do that. There is nothing in the Constitution that mentions race or gender so that they were male is incidental.”
On Tucker Carlson show
Victor Davis Hanson is billed as a conservative. The quote above demonstrates that he is merely holding down the right side of the left. Davis, in point of fact, is a classic Renaissance Humanist. There is very little that is conservative about the man.
Critiquing the quote we would note;
1.) The founding father’s transcended their sex? What does that even mean?
2.) While they were chauvinists and racists “they weren’t JUST chauvinists and racists.” Well, that is a relief to know.
3.) I guran-damn-tee you that very very few, if any of those founding fathers would have supported women’s suffrage or civil rights in the way women’s suffrage and civil rights occurred.
4.) The majority of the founding fathers were not operating out of an Enlightenment worldview. The founding documents (Constitution and Declaration of Independence) can only be understood in the context of a Christian World and life view.
5.) The founding fathers did not believe that all men were created equal in the modern egalitarian sense. They believed all Englishmen were equal. That was the issue at hand. The issue at hand in the American counter-Revolution was whether Englishmen in the colonies were equal to Englishman in England. The fact that they did not believe that all men were created equal in the modern egalitarian sense is seen in the fact that in the Declaration of Independence they refer to the Indians as “savages.” That is an odd thing to say if you believe all men are created equal in the sense that Hanson is using it.
6.) I suppose that they were white is incidental as well. I mean, just as women could have as easily produced the same document (after all the men transcended their gender) so nonwhite men could likewise have produced that same document since race and gender are incidental.
Amen.