3 ms·
>I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights we
by slg 6y ago
>I would argue that the founders were students of Greek and Roman history which preceded them by almost 2000 years. The lessons encoded in the bill of rights were in fact, timeless and speak to the innate nature of human beings. As a species we haven't evolved much in 200K years.
Which is why it took until just within the last century to guarantee voting rights to people besides white men? It is bizarre how we want to pretend that those who came before us had some magical foresight to setup rules to govern a world they could never imagine while we ignore so many clear mistakes they made such as calling rights inalienable while simultaneously disenfranchising a majority of the population.
- chrisco255 6y agoVoting rights as a whole are about 2 centuries old. The United States, as young as it is, is the oldest continuous democracy in existence. The United States came out of a world of empires and war and conquering, which is how the world was for almost all of human history. Not a square mile of it hasn't had blood spilt over it several times over. At any rate, it was Thomas Jefferson who encoded the bold words "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." in our founding documents. That the world wasn't ready for its eventual conclusion didn't matter. A seed was sown. And that same language was used by MLK (himself taking full advantage of the first amendment to effect change). Lot of powerful and timeless ideas there.