Connecticut Dems strip Jefferson, Jackson names from fundraising dinner

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Fox News:

Connecticut state Democrats voted Wednesday to remove the names of former presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual fundraising dinner, reportedly because of their ties to slavery.

 

According to the Hartford Courant, it only took two minutes for the Connecticut Democratic State Central Committee to unanimously pass a resolution stripping both names from the title of the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner.

 

Party Chairman Nick Balletto proposed the change. He told the Daily Caller the decision, which apparently came under pressure from the NAACP, was about party identity.

 

“Democrats are the party of inclusion. And in my opinion, the time has come to reevaluate the name of the JJB [the dinner] to reflect the diverse makeup and forward-looking vision of our party,” he said. He and other Democrats also cited Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans.

 

The decision comes as officials across the country debate removing Confederate symbols on state grounds -- but the move to reach even further back and scrub references to one of the nation's most admired founding fathers was seen by some as a step too far.

 

Connecticut Republican Party Chairman JR Romano called the move a liberal distraction, and noted his party ended slavery.

 

“The Confederate flag should’ve never been on buildings, but the legacy and the history of the Democratic Party is tied to racism, segregation, and they’re trying to rewrite history. They can’t deny their roots,” he told FoxNews.com. He said it was a shame that Democrats tout a dinner name change while Connecticut middle class families suffer.

________

 

From the party that brought you segregation.

[Valin]

Presentism on parade

Against Presentism

Lynn Hunt

 

 

(Snip)

 

Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline. In some ways, now that we have become very sensitive about Western interpretations of the non-Western past, this temporal feeling of superiority applies more to the Western past than it does to the non-Western one. We more easily accept the existence and tolerate the moral ambiguities of eunuchs and harems, for example, than of witches. Because they found a place in a non-Western society, eunuchs and harems seem strange to us but they do not reflect badly on our own past. Witches, in contrast, seem to
challenge the very basis of modern historical understanding and have therefore provoked immense controversy as well as many fine historical studies.

 

Students readily absorb these attitudes of temporal superiority, but they also stand in some ways as our best bulwark against it. When I teach Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history to students in UCLA's history of history class, they at first seize upon his Eurocentric, indeed racist, comments about Africa's place in world history, but they quite readily see that their condescension toward Hegel derives from Hegel's own worldview. Hegel was the great codifier of Western temporal superiority; for Hegel, all truth is revealed through the progression of history, which means that those in the present always have a better shot at grasping truth than do people in the past. Students understand quite quickly that those who follow them will have the same retrospective advantage over them that they enjoy vis à vis Hegel. Moreover, despite the great upsurge of interest in 20th-century and even post–World War II topics, students still take courses in ancient and medieval history. Whether motivated by escapism, nostalgia, a wish to study "elite" subjects, or just a desire for something "different," they readily throw themselves into another era. In this, they reflect the interests of the general public, which often resents the scholarly insistence on revealing all the foibles of past men and women. They don't always want history to teach them the inadequacies of people in the past or even to reassure them about their own identities in the present. It's the difference of the past that renders it a proper subject for epic, romance, or tragedy-genres preferred by many readers and students of history. The "ironic" mode of much professional history writing just leaves them cold.

 

Presentism admits of no ready solution; it turns out to be very difficult to exit from modernity or our modern Western historical consciousness. But it is possible to remind ourselves of the virtues of maintaining a fruitful tension between present concerns and respect for the past. Both are essential ingredients in good history. The emergence of new concerns in the present invariably reveals aspects of historical experience that have been occluded or forgotten. Respect for the past, with its concomitant humility, curiosity, and even wonder (as Caroline Bynum reminded us in a memorable presidential address), enables us to see beyond our present-day concerns backward and forward at the same time. We are all caught up in the ripples of time, and we have no idea of where they are headed.