CT Blue

Michelle Bachmann is taking a little bit of heat for the rapidity with which she signed that Family Values oath, with its statement that black families were better off under slavery, and for her general propensity to compare everything she doesn’t like to the imposition of slavery:

– Health Reform: In a 2009 speech in Colorado, Bachmann railed against health care reform. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass.” Claiming that many Americans already pay half their income to taxes, she said, “This is slavery…It’s nothing more than slavery.”

– National Debt: In January, Bachmann offered her now infamous take on American colonial history in which she declared that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Bachmann then framed her speech as an argument against the “slavery” of the national debt. “It is a slavery, it is a slavery that is a bondage to debt and a bondage to decline,” she said. “It is a subservience of a sovereign people to a failed, self-selected elite.”

Well, I maintain that the criticism is misplaced. Bachmann is simply following a long American tradition of white folks complaining about their own prospects of being reduced to slavery, even while they themselves held men and women in bondage. And it’s hard to ever find an example where the evil complained of comes close to the evil with which it’s compared.

To pick a couple of examples from fairly respectable sources. Here’s Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 29, writing about the necessity of a well regulated militia:

If there should be an army to be made use of as the engine of despotism, what need of the militia? If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition, for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course, but to the seat of the tyrants, who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined intrenchments of power, and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people?

Even Tom Paine, in the very first paragraph of the American Crisis, accuses the British Parliament of turning white Americans into slaves:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

These are relatively mild examples, to which I confine myself through laziness and the difficulty of finding others by googling (search terms too common-these came easily be searching e-books). Anyone who has read much history is well aware that the Americans of the revolutionary period routinely accused the British of trying to enslave them, and, worse than that, after the revolution Southern slaveholders accused the people of the North of trying to do the same to them, and there are probably hundreds of examples of members of the elite complaining that this or that action of the state threatened them with slavery. All this without a hint of shame or, seemingly, any recognition of the hypocrisy of the words coming from the mouths of slaveowners or their enablers. Certainly the British didn’t miss the contradiction during the revolution.

So, as I say, Michelle is just following a long and ignoble tradition. She walks in the footsteps of some giants, and many pygmies.

Afterword: I can’t put this on-line without coming to Tom Paine’s defense a bit, since, of all the founders, he was the most actuated by pure principle. He was always and vociferously anti-slavery, but even he, apparently, could see his way clear to comparing a (relatively) mild injustice to an unspeakable evil.