2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillary's historian refutes Sanders claim that this country is "created on racist principles". [View all]malthaussen
(17,187 posts)He does refer to Douglass, and juxtaposes him and Lincoln to Calhoun, which says to me there is a deeper, "state's rights" subtext to his argument. But it is subtle.
The whole thrust of his argument, though, seems to be that the Federal government was not founded on racist principles (because none such were enumerated in the Constitution), but that it may have been a different story in the States. Looks like he's following Fehrenbach, here. So not only is he conflating the Constitution with the founding principles of the country, he's also apparently developing the idea that whatever this or that state might have ruled, the Federal government is lily-pure as far as racism is concerned. Which would seem to indicate he also thinks corporations are people, since so far as I am aware, it is usually considered to be people who hold principles and establish institutions which reference them, and not the institutions themselves which do the thinking.
-- Mal