The uninformed objection is as simple as it gets. Blacks are a whole person and therefore the fraction was racist because it didn’t define blacks as a whole person. The no-less ignorant student then goes home thinking that he/she has learned about a great sin of our nation’s past and promptly forgets about it during after-school game time.

Some time later in life that same ignorant student will hear a politician, pundit, or other ignoramous refer to the famous fraction and recall back to when they heard it the first time and formulated an uninformed opinion. Now their uninformed opinion attracts them to the ignorant commentator or candidate who reminded them of it. Continuing to think themselves smart and well versed in at least the basics of America’s fundamental sins, they are again distracted only to repeat the cycle some time in the future. On and on this goes with the person never realizing that the whole premise was a three fifths lie.

Why don’t they just think? How did the fraction even come about? It came about because of a compromise. Some in the convention wanted blacks to count as whole people and others wanted them to not count at all. What the ignorant fool politicians and poor students do not understand today is that it was the anti-slavery delegates who argued for blacks to not count at all.

The pro-slavery delegates wanted blacks to remain slaves, but wanted them to count in the apportionment of representatives in the congress. That would have meant that a state with a large slave population with not only no property owning rights but actually being the property of those with rights to own property and vote, would still have those slaves counted the same as free people. Imagine, where the issue of slavery would become an issue ripping at the thread of the nation in congress after congress what would have happened to further the cause of the pro-slavers if they had more representatives in congress counting those with no civil and free rights.

The argument of the delegates in the constitutional convention who aimed to have blacks not counted at all, zero fifths of a person, was not to make a philosophical statement about blacks and whites. Their argument was to have the constitution declare to the world the evil reality of the plight of the black slave in the former colonies. The pro-slavers wanted no statement in the constitution of any kind regarding their plight. They wanted the benefits of the free labor to the wealthy slave owners, as well as the benefit of their numbers to apportion them power in the congress. It was a great victory to get that 1 whole person down to three fifths.

The world reading about the new American constitution could see plainly that some had fought to make the slave-holding states less powerful by declaring more truly the reality of life in some of the former colonies for black people. The only tragedy of the three fifths apportionment was, given slavery could not be abolished in he convention without losing states in the union, that truer statement could not be made, that blacks in early American states were not people to those who considered them property of other men.

The above is a fairly lengthy but enlightening, uplifting, edifying speech by Clarence Thomas on the subject Lincoln, jurist prudence, and slavery.

In this speech Justice Thomas talks about Lincoln’s famous rebuttal of the support of the Kansas-Nebraska act extending slavery to the Louisiana purchase territories. Many people think that Lincoln used the phrase “House divided” in reference to the civil war, but it was well before the civil war and even before he was president.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new–North as well as South.

The battle against slavery that had begun in the very beginning of the federation during the constitutional debates, culminated in the civil war. Then after the civil war, the quest for equal civil rights based on rights culminated in the civil rights movement. In each case, the journey to equalize the house divided took 80 to 100 years.

In the 20th century, the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR administrations began to divide the house again. We will either become fully socialist as it was called by the progressives of the Wilson era or we will re-liberalize our individual sovereignty back from the state and be fully the nation that we fought for in the revolutionary war.

I fear that Lincoln’s words are prescient for our time as well. On the issue of Marxism in America “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved–I do not expect the house to fall–but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

In the classical sense, Liberalism is the rejection of sovereignty in the state in favor of the concept of individual sovereignty in the people. Up until the liberal period in western society, sovereignty was usually vested in a monarch, parliament, or some other state entity. All individuals within the dominion of the sovereign were nothing more than subjects of the sovereign. Their own natural sovereignty was not recognized or granted to them by the sovereign of the state.

Many philosophers and political thinkers began prior to the liberal era to theorize and later declare that all people were born sovereign and that their sovereignty had been commandeered by those in whom state power was then vested. This radical idea was treasonous in many nations and was only theoretical until a state would arise that would challenge the old notions of vested power. The moment that allowed the theory of liberalism to become practice arrived in an attempt of colonists subject to a distant power to retain liberty that had only been obtained by accident on the part of the host state.

The British crown at the time of the American revolution may have been under the authority of a liberal constitution established in the Cromwell rebellion, but it never gave the people living in the homeland of the empire the kind of individual sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed only through the inability of the crown to restrict them across the Atlantic. When the restrictive power of the crown increased through the expansive influence and power of the growing British empire, the American colonists would not concede the liberty they came to appreciate was theirs.

The declaration of independence and later the constitution named a liberty that had already been part of the American tradition. Subsequent movements of abolitionism of slavery and reconciliation with the native populations with time bore fruit. The journey had been hard and bloody.

Growing along side the expansion of true classical liberalism, modern “liberalism” also grew. It has always been mislabeled, because it has nothing to do with the liberation of individual sovereignty. In fact, the liberal acceptance and experimentation of anything counter to normative culture often pursues expansion of the state in its favor. One can see that liberals so called are neither liberal nor open-minded. They are only counter-cultural and permissive of anything counter-cultural. They are illiberal.

Illiberalism, if further named could be called permissivism. Permissivism is a term that must be used, because it explains it all. If you would like to permit abortion, the left is your ally. Want to have gay marriage, the left is your ally. Activist courts, Czars instead constitutionally reviewed cabinet members, money confiscated from one citizen to give to another, expansive administrative bureaucracies bound by no one and no constitution, indoctrination in schools, state-sponsered healthcare, and on and on. The ideology of permitting anything as long as it is new, expansive, and will solidify your life statement of not being like your parents is the leftist’s ideology.

When Mussolini first became an international political figure, he was celebrated for his new ideas. Socialism was stale and unworkable to many leftists. After all, the government must take over all industry for it to work. The political and logistical implications of such an implementation were seen by many un-constrained permissives as impossible or at least improbably executable. Mussolini’s idea of simply regulating businesses into large corporate entities that would be easier to infiltrate, influence, or bully was so much more practical.

Mussolini himself was a died-in-wool socialist from birth getting even his given name, Benito, from the mexican socialist revolutionary Benito Juarez. Benito Mussolini was lionized in American and western culture for brief time as his ideas were fresh and had not yet been carried to their only conclusions. It was the permissives that called themselves progressives that simply loved these new and unusual ideas.