I don't say this enough, but a modern nation should not be forced to live in an unalterable death trap of a Constitution, which was devised to keep the slaveholders on board and DIDN'T EVEN ACHIEVE THAT when push came to shove.

I honestly think that the "progressive" Founders thought that the design of the Constitution would lead to a gradual withering away of slavery. That was insane. You don't get rid of a system of brutality like that without killing people. It's impossible.

I'm reading slave narratives in one of my classes, and one thing that really jumps out at me is that every slaveowner should be presumed to be a serial rapist unless there's strong evidence to the contrary. These are the guys who were given a systematic advantage in the Founding.

You know the slogan "the cruelty is the point"? That's basically slavery in a nutshell. And again, the Constitution is designed to favor the guys who presume to own other human beings, who torture them on the slightest provocation, who rape them and then sell their own children.

And once slavery was abolished, at a huge cost in human lives, those same people were put back in charge in the South, leading to 100 years of segregation and state-sponsored terrorism against black communities. States rights are sacred, after all!

So yeah, I guess it makes a certain kind of sense that the first black president found his administration hamstrung and his legacy completely destroyed by a state-centric, anti-democratic mode of governance that was specifically devised to accomodate slavery.