“We the people” has always been an egregious lie, the faux-universalism of bourgeois revolutionaries.

Do you believe that it’s such a great thing to flatter someone’s fondness of slavers, however “selectively”? Do you believe that, when the basis of your rhetoric, the “point of leverage” to extend you analogy, is the personality cult built around slavers and that is the place from which it draws this affection that you want to “take advantage of,” that you are not either undermine socialism by joining them in veneration (but jumping in and out of their Bible recitation like a dolphin, based on which parts you think are useful), or else that you are undermining yourself by successfully attacking the cult but leaving yourself holding dead, rotten words, because you disabused them of their affection for it?

You need to fight without taking shortcuts that you will suffer for in the future. You cannot simply take into hand the ready-made ideology of the state you are trying to destroy and act like this sort of pandering to myths is needed or even helpful. Do you know how to use the Founders to establish that class antagonism is irreconcilable and the job of a capitalist state is fundamentally to “mediate” it in favor of the capitalists? Or how democracy thereby inevitably results in undermining the power of the rich and their monopolistic claims to property, and that this is why our government is structured how it is? The Founders wrote about this. They wrote about most of it pretty explicitly, even, but they merely said that suppressing democracy was good if it meant defending the interests of the rich.

I apologize for doing the Sturgeon thing, but if you were trying to rehabilitate a Neo-Nazi, do you think a good approach would be to quote Hitler on the basis that they would be more sympathetic to your message if he saw the famously-credible Hitler supporting parts of it? Do you think that’s how you would do best to persuade them of, I don’t know, the badness of animal cruelty or environmental degradation? Or by using some phrase that sounds good in isolation, but which he never meant and acted against [like “We the people” for the Founders]? Of courses not, because their Hitlerism is precisely the problem that you are trying to combat. So it is with members of, say, Jefferson’s cult of personality, that you aren’t going to have the best time drawing them out of the cult by using the persistence of their affection for Jefferson as a vital axiom of your appeal! It’s paradoxical.

We have plenty of rhetorical tools already that are infinitely more valuable and don’t do favors for the heart of the ideology we want to destroy, most of all that the truth is on our side, and therefore the empirical record is on our side, and we shouldn’t undermine this with disingenuous, condescending pablum as though we don’t believe they can accomplish in their development what we already have and didn’t need such backward tools for, because if those tools were used on us we’d be just as likely to become “Patriotic Communists” or whatever the ACP calls itself. Despite the memes, we also have human nature on our side, because humans are inclined toward empathy and toward helping each other, such that it needs to be beaten down with cruelty by the system we live in, but they are incapable of taking it from us. Most of all, though, our greatest persuasive tool is that we can actually help people where others refuse to, even if it’s just a tiny mutual aid network, or treating someone like a human deserving of dignity when others won’t, but it can also be greater, like helping them organize a union in a shitty job they’ve been stuck in for 20 years so they can see how collective action can help all workers, themselves included, or toppling some dogshit centrist mayor who does nothing but sell out his constituents and yet gets re-elected because it’s a blue state and the red guy is worse and the DNC is firmly on his side.

Any sensible person would be able to tell that when you said “We the people,” you were speaking out of both sides of your mouth, and even a less-sensible person may grow wise to it eventually, and thereby quite reasonably resent your disingenuousness all the more for having been successfully baited by it in the past.

It’s not like I’ve never quoted the Founders to explain something. I think it’s a pretty good summary of the attitude of revolutionary socialists that

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

Which was, of course, written by John Adams. I even have something of a feeling of emotional resonance with the broader context of the message, which is that he is saying that he wishes that he could be in the position of his grandson and study art instead of war. In explaining my own disposition to people, I tend to say that I have a lot of the disposition of a conservative, I just don’t live in a society that should be conserved and therefore wish that one could be established where being a conservative would be a good thing, because it was a just society that should be conserved. However, in saying this, I’m using a common point of reference, but would never, ever raise the issue to someone without pointing out that Adams’s message is farcical in relation to what he actually did if he meant anything other than literally his own son and grandson, and that when I say it is a good summary, that’s by taking it as speaking of the future generations of all people, regardless of ethnicity, gender, etc., which Adams demonstrably was not very interested in and surely did not mean.