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parrhesia  1yr ago (parrhesia.substack.com)   2993 thread views

History Classes Are Mostly Useless

parrhesia.substack.com

SS: Americans are rather ignorant about history. Moral reasoning by historical analogy is bad. Historical examples can be misleading for making predictions. These facts suggest that the utility of history courses is overestimated. In fact, they are mostly useless.

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The UK still, over 200 years later, does not have a written constitution and does not explicitly guarantee many of the rights in the US Constitution.

The US did not guarantee the rights in the Constitution until well into the 20th century. The Bill of Rights was de jure unenforceable against State governments until the Civil War (and given the limits on the power of the feds viz-a-viz the States, which were taken seriously back then, the States were far more dangerous to individuals). The Bill of Rights remained de facto unenforceable during the Jim Crow era - the Slaughterhouse cases was the line of doctrine justifying this. Given the politics of the founding, I think both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists would be horrified by the degree of centralisation required for the Feds to effectively guarantee individual rights against the States.

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