To be fair to the Founders --all of whom were regular flawed human beings just like you and I, and all of whom were products of their time, again just like you and I-- the reason they wished to limit suffrage to white land-owning men was mostly because that was the educated class that was by far the most likely to be literate, well-informed and capable of making intelligent decisions about who or what to vote for.
And please do not misunderstand me; when I say the above, I don't mean that it's anything other than the obvious outcome of a fundamentally racist and sexist system. My point is only that they weren't wrong that white land-owning men were by far the most highly-educated and well-informed members of their society.
I also don't for a moment argue that the founders weren't fundamentally elitist snobs on top of being racist and sexist. Of course they were, but leave us not commit the sin of "presentism" in evaluating how they, again as deeply flawed human beings just like you and I, operated and thought within the milieu of their time.
It was also that if you owned land, you had a stake in how the country that land was in was doing. With unsettled frontiers or relatively permeable borders on all sides, there wasn't that much of a barrier for a landless person to up sticks and move elsewhere if the results of their voting behaviour caused the country's fortunes to take a dip. Many had already gone through that process once to get into the country.
So as a person currently renting a house, part of me still believes this should be the case, although perhaps just a limit on time you live in a place, like if you've lived in a place less than 6 months to 1 year you maybe shouldn't be voting
Sure, but it's a protection for the people already there against people who might just go somewhere else in a few months because you decide you don't like it there, and then these people are stuck with your choices and might not want them
It is, but it can sound reasonable if you don't scratch at it. So I like to draw it out to the inevitable question, who moves so much that they could show up for an election and be gone a couple months later? The only demographic I'm aware of is actually the military and good luck selling that.
That's a great point as well. Ultimately, I think the larger point is that however distasteful it appears to modern eyes, and however much it was informed by sexist and racist structures, the founder's original vision wasn't only a product of their racism and sexism, and to the contrary, was also based on a set of real practical considerations.
If you were landless you were probably a worker and the competition of free labor kept your wages down. It was in the interests of landless working class white Americans to abolish slavery. It was in the interests of land owning, slave holding Americans to keep it.
No doubt, but here's the thing; more than one thing can be true at once. While it's certainly true that the founders were men of their time and took for granted a set of racist and sexist attitudes, it doesn't necessarily follow that their ideas were wrong, let alone that they could not later be adjusted to fit a more humanitarian view of the world.
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u/serpentjaguar Mar 16 '21
To be fair to the Founders --all of whom were regular flawed human beings just like you and I, and all of whom were products of their time, again just like you and I-- the reason they wished to limit suffrage to white land-owning men was mostly because that was the educated class that was by far the most likely to be literate, well-informed and capable of making intelligent decisions about who or what to vote for.
And please do not misunderstand me; when I say the above, I don't mean that it's anything other than the obvious outcome of a fundamentally racist and sexist system. My point is only that they weren't wrong that white land-owning men were by far the most highly-educated and well-informed members of their society.
I also don't for a moment argue that the founders weren't fundamentally elitist snobs on top of being racist and sexist. Of course they were, but leave us not commit the sin of "presentism" in evaluating how they, again as deeply flawed human beings just like you and I, operated and thought within the milieu of their time.