Because it’s clear Beckwith either slept through the entire course or emerged from the experience convinced that facts and the truth are as malleable as playdough—substances someone ethically untethered can mash, mush and twist into any shape he wishes.
Given that our lieutenant governor is the sort of restlessly ambitious young man who always snoozes with one eye open, alert to any opening for his next hustle, the latter explanation is the most likely one.
Beckwith’s most recent foray into fashioning facts into something unrecognizable as truth can be found in a video he posted on social media.
In it, he argued that the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise—the language that said Southern states could count enslaved human beings as 60% of a human being and thus increase their representation in Congress and the Electoral College—in the U.S. Constitution actually was a boon to Black Americans.
Beckwith contended the provision was a clever ploy by the Northern states and, by implication, Black Americans denied their rights and liberty to lead to a racially inclusive society. He said the fact that his fatuous and yet mean-spirited interpretation of history is not more widely known is because U.S. schools are committed to policies of diversity, equality and inclusion.
I’m not sure I understand the rhetorical or political purpose of granting that caring about the truth is a DEI value but not one for Beckwith’s Christian nationalist movement.
But I am sure that Beckwith’s argument is one of the most moronic I’ve heard in an age dotted and clustered with willful stupidities.
Consider the lieutenant governor’s contention that the North slapped down the South’s attempt to include their human “property”—and in the video, Beckwith didn’t seem at all appalled by the notion that human beings could be property—by saying that the Northern states would count their chairs, tables and other inanimate objects to increase their representation, too.
Did this deep-thinking student of history not realize that people in Southern states owned chairs, tables and other forms of furniture, too? Or was he so enraptured by his own con that he thought no one would notice that he wasn’t making any sense at all?
To be fair to Beckwith, the Three-Fifths provision is one of the most misunderstood parts of our Constitution.
Black Americans understandably see it as an ugly assertion that they counted as only 60% of a white person.
Actually, it was worse than that.
As the Constitution was drafted in the sweltering Philadelphia summer of 1787, Southerners already were nervous about the burgeoning growth in population and wealth in the North. Those Southerners wanted a hedge that would keep the Northern states from outvoting and overwhelming them.
If they didn’t get that hedge, they would refuse to enter the Union.
The Three-Fifths Compromise was that hedge. It granted white Southern slaveholders extra votes for the human beings they kept in bondage.
This had two effects, each of which was evil.
The first was that it offered white Southerners an immense political reward for enslaving other human beings. This deepened the South’s commitment to preserving slavery as an institution and all but guaranteed that the United States would have to endure one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history to uproot the evil at the nation’s heart.
The second is that the compromise made enslaved human beings unwilling participants in perpetuating a system that subjugated and oppressed them.
Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the pivotal presidential election of 1800 with the extra votes the Three-Fifths provision granted the South. In fact, Southerners occupied the White House for 40 of the first 48 years after the Constitution took force, planting the evil that was slavery ever deeper in the American experience.
This was a wrong we Americans would be and will be a long time trying to make right.
That’s why Abraham Lincoln—once an exemplar of the Republican Party of which Beckwith is a member—said in his renowned Second Inaugural Address that it would take 250 years for the United States to atone for slavery and its ills.
But then, Lincoln was a man obsessed with truth and justice.
Those don’t seem to be questions that trouble Micah Beckwith at all.
