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Podcast: New Books in American Politics
Episode: Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Description: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is notoriously fiery. No doubt part of what’s gripping about it is its internal tension. Douglass begins by sincerely praising the founders and their philosophical principles, and then turns to a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of the United States. Underlying Douglass’s argument is a commitment to the democratic project in the United States that one imagines could be sustained only with extraordinary effort. What prevented Douglass from embracing the understandable, warranted pessimism that the democratic experiment in the United States had failed – or perhaps had...