So. If these rich white landowners -- many of whom owned slaves -- advocated this idea, this ideal, while not actually striving to make it in their own lives, does that mean the idea or the ideal are bad?

This vexing question is, allow me to speak freely, a vexing fucking question.

@GeePawHill

To be fair, though, a lot of them *did*. For every Jefferson there's a John Stuart Mill. Or even an Edmund Burke, weirdly enough (one of the core contradictions of the antislavery movement in England was that anti-slavery advocates were absolute sociopaths about the poor in their own countries, while the people who fought for *them* were aggressively indifferent about slavery at best)