At first glance, the title of this article may seem provocative and outlandish. How could anyone possibly support slavery in the United States in 2024?

Slavery was a horrific, dehumanizing, and oppressive institution that remains a shameful blemish on our nation’s history. To embrace such an ideology now would surely be met with revulsion, and rejected outright as vile and reprehensible.

However, as a culture, we unfortunately do embrace the exact same ideology that was championed by nineteenth-century slaveholders and their supporters, even if we don’t immediately recognize it.

Evil Is Blind to Itself

Too often we view historical atrocities in a vacuum and analyze them as isolated events involving people who were uniquely evil, with depraved belief systems that were detached from normal human nature. We struggle to fathom the possibility that these people truly were not much different than ourselves. We like to believe that we would have been staunch abolitionists or that we would have illegally harbored Jews in Nazi Germany or would have risked our lives by standing up to the communists in Maoist China. We certainly would not have been in league with the evil oppressors.

Unfortunately, the problem is that in the vast majority of historical examples, these evil acts were done in the name of moral certainty. The people committing them, along with their supporters, strongly believed that they were acting righteously. They did not believe they were doing anything wrong. The horrible truth is that evil does not usually recognize itself as evil.

It is, therefore, important to understand the motivations and ideology underlying these historical atrocities, rather than simply relying on hindsight bias and a sense of moral superiority afforded us by distance and time. What were the motivations underlying slavery, and what were the rationalizations used to justify them?

Most fundamentally, there was a sense that slaves were something less than human and they did not deserve equal human rights. They were considered to be property. This idea was reinforced by the 1857 Supreme Court ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, when the court proclaimed that slaves were not citizens, but the property of their owners. This was the fundamental issue. If slaves were not legally human beings with human rights, but merely property, then all interference in slave ownership would be an issue of property rights, not human rights. Such was the pronouncement of slaveholders. They believed the government had no right to tell them what they were and were not allowed to do with their property, and the Supreme Court agreed.

Dred Scott

Other arguments included fears of economic turmoil if slavery was abolished, due to the South’s dependence on slave labor. There were arguments suggesting that slaves were better off in slavery and that they did not have the ability to survive on their own — so therefore, slavery was the kinder, more humane option.

They believed in these things so strongly that they were willing to go to war over them. Were they just uniquely evil people making excuses for their evil? Or were they merely human beings caught up in the siren song of moral certainty?

Our Own Form of Slavery

It is easy to look back on those people and scoff. With the powers of hindsight, we morally elevate ourselves above those who fought to protect such a horrific institution. We wag our fingers at those who might have personally opposed it but stood aside because they either thought it was none of their business or was too difficult to overcome politically. We incredulously look back at history, wondering how people could let such blatant human rights abuses happen on their watch and do nothing.

Can you think of any current issue where we, as a country, are doing the same? Are we not standing by while proclamations abound that a certain group of human beings is something less than human, that they are not citizens and have no human rights? That they are merely the property of their owners and any interference in that relationship violates the owner’s rights? Is anyone saying that without this institution there would be economic turmoil, that those less-than-human beings cannot survive on their own, or their lives would be miserable that treating them this way is actually the kinder option?

It should be clear that the moral certainty that drove the rationalizations behind slavery also drives the rationalizations behind our culture’s own sacred cow: abortion.

Abortion and slavery are not similar in practice, but they do share the underlying psychology that drives human beings to do horrible things to other human beings and rationalize that they are good.

In order to rationalize acts that would otherwise be deemed heinous, it is vital for one to internalize the belief that what they are doing is either deserved (e.g. self-defense), or that the person they are doing it to is not actually a person. This is not unique to slavery or abortion. It has been the clear pattern throughout all of history to justify all manners of horrific acts and human rights abuses. It is the same type of ideology that has driven mass shootings, gang violence, and even the belief that former President Donald Trump deserves to be assassinated. If you can convince yourself that a person is less than human, that they do not deserve to live, or that your own rights supersede their right to life, then you can justify anything. If you can successfully dehumanize a group of human beings, then anything you do to them can be rationalized.

The Tragedy of Human Nature

We find ourselves in an election cycle and a political climate in which one side is clearly championing such a toxic ideology. Abortion, specifically, is heralded as a beacon of women’s rights. The Left considers it to be the most important issue we face, and they seem willing to do anything to protect it. Multiple states have already removed all restrictions on abortion, and bitter fighting ensues as others attempt to follow suit.

But even outside the Democratic Party, abortion is not as staunchly opposed as one would hope. Broad public opinion still supports the idea that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” which is still an inherent rejection of the idea that an unborn child is a human being with human rights. This is like saying slavery should be legal in some circumstances. But the fact is, it is either moral or immoral. It is either a violation of human rights or it isn’t. If an unborn child is a human being, there is no justification for killing him or her. It cannot be moral sometimes and immoral other times. (Of course, some might argue that when the life of the mother is in danger one must choose the lesser of two evils — but even then, it becomes an emergency delivery and triage situation, not a justification for shredding a tiny baby with a cutting tool.)

Many people now personally oppose abortion, but like their nineteenth-century predecessors, believe it is either none of their business or that it is to politically difficult to dismantle. Therefore, they stand aside.

This is a tragedy of human nature. We repeat history without even recognizing that we are repeating it until it’s too late. It is only when we look back with hindsight that we realize what we’ve done, and we righteously vow never to do it again — only to find ourselves falling back into the same traps, the same ideological poison, and the same corrupted moral certainty. How can we so easily lose sight of the value of life?

I hope that we find the courage to forever end the scourge that is abortion. But I am convinced that future generations will look back on us the exact same way we look back on those who lived during slavery, and they will ask, “How could they ever have let that happen?”

Leonydus Johnson is a writer, cultural/political commentator, and host of Informed Dissent, a podcast bringing common sense, liberty-minded perspectives to a variety of hot-button topics including race, politics, economics, psychology, and religion that dare to challenge the accepted narratives. He is also the author of Raising Victims: The Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory (Salem Books, 2023).