America’s tragic flaw is our systemic racism, and it’s a residue of a terrible decision our founders made to resist the new and perpetuate the old: the enslavement of black people. Slavery had ended in most of Europe by the 1500s, but not in its colonies in the New World and elsewhere. France and Spain and Britain outlawed their slave trades and slavery itself decades before the United States did, and they found it unnecessary to fight civil wars over the issue. Tsarist Russia emancipated its serfs before democratic America emancipated its slaves. On abolition we were not early adopters.
