The Reuters investigation of the bloodlines of U.S. political figures jars in ways unanticipated by its authors.

The study found that the ancestors of all living U.S. presidents save Donald Trump; Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch; and such notable Capitol Hill figures as Sens. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and Tammy Duckworth owned other human beings as slaves. In terms of numbers, Reuters traced slaveowners in the ancestry of at least 11 governors, 28 senators, and more than 100 House members.

Republicans, overrepresented among those who represent the South, find slavers in their line to a greater degree than Democrats even though the former party organized to abolish slavery and the latter fought to defend it — and later to defend Jim Crow.

Recent public opinion surveys seemed to indicate a purpose to the fanatical interest in the past by journalists who so often do not bother to notice it. The Reuters report cited polls that described Americans as less likely to vote for a candidate with a slaveowner in his or her lineage and more likely to support reparations if the respondent can identify a slaveholder in their own lineage.

The Reuters Investigation Means Nothing

That we know that one of James Lankford’s 256 great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents owned at least two slaves — and bequeathed them to his wife — says nothing about the senator and much about those shouting, “Unclean! Unclean!” at a man who shares 0.39 percent of his DNA with a man who owned a pair of slaves 196 years ago.

Ditto for Elizabeth Warren. The fact that a test found a miniscule amount of Native American ancestry, despite the Rutgers Law School grad parlaying claims of such to a preposterously unlikely position on the Harvard Law School faculty, undermined her claims and thus her character. But the presumption of Native American lineage never made her deserving of better or worse treatment in the first place. Now this investigation reports that Warren’s ancestors owned slaves. Possibly this delivers a rhetorical gift to her political enemies. It tells us zero about Elizabeth Warren as a human being that people she never met who shared with her a small amount of DNA owned African Americans she never met as though property.

Given the ubiquity of the “peculiar institution” in human history, slaves and slaveowners likely appear somewhere on all of our family trees where FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com — two sites relied upon by the Reuters team — cannot climb. This includes African Americans, whose ancestral records — because of legal and social prohibitions on interracial relationships — generally do not include their slave-owning antecedents. Their exclusion, save for Barack Obama, from the Reuters list buttresses this.

For everyone, some ancestor somewhere probably owned slaves and another somewhere else probably became a slave. Given the messiness of this reality, reparations for this past sin always amounts to a cure that aggravates rather than alleviates racial animosity. Unlike payments sought by victims of the Holocaust or World War II internment camps, the beneficiaries of reparations for slavery never endured the injustice. Their immediate family members did not endure the injustice. A trendy concept called “generational trauma,” in which one blames shortcomings on grievances in some cases dating back centuries, rationalizes the strange policy of forcing people who never owned slaves to transfer wealth to other people who never were slaves.

David Horowitz got a bead on this issue more than two decades ago when he took out a series of ads in campus newspapers listing 10 reasons to oppose reparations. These included the fact that only a small percentage of Americans owned slaves, no single group benefited exclusively from slavery, and the provocative question as to what moral debt the descendants of slaves owed the largely white casualties of the war that resulted in their freedom.

Horowitz would later write in his 2002 book, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery: “In the period between 650 and 1600, before any Western involvement, somewhere between 3 million and 10 million Africans were brought by Muslim slavers for use in Saharan societies and in the trade in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. By contrast, the enslavement of blacks in the United States lasted 89 years, from 1776 to 1865. The combined slave trade to the British colonies in North America and later to the United States accounted for less than 3 percent of the global trade in African slaves. The total number of slaves imported to North America was 800,000, less than the slave trade to the island of Cuba alone.”

One might add two reasons to the list compiled by Horowitz several decades ago.

First, the irony seems lost on reparations advocates that the same racial arguments used to justify the enslavement of one group by another serves as the raison d’être of their movement. When the same genetic and blood obsessions that moved Adolf Hitler also animate your cause, then maybe find a new cause.

Second, basic morality forbids collective or generational punishment. The Old Testament, for instance, talks about not visiting the sins of the fathers upon the sons. The idea of meting out punishment for the wrongs one’s ancestors committed or divvying out spoils for the suffering one’s ancestors endured seems an idea as primitive as slavery.

Yet, even back a quarter century or so when Horowitz focused on the issue, proponents characterized reparations as an idea certain to win over policymakers in the future. Those proponents grew in number, but the idea did not win over a majority. Still, the present rejoices that ugly ideas picking at the scabs of the past tend to perpetually remain forever triumphant in the future and never victorious today.