Posted on 02/06/2017 8:58:21 AM PST by Ouderkirk
Where does this end?
The progressives’ rejection of the presidential election, the obstruction and social disruption – what is its purpose?
Is this the Democrats in 1861, or the Bolsheviks in 1917?
Four months after the Democrats warned that refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election would tear the country apart, they are refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election.
In coordinated nationwide demonstrations, in random outbreaks of campus violence, in shrill denunciations and boycotts, a secession has taken place. A non-geographic civil war has seemingly been declared.
In rejecting the outcome of an election in a republic, one rejects the premise of that republic, and the compact of citizenship. It is a nullification of the social contract. If, in fact, the president selected by a constitutional process is not your president, then it is not your Constitution. You have rejected it. You have stepped outside the group which declared itself with the words, “We the People.”
Certainly, a person or a party can dislike the outcome of an election – ask any conservative about the last eight years. But to reject the outcome of an election is to come out in open hostility toward the structure which defines a nation.
It is an act of rebellion and revolution.
And to throw fuel on that fire, to ratchet up the spending and the rhetoric, to pump the marketplace of ideas with ever more invective and anger, is to mash down on the accelerator of a car headed toward a brick wall. Enraging people, abandoning civility and comity, is how you build barricades, not bridges. This is not the spirit of the American Revolution, it is the spirit of the French Revolution.
And the master funders of the progressive movement are plowing millions into it. The leaders of the Democratic Party, in government and out, are claiming and shouting outrageous and incendiary things. The shrill zealots of progressive society are shaming and blacklisting and whipping the timid into conformity.
And you wonder where it goes.
What is the end?
Where do they want this to take this country?
What is the finish line these people seek to cross?
Is all of this to whip up passion for a congressional election that is still two years away, or a presidential election two years beyond that? Is it to paralyze and derail the function of the American government, to destabilize our nation, until the candidate of the mobs can be installed?
Do they want commissars to be appointed? Do they want an overturn of the presidency? Is it a coup they seek? Do they want to foment a social disorder that crumbles the organizational infrastructure of the American nation and people?
Or is there some form of release and relief in shouting their hatred for a president and his supporters? Is there an orgasmic thrill to be had in declaring half of your fellow citizens your moral and intellectual inferiors?
Or is it extortion? Are they hoping to buy something with their unrest, to squeeze from the government some concessions and autonomies?
Will there be a new flag, and a new capital – a new currency, and who will be on it?
The Democratic Party has established itself as a coalition of the disaffected. Is it now seeking to disaffect the entire nation, to turn it against its structures and institutions -- even its electoral voice? Americans have always been taught to support the constitutional government that protects their liberties, now they are being taught to actively hate it.
Mayors have used taxpayer resources to organize political protests. Weekly demonstrations have been decreed by sitting municipal officials. The fuehrers of the arts community have declared they are undertaking a war against fascism, and performers and business leaders are threatened with blackballing if they acknowledge a new president.
In 1950 you were blacklisted if you were a communist; in 2017 you are blacklisted if you are a Republican.
The loudest voices in our society are profanely denouncing what two hundred years of American experience have defined as the basic obligation of the citizenry – to live by the Constitution. If social disruption is to occur in the wake of a presidential election, then it was not a peaceful transfer of power. If one half of the electorate is to take its toys and go home, to throw a rage of destruction over its electoral failure, then their relationship with their fellow citizens is fundamentally abusive and hostile. If the progressives can’t have control of the levers of power, then no one can.
That is bullying, at best. And civil war, at worst.
And they keep pushing down on the accelerator.
So perhaps they should be honest enough to state their objective.
What is the end game?
What are they trying to achieve?
Is this secession? Is it revolution?
Or is it just a tantrum?
Boy, are you understocked.
Not joking.
It’s only about 1/8 of my state (WA) that supports this foolishness. No need to bring the whole state down.
I'm not really talking about the people. The decision to fight a war rested with one man. His reason for going to war boiled down to money. What the population at large thought didn't matter. If Lincoln said "War" it was war. If he said "Peace" it was peace.
The Southern States represented the bulk of the federal income, and the bulk of all trade income for the Atlantic merchant fleet.
The economy of 1860 was 4.5 billion dollars as near as I can determine. Of that, European trade constituted about 300 million dollars of the GDP. I've been trying to see a more specific breakdown as to what constituted the rest of the economic activity, but the European trade was absolutely essential to the North East, and the North East had influence in Lincoln's government.
But it was worse than what first meets the eye. With the Southern states making their own trade with the Europeans, it takes capital out of Northern pockets and puts a lot more in Southern pockets. Soon the extra capital would have produced competing industries in the South, and because of their much lower tariffs, it would have decimated industries in the North.
Additionally the newly capitalized South would then compete for business in the Midwestern states with the merchants in the North, and take away that trade too. Once serious economic connections had been established between the Midwest and the Southern sphere, what's to keep those states who's economic interests now lay with the South from joining the confederacy? There were several potential losses of power involved in this.
I am looking at this thing through the eyes of businessmen of the era who would have realized what an economic threat an independent South would eventually pose to them and their industries.
If the South had been left alone, it would have wrought serious economic devastation on Northern Industries, and it would likely have shifted the bulk of power away from the North East, and landed it back in Richmond or perhaps Charleston.
But none of this is obvious just by looking at what we could see of the surface history of it.
Maybe my thinking is off base, and if it is, I will be happy to have you or someone else show me where my thinking is wrong, but I do want you to keep in mind that people will often act on what they think will happen, and if Northern industrialists thought the South would pose an economic threat, than they would have acted on that belief.
I think the Lincoln era was pretty much the beginning of "Crony Capitalism." It's immediate aftermath was the onset of corruption on a level the nation had never previously seen.
The Slavery issue was a public red-herring to cover for the real reason for the conflict; The economic threat that an independent South represented to wealthy Northern interests.
It always boils down to money. Follow the money.
Lincoln’s decision to send an army against the Deep South states to force them to remain in the union probably did include money. But the decision by those states to secede was driven by the ongoing northern campaign against slavery, political as well as terrorist. You could argue for economic factors being an ignored factor for why Lincoln decided to go to war but you can’t toss out slavery as a major issue in leading to secession. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery wasn’t new, it was well known from his debates with Douglas and it’s why his election was seen by the Deep South as reason enough for going out on their own.
I have no doubt that many of the Southern states were tired of being lectured by people in the North East who presumed to be their moral betters. (Same problem we are facing today.)
But I think the economic aspect of free trade was a serious part of their thinking. They stood to make a substantially greater profit by handling their own trade. I find it hard to believe that wealthy businessmen of the era did not keep very close track of the financial ramifications of the situation.
Even so, it hardly matters why the South left. Their reasons were immaterial to why the North invaded. It is only the reasons why the North invaded that matter to the fact of the war.
You could argue for economic factors being an ignored factor for why Lincoln decided to go to war but you can’t toss out slavery as a major issue in leading to secession.
I don't think it was ignored by the significant players of the time. I think the power coalition of Northern business interests and Lincoln's government were all too aware of the economic issues involved, they just didn't talk about them publicly because to do so would work against their interests. If they said they were invading to get back the money the Northern interests were losing, the people of the North would have balked. They had to make the cause greater than greed to get the people to agree to it.
The economics of it are ignored by Historians because it paints a very ugly picture of what happened. People much prefer to believe it was a noble cause.
Lincoln’s opposition to slavery wasn’t new, it was well known from his debates with Douglas and it’s why his election was seen by the Deep South as reason enough for going out on their own.
Yes, Lincoln opposed slavery, but he repeatedly said that he would not do anything about it. He effectively said "If you like your slavery, you can keep your slavery."
Nobody believed him. I'm pretty sure the South thought he would "executive order" them in all sorts of ways to interfere with the status quo.
One of the reasons I think Lincoln fought the war for money was because for the first two years of it, he kept trying to reassure the South that he wouldn't do anything about slavery, he just wanted them back in the Union. If you take away the slavery issue as the reason the North invaded, what is left? Pretty much the economics of independence.
We don't have to guess about the motivation of some of the seceding states- Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia all issued declarations explaining why they chose to leave the old Union, and in each case it centers around what they considered unConstitutional actions by the federal government to attack the institution of slavery. You can read those declarations here.
I agree that the decision to resort to war was Lincoln's. The Star of the West had been fired upon while Buchanan was in office and he didn't resort to war. Buchanan thought that secession was unConstitutional, but he also thought that the federal government lacked the right to declare war on one of its states. Interestingly enough he had sent the Army against the insurrection in Utah but believed that was different since it was a territory.
There *IS* evidence that the South and the North were well aware of the economic consequences of secession. I believe it was the behind the scenes impetus for the whole thing, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it because "greed" is so not cool.
Amen!
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