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Endless complaints. |
Posted on 12/31/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by Caipirabob
What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?
While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.
Stars with bars:
Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.
Some things are better left dead in the past:
For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.
Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.
Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:
So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?
Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.
This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.
Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.
At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.
So what do you think of this movie?
Roger Williams was one of those virtuous Pilgrims who could read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, did indeed outwit the bad guys. He wrote Key into the Language of America, 1643). He often used his good offices in maintaining peace with them until events overcome his goodwill resulted in The Pequot war.
Williams even challenged the legitimacy of the king's issuance of land grants to settlers, on the grounds that the king did not own the land he was granting. He felt the Indians properly owned the land, and that it was from them that the land should be gotten.
Note: The Mauquawogs or Mohowawogs [Mohawks] signifies 'Man Eaters' in their language:
'Many American places have been named after Indian words. In fact, about half of the states got their names from Indian words. The name of Kentucky comes from an Iroquoian word (Kentahten), which means "land of tomorrow." Connecticut's name comes from the Mohican word (Quinnehtukqut), which means "beside the long tidal river." And the word "Podunk," meant to describe a insignificant town out in the middle of nowhere, comes from a Natick Indian word meaning "swampy place." American Indian Place Names
That is specious marxian nonsense that Lincoln idolaters have been pushing since the time of his death in order to compensate for the defecit of clear anti-slavery policy prior to 1863 including his pro-slavery policies such as the Corwin amendment and countermanding the release of slaves by union generals early in the war. If it were true that slavery's territorial limitation was the key to its economic decline, the south would have never seceded and in doing so forfeited their claims to the western territories where this expansion was supposedly going to occur. Even with northern state opposition in the union, expansion options for the southern states were far more limited on their own in the confederacy.
Nothing to enshrine, what he attempted to do was make explicit what was already implicit, slavery was a state issue.
That implicit claim was far from certain in the 1850's and in fact constitutional scholars at the time had been arguing over it for decades. The Dred Scott case arose over it, was settled one way under the lower court, and was reversed the other way at the Supreme Court. But much like Roe v. Wade today, adherence to Dred Scott was anything but universal and had as many detractors as it did supporters. Lincoln's amendment, however, would've settled the issue once and for all in a pro-slavery way.
Not nearly as much as his tax cuts though!
Not responding to the direct treasonable quotes I posted, and attempting to switch your obvious embarrassment by the printed facts concerning the hidden agenda of hardcore neo-Confederates, does not erase the facts concerning this subversive collection malcontents.
Trying to peg me as one who promotes big government will not function either. Where did I ever state the following: You continue to paint those that advocate lower taxes and limited government, the right of self government... (?)
What does lower taxes & limited government, which most people favour, including myself, have to do with bombastic statements quoted by self proclaimed neo-Confederates.?
I am aware the truth must hurt, but it also must be confronted.
What is your position on the following quote? "Accordingly, no Confederate can, by definition, be a Republican or Democrat, or a member of any other U.S. political party. It is NOT our government, and it's flag is NOT our flag.
Instead of passing the buck and attacking me respond to the above quote and all the others listed in thread #2,847.
"You attempt to paint an entire class of people as dirt, or even lower than dirt, based on "your racism and hatred."
How can the hardcore neo-confederates crowd be considered a 'race of people'
Please, do not not mention Carter Clinton, Al, Jesse, in the same sentence with anything connected with my beliefs.
Although even you have to admit nobody could go on and on and on, in terms of speech making like old Hubert Humphrey LOL
I would more or less agree with your depiction of "-secessionists/Confederates - as knuckle-dragging slobs/Neanderthals",..it fits. :) You are not linked with that element so laugh a little!
Lol, lololol ...Talk, talk , talk , on & on & on & on ...& on & on ....& on ........& on
Both highly admirable and successful endeavors!
...
Oh, I'm sorry -- I don't accept homework assignments. You've got a better story and a better source? Post away! (That's your job, you see.)
So you'd be "happy to see my documentation," but can't be bothered to look up the writers I recommend? Really, in the end we all educate -- or don't educate -- ourselves. I looked into your Claude Bowers enough to determine that he isn't a particularly valid source of information or opinion. If you don't want to do the same with Current or Stampp, that's your problem. Notice, I don't say "that's your job." I'm neither your boss, nor your parent, nor your master. I simply say that you're missing out if you don't consider and investigate opinions that go counter to your own. Simply to ignore or villify anyone who's held a position at a major university over the last 30 or 40 years is a good way to bind oneself to unexamined prejudices and foregone conclusions forever.
It's not surprising that Mark Neely points out that Civil War studies are still a living field with plenty of opportunities for investigation. That doesn't mean that he, or we, should expect such investigations to prove various conspiracy theories or validate century-old theories of Yankee perfidy. There's a lot that we don't know about the Second World War. Pointing that out doesn't mean that the revisionist theories are right.
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams hardly count as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams is preoccupied with taxes to the exclusion of everything else, and doesn't seem to have published much actual history, and Woods's Guide is a comic book version of American history, that doesn't seriously consider opposing arguments or examine evidence that conflicts with its theses. Hummel's work was more substantive, but still wrong headed, relying on speculation and ideology to carry a questionable argument. The usual Rockheads don't count for much either. If you want to write off everything that's come from writers affiliated with Claremont, there's still plenty of writing opposed to your views. Exclude the self-promoting, intellectually third-rate (at least when it comes to history) Rockwell/Mises cult and that's a large chunk of those who support your sort of arguments in print that can even claim to be taken half-way seriously.
What you've latched onto looks a lot like the wave of the past -- the ideas in circulation about a century ago that were quite conciliatory towards the secessionist South, highly critical of the abolitionists, relatively unconcerned about ideas of racial equality, and convinced that Jim Crow was a good "solution" to the "racial problem." Arguing and rethinking will go on forever, but one would have to have missed much of recent American history to embrace the older ways of looking at the Civil War and Reconstruction (older ways that were quite revisionist when introduced, and not always to the liking of those who had actually fought the war).
What we've learned about the agrarian vs. industrial argument is not to view things as naively and neatly divided as some in past generations did. We see now how Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and others on the agrarian side of the line were perfectly willing to use the federal government to achieve their ends. And we can see how tied in with the world economy and the factory system cotton planters were. They were anything but self-sufficient yeomen.
We can't naively take the Confederacy as representative of small government and the Republican-Unionists as big government men after we learn how much control the Confederate government really had over industry and commerce. Granted those were war measures, but so were many of the things done in the North that have been objected to.
And we can't naively take the old Democrat party simply as the party of farmers and limited government, because we know too much of the workings of parties and government to accept such self-definitions. When the time came to expand government and create a welfare state, the Democrats were on the scene doing the heavy lifting, and that needs some explanation. Nor of course was segregation ever a matter of "limited government."
Democrats like Horatio Seymour and Samuel Tilden weren't all about good government and tariff reform. They brandished noble slogans like "This is a White Man's Government" and had a clear racial agenda. Nor were antebellum Democrats like Polk entirely absorbed with decreasing the size of government. Territorial expansion, and securing a future for plantation slavery were also important concerns for them. You can slam Whigs and Republicans for their own faults, but nobody's who knows his or her history is going to take the noble Democrats vs. evil Whigs/Republicans melodrama seriously.
From the days of Madison implementing a large part of Hamilton's program to the times when Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell and other Southern Democrats formed close business-government alliances, agrarians and industrialists, states righters and centralizers in America have been irredimiably mixed together. I'm not going to say that the Whigs or Republicans or Federalists were good and right about everything either. That's the sort of thing we've gotten away from.
Two or three generations ago a lot of people argued as you do about the Civil War and Reconstruction. That's become a lot harder in recent years with the changes in attitude. Your friends try to help but don't. They pay homage to contemporary sentiments and try to twist the history to make it look like today's attitudes and the Confederacy somehow go together. People eventually see that they don't. So between them distorting the record and you clinging to the old rhetoric that's now no longer accepted or acceptable there's not much left of the argument, even if I wanted to agree with you. You and your pals point in different directions, but for most thinking people today, both your roads are dead-ends.
BTW, I hope you do realize that your star witness, Kimberly Smith views the abolitionists in a far more positive light than you do. I haven't read her book, but here's what her publisher says:
Smith shows that alternatives to reasoned deliberation--like protest, resistance, and storytelling--have a place in politics. Such alternatives underscore the positive role that interest, passion, compassion, and even violence might play in the political life of America. Her book, therefore, is a cautionary analysis of how rationality came to dominate our thinking about politics and why its hegemony should concern us. Ultimately Smith reminds the reader that democracy and reasoned public debate are not synonymous and that the linkage is not necessarily a good thing.
You can agree or disagree with that, but it does add up to a more sympathetic view of the abolitionists than you have been peddling. She apparently thinks the abolitionists were wholly justified in using the arguments they did, and I doubt she'd really cast things in the terms that you do. From what I can gather she distrusts the cold-blooded rationalism of some forms of discussion on the grounds that they exclude the passions which do have a place in life and politics.
In fact, I think you do agree with her that emotionalism has a place in politics -- you just want to deny to your opponents the emotionalism that you indulge in to your own heart's content. That's only human. If one really believes in something, one keeps coming up with evidence to support it. Others may say that it's anecdotal or sentimental, but one keeps at it -- along with presenting other arguments -- in hope that it will make the same impression on others as it does on one's self. That is what you do. It's what the abolitionists did. And it's probably more or less what we all do, myself included. I doubt citing her book adds anything to your argument. She doesn't believe in restricting political discourse to a coldly rational Enlightement mode, and I doubt you really do either. You might appreciate her book on agrarianism, though.
I notice that you still haven't answered whether you would have built the Liberty Place monument to the White Leagues and whether you would have kept it up. It would put an end to much speculation if you did.
Moreover you're all for checks and balances when it comes to what others can do, but want absolute sovereignty for yourself. Double standards like that are human and natural, but not justifiable. There have been extreme subjectivist or egotistic philosophies, but I doubt most thinkers would agree with your position.
If you look back at conservative thinkers of the last three centuries, there's long been a distrust of radical Rousseauvian ideas, and an emphasis on natural law and the rule of law rather than cultural relativism or absolute group autonomy or group self-determination above all.
Some times the valuation of procedures and precedents and universal principles may go too far but there were real reasons for emphasizing law and comity rather than sheer will and self-assertion. Those who've taken the path of radical relativism and absolute will have generally come a cropper and caused much pain in the world. I don't know how we can condemn radical Rousseauvian ideas in other parts of the world while we exalt them at home.
Of course there were plenty of opportunities for the expansion of slavery in the 1850s. There was some discussion of slaves being employed in mining. And they were already in use in industry in Virginia and Tennesee. Slave labor also played an important part in Southern railroad construction. Expansion to Mexico, the Carribean, or Latin America was discussed.
Slave owners considered that it was very much in the interest of Southern states to make slavery legal in Kansas or Nebraska or New Mexico or Oregon, even if it only involved personal servants and household help at first, since it would create a base of slaveowning voters who would side with their Southern peers. And if slavery could be imposed in principle upon states and territories, it's as likely as not that ways would have been found to use the opportunity in real life.
If the Missouri Compromise or the Northwest Ordinance or Northern personal liberty laws could be overturned, and the return of runaways and right to move slaves anywhere in the country could be guaranteed, what a boon that would be for slave owners. It would mean fewer worries about runaways or about losing power in the country. And it would mean that the influence of free working people in the country would decline.
I don't argue that all these ideas were realistic, but they were all under consideration in the slave owning states in the years just before the Civil War. Consequently, Northerners had some fear of what was in the works. Our friend Lentulus knows all that, but those darn monkeys. Lentulus has some fear of outsourcing, but the monkeys don't see that Northerners perceived a similar threat in the rise of slavery. Or maybe the chickens fear losing their jobs to Bangalore, but Lentulus doesn't want to see anything from an Northern perspective, and can't make the connection between slavery then and outsourcing now. Those bad monkeys just won't stop. They're making some mess.
To reply to your post, "immediate cause" I understand just fine, but it isn't the same thing as "main cause", "root cause", "underlying cause", or anything like that. Yes, the slavery issue had been pushed by Republican and Abolitionist propagandists until everyone was acting like a Jerry Springer audience (Jerry Springer is evil, bring me the head of Jerry Springer), and they were all ready to start killing each other.
But here is the thing. Control of agenda, control of one's own political destiny, is far more potent a first cause and source of motive than any individual issue, because control goes to ALL issues and so is as powerfully motivating as the sum of all issues in play.
Control, rather than any one issue, even a big one like the basis of the Southern economy, is the really big motive in secession, and if you would take the time to review Stephens's other speeches such as the one I linked to in my post to x above, you would see that control links like a fetter all the issues he mentions either in the Cornerstone Speech or his speech to the Georgia legislature a few months earlier .
You can't raise a control issue like the one in play with Lincoln's election, without simultaneously setting into motion all the other causes and issues that pressed upon the actors of that day.
I wasn't aware that he put that into his will. I thought Martha freed them on her own initiative, and that during his lifetime, Washington himself did not.
So, what do you think of the Declaration's statement that all men are created equal as it relates to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
They were talking about their own society, i.e. European society, of which they didn't -- not all of them -- consider Africans to be part.
Or,do you take the Confederate view that there were certain men born to be ruled as slaves?
That's Natural Law, and no, I don't think that. People are born slaves in Mauritania every day, but I don't think that should determine their status for life.
Another aspect of Natural Law is that differences among men are recognized and paid court to; that if I am able, somehow, by main force or trickery to overcome you and bind you to my will by force or deceit, then you are of course my natural prey. I don't accept that, either, and define such conduct as simply misconduct, and possibly criminal, and in some circumstances justiciable.
Sorry you had to wait so long for a reply, but I had my hands full.
One obvious difference is that the rhetoric mobilized Northern opinion in a way that 18th-century antislavery discourse did not, and led directly to dissolution of the society and war.
That is the point that I was trying to make, citing the academic psychologist's study of Abolition rhetoric (among other rhetorics). Her point was, her study led her to the creeping suspicion, bordering on conclusion, that violence has played a much bigger role than we, in our democratic "free-speech" propaganda bath, would like to admit. I would stipulate to it, as regards the civil-rights movement, which was a confrontation solved by one side's successful enlistment of the power of Northern elites to use the latent violence of the State against dissenting Southerners. Legally, ending segregation was a law-enforcement problem -- once the law was changed. Politically, it was a strategic paradigm change enforced by National Power deployed against the People.
You approve of hot-headedness in the name of interests you agree with, but oppose passion when it acts in the name of other interests.
No, I don't "approve of hot-headedness". I've been quite explicit in my disagreement with, and disapproval of, the intemperateness of e.g. Edmund Ruffin and Robert Toombs; Ruffin closed out his side of the conversation by, if you will, American seppuku, even if Ruffin probably intended his suicide only selfishly (to avoid the Yankees), or possibly symbolically, in emulation of Cato the Younger, whose suicide rankled Caesar mightily because it stigmatized his domination of the optimates by civil war and bloodshed. (It's an idle speculation whether Lincoln, had he lived, would have faced a similar deconstruction of his carefully-manicured aura of legitimacy by latterday dissenters. He certainly avoided the collision with Congress that Johnson endured.)
But, classicizing gestures aside, Ruffin and the other counsellors of rash action who pressurized Jefferson Davis into accepting the proffered war bear, as I've said, a grave responsibility for the war's outbreak and their People's subsequent prostration by the dictator.
You bundle together truly passionate immediatist abolitionists with more moderate politicians like Lincoln, who simply opposed the expansion of slavery to the territories and hoped, like the founders, that eventually slavery would be brought to an end.
I think you're naive about Lincoln. I disagree that he was really a moderate. I think he was just as committed to the total abolition of slavery as the Grimke sisters or Frederick Douglass. But the difference between them and him was one of deadly effectiveness. Within six weeks of taking office, Lincoln led the country to war. How moderate was that?
In the eyes of many Southerners, if you weren't fully for slavery, you were against the South. That's the mindset that produced the war. If we want to refight the war, you're all set and ready to go. But if we want to understand what happened and why, we may need to step back from such attitudes.
I agree that there was a great deal of inflexibility in the positions a lot of Southerners took, and nothing like the flexuous adaptiveness, popular touch, and farsightedness that Lincoln displayed in measuring and slaying the South. He was the better politician, in the worse cause. The Southerners, for their part, seemed to want to prosecute their politics according to code duello, and they were excessively quarrelsome and demanding in the face of the greater emergency: their need for mutual assistance cooperation was much greater than Lincoln's, but their conduct in pursuing their own lights (and I am thinking of General Bragg and his circle here, and the state governors) often made adversaries like General Halleck look like paragons of perspicuousness in comparison. Jefferson Davis, too, fell short of the mark by many people's estimation, even allowing for his greater burden, and was particularly lacking in Lincoln's virtues like flexibility and charm. His failure not merely to balance the needs of the theater commanders, but even to detect and eliminate the hoarding of vast supplies by his own commissary in the face of exigent need in the field, is one of the central failures of the Civil War.
But having said all that, I don't think that obduracy on the part of the Confederates was the determinant of the outbreak of war. Given their obduracy, other things happened that caused the war to break out. But to imply that they owed it to the public peace to lay down their rights is to say too much, and I think you'll concede the fact that rights held to only when they are uncontroversial aren't really rights, but only concessions or usufructs.
You don't directly answer about whether you would have put up the Liberty Place monument or whether you favor keeping it in place. But I think anyone can read between the lines.
Stop it. I'm damned tired of these sneaking imputations of racism -- you keep doing that. No, I don't give a damn about Liberty Place -- but I do give a damn about Orwellian views of history, and you seem to have one, as do PC black politicians. Correct me if I'm wrong -- you one of these "usable history" buffs?
The answer for history you don't like is, make some more history that you do. Tearing down other people's monuments just isn't American, it's totalitarian and vindictive.
Good example of moralizing vindictiveness. And what meat do you eat, that you think you're entitled to judge these people like that?
And since we're talking about moralizing......and hypocrisy.....
Another New England fanatic correct?
Well, try here, you'll find your New England Fanatics. Hope you like liberal authors; Howard Zinn liberal enough for you? Allow the whole document to load before searching (this will take a little while -- they put the whole book up), then search for keys like "Pequot" and "1637", the year in which the Massachusetts Bay Colony instigated the massacre of 600 Pequots.
Bon appetit!
If you really believe that, then I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.
</sarc>
You think that would be punishment? From what I've read from the Confederate apologists for slavery in the 1860s. the slaves were happy and contented, better off than they would be free. I'd think the pro-slavers of 1865 would be happy to enter into such a blessed state as slavery.
Guilty conscience eh, concerning the old law of reciprocity applying to the pro-slavers?
Howard 'The Commie' Zinn? Please, spare me.
Out in the blazing sun, enjoying each unpaid minute, who could request any better life according to modern day Confeds?
So you'd be "happy to see my documentation," but can't be bothered to look up the writers I recommend?
Well, like I said, your end of the discussion is your end. I'm not going to sit here like a sucker while you wave your arms grandly and run us around a tour d'horizon of some unlinked, unreferenced Left-wing resource catalog of American history. You want to make a point, post up.
I looked into your Claude Bowers enough to determine that he isn't a particularly valid source of information or opinion.
Yeah? Who was your filter? I noticed you posted comments from a Columbia University publication -- Eric Foner's stomping grounds, and a Communist hellhole since the 1930's. Fine, but why are you posting like a Democrat?
Are you a Democrat? Some other kind of liberal? You post like one -- von Mises is "third rate"? Hmmm.
I simply say that you're missing out if you don't consider and investigate opinions that go counter to your own.
Take your own advice. You filtered Bowers on the basis of what someone else said about him. I quoted Nicolay.
What you've latched onto looks a lot like the wave of the past
Yeah, well, your car is old and has body rust -- which proves you were stupid to buy a Ford in the first place, right?
</fallacy>
-- the ideas in circulation about a century ag....
The ideas of Pythagoras were in circulation twenty-three centuries ago.
......that were quite conciliatory towards the secessionist South, highly critical of the abolitionists, relatively unconcerned about ideas of racial equality, and convinced that Jim Crow was a good "solution" to the "racial problem."
Ever hear of "allowing for differences"? You're filtering. You don't want to talk to anyone who isn't a liberal Democrat. That's what you're doing -- you're editing the book list, and throwing out all the non-PC authors! I knew you were doing that -- jeez, what a NewThinker!
What in the hell has the civil rights movement got to do with Civil War history? Do you mean to tell me that you're giving black-studies departments a veto over your reading list? That you're tossing anyone who gets a knock in some PC article about DWM historiography? That's it, isn't it? You don't want to get caught dead, reading someone on the PC Hate List!
Look, I'll read anything you care to put up. I'm not going to go wandering through a Columbia University reading-list, barfing and choking on Marxist spew from Foner and McPherson because I've got better things to do; but if you want to quote them to support a point, fine, I'll read anything you care to put up, either in direct quotes or in paraphrase. But I'm not going to let you cop a point by pretending to stand over me like a schoolmaster and hand me a reading list. You've read your books, and I've read mine. I've no obligation to accept your syllabus as canonical, even if you adduce reasons why you think it is, and I'm certainly not going to fall for a line of patter about who's hot and who's not in American historiography, because I know as well as you do, that trends and flavors of the month are just as prevalent in history departments as they are anywhere else, even if writing about economic history is coming along as you indicate. I'm not going to fall for your representation that your favorite groupthink is the last word in up-to-date Professionalism for People Who Think Seriously. That's a hustle, and you know it. And I'm perfectly willing to let other posters decide which of us is right about that.
So go patronize somebody else, I'm not having it.
And we can't naively take the old Democrat party simply as the party of farmers and limited government, because we know too much of the workings of parties and government to accept such self-definitions. When the time came to expand government and create a welfare state, the Democrats were on the scene doing the heavy lifting, and that needs some explanation.
As a well-read person who pretends to give me homework, you ought to know, and your remarks to reflect, that the Democratic Party changed hands in 1928, passing from the hands of the rural populists, the Klan, and the Grange into those of the urban ethnic progressives who nominated Al Smith, and then Franklin Roosevelt, and who staffed the alphabet-soup socialist agencies that Roosevelt created.
Granted that Wilson's Administration saw an earlier period of bureaucratic empire-building and regulation, nevertheless those were war measures, and the public turned away from them to return to "normalcy". Roosevelt made them part of the Superstate, and it was the urban Democrats like Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran and Bernard Baruch who helped him build that edifice.
And of course the Democratic Party eventually flew apart, with Southern blacks replacing Southern whites as its southern wing.
Nor of course was segregation ever a matter of "limited government."
It was mostly an accommodation of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Some segregationist measures crept in under Grover Cleveland, IIRC, but it was Woodrow Wilson whose administration fostered it more in federal offices. FDR's replies to black complaints in the 1940's, as he worked to keep his coalition together, sounded a lot like Gov. Paul Johnson's of Mississippi, 20 years later, when he kept asking for delays and "understanding".
Nor were antebellum Democrats like Polk entirely absorbed with decreasing the size of government. Territorial expansion, and securing a future for plantation slavery were also important concerns for them. You can slam Whigs and Republicans for their own faults, but nobody's who knows his or her history is going to take the noble Democrats vs. evil Whigs/Republicans melodrama seriously.
Territorial expansion was not the same thing as expansion of the federal government. "Manifest Destiny" wasn't a planters' plot or an agricultural Teapot Dome.
We see now how Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and others on the agrarian side of the line were perfectly willing to use the federal government to achieve their ends. And we can see how tied in with the world economy and the factory system cotton planters were. They were anything but self-sufficient yeomen.
I don't think you can argue that Democrats stiffed Northern interests the way Northern Whigs and Republicans stiffed the South -- the Warehouse Act of 1848 hugely benefited New York City, as we've discussed before, and that was passed during the Polk Administration -- since you've called his name. Jefferson likewise went outside his own construction of the federal role, in order to purchase Louisiana -- and don't tell me he wasn't thinking of the whole country's interests when he did that. There may have been examples of Democrats' use of political power to reward their allies, but you'll have to cite a few. Just bloviating that "well, the Democrats did it too" when what you are talking about is the vast, programmatic expansions of government and infrastructure attempted by Henry Clay and the backers of the 1828 Tariff and the Morrill Tariff, isn't going to get it as moral equivalence.
All of which is tiddlywinks, by the way, in comparison to the railroads. And that was a Republican pork chop -- hell, it was most of the pig!
I'm not going to say that the Whigs or Republicans or Federalists were good and right about everything either. That's the sort of thing we've gotten away from.
Oh, please! McPherson, Foner, Bright, Linenthal, and the other Confederate-flag-folding, PC-revisionist historians go around "contextualizing" Civil War-era National Battlefields and Monuments with modern civil-rights propaganda about "it was ALL about slavery!!" (want links?), and it's very, very evident that "some of us" have absolutely not "gotten away from" broad characterization of competing factions in American history. They are acutely interested in inculpating Southerners and the Confederacy as part of Bill Clinton's jury-pool-polluting, Democratic Party-building propaganda.
I'm sorry, but you are just naked on that one. Grab a towel or something, will you?
I'm just not buying your "you-guys-are-so-yesterday" patter. Salesmen sell used cars, and some of them sell history. Your "all thinking people agree with me" might sound good to you when you say it, but it ain't flying out there in the audience, sorry, not when you come up with howlers like the one above.
You quote Kimberly Smith's publisher on The Dominion of Voice, I quoted another reviewer. But just because you and she approve, for political reasons perhaps, of what happened to public discourse in the 19th century, doesn't mean you and she are right that it was a good thing in the longer run. You quote the publisher's blurb:
"Her readings support the conclusions that the value of rational argument itself was contested, that the emergent Enlightenment rationalism may have helped to sterilize political debate, and that storytelling or testimony posed an important challenge to the norm of political rationality."[Emphasis added.]
Quoting the other reviewer, I made the same point in a different way. The Abolitionists in particular (and others later) replaced light with heat in making their political argument, in order to drive change.
Applying reductio ad absurdum, which is a valid way of looking for a weakness in an argument, would you feel as optimistic about this or that "change" if I were to come over to your house with a gun and settle your hash directly?
The weakness in the argument is that what Kimberly Smith is talking about is incitement to violence. It wasn't the rhetoric or the mode of argument that produced the change -- it was two million bayonets, used by one part of the country against another. It was violence. Where you go wrong is in falling in love with the outcome (teleology) and assuming that future violent outcomes driven by your (or your friends') rhetoric will also be congenial to you. This is a way of making political violence seem benign; and yet it is the thing whose outbreak the Framers worked hardest against.
From what I can gather she distrusts the cold-blooded rationalism of some forms of discussion on the grounds that they exclude the passions which do have a place in life and politics.
Your front yard, five minutes, bring your gun. Yeah, right.
In fact, I think you do agree with her that emotionalism has a place in politics -- you just want to deny to your opponents the emotionalism that you indulge in to your own heart's content.....She doesn't believe in restricting political discourse to a coldly rational Enlightement mode, and I doubt you really do either.
You keep confusing style with substance. I don't argue ad hominem and ad plebem or indulge in teleological gloating -- and yet your side of the argument does this constantly. Wlat was really bad about it, but you've invoked teleology or appeal to force once or twice. My point is, I argue against these appeals regularly, even naggingly, and try regularly to carry the discussion back to constitutional arguments, whereas you are content to float on great tides of dialectic materialism, seemingly indifferent to the American Experiment and contemptuous of attempts to preserve American Exceptionalism. You'd be just as happy, I think sometimes, if we subsided into Orwell's Oceania, if only smart guys who know some history could continue to be included in the Big Picture. (You took a shot at me, here's one back.)
Inasmuch as I argue for rational discourse, as opposed to putting up those comic-books some of your fellow-travelers are posting (at great cost in bandwidth), I think your statement is stood on its head, and no, your moral equivalency or mirroring argument ad hominem isn't valid.
Perhaps it's having read Ronald Syme on the end of the Roman Republic that makes me so allergic to these forms of public discourse over which you and Smith become nearly lyrical in your admiration and praise of Frederick Douglass. Nevertheless, your argument points toward violence and Caesarism in the American political future, and with Hillary already well in view, I think your and Smith's phlegmaticism about propaganda and violence in public discourse is dangerous.
I'll spare you Howard the Commie if you'll spare me Duke the Dwarf.
You know he's misusing that flag, btw, don't you? Our side has made the point several times that all sorts of flags get used for things the people who first carried them never intended. The Silver Shirts carrying U.S. flags is an example. But I see you continue to ignore us and put up emotive stuff like that Duke picture.
BTW, I was talking about you in that last long post to x.
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