There was the South Carolina nullification/secession crisis of 1830, and there may have been whisperings or shouts of secession in New England because of the 1807 embargo and War of 1812. And of course there was the crisis over the expansion of slavery and the Civil War.
My point is that secession is far less likely to be invoked to defend individual, human, civil, or even property rights, and far more likely to be used by states to promote their own interests. It has been much more about power, than about freedom. To be sure freedom and power are connected ideas, but the power and interests of states may be satisfied without increasing individual liberty. Indeed, the interests and power of states may demand the repression of individual liberties. They aren't that different from the federal government itself.
So even had there been no 14th Amendment, you wouldn't have seen secession or secession threats over the bulk of what we call "big government." Would the threat of secession have kept the growth of the federal government at bay? It's just barely possible, but how much do our politicians worry about the threat of revolution or massive civil disobedience or civil war? Most of them don't even really have to worry about being defeated in the next election.
In any case, I don't believe that the Constitution contains any right of secession on demand. Nor do I share DiLorenzo's naive presumption that more "state's rights" necessarily means less government and greater individual freedom. States have themselves been capable of great oppression. The same would be true of any sucessor states to our federal union.
For these reasons, I'm not inclined to view secessionists and Confederates or the secessionists and state's righters who followed them as victims and heroes. I concede that there is much to worry about in federal supremacy, but there was also much to oppose or condemn in the actions of the "sovereign" and unchallengable states.
Yes, it sure sounds like that is where you are going. So Constitutionally constrained democracy only works for you if you win, is that it? If someone comes to you and demonizes someone else, and if he persuades you that that object of demonization is a Bad Person, are you then dissatisfied with any right that may be left to the demonized one? Any freedom? Any due process that impedes his swift trip to prison? That is argumentum ad hominem elevated to the level of policy, and legal positivism elevated to the level of overthow of the Bill of Rights a priori, lest it get in the way.
I accept that the 14th Amendment is part of the Constitution, and that constitutional constraints now apply to the states as well as to the federal government. One could also quite easily turn your argument against you. Given completely sovereign, unchecked states, which were not required to abide by the Bill of Rights, what defense of due process would dissidents have against "a swift trip to prison?" In any case, if you look at what happened, the segregationists left the scene without being imprisoned or repressed. Indeed, in the 20th century they did far more of this to those they had power over.
There's a romanticism of lost causes that makes people think that those who lost in history were better and nobler than those who won. The expectation is that massive repression destroyed them. That wasn't the case with the 20th century segregationists. In the final confrontation, they were the weaker side, but they were far more inclined to use force and violence than their opponents.
If you look at my post, I specifically tried to avoid vilifying those segregationist "state's rightists." I am willing to listen to their arguments, and I'll admit that they have a point about the growth of the federal government. But I will not make heroes or martyrs out of them. I don't believe that they were better or purer than what replaced them. Critical of their opponents and sharing some of their concerns about growing federal power, I still don't believe that victory for the segregationists would have been better than their defeat.
My comment about "letting bad ideas die" was addressed to non-sequitur. You guys miss a lot of these articles. It's the other side that posted the last few. I can understand the passion for debate, but sometimes I wonder how much is gained by it.
Of course not, not from a beaten people. By the time FDR came along, the new Masters of America had had their churls on the time clock for two generations.
People overlook the enormous change in work relationships (and therefore in class and civic relationships) that was wrought by the introduction of large, integrated companies and their work rules and time clocks. Some sociologists have noticed.....but as upper-crusty, highly-educated intellectuals, they don't care. Intellectuals have only a negative interest in democracy anyway. They do better under despots.
Someone teased Ned about rattling his chains. Your recital of alphabet-soup agencies of the federal government is a pretty good imitation of chains rattling.
My point is that secession is far less likely to be invoked to defend individual, human, civil, or even property rights, and far more likely to be used by states to promote their own interests.
Error of logic. Secession was undertaken precisely in response to a prospective change in the definition of property rights, especially crafted to disadvantage Southern planters and despoil them of their capital. You don't suppose Abe Lincoln actually proposed to pay full face value for manumitted slaves, do you? His 1864 offer was about 20 cents on the dollar. It was tardy, inasmuch as hostilities had already gone too far, and there was too much ill will.
The backers of secession were looking to their personal interest, to which they knew Lincoln and his party were inimical.
It has been much more about power, than about freedom.
Well, that is a reasonable statement, but a false dichtomy. If I'm powerless, I can't defend my freedom. Certainly the secessionists reasonably (and correctly) expected Lincoln to invade their rights and freedoms on a personal level, as well as on a constitutional level (repeal of the Tenth Amendment).
Indeed, the interests and power of states may demand the repression of individual liberties. They aren't that different from the federal government itself.
This is a reasonable point, and I agree. Certainly the career of Jim Crow demonstrates the truth of what you say. But if you mean to say, oh, well, there's no difference -- let's just do it my way, then I'm afraid I'll have to demur on two grounds. The first is subsidiarity. It's a durable conservative principle that government tends not to oppress or to neglect the people, the closer it is to them. This is precisely why so many Freepers regard globalism, whether commercial or governmental, and its twin internationalism, as bad things. It isn't that someone from Switzerland can't hear a case and dispense justice, or that an English legislator couldn't serve a congressional district. It's that, in the estimation of history, imperial or transnational arrangements tend to have more bad habits than local ones. When the Hutus went after the Tutsis, for example, the United Nations was a veritable bump on a log.
There is nothing about more comprehensive forms of government that somehow makes them simultaneously more responsive or respectful of civli liberties. People who seem to think so, are laboring under the delusion that empires are still a desirable (for the populations involved) form of human organization. One could make some argument for their cross-pollenating and commercial functions 100 years ago, but now we know we don't need to put up with the institutional and social complications of imperialism to reap imperialism's benefits. One could argue, indeed, that we are benefiting entirely too much from global integration. Does the benefit of being able to hear for the first time two young women speaking Amharic in a parking lot (they were from Ethiopia) outweigh all the complications of excessive and illegal immigration? No.
The second ground for my disagreeing with you on this point is that it's a fallacy of distraction. The point is, that Lincoln disturbed by waging war, a settled arrangement of the Constitution, and this damage to the American Expeiment needs to be repaired. The American people need to learn to recognize and reject intellectual hustlers who advocate some multiplication of powers and offices, on the strength of some come-on moral argument like feeding the hungry or protecting children. Yet this happens all the time, and many things are transacted at the federal level as a result; this is a violation both of subsidiarity and of enumerated powers.
Nor do I share DiLorenzo's naive presumption that more "state's rights" necessarily means less government and greater individual freedom. States have themselves been capable of great oppression. The same would be true of any sucessor states to our federal union.
This is a kind of "they all do it" argument, and I continue to disagree with you about whether state governments would be more likely to abuse citizens than a national government full of big-wheel wannabes.
One could also quite easily turn your argument against you. Given completely sovereign, unchecked states, which were not required to abide by the Bill of Rights, what defense of due process would dissidents have against "a swift trip to prison?"
You mentioned the 14th Amendment. The putative lack of this amendment, in your mental exercise, would be supplied by Amendments V, VI, and VIII. If the entire Bill of Rights were removed, then of course there would be a problem.
In any case, if you look at what happened, the segregationists left the scene without being imprisoned or repressed. Indeed, in the 20th century they did far more of this to those they had power over.
Your claimed point is open to challenge on a couple of points. First, there is accumulating evidence of "reverse Jim Crow" or "Crow Jim" as I usually call it, from bans on displays of Confederate flags to banishment of placenames, removal of Confederate monuments, and flat refusal by black politicians in the South to permit public appropriations for Civil War memorials.
Furthermore, during the increase in violence that occurred in the 1980's and 1990's, murders in the United States rose to about 25,000 per year. Of these homicides, 50% were black victims, 91% of whom were killed by black assailants: this is "black on black crime". Of the non-black proportion of the decedents, some 50% of these as well were murdered by young black men. Crime statisticians have been ordered, I think, to cover up this hecatomb of "murdering out" by the black community (refusing to stipulate the assailant's race in some 25% of cases, e.g., putting down the race of the assailant as "unknown") and otherwise playing games with crime statistics in order to conceal the central social fact of 20th-century crime, which is that young black men are raping out, robbing out, and murdering out at a tremendous rate. During the years in question, they claimed a net imbalance of 5400 murders per year among non-blacks. This is a hecatomb of deaths that absolutely dwarfs the numbers of lynchings that were so prominent in the political arguments of the civil rights movement.
Therefore I think that, on the strength of these numbers, your statement that "in the 20th century they did far more of this to those they had power over" is categorically incorrect. Rather, the civil rights movement has been attended by the payment of a high blood price for the substitution of more liberal law-enforcement techniques for the old Jim Crow regimes, formal and informal, that formerly obtained in many big cities. This has to count as a major policy embarrassment for liberalism, and one that they are at pains to keep quiet.
There's a romanticism of lost causes that makes people think that those who lost in history were better and nobler than those who won.
The short form of this argument is "So's your old man, and you're another." It's a fallacy, an argument ad hominem tendered in the absence of evidence that an independent South would have followed the same, or a worse, road than the United States has done. Without getting into recriminatory argle-bargle, let me just say that the form of your argument is defective, in that 1) it consists of a known fallacy, and 2) is beside the point. The point is, the Southerners had the right to create their own future, whether better or worse -- and Abraham Lincoln denied them their future by violent force, in order to compel them to remain in the Union to become his policy objects.
I still don't believe that victory for the segregationists would have been better than their defeat.
Well, that is a discussion for another thread, anyway, and I tend to be neutral on that subject anyway. I think there are a lot of loose ends in equity to the history of the civil rights movement (such as the egregious statistics I quoted above), but overall it's a completely different situation in several ways from the 1860's.