Posted on 09/06/2003 9:14:08 AM PDT by quidnunc
Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as their agent, hedging it in by a doctrine of enumerated powers. Since the compact between the states was voluntary, secession was considered an option by public leaders in every section of the Union during the antebellum period. Given this tradition — deeply rooted in the Declaration of Independence — a great statesman in 1860 would have negotiated a settlement with the disaffected states, even if it meant the withdrawal of some from the Union. But Lincoln refused even to accept Confederate commissioners, much less negotiate with them. Most of the Union could have been kept together. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas voted to remain in the Union even after the Confederacy was formed; they reversed themselves only when Lincoln decided on a war of coercion. A great statesman does not seduce his people into a needless war; he keeps them out of it.
When the Soviet Union dissolved by peaceful secession, it was only 70 years old — the same age as the United States when it dissolved in 1860. Did Gorbachev fail as a statesman because he negotiated a peaceful dissolution of the U.S.S.R.? Likewise, if all states west of the Mississippi were to secede tomorrow, would we praise, as a great statesman, a president who refused to negotiate and launched total war against the civilian population merely to preserve the Union? The number of Southerners who died as a result of Lincoln’s invasion was greater than the total of all Americans killed by Hitler and Tojo. By the end of the war, nearly one half of the white male population of military age was either dead or mutilated. No country in World War II suffered casualties of that magnitude.
Not only would Lincoln not receive Confederate commissioners, he refused, for three crucial months, to call Congress. Alone, he illegally raised money, illegally raised troops, and started the war. To crush Northern opposition, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for the duration of the war and rounded up some 20,000 political prisoners. (Mussolini arrested some 12,000 but convicted only 1,624.) When the chief justice of the Supreme Court declared the suspension blatantly unconstitutional and ordered the prisoners released, Lincoln ordered his arrest. This American Caesar shut down over 300 newspapers, arrested editors, and smashed presses. He broke up state legislatures; arrested Democratic candidates who urged an armistice; and used the military to elect Republicans (including himself, in 1864, by a margin of around 38,000 popular votes). He illegally created a “state” in West Virginia and imported a large army of foreign mercenaries. B.H. Liddell Hart traces the origin of modern total war to Lincoln’s decision to direct war against the civilian population. Sherman acknowledged that, by the rules of war taught at West Point, he was guilty of war crimes punishable by death. But who was to enforce those rules?
These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of preserving an indivisible Union. But Lincoln had inherited no such Union from the Framers. Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of blood and iron. What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president. He claimed legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an historically false theory of the Constitution which held that the states had never been sovereign. The Union created the states, he said, not the states the Union. In time, this corrupt and corrupting doctrine would suck nearly every reserved power of the states into the central government. Lincoln seared into the American mind an ideological style of politics which, through a sort of alchemy, transmuted a federative “union” of states into a French revolutionary “nation” launched on an unending global mission of achieving equality. Lincoln’s corrupt constitutionalism and his ideological style of politics have, over time, led to the hollowing out of traditional American society and the obscene concentration of power in the central government that the Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.
A genuinely American conservatism, then, must adopt the project of preserving and restoring the decentralized federative polity of the Framers rooted in state and local sovereignty. The central government has no constitutional authority to do most of what it does today. The first question posed by an authentic American conservative politics is not whether a policy is good or bad, but what agency (the states or the central government — if either) has the authority to enact it. This is the principle of subsidiarity: that as much as possible should be done by the smallest political unit.
The Democratic and Republican parties are Lincolnian parties. Neither honestly questions the limits of federal authority to do this or that. In 1861, the central government broke free from what Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution,” and we have, consequently, inherited a fractured historical memory. There are now two Americanisms: pre-Lincolnian and post-Lincolnian. The latter is Jacobinism by other means. Only the former can lay claim to being the primordial American conservatism.
David W. Livingston is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (University of Chicago Press).
I've been mulling this over and I think you're correct. My guess is that unless current trends change, California will be first. By analogy (a poor mode of reasoning, I realize), it's quite similar to what happened to the Episcopal church, which in my lifetime was (fairly accurately) known as "The Republican Party at prayer."
The liberals got control in the 60s and started changing things. In "modernizing" the liturgy (in the process losing the very beautiful Cranmerian language -- yes it is archaic, but it's easily understood) they altered the doctrines. There were some bitter fights, and the first round of departures began.
Then it got worse. In the early 80s my rector (for whom I still retain much love and respect, though he has passed on) got a bit frosted when, as a delegate to the diocesan convention, I not only voted against supporting the Nuclear Freeze Initiative, I questioned why the church was involved in secular political issues. (I was a bit more naive then.)
Soon after I moved away and just could not associate with any of the churches here, so (making a long story short) I joined the departures as I became an Anglican. The depatures slowed to a trickle, until the recent confirmation of Vicki Gene Robinson, who divorced his wife and then became the first openly practicing queen bishop, which is roiling much of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Soon, I suspect, they will have driven anyone who isn't extremely left-wing out. And they will own the church's extensive properties, free and clear. At least until they've run them into the ground.
Would it have been different if we'd all stayed and fought until the very last man standing? I don't know. I consider that the changes that brought about the first departures were already bitterly fought -- and lost. The liberals have a basic advantage in that there is nothing so low that they won't stoop to it in order to WIN; and most conservatives and moderates are hampered by the failure to recognize that we're engaged in a winner-take-all social war. Rudyard Kipling illustrated this in his story The Mother Hive.
Now think of California and what the liberals are doing. For individual reasons, rationally made, the more conservative are leaving. Taxation, regulation, affordability, the moral climate -- there are all sorts of reasons to leave. How many years it will take I have no idea (I'm still guessing, mind you), but it is conceivable that at some point the supporters of the Aztlan movement (or whatever it is called) to change "ownership" of California to Mexico will surpass the opposition. Certainly some of the recent actions, Motor Voter and Illegal Aliens Get Driver's Licenses, move things in that direction. And America's Left will support the give-away.
People like you are so funny. You completely ignore the actions and war crimes of those you idolize.
Davis was a politican, nuff said. But Lee was the absolute embodiment of the statement, "An Officer and a Gentleman".
If you look at the documents of the officers on both sides of that war and you will note that 90% of them, including Grant, agree with my statement.
Grant: " Let us have peace."
You must mean 'peace of the grave', because when Grant was finished with the South, he turn his attention to the West and committed GENOCIDE against the native americans.
Whiskey Papa, a person so anti-southern that it is funny.
It is true the sout sent their 'negotiators' to discuss the debts of the south, and they were refused, but primarily because the debts of the South were, even before the south stole every bit of Federal property not nailed down, so much larger than it's ability to repay them that meeting with the commissioners could only be the equivalent of a bankruptcy sale. Compared to the southern democrats and their penchent for soaking down 60% of the Federal treasury funds annually while the south only contributed 14% of the tax income, Lincoln was indeed a real conservative. It is to be noted that while the south had a way to fund it's war effort, it failed to do so and simply ran itself into a financial hole in the ground. The north, on the other hand, managed it's resources very competently dispute what was then an un-magineable debt load. THe credit for this did not go to Linccoln though, but the Thaddeus Stevens who was head of the House Ways and Means committee for the duration of the war.
Long trashed in cheap pulp fiction and, most notably, Woodrow Wilson's dixiecrat brutally racist history of the war, Stevens was truly appreciated and acknowledged in his day, and was given a public viewing on the same bier in the under the Capital Dome that Lincoln was given. He was a truly remarkable individual and a political wit of true genius. There has been no American politician like him since, and given the way the ideas of the founders are being run into the ground, very likely never will be another.
If you look closely you will see that I didn't make the comparison, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette did.
This was an exerpt from an editorial which almost certainly was written by the redoubtable Paul Greenberg, whose credentials as a Southerner and as a rock-ribbed conservative simply cannot be gainsaid.
I would bet money that this is also a Pro-Clinton newspaper.
I don't put much stock in any newspaper with the word 'Democrat' in it's name.
You would lose.
There were a couple of FOB columnists, but Greenberg — who runs the editorial department of the paper — attempted valiantly to warn the electorate about Clinton prior to the election of '92.
He coined the nickname "Slick Willy."
I don't put much stock in any newspaper with the word 'Democrat' in it's name.
The name Democrat-Gazette came about when two ppers — the Democrat and the Gazette — merged.
But how you can compare a religious theocracy (Islam, which is base on middle eastern sects and cults) with a democratic-republic (the South which is based on both the original Constitution and British common law) is beyond me.
Well, I'm no more pro-North than you are pro-South.
The only difference is that I'm pro-the-winning-side while you're pro-a-bunch-of-losers.
As for comparing Araby with the South: didn't they both engage in slavery and both subscribe to an honor/shame culture?
And of course as Greenberg pointed out, they have both constructed a mythos about their history which is more fantasy than fact.
How quick you forget that the U.S. supported slavery for almost 90 years. Also, the founders of this nation, whether they liked it or not, also signed off on slavery when they sign they signed the Constitution (look un the 3/5 vote for a slave).
And not much have really changed, the country still has slaves, only we don't them slaves. They are either in the URBAN slums, harvesting votes or in the sweatshops.
And here is the true irony of the situation, this country is falling apart because of the socialism that Abe himself started the ball rolling on a little under 130 years ago.
How quick you forget that the U.S. supported slavery for almost 90 years. Also, the founders of this nation, whether they liked it or not, also signed off on slavery when they signed the Constitution (look up the '3/5 vote for a slave' in the Constitution).
And not much have really changed, the country still has slaves, only we don't them slaves. They are either in the URBAN slums, harvesting votes or in the sweatshops.
And here is the true irony of the situation, this country is falling apart because of the socialism that Abe himself started the ball rolling on a little under 130 years ago.
It is true poetic justice.
They made a political compromise on slavery to accomplish union, expecting it to fade away in a republic. Wrong. -- Slavers did not want republican forms of government.
And not much have really changed, the country still has slaves, only we don't them slaves. They are either in the URBAN slums, harvesting votes or in the sweatshops.
Weird view, - you a communitarian?
And here is the true irony of the situation, this country is falling apart because of the socialism that Abe himself started the ball rolling on a little under 130 years ago. It is true poetic justice.
The concept of an 'all powerful state', one that can ignore our constitutions restrictions, has always been a product of the states rights movement in america. The socialistic politics of the early 1900's grew from that seed, -- and flowered in Roosevelts big government 'new deal'; which was bought to power by a coalition between leftist labor & states rightist political interests.
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/side/newdeal.html
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