It’s Them or Us

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Loquitur Veritatem

Apropos the left’s unhinged and baseless attack on the Covington kids, the Audacious Epigone writes:

They [leftists] are incorrigible. There is no reformation, only destruction -– theirs or ours.

Theirs or ours. Them or us.

As Christopher Roach puts it:

The intensity of the friction has led, in recent times, to the suggestion we may be on the brink of a kind of civil war.

One solution proffered from time to time is a peaceful separation. Observers on the Right and the Left have suggested that the rift is simply too deep and serious to be resolved, and that the mutual interest of everyone concerned would benefit by a divorce, whether deemed secession or an invigoration of local autonomy or something else….

A peaceful national separation is probably a good idea. But those on the Right must face the most important obstacle: The Left would never ever let us leave.

Leftism is not simply one opinion among many. For the Left’s votaries, it’s closer to a religion. It’s not enough that one is himself a vegan, drives a Prius, doesn’t own guns, rejects the traditional family, or anything else that goes with the lifestyle. It is essential that everyone else does so. Any deviations are “backwardness” and “divisive” or worse.

… All disagreements are pathologized as moral failings and psychological defects, labeled with pseudoscientific terms like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all the rest….

For all the talk of diversity and tolerance among the Left, this tolerance extends mostly to things most of us do not want to do. Most men and women do not want to change their sex or marry someone of the same sex. Most of us do not intend to leave the country our ancestors built. So the Left gives us the right to do things most of us do not want to do—gay rights, immigration—but takes away things that used to be commonplace, like supporting a family on a single income or governing our towns and cities without having to beg for the imprimatur of a hostile judiciary….

A peaceful separation requires some mutual respect and concern for the flourishing of the other. The Left, like crazed primitives engaged in honor killing, would instead exact revenge and command forced association rather than allow a divorce. The Left would be embarrassed and discredited if their ideology were rejected by the group it is supposedly benefiting with the promise of diversity, equality, and progress. Nailing shut the exits is a deliberate part of the Left’s utopian quest for uniformity and expansive labeling of all of its opinions and policies as nonnegotiable “human rights.”

Withdrawal isn’t an option either, as Bruce Frohnen observes:

[Rod] Dreher has been writing a good deal, of late, about what he calls the Benedict Option, by which he means a tactical withdrawal by people of faith from the mainstream culture into religious communities where they will seek to nurture and strengthen the faithful for reemergence and reengagement at a later date….

The problem with this view is that it underestimates the hostility of the new, non-Christian society [e.g., this and this]….

Leaders of this [new, non-Christian] society will not leave Christians alone if we simply surrender the public square to them. And they will deny they are persecuting anyone for simply applying the law to revoke tax exemptions, force the hiring of nonbelievers, and even jail those who fail to abide by laws they consider eminently reasonable, fair, and just.

The left simply will not abandon its desire to dictate to “the people”. It’s for their own good, you see.

Keep your powder dry.

Preemptive (Cold) Civil War

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Loquitur Veritatem

Parts I – IV are recommended as supplemental to “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“, which adapts the action recommendations of part V.

I. PROLOGUE

This post is driven by what I have seen of leftism over the years. Just a few hours before its scheduled publication I read a piece by Richard Jack Rail, “Our America or Theirs“, which captures the fighting spirit of this post:

Our adversary is nasty and pitiless. These people cheat, lie, and kill, and they don’t care about the country. They tout honor they don’t have and accuse us of having none.

We are facing evil and its fruits.

We can’t just let it go anymore. There is no place left for us to retreat to. For decades, we’ve let them get away with their rowdy, insulting, destructive behavior. We’ve pretended they meant well when we knew they did not. We’ve allowed them to get away with their lies because it was so unpleasant fighting all the time.

We can’t do that anymore. It’s time to draw lines in the sand and fight back. Put them in prison and keep them there for crimes, rather than slap their wrists and pretend they’re harmless. Forcibly shut them up when they try to forcibly shut us up. Meet their obnoxious behavior with our own obnoxious behavior.

This is what they’ve pushed toward for 50 years, and it’s time to give it back to them. They have taken over the closest thing we have to a national police force – the FBI – and corrupted it at its core, using police powers not to protect America or U.S. citizens, but to go after political foes. This is the very definition of tyranny….

… There’s no “give” left.

It’s our America or theirs.

II. EXHIBIT A: THE WAR ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT

I hereby retract something that I said in “Leftism as Crypto-Fascism: The Google Paradigm“:

Google is a private company. I strongly support the right of private employers to fire anyone at any time for any reason. I am not here to condemn Google for having fired James Damore, the author of the now-notorious 10-page memo about Google’s ideological echo chamber.

Later in the same post, however, I said this:

What happened to James Damore is what happens where leftists control the machinery of the state.

Given the influence that Google and the other members of the left-wing information-technology oligarchy exerts in this country, that oligarchy is tantamount to a state apparatus. As Joel Kotkin puts it,

Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.

Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.” [“How Silicon Valley Went from ‘Don’t Be Evil’ to Doing Evil“, The Orange County Register, March 3, 2018]

Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other information-technology companies represent just one facet of the complex of institutions in the thought-control business.

A second facet consists of the so-called mainstream media (MSM) — the print and broadcast outlets that for the most part, and for many decades, have exploited their protected status under the First Amendment to heavily lard their offerings with “progressive” propaganda. MSM’s direct influence via the internet has been diluted slightly by the plethora of alternative sources, many of them libertarian and conservative, but Google and friends do a good job of throttling the alternative sources.

I need say little about a third facet — the “entertainment” industry — which also exploits its First-Amendment privilege to spew left-wing propaganda.

The academy and its spawn, public ~~education~~ indoctrination, form a fourth facet. The leftward tilt of most academic administrations and goodly chunks of the professoriate is no secret. Neither is the stultifying atmosphere on college campuses:

Sixty-one percent of U.S. college students agree that the climate on their campus prevents some people from expressing their views because others might find them offensive. In 2016, 54% of college students held this view.

These results are based on a 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of 3,014 randomly sampled U.S. college students about First Amendment issues. The survey is an update of a 2016 Knight Foundation/Newseum Institute/Gallup survey on the same topic….

While more students now agree that their campus climate stifles free speech, fewer students now (70%) than in 2016 (78%) favor having an open campus environment that allows all types of speech, even that which is offensive. In contrast, 29% of students now, up from 22% in 2016, would rather campuses be “positive learning environments for all students” by prohibiting certain speech that is offensive or biased….

When students perceive the campus climate as deterring certain people from speaking their minds, they may have conservative students in mind more than others. Sixty-nine percent of college students believe political conservatives can freely and openly express their views on campus. While still a majority, it is far less than the 92% who say the same about political liberals. Between 80% and 94% of students believe other campus groups, including many that have historically faced discrimination, can freely express their views. [quotations from a Gallup/Knight survey by William A. Jacobson in “Gallup/Knight Survey Shows Free Speech Crisis for Conservatives on Campus Is Real“, Legal Insurrection, March 12. 2018]

On top of that, there are the hordes of public-school teachers who are the willing adherents and disciples of the “progressive” orthodoxy, which they gleefully transmit to captive and impressionable students across the land.

III. THE BROADER, DEEPER PROBLEM: SUBVERSION OF LIBERTY AND PROSPERITY

These information-entertainment-media-academic institutions are important components of what I call the vast left-wing conspiracy in America. Their purpose and effect is the subversion of the traditional norms that made America a uniquely free, prosperous, and vibrant nation.

It is what Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander wrote about several months ago:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.

Did everyone abide by those precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations….

… The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.

This cultural script began to break down in the late 1960s. A combination of factors — prosperity, the Pill, the expansion of higher education, and the doubts surrounding the Vietnam War — encouraged an antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal — sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll — that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society….

And those adults with influence over the culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all….

… Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low. Those who live by the simple rules that most people used to accept may not end up rich or hold elite jobs, but their lives will go far better than they do now. All schools and neighborhoods would be much safer and more pleasant. More students from all walks of life would be educated for constructive employment and democratic participation.

But restoring the hegemony of the bourgeois culture will require the arbiters of culture — the academics, media, and Hollywood — to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden. Instead of bashing the bourgeois culture, they should return to the 1950s posture of celebrating it. [“Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture”, The Inquirer, August 9, 2017]

Needless to say, Alexander and Wax have been vilified and threatened with physical harm for daring to speak truth to the power of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

What will happen in America if that conspiracy succeeds in completely overthrowing “bourgeois culture”? The left will frog-march America in whatever utopian direction captures its “feelings” (but not its reason) at the moment; for example:

eugenics, prohibition, repeal of prohibition, peace through unilateral disarmament, overpopulation, global cooling, peak oil, global warming, carbon footprints, recycling, income inequality, unconscious racism, white privilege, forced integration, forced segregation (if blacks want it), coeducation, mixed-sexed dorms, single-sex schools, any reference to or image of a firearm, keeping score, winning, cultural appropriation, diversity, globalization, free speech (not), homophobia, same-sex “marriage”, smoking, gender “assignment” at birth, “free” college for all, “settled science”, collective guilt (but only of straight, white, conservative males of European descent, and Germans in 1933-1945), racial profiling and stereotyping (except when leftists do it), etc., etc., etc.

Further,

leftism’s utopian agenda has a chance of success only if everyone is forced to hew to its dictates. There’s no room in utopia for dissent or learning by trial and error — the kind of learning that fuels economic progress and yields stabilizing social norms.

The fact that a dictated utopian agenda really has no chance of success is beyond the imagining of a leftist. We have already seen what such an agenda does to economic progress, social comity, and liberty in places like the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and Venezuela.

It is no coincidence that American leftists have always been quick to rationalize, dismiss, and cover up the brutal consequences of the regimes in those places. They have had exactly the kind of governance that leftists seek to bring to the United States as a whole, and have almost succeeded in imposing on many large cities and not a few Blue States.

Leftists are utopians, driven by impossible dreams and hooked on the nirvana fallacy. They are therefore immune to facts, and doomed to repeat the harsh lessons of history. Which would be fine if leftists governed only their ilk, but they are intent on making their fellow citizens suffer along with them — and they have succeeded far too well.

Clearly, the information-entertainment-media-academic complex is striving for a monopoly on the expression and transmission of political thought in America. Such a monopoly would be tantamount to state action (see this and this), and must therefore be prevented before it can be perfected. For, if it can be perfected, the First Amendment will quickly become obsolete.

But there’s far more at stake than the First Amendment. As Malcolm Pollack puts it,

the tremendous fissure in American culture and politics…. goes far deeper than mere disagreements about policy; it has reached the point in which the two sides have entirely different conceptions of moral, political, cultural, social, historical, and even human reality — views that are not only incommensurable, but mutually and bitterly antagonistic.

IV. THE END IS NEAR … ABSENT BOLD ACTION

Complete victory for the enemies of liberty is only a few election cycles away. The squishy center of the American electorate — as is its wont — will swing back toward the Democrat Party. With a Democrat in the White House, a Democrat-controlled Congress, and a few party switches in the Supreme Court, the dogmas of the information-entertainment-media-academic complex will become the law of the land; for example:

Billions and trillions of dollars will be wasted on various “green” projects, including but far from limited to the complete replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables”, with the resulting impoverishment of most Americans, except for comfortable elites who press such policies).

It will be illegal to criticize, even by implication, such things as abortion, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, or the confiscation of firearms. These cherished beliefs will be mandated for school and college curricula, and enforced by huge fines and draconian prison sentences (sometimes in the guise of “re-education”).

Any hint of Christianity and Judaism will be barred from public discourse, and similarly punished. Other religions will be held up as models of unity and tolerance.

Reverse discrimination in favor of females, blacks, Hispanics, gender-confused persons, and other “protected” groups will become overt and legal. But “protections” will not apply to members of such groups who are suspected of harboring libertarian or conservative impulses.

Sexual misconduct will become a crime, and any male person may be found guilty of it on the uncorroborated testimony of any female who claims to have been the victim of an unwanted glance, touch (even if accidental), innuendo (as perceived by the victim), etc.

There will be parallel treatment of the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism.

All health care in the United States will be subject to review by a national, single-payer agency of the central government. Private care will be forbidden, though ready access to doctors, treatments, and medications will be provided for high officials and other favored persons. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace (like that of the UK) will be shrugged off as a residual effect of “capitalist” health care.

The regulatory regime will rebound with a vengeance, contaminating every corner of American life and regimenting all businesses except those daring to operate in an underground economy. The quality and variety of products and services will decline as their real prices rise as a fraction of incomes.

The dire economic effects of single-payer health care and regulation will be compounded by massive increases in other kinds of government spending (defense excepted). The real rate of economic growth will approach zero.

The United States will maintain token armed forces, mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Given its economically destructive independence from foreign oil and its depressed economy, it will become a simulacrum of the USSR and Mao’s China — and not a rival to the new superpowers, Russia and China, which will largely ignore it as long as it doesn’t interfere in their pillaging of respective spheres of influence. A policy of non-interference (i.e., tacit collusion) will be the order of the era in Washington.

Though it would hardly be necessary to rig elections in favor of Democrats, given the flood of illegal immigrants who will pour into the country and enjoy voting rights, a way will be found to do just that. The most likely method will be election laws requiring candidates to pass ideological purity tests by swearing fealty to the “law of the land” (i.e., abortion, unfettered immigration, same-sex marriage, freedom of gender choice for children, etc., etc., etc.). Those who fail such a test will be barred from holding any kind of public office, no matter how insignificant.

Are my fears exaggerated? I don’t think so. I have lived long enough and seen enough changes in the political and moral landscape of the United States to know that what I have sketched out can easily happen within a decade after Democrats seize total control of the central government.

Will the defenders of liberty rally to keep it from happening? Perhaps, but I fear that they will not have a lot of popular support, for three reasons:

First, there is the problem of asymmetrical ideological warfare, which favors the party that says “nice” things and promises “free” things.

Second, What has happened thus far — mainly since the 1960s — has happened slowly enough that it seems “natural” to too many Americans. They are like fish in water who cannot grasp the idea of life in a different medium.

Third, although change for the worse has accelerated in recent years, it has occurred mainly in forums that seem inconsequential to most Americans, for example, in academic fights about free speech, in the politically correct speeches of Hollywood stars, and in culture wars that are conducted mainly in the blogosphere. The unisex-bathroom issue seems to have faded as quickly as it arose, mainly because it really affects so few people. The latest gun-control mania may well subside — though it has reached new heights of hysteria — but it is only one battle in the broader civil war being waged by the left. And most Americans lack the political and historical knowledge to understand that there really is a civil war underway — just not a “hot” one (yet).

V. A PREEMPTIVE STRATEGY TO PRESERVE LIBERTY AND PROSPERITY

As a firm believer in preemptive war as a means of preserving liberty, I recently recommended this “war” strategy:

The only way out, as I see it, is for majorities of the people some States to demand that their governments resist Leviathan by selectively ignoring some of its decrees. If California can do it, surely some of the 15 States that went for Trump by more than 60 percent can do it.

Once the ice is broken, nullification — the refusal to abide by unconstitutional laws and decrees emanating from Washington — will become a national movement. Federalism will return after an absence of almost 90 years. National “democracy” will be a thing of the past. The citizens of each State will have greater control over the reach of government into their lives. It won’t be nirvana, but it will be better than the present state of affairs.

Quasi-secession, as I would call it, is the only peaceful way out. It’s the only “democratic” way out. If that doesn’t work, there’s always the real thing, which is legal.

But, as I have said elsewhere, there’s an underlying problem that won’t be solved by quasi-secession or even by the real thing:

I am … pessimistic about the willingness of the left to allow a return to the true federalism that was supposed to have been ensured by the Constitution. The left’s mantra is control, control, control — and it will not relinquish its control of the machinery of government. The left’s idea of liberty is the “liberty” to follow its dictates.

All bets will be off when Democrats regain control of the central government. And there is precious little time in which to default to federalism, either through quasi-secession or the real things (which even deep-Red States are likely to resist). An Article V convention of the States might do the job. But it would take too many years in which to authorize, organize and complete a convention, and to implement the new guarantees of liberty that (should) issue from such a convention.

Add a convention of the States to the several other options that I outlined a few years ago, and you have a nice, round 10 ways of restoring liberty (not all of them mutually exclusive). All of the options are flawed in one way or another, and (except for a risky coup) are unlikely to have decisive results.

There is an eleventh option, which I have discussed elsewhere, one that could be exercised now — and with decisive results. It is departmentalism. What is that? Here’s an explanation by Matthew J. Franck:

It’s one thing to say that the Supreme Court, at the apex of the federal judiciary, has a binding authority over the states to see that the Constitution means the same thing in every part of the country, when cases and controversies necessitate the performance of this duty. It is quite another thing to say, as [the Supreme Court in] Cooper [v. Aaron] did, that Supreme Court rulings are “the supreme law of the land” owing to an exact identity with the Constitution itself, and thus binding with Article VI force on all rival interpreters of the Constitution. From this it would follow that Congress and the president, no less than the states, are bound by their oaths to accept Supreme Court decisions as binding expositions of the meaning of the Constitution.

That is the proposition that departmentalism challenges, and rightly so.

Michael Stokes Paulsen and Luke Paulsen, writing in The Constitution: An Introduction, put it more directly:

All branches of government are equally bound by the Constitution. No branch of the federal government— not the Congress, not the President, not even the Supreme Court— can legitimately act in ways contrary to the words of the Constitution. Indeed, Article VI requires that all government officials— legislative, executive, and judicial, state and federal—“ shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” Thus, the idea of a written constitution is closely tied to the idea of constitutional supremacy: In America, no branch of government is supreme. The government as a whole is not supreme. The Constitution is supreme. It is the written Constitution that prevails over every other source of authority in the United States.

Here’s what needs to happen, and happen soon:

Compile a documented dossier of the statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions of the United States government that grievously countermand the Constitution. Such a tabulation would include, but be far from limited to, enactments like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare that aren’t among the limited and enumerated powers of Congress, as listed in Article I, Section 8. They would also include judicial interference in matters that are rightly the president’s, under the Constitution and constitutional laws and regulations.

Prioritize the list, roughly according to the degree of damage each item does to the liberty and prosperity of Americans.

Re-prioritize the list, to eliminate or reduce the priority of items that would be difficult or impossible to act on quickly. For example, although Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are unconstitutional, they have been around so long that it would be too disruptive and harmful to eliminate them without putting in place a transition plan that takes many years to execute.

Of the remaining high-priority items, some will call for action (e.g., implementation of the “travel ban” before the Supreme Court can act on it); some will call for passivity (e.g., allowing individual States to opt out of federal programs without challenging those States in court).

Mount a public-relations offensive to explain departmentalism and its benefits, with hints as to the kinds of actions that will be taken to reassert the primacy of the Constitution.

Announce the actions to be taken with regard to each high-priority item. There would be — for general consumption — a simplified version that explains the benefits to individuals and the country as a whole. There would also be a full, legal explanation of the constitutional validity of each action. The legal explanation would be “for the record”, in the likely event of a serious attempt to impeach the president and his “co-conspirators”. The legal version would be the administration’s only response to judicial interventions, which the administration would ignore.

One of the actions would be to enforce the First Amendment against information-entertainment-media-academic complex. This would begin with action against high-profile targets (e.g., Google and a few large universities that accept federal money). That should be enough to bring the others into line. If it isn’t, keep working down the list until the miscreants cry uncle.

What kind of action do I have in mind? This is a delicate matter because the action must be seen as rescuing the First Amendment, not suppressing it; it must be taken solely by the executive; and it must comport with legitimate authority already vested in the executive. Even then, the hue and cry will be deafening, as will the calls for impeachment. It will take nerves of steel to proceed on this front.

Here’s a way to do it:

EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. __________

The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. (Article V.)

Amendment I to the Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”.

Major entities in the telecommunications, news, entertainment, and education industries have exerted their power to suppress speech because of its content. (See appended documentation.) The collective actions of these entities — many of them government- licensed and government-funded — effectively constitute a governmental violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech (See Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) and Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946).)

As President, it is my duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. The Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech is a fundamental law of the land.

Therefore, by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution, it is hereby ordered as follows:

1. The United States Marshals Service shall monitor the activities of the entities listed in the appendix, to ascertain whether those entities are discriminating against persons or groups based on the views, opinions, or facts expressed by those persons or groups.

2. Wherever the Marshals Service observes effective discrimination against certain views, opinions, or facts, it shall immediately countermand such discrimination and order remedial action by the offending entity.

3. Officials and employees of the entities in question who refuse to cooperate with the Marshals Service, or to follow its directives pursuant to this Executive Order, shall be suspended from duty but will continue to be compensated at their normal rates during their suspensions, however long they may last.

4. This order shall terminate with respect to a particular entity when the President is satisfied that the entity will no longer discriminate against views, opinions, or facts on the basis of their content.

5. This order shall terminate in its entirety when the President is satisfied that freedom of speech has been restored to the land.

(Note to constitutional law experts: Please chime in.)

VI. NOTHING TO LOSE BY TRYING

The drastic actions recommended here are necessary because of the imminent danger to what is left of Americans’ liberty and prosperity. (See IV.) The alternative is to do nothing and watch liberty and prosperity vanish from view. There is nothing to be lost, and much to be gained.

There is now a man in the White House who seems to have the nerve and commitment to liberty that is called for. Another such president is unlikely to come along before it’s too late.

I beseech you, Mr. Trump, to strike preemptively now … for the sake of America’s liberty and prosperity.

Related reading:
Niall Ferguson, “Tech vs. Trump: The Great Battle of Our Time Has Begun“, The Spectator, October 17, 2017
Christian Gonzalez, “Looking through an Ideological Lens at Columbia“, Heterodox Academy, March 15, 2018
Brandon Moore, “The Censorship of Conservatives on the Internet Is Approaching Critical Levels of Bad“, Red State, March 15, 2018
Nikita Vladimirov, “Scholar Traces Current ‘Campus Intolerance’ to ’60s Radicals“, Campus Reform, March 14, 2018
Matthew J. Peterson, “Total Political War“, American Greatness, March 23, 2018
Joel Kotkin, “Is This the End for the Neoliberal World Order?“, The Orange County Register, March 24, 2018
William A. Nitze, “The Tech Giants Must Be Stopped“, The American Conservative, April 16, 2018

Lincoln Was Wrong

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Loquitur Veritatem

Michael Stokes Paulsen and his son Luke opine:

[A]t the heart of the Civil War, the crisis that triggered it, and the changes that it brought were enormous constitutional issues. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the Civil War was fought over the meaning of the Constitution, and over who would have the ultimate power to decide that meaning. The Civil War decided—on the battlefields rather than in the courts—the most important constitutional questions in our nation’s history: the nature of the Union under the Constitution, the status and future of slavery, the powers of the national government versus the states, the supremacy of the Constitution, and the wartime powers of the president as commander in chief. It was the Civil War, not any subsequent judicial decision, that “overruled” the Supreme Court’s atrocious decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford creating a national constitutional right to own slaves….

The United States is the nation it is today because of Lincoln’s unwavering commitment to the Constitution as governing a single, permanent nation and forbidding secession. Lincoln’s vision of Union is so thoroughly accepted today that we forget how hotly disputed it was for the first seventy years of our nation’s history. The result was hardly inevitable. Lincoln’s vision and resolve saved the nation. Lincoln’s nationalist views have shaped every issue of federalism and sovereignty for the past one hundred fifty years. Compared with the constitutional issues over which the Civil War was fought, today’s disputes over federal- versus-state power are minor-league ball played out on a field framed by Lincoln’s prevailing constitutional vision of the United States as one nation, indivisible.

On the president’s constitutional duty: Lincoln understood his oath to impose an absolute personal moral and legal duty not to cave in to wrong, destructive views of the Constitution. He fought on the campaign trail for his understanding of Union and of the authority of the national government to limit the spread of slavery. Once in office, he understood his oath to impose on him an irreducible moral and legal duty of faithful execution of the laws, throughout the Union. It was a duty he could not abandon for any reason. [“The Great Interpreter”, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Research Paper No. 15-09, April 17, 2017]

Whence Lincoln’s view of the Union? This is from the Paulsens’ book, The Constitution: An Introduction:

Lincoln was firmly persuaded that secession was unconstitutional. Immediately upon taking office as President, in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln— a careful constitutional lawyer— laid out in public his argument as to why secession was unconstitutional: The Constitution was the supreme law of the land, governing all the states. The Constitution did not provide that states could withdraw from the Union, and to infer such a right was contrary to the letter and spirit of the document. The Constitution’s Preamble announced the objective of forming a “more perfect Union” of the states than had existed under the Articles of Confederation, which themselves had said that the Union would be “perpetual.” Moreover, the Constitution created a true national government, not a mere “compact,” league, or confederacy— in fact, it explicitly forbade states from entering into alliances, confederacies, or treaties outside of national authority. The people of the United States, taken as a whole, were sovereign, not the states.

It followed from these views, Lincoln argued, that “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.” Purported secession was simply an illegal— unconstitutional— rebellion against the Union.

Lincoln’s position, which the Paulsens seem to applaud, is flawed at its root. The Constitution did not incorporate the Articles of Confederation, it supplanted them. The “perpetual Union” of the Articles vanished into thin air upon the adoption of the Constitution. Moreover, the “more perfect Union” of the Constitution’s preamble is merely aspirational, as are the desiderata that follow it:

establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

“More perfect”, if it means anything, means that the Constitution created a central government where there was none before. The Constitution is silent about perpetuity. It is silent about secession. Therefore, one must turn elsewhere to find (or reject) a legal basis for secession, but not to the Civil War.

The Civil War “decided” the issue of secession in the same way that World War I “decided” the future of war. It was the “war to end all wars”, was it not? Therefore, tens of millions of deaths to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been no wars since the Armistice of 1918. By the same logic, the thief who steals your car or the vandal who defaces your home or the scam artist who takes your life savings has “decided” that you don’t own a car, or that your home should be ugly, or that your savings are really his. Thus does might make right, as the Paulsens would have it.

There is in fact a perfectly obvious and straightforward case for unilateral secession, which I have made elsewhere, including “A Resolution of Secession”. You should read all of it if you are a rabid secessionist — or a rabid anti-secessionist. Here are some key passages:

The Constitution is a contract — a compact in the language of the Framers. The parties to the compact are not only the States but also the central government….

Lest there be any question about the status of the Constitution as a compact, we turn to James Madison, who is often called the Father of the Constitution. Madison, in a letter to Daniel Webster dated March 15, 1833, addresses

the question whether the Constitution of the U.S. was formed by the people or by the States, now under a theoretic discussion by animated partizans.

Madison continues:

It is fortunate when disputed theories, can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity….

[I]n The Federalist No. 39, which informed the debates in the various States about ratification….

Madison leaves no doubt about the continued sovereignty of each State and its people. The remaining question is this: On what grounds, if any, may a State withdraw from the compact into which it entered voluntarily?

There is a judicial myth — articulated by a majority of the United States Supreme Court in Texas v. White (1869) — that States may not withdraw from the compact because the union of States is perpetual….

The Court’s reasoning is born of mysticism, not legality. Similar reasoning might have been used — and was used — to assert that the Colonies were inseparable from Great Britain. And yet, some of the people of the Colonies put an end to the union of the Colonies and Great Britain, on the moral principle that the Colonies were not obliged to remain in an abusive relationship. That moral principle is all the more compelling in the case of the union known as the United States, which — mysticism aside — is nothing more than the creature of the States, as authorized by the people thereof.

In fact, the Constitution supplanted the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, by the will of only nine of the thirteen States….

[I]n a letter to Alexander Rives dated January 1, 1833, Madison says that

[a] rightful secession requires the consent of the others [other States], or an abuse of the compact, absolving the seceding party from the obligations imposed by it.

An abuse of the compact most assuredly necessitates withdrawal from it, on the principle of the preservation of liberty, especially if that abuse has been persistent and shows no signs of abating. The abuse, in this instance, has been and is being committed by the central government.

The central government is both a creature of the Constitution and a de facto party to it, as co-sovereign with the States and supreme in its realm of enumerated and limited powers. One of those powers enables the Supreme Court of the United States to decide “cases and controversies” arising under the Constitution, which alone makes the central government a responsible party. More generally, the high officials of the central government acknowledge the central government’s role as a party to the compact — and the limited powers vested in them — when they take oaths of office requiring them to uphold the Constitution.

Many of those high officials have nevertheless have committed myriad abuses of the central government’s enumerated and limited powers. The abuses are far too numerous to list in their entirety. The following examples amply justify the withdrawal of the State of _______________ from the compact….

We, therefore, the representatives of the people of _______________ do solemnly publish and declare that this State ought to be free and independent; that it is absolved from all allegiance to the government of the United States; that all political connection between it and government of the United States is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a free and independent State it has full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Civil War?

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Loquitur Veritatem

I follow American Thinker because the articles and posts there are usually provocative. A lot of it is wild-eyed speculation by right-wingers. But even the most wild-eyed stuff sometimes has a tangential relationship to a plausible idea.

This is from Robert Arvay’s “Will the Left Actually Incite a Civil War?” (November 21, 2016):

It is … not entirely impossible for me to peer into the minds of the anti-Trump protesters, since their dread has actually materialized – as a Clinton defeat at the polls. So far, their angst has been manifested mostly in tears, whining, and cowering – but there is a violent element among them. Their fears are enormous, some imaginary, some real, but in either case, those fears will motivate them. The imaginary fears include the predicted assembly of illegal immigrants into concentration camps. The real fears include loss of political power and all its perquisites, including the dictatorial ability to force bakers to serve cakes at same-sex ceremonies, an ability that portends much worse to come.

Be assured that every failure of liberal policies (such as the implosion of the Obama health care system) will now be blamed on Republicans, and particularly on the man they despise most, Donald Trump. The Democrat ministry of propaganda (formerly the mainstream news media) will headline every unfortunate instance of a child suffering from disease, and loudly proclaim that the child would be in perfect health had not Trump cruelly withheld the funds to save that child. Such diatribes cannot help but incite violent emotions.

Calls for assassination will be made, as in fact they already have been, including by educators. God help us should something tragic result.

From my side of the front lines, I still view the republic as at risk. From their side, many may now feel they have nothing to lose. Had Clinton won, I would very likely feel the same.

I don’t know how any of the things that Arvay mentions would incite a civil war. It’s true (I hope) that Trump will clamp down on political correctness, and that a Supreme Court with the addition of a Trump nominee would reverse the anti-free speech laws that have sprung up in some States. But would violence ensue? I doubt it.

Yes, the MSM will continue to be the Democrat ministry of propaganda — nothing new there — and will double down on its portrayal of Republicans as heartless and cruel — nothing new there, either.

If Trump were assassinated by a leftist, or a cabal of leftists, would that lead to civil war? It might lead to anti-leftist violence by the kind of people who are drawn to Richard B. Spencer. But a violent response, if any, would most likely come from black militants, who are leftists only in the sense that they are loyal to the Democrat Party and its patronizing policies toward blacks. The resulting conflict would shed a lot of blood, but it could be mopped up quickly by police forces and National Guard units empowered to do so by the governors of States where violence erupts. And under a President Pence, they probably would feel empowered to do so, not constrained by the specter of a civil-rights investigations by the Department of Justice. I would expect Pence to do everything in his power (and perhaps more) to support local and State authorities in their efforts to quell violence. He would have nothing to gain and much to lose if it weren’t quelled. Failure to do so would undermine his authority as the newly fledged president.

What’s much more likely than a civil war is a growing secessionist movement on the left. As I argue in “Polarization and De-Facto Partition,” such a movement could be exploited to advance the cause of liberty:

Given the increasing polarization of the country — political and geographic — something like a negotiated partition seems like the only way to make the left and the right happier.

And then it occurred to me that a kind of partition could be achieved by constitutional means; that is, by revising the Constitution to return to its original plan of true federalism. The central government would, once again, be responsible for the defense of liberty and free trade. Each State would, within the framework of liberty, make its own decisions about the extent to which it intervenes in the economic and social affairs of its citizens.

How might that come to pass?

There are today in this land millions — probably tens of millions — of depressed leftists who foresee at least four years of GOP rule dedicated to the diminution of the regulatory-welfare state….

The shoe is now on the other foot. A lot of leftists will want out (see this for example), just as Northern abolitionists wanted separation from the South in the 1830s and 1840s. Let’s give them a way out while the giving is good, that is, while the GOP controls the federal government. The way out for the left is also the way out for conservatives.

Congress, namely, its Republican majorities, can all an Article V convention of the States….

The convention would be controlled by Republicans, who control a majority of State legislatures. The Republican majority should make it clear from the outset that the sole purpose of the convention is to devolve power to the States. For example, if a State government wants to establish its own version of Social Security to supplement what remains of it after future benefits have been scaled back to match projected future revenues, that State government wouldn’t be prevented from doing so. And it could design that program — and any others — as it wishes, free from interference on by the central government.

For more (much more) read the whole thing, and then read my version of a revised Constitution: “A Constitution for the 21st Century.”

The Next Civil War

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

It begins with the general election of 2012. The GOP retains its majority in the House and gains a majority in the Senate. But the presidential election is too close to call, as the outcome in several, deciding States depends on the outcome of hotly contested recounts.

The outcome of the presidential election remains important because the GOP’s majorities in the House and Senate are not large enough to override vetoes. If the presidential election goes to Barack Obama, Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, curtail entitlement programs, curb the regulatory agencies, recommit to the war on terror, and rebuild national defense will be thwarted. Democrats, hoping to thwart those GOP initiatives, dispatch armies of lawyers to the States where the presidential election hangs in the balance.

In the end, there is a replay of Bush v. Gore, but on a grander scale. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively decides the election for the Republican candidate, by a vote of 5-4. Democrats are outraged. The governors and legislatures of the solidly Democrat States, in a series of coordinated actions, enact resolutions to the effect that their States will not recognize the authority of the federal government, and will bar federal agencies from operating within their States. The governors of the rebelling States order their States’ police and National Guard forces to seize all civilian federal offices (IRS, Social Security, etc.), the functions of which will be assumed by the rebelling States.

What would you do? Take the following poll, leave a comment, or do both.

The Southern Secession Reconsidered

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

A post by The Vociferous Reader, “Lincoln’s War,” prompts me to revisit the issue of secession. The main obstacle to serious consideration of secession is its association with the secession of the Southern States, which was motivated by the issue of slavery. The resulting Civil War had three principle outcomes:

reunification of the United States by force (which did not determine the legality of secession)

the end of slavery in the reunified nation

the persistent myth of the South as especially bigoted and oppressive, despite the North’s undeniable record of racial tension, discrimination, and de facto segregation.

What tends to be forgotten is the South’s pre-Civil War stance with respect to the central government. Southern resistance to the centralization of political power, and to the central government’s unconstitutional exercises of power, long pre-dated the Southern secession and was founded on a valid interpretation of the Constitution.

The Civil War, as a forcible act of reunification, is defensible only insofar as a main result was the end of slavery in the United States. On constitutional grounds, however, the Southern secession was valid and should not have been contested.

I have elsewhere laid out a general case for secession. Here it is, in part:

[S]ome of the people of the Colonies put an end to the union of the Colonies and Great Britain, on the moral principle that no person or people is obliged to remain in an abusive relationship. That moral principle is all the more compelling in the case of the union known as the United States, which — mysticism aside — is nothing more than the creature of the States and the people thereof.

It was only by the grace of nine States that the Constitution took effect, thereby establishing the central government. Those nine States voluntarily created the central government and, at the same time, voluntarily granted certain, limited powers to it. The States understood that the central government would exercise its limited powers for the benefit of the States and their people. Every State subsequently admitted to the union has entered into the same contract with the central government.

But, as outlined above, the central government has breached its trust by exceeding the powers granted to it. In fact, the central government’s abuse of power has been so persistent and egregious that a reasonable remedy on the part of the States — individually or severally — is to declare the Constitution null and void. Each and every State, in other words, has the right to secede from the union and to withdraw from the central government its support and the support of the people.

My argument is buttressed by the pre-Civil War history of the United States, which includes the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, the Nullification Crisis of 1828-33, and the Northern States’ Rights movement, which flourished before the Civil War and was sympathetic to the idea of Southern secession. Some of these events find their way into a review by David Gordon of Kevin R.C. Gutzman‘s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution.

Here are some relevant excerpts of Gordon’s review (page references omitted):

The principal thesis of the book is that the Jeffersonian, states’ rights understanding of America’s founding and the Constitution is correct. When the American colonies assembled in the Continental Congress and adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they did not create a new nation, Abraham Lincoln to the contrary notwithstanding.

…The Declaration said that the colonies were now states, i.e., independent governments. “In the Declaration’s culminating fourth section, Congress declared the colonies to be ‘free and independent states’ and claimed for them the right to do everything that free countries could do.”

Nor did the Articles of Confederation change matters. Each state retained full sovereignty over all matters not “expressly delegated” to the United Sates….

As Gutzman makes clear, some delegates to the Philadelphia Convention certainly wished to change the nature of the American system. Instead of the usual split between nationalists and their opponents, however, Gutzman maintains that there were three parties in the convention: “The first was the monarchist party, the chief exemplar of which was New York’s Alexander Hamilton. The monarchists were intent on wiping the states from the map and substituting one unitary government for the entire continent … The second party consisted of nationalists, people who — without ever avowing admiration for the monarchical form — wanted to push centralization as far as could reasonably be hoped … Finally, there was a cohort in the Convention of members insistent on proposing a reinforcement of the central government while maintaining the primary place of the states in the American polity — a truly federal, rather than national government.”

Gutzman rightly points out that neither of the two nationalist parties got its way. Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, wanted the federal Congress to have the power to veto state legislation, but this proposal was rejected. So far, our author has given a standard account, but now comes his key interpretive move.

He maintains that crucial to understanding the meaning of the Constitution were the intentions of the delegates to the ratifying conventions. These delegates, after all, were the people whose votes established the Constitution as legally binding. Gutzman concentrates on the Virginia convention, and he places great stress on one point.

The Virginia delegates looked on the new Constitution with great skepticism, fearing that it would become a tool for the federal government to crush the states. To placate opponents such as Patrick Henry, the leaders of the pro-ratification forces, who included Governor Edmund Randolph, the proposer of the nationalist Virginia Plan at Philadelphia, had to make a concession. They had to agree that the powers of the new Congress were limited to those “expressly delegated” in the Constitution. The delegates repudiated in advance any move by the new authorities to expand their powers beyond this. Further, they wrote into their ratification statement the right to withdraw from the new government, if it exceeded its proper powers.

Gutzman contends that because this understanding was part of Virginia’s instrument of ratification, no stronger central government can claim Virginia’s authorization. And since it would be senseless to think that the Constitution gives the federal government more power over some states than others, the Virginia restrictions apply to all the states.

This is the Jeffersonian view of the Constitution. Gutzman’s great contribution is to show that the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, the key statements of the Jeffersonian position, restated the understanding of the Virginia ratifying convention. Contrary to the Federalist opponents of the Resolutions, Jefferson and Madison did not act as innovators in 1798; and their position cannot be dismissed as merely one of several competing interpretations. It was firmly based on the legally valid Virginia ratification instrument.

Gutzman summarizes his main contention in this way:

“Most history and legal textbooks say that Jefferson and Madison invented the idea of state sovereignty. But … they only argued for what the founders had already understood to be true about the sovereign states from the beginning, even if some of the founders(the nationalist and monarchist wings) wanted to change that understanding.”

However sound the Jeffersonian understanding of the Constitution, it of course has not prevailed in subsequent American history. Gutzman assigns federal judges a large share of the responsibility for the transformation of the original understanding; and one judge in particular arouses his critical scorn. The judge in question is the foremost of all federalist judges, Chief Justice John Marshall….

For Gutzman, Marshall’s chief sin is … his repudiation of the Jeffersonian understanding of the limits of federal power. In McCulloch v Maryland, Marshall “wrote that while the Articles of Confederation had specified that Congress had only the powers it was ‘expressly delegated,’ the Constitution included no such language, so no such principle applied to it. This was an extraordinary argument, given that Marshall himself and other Federalists … had assured their ratification colleagues that this very principle of limited federal power … was implicit in the unamended Constitution even before the Tenth Amendment was adopted.” [It was, moreover, clear from the construction of Article I, Section 8, and the discussion of that portion of the Constitution in the The Federalist Papers (e.g., No. 45): ED.]

Given his Jeffersonian views, it comes as no surprise that Gutzman thinks the Southern states acted fully within their rights when they seceded from the Union in 1861. “The Federalists always insisted during the ratification debates — knowing that they had to win support for the Constitution — that the states were individual parties to a federal compact. Spelling out the logic of the compact, three states — Virginia, Maryland, and Rhode Island — explicitly reserved (in the act of ratifying the Constitution) their right to secede from the Union.”

Gutzman has made a very strong case for his Jeffersonian understanding of the Constitution. A critic might challenge him on the grounds that we need not today care about how the Constitution was understood by its eighteenth century ratifiers. But Gutzman could in response say that this is what was legally enacted; those who favor other views of government should not attempt to attain their goals through misreadings and distortion of the constitutional text.

Just so. There is no point in memorializing an agreement unless that agreement is meant to stand for all time, or until the parties to it agree to revise or revoke it. Legislators, executives, and judges are not parties to the Constitution; they are its sworn caretakers. And they have long failed in their duty.

As for Lincoln, he did his duty as he saw it — which was to preserve the Union. It is hard (for me) to fault the man who ended his first inaugural address with this:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

P.S. The foregoing makes a legal case for secession. A different case, which I make here, is that secession is valid because the Constitution did not bind the whole of “the people” when it was ratified, and could not have bound future generations.

* * *

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Rating America’s Wars

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Loquitur Veritatem

In “Why We Should (and Should Not) Fight” I say that

American armed forces should be used only to preserve, protect, and defend the interests of Americans.

I ended that post with an assessment of the engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. But what about earlier American wars? Here are my thumbnail assessments of them (the dates indicate years in which U.S. forces were involved in combat):

Indian Wars (1637-1918). This long, episodic battle with Native Americans was justified when the purpose was to defend Americans and justly condemned when the purposes were genocide and theft of Indian lands by force or fraud. There is probably much more to be ashamed of than to be proud of in the history of the Indian Wars.

Revolutionary War (1775-1783). The struggle for self-government deserves praise whether the motivation was liberty in general or the economic interests of colonial planters, merchants, and manufacturers. The latter is a subset of the former, and the outcome of the war served both ends. In that regard, many of the leaders of the armed struggle also became prominent figures in the establishment of the Articles of Confederation and Constitution. Both documents were aimed at preserving and extending the liberty for which the revolution was waged.

War of 1812 (1812-1815). A leading cause of this war was the imposition by Britain of restrictions intended to impede American commerce with France. That, alone, would have justified the war if Britain could not be dissuaded by peaceful means, which it could not be. The U.S. had other legitimate grievances: impressment of American sailors into the British navy and British support of Indian raids in the Northwest Territory. The War of 1812 was, in effect, a belated and creditable resumption of the Revolutionary War.

Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The proximate cause of the war was the attempt by Mexico to retake Texas, which had won independence from Mexico in 1836 and annexed itself to the United States in 1845. The resulting war enabled the U.S. to acquire from Mexico — for $18,250,000 — land that is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. The U.S. was right to prosecute the war and entirely reasonable about the terms and conditions for resolving it.

Civil War (1861-1865). The war that is still being fought (with words) by many Americans pitted the morally reprehensible Southern defenders of slavery against Northerners, led by Abraham Lincoln, who hewed to the dubious proposition that secession is impermissible under the Constitution. The Civil War can be justified only in that it ended slavery in the United States, which was not Mr. Lincoln’s original aim in prosecuting it.

Spanish-American War (1898). This unnecessary war was fought on the excuse of Spanish atrocities in Cuba and the still-mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. It was in fact an exercise in imperialism through which the U.S. acquired the dubious honor of controlling Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines — altogether more trouble than they were worth. It is especially galling that Theodore Roosevelt rode the Spanish-American War to fame, and eventually to the imperial presidency.

World War I (1917-1918). The immediate cause of the entry of the United States into this war was German acts of belligerence — sabotage and the sinking of U.S. merchant ships. Those acts were aimed at preventing the U.S. from selling war supplies to Britain. Germany, in other words, was sorely provoked, and the U.S. government could not realistically claim to be a neutral party in what was really a European war, with Asian and African sideshows involving opportunistic attacks on German interests in those regions. Had the U.S. stayed neutral and avoided war, Germany might have won, though a stalemate was more likely. In either event, an exhausted Germany would hardly have been a threat to the U.S., and might even have welcomed trade with the U.S. as it rebuilt in the post-war years. All of this was last in the anti-German hysteria of the time, which played well to the super-majority of Americans whose roots were in the British Isles. It is pure hindsight to say that a victorious or stalemated Germany probably would not have produced the Third Reich, but true nevertheless. America’s entry into World War I was a mistake, in any event, but it turned out to be a horrendously costly one.

World War II (1941-1945). While Anglo-American and French politicians pursued the illusion that peace could be maintained through diplomacy and treaties, Adolf Hitler and Japan’s military caste pursued dominion through conquest. The Third Reich and Empire of the Rising Sun failed to dominate the world only because of (a) Hitler’s fatal invasion of Russia, (b) Japan’s wrong-headed attack on Pearl Harbor, and (c) the fact that the United States of 1941 had time and space on its side. Had the latter not been true, Americans could well have found themselves cut off from the world — and much the poorer for it — if not enslaved. World War II clearly ranks just behind the War of 1812 as the most necessary war in America’s post-Revolutionary history.

Cold War (1947-1991). This necessary, long, and costly “war” of deterrence through preparedness enabled the U.S. to protect Americans’ legitimate economic interests around the world by limiting the expansion of the Soviet empire. The Cold War had some “hot” moments and points of high drama. Perhaps the most notable of them was the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which was not the great victory proclaimed by the Kennedy administration and its political and academic sycophants. (For more on this point, go here and scroll down to the section on Kennedy.) That the U.S. won the Cold War because the USSR’s essential bankruptcy was exposed by Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup is a fact that only left-wingers and dupes will deny. They continue to betray their doomed love of communism by praising the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev for doing the only thing he could do in the face of U.S. superiority: surrender and sunder the Soviet empire. America’s Cold War victory owes nothing to LBJ (who wasted blood and treasure in Vietnam), Richard Nixon (who would have sold his mother for 30 pieces of silver), or Jimmy Carter (whose love for anti-American regimes and rebels knows no bounds).

Korean War (1950-1953). The Korean War was unnecessary, in that it was invited by the Truman administration’s policies: exclusion of Korea from the Asian defense perimeter and massive cuts in the U.S. defense budget. But it was essential to defend South Korea so that the powers behind North Korea (Communist China and, by extension, the USSR) would grasp the willingness of the U.S. to maintain a forward defensive posture against aggression. That signal was blunted by Truman’s decision to sack MacArthur when the general persisted in his advocacy of attacking Chinese bases following the entry of the Chinese into the war. The end result was a stalemate, where a decisive victory might have broken the back of communistic adventurism around the globe. The Korean War, as it was fought by the U.S., became “a war to foment war.”

Vietnam War (1965-1973). Whereas the Korean War was a necessary war against communist expansionism, the Vietnam War was an unnecessary entanglement in a civil war in which one side happened to be communist. Nevertheless, the U.S., having made a costly commitment to the prosecution of the war, should have fought it to victory. Instead, unlike the case of Korea, U.S. forces were withdrawn and it took little time for North Vietnam to swallow South Vietnam. American resolve suffered a body blow, from which it rebounded only partially by winning the Cold War, thanks to Reagan’s defense buildup in the 1980s. When it came to actual warfare, however, Vietnam repeated and reinforced the pattern of compromise and retreat that had begun with the Korean War, and which eventuated in the 9/11 attacks.

Gulf War (1990-1991). This war began with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait. U.S. action to repel the invasion was fully justified by the potential economic effects of Saddam’s capture of Kuwait’s petroleum reserves and oil production. The proper response to Saddam’s aggression would have been not only to defeat the Iraqi army but also to depose Saddam. The failure to do so further reinforced the pattern of compromise and retreat that had begun in Korea, and necessitated the long, contentious Iraq War of the 2000s.

The quick victory in Iraq, coupled with the coincidental end of the Cold War, helped to foster a belief that the peace had been won. (That belief was given an academic imprimatur in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.) The stage was set for Clinton’s much-ballyhooed fiscal restraint, which was achieved by cutting the defense budget. Clinton’s lack of resolve in the face of terrorism underscored the evident unwillingness of American “leaders” to defend Americans’ interests, thus inviting 9/11. (For more about Clinton’s foreign and defense policy, go here and scroll down to the section on Clinton.)

Which leads us back to the wars and skirmishes of the 21st century.

A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?

Posted on August 20, 2009 by Loquitur Veritatem

Max Borders writes:

. . . Toleration and open discourse is, well, no longer tolerated. We are slowly becoming a place of mere de jure free speech. And even that is being eroded by the day. I have to blame so-called “progressives” the most for this. They are people for whom the end justifies the means. So any lip-service they occasionally pay to civil liberties is but a tool of convenience to be employed on the way to getting things their way. A new cold civil war is emerging.

There is much truth in that. But I would go further.

Thanks to the lethal combination of left-statist demagoguery and voter irrationality, Americans are, among other things, saddled with

a debilitating tax and regulatory burden, which has accrued since the “progressive” agenda began to take hold in the early 1900s

the destruction of civilizing social norms, together with a high threshold of tolerance for criminals and a concomitant softness on matters of national defense

the continuing nationalization of medical care, which began in earnest with Medicare and continues in the guise of Obamacare (with all of its potential for bureaucratic abuses of power)

severe restrictions on economic output in order to satisfy the dictatorial urge to puritanism that lies behind the “warming” industry

As I have said,

[t]hese encroachments . . . are morally illegitimate because their piecemeal character has robbed Americans of voice and mooted the exit option. And so, we have discovered — too late — that we are impotent hostages in our own land.

I am reminded of these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

What we need is not a civil war — cold or hot — but a serious movement toward secession:

The legal basis for the perpetuation of the United States disappears when the federal government abrogates the Constitution. Given that the federal government has long failed to honor Amendment X [among many other parts of the Constitution], there is a prima facie case that the United States no longer exists as a legal entity. Secession then becomes more than an option for the States: It becomes their duty, both as sovereign entitities and as guardians of their citizens’ sovereignty.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

The End of Slavery in the United States

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Loquitur Veritatem

This post commemorates the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth by revisiting two long-debated questions about the Civil War: Was it fought over the issue of slavery? Would slavery have ended in the United States, even if the Confederacy had not been defeated?

WAS THE CIVIL WAR ABOUT SLAVERY?

The war was about slavery, in a roundabout way:

The mainly agrarian South wanted low tariffs on manufactured goods because high tariffs meant that Southerners had to pay higher prices for manufactured goods. The North wanted high tariffs to protect its new manufacturing industries.

Slave labor was fundamental to Southern agrarianism. Abolition was largely a Northern phenomenon.

Anti-Northern feelings among Southern elites had been running high for decades. With the rise of the Republican Party, Southerners faced not only the continued prospect of Northern economic dominance but also the prospect that slavery would be abolished. The declarations of the causes of secession issued by four seceding States — Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas — leave no doubt that anti-abolition, pro-slavery sentiment fueled secession. Mississippi’s declaration, for example, puts this at the top of the list of reasons for secession:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.

In sum, the election of Abraham Lincoln posed an imminent threat to the Southern “way of life,” in which slavery was an essential ingredient.

War was inevitable, given the South’s aversion to the North’s economic and abolitionist agenda, on the one hand, and Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union, on the other hand.

The North’s victory in the Civil War meant an end to slavery in the United States, even though ending slavery was, in Lincoln’s view, secondary to preserving the Union. According to one account of a failed peace parley in January 1865 — an account that is somewhat disingenuous about the South’s interest in preserving slavery — Lincoln

stated that it was never his intention to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed and he would not have done so during the war, except that it became a military necessity. He had always been in favor of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories but never thought immediate emancipation in the states where it already existed was practical. He thought there would be “many evils attending” the immediate ending of slavery in those states.

Be that as it may, the government of the United States did take advantage of the Civil War to eradicate slavery, first partially through the Emancipation Proclamation, then fully through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

Slavery’s demise, as a byproduct of the Civil War, raises two questions:

Might not slavery have ended, regardless of the Civil War or its outcome?

Is slavery an indelible stain on American history?

WITH RESPECT TO SLAVERY, WAS THE CIVIL WAR NECESSARY?

There are those who argue that if the North had fought the Civil War over slavery, it had fought an unnecessary war because economic forces would eventually have put an end to slavery. There are others who argue that slavery would not have succumbed to economic forces. Crucial to the debate between the two camps is the validity (or invalidity) of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s cliometric study, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), which makes a case that slavery would not have succumbed to economic forces. Fogel and Engerman’s study, however, is fraught with errors. Thomas J. DiLorenzo explains some of those errors:

. . . Fogel and Engerman’s . . . reliance on . . . the price of slaves . . . as “evidence” that slavery could not have been ended peacefully is poor economics. . . . For one thing, the Fugitive Slave Act socialized the enforcement costs of slavery, thereby artificially inflating slave prices. Abolition of the Act, as would have been the reality had the Southern states been allowed to leave in peace would have caused slave prices to plummet and quickened the institutionÂ’s demise. That, coupled with a serious effort to do what every nation on the face of the earth did to end slavery during the nineteenth century – compensated emancipation – could have ended slavery peacefully. Great Britain did it in just six years time, and Americans could have followed their lead.. . .

[T]he high price of slaves . . . in 1860 created strong incentives for Southern farmers to find substitutes in the form of free labor and mechanized agriculture. It also increased the expected profitability of mechanized agriculture, so that the producers of that equipment were motivated to develop and market it in the South. This is what happens in any industry where there are rapidly-rising prices of factors of production of any kind. As Mark Thornton wrote in “Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process” (Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 7, No. 2, 1994), by 1860 “slavery was fleeing from both the competition of free labor and urbanization towards the isolated virgin lands of the Southwest.” Gunderson does not cite any literature past 1974 on this point, so he is probably unaware of such facts.

[T]here is a difference between slave labor being “efficient” for the slave owner and its effect on society as a whole. Of course slavery was profitable to slave owners. This government-supported system helped them confiscate the fruits of the slaves’ labor. But since slave labor is inherently less efficient than free labor, and since so many resources had to be devoted to enforcing the system — most of which were the result of government interventions such as the Fugitive Slave Act, mandatory slave patrol laws, and laws that prohibited manumission — the system imposed huge burdens (”dead weight loss,” in the language of economics) on the rest of society. Free laborers and non-slave owners in the South (at least 80 percent of the adult population) were the primary victims of these government-imposed costs, and would have been a natural political constituency for their eventual abolition. As Hummel concluded, “In real terms, the entire southern economy, including both whites and blacks, was less prosperous” overall because of slavery.

There was net internal migration from South to North, confirming the fact that free laborers in the South were also indirectly exploited by the slave system which forced them into lower-paying jobs. . . .

DiLorenzo — an anarcho-libertarian who despises Abraham Lincoln and is rabidly pro-secession (column archive) — may strike you as a biased source, even though he seems to have facts and logic on his side, in this instance. But we need not rely on DiLorenzo. Fogel and Engerman’s thesis has been attacked, on its merits, from many quarters. Here, for example, are excerpts of a review essay by Thomas L. Haskell, “The True and Tragical History of ‘Time on the Cross’ ” (fee required), from The New York Review of Books (October 2, 1975):

The flaws of Time on the Cross are not confined to its parts but extend to its conceptual heart: the efficiency calculation. No finding raised more eyebrows than the dramatic claim that slaves, through their personal diligence and enthusiastic commitment to the work ethic, made southern agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the family farms of the North. My own nonspecialist’s doubts about this contention . . . have been amply confirmed (and superseded in expertise and weight of evidence) by the work of a half-dozen economic historians.

Fogel and Engerman should have known from the beginning that any comparison of regional efficiency in the antebellum period was fraught with breathtaking difficulties. The basis for their comparison, a rather controversial economist’s tool known as the “geometric index of total factor productivity,” gives results whose interpretation is debatable in even the most conventional applications. . . .

Since the index is based on market value it reflects not only the performance of producers (which is what we have in mind when we talk about productive efficiency) but also the behavior of consumers, whose eagerness for the product helps to determine its market value. Consumer behavior is clearly irrelevant to productive efficiency and the index is misleading to the extent that it is influenced by this factor.

In short, the index is sensitive to demand: if two producers organize their work in equally rational ways, work equally hard, and even produce equal amounts of physical output, the so-called “efficiency” index may nonetheless rank one producer more “efficient” than the other because his product is in greater demand. As David and Temin observe, this is not the accepted meaning of “efficiency.”

Given the sensitivity of the index to demand and the heavy demand for the South’s principal crop, cotton, the index by itself is utterly incapable of justifying the chief inference that Fogel and Engerman drew from it—that slaves must have been hard-working Horatio Alger types and their masters skilled scientific managers. Gavin Wright confirms that the efficiency gap has more to do with voracious consumer demand for cotton than with any Herculean feats of productivity by southern producers. . . .

The bias introduced by cotton demand is only the most obvious of the flaws in the efficiency calculation. Even apart from the inherent frailties of the index in this especially difficult application, Fogel and Engerman’s use of it rests on some extremely dubious assumptions. The choice of 1860 as a typical year for measurement has been sharply questioned. So has the authors’ proposition that an acre of northern farmland was on average 2.5 times better in quality than southern farmland. This extraordinary assumption alone is enough to guarantee a finding of southern superiority in productivity. . . .

Lance Davis of the California Institute of Technology, a prominent cliometrician, singled out the efficiency calculation as the least plausible argument of a generally unpersuasive book. He estimated that Fogel and Engerman’s chances of successfully defending the efficiency finding were about one in ten. This is a telling judgment from the man who introduced the term “New Economic History,” who once called Fogel’s railroad study a “great book,” and who even crowned Fogel himself as “the best” of the cliometricians nine years ago. The efficiency calculation has been closely scrutinized not only by Davis, Wright, Temin, and Paul David, but also by Stanley Lebergott of Wesleyan, Harold Woodman of Purdue, Jay Mandle of Temple, and Frank B. Tipton, Jr. and Clarence E. Walker, both of Wesleyan. No one has a kind word to say for it.

Haskell certainly wasn’t offering an apology for slavery or for any other form of oppression. Nor am I. Slavery was evil, but it existed. The question facing our forbears was how best to eradicate it and then improve the lot of those who had been enslaved. With the advantage of hindsight a case can be made that America’s blacks would be better off today if their ancestors had been freed and integrated into society voluntarily — through economic forces if not social ones. But that is merely hindsight. Regardless of Lincoln’s motivation for prosecuting the Civil War, that war brought an end to slavery. And that — thankfully — is that.

Moreover, Lincoln-hater DiLorenzo gives us good reason to believe that slavery would have died hard in the South. DiLorenzo wants the best of both worlds. He wants to prove that the Civil War was not fought (by the North) because of slavery, and also to prove that the Civil War was fought (by the North) unnecessarily because economic forces would have put an (eventual) end to slavery. The second proposition is inconsistent with the first. DiLorenzo’s inconsistency arises because he is a pro-secessionist who also has the good grace to oppose slavery. He must therefore resort to alternative history in order to justify his secessionist views. His alternative history (sampled above) is that economic forces would have brought an end to slavery in the South, absent the Civil War. But would they have done so? Perhaps eventually, but not for an unconscionably long time.

Economic forces arise from human nature. One facet of human nature is a “taste” that manifests itself in the oppression of “inferior” races (e.g., blacks, Jews, Tutsis, Hutus). Such a “taste” can override “rational” (i.e., wealth-maximizing) forces. The post-Civil War history of race in the South suggests very strongly that slavery would have died hard in the South. Thomas Sowell examines a slice of that history:

The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Most people do not know the rest of the story, however. Why was there racially segregated seating on public transportation in the first place? “Racism” some will say — and there was certainly plenty of racism in the South, going back for centuries. But racially segregated seating on streetcars and buses in the South did not go back for centuries.

Far from existing from time immemorial, as many have assumed, racially segregated seating in public transportation began in the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those who see government as the solution to social problems may be surprised to learn that it was government which created this problem. Many, if not most, municipal transit systems were privately owned in the 19th century and the private owners of these systems had no incentive to segregate the races.

These owners may have been racists themselves but they were in business to make a profit — and you don’t make a profit by alienating a lot of your customers. There was not enough market demand for Jim Crow seating on municipal transit to bring it about.

It was politics that segregated the races because the incentives of the political process are different from the incentives of the economic process. Both blacks and whites spent money to ride the buses but, after the disenfranchisement of black voters in the late 19th and early 20th century, only whites counted in the political process.

It was not necessary for an overwhelming majority of the white voters to demand racial segregation. If some did and the others didn’t care, that was sufficient politically, because what blacks wanted did not count politically after they lost the vote.

The incentives of the economic system and the incentives of the political system were not only different, they clashed. . . .

The “incentives of the political system” — a “taste” for racial oppression, in other words — dominated Southern politics until the 1960s. And that was in a defeated South. The determination of Southern political leaders to defend slavery in the first place, and then to salvage the remnants of slavery through Jim Crow, is strong evidence that economic forces might not have been allowed to operate freely in the South, at least not for a long time. The evil (take note, Mr. DiLorenzo) was to be found in Southern political leaders, not in the White House.

Opponents of slavery, unarmed as they were with “sophisticated” (and flawed) cliometric techniques, saw the evil in slavery and eradicated it when they had the opportunity to do so. Uncertain gradualism in the defense of liberty is no virtue. Opportunistic abolitionism in the defense of liberty is far from a vice.

THE STAIN OF SLAVERY

The fact that slavery existed in the United States for so long is taken by some — especially those of the Left, here and abroad — as evidence that white-male-capitalist-dominated-America is evil incarnate. But slavery in the United States was ended when white, male capitalists still dominated America, whereas slavery still exists in non-white areas of the world.

Strident critics of the United States nevertheless persist in saying that the existence in the United States of slavery (or any other “evil,” real or imagined) means that the U.S. was and is no better than, say, the fascistic Third Reich. (Leftists don’t like to remind us about the longer-lived and equally fascistic USSR.) Such assertions studiously ignore the fact that most Americans always have been freer than the subjects of Hitler and Stalin. The economic forces that could eventually have brought an end to slavery in the United States would not have been allowed to operate in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union — or in Communist China, Cuba, Saddam’s Iraq, North Korea, and other dictatorial regimes of the kind that Leftists often have defended and even idealized as “progressive” and even “freedom-loving.” Nor should it go without notice that Nazi Germany and the USSR met their demise at the hands of the “militaristic” United States.

It is supremely ironic that Leftists — who like to attack the United States as “fascistic” and “militaristic” — are proponents of government interventions in private affairs that are confiscatory and stifling in their effects on economic output. All working persons in the United States — and all who depend on them — are in thrall to the “plantation owners” who run our affairs from the Capitol in Washington, the various State capitols, and sundry municipal buildings. The Left applauds that thralldom and agitates for its intensification.

Yes, the fact that slavery existed in the United States for so long is a stain on the history of the United States, but it is not an indelible stain. To err is human, which must come as news to the Left, with its penchant for judging its enemies (mainly conservative, white, American males) by superhuman standards of conduct, while seeking to impose its utopian social and economic order through the power of the state. The Left’s cynicism stands in stark contrast to the vision of the Framers, who sought “a more perfect Union” by enabling the free exchange of ideas and goods.

Politics and Prosperity

“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

Tag Archives: Civil War

It’s Them or Us

Preemptive (Cold) Civil War

Lincoln Was Wrong

The Next Civil War

The Southern Secession Reconsidered

Rating America’s Wars

A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?

The End of Slavery in the United States

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