Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
I'm disappointed that you keep posting this stuff after it has been confuted.
It wasn't a "rebellion": it is ontologically impossible to "rebel" against something of which one is no longer a member.
Southerners always had the right, as did every State in the Union, to withdraw from the Union either singly or en bloc. If Alaska were tomorrow designated the National Trash Dump and Parking Lot, I'd expect them to withdraw from the Union, too, and for good cause.
Southern States exercised their rights as sovereign (we've established that), free Peoples to dissolve the ties between themselves and the Union, just as our ancestors dissolved their tie to the British Crown.
The level on which the Southern States acted was as Peoples, as Sovereigns.......please get it through your held, N-S, that as among sovereigns, there is no Law!
Among sovereigns, the only law is treaty law, and treaties are only as good as agreement among the principals makes them. Capiche?
MY, my, my, such big words. Using $10 words to support a 10 cent position buys you nothing.
Southerners, or any other state for that matter, have never had the right to unilaterally withdraw from the Union. Nowhere does the Constitution give them that right or the right to act unilaterally when the interests of another state may be affected. All you have given is your opionin that that right exists. I, along with the Supreme Court, disagree.
You can continue to parrot soverign states and states rights all you want. It does not change the fact that all you are spouting are your opinions on the existence of such rights. The states were soverign so long as their actions did not violate the provisions of the Constitution. They themselves agreed that laws made under the Constitution overruled laws made under their state Constitutions. And the Supreme Court has ruled that the articles of secession which they passed in 1861 violated the Constitution and were therefore illegal. That made secession illegal and their actions were acts of rebellion. Lincoln's duty to the Constitution required that he put it down by any means necessary.
So go ahead and troll the dictionary for more words. Make all the claims that you want. You are welcome to your opinions. I just think that they are wrong. Capiche?
I don't share your conviction that an independent South would keep out or throw out Mexican immigrants. It looks like they're bound to end up where ever there is ill-paid menial labor or dangerous, poorly paid, non-union work, or a demand for servants. Or the work will be performed by other immigrants from Latin America or Asia. Tightening borders could stop or slow down the process, but it would be a mistake to assume that the kind of people who would rule the US's successor states would be the kind of people who would do that, if those successor states were to be of any size. The people who end up running things above the county level are the same sort of people wherever you live. And that would be true of an independent South. It won't be those who are propagandizing for it who will end up running things. And if the libertarian component is large in any of those new countries, they certainly wouldn't cotton to what it takes to keep borders under control.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. Some emotional ties may have grown up by living together with household servants, but one can't leave the economic calculations which were more important in managing the field hands out of the picture. Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation. Agriculture doesn't need the kind of large settled populations it once did, but one can expect, unless people radically change, that much of its labor requirements will be met by cheap, exploited immigrant labor.
Today, as in previous centuries and for good or ill, we are more one country than many have thought. First slavery, then defeat, poverty, and an enduring racial problem convinced many of a Southern uniqueness. To be sure, there are persisting regional differences, but our regions have more in common with each other than separatists will admit. For a century, poverty and racial conflict kept large-scale immigration out of the South, and indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war. But now those problems won't hold back immigration to the South any more than to other sections. Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some. I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- but I'll get a big kick out of watching Rockwell paleo-libertarians and metaphysical Southern nationalists fighting each other over the size and role of the state in culture and society.
Southerners have a sense of "their own", and will insist that such jobs as are needful be filled at a fair wage, or that employers do without. Southerners know that it doesn't benefit the community when employers are able constantly to undercut wages (as they are doing now in Georgia and Texas with green-card and illegal aliens), and they know that employers will always attempt to reduce wages and employment, on any pretext, just because they want the money themselves. It doesn't take a rockets scientist to figure out that what the community needs isn't a transfusion of Yankee smarts and immigrant hands, but populist political leadership that won't collaborate and won't scalawag.
You underestimate Southern populism -- it's the home of Jacksonianism, remember, and of numerous farmers' movements to protect themselves against rent and crop-price exploitation. Anti-black sentiment was part of that: the sense of community broken by wage exploiters using the black worker to break wages, of livelihoods lost to the last starving man still able to raise his hand and bid the share, or the wage, lower. As much as the tradition of "great man" deference may persist, which we've discussed and which is epitomized by the glorification of Robert E. Lee, Southerners know who is The Problem when it comes to the ability to get a living: it's the Man in the Big White House. It's always been the Man.
Your depressing construction of it aside, the South's future will be better than its past, but for the South to have a future, Southerners have to reject the collaborationist sociopolitical apparatus that exists now (which you referred to), which consistently divides Southern constituencies, neutralizes them through race politics, and overrides the interests of the constituencies. The constituency, which votes, is beaten in policymaking daily as we discussed earlier by the "audience" of the national clerisy employing corporate influence, federal subsidies, federal strictures, racial politics, and federal court decrees to secure the cooperation of "decisionmakers" in the South. Operating through corporate, media, and political conduits, the Northern elites work to destroy the cultural attitudes of the South and to substitute for them the competing meme of their own urbanized and thoroughly domesticated Northern society with its themes not of personal freedom, but of social and opportunity inequality spuriously validated by meritocratic pretensions of fairness but driven in fact by avarice and classism.
But, as they say, that is a whole 'nother thread.
Not true. In Texas, the State School Board saw several strong cultural conservatives like Donna Ballard elected to the Board as a result of the repeated attempts of NEA allies to introduce liberal propaganda into Texas schoolbooks. The first to oppose NEA and its affiliate, the TEA, were Mel and Norma Gabler, a pair of peppery, religious people who raised powerful objections to the moral values being propagated in school, and were able to back up their moral claims with good examples of NEA moral pap that were reprinted in the newspapers and stirred up other conservatives. They attracted even more attention by reviewing the books closely and holding press conferences in which they drew attention to numerous errors of fact and other evidences of slovenliness in the writing of the books they reviewed, to which complaints they appended more examples of value choices being propounded which the Texas community wouldn't accept. They attracted enough attention to bring Norman Lear's People for the American Way to Texas to try to discredit them, but they also energized numbers of smart, dedicated conservatives to get involved with State School Board politics -- they ran, and several of them won.
Then the Bush Machine stepped into the picture, and drove the conservatives out by burying them in the primaries with money and patronage of Governor Bush himself, who explicitly endorsed business-wing RINO's against precedent in the primaries.
So your fatalistic, pessimistic-unto-suicide statement about the inevitable domination of Southern politics by the usual suspects holds water only if you assume that conservatives can't or won't organize against the RINO's and their double-dealing successfully. And yet you have against you the precedent of the 1964 Goldwater campaign and two Reagan campaigns for the nomination, in 1976 and 1980, that show that the East Coast topsiders can be unhorsed when the people's values are engaged. And both Goldwater and Reagan got their best boxes in the South, whether in primaries or in the general election.
Viewed against that background, your statement sounds more as if you wished I would believe it, and stop struggling, and just lie down and die peacefully -- what the North has always wanted from the South. It reminds me of the penultimate scene in American Me, in which the elder brother is ordered to garotte young Little Puppet, and he tells his younger brother whom he is betraying to death, "Don't look at me! Don't look at me!" even as he draws the noose.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. .... Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism. [Emphasis supplied.]
As I said, The Man and his ambition have been the fountainhead of many miseries North and South, and in the South no less than in the North. But you project Northern cynicism on the South when you assert that the South can't stand up to money and power. In 1861, it did, and what's more, it was led by men who knew both, and who in your rationale should have been first for compromise and least willing to expose their country to the hazards of war. That's what browns Northerners off so royally about the South: Northerners happily sold out to the Machine, the "Age of Combinations" Rockefeller called it -- and the South didn't.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation.
What happened in the Texas sugar cane country is that the plantations were served for a little while by prison labor, and then the State took the plantations for taxes, in order to operate them directly as prison farms. The State screwed the planters, in other words. Elsewhere, sharecropping was common, but there was no mass importation of drudge labor. Until now, courtesy of the Bush family and the Clinton-Gore political machine.
indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war.
Is that true? It would be hard to prove, but I suppose you can back that statement up with census data or a study. Free migration after the War would have been net emigration, but then the South was a net prewar contributor to the Territories and Texas just like the North. Abraham Lincoln himself was born in Kentucky, as were many inhabitants of downstate Illinois and Indiana.
....Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
So far, it's been Northern money and Yankee ties that have kept people like the Bushes in the saddle in the South, and business ties to local leading firms and newspapers. The Houston Chronicle left the sidelines to become a player in the desegregation controversy of the early 1960's, working behind the scenes to spike stories in the local media -- all the media -- while negotiating a Downtown Deal with the local NAACP and the ministers of the largest black churches. The Chronicle and the Downtown Boys imposed a total blackout of news, just as if they were organizing a coup d'etat, and also worked to keep the idealistic young black protestors out of the news, too. And if I recall correctly, it was a Hearst paper at the time -- or was it Chicago's Tribune Corp.? At any rate, the paper reflected Northern values, like the Atlanta Constitution (whose editorial-page editor, Cynthia Tucker, follows a Crow Jim hiring policy of her own), and the Downtown Boys followed a Machine line on integration. Which, seen from the perspective of 40 years, and in view of even the black community's beginning to abandon integration as a nostrum, begins to look more and more like playing to the "audience" rather than to the "constituents", and a betrayal of the public by the local squirearchs.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some.
You sound like my cousin's Canadian wife: who needs countries? We have everything we need. Let's be citizens of the World! We can have a World Government -- it'd be open-minded, tolerant, and liberal just like the Canadian government, right? Why would it not?
I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- ...
Ah, so there is something to subsidiarity after all! I'll send a note to Bill Buckley at once -- he has preached it for years. Something to be said after all, for not micromanaging the South, the conquered province, directly from Washington after all. Thanks, I'll take that to the bank.
The South didn't weasel -- the States' acts were public and sovereign, taken in broad daylight. What's weaseling about that?
I don't assume the North broke the Constitution, although Lincoln may have a few times -- in pursuit of a higher good no doubt. What I've written several times is that the North rewrote the Constitution and inserted what we may happily call the unwritten Blood Clause, which I will summarize for you:
Amendment XIIIb
1. The States shall no longer be Sovereign, nor their Peoples have rights except those stipulated in the Constitution. They may not agree to any Thing unless the Congress or the President set it before them. The Congress may legislate at will on any subject whatsoever, and the Executive make Orders on discretion, and all shall have the force of law.
2. The subjugated people of the South shall be subordinate and their rights subject to modification or abrogation by public law, executive order, or the decree of any Federal Court.
stupidity doesn't run on my side of the argument.
Are you sure? You just made that post above about "weaseling".
Not so. (I'm going to imitate you for a while.)
Nowhere does the Constitution give them that right [Emphasis added.]
Wrong proof. Wrong word. Show me where the Constitution takes that right! Tenth Amendment, remember? Delegated powers, remember? Sovereign People, remember?
.....or the right to act unilaterally when the interests of another state may be affected.
Big words yourself. And all those weaselly conditions -- "unilaterally", "interests of another state". Gee, did Massachusetts ratify the Constitution unilaterally, or did they have to consult with North Carolina first? And where does the Constitution refer to "the interests of another state"? Oh, you mean Connecticut trying to muscle Rhode Island into ratifying -- that what you mean? Oh, wait, bad example.
All you have given is your opionin that that right exists.
Bzzzzzzztt!! Not so. 4Conservative Justices and I proved it, by disproving your claims about what the Constitution permits and what it doesn't. You are guilty of slothful induction and bad faith.
Which I, along with the Supreme Court, disagree.
Appeal to force, disguised as appeal to the authority of a corrupt decision.
You can continue to parrot soverign states and states rights all you want. It does not change the fact that all you are spouting are your opinions on the existence of such rights.
Not at all: 4CJ and I have backed them up with quotations and discussion of relevant passages from the Constitutional Convention debates, the ratification debates, and books about both. Low blow.
The states were soverign so long as their actions did not violate the provisions of the Constitution.
Says you. Sovereign means sovereign -- words mean something! And sovereign means what it means. The States shared their sovereignty, which alone is self-sourcing in the Revolution, and that which was reserved, they continued to enjoy. YOU JUST DON'T WANT THEM TO BE -- that is the problem in a nutshell!
They themselves agreed that laws made under the Constitution overruled laws made under their state Constitutions.
Irrelevant to the question at hand. Secession isn't a law. It's a sovereign act that only God Himself can overrule.
And the Supreme Court has ruled that the articles of secession which they passed in 1861 violated the Constitution and were therefore illegal.
Corrupt, political decision. Like Plessey, like Roe vs. Wade, like Bakke. No way they were going to confirm the States in their rights. Which, by the way, SCOTUS had no right to review, beyond denying the federal government's claims.
You about done on this subject? You were confuted, refuted, and done like a Christmas turkey quite a while ago.
You didn't answer the question, but it isn't going away.
Do you think ratification made the States the prey of the Supreme Court and whatever SCOTUS decided to rule, and whatever Congress decided to legislate? That the federal government can do to any State any thing it pleases, and to all the people that live in it?
The people who run things in the world today are more and more similar. A crank, eccentric or original can be elected to the state legislature, perhaps to Congress and very rarely to the Senate. But governors are almost always solid, conformist types. Nations, states and cities are all in competition with each other for investment. Those who win are those who make the best appeal to bankers and CEOs, and the culture of bankers and CEOs today is very different from what it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is much more of a "liberal," permissive culture. The media and technology also play a role here.
So I don't think that an independent South would be that much different or more conservative. For a time, perhaps, there might be a more conservative mood, but look at Ireland and Scotland. Once people attain independence or autonomy, the new "national elite" takes over, and these elites are pretty much the same. To be sure, business, technological, political and artistic elites differ from each other, but those in each group are pretty interchangable from country to country.
Your Bush example seems to support my point better than yours. Popular movements spring up on the fringe and owe little to established elites. In the end, either they are co-opted and taken over by those elites, or they wither.
In Jefferson's day, you had to be able to appear at ease in a drawing room to succeed in politics. Today, you need to master all the arts of media and economics. An outsider can make a splash. Look at Le Pen in France, or at the various taxpayer revolts here. But those outsiders don't have sticking power at the top. Your comrades act as though they are creating a new order or restoring an old one. In fact, the new order is here. It's quite different, capitalistic and liberal or libertarian. Populist rebels are the system's way of purging itself, temporary corrections, rather than new beginnings.
You're right that I don't know Southern populism first-hand. But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards. If you ever do get a separate country and are no longer kicking at New England or the North, that whole North-South opposition is neutralized, and the passion dies. Maybe not immediately, but after a generation, the slick technocrats take over from the less polished populists.
Indeed, if you look at what sustained Southern populism from the 1890s to the day before yesterday, it was that the South was poor and the North rich. For the past thirty years the culture wars and the struggle against the sophisticated or decadent Northern urban elites have also contributed to Southern populist sentiments. But if you really are to be an independent and prosperous state, what political base is there for the Tillmans, or Watsons, or Wallaces?
If the door to fortune lies in Atlanta or Houston and not in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, if your own powerful corporate elites are given a nation of their own, what remains of all the League of the South agitation and propaganda? There may be a generation's delay, a tumultous interregnum, but by pursuing the goals that all free capitalist states do, you become more like them. An independent South would be less multicultural than the nation as a whole, but it would probably be moving in the same direction.
When Ireland was poor, there was much talk about an Irish national essence or culture that had to be defended against the English. When wealth stood within reach, all that was abandoned. It was regarded by individuals as too much of a burden.
And consider the decline in the Irish birthrate that's led this people which once sent emigrants out in drove to take in immigration from other countries. If you take the capitalist road, that will be your fate. The other option -- to chose poverty voluntarily in the interests of culture or morality -- isn't likely to make much headway. There are doubts about whether it works, and no doubt that it doesn't satisfy the public.
"It's ours" is the reaction of successful nationalisms. In the beginning one thinks that the new government will reflect some national essence or enduring national character. But most often in the end, one simply comes to accept that government as one's own and to take whatever it decides as a reflection of what the nation is.
And this is what's most infuriating about the Rockwellites. They toy with all of this Southern kitsch. But the principle of individual freedom and personal fulfillment that one supposes they espouse as libertarians, is one that will make short shrift of Southern nationalism and "metaphysical" Southronism. "Nationalisms" as political philosophies only make sense when there is a strong enemy to be dethroned. Once one is master in one's own house and at ease, there's no binding power in nationalism, so people begin to adopt other ideologies.
I can see why so many Southernists say that they didn't sell out to capitalist development as much as Northerners did. There is that puritan strain in the North that wants everything to be useful and profitable. But the capitalist strain was also present in the South, though slavery and the plantation system diverted it and repressed some of its manifestations.
I wouldn't argue that the postbellum South didn't sell out to the corporations. Some people very surely did. They just got less for it than successful Northerners did. Many others didn't get the offer. So much of what one reads about Southern culture has to do with circumstances that no longer exist. Poverty, most recently. That doesn't mean that the post-bellum South didn't have virtues and a rich culture, but it does suggest that it will be hard to maintain those virtues or that culture in an age of affluence.
I suppose you could argue that the South was less materialistic than the North, but only in comparison. It's the opposition that hightened the characteristics of both sides. Separate the two sides completely, and you may find Yankees less ambitious and Southerners more acquisitive. Southerners played a Yankee role with regard to Latin Americans and would have done so on a larger scale had the Confederacy won the war. More than a century of practice has made the South as capitalist as the North, it's only in comparison that the cultural survivals bulk large. Ambition and activity aren't anything to be sneezed at, though.
I do read in the papers this week that American nationalism, patriotism and identification with the nation have greatly increased since 9/11. With the nation threatened, "hyphenation" is supposedly becoming more unpopular, and with it, perhaps, separatism.
They were not withheld from the States. Your persistently saying so stands Constitutional history on its head. Those powers belonged to the States, which otherwise would not have had any authority to delegate them to the United States of America under the Constitution.
Read the specific language of the first sentence of Articles I, II, and III: it speaks of Powers that shall be vested. But by whom? Look at Article VII (emphases mine):
"The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same."
Whoop! There it IS!! It is not a self-sourcing, self-originating, self-creating document, but a created Thing, which names its creators in that sentence. The clincher is the second clause of the same Article:
"done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September ....."
Quod erat demonstrandum.
I repeat: If these sovereign powers had not inured to the States from the outset, the Constitution would not have enumerated them at all, since it would have been obvious to all observers that the States did not dispose of these powers to begin with.
Your interesting rewriting of the XIII is typical and totally FUD.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by that. I merely attempted to state, as part "b", in additional clauses of the XIIIth, the unwritten but nevertheless operative changes which I believe Abraham Lincoln made to the Constitution by victoriously warring on the South. The English Constitution has been occasionally modified by acts rather than writs or laws over the centuries; and without passing on their way of amendment as distinct from ours, I wanted merely to point out that Lincoln had, in fact, effectuated such unwritten amendments to our own Constitution -- such as the implosion of the Tenth Amendment under cooperative assaults by Congress and the Courts asserting the Commerce Clause power in the teeth of the Tenth.
Because of the fact that slavery existed at the start of the Union, an amendment was needed to end it, because of the 10th amendment and the fact that slavery was one of those "reserved rights" that you are so proud of. You might note that the XIII was ratified with the help of the *real* legislatures of many of the southern states - unlike the [XIVth], which was only ratified after these same legislatures were removed by the federal government.
If the ex-Confederate state legislatures met and ratified the XIIIth Amendment, that is currently news to me (I can't swear I never heard of it), and of course raises questions of compulsion (1,000,000 troops). But I can see numbers of ex-Confederate legislators taking the conciliatory view Longstreet took, even though I believe that view was in the minority in the South.
Let me see if I can reprise your arguments.
1. The South isn't really different.
2. If the South is different, it really doesn't matter, because class is determinative, and upper classes are uniform in their interests and policies. They will pursue the same outcomes as Northern Liberals, because....(unspecified)....and then the South won't be different.
3. If the South is different, and if class momentarily isn't determinative in Southern politics, never mind, because it inevitably will be, and so the South really won't be different in the end.
4. If the South is ethnographically different, it won't be, because the inevitable machinations of the inevitable upper class will inevitably drown the South and its people in swarms of dark, cheap, starving inevitable people who speak no English -- and so the South won't be different after all.
5. If the South is different in its value set, the difference is illusory, because upper class will emerge, and its upperness will determine future values, driven by the same ambitions as Northern Liberal elites, and so the South really won't be different.
6. After 9/11, the elites won't let the South be different because they're threatened, and so the South won't really be different.
Gee, x, is there a tendency here, or is it just my imagination? ;^) It's beginning to sound a lot like,
The ultimate triumph of Northern Liberalism is inevitable. All your countries are belong to us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Well, pardon me if I say that honor requires us all to demur, and to resist the proffered dram of liquid oblivion. Conformism and other forms of supinity and surrender are never honorable, and one of the quirks of Southerners, even the educated ones that you think have all been coopted by Ivy League admissions offices, is that they still remember the idea of honor, and they still know what shame is. Thanks, but we'll pass.
Lentulus Gracchus
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.