Tag Archives: Civil War

Score 1 for United Government

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Something I wrote a few days ago has piqued the interest of a supporter of “divided” government (see We Should Expect Divided Government for a Long Time and associated comments below).

Coincidentally, I just read about President Lincoln addressing Congress after the attack on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had raised a volunteer army to defend the Union, but without Congressional approval, since Congress was out of session and not due back for months. He summoned Congress back for a summer session and made his case (I’m quoting from The Man Who Saved the Union by H. W. Brands):

“These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity, trusting then as now that Congress would readily ratify them” He requested authority to expand the army to 400,000 men at a cost of 400 million dollars. “A right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world than ten times the men and ten times the money…”

“This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy – a government of the people, by the same people – can, or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its domestic foes… Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?… It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry any election can also suppress a rebellion.”

Since the Democratic Party’s Southern wing had disappeared (i.e. joined the Confederacy) and its Northern wing had lost its leader (Stephen Douglas had recently died of typhoid fever), the Republicans now had a large majority in both houses. Congress immediately ratified Lincoln’s previous actions and approved his request for more men and money. In fact, they voted for 500,000 men and 500 million dollars, more than Lincoln asked for.

U. S. Grant Speaks

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When I was in school, I got the impression that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk and a terrible President. Everyone agreed he helped the Union win the Civil War, but I assumed he must have been lucky. Maybe he was in the right place at the right time.

Some years ago, however, I learned that Grant’s autobiography is highly regarded by both historians and literary critics. Here’s what Mark Twain had to say about it:

I had been comparing [Grant’s] memoirs with Caesar’s Commentaries… I was able to say in all sincerity, that the same high merits distinguished both books—clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, unpretentiousness, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and avoidance of flowery speech. I placed the two books side by side upon the same high level, and I still think that they belonged there.

Grant began writing his memoirs after being diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Hoping to provide for his family, he worked quickly, although he was in constant pain. He finished five days before he died.

I’ve got a copy of Grant’s autobiography, but have never gotten around to it. Recently, however, I began reading The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands. It’s hard to know how accurate a biography is, but so far Grant is appearing in a very positive light, as a flawed but highly admirable human being.

Part of Grant’s appeal comes from his own words. For example, in regard to the Constitution:

It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies… The fathers would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable.

And after the attack on Fort Sumter:

Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.

Using the Democracy We Already Have

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Michael Lind, writing at Salon, argues that the agenda of the American right wing amounts to a “Southern Autonomy Project”: an attempt to attract investment to the South by insuring cheap labor and minimal government regulation, while limiting any negative response from Southern voters and interfering with possible corrective action in Washington.

Lind believes we need a progressive agenda to counteract the right, a “National Majority Rule Project”:

Setting political difficulty aside, it is intellectually easy to set forth a grand national strategy that consists of coordinated federal policies to defeat the Southern Autonomy Project.

He thinks these policies would do the trick:

1) A federal living wage, which would level the economic playing field among the states;
2) Nationalization of social insurance, so that Southern states couldn’t water down programs like Medicaid and the ACA to their advantage;
3) Real voting rights for all Americans, insured by Federal law;
4) Truly nonpartisan redistricting in order to eliminate gerrymandering of Congressional districts;
5) Abolition of the Senate filibuster (I’d add a change to House rules that would make it easier to bring legislation to a vote);
6) Abolition of the Federal debt ceiling.

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/the_south_is_holding_america_hostage/

Unfortunately, it’s really hard in practice to “set political difficulty aside”. As things stand now, any such reforms would require cooperation from the people the reforms are aimed at.  

The same problem applies to a Salon article that calls for a new Constitutional Convention. The author of this article argues that the Constitution should be amended to make it more democratic, including changes like:

1) Ten-year terms for Supreme Court justices;
2) Public funding for elections and the elimination of campaign contributions;
3) Abolition of the Electoral College;
4) Elimination of special voting rules and earmarks in Congress;
5) A requirement that Congress approve a yearly budget or face a special election;
6) Elimination of the need for state legislatures to approve constitutional amendments.

The author concludes, however:

Of course, it is unthinkable that the United States would do what its states have done 230 times, i.e., call a constitutional convention to design a modern framework of governance. This would require two-thirds of the states to agree. Amending the current constitution is also nearly impossible as it demands a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress as well as the approval by 38 states.

 http://www.salon.com/2013/10/12/us_constitutional_reform/

It’s reasonable to conclude that the only way to make our country more democratic is for more right-thinking people to participate in the democracy we already have. People need to vote for politicians who would support changes like those above. (We’d also have to get over the idea that our Constitution as written is a sacred document.)

Having the right people in office can certainly do wonders. Since the voters of California elected a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature, California has started moving in the right direction again.

According to an article in the New Yorker (whose author argues, by the way, for Obama to ignore the debt ceiling if it comes to that), a similar phenomenon occurred after the Southern states seceded:

Throughout the Civil War and afterward, Republicans in Congress had enacted some of the most forward-looking legislation in American history: a national currency, the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, support for higher education, the definitive abolition of slavery—all thanks to the extended absence of delegations from the self-styled Confederate states.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/10/21/131021

See, all we need to do is use the democracy we already have! (And keep having babies who grow up to be Democrats, especially in Texas, Florida and Ohio.)

The Cold Civil War and the South Rising Again

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It’s tragic that we have to keep fighting the Civil War, even though it’s been a cold war for the last 150 years. Witness Reconstruction’s failure, white Southern insurgency, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, “separate but equal”, the Ku Klux Klan, chain gangs, filibusters, Lester Maddox, “right to work” laws, the Tea Party, voter suppression, and so on.

But that’s the situation we’ll be in until the biological and cultural descendants of those 19th century Southern traitors (also known as “rebels”) lose their ability to screw up America.

That blessed day will begin to dawn when there are enough African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in Texas and Florida to make those state consistently blue. When that eventually happens, the rest of us should finally be protected from the South ever rising again.

It’s the Civil War Minus the Armed Rebellion Part

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Michael Lind grew up in Texas, which apparently gives him an advantage in understanding Tea Party-ish people.

Lind argues that there are a number of common misconceptions about Tea Party supporters. First, they aren’t merely a group of ideological extremists. Second, they aren’t populists – the average Tea Party supporter is more affluent than the national average. Third, despite their silly costumes and bizarre beliefs, they aren’t stupid or uneducated – they’re actually better educated than the average voter.

If the Tea Party isn’t best understood as a case of “abstract ideological extremism”, “working-class populism” or “ignorance and stupidity”, how should it be understood?

According to Lind, the Tea Party is simply the latest example of white right-wingers, mostly Southern, doing whatever they can to maintain their privileged position. He prefers referring to this movement as the “Newest Right”. They are merely the traditional right wing “adopting new strategies in response to changed circumstances”. The social base of the Newest Right consists of “local notables”, i.e.: “provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class”.

Basically, it’s a continuation of the Civil War carried on by mostly Southern county supervisors and car dealers, “second-tier people on a national level but first-tier people in their states and counties and cities”, without the armed rebellion part.

Before describing their current strategies, Lind outlines some history:

For nearly a century, from the end of Reconstruction, when white Southern terrorism drove federal troops out of the conquered South, until the Civil Rights Revolution, the South’s local notables maintained their control over a region of the U.S. larger than Western Europe by means of segregation, disenfranchisement, and bloc voting and the filibuster at the federal level. Segregation created a powerless black workforce and helped the South’s notables pit poor whites against poor blacks. The local notables also used literacy tests and other tricks to disenfranchise lower-income whites as well as blacks in the South, creating a distinctly upscale electorate. Finally, by voting as a unit in Congress and presidential elections, the “Solid South” sought to thwart any federal reforms that could undermine the power of Southern notables at the state, county and city level. When the Solid South failed, Southern senators made a specialty of the filibuster, the last defense of the embattled former Confederacy.

It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, to see Republicans using similar methods now in order to maintain their economic position and insure a supply of cheap, compliant labor. Lind highlights these four strategies (although there are others, such as providing limited funding for public education):

Use partisan and racial gerrymandering to maintain a Solid South;
Employ the filibuster and the “Hastert” rule to sabotage Congress;
Disenfranchise politically unreliable voters; and
Localize and privatize federal programs.

It’s an excellent article if you want to understand today’s political environment:

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/tea_party_radicalism_is_misunderstood_meet_the_newest_right/

At the Globalist, Stephan Richter places the government shutdown and debt ceiling mess in the same historical context:

One of the biggest hoaxes of American history is that the Civil War ended back in 1865. Unfortunately, it has not ended yet. What was achieved back then was an armistice, similar to the situation between the two Koreas.

As the current logjam in the U.S. Congress makes plain, the Civil War is still very present in today’s America – and with virulence that most other civilized nations find as breathtaking as it is irresponsible.

The reason why the Civil War was declared finished, according to the history books, is the military defeat of the South and its secessionist forces. But can anyone seriously doubt that the same anti-Union spirit is still to be heard loud and clear in the halls of the U.S. Congress today?

http://www.theglobalist.com/u-s-civil-war-continues/