“The Old World Order”: Are We Still Fighting The Civil War?
Politically speaking, we live by caricature. Particularly in the age of satellite TV news and Internet fulmination, the temptation is to melodrama. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read a recent article in the online magazine Salon arguing that “even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true.”
Never mind that author Andrew O’Hehir appears to be one of those overheated writers who use the adverb “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier meaning “figuratively.” Salon supposedly has editors. Elsewhere, O’Hehir concedes that the imagined conflict won’t “involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead.”
So it won’t be a war at all then. As a Yankee long resident in the South, maybe I should be grateful for that. O’Hehir also acknowledges that while today’s “fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension,” they “don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question.”
Um, not quite, no.
But then as O’Hehir also categorizes Michigan as a “border state” for the sin of having a Republican governor, it’s hard to know what Democrats there should do. I suppose fleeing across the border into Ontario would be an option.
Is it possible to publish anything more half-baked and foolish? Oh, absolutely. Here in Arkansas, we had more than our share of cartoon-think before the 2012 election. Three would-be Republican state legislators wrote manifestoes in favor of the old Confederacy.
One Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro delivered himself of a self-published book arguing that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.”
Fellow GOP candidate Charles Fuqua of Batesville—like Jonesboro, a college town—self-produced an e-book entitled God’s Law: The Only Political Solution. In it, he not only called for expelling all Muslims from the United States, but returning to the Biblical practice of stoning disobedient children to death.
Not many stonings, Fuqua thought, would be necessary to restore sexual morality and good table manners among American youth.
Then there was Rep. Loy Mauch of Bismarck. An ardent secessionist, Mauch had written a series of letters to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette arguing that since Jesus never condemned slavery, it had Biblical sanction.
Mauch also condemned Abraham Lincoln as a “fake neurotic Northern war criminal,” frequently likened him to Hitler, and deemed the rebel flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.”
Comparing Hubbard’s views to those of Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed alarm at “the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize with the Confederacy.”
Ah, but here’s the rest of the story, which Blow barely mentioned: All three “Arkansaw lunkheads,” as Huck Finn might have called them, were not only repudiated by the state Republican Party, but lost badly to Democratic opponents last November in what was otherwise a big year for the GOP here.
Unimpeded by the burdens of office, they can now get back to self-publishing their neo-Confederate hearts out.
The point’s simple: these fools certainly weren’t elected due to their crackpot fulminations, or even in spite of them. Their views were simply unknown. As soon as they became an issue, they became an embarrassment. Now they’re ex-state legislators. The end.
This is not to deny that there’s a strong regional component to the nation’s current political impasse. The New Republic’s John R. Judis did the numbers on the recent “fiscal cliff” vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Altogether, 85 Republicans voted for the Senate’s resolution, 151 against.
Broken down by region, however, the differences were stark. Republicans outside the South actually voted for the bipartisan compromise, 62-36.
GOP congressmen representing the old Confederacy voted against, 83-10—including unanimous opposition from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. But for Florida, opposition would have been nearly unanimous.
For all the good it did them. Because the Old South is visibly shrinking. Florida and Virginia are already gone; given demographic trends, Texas is on its way. Even Arkansas, which voted for Bill Clinton something like eight times, seems unlikely to become a one-party state.
As for the rest, Mike Tomasky correctly observes that “over time…the South will make itself less relevant and powerful if it keeps behaving this way. As it becomes more of a one-party state [sic] it becomes less of a factor.”
From that perspective, few recent political events have been as telling as the outrage of northeastern Republicans Rep. Peter King and New Jersey governor Chris Christie at the House’s foot-dragging on Hurricane Sandy relief. A few more stunts like that, and the GOP could end up as fragmented and futile as Alabama governor George Wallace’s American Independent Party.
No Civil War necessary.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 9, 2013
“The South Lost”: The Historical Misunderstanding At The Root Of Modern Republican Philosophy
There’s a basic, historical misunderstanding at the root of modern Republican philosophy. A little fact that seems to get overlooked. It’s not their insistence that the road to fascism begins with good health care. It’s not even the pretense that President Obama somehow masterminded an economic collapse, bank bailout, and massive deficit weeks, months or years before he came into office. No, the incident that the GOP has let slip is a little more basic.
The South lost.
See, Republicans seem to have mistaken “wage slavery” for … that other kind of slavery. They must have, because anyone who understood that workers are employees, and not property, would recognize that workers have rights. Not just some rights, not a neatly restricted little subset of rights, but the same rights as the people who employ them. They would recognize that the rights of an employer do not include the ability to abridge the rights of an employee.
Only they don’t. When you see Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum or John Boehner railing against government overstep on religion, conscience, what-have-you, you can be 100 percent certain that their concern is that somewhere, somehow an employer might have to allow his employees to do something that, you know, miffs them. That millions of employees might be forced to do without needed health care … doesn’t enter into the equation.
It’s easy to see how employers might be confused, considering all the love being lavished on them by both parties, and with the paeans being sung to them as magical “job creators.” And hey, we already pretty much handed over that fourth amendment to them, what with peeing in a cup or being able to fire people because of an old photo on Facebook. Republicans have been busy reinforcing that lesson by insisting that anyone who collects so much as an unemployment check should be subject to any rules they want to set. It’s no wonder that the line between handing someone a paycheck, and holding someone’s title, should have gotten blurred.
So consider this a primer to the confused American business owners and executives who might have listened just a little to long to all that sweet praise.
As an employer, you have the absolute right to religious freedom. Attend any church, temple, synagogue or reading room you like. Give as you feel obligated. Worship as you please. Place on yourself any restriction in diet, activity or anything else that you feel is in keeping with your beliefs … but only on yourself. You don’t get to impose these restrictions on your employees.
Your employees are separate from you. Not only that, they are equal to you in rights, no matter how unequal you may be in income. You do not get to tell them who to vote for. You do not get to tell them who they can love. You do not get to use your religious beliefs as an excuse to limit their health care.
No matter how strong your personal faith, your employees are not obligated to live according to those beliefs, expressly because they are personal. You may find it frustrating, but your employees have just as much right to their own beliefs as you do to yours, and whether you pay them pittance on an assembly line or six figures as a manager, you have zero right to carve off a slice of their freedom. The direction of the pay arrow has no effect on who gets to dictate to who.
If the government was telling you, as an individual, that you had to use birth control, that would be a violation of your rights. That’s not happening. They’re just saying that you don’t get to make that decision for the people who work for your company. Because, really, you don’t own them.
If you’re still mad; if you’re upset that healthcare has to be funneled through employers at all … there’s a cure for that. It’s called “single payer.”
By: Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, February 19, 2012
Newt Gingrich And South Carolina Were Made For Each Other
Hot-headed South Carolina and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are made for each other. The state first to secede from the Union about 150 years ago remains defiant, mischievous, and unreconstructed. Not all states are created equal.
South Carolina, shall we say, made its name early as the troublemaker. To this day, it doesn’t like to fall in line and sends elected representatives to Washington cut from that cloth. Down home in Charleston, men especially still brag on the firing on Fort Sumter, the shots and blockade that started the Civil War. Very nice.
So natch Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary over the front-runner, former Gov. Mitt Romney. There was no way the most viciously verbose and confrontational politician in our time was not going to win over the weekend. Just like the confident, beautiful people of the New England Patriots were going to see their football team beat the sincere, scrappy Baltimore Ravens, any which way. Gingrich’s victory was destined by the order of the political court.
The 243,398 Republicans who voted for Gingrich in the Palmetto State gave him the first statewide win of his life. Remember, the former speaker only ever faced voters in a congressional district in Georgia. He is not necessarily a man of the people, no matter what the South Carolina verdict. Not that I care, but Romney does not need to fear the writing on the wall yet.
Gingrich, like his new best friend state, is an outsider of the establishment. Gingrich, like South Carolina, home to the the Citadel, likes starting the political equivalent of war, although he never did military service. Gingrich, like South Carolina, is steeped in history which each are capable of entirely misreading and handing down like lore.
A few facts on Gingrich’s own history. As House speaker, he was awed by President Clinton’s political prowess and brilliance, as Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss pointed out on Sunday’s Post op-ed page. He knew he had met more than his match. Later in Clinton’s presidency, he masterminded the House impeachment strategy, carried out by then-Rep. Henry Hyde, that nearly doomed Clinton’s fate. The Monica Lewinsky affair was only a vehicle. No moral umbrage was involved, as we now know Gingrich was then having an affair with an aide on the Hill, now his third wife Callista Gingrich.
Vengeful hypocrisy still cuts deep. If Gingrich had his way, Clinton would be as gone as the good King Duncan in Macbeth. Sen. Lindsay Graham, then a South Carolina congressman, was one of Hyde’s dozen helpers. This was only over a dozen years ago, but it seems like “history” we have forgotten. That’s what Gingrich is counting on when he talks about God’s forgiveness and “despicable” debate queries. That’s what columnists forget when they write that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr was solely responsible for the whole tragic circus.
Some more history on South Carolina. When the greats gathered in a room to invent the Republic and its rules, South Carolina’s men were most adamant about protecting slavery as an institution. That was formative fruit on the tree since. A South Carolina congressman caned a Massachusetts senator for his abolitionist views on the Senate floor before the Civil War broke out. As noted, they were first to fight “the Yankees” and call themselves another country. Over much of the 20th century, the stubborn Strom Thurmond of South Carolina made an indelible mark as an arch-segregationist, a senator, and a presidential candidate. Former Sen. Ernest Hollings, the bright and capable junior senator with the low country in his voice, was thankfully a reminder of the good men and women from that state.
The Confederate flag has flown over South Carolina for too long. Not only up in the air but in the hearts of men. Gingrich won in a state that is, in a sense, another country.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, January 23, 2012
The Government Has Not Failed The People As It Did In 1860
For all its current shortcomings, the United States government remains intact, and the issues it faces are not as resistant to compromise as slavery, which means that 2011 was not as bad as 1860, a year that nearly ended the existence of the United States.
In 1860, “the government” failed on four distinct levels: a major political party, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the electorate. At the Democratic National Convention in April, delegates from 10 states walked out in response to the nomination of a presidential candidate and the adoption of a platform of which they disapproved, and formed a breakaway party. That break severed one of few remaining national institutions, and opened the way for the victory of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. Before Lincoln took office, seven states left the Union.
Neither the legislative nor the executive branches responded well. An incendiary public letter decrying compromise issued by southern congressmen on Dece. 13, 1860, made it obvious that congressional attempts at compromise were exercises in futility. President James Buchanan simply counted days until he could get out of Washington, while members of his Cabinet, most egregiously Secretary of War John Floyd, actively aided secessionists.
Then as now, elected officials in Washington do not have a corner on blame, for if “We the people” in our Constitution’s preamble means anything, then government is not a faraway them; it is us. The electorate shares responsibility. Self-government works if and only if all parties abide by election results whether or not they like them. If a dissatisfied part of the electorate decides it need not be bound by election results, then self-government loses all legitimacy, and the American experiment in self-government fails, which was what Lincoln meant when he explained that secession in response to election results presented “to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy–a government of the people, by the same people” could survive.
We may shake our heads in frustration, but we do not face issues as essentially impervious to compromise as slavery, nor do we seriously question the government’s survival, which reminds us that things could be worse. But 1860 should also remind us that if we are to look for the sources of our government’s problems, then “We the People” cannot exempt ourselves from some of the scrutiny.
By: Chandra Manning, U. S. News and World Report, December 30, 2011
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