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Better Living Through Coercion
Prior to the Civil War, apologists for the South’s “peculiar institution” concocted “positive good” rationales that claimed slavery was beneficial. Though the arguments varied, they were broadly based on assumptions of white superiority: intellectual, spiritual, and civilizational. The “superior” white man had the right to live off the labors of the “backward” African because doing so freed him to engage in the higher pursuits afforded by his loftier intellect, morality, and civilization.
Abraham Lincoln’s rejoinder — made during his debates with Stephen Douglas — was that the Southerners’ arguments could equally justify their own slavery by their supposed betters. Islamists, for example, believe their religion, morals, and culture are infinitely better than ours and so it is their religious duty to conquer the West and bring it under Sharia Law. Those refusing to convert to Islam are to be subjected to death, slavery or — at best — to the partial slavery of dhimmitude, which entails limited rights, obligatory humiliation, and special taxes to help enhance the lifestyles of the faithful.
In early America, people voluntarily supported the weak and infirm, but such practical compassion is not compatible with the enlightened and progressive times in which we live. Instead, the left of today imposes its own form of better living through coercion, based – not on assumptions of superiority – but on assumptions of inferiority. In the left’s utopia, productive individuals are forced to support those unable or unwilling to work; the recipients’ poverty, ignorance, infirmity, or victimhood entitling them to the fruits of others’ labor. The successful must be subjected to special taxes and to humiliation (“greedy,” “uncaring,” “elitist”) to justify the confiscation of their property and to soothe the beneficiaries’ feelings.
Antebellum apologists for slavery buttressed their arguments with force, sometimes running obstinate newspaper editors and preachers out of town. Today’s apologists resort to similar tactics. They “disinvite” or shout down speakers with whom they disagree. They charge dissenters and deniers with committing “hate speech” and “micro-aggressions” to bully them into subservient silence.
Lincoln’s response is just as relevant today as it was in 1858. Those who live by claims of their own inferiority and victimhood can be outbid by others purporting to be even more wretched than they. Thus, a world ruled by the progressive dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” collapses into a downward spiral of competition to demonstrate ever less ability and more need. Those hoping to live by the efforts of others end by enslaving themselves; they forge their own chains of helpless dependence.
Image Credit: “Abraham Lincoln November 1863” by Alexander Gardner – http://www.britannica.com/bps/media-view/112498/1/0/0. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Published in General
Thanks for the kind word–but standing up to defend Lincoln’s honor seems somehow inappropriate… & I didn’t even get to your post before that–egad!
I do think you are right to hark back to Lincoln’s defending of the principle that no man is so good as to rule another without his consent. I dislike intensely the way our side talks about the left–but this is one thing that we can never repeat enough & reflect enough about it.
1 – And they let their constituent states go peacefully without a shot being fired.
2 – So then the Scots didn’t have the right to secede had they voted so? Why should it take tyranny if a group of people in a common geographic area decide “There are too many differences. We want a divorce, thanks”? Czech’s and Slovaks have similar languages (basically, the same) and cultures, and had been a country for decades. And yet they decided to go their own ways, with no ill effects. Why shouldn’t they have been able to?
I thought Cromwell won the Civil War. Didn’t stick after he was dead, though.
But, I’ll just put it down to another ignorant Yankee who doesn’t know that the war in the 1860’s was the War of Northern Aggression.
My good man, you might think the Ricochetti are too ignorant to remember how the USSR dealt with the Prague spring–but how do you think so imprudently then bring it to their mind in the sequel? Fired no shot is a convenient way to put what happened in 1989, but the truth is that only violent tyranny kept the USSR together–when the fear of war disappeared, so did the damned thing. To talk about the end of a tyranny as an act of–what–magnanimity will earn you the contempt of all of us who know what the USSR really did.
What the Scots–well, some–seem to have wanted has nothing to do with that. The Act of Union of 1707 could reasonably be said not to bind a people that was not consulted. Not even the English really were a part of it. Pre-democratic empire does not seem to persuade democrats that it is worth keeping…
You embarrass yourself again. They were not a country–they were put together by strange imperialists of anti-empire after the Great War. Then, conquered by several tyrannies. That is all the past they had as one country. You think we do not know history here & will believe anything? Neither people had asked for union or had it offered.
Actually, they had to do a lot of selling to get it through both parliaments, and it never would have happened if Scotland hadn’t been bankrupted by the Darien Scheme. Now, it was not a direct democratic vote, but both peoples had a choice through their representatives, their MPs.
Similarly, the States of the South seceded through votes in their legislatures.
“Well, c’mere my good man, you’re a treat.”
“You’re a peach.”
“My good man”
I knew about Bad Hemingway competitions, but didn’t know about the Bad Buckley contest. Good luck, and all.
“I dislike intensely the way our side talks about the left”
Well, there’s a shock.
“I dislike this kind of reading”
Maybe because the truth hurts, and that Leftists claim Lincoln because he’s closer to their ideas than you’re comfortable admitting. While Jaffa is our chief High Priest of Lincoln, he’s outnumbered by everyone from Carl Sandberg to Eric Foner on the Left. The Marxists Americans that went to fight in Spain chose to call themselves the Lincoln Brigade for a reason. They thought they were continuing his fight.
“What’s the point of any law if you can secede!”
What’s the point of keeping people in a country if they don’t want to remain in that country? You keep dancing around this while never really answering that question. You argue that it’s good and right to war for liberation of peoples, and yet deny that peoples can peacefully separate themselves from a mother country unless something very heinous is going on.
cont…
“To talk about the end of a tyranny as an act of–what–magnanimity will earn you the contempt of all of us who know what the USSR really did.”
First off, the point, seeing as you missed it completely, was that despite the evil of the USSR, ironically, no armies were sent in to stop the dissolution (and yes, I well remember the attempted two week coup, Boris Yeltsin at the White House, etc). I’ll take a back seat to no one…. even in Bucharest… of my loathing of communism and the Soviet system. And I was in uniform, with Soviet guns pointed at me, when your mother was changing your diapers in Bucharest, thanks. I know exactly what the Soviets were like.
If you want to kneel to the Lincoln Memorial five times a day over in Eastern Europe, have at it. I grew up, like most, thinking the man was some kind of saint. I didn’t begin to question him… and dislike him… until I was an adult and began reading for myself on the subject, beginning in college (where Sandberg’s tome started setting off alarm bells for me). He told different crowds different things (“I’m an atheist” – to friends)(“I love Jesus” – to wife), and under it all, was mainly concerned about power. He was the Bill Clinton of his age, the father of “Whatever it takes” in American power politics.
James McPherson says in both The Second American Revolution and What They Fought For that Lincoln’s justification for prosecuting the war was that, yes, the South had a right to secede but for just cause, and keeping slaves was not just cause.
“Just cause” is a notion that used to be common in divorce law and no longer is. I don’t think people today would accept that rationale. But at that time, it was defensible and legitimate. Essentially, we had agreed to be a country. We had a Constitution that we had agreed to abide by.
And as a sidebar: I watched a special on Napoleon on PBS that made an interesting point: at the time of the Napoleonic wars, the size of the army was the most important factor in who won or lost. Napoleon amassed the biggest army the world had ever seen. I think there is a similar factor at work in the rationale for wanting to keep the fledgling United States together. We were very young still and vulnerable. The wars of 1812, 1830, and 1848 were fought in Lincoln’s recent years, and size–simple geographical size–could make or break a country.
I think we’re agreed, the peoples of England & Scotland are not the mover or responsible party here. Sure, there was the House, but that is an imperfect binding of the people, not least because the House can change any part of the political constitution!
The right to revolution of which one hears in Locke & the Declaration depends on understanding the people as a political actor in extra-constitutional situations. It is unreasonable to talk about it in any case but impending threats of tyranny–at least, that is the American opinion of the Founding.
Aside from its undemocratic character, aside from the obvious problem that excluding slaves from voting also excludes any talk of political rights as inhering in individual human beings as individual human beings–the state legislatures acted outside of the Constitution which all states obeyed & which was ratified by the states uncoerced. The Constitution says nothing about secession. Indeed, it could not.
Let me stop you right there. What’s so great about mob rule?
I never said mob rule was great. I said, if one argues in the Lockean manner Americans love, that a man can only be ruled justly by his consent & that he therefore has a right to rebel against tyranny, then it follows that decisions of the constitutional order made without popular consent should not be held to bind the people. I am not sure the Act of Union quite qualifies for an act which the people could simply revoke–then again, Englishmen are not quite as Lockean as Americans, or at least Burke said they were’t—but it cannot be blamed on the people, at any rate. So that the talk of a referendum in the UK is not at all comparable to secession talk in the South.