Of Civil War and National Unity

Photo by Veronica Livesey on Unsplash

At a sesquicentennial distance the Civil War can become too easy to romanticize.  We can be tempted to envision some charm in it.  From a prolonged study of the Civil War, via many sources and a variety of formats, I find little romance in it.  The brutality and misery of that war have not been overstated.  Fortunately, there was work that was noble and heroic, such as the ending of slavery.   

A more peaceful solution, in hindsight, was available and likely, as the operation of the Constitution was steadily bringing about.  Perhaps it took a civil war challenge to that Constitution to make people recognize—the slaveholders especially—that a peaceful end to bondage would have been preferable.  Abraham Lincoln, a casualty of the war, perceived in a few words at the Gettysburg commemoration, that the Civil War was “testing whether [our] nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

To what conception and dedication did Lincoln refer?  “A new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

It must be understood that Lincoln observed that this nation had not fully achieved those principles.  He called it “unfinished work.”  Building on how well that work had begun, Lincoln praised how far it had been “so nobly advanced.”  Our nation, conceived in liberty, embraced a dedication to which our Founders bound themselves and their posterity, to achieve the proposition that each of us was created equal.  As the price in blood and suffering mounted, he was asking whether such a dedicated nation, still in its adolescence, could continue.

Through the 21 months following Gettysburg, the price would grow higher and more horrid while the people of that day persevered and demonstrated that the nation would endure, as it has to our day.  Further headway was made to fulfill our founding principles.

Today is a time for our dedication to be tested, as such a nation will always be.  Loud, magnified voices—there were those in Lincoln’s day demanding to end the effort (he nearly lost his reelection to some who preferred a compromise with the slavocrats)—today parade the obvious that our nation has not yet achieved all of our Founders’ ideals, and so demand that we abandon those ideals.

They prescribe a return to the age old pattern whereby in exchange for our liberty the self-selected few are elevated to mold the rest, prescriptions that somehow end up profiting the new bosses.  As in the past, while dressed in varieties of costumes, the chieftains, kings, czars, fuehrers, commissars, and other ugly monsters reshape societies that eventually devolve into ruin.

Their “modern” strategy is similarly old:  divide and conquer.  Rhetorical crossbows aim darts first at the failings of the very human Founders, to whom they assign blame for anyone unhappy with himself.  Next they guide their unhappy victims against our founding ideal, “the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Their bizarre assertion is that any failure in the ideal’s complete achievement justifies its trashing, the more violently the better.  Upon the ruins of civil disorder, disunion, and violence, they would build in the name of “equity” where they have destroyed fundamental equality. 

That is the program of those positioned to claim to be more equal than others while they rake in a bigger share of the proposed “equity.”  It is all old naked ugliness when denuded of the costumes.  In time it has always failed, but not without putrid fruits of misery.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln appealed to his hearers for increased devotion to ensure that our nation, governed of, by, and for the people, should not perish.  Succeeding generations have united to nurture the nation.  It is our task to answer the divisive calls with our dedication to advance the work so nobly begun. 

Of Slavery and the Constitution

 

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

Slavery in America was doomed under the Constitution, and the slavocrats knew it.  For more than four score years they had been fighting and steadily losing ground to preserve slavery.  When Abraham Lincoln was elected President, the slavocrats understood that things would not get better for them.  They saw getting out as the only way to continue slavery.

They pushed their states to leave after the election of 1860 not because they disputed the results.  They recognized that Lincoln had been duly elected.  What the slavocrats feared was that under his administration and his support in Congress their ability to preserve slavery would be irreparably eroded and eventually ended.  They sought to exit the Union before that happened.

By necessity, forming a “more perfect union” under the Constitution required compromise to accommodate diverse peoples and experiences.  The miracle of the Founders was to bring all the states in.  Compromise and accommodation are at the heart of a republic. 

There is an art to compromise.  I saw that during the days of the Reagan administration.  President Reagan was a highly principled man, yet he often compromised.  I marveled how, in his compromising, he resisted compromise of principle.  Again and again he advanced his principles while accommodating on details.   

The Founders establishing a Constitution sought to preserve essential principles by which a government of liberty would act.  A key example was the slave trade.  Some vociferously argued for its end.  Slave state representatives argued for the matter to be left to individual states.  The Constitution enshrined the national principle that the slave trade must end.  Placing regulation of trade in general with Congress, the compromise set 1808 for the complete end of the slave trade.

A similarly important example where compromise embraced the principle was the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives.  The number of a state’s representatives was based on population.  Representatives from slave states wanted to count slaves.  Others objected that if your state treats these people as property, then they should not be counted any more than other property.  The principle in the compromise was to recognize the humanity of people held in slavery, but to count a person only as three-fifths for congressional apportionment so long as he was held in slavery, reducing southern congressional representation.

With these two compromises, resting on anti-slavery principles, all the states came into the union, accepting a Constitution that would progressively lead to abolition.  As the reality of that became abundantly clear to the leadership of eleven of the states, they tried to renege on the deal and leave.  The slavocrats failed.  Rather than let the Constitution end slavery peacefully, they forced a horrid war that ended it all the sooner, but at the cost of more than 600,000 dead, greater than the total of Americans killed in both World Wars I and II. 

The power of the principles of the Constitution continued its work.  Amidst a Civil War that, in the words of Lincoln, tested “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” elections were held.  The voters chose liberty and the nation endured.

The American Founders were sober people, sobered by a long and difficult war of Independence followed by several years of economic and social confusion.  They understood that people were flawed and make mistakes.  They believed that people are also good, who can and do make good decisions.  The Constitution on which they established the United States recognizes and is designed to offset the bad and allow good to succeed, which it more often than not does.  

Tested by myriad difficulties and unparalleled prosperity, the Constitution has worked better than any other system of government on earth.  That is why enemies of freedom hate it and why so many people want to come here to live.

Of Minorities and Society

The saddest chapters of history chronicle the breakdown of human society.  Rights are abused, the innocent—if innocence is allowed to exist—are trampled.  Poverty, hatred, violence, and uncontrolled human passion prevail.  Destruction and degradation, physical and moral, replace human progress.

All society, except that of master to slave, relies upon an element of free association.  Societies may have more or less elements of coercion as well, but it is the element of free association that allows the society to continue, that motivates its members to acquiesce in or even encourage the society’s continuation.  Free, voluntary association is what gives a society its legitimacy.  Without it, there is no society, just a group of people ruled by one coterie of thugs or another. 

Cooperation in society cannot be taken for granted.  When it is, when free cooperation, instead of being nurtured and encouraged, is replaced by coercive rules and compulsion, particularly rules and compulsion designed to benefit some at the expense of others, society declines, people interact more by will of others than by their own volition.  With time either the situation is redressed or the society disintegrates, often to be conquered from the outside when its internal strength has turned to weakness.

In its latter years imperial China was prey to numerous foreign incursions because its society was a mighty empty shell, old traditions surrounding an empire of competing warlords.  Ancient Greece, which twice when united proved too much for the Persian empire, became relatively easy prey to the Romans after the ties of Greek society had become tired and weak.  Rome, in its turn, after a thousand years, was enormously wealthy but mightily weak in the internal strength to repel the roaming barbarians, vibrant societies powerful in their own internal cohesion.  Much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America today remains mired in poverty from the inability of relatively young countries to develop cooperative societies that encourage the generation of wealth and its application to promote prosperity for the present and for the future.

With cooperation at the core of successful society, one would think that democracies must be the most successful.  History records otherwise.  There are no historical examples of a successful democracy, at least not one that lasted for long enough to matter.  Like a match set to paper, democracies flare up brightly into power and glory but all too soon die away to ashes. 

The problem with democracies has been that all too quickly the majority in the democracy learns that it can become wealthy by robbing the minority, under camouflage of statutes and government.  That only lasts until either the minority successfully rebels, becomes a majority in its turn, or the wealth of the minority is exhausted.  In reaction, the majority may seek to preserve its advantages by yielding to a dictator—a “mouth” for the majority—to govern in the name of the majority to discern and express its will.  Few of these dictators have resisted the temptation to wear the mask of the majority to govern for the benefit of themselves and their cronies.  That has been the case for every communist government, without exception.   

 

But, is it not right and just for the majority to prevail?  Perhaps, but to prevail over what?  Everything?  Consider:  if majority rule is applied to deprive the minority of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, why should the minority cooperate?  All that such society offers them is slavery, unrequited labor and service to fill another’s belly and pockets.  In a pure democracy, there is no check on majority avarice, no refuge for the minority.  The majority must always have its way.

Republics, however, are built upon a foundation of minority rights.  Republican governments are granted only limited powers, exercised by representatives of the people, within boundaries beyond which the government may not go.  A written constitution serves to enshrine and strengthen those rights against violation by the majority.  The system gives a stake to all—not just the current rulers—in the continuation and strengthening of the society.  No democracy, hereditary monarchy, or dictatorship can provide that.

In a nation as great and diverse as the United States everyone is part of a minority.  Whether we consider age, ethnic background, religion, geography, culture, profession, or a multitude of other distinctions, we are a host of minorities.  We can only come together and remain as a nation, strong and vibrant, if we are confident of protection in our minority rights, for protecting minority rights in America means protecting everyone’s rights.  That is why the Founders proposed and the nation embraced a Republic formed on a federal structure of divided and limited government.

In that context, what are we to make of the current direction of American society?  Are we preserving the Republic?  Does our society feel like it is coming together?  Recent public opinion polls find that more than 60% of Americans believe the nation to be going in the wrong direction.  In another poll, a mere 22% believe that the current government rules with the consent of the governed. 

What is the national political leadership doing about this?  We have a President who aggressively pursues a variety of programs that have in common the taking of wealth from one minority segment of the nation to reward others.  These wealth transfers are lionized for the undenied purpose of political and electoral advantage for the President and his supporters. 

You will recognize the pattern.  A crisis is discovered by the President, and an industry or group is demonized in public speeches and echoed in the establishment media as causing the problem and/or standing in the way of its solution.  A plan is announced that involves confiscations from the demonized industry or group to fund benefices bestowed on Administration favorites.

Consider a few examples of many.  Global warming is hailed as an imminent crisis with disastrous consequences; the coal, oil, and gas industries are identified as the foes of progress; and a variety of taxes and other restrictive policies are proposed, together with planned subsidies for businesses and companies favored by the White House.  Banks are declared to be the nefarious forces behind the recent recession, new laws and regulations are applied that confiscate billions of dollars from the industry, much of which is then channeled to hedge funds and other political allies of the administration.  Some millions of people are discovered to be without health insurance, doctors and the health insurance industry—among others—are fingered as being at the root of the problem, so a major overhaul of the entire structure of the health system is enacted that favors some at the expense of others.  Administration cronies receive lucrative contracts to develop and administer the new system.  There are many other examples, large and small, in education, welfare, housing, transportation, law enforcement, and many other government programs.

Is there any wonder that there is gridlock in the national government, when policy after policy is aimed at transferring wealth from some to reward others?  Where is the room for cooperation and compromise, when the issue is how much of your family’s wealth is to be taken and given to someone else?  The Roman Republic fell into gridlock after decades of appeals to mass acclaim for schemes of popular distribution of public plunder.  It ended in the triumph of the Caesars, and later their eventual fall to the barbarians.  It is perilous to abuse social comity. 

President Obama has announced the transfer of wealth to be the chief focus for the remaining three years of his administration.  Can our society weather that?

Of American Exceptionalism and Our Chief Executive

Two colleagues and I recently had an Internet conversation.  The first brought up the question of American exceptionalism, wondering what it really was, in what it consisted.  Two of us responded with some ideas.  You may find the brief discussion interesting, as I did. 

I would note that this is a real discussion on a public forum.  While I have edited the segments down a bit, I have not inserted new material or changed any of the thoughts expressed.  I give only the first names of my two colleagues.  While this took place on a public forum, I did not ask them to repeat their comments here.

Neal:  American exceptionalism is demonstrated as American values and beliefs projected to the world with Washington, D.C. policies.  Therefore, American exceptionalism is arrogance. This is what I would believe if I allowed myself to accept conventional wisdom.  But I’m settled on understanding exceptionalism to mean that ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things, even beyond their own expectations.  And the reason why it is called “American exceptionalism” is because the country was founded on principles of liberty, freedom, and structures that were intended to defeat tyranny.  This was unique in the world and history at the time of the nation’s founding.

So I conclude that American exceptionalism is something that is not collective and is something that cannot be demonstrated by any policy that comes out of Washington, D.C.  American exceptionalism is something that can only be demonstrated by an individual.

I have trouble believing American exceptionalism was the deliberate intention of the Founders, because I see slavery in the Constitution.  How is it possible to reconcile the concept of American Exceptionalism with the tyranny of slavery?

Wayne Abernathy:  Neal, perceptive questions.  I think that when considering American Exceptionalism—and it is very real—you have to take modern Washington and collectivism out of the equation.  Our current collectivism, which is at the heart of much of what Washington does, is a throwback to what people came to America to escape. The basic idea of American Exceptionalism—which even preceded our independence and our constitution—was that this new land was a place where the worth of the individual, protected by the rule of law, prevailed.  While there were elements of those ideas in much of Europe, they struggled there against monarchy, class systems, and other means of imposing collective will on individuals.  The European ruling classes failed in their efforts to impose collectivist and class rules in North America, but they tried very hard.

I would dispute your point about slavery.  The U.S. Constitution did not create slavery.  It took the thirteen states and brought them as they were into a new foundational rule of law based upon individual liberty.  While slave states entered into that constitutional system and brought their slavery with them, they entered into a system that would not long tolerate slavery.  Before four score and seven years had elapsed most of the slave states recognized that if they stayed under the U.S. Constitution they would lose slavery through the operations of that Constitution, and they would lose it through peaceful means.  That is why they chose to try to leave the Union and defend slavery by force of arms.  The Constitution triumphed—or the people within that constitutional government did—and defeated both secession and the defense of slavery by force of arms.

All of those were elements of American exceptionalism. We risk American exceptionalism to the degree that we embrace the age old practices and policies of group rights, class structure, collectivism, and other policies that undermine individual liberty and the rule of law.

Honza:  As an immigrant, I always took American Exceptionalism to be what our first political generations meant it to be—the idea that we are not a collection of tribes or a particular trading depot that elbowed its way into nationhood so much as people united by a very specific set of ideas:  life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (including but not limited to property).

Contrast us to Saudi Arabia or any nation with an established faith, or even, arguably national countries like India or Germany, where group membership matters more than who one is.  That’s our genius, it’s why we perform, decade in and decade out, remarkably well compared to other places and why we’re always anxious, as we are now (thanks Wayne), that we’re becoming a nation where who one knows matters more than what one knows.

Neal:  Thank you guys for offering corrective perspectives on this wildly misunderstood idea of American Exceptionalism.  I first got interested when listening to Rush. I thought he was going to define it in a quick sentence, but there was a bunch of table setting.  But Rush gave us more establishment of context.  I was still not certain I had correctly grasped what he defined.  

A whole bunch of people use the phrase “American Exceptionalism” in a very wrong way, and I think it must require an individual effort to get yourself beyond the conventional wisdom meaning. We need somebody more eloquent than Obama to explain it to the American people.

Wayne Abernathy:  I don’t think that Obama believes in it.  He offers a lot of rhetoric—and policies—rooted in the idea that America is just like everywhere else, or where it isn’t it should be.  The United States was founded on the belief and vision that this was a place that could and should be different, that could break the patterns of oppression that had prevailed throughout history and all over the Old World.  By and large, the Founders succeeded, though it is a work in progress and is constantly challenged at home and abroad.

I think that it is that difference, that respect for the individual and for the rule of law, that makes us the target of ideologies of slavery, like the Islamists and the socialist tyrannies.  I am not sure that Obama recognizes that.

Neal:  Comparison to Saudi Arabia brings to mind a question I toyed with:  would the mundane act of a woman driving a car without fear of punishment be considered an example of American Exceptionalism?

Honza:  Neal, I think Wayne is correct. The Canadian rock band Rush (at first I thought you were talking about them rather than the radio host) is less likely to blame others’ poverty and repression on America’s prosperity and freedom than Obama is.  Obama hasn’t really thought about the idea of American exceptionalism, isn’t interested in it and just knows he’s against it without understanding it.

Of War and Freedom

Independence Day 2013 had perhaps a more than usual significance for our national holiday.  On that day, 150 years before, the Army of the Potomac waited on the hills and ridges south of Gettysburg for a rebel assault that did not come.  Though General Meade and his officers and soldiers were unaware of it that morning, the rebel army was beaten, after three fruitless days of attacking the soldiers of the United States to clear a path to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or even Washington itself.  Instead, Robert E. Lee was engaged on July 4, 1863, in plans to extricate what was left of his army from Pennsylvania and get it across the Potomac and into Virginia before it could be destroyed.

On that same day a thousand miles to the southeast, the rebel army in Vicksburg, Mississippi, surrendered to the U.S. Army and General U.S. Grant.  It was strategically an even more important victory.  The fall of that rebel stronghold would lead to the free navigation of the entire Mississippi River, from its source to the Gulf of Mexico, for all shipping loyal to the United States, and it divided the rebel Confederacy in two.

As Grant reflected later in his Memoirs,

The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell.  Much hard fighting was to be done afterwards and many precious lives were to be sacrificed; but the morale was with the supporters of the Union ever after.  (Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, p.297)

Some who are not friends of the United States Constitution make the false claim that the War of the Rebellion was clear evidence that the Constitution was hopelessly flawed, that the war revealed the weakness of the American government rather than its strength.  Such critics little understand history or what a rare thing it is for nations—or rather the people of nations—to learn to be willing to settle issues of life, death, and livelihood by the casting of ballots.  It is an acquired discipline. 

Consider how very few democracies or republics have been established and accepted by the populace without the people being convinced by bloody war and rebellion that deciding issues by votes and law is superior to trying them by force.  England had many civil wars and rebellions on its way to rule by parliaments instead of kings.  France, too, went through several revolutions before its current Fifth Republic achieved political stability.  The Weimar Republic of Germany teetered for some fifteen years until it descended into the Third Reich, and only upon ruins was a stable federal republic built.  Japan at last settled for meaningful republican government after its military dictatorship completely prostrated the nation in World War II.  Republican government was only months old when the Bolsheviks replaced it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the verdict is not yet in as to whether the Russian nation has embraced free republican government even now.  Similar stories can be told all across the globe, about China, Korea, Turkey, Mexico, and many other lands that through trauma and struggle came today to be governed by leaders chosen by the people limited in their authority by viable constitutions.

But if the American War of the Rebellion demonstrated the challenges to constitutional government in the first one hundred years of the Republic, it also showed its strength.  That can be illustrated by what its critics consider its most damning flaw, for they denounce the document for enshrining human chattel slavery instead of abolishing it.  In this they are entirely wrong.  The Constitution took the thirteen new American states as they were in the late eighteenth century and brought them into a society of constitutional freedom incompatible with slavery, where the operations of that Constitution would sooner or later bring slavery to an end.

It is true that there are provisions in the Constitution as adopted in 1787 that recognized slavery.  That was the price for bringing the slave-holding states into the Union within the structure of the Constitution.  That very Constitution, however, made it impossible for slavery in the United States to endure.  Four score and seven years after the Declaration of Independence, war waged by the people under that very Constitution was abolishing legal slavery in America.  Perhaps there was a time when it might have ended peacefully, but peacefully or not, slavery in the United States had to end.

As Abraham Lincoln predicted at the 1858 Illinois Republican Convention, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing, or all the other.”  I believe that Lincoln knew which would triumph, but I do not know that he suspected that he would be the constitutional officer that would see that the Union was not dissolved and that all of the United States would become free.

By  the end of 1860, slaveholders knew that they could not retain slavery if they stayed under the Constitution.  Sooner or later, the votes would be cast to end the practice.  The slaveholders chose to rebel and get out from under the Constitution before its principles of human freedom inexorably overcame them.  But once under the Constitution, it was too late to leave.  Under the organization of the Constitution, the armies of the Republic were organized and put down the rebellion and slavery, holding congresses and conducting elections along the way.

The War of the Rebellion did not free the land from enemies of freedom and constitutional law. Those who would impose their will on their neighbors remain with us today.  Their freedom is protected by the Constitution.  But the Constitution has ever stood in the way of their plans to subjugate their fellows, and it will continue to do so as long as it is upheld.  Hence the relentless efforts to undermine it, to claim it a flawed document, or pronounce it a “living document,” changeable at the whim of politicians and judges who are allowed to raise their own will above its meaning.  Our devotion to that Constitution, if we are to remain free, cannot be any less than that of those who fought at Gettysburg and other battles of freedom.  As we remember them, it is our turn to show “increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion”.

Of the Constitution and the Ever-Fresh Idea of Freedom

It seems that the days of trial and testing of our Constitution are not over.  Perhaps they never will be until the Author of the Constitution returns to the earth.  The Obamacare statutes unfold as the time approaches when people will be required to buy government-designed health insurance whether they want it or not.  The Environmental Protection Agency continues to impose on industry rules that Congress refused to pass.  The new financial consumer czar, with no meaningful oversight or accountability, exercises his will to design financial services for all Americans, even though he was put in office by a recess appointment made when the Senate was not in recess (skipping the uncomfortable Senate confirmation process).  There is more, but these examples represent the challenge.

Under the inspiration of God, the Founders established the Constitution to protect, preserve, and indeed promote the rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That is the legitimate purpose of government, as the Founders inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, considering it self-evident,

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.

In this effort the Founders twice abolished and instituted new basic forms of government.  The first was to throw off their allegiance to the Crown of England and control by his Parliament.  The second was to exchange the loose and ineffective Articles of Confederation with the new Constitution.

The Constitution was and remains a revolutionary document.  With footings based solidly on the indestructible rights and worth of the individual members of the society, it was unlike anything anywhere on the earth at the time.  At the core of the Constitution, and affecting all of its members, are the overriding and animating principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, constantly at war with and destructive of all forms of tyranny. 

Among the first fruits of the Constitution was the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, all so wholly consistent with the Constitution that the only objection raised to them was that they were redundant to the basic text that they amended.  Maybe they were redundant, but time has proven the wisdom of spelling out these powerful and important rights of the individual.

They were soon challenged.  Once in government it is natural and expected that government leaders would become progressively intolerant of criticism and opposition.  Government “of the people” does not make government automatically friendly to the people and tolerant of their freedoms.  We see it today, every day.  In 1798 the Federalist Party leaders in government passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, inimical to the Constitution, in significant part to silence opposition voices from the new Democratic-Republican Party.  The Acts sought to declare criticism of public figures to be libelous, punishable by fines and imprisonment.  Under these unconstitutional statutes newspapermen were arrested and their newspapers stopped, among other outrages to liberty.    

Fortunately, the Constitution was not impotent to throw off this new effort to impose an old tyranny on the nation.  Thomas Jefferson led a popular revolt through the elections of 1800 to expel the Federalists from office, repeal these statutes, and launch a renewed spirit of governing focused on individual rights and liberties.

In succeeding years the inconsistency of human slavery with the principles of the Constitution grew increasingly acute, until in 1861 the leadership of most of the slave-holding states concluded that it would be impossible to maintain their “peculiar institution” if they remained governed by the Constitution.  They understood that they could maintain slavery or observe the Constitution, but not both.  Eventually, the spirit of freedom at the core of the Constitution would work to end slavery, by operation of the very constitutional system. 

Since the Union created by the Constitution would not allow the states to leave peacefully and take their slaves with them, the southern leadership invoked rebellion as the only way out.  Theirs, however, was a rebellion to invoke and support tyranny, and it failed.  The revolutionary American Constitution and the people on whom it rested won yet one more victory for freedom.  As Abraham Lincoln perceived, the war of the rebellion was a test of “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

That nation, conceived in constitutional liberty, did endure that test, but the tests never end.  There are ever those who believe that they have the privilege, the calling, the right, or even the duty, to impose their will and judgment on others in ways destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Not every assault on freedom and the Constitution fails. There have been too many that have succeeded.  So far the Constitution and the people who uphold it have withstood these assaults, even if at great cost.  The Supreme Court’s outrageous Dred Scott decision and the foolish Kansas-Nebraska Act were last gasp efforts to perpetuate the tyranny of slavery, but in the end they sparked the birth of the Republican Party and fed the Civil War that removed slavery and extended the reach of the principles of the Declaration and Constitution.

Today as a nation we face the sputtering final efforts of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy to enthrone government as the source of solution to people’s problems—and to buy popularity with government-laundered largesse confiscated from a dwindling pool of taxpayers.  That is a hoary practice of kings and Caesars that buys time but no lasting success.  The money always runs out before the promises do. 

The question that remains for us and for our Constitution is how well will we as a people, and our Constitution as a system of government, weather the demise of the New Deal system.  Acute test of freedom approaches again, if not already here, when we will determine whether our “nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”  I have confidence that it will, and—in the words of Lincoln—that the American people will decide “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” as it has in all of its greatest tests so far.

Of Elections and Sports

It is early Fall.  That means that we are nearing the end of the regular season of baseball, and the New York Yankees are on course to make the playoffs and another run for the World Series title, number 28.  Their chances look good this year, if they can keep their players from injury and the bullpen resumes pitching up to its abilities.

Others are following football.  Already the Washington Redskins have gone from having a lock on getting into the Super Bowl, after winning their first game, to being nearly mathematically eliminated from the playoffs by losing their next two.  As they say in baseball, though with less justification in pro-football, it’s a long season.  And speaking of the Redskins, it has been said that you can tell that someone has been in Washington too long when he begins cheering for the Redskins.  Let that rest on your own taste and experience.

Basketball fans know that in just a few weeks, practice begins for college hoops.  The college basketball season will terminate several months later in the greatest sporting event that the United States has to offer, March Madness!  I don’t know when or whether the professional basketball season ever ends.  I suppose it does.

Somewhere someone is playing soccer, where some team is leading another by the insurmountable score of 1-0.  But I think that we may be in the only few weeks of the year when there are no hockey games—even as the NHL is haunted again by more labor-management strife.

At his school my son is running on a cross country team, the Trinity Tempest.  The motto of the team is not but should be, “Tempest Fugit.”  Instead, it seems to be something like, “Pass the weak, hurdle the dead.”  Nice so far as it goes.  Classical Latin would be better, it seems to me, but I am not a runner and have no say.

Yes, there is much sporting excitement and many sports in the Fall.  Elections, however, are not one of them.  Electing the leaders of our government, who will wield control over life and death, freedom and slavery, prosperity and poverty, is not a sport.  Self-government is one of the most serious activities of life for those who cherish their liberty.  Those who do not will eventually vote away their freedom, as we have seen in places like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia in recent years, and before that in places like Germany of the 1930s.

Of course, you would never know that from the public discourse on television, radio, in newspapers and other media outlets.  Presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional races are treated as if they all were games, with little at stake other than whether your favorite team wins.  Issues are trivialized, if mentioned at all.  The trivializers have even assigned team colors, one side “Red” and another “Blue.”  The most important issue in the media after a debate is “who won?” rather than, “what did we learn about what a candidate believes and what he would do if elected?”  Points are awarded by press experts for style, poise, rhetoric, and gotcha lines.  Panels of talking heads award scores as if they were judges at a figure skating competition.

It is all more than beside the point.  It corrupts the process.  Rather than true debates, in which candidates have enough time to declare and explain their views and policies on important issues, media celebrities offer trick questions, to which the future President of the United States is given two, three, or sometimes even five minutes to respond as he or she fishes for a soundbite to make it into the 60-second news recap (most of which will again be focused on, “who won?”).  Based on this silly exercise, viewers are encouraged to text in (for a small fee) their vote—not for who would be the best office holder—but for who was the winner of the night’s contest.

We should expect and demand better.  Through modern revelation we have been given a set of standards.  You do not have to be a believer in revelation to recognize the wisdom of the counsel:

Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise, whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil.  (Doctrine and Covenants 98:10)

Our task as voters interested in preserving our rights and freedoms is too seek out diligently the honest, the good, and the wise.  Anything less is evil.  In an election, in a campaign, in a debate, I want to discover who is the honest, the good, and the wise, and I am little interest in style points. 

That takes careful and diligent effort, for among the honest, the good, and the wise, are the liars, the false, and the foolish intent on deceiving.  These latter like to hide in the noise of the sporting contest and often seek to divert attention to the things that little matter, the stray word, the high school prank.  We need to keep our focus on a diligent search for the honest, the good, and the wise.  With persistent effort, we can find them.

 

In self-government, we are the players.  The issue is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, decidedly not a game.  But if we follow these standards and apply them diligently, then in the end We the People will be the winners.

Of Democracies and Demagogues

The demagogue has ever been the bane of democracies.  By definition, democracies rest upon the choices of the people.  When wisdom guides, democracies prosper.  As history shows, wisdom does not always prevail, and it never does when demagogues do.  Since the demagogue seeks his own power by taking power from others, once the people give him their voice they will be hard-pressed to get their power back; the democracy deteriorates into dictatorship, invoked in the name but never the reality of the rights of the people.

Why would a free people yield their power to the tyranny of the demagogue?  It is not reasonable to place your own hands and feet in fetters.  In every successful democracy there is a balance between reason and emotion.  Rather than advise wisdom, demagogues appeal to the basest popular emotions to overcome reason.  American Founder, James Madison, drawing lessons from the best known democracy of history, the democracy of Athens, warned Americans of the danger:

      In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.  Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

(James Madison, Federalist no. 55, as quoted in John Samples, “James Madison’s Vision of Liberty,” Cato Policy Report, Vol.XXIII No.2, March/April 2001, p.12)

Madison recognized that in groups fiery emotion can make for a more persuasive pitch than cooler reason can.  He recommended the Constitution as a defense against demagogues, a structure of fundamental limitations on government and against those who would seek to govern by preying upon the passions of the people.  The formula has worked and the Constitution has held—against many trials, including a Civil War—for more than 200 years. 

The typical demagogue is a forceful speaker who seeks power by stirring up the people, whom he sees as masses to be manipulated and managed rather than as a body politic of reasonable individuals.  It does not particularly matter which emotions are invoked against reason; the most successful demagogues draw upon a variety.  Perhaps the emotion most powerful to the ends of the demagogue is fear, but he will also use hatred, avarice, envy, sorrow, vanity, vengeance, vainglory, among others.  He will even try to invoke love, though love is hard to make compatible with the demagogue’s message of contention, but it can be used to garner sympathy and to get people to let down their guard against an appeal to baser emotions.

Are Americans and the American constitutional democracy perpetually proof against the demagoguery that has destroyed democracies before?  The Founders did not think so.  A popular watch phrase among them was, “eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty”.  They were referring more to internal dangers than dangers from foreign enemies.

How do we keep watch on the threshold of the 21^st Century?  Here are ten tests to help unmask the demagogue:

• He gives powerful, emotional speeches, as public speaking is one of his most powerful tools.  “Facts” will usually play a minor role in the speech, and when used will often either be half-truths or outright lies, sometimes very big lies with passionate appeal.
• As discussed, emotion rather than reason predominates in his arguments, with fear the most prevalent emotion.
• He conjures up apocalyptic dangers and manipulates crises (and creates them when none are readily available).  The sky seems to be always about to fall.
• Riding on the wave of crisis, he will offer sweeping “action plans” that would cede to him major powers and authorities and push aside sources of opposition.  “Forward” is the frequent cry shouted to drown out objections, “the debate is over.”  (In a real democracy, can the debate ever be “over”?)
• He dishonors the Constitution and violates it without regret; the Constitution and demagoguery are incompatible.  Neither can survive while the other prospers, to paraphrase J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter formula for her fictional demagogue.
• He accuses others of employing his own despicable tactics.  In order to create fog and camouflage, and blunt criticism of his own actions, the demagogue will often claim opponents are lying, fomenting contention, engaging in petty partisanship, and so on, all the while employing those tactics himself.  Note that the accusations will usually employ an appeal to sentiment.
• He points to enemies of the people, enemies that his plans will vanquish.  These enemies are usually chosen to evoke emotion, such as “big business” to foster fear, “the rich” to stir envy, race or ethnic divisions to feed hate.
• He calls for unity while proposing plans that divide the nation, opponents of his plans being cast as those who would seek to divide a nation that would be unified by agreeing with him.  Issues are chosen that find and feed emotional fissures in public opinion.  Most effective, the demagogue will propose to take something of value from a group in a minority and “share” it with the group whose favor he seeks, such as targeted taxes or confiscations to provide some popular benefit.
• Following on that point, he develops classes of supporters dependent upon what he promises to give them from the government, benefits that will need his continued care to be sustained.  That is what lies at the core of the difficulty in fixing problems with welfare, Medicare, and Social Security, and why the demagogues have a field day when anyone offers reasonable proposals to deal with these very real issues.
• He hates a free and independent press that raises objections of fact and evidence to challenge the emotional appeal, but he loves an obliging press that magnifies his message and drowns out dissident appeals to reason.

It is not hard to recognize demagogues among us today appealing for ascendancy.  Democracy in our day demands that we retain our freedom and that we do not yield.  More than our freedom is in the balance, but our freedom is in the balance.

Of Abraham Lincoln and Another Birth of Freedom

On the 203^rd anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln—to our national embarrassment a day no longer celebrated as a national holiday—I once again picked up a copy of the compelling lecture by Walter Berns, commemorating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.  Delivered on February 9, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute, Berns’ lecture concluded with these words:

We say that a man can be known by the company he keeps.  So I say that a nation, a people, can be known and be judged by its heroes, by whom it honors above all others.

We pay ourselves the greatest compliment when we say that Abraham Lincoln is that man for us. 

(Walter Berns, “Lincoln at Two Hundred:  Why We Still Read the Sixteenth President,” AEI Bradley Lecture, February 9, 2009)

Berns offers a compelling statistic as a measure of the nation’s recognition of Lincoln and his greatness:

            More has been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other president or, for that matter, any other American.  The amount is prodigious:  no fewer than16,000 books and goodness knows how many journal articles.

Abraham Lincoln was president for slightly more than four years, assassinated one month after his second inauguration, when the Civil War was not quite over but its end was in clear sight, Robert E. Lee having surrendered the rebels’ largest and most successful army just a few days before.  Soon after his first inauguration the war began. 

What are the grounds for asserting and recognizing Lincoln’s heroism, having fought a war and not quite finished it?  Because he did fight the war and persevered and put in place what was needed for its inexorable conclusion in the victory of the United States.  I do not say victory of the North, but rather victory for the whole nation.  North, South, and all of the later states of the West and all of their people and their descendents were blessed by that victory.  So was the rest of the world, for that victory showed that a free people could triumph in self-government, having rejected the tyrannies of Europe and overcome the challenge of anarchy offered by the rebels of the old South.  The United States has done a lot of good for the world since then, all of which would have been impossible but for that victory.

Lincoln’s immediate predecessor, the Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan, opposed the rebellion of the South but refused to do anything about it.  He dithered and dallied as state after state fell into rebellion and even seized U.S. Army and Navy supplies and facilities while doing so.  Berns quotes how then Senator William H. Seward mimicked Buchanan’s near traitorous dereliction of duty with the impotent formula, “the states had no right to secede, unless they wanted to, and the president had the duty to enforce the law, unless someone opposed him.”

Lincoln came to office with a singular focus from which he refused to be distracted, to meet foursquare the national emergency, that is, to unite the nation and preserve that unity.  And he knew why.  He knew what the United States meant for freedom, for Americans, and for all people everywhere.  In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reminded his countrymen that the war was a test whether our free nation “or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure.”  The answer must not be allowed to be anything other than “Yes.”

As another mark of greatness, Lincoln knew that this was not about Lincoln.  As the war progressed, he fully expected to be defeated in the election of 1864 by the candidate of the Democrats, former Union General George B. McClellan, on a platform of ending the war by negotiating a truce with the South.  Lincoln pressed Generals Grant and Sherman to win the war before Lincoln’s likely successor could surrender. 

Moreover, Lincoln repeatedly pointed the nation away from himself and to who it was who fought the war.  At the new National Cemetery at Gettysburg, he reminded the nation that it was “the brave men, living and dead” whose national sacrifice had consecrated the war effort, far above the poor power of speeches by political leaders to add or detract from it.  Later, as the end of the war could be seen approaching and the end of his own life near if unseen—soon to be added to the many others who paid the price of preserving self-government—Abraham Lincoln again pointed the people to those who fronted the battle.  His second inaugural address could have been a moment of triumph and self congratulation against great odds.  Instead he asked the nation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan”.

Lincoln was great because he rose to the challenge of the times without shirking or excuse and sacrificed all that he had to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which principles were given force through the Constitution.  The force of those constitutional principles was correctly interpreted by the southern slave holders as leading to the inevitable end of slavery, confronting them with the acceptance of the end of their “peculiar institution” or rebellion.  They chose rebellion and anarchy, and Abraham Lincoln rallied a nation to refuse to walk away from that challenge to liberty for all.  

Today again we face a rather divided nation facing freedom-threatening dangers, not the least of which is impending national bankruptcy.  Fortunately, our nation is less divided than the press would have us believe (opinion poll after opinion poll shows large majorities who support the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution).  This time, however, we have a president who not only avoids the national fiscal crisis but feeds it.  To distract attention from that irresponsible policy he seeks every opportunity to encourage division and create new divisions. President Obama seeks to divide the nation by income, by race, by class, by religious belief.  He indicts whole industries and groups of people one by one as in effect enemies of the nation, whether it is the energy industry, pharmaceuticals, banking, health insurance, or Catholic leadership.  The solutions that he promises all boil down to “vote for me” in a media-supported national cult of personality.

Every cult of personality throughout history has ended badly for its people and their fearless leader.  The current one does not look to be changing that historical trend.  And yet, we still have the power to elect our leaders, and the year of national election has begun.  It may not be too late. 

As I ponder the birth, life, and service of Abraham Lincoln, I choose his example, because he rejected the cult of personality but instead gave his life for individual freedom and self-government.  I have hopes that the policies of dependence on government and the surrender of freedom will be rejected so that the American experiment will witness yet another “birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” will continue to be a beacon and example around the world.

Of Civil Wars and Slavery

One hundred fifty years ago today Jefferson Davis was “elected” President of the so-called Confederate States of America.  For half a year up until then Davis had served as provisional president of the rebellion, not subjected to a formal election process.  With the election he had the trimmings of legality, enough to give him legitimacy in the eyes of most voters in the southern states.  Still, all that the phony election could do was make him the acknowledged leader of an unconstitutional rebellion against the best government then in existence on the earth.

There yet may be some shallow commentators who will claim that the rebellion was not about slavery.  You just need to ask them a couple of children’s questions—such as “Why”—to expose slavery as the fundamental reason for the break.  The attempt at secession from the Union, although threatened for years, did not take place until after the election of 1860 when Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated two different Democrat candidates and one independent.  In accordance with the procedures of the Constitution, Lincoln obtained a clear (and decisive) majority of votes in the Electoral College.  Then southern politicians in southern states started trying to peel away.

Why?, the six-year old asks.

Well, because they did not want to live under Lincoln as President, would be the modern firebrand’s reply.

Why?

Because he was in favor of the abolition of slavery and would be unlikely to do what the Democrat presidents had done before him to keep Congress from passing laws that would destroy slavery.

So the war was about slavery, then?, you might be forgiven for asking.

No, would be the reply.  It was all about states' rights.

Which states' rights?, you could ask without being rude.

Like the right to determine their own future, their own culture, their own institutions.

Which institutions in particular?, you should be expected to inquire.

Well, the institution of slavery in particular, the southern apologist would rejoin.

Are there any other southern institutions that Mr. Lincoln or the Congress were threatening? 

No, not really, responds your interlocutor, except maybe free trade.  Congress several times before imposed protective tariffs and restrictions on trade, and one time the southerners did rebel.  At least South Carolina did.

Did South Carolina really rebel and leave the Union over trade protection?

A truthful response might go like this:  Well, no, not really. No other states were much interested, and President Andrew Jackson, a southerner, by the way, threatened to send in the army.  The action became just talk and eventually died down.

So the only institution southern politicians feared for in 1860 was slavery?  So the rebellion is about slavery after all.

Here the defender of the indefensible would be left with nothing but denials and circular talk, leaving slavery as the only justification standing.

It is hard today to imagine Americans at war with each other, slaughtering each other for the better part of four years and over half a million people.  It took a mighty polarizing canker at the heart of the nation to allow it.

It may be easier to imagine American politics getting all pushed into an impossible situation by failure to come to grips with a monumental problem that only grew worse.  It was clear in the mid-1800s that slavery was unsustainable socially, politically, and even economically.  It was poisoning American government and society and polarizing the nation, but neither Congress nor President was willing to take it on directly.  Sure, there were several grand compromises, the heart of which was to avoid the problem rather than solve it.  The problem was pushed off to another day for someone else to solve.

Keeping millions of people in servitude was increasingly untenable and at odds with the governing morality of the nation, the morality that comprised the central spirit of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Neither of those documents ended slavery, but both set in place governing principles intolerable with slavery and that progressively undermined it.  That is why it took one last grand breaking of the Constitution—the southern rebellion—to try to preserve slavery.  Fortunately it was met by an even greater struggle to enforce the Constitution and as a result bring an end to the South’s “peculiar institution.”

We should be able to imagine that kind of an exercise in political catastrophe, because we have a no less intolerable situation threatening our nation today, a situation that only grows worse by the month as too many leading politicians fail to address it.  Those who try are lambasted by a media sympathetic to the whole evil business.  We have our grand compromises that in fact do very little other than put off dealing with the real problem.  The social welfare society of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his political heirs down to President Obama cannot be afforded by any nation, not even the United States, the wealthiest and most prosperous of them all.  A much less prosperous Europe is coming unglued over their social welfare system.  The process of buying votes with government programs and benefits paid for by future generations may make for temporarily clever politics, but it is fundamentally immoral, destructive of society and individual character, and economically unsound and unsustainable. 

President Obama hopes to buy a few more years before the day of reckoning (enough to get him past 2012 elections) by talking of taxing the rich.  Unless he is stupid, he knows that higher taxes—whether on the rich or anyone else—cannot solve the problem.  Today 48% of the population pays little or no net Federal taxes.  What happens to our republic when the line crosses 50% and the majority come to believe that they can live by taxing the rest of the population?  How long will the working minority put up with that modern slavery?

But here is another slavery that the government welfare society is creating.  Even if we stop the whole process now, ending all government deficits where they are—no new debt—my children and grandchildren will still have to be twice as productive as we are today just to maintain current standards of living.  Today there are 4 workers for every retired person in America.  Current projections show that during my time in retirement (should I ever reach it) there will come the day when there are only 2 workers for every retired person.  At that time, more than half the production of my grandchildren will go to support other people and pay the debts piled up in many cases before the children of today and tomorrow were born.

Anyone care to predict how America’s social fabric will be held together then?

Of Borrowing and Saving

The basic rule is, if you are not already saving, then you are not ready to borrow. This may sound paradoxical, but it is the only safe way to approach borrowing.

You may wonder, if I have savings, then why would I borrow? That question may be answered in any number of ways. Asking it suggests some lack of understanding of the proper purpose of borrowing.

The proper purpose of borrowing is to manage your income. You should never borrow to spend beyond your income.

Most people receive income in lumps, like once a month or twice a month. Expenses do not always behave themselves that way. First, there are the every day expenses, such as for food, transportation, and a wide range of miscellaneous minor expenditures that quickly add up. Then there are other expenses that occur monthly and may more or less happen at about the same time as your income. A third category is the big expenditure, that may come once or twice a year, such as tuition, taxes, major purchases, insurance premiums. Since the timing of our income and outgo often do not line up, we use borrowing to help bring the two into line.

For example, the tuition is due in September, but you plan to pay for college by working through the school year. A student loan or other borrowing arrangement with the college can line your income up with the expense.

Another example might involve a big appliance. Your refrigerator breaks down and you need a new one. You may not usually have several hundred dollars of unallocated income available in any one month to pay for the new refrigerator, but you likely will over the course of a year. Borrowing lets you draw that income from the course of the year into your current month and match it against this large purchase needed today.

Here is a bigger example. You need a new car, both for family transportation and perhaps even for travel to work. Very few people have enough ready income to buy the new car with what will be received in any one month. Most people, though, can draw upon funds available from their income over the course of a few years to pay for the car, and borrowing is the tool that they can use to do that.

Of course, this borrowing from the future to pay for something today can be abused. There is a natural temptation common to man to seek gratification today and worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow, even while causing them today. Two things can help counter this potential for abuse. One is interest, and the other is saving.

Interest is what we pay for borrowing. While rewarding the lender, it is a penalty against anyone who borrows in order to spend beyond his income. As you spend beyond your income, the interest mounts. In the end, it will bring down the abuser once the abuse has gone too far and gets out of hand.

Saving is a more benign and effective check on the impulse to borrow in order to spend beyond income. If you are regularly saving, you are doing something even more important than preparing for the future and reaping the rewards from lending to other borrowers. By definition, if you are saving, you are living within your income. You are taking part of your income and putting it aside. That discipline is what is needed to prevent you from using borrowing to exceed your income. You have a proven practice of spending less than you earn.

That is why I say that if you are saving, then you are prepared to borrow, and if you are not saving, then you are either living right on the edge—spending your income as fast as it is received—or you are going beyond, borrowing to spend beyond what you earn, and that leads to trouble. Then you will be spending to consume something that you did not earn and do not deserve. The eventual price for that is loss of freedom, as you must in the future consume much less than you earn in order to satisfy the debts.