The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Secession Day

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 31 Comments

Secession Meeting at the Mills House, Charleston, S.C., 1860

On this day in 1860, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, and this 150th anniversary inspires historian Paul Rahe to publish his endorsement of the “indissoluble union” theory:

The legitimacy of secession has been debated ever since. In my view, secession was unlawful. There is provision in the United States constitution for ratification and for the admission of new states into the Union. There is no provision for secession.
It is true, of course, that – in ratifying the Constitution – Virginia specified “that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” But this unilateral assertion on Virginia’s part is not and could not be an assertion of a legal right under the Constitution – which, even if viewed as a contract, recognizes no such right. Rather, it is a reassertion of the natural rights that underpin the right to revolution asserted in the Declaration of Independence, and it applies to the people of the United States and not to the state of Virginia or even the people of the state of Virginia as such.

Of course, this theory effectively abolishes the states, rendering them nothing but administrative jurisdictions of the unitary and all-powerful national government — the negation of federalism.

From the standpoint of political science, it makes no difference whether in your opinion Southern secession was wise or just in 1860, or whether you are in favor of secession as a general idea, and it certainly makes no difference what your opinion is as to the controversies over slavery that provoked the crisis of 1860-61.

The fundamental question is, “Who ratified the Constitution, and what sort of union was created by that ratification?” And the answers to those questions are not, nor can they be, a matter of mere opinion. There are historical facts to be considered, and which Rahe glosses over.

The American colonies which declared their independence from Great Britain in July 1776 made it as clear as possible what their intent was:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

The colonial uprising we now know as the American Revolution had been under way for more than a year. The battles of Lexington and Concord were fought in April 1775 and the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. The provisional government represented by the Second Continental Congress — which also convened in 1775 — voted for independence on July 2, 1776.

All of these things, then, had been done prior to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. So when Rahe refers to “the right to revolution asserted in the Declaration of Independence” — well, this was a right that patriot militiamen and Continental troops had been actively exercising at the peril of their lives for some 15 months before it was ever “asserted.” And had they lost the war, they’d have been hanged as traitors to the Crown.

So much, then, for “the right to revolution” — a right entirely dependent on the fortunes of war.

The union of “Independent States” described in the Declaration was therefore a military alliance for mutual self-defense, as the representatives of the rebellious colonies “in Congress, Assembled” pledged their common purpose. There could be no separate peace — the King and Parliament could not hope to enter into negotiations with Rhode Island or North Carolina, seeking a treaty that would break the alliance.

By the time it voted for independence and issued the Declaration, Congress had already appointed a committee to write a plan of common government. The Articles of Confederation were submitted to the states in 1777, but not finally ratified by all the states before 1781. The American victory at Yorktown in 1781 to all effects ended the Revolution, the peace secured in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris, which names the states whose independence was thereby recognized:

His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states . . .

So, by their united effort in war, these states had won their independence. Their common government under the Articles of Confederation was so severely flawed that, only six years after Yorktown, the need for changes led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. While the delegates to that convention had originally been authorized only to amend the Articles, it became obvious that the best thing to do was to start from scratch. Having overstepped their original authority, the Convention recognized that the new framework of government they had wrought would require ratification, and it was two years before a necessary nine of the 13 states had ratified it.

This ratification was conducted in each state by a special convention, and the debate was quite intense. Patrick Henry, among others, was in the anti-Federalist faction, warning that the Constitution granted too much power to the national government. It was to allay these concerns that the Bill of Rights was adopted immediately after ratification. Among those amendments, the 10th gave especial protection to the states, limiting the government to those powers delegated by the Constitution, and reserving the balance to the several states.

Now, we must pay careful attention to a key point about the Constitution, namely Article 7:

The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

Which is to say that as many as four of the original states might have, by refusing to ratify the Constitution, exempted themselves from that government. And when nine states had ratified the Constitution, two of the largest states, New York and Virginia, still had not ratified it. It was not until 1790 that Rhode Island finally ratified — by which time the Bill of Rights, including the 1oth Amendment, had already been submitted to the states for ratification.

The idea that tiny Rhode Island might have gone its separate way might seem absurd — well, it would have spared us the obnoxious Sheldon Whitehouse — but its long delay in ratifying the Constitution shows that at the time of the Founding, there was a serious concern that this new government might be too powerful, a threat to those “Free and Independent States.”

Did these states, by ratifying the Constitution, thereby permanently forfeit their independence?  Is there nothing the federal government could do — no act of the president or Congress, no decision of the Supreme Court — that would justify any state in saying, “OK, you’ve gone too far now”?

It would seem that Paul Rauh answers that question in the negative, that he denies that the states have retained any shred of their original independence, that no state has any just recourse if its citizens should feel that the federal government has overstepped its rightful bounds.

The states are therefore no longer states in any meaningful sense, and we no longer in fact have a federal system of government, but rather one vast unified empire of 300 million subjects, with whatever vestiges of the “states” remain being subject to obliteration so soon as it suits a majority in Congress (or the Supreme Court) to do so.

Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver once famously observed, and so it is with the idea of the indissoluble union. (Evidently, it’s like La Cosa Nostra — once you join, there’s no quitting.) What we now have is a national government without any effective limit to its power, except so far as regular elections may have any limiting effect. But if this also fails and the advocates of an all-powerful national government should obtain a permanent majority, what remedy can there be under Rahe’s theory?

As it is now, California and Illinois — both states deeply in thrall to the advocates of unlimited government — teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. Should the citizens of Texas or any other more thrifty state be compelled to pay for the federal bailout of a bankrupt state?

Even if one were to stipulate that South Carolina’s secession in 1860 was ill-advised and unjustified, it still does not follow that the states, in joining the Union, thereby foreswore forever any prior claim to sovereignty.

Paul Rahe should be glad he’s a professor of history in Michigan, and not in Texas. Those Texans can be mighty touchy about their independence, you know.

UPDATE: My good friend Stogie calls Professor Rahe “a misinformed Northern apologist,” which seems a tad too hostile. While we cannot rule out the possibility that Professor Rahe’s views are inspired by the all-too-common error of boreal supremacy — the belief that all things Northern are superior to all things Southern — I would not accuse anyone of such a hateful prejudice without solid evidence.

Stogie also reproduces a famous handbill:

C’mon, can I get a “Yeee-haaaww,” y’all?

Category: History

Truth or Hate?

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 4 Comments

“Telling uncomfortable truths about homosexual behavior is not an act of hate. . . . The SPLC slander of Christian organizations is a troubling shift; instead of being focused on actions, we now are told that certain facts are disallowed in public discourse because they bear negatively on the political agenda and sensitivities of a group of people.”
— “Coral Ridge Ministries Responds to Anti-‘Hate’ Group”

Category: Gays, Religion

Doing a ‘Macaca’ on Haley Barbour

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 26 Comments

If you’re not from the Deep South and don’t personally know people who lived through the civil rights era — or if you’re a liberal just trying to smear a conservative Republican from Mississippi — it seems perfectly fair to play the kind of dirty game that Matthew Yglesias is playing with Haley Barbour.

Yglesias seizes on a passage in a Weekly Standard profile of Barbour in which the governor of Mississippi explains why school desegration in his hometown of Yazoo City was accomplished without violence:

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. . . .”

Barbour states this as a fact, which sets Yglesias and other liberals to shouting “white supremacist!” And yet nothing that Yglesias or anyone else musters as evidence sheds any light on the facts in dispute: Was the White Citizens Council in Yazoo City composed principally of “town leaders” and members of “the business community”? And did these leaders play a role in ensuring that school desegregation took place without violence?

Whether or not Barbour’s characterization of circumstances in Yazoo City half a century ago is accurate, it ought to be possible to address that question without imputing to Barbour — as Yglesias evidently desires to do — any nostalgia for Jim Crow. Keep in mind that Haley Barbour was born in October 1947, so that he was only 16 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law and thus has lived his entire adult life in a post-civil rights America without incurring the sort of reputation with which Yglesias & Co. are now attempting to tar him.

Ben Smith of Politico scarcely does any better:

The roots of Southern Republicanism are in the segregationist split from the Democratic Party . . .

This is not true, and I don’t care how many times liberals invoke “The Southern Strategy,” that still doesn’t make it true. The Democratic Party remained a viable and even dominant political force in the South for three decades after the end of segregation.

Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 and Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. The Democratic Party maintained control of the Georgia state legislature until 2003 and it was not until this year — let me check my calendar, yeah, it’s 2010 — that Republicans gained a majority in the Alabama state legislature.

As much as it may flatter the vanity of liberals to think that the Democratic “Solid South” ended in 1964 — and that the success of the GOP in the Sunbelt is therefore somehow attributable to redneck bigotry — it simply is not true.

And I’m sick and tired of pious lectures from arrogant fools whose moral horizons can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat.”

UPDATE: Tom Maguire notes the absurdity of Matthew Yglesias teaching Mississippi history to Haley Barbour, a fifth-generation Mississippian.

But Yglesias went to Harvard. That means he know everything.

UPDATE II: Drew M. at Ace of Spades HQ:

A lot of folks whose only notions of the south come from watching or reading To Kill a Mockingbird or popular history simply equate “southern” with “racism”.

Thanks for acknowledging that reality, Drew. I’ve often said that some people seem to believe that racism is like Coca-Cola, a product invented in the South and exported from there around the world.

Drew also notes Jimmy Carter’s early political career as a segregationist. Although, in fairness to Carter, it would have been impossible for him — or anyone else — to get elected to public office in Sumter County, Ga., as an advocate of integration in 1956.

I have on my shelves a 1960 book by William D. Workman Jr. entitled The Case for the South. Workman makes clear that it was foolish to speak of “moderates” in the Deep South of that era if, by “moderate,” you meant white people who were in favor of integration. The overwhelming majority of white Southerners were in favor of maintaining the status quo of Jim Crow, which was all they’d ever known.

When it became obvious that the federal government intended to impose desegregation at all hazards, one might say that those leaders who counseled peaceful cooperation for the good of the community were “moderates,” but this doesn’t mean they were actually in favor of desegregation. Neither does it mean that officials like Jimmy Carter — who campaigned and governed as a segregationists so long as that was the means to political success — were any more “racist” than anyone else.

It is worthwhile to observe that the man whom Carter succeeded as governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox, campaigned as an outspoken segregationist but, once in office, governed in a far more equitable manner than anyone expected. Indeed, you might even say that Maddox was a progressive reformer, who especially improved the previously deplorable conditions in Georgia’s prison system.

The problem in all this involves the moralitic tendency to make mere politics a proxy for virtue, with a one-dimensional focus on race, during one of the most controversial eras in American history.

UPDATE III: Dave Weigel:

Like I said, Barbour is not dumb. If he’s being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he’s not alone, and he’s fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate — this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all? He wasn’t in a Citizens Council. . . . [H]ow many of these reporters know what they’re talking about, anyway?

That last question is the most important. The idea that everything knowable about race relations in Yazoo City (or anywhere else) in 1960 can be learned from the distance of a thousand miles and a half-century is extraordinarily foolish. To borrow Orwell’s axiom, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Category: Mississippi, Racism

Maybe He Should Have Become a Columbia University Professor

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

Regular readers will remember Ray Greaves, author of The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure. And now, from Dave C. at Point of a Gun comes this news:

PUEBLO, Colo. — A Colorado man who wrote a how-to guide for pedophiles is headed to Florida to face obscenity charges.
Phillip R. Greaves of Pueblo, Colo. waived his right to fight extradition Monday after he was arrested at his home on a warrant that charges him with violating Florida’s obscenity law.
Sheriff Grady Judd in Polk County, Fla., said his office was able to arrest Greaves because he sold and mailed his book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover’s Code of Conduct,” directly to undercover Polk deputies. . . .
“He very proudly sold us his personal copy,” Judd told the Associated Press. “I was outraged by the content. It was clearly a manifesto on how to sexually batter children … You just can’t believe how absolutely disgusting it was.”

Read the rest. Maybe Ray Greaves can get Professor Epstein’s lawyer to represent him.

Category: Crime

The Antoine Dodson Chorale

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 2 Comments

They be snatchin’ people up out here!

Via Ann Althouse.

Category: Video

Apology for NSFW Rule 5 Sunday

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 18 Comments

As regular readers know, our trusty blog sidekick Smitty has been deployed as a REMF Stealth Ninja in an undisclosed location ending in “-stan.” At last report, the Admiral is currently (a) fighting the terrorist menace of bad Java scripts while (b) bitching about the lack of bandwidth.

In the meantime, Smitty’s usual weekend duties have been taken over by Wombat, who apparently neglected to read the fine print in the guidelines for “Rule 5 Sunday” entries. While I’ve managed to lose my copy of the guidelines in the incredible mess on top of my desk, my memory is clear that entries must adhere to a PG13 standard.

Which is to say: No nipples. No nookie. Nothing NSFW. Read more

Category: Rule 5

Southern Poverty Law Center Defames Scholar, Retracts, Offends Armenians

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 8 Comments

The shameless “hate”-hustling racketeers have really stuck their foot in it this time, and since the article at Inside Higher Education is kind of convoluted, this summary might be helpful:

  • In 2008, the SPLC published an article by David Holthouse about those who have attempted to cast doubt on the historical fact of Turkey’s 1915-16 genocide of Armenians. More than 1 million Armenians are believed to have died as a result of this brutal repression under the Ottoman Empire during World War I. This issue has become a political and diplomatic hot potato in recent years.
  • One of the genocide-deniers featured in Holthouse’s article was University of Massachusetts professor Guenter Lewy, whose work the SPLC alleged was “financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey.” This statement was false and clearly defamatory.
  • Lewy sued the SPLC, a tax-exempt non-profit with an endowment of more than $150 million.
  • The SPLC settled out of court, issuing a retraction and apology. In its retraction, however, the SPLC made statements that lent credibility to Lewy’s research claims — and thereby abetted the genocide-deniers, critics say.

This issue is timely because a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide is one of the measures Democrats are trying to ram through the lame-duck session. Opponents of the resolution point out that (a) it would offend Turkey, an important ally in the war on terror, and (b) it is merely a symbolic gesture, which would do nothing at all to help Armenians.

The hidden political explanation: Armenian-Americans have historically been a Republican constituency, especially in California. By pushing this meaningless symbolic resolution, Democrats are attempting to undermine the Armenian community’s GOP allegiance, while depicting Republicans as indifferent to genocide.

(Via Instapundit.)

Category: Turkey

Three Scariest Words You’ll Read Today

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 18 Comments

“Run, Jeb, Run.”

Three-word reply: God, please, no.

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Category: Election 2012, No More Bushes
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