Josh Marshal to the universe: If you disagree with me you’re a racist!

Neo-confederate libertarians

Not for the first time, Josh tells us how he really feels on the legal and constitutional questions raised by the Civil War.

The idea that there is a ideological divide or set of philosophical questions or priorities that makes some libertarians embrace the Confederacy and secession and despise Abraham Lincoln while others do not is, to put it generously, nonsense.

Neo-Conderates [sic], pro-secessionists, whatever else you want to call them are varying hues of white supremacists or to put it even more simply, racists.

That’s not an accusation. 

It’s simply identifying them as a distinct political strain in American politics.

Do they embrace the Confederacy and despise Lincoln?

Perhaps they do.

Or perhaps not.

Are they, in fact, white supremacists or racists?

And is that supposed to discredit their claims about the constitution, the law, and Civil War?

Hitler built the autobahn and was the patron of the Volkswagen, so Eisenhower was a Nazi and so is your kid who just bought a new Bug, I guess.

There’s a libertarian war over the Civil War?

The libertarians - not without exception, of course - tend to view the constitution as though the incorporation doctrine had been true since 1776 and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics really had been written into the constitution.

And not in the 14th Amendment but from the beginning.

The neo-Confederates, as a rule, completely reject incorporation, even now, and think states originally had and still have legitimate powers no libertarian could love - powers perhaps eschewed by their own constitutions, but not denied by the federal one.

And nobody doubts that Lincoln violated the constitution massively during the course of the Civil War.

So what?

The libertarian war over the Civil War

What does it say about contemporary politics in general and liberal politics in particular that people think departures from Civil War Unionist dogma about the War Between the States call for “policing”?

Rachel Weiner, who seems to regret the libertarians aren't very good at "policing," nevertheless is far more sensitive to nuance that JM seems.

She appears ready, for example, to recognize that one might hold a critical view of Lincoln and his war without endorsing or in any way legitimating the cause of the South.

She writes,

There are contrarians who criticize Lincoln’s use of federal power and argue that the South had a right to secede — but have no love for slavery or the Confederacy.

Libertarians are anti-war and in favor of market-based solutions, and some argue that even though slavery was abominable, it would have ended for economic reasons with far less bloodshed if the North had allowed the South to secede.

“Though I think Lincoln was the worst tyrant in U.S. history and his war was illegal, immoral, unconstitutional,  I do not think the [Confederacy] was some quasi-libertarian bastion of freedom or justified,” said Stephan Kinsella.

“The real enemy is, as always, the State — whether it be the USA or the [Confederate States of America].” 

On the other hand, JM is not really contradicting her, is he?

She says these guys are not pro-slavery or pro-Confederacy.

He says they are racist and white supremacist.

They could, of course, both be right, on those points.

Lincoln,  himself,  was a racist and a white supremacist. 

And yet, as I said, one can like Volkswagens and the Interstate system without being a Nazi.

Update.

"Neo-Confederate," by the way, covers people who are not libertarians, at all, as well as some who are, if it refers to anyone who thinks secession was not unconstitutional, opposes Lincoln's choice for war, and believes Lincoln violated the constitution quite vigorously in his conduct of the Civil War.

Paleocons, generally.

Think of Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo.

And even that's not all of them.

If that's a neo-Confederate then I am one, too.

And I am no kind of libertarian or conservative.

By that I mean I expect I would have opposed the war, at the time, had I been one of the Northern whites whose taxes would pay for it and who might even be coerced into fighting it.

Of course, had I been a black slave at the time, I would have seen things in a different light.

However much one disapproves being coerced into altruistic sacrifice for others, one is always grateful for altruistic sacrifice toward oneself.