The Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

Make no mistake.

In this document,  the 13 colonies declared themselves each individuality separate from and independent of their common Mother Country,  their metropole, Great Britain.

Each a sovereign and independent state with all the rights and powers customary for such.

Though they here affirm an ancient and traditional consent theory of legitimacy, in a somewhat pointedly republican and Lockean variant with justification for popular revolution against a despotic regime, they promptly pivot to the business at hand and a detailed list of abuses of the colonies and their rights by the government of the British King, justifying separation.

This war of secession did not and was not meant to create a new nation, but 13 independent and sovereign states with a habit of cooperation for their common good and a desire to continue the same.

The war effected a revolution of republicanism effortlessly and by the way, since the colonial governments and societies were already, in their local structures and outlook if not in those, now gone, that had tied them to Britain,  republican.

But it was not a national revolution and it did not create "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

It created 13 states in which slavery was legal, gathered in a loose, ad hoc association of questionable longevity, in each of which nearly everyone took such ideas not with a grain but a lump of salt.

“All men are created equal”

Obama a marker on post-racial path

The Declaration of Independence

“All men are created equal”?

What does that mean, exactly, even ignoring the embarrassing notion, best neglected, that this is a self-evident truth?

Neither taken individually nor in groups are all men – all humans – equal with regard to everything, or even merely everything that matters.

Neither in their acquired skills nor in their natural endowments, and again neither as individuals nor as distinct racial or other, smaller, population groups.

Men are larger and stronger than women, and only a fool would deny this is nature as well as nurture.

And men are more violent than women, too; and this is likewise rightly attributed to both nature and nurture.

Jews are smarter than gentiles, and for a very long time this has been attributed, at least in part, to the intelligence-killing genetic impact of millennia of monasticism in Christian lands, during which intelligence was simply bred out of the Christians.

As for the apparent natural intellectual inferiority of American blacks to those of Africa as well as to the euro-whites of America, it has been said that only the less bright Africans were taken as slaves, survived the passage, or survived and were allowed to reproduce under slavery.

Analogous explanations have been offered for a sometimes suspected inferiority in intelligence of American euro-whites to the whites of Europe.

I am not aware of any like explanation for the like inferiority of American Indians to American whites or East Asians.

In any case, only fools, fakers, and those who wish to be deceived claim none of this is real, or none of this is nature and all of it is nurture.

Too, no one thinks all individuals are in fact or by natural endowment equal with respect to special or especially noteworthy talents or abilities.

Mozart began composing at five and wrote an opera at twelve, if I recall correctly; I can barely whistle a tune.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was making ground-breaking discoveries in math in his teens.

Saul Kripke taught himself Ancient Hebrew by age six and had read all of Shakespeare by age nine.

So what, after all, is the significance of the Declaration’s ringing claim that all men are created equal?

Despite being propaganda intended for the wide public of the time, it was not a demagogic rejection of the obvious diversity of human endowments and achievements.

It was not even a rejection of the idea of natural inequalities of races or nations.

It was and is a rejection simply and solely of hereditary differences of power, status, authority, rights, or privileges.

It was and is a rejection of caste.

It was a rejection of monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, and slavery.

It was a demand for republicanism and popular government.

That, at any rate, was the intention of the 18th Century, of the Age of Enlightenment, honestly construed.

It was not quite a demand for government of the people, by the people, and for the people – an idea that, despite bluster and boilerplate and probably not excepting Lincoln, no one really takes both literally and seriously.

The Gettysburg Address

Government by the people?

Actual democracy?

Many are the reasons both obvious and weighty against it, not the least compelling being that the exercise of political power is a full time job.

And another, too, is decisive, all by itself: the people are often malevolent and at all times and in all nations vain, willfully ignorant, impulsive, egoistic, gullible, and stupid.

Whereas, though it’s a matter of degree, their betters are generally only vain, egoistic, and often malevolent.

A sensible person would want to make a government more democratic only in order to give the many a chance to protect themselves from the predations and indifference of the few, managing for themselves a better share, so far as they are capable, of the benefits of civilization and social life.

And always in despite of the awful vulgarity of mass politics and mass culture.

Hence, by the way, a crucial function of the system of representation is and has always been to ensure those with their hands on power were not as bad as the people as a whole, and so would not rule as badly.

To keep the rabble out, in other words.

Not a perfect mechanism, no.

But something.

Say again?

Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people

Sam Tanenhaus says the Republicans are the party of white people and his magazine, the New Republic, calls that “original sin.”

Me?

I wonder if Sam – or the people who write his headlines, anyway – is telling us that white people who know what’s good for them should be voting Republican.

I wonder if the New Republic is saying it’s a sin for white people, though not others, to be concerned about what’s good for them.

Having voted for Obama twice and being pretty sure no un-rich American of any race with an ounce of sense and a glimmer what’s good for him will ever vote Republican for any office during the rest of my lifetime, I find all this confusing.

Being white myself, I mean.

Am I perhaps the one making a terrible mistake?

Sam, like liberals generally, by far prefers to cast the central contemporary opposition between the Republicans and the Democrats as a clash of races, or rather as a clash of one race against all the others and a clash between whites who deny and others who comprise and celebrate American diversity.

Like liberals generally, he has abandoned the other vision of that opposition that cast the Democrats as the party of the people, of the common man, of the vast American majority and the Republicans as the party of the rich.

He prefers to narrate American history as a racial conflict and even thus to exacerbate it for political gain, though that narrative slanders and maligns and even alienates the tens of millions of whites who voted for Obama and without whom the Democrats still cannot win, and will not be able to win for many decades to come, if ever.

And it slanders as well the millions of whites who vote Republican because they are rich and want to keep what they have laid hands on by hook or by crook, because they accept the moral and political vision of the libertarian bumper-sticker that says “socialism is fine until you run out of other people’s money,” or because they are devout Christians who reject the contemptuous and grossly immoral secularism they see as dominant among Democrats.

And he does all that just as a majority of the professional white left has done since the race riots of the sixties and 70’s when they virtually guaranteed the success of the “southern strategy” by repeatedly siding, at least rhetorically, with the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and the Panthers against the whites who feared them and the police who fought them.

Not to mention the black rioters who, in those days and in city after city, slaughtered whites whenever they could as the professional left told America whites had it coming and the rioters were exacting moral and racial justice.

Oh.

Many conservatives over the last 60 or 70 years have lionized Edmund Burke, a champion of monarchy and aristocracy against the brilliant revolutionary republicanism of the French on the continent.

Considerably fewer over all that time have ever had a clue who Calhoun was, and he nearly disappeared from conservative propaganda altogether between the civil rights era and the recent emergence of neo-confederate thought that has lionized pre-Civil War nullificationists and secessionists of the South like Jefferson and Madison and of the North like Webster, Stevens, and most of the abolitionists.

All the same, a history lesson is a good thing, once in a while.

Even if the liberal bias of the thing is so pronounced.

And what thinks he of rights, then? George Will, atheist.

God, the Founders, and George Will

So Conrad Black says Will is “a professed atheist”?

I have read of his irreligion before, but I wonder where and when he has professed it.

Anyway, he is one of those atheists who think it good that the plebs believe.

What then does he personally think of alleged natural rights?

It looks like he believes in the rights in the Declaration of Independence, but not the God.

Or is it just that he thinks it good that others believe in those rights, as he thinks about God?

According to author Conrad Black,

Will agrees with Irving Kristol that “it is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendental meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense.

"Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.”

Really?

Is that how he personally experiences his life?

That it is "a meaningless event in a meaningless world"?

If not, why not, since he seems pretty clearly to suppose that only religion, though false, supplies the meaning, and only for those who mistake it for true?

And is that government’s problem, anyway?

Still, he might be right (how very Marxist of him) to think, as he seems to, that with the decline in religious faith come greater demands on this, our one and only life.

So we should lie to people just to stop them making such demands?

Why?

Per Black, Will claims some key founders like Jefferson and Madison thought it good the common folk were actual Christian believers since that helped shore up their belief in the rights of the Declaration.

And Will sees (as does Black) a conflict between honoring those rights - I think he and Black are both assuming Locke's right to property is implicitly on that list - and trying to better the common fate in this life.

So much the worse for the rights, then, I say.

Why doesn't Will?

Black’s piece is interesting in more ways than one.

He is not at all happy with Will's atheism or his valuing Christianity only as a matter of expediency, whether personal or political.

Are conservatives really so obtuse as to take it for granted that of course we should not only believe what the founders believed (or wanted the hoi polloi to believe) two and a half centuries ago but want what they wanted (or what they wanted the hoi polloi to want)?

All of us?

Or are they just smart enough to pretend to be that obtuse?

Nothing short of disarmament can stop slaughters like this, he seems to think, but does not quite say

On Newtown and Gun Control

And Charles Cooke at NRO is quite right not only about that but that the federal government can’t disarm the country to any serious or helpful extent in the teeth of the 2nd Amendment.

And so?

Cooke writes,

American liberties, including the Second Amendment and the 40-plus state-level guarantees of the right to bear arms, pre-exist the federal government, and are defined and protected in the same document from which the state derives its authority and its structure.

The 2nd Amendment pre-exists the federal government?

The state derives its authority from a document?

Not from the consent of the people?

What is this document to which all humanity owes such servile obeisance?

Perhaps his regular readers know what he has in mind.

I don't.

In a free republic, the people cannot be disarmed by the government, for they are its employers, and they did not give up their individual rights when they consented to its creation.

In a free republic the people rule themselves and are not prevented from doing so by any institutional embodiment of someone else’s will.

And in a free republic – free in that regard, anyway – the will of the people would not be obstructed by anything like the 2nd Amendment.

There is no clause in our charters of liberty that allows for the people to be deprived of their freedom if and when a few individuals abuse theirs.

Yes, yes.

And no one thinks there should be.

Moreover, contrary to the rhetoric of many, America is not in the middle of a crime epidemic.

As laws have been liberalized over the last forty years, crime has dropped significantly.

The partial incorporation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court, along with the decline in public support for gun control and the passage of state-level concealed carry laws has done nothing to check this trend.

This could be right.

But as Cooke made perfectly clear at the top of his article, he understands perfectly well that the frequency of ordinary crime is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

And he also understands perfectly well that mass slaughters, already on something of an upswing, have increased dramatically since the Supremes began to combine 2nd Amendment honesty with the fundamental fakery of incorporation.

It is sad that all political factions in America, more and more, and including the faction of one that I am, have so much at stake in the secure and continued reign of utter fraud in our constitutional law.

After Newtown, and Before It

NRO's editors write, espousing an interesting twist on Locke,

The irreducible challenge the Second Amendment poses to gun restrictionists is that it does not bestow upon the people a right they previously lacked.

It proscribes the government from infringing upon a right the people already have. 

It is not that the people are allowed to arm.

It is that the government is disallowed to disarm them.

This is perhaps their opening shot in what they fear may be an emerging movement for outright repeal of the 2nd Amendment, for which no public safety argument is better than the rising tide of mass murders by people both very well armed and mentally disturbed.

Locke and his usual followers, even among the American colonials, seem to have had no idea the right to keep and bear arms is an absolute natural right on the same short – and, of course, entirely imaginary – list as life, liberty, and either property (for Locke) or the pursuit of happiness (for Jefferson).

In the constitution, the actual text of the 2nd Amendment clearly does not take that view, the right being said to exist and require safeguarding because, as a practical matter and as the framers and ratifiers believed and said, a well-regulated militia is necessary (and sufficient) to the security of a free state.

Of course, the framers and ratifiers were wrong on that point, even in their own lifetimes, as the Whiskey Rebellion and the War of 1812 both made abundantly clear though the Revolutionary War somehow did not.

The former made it abundantly clear that the armed yeomanry could not possibly stand up successfully against trained regulars in defense of liberty; they could not even do it in defense of whiskey.

And the latter demonstrated the uselessness of militia against foreign regulars in wartime.

The Brits, you will recall, pretty much cleaned our clocks in a war that took place and caused significant devastation almost entirely on our territory and not at all on theirs.

Other reasons given for the necessity of such a right in the 18th Century included frontier defense against Indians, self-defense in a society without effective police, and the daily need to feed one’s family.

None of these considerations apply in our time, of course; nor would they, if reasonable, be important enough to justify a constitutional right.

And nor would they, in the absence of such a right, justify allowing the ocean of guns in private hands in America to continue to enable such horrific disasters as that at Newtown.

So we are left with a constitutionally protected right thought necessary by its original supporters only for reasons that do not apply and the effect of which – thanks in large part to a gratuitous extension of the gratuitous incorporation doctrine – is wholly harmful.

And a right that NRO’s editors, no doubt not alone, have decided to upgrade to the short list of absolute, natural rights – all of them God-granted, in their official view – the better to defend the amendment that protects it from repeal and the right itself from common sense.

Wonderful.

Telling it like it was

Obama Worshiper Happy About "Killing All White People" in New Movie

No known young black male in America displays anything remotely like the racial sensitivity demanded of whites as a matter of course, or makes any attempt to avoid open displays of fearless racial contempt.

Liberals will bypass all that and blame shift, headlining their reports, “Young, conservative, white chick plays race card.”

All the same, Foxx is telling it like it was.

So far as I know, every slave revolt in the New World involved unspeakable cruelty and totally indiscriminate slaughter of whites by the rebelling slaves.

The most famous case was the Haitian revolt.

But in the US, Nat Turner’s rebellion went much the same way.

Conservative historians say Jefferson blanched, wanted Napoleon to crush the rebellion, and stopped urging emancipation, after that.

The abolitionist movement in the South dried up.

The South came to fear terrible black on white violence in case of emancipation.

Violence that never materialized, as things actually turned out.

Until the mid-20th Century, a hundred years after emancipation, race riots in America were pretty much exclusively a matter of whites on the rampage against blacks.

Since then, of course, it’s gone the other way.

Mr. Lincoln's war, revisited

Suppose Lincoln had forced the country through all that horror and loss and, in the end, let slavery stand.

Could any national leader have been more infamous in US or even world history for doing anything of more costly and unspeakably stupid futility?

The Articles of Confederation established a perpetual union of the subscribing states under itself, that union’s equally perpetual constitution.

The generation that wrote them blew off both the union and the Articles in flat defiance of several of them and wrote a new constitution far more national in nature – members voted as individuals in that new bicameral legislature instead of each state’s members voting together as a block, for example – that they were willing to see disrupt the union fatally and forever in case it was not ratified by them all, with states previously in now staying out.

The leaders of the southern Confederacy were no more cavalier about the constitution or the union than they had been, and anyway the claim to perpetuity had been discreetly, understandably, but not inconsequentially omitted from the Philadelphia document by its lawless creators.

Union forever?

Phooey.

It is clear as day, I think, that Lincoln’s bloody war to save the union would have been an outrage against humanity and the least common sense had he won and let slavery stand.

And if slavery had within a few decades been actually abandoned voluntarily in all the states that would only have made it worse.

But he did not let slavery stand and what the South feared at the time was very possibly true, though the neo-Confederates today deny it, that Lincoln from the moment the first shot was fired aimed both to keep the South in the union and to end slavery everywhere within it, though he could not at that time say so.

That is, and contrary to what had been the expressed views of many abolitionists before him, he meant to prevent the southern states breaking off and forming a powerful slave confederacy right on our borders, taking away a large part of our national strength and perhaps expanding into the Caribbean, inevitably becoming an enemy and perhaps a menace to the northern, free-state, rump union they would leave behind, as some who favored secession intended.

Many today speculate that had he let the southern states secede slavery would have died out among them anyway within a few decades, as at any rate seems more plausible than the nightmare of entrenched, vigorous, and spreading slavery I have hypothesized Lincoln fought to avoid.

Certainly it is difficult - though I think not impossible - to believe it could in that case have survived as a legal institution anywhere in the Occident up to our own day, though it survives even now illegally in many areas of the world and even legally in some parts controlled by Muslim religious law.

But even granting – and I think it is not certain – that slavery would anyway have disappeared before now it remains true that the Civil War did at any rate much shorten the life span of slavery in the southern states, themselves, and almost certainly elsewhere.

So, why could Lincoln not say so from the beginning if, as I have suggested, he meant to save the union and kill slavery within it from the start?

Because he thought he just might have a plausible constitutional case that secession was nothing but rebellion and he as president had a duty to put it down.

That was the view of the Republicans at the time whose outlook on the matters of federal power and states’ rights made them old-time Federalists on steroids.

But he had no case whatever and did not believe that the federal government under the then constitution had the least authority to disturb slavery in the South under any pretext whatever, and specifically not even under pretext of rebellion.

Though during the war he claimed and exercised the power of emancipation he applied it only to some of America's slaves and was by no means sure of its permanent effect.

Hence the need, eventually, to force through the 13^th Amendment banning slavery to give the Civil War an indisputable meaning it would otherwise most certainly not have had.

Should Lincoln have done it?

Should he have fought this war?

The Democrats who opposed him were certainly right, I think, that he ought not to have fought merely to save the union, just as we mostly feel today, I think, that Canada ought not to fight to keep Quebec in, nor Italy to keep in an unwilling South Tyrol, nor anyone at all to keep the Flemings and Walloons from splitting Belgium as the Czechs and the Slovaks split Czechoslovakia.

And is not the UN, even today, defending the right of secession in the former territories of Yugoslavia?

Those who protest that admitting a right of secession is an absurdity in normative political theory are quite right, but they are missing that normative political theory is absurd in the first place and has little bearing on actual history.

See the earlier posts labeled “amoralism.”

In the real world not only secession but even the more radical step of partition are sometimes acceptable and even the only defensible course.

But assume that, though he said he was, Lincoln was not fighting, even at the beginning, merely to save a union half slave and half free.

Assume he aimed from the beginning both to save the union and to kill slavery within it, if he could.

Should he have fought this war?

Were those in the North and West who opposed him at the time actually right?

Especially the thousands of draftee immigrants forced to fight either meaninglessly to save a pointless union or wholly altruistically, tens of thousands of them dying to free slaves little worse off than the free men of their own working class in the cities of the North?

Everything I have ever read denouncing the draft as the most horrific and hateful servitude when the draftees are taken to fight for anything at all but the defense of their own lives and liberty, their country, homes, and loved ones - if perhaps not in that case - comes here to mind, inescapably, and I cannot but sympathize with them rather than him.

And a good deal of all that was written by American republicans sure the end of monarchy and placing the war power in the hands of a popularly elected congress had put an end to the normal feature of history, the powers that be dragging hundreds of thousands, again and again, to kill and die in causes not their own.

Or by anti-federalists opposed to ratification of the Philadelphia constitution, sure that a strong, national union would perpetuate in American that same ancien regime in which the common people fight endless wars for the empire and glory of rulers to whom they are but canon-fodder and cattle.

Afterthought.

The neo-Confederates and, to be fair, other historians have pointed out quite truthfully that Lincoln was among the absolute worst of presidents for usurpation of power and trampling of liberty, democracy, and the Constitution to make his war.

Wilson’s suppression of dissent and infamous treatment of Debs was not worse, by any means.

And the Federalists who so infuriated Jefferson’s and Madison’s Democrats were cub scouts, compared to him.

Perhaps only FDR's internment of the Japanese in America was a comparable or even greater violation of constitutional rectitude.

And yet another afterthought.

The bulk of the evidence shows that Lincoln was a frank racist convinced of the inferiority of blacks to whites, intellectual and otherwise, though he rejected unto shedding rivers of blood that this justified slavery.

Where modern liberals claim to see contradictions others might see only nuance.

Get rid of the 2nd Amendment

It was intended in the 18^th Century to defend republican institutions against resurgent monarchy and aristocracy and to prevent the great and rich from trampling the rights of the people.

In our time it has become a public safety disaster, a weapon of the unscrupulous plutocracy, and a threat to republicanism and democracy.

I posted the below in answer to this post of BooMan’s with which I mostly agree. 

Indeed, much of what I write repeats what he writes.

But not all, and we don't agree on quite everything.

Talking the Second Amendment

Considerable research has been done on the intentions behind the Bill of Rights as a whole and the 2nd Amendment in particular, mirrored in the constitutions of several other states at the time and since.

The generally accepted conclusion has been that protection of an individual right was intended and that the reasons it was thought necessary to protect that right were three: the need for self-defense in a frontier society, the need to hunt for food, and a popular – not an upper class – concern to enable resistance to tyranny at a time when the American synonyms for "tyranny" were “monarchy” and “aristocracy” rather than “socialism” or “Marxism.”

Madison and the men of Philadelphia had not included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution and he thought it both unwise and unnecessary to do so.

But, under pressure from many others including Jefferson, Madison drafted a list of amendments the then congress boiled down to the familiar ten.

When he did so he included in what became the second as a reason for its importance an allusion to the republican notion of the time that “a well-regulated militia” – as opposed to such a dangerous tool of tyranny, again meaning monarchy and aristocracy, as a standing army – is the “best security for a free state.”

At the time, a militia was just a somewhat drilled, trained, armed, and disciplined body of ordinary people.

Just the kind of thing the people could, it was felt, spontaneously organize among themselves to resist threatened impositions of monarchy or aristocracy if they owned their own weapons, though such spontaneously self-organized rebellion did not do well against George Washington’s troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.

All the same, that political reason was not the only reason for writing directly into the Constitution a guarantee of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Something like the above understanding first became the conservative theory of the 2nd Amendment some decades ago.

It was accepted as early as 2008 by Barack Obama and has since through decisions of the Supremes been incorporated in the reigning jurisprudence of the land.

It is worth emphasizing, I think, that the tyranny this right was intended to enable the people to resist was embodied in monarchy and aristocracy, the then nearly universal forms of tyranny that America had just thrown off and that Ben Franklin alluded to in his famous statement of what sort of government the Constitution set up, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

And these forms of tyranny, of course, were emphatically defended by that modern conservative hero and vigorous enemy of republicanism and revolution, Edmund Burke, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a book of such infamous and black reaction that had it been written in America during our own revolution it would have been the deepest treason and well worth a hanging.

And it is also worth noting that the threat of a monarchist counterrevolution is past while nowadays having too many weapons in the wrong hands has become a major threat to public safety and itself dangerously subversive of our republican and constitutional government owing to the rise and spread of right wing political violence and intimidation.

And last, it is also worth noting, I suppose, that hunting is no longer one of life’s necessities for the majority of Americans and that any legitimate concerns for self-defense are addressed by small capacity pistols and shotguns.

So it’s time to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

Don’t you think?

Sorry, I should have included that it was felt when the Bill of Rights was adopted that the militia could defend the states and the Union against attack and invasion by another country while an army was organized and that this was preferable to reliance on a standing army because the latter could easily be used against the people and their liberties by the great and the powerful while the former could not and could even enable the people to deter, if not overcome, such attempts.

Of course, Washington's easy success against the Whiskey Rebellion made mincemeat of that idea, too.

Update.

And then there was that war of 1812 in which the Brits used regulars and the Americans mostly used militia on short term enlistments.

The Brits cleaned our clocks.