Thursday, August 19, 2010 (journal entry)

The contradictions of the Left

The Left's view that Justice is promoted through the promotion of group identities and by a powerful central government is fallacious historically.

Historically, the Civil War was not a matter of a powerful Federal government standing up for the rights of black people. The Civil War was started by Abolitionists, both Black and White, who rightly refused to abide by the edicts of the federal government to protect slavery where it already existed. It is true that the federal government tried to prevent the spread of slavery to new territories. However, even this limited effort was attenuated in 1854 by the Kansas and Nebraska Act that introduced the unjust idea of Popular Sovereignty as to whether to allow slavery.

By its protection of Slave owners rights the Federal government was itself dividing the Union not upon sectional lines but racial lines. Thus we see that it was as much the actions of the federal government in its protection of slavery that promoted disunion as it was the actions of individual states. It was therefore a false choice that the war was either to end slavery or save the Union. It was only by ending slavery that the Union, disunified along racial lines, could be restored. Any nation thus divided along racial lines was already disunified before the war began and even before secession. This is what Lincoln meant in his "House Divided" speech.

In the South, secession was dishonestly justified by an argument for "states' rights" and decentralized power. This was to gain support of the majority who were non-slaveholders. The primary issue at the Secession Conventions was slavery, pure and simple. They could not abide the growing Abolitionist movement in the North that wanted to attack slavery and the South as immoral and evil. The South, therefore, saw itself as a different nation than the North culturally as opposed to any political differences that existed. This was demonstrated in the Confederate Constitution that was almost a duplicate of the Federal Constitution in its political arrangements but was specific in its protection of the cultural institution of chattel slavery. The Confederacy had not allegiance to State or even individual rights as demonstrated by it actions domestically in the South during the war.

In this historical example we see that contradiction in the notion of the Left that it has historically been a powerful central government that promotes Justice. In the Civil Rights Era we see this same contradiction. The Civil Rights Era is viewed by most on the Left as being the story of the Federal government's promotion of Justice. Although there is some justification for this view compared to during the Civil War, it is not so simple a story. Segragation was a pattern of laws enforced by state and local governments and in many ways by the Federal government where it had jurisdiction such as in DC during the Wilson administration.

It was only by the late 1950s or so that the Federal government began grudgingly to oppose Segragation laws. It did not do this out of any sense of Justice but by being agitated against by the Sovereign power in a free nation: the People in their political capacity. Just as the Abolitionists, as free citizens, formed groups to oppose slavery, so Civil rights minded American citizens formed groups to oppose injustice in a Segragated and disunified society.

The idea that an enormously powerful central government will be responsive to minority rights or civil rights for minorities of people is a quaint and fallacious argument unsupported by the hard facts of history. It is the People themselves, organizing and acting in their political capacity that promote any real and lasting change in a free society. The Federal government and all the governments in the nation down to dogcatcher belong to them in their political capacity as free citizens. This is written directly into the Constitution by the method of amending it through conventions of the People.

It is in the nature of an unchecked and overweening central government to usurp Justice, even when no plan or conspiracy for such usurpation exists. A wolf cannot be expected to control his ravenous appetite when guarding the hens. The Left, or large parts of it, have never seemed to understand this. That fact to this moment baffles me.

Power into will, will into appetite
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power
Must make perforce a universal prey
And last eat himself up.

William Shakespeare from "Troilus and Cressida"