South Carolina
South Carolina will undoubtedly be the next target of lawsuits from the ACLU, SPLC, and Eric “My People” Holder’s “Justice Department.” The attack dogs have already been unleashed on Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Utah, and Indiana.
It brings to mind Robert E. Lee’s correspondence with Lord Acton in 1866:
“I can only say that while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it. I need not refer one so well acquainted as you are with American history, to the State papers of Washington and Jefferson, the representatives of the federal and democratic parties, denouncing consolidation and centralization of power, as tending to the subversion of State Governments, and to despotism.“
Here’s some useful advice from Michel Foucault:
“The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions and, starting from that re-problemization (where he plays his specific role as intellectual) to take part in the formation of a political will (where he has his role to play as a citizen.”)
In other words, it is my job here to analyze reality and call into question things taken for granted, shake the bad habits, open your eyes to the “hate truth,” and jog your memory.
Here we go:
Update: As always, the historian Pat Buchanan is five steps ahead of his peers. We’re also five steps ahead here. Looking toward 2025.
If Washington succeeds in ruining America (something that is inevitable at this point), then it will finally be time to revisit the results of the War Between the States and the Civil Rights Movement here in Dixieland.
The Robert E. Lee quote brings to mind Gibbon’s view of why the Roman Empire went into decline, namely increasing centralization of power by the imperial authorities combined with the people’s memory of their former freedom. Devolution of power to local authorities and a kind of regional competition among various small states, Gibbon believed, would have maintained “virtue” (the responsible exercise of true freedom) among the people and potentially saved the Roman imperial polity.
Allow me to include a quote from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s introduction to the Everyman version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with Gibbon’s own words liberally interspersed by Trevor-Roper to make this point:
“For this reason, Gibbon, though he may praise the virtuous emperors, cannot praise the system; and he adds that … the inherent vices of the system were positively aggravated by ‘two peculiar circumstances’ which exposed the subjects of the Roman empire to a condition ‘ more completely wretched than the victims of tyranny in any other age or country.’ These two circumstances were the memory of past freedom and the universality of imperioal power. ‘The division of Europe into a number of independent states … is productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind.’ The heretic, the nonconformist, could always find a base, and so ideas and experiments unwelcome to present power could not be completely stifled. But the monopoly of the Roman emperors was absolute. They ruled effecitvely over the entire civilized world.
“Virtue therefore depends for assured survival, not only on a continuing tradition of freedom, but also on a plural society, on the division of power between separate authorities. Ideally, it requires independent competing states, preferably with different political system; independent authorities within particular states; economic and intellectual competition. In the Roman empire these conditions did no obtain. There the emperor exercised a complete monopoly of power, and this monopoly, by stifling freedom, inevitably stifled all forms of progress. At one moment, Gibbon tells us, in the decline of the Western Empire, the emperor Honorius sought to devolve power in Gaul to provincial assemblies. ‘If such an instituion which gave the people an interest in their own government had been universally established by Trajan or the Antonines, the seeds of public wisdom and virtue might have been cherished and propagated in the empire of Rome,’ which ‘under the mild and generous influence of liberty’ might then ‘have remained invincible and immortal.’ But the Antonines had granted no such devolution of powers, and now it was too late. The over-centralization of the Empire had already stifled the spirit of freedom which alone could have revived it, and ‘the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.'” (Everyman, vol. 1, pp. lxxxix-xc, 1993)
Sounds familiar, huh? We really don’t learn much from history, do we?