Category Archives: Constitution

What’s Fueling The Fever Of Freedom?

Constitution, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy, Private Property, States' Rights

IMMIGRATION IS. When states stand up to the always-oppressive federal government, it’s a good thing. When issues loom large enough to bring about this necessary rift—necessary if freedom is to prevail—they deserve a closer look, if not, I would argue, our unreserved support. If gay marriage, yea or nay, prompted a state to secede; I’d be the first to cheer that state on.

Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has ruled that “state law enforcement officers are allowed to check the immigration status of anyone ‘stopped or arrested.” According to FoxNews, Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion on Friday “extending that authority to Virginia police in response to an inquiry over whether his state could mirror the policies passed into law in Arizona.”

“It is my opinion that Virginia law enforcement officers, including conservation officers may, like Arizona police officers, inquire into the immigration status of persons stopped or arrested,” he wrote.

Bring it on is what Cuccinelli is telling the federal government.

According to Lou Dobbs, interviewed by Megyn Kelly, “11 states are preparing to emulate Arizona. It is not what the Obama administration wanted; but it is exactly what the American people want,” he told the host of America’s News. Kelly says there are at least 18 states poised to follow Arizona on immigration and into a conflagration with the feds.

Now, you could challenge me as follows: “Mercer, you are not a proponent of majoritarianism. You’ve argued vigorously against democracy—even have a book due out that is a manifesto against raw democracy. Why are the people’s wishes okay in this instance?”

Because, as I’ve often said (most recently in this blog post), people have negative, leave-me-alone rights. Preventing a foreign invasion is perfectly within the purview of the “night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory,” in the words of the late philosopher, Robert Nozick.

Having delegated defense and policing to government, a people has a right to live free of the dangers that flow from being trespassed upon.

To the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson especially, secession was essential to the American scheme. Jefferson viewed extreme decentralization as the bulwark of the liberty and rights of man. Consequently, the United States was created as a pact between sovereign states with which the ultimate power lay. Sadly, it has progressed from a decentralized republic into a highly consolidated one.

The Constitution assigns the narrow function of naturalization to the feds. That small thing notwithstanding; I find it hard to fathom a founder arguing that the men and militia of a state should sit on their hands because a tier of tyrants (the feds) told them to (while their farms and nature reserves are trashed and their families endangered).

Neither should libertarians sit this thing out.

UPDATED: Tea Party Central

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Politics, Race, Racism

How do you tell that a grassroots, decentralized movement has moved into mainstream politics and has been thoroughly co-opted by its forces? Here’s one sign: A movement that arose in order to address profound issues of political philosophy begins to front “spokespersons” to apologize and bend over backwards in order to pacify mainstream muckrakers and race-baters. That’s one way to know for sure that the Tea Party is being schooled and groomed for grimy politics as usual.

MSNBC:

Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.
He shrugged off the diss, calling it “grandstanding” from a “minor player on the fringe.”
A California radio host and leader of the Tea Party Express, Williams had labeled the Manhattan boro president a “Jewish Uncle Tom” and President Obama an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug.”
But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from “the Colored People” to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line.
The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams’ group when it wouldn’t fire him. “We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

You got a hint of the forces controlling the Tea Party—the kind of people who’ve clawed their way onto establishment forums such as “Face the Nation”—when the “gritty” movement doubled up in pain and then went into defense mode over being accused of racism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Being so accused by such people is always false and is almost always a badge of honor.

Andrew Breitbart’s “Go to hell” is a start. But even better would it have been to ignore an organization that is too stupid to debate, but is sufficiently wily to work to ensure that nothing of the old, founding liberties remains or is revived.

It was wrong to so much as dignify these contemptible efforts to silence the small segment of America that is still true to her origins. Leaders of that America should never have chomped down on the bait, which is nothing but ad hominem intended to paralyze and marginalize liberty.

“The Many Ministries of Truth,” I wrote,

“make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.
One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.”

UPDATE (July 19): “Is it not an absurd world we live in?” asks a fired-up Pat Buchanan, who I’ve been seeing less and less on MSNBC.

“Here is an organization whose very name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pronounces its goal—advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race—accusing another organization of being motivated by race.”

Jealous and the NAACP are trying to change the subject from Obama’s failure to Obama’s race, and from the failures of liberals to the motivations of conservatives.
By accusing the tea party of harboring racists, the NAACP is, in effect, demanding that the party appear in a court of public opinion to prove itself innocent of an unsupported slander.
Sorry, that’s not how things work in America.

Oh, but that’s exactly how things work in America.

UPDATE II: Beck Is Abysmal On Lincoln (Al Sharpton Slips-Up On States’ Rights)

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, History, Neoconservatism, Race, Racism, Republicans, States' Rights

I take some credit for pushing my good friend Tom DiLorenzo to respond to Glenn Beck’s “absolutely awful and sometimes untruthful” depiction of the antebellum South, “the subject of Lincoln, the War to Prevent Southern Independence, and its legacy.” Now, Tom has done so in spades. I’m especially relieved that in “Glenn Beck’s Lincoln Contradictions,” Tom has dispelled one of Beck’s most jarring tall tales:

“During one show he claimed to have read the actual original copy of The Confederate Constitution. I assume he made this assertion to show that he must really be quite the expert on the document. I didn’t believe him when he said this, and his next sentence proved to me that he did not read the document. The next sentence was the statement that the formal title of the document was ‘The Slaveholders’ Constitution . . .’ Anyone can look the document up at Yale University’s online Avalon Project, which warehouses all the American founding documents, commentaries, and more, to see for yourself that Beck was wrong about this.

Beck’s next false statement was that ‘I read it’ (the Confederate Constitution) and ‘it wasn’t about states’ rights, it was all about slavery.” Read it yourself online. It is a virtual carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution, with a few exceptions: The Confederate president had a line-item veto; served for one six-year term; protectionist tariffs are outlawed; government subsidies for corporations are outlawed; and the “General Welfare Clause” of the U.S. Constitution was deleted.

The act of secession was the very essence of states’ rights, contrary to Beck’s proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central government for their own mutual benefit, but all other powers remained in the hands of the people and the states, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns, they had a right to secede for whatever reason. If a state needed the permission of others to secede, as Lincoln argued, then it was not really sovereign.

The U.S. Constitution adopted a federal, not a national system of government. That is another way of saying a states’ rights system of government. The Confederate Constitution was nearly identical.

As for slavery, the Confederate Constitution was not essentially different from the U.S. Constitution as it existed at the time. Beck was grossly deceiving when he told his audience that the Confederate Constitution protected slavery while saying not one word about how the U.S. Constitution did the exact same thing.”

[SNIP]

Tom draws an interesting connection between “the idea of ‘collective salvation” that Obama himself espouses,” and the “Right’s “militarism fueled by Lincoln idolatry.”

To the Yankees, their “kingdom” was to be a “perfect society” cleansed of sin, the principal causes of which were slavery, alcohol, and Catholicism. Furthermore, “government is God’s major instrument of salvation” … “Collective salvation,” as opposed to the individualistic salvation that the Bible teaches, was what motivated the Yankees and their war on the South. This of course is exactly what Glenn Beck has been ranting and raving about recently when it is practiced by opponents of the neocon establishment – the exact same establishment that embraces the Lincolnite, Yankee millennialist fervor as one of its defining characteristics.

Much to his detriment (and to our benefit), Tom is ever vigilant about reminding spaced-out Americans just how bad the the Republicans—the drag queens of politics—are.

The column is “Glenn Beck’s Lincoln Contradictions.”

UPDATED I (July 17): I asked Prof. DiLorenzo to comment on Beck’s obsession with MLK. Beck appears incapable of mentioning the Founders without the obligatory mention of MLK, a minor philosopher by comparison. I also wanted to know whether it was true, as Beck has claimed, that we had black founding fathers. For sure, there were black good guys, but were these laudable men founding fathers?

“As I say in the article,” writes DiLorenzo, “it really is part of the neocon ideology to hate the South and Southerners. They were the only ones to ever seriously challenge the authority of the centralized Leviathan state that the neocons champion, therefore, they must be eternally demonized.

The neocons are also MLK and FDR worshipers, therefore, Beck cannot be too critical of either men if he wants to keep his job.

There were free black men who participated in the American Revolution, and should be considered to be a heroic as anyone else who did the same. But they weren’t Thomas Jefferson/James Madison/Patrick Henry/John Randolph caliber.

The idea that there was a black Jefferson who has been airbrushed from history is simply asinine.

UPDATE II (July 18): Al Sharpton said it. He inadvertently seconded the idea that the tea party’s impetus was a return to the original federal scheme of a weak central government and a stronger locality. The “Reverend” was making his unique contribution to the lynching of his fellow (predominantly white) Americans, when he blurted out that,

“‘the civil rights movement sought to pressure the federal government to step in when states were enforcing segregation laws, and the tea party’s focus on states’ rights puts people at risk. They talk about restoring dignity. They are really talking about restoring a time before the federal government intervened and protected the rights of people,’ Sharpton said.”

He went on to admit that, “this is not just about race. It is about how you see government.”

So, if I understood Sharpton, he just conceded that the idea of States’ rights is a matter of political philosophy, and not necessarily of race.

Al probably forgot his shtick for a moment: his ilk equate states rights (and everything else) with racism. In truth, “The issue of segregation or racism … is intellectually independent of states’ rights. The reason for the mistaken conflation of states’ rights and segregation resides with the same propagandists who successfully equate, for the purposes of discrediting, the right of secession with an alleged support for slavery.”