Originally posted by b
[email protected] 06, 2007 07:36 pm
but the civil war changed all that
How so?
The paper constitution now is, as bush so shrewdly observes, just paper
It is just as misinterpreted now as it was a few years after its drafting (alien and sedition acts, numerous other examples).
Well, these matters are hardly discussable here, but here's my thumbnail sketch:
The American Republic has died.
There had been several Republics but unlike the French we maintained the fiction that “the Republic,” although different, was always the same. The First Republic was of course a loose federation of republics. The Philadelphia constitution of 1787 launched the Second Republic, a relatively centralized constitutional and partyless monarchy, which is to say, a one party state. Still, it was a federal Republic, “if you can keep it,” as Franklin famously remarked.
The Revolution of 1798-1800 gave us a Third Republic, with a legitimate opposition. Jefferson thought the happy outcome was due not to the paper constitution but to “the constitution of the people, which would oblige even a despot to govern us republicanly.” “What is meant by `republic’ in the United States is the slow and quiet action of society upon itself,“ explained Tocqueville. “If republican principles are to perish in the United States… they will have many apparent revivals and will vanish beyond recall only when an entirely new people has taken the place of the one there now.”
The paper constitution was in fact worthless, providing mostly a half-baked set of ground rules for the contest over chattel slavery, eventually to be resolved through “the constitution of the people” in the very Republican form of Anti-slavery. The Civil War ended chattel slavery but also ended the federal Republic and ushered in the consolidated Fourth Republic. Before the war, one said “the United States are”; thereafter, one said “the United States is,” which is grammatically incorrect but politically factual.
The end of chattel slavery in Dixie meant not so much freedom as peonage, and in the North the full measure of wage slavery. The defeat of the plantation system sped the business corporation toward unchallenged supremacy. “At the time of the anti-slavery agitation, I was not sure whether we should come out of the struggle with one republic or two; but republics I knew we should still be,” said the great Abolitionist Wendell Phillips. “I confess that the only fear I have in regard to republican institutions is whether, in our day, any adequate remedy will be found for this incoming flood of incorporated wealth… Every man that has met it has been crushed to powder.”
“I am not so confident, indeed, that we shall come out of this storm as a republic unless the Labor movement succeeds,” said Phillips with the Knights of Labor in mind. The Knights, too, were “crushed to powder.” and corporate power grew and grew, with the blessings of the American Federation of Labor. When the West was won, the Owners began to look beyond the seas and to build great fleets; and as the moneyed corporations became more and more oppressive, the national state assumed more power to regulate its corporate creatures. At the end of World War Two, the talented and popular historian of the Civil War Bruce Catton observed that the collusion of Big Government and Big Business (Big State and Big Corporation) in the war against fascism had now created the preconditions for fascism in America.
In 1947 the Fifth and Final Republic began to emerge with the secret “National Security Council” as the president’s privy council, displacing the cabinet. There was an awkward period when journalists noticed that the “cabinet meeting”—always a sham in a country with no parliament but still an important trapping of republicanism—hardly ever occurred. Fewer and fewer remembered even the trappings. Who now even asks about “cabinet meetings?” Of course, progressives still make much of “cabinet level” bureaucracies to denote matters of gravitas, but not to suggest anything like a cabinet.
As the national security state grew, the council in turn, beginning with Kennedy, was pushed aside in favor of a single advisor to the president, and “national security” flowered into “national crisis.” Then, in 2001, a gaggle of exTrotskyites, disillusioned and on the make, gave the world “neo-conservatism” which transmuted the doctrine of Permanent Revolution into the doctrine of Permanent Crisis and Permanent War against resistance everywhere, and all power was gathered into the hands of the Imperial Commander. The Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions—the labor of centuries—became “quaint” relics. The Republic, once the earthly executor of Julia Howe’s righteous god, was now a shadowy abstraction for which the flag somehow stood; and republicanism was now the rule of a totalitarian “republican party.” The arbitrary power to which the “republican party” is dedicated is, of course, the antithesis of Republicanism, but the term long ago passed out of the collective memory.
A Democracy has to be a Republic, but a Republic is seldom Democratic; the late American Republic, after an early skirmish with Democracy, returned to its oligarchic roots. Honest conservatives knew that it was “a Republic and not a Democracy.” Some even knew that empire is incompatible with a Republic. Progressives, on the other hand, were not interested in the Republic while it lived and breathed, preferring to fulsomely praise a “democracy” that never drew a first breath or to wax indignant about the “so-called democracy” which was never so called by the founders of the Republic.
While progressives found the Republic old-fashioned and boring, they were vaguely aware of its advantages—especially elements of the Bill of Rights, which they endeavored to edit down to the parts they regarded as progressive. Since the funeral, they have rushed to offer patent medicine, brewed in the Petri dishes of “political science,” to cure the rigor mortis of the body politic; and now that the Republic has reached an advanced state of decomposition, they offer stronger doses of the same medicine. Still, the patient does not improve. Some even warn that death may prove fatal to the Republic, and they are no doubt correct.
“Heal Our Republic,” urges the Coffeehouse Digest. “Change Our Electoral System.” The “electoral system” turns out to be the way our “presidents” are selected—rather like curing a drunk by pouring gin down his throat—nor is there any indication that the writer understood the irony of the title. Thus doth the Republic end, not with the shrieks of valkyries but with the simpering of progressives, who sit amid its whited sepulcher and dream of the Good Ruler elected according to sound accounting principles, his total power totally legitimated.
For generations assured that “it can’t happen here,” denial is the first and obvious response to the death of the Republic; but it has happened here. For progressives as well as the few dozen remaining Republicans, the crucial emerging question is one familiar to Romans of the First Century: how do we live under despotism? The cheerful answer is “we will recover the Republic,” but we will not. Americans are no longer Republicans. They have become, as Tocqueville would say, “an entirely new people.”
There may be “apparent revivals,” just as the Roman Republic revived for two days after the death of Caligula. We may have periods of relative benignity, when the State and its subsidiary media will report no torture and reveal no news from the vast constellation of American gulags that encompass the Earth, and great crowds may mill about with placards and pompoms and celebrate their mendicant “democracy.” That will satisfy the shallow virtues of good-government progressives, and they will generously praise themselves for it; but there will be no move to suppress arbitrary power, and the Republic will continue to molder in the grave
What kind of people are these new, post-modern Americans? The evidence is overwhelming: they are fit only for despotism, and their despots know it well. Liberty can be learned, and, as our ancestors knew, it is unlearned with greater ease. If the Republic is born in “the times that try men’s souls,” then the death of the Republic is surely the time for men without souls. Accordingly, we see the reign of soulless men who are as servile but not as faithful as golems: barbarians without naïve virtues, criminals without redemptive remorse.
Let us then give the Republic a decent burial, each according to his lights. How does one live under despotism? Quietly, fellow prisoners. Quietly.