Libertarianism, the Confederacy, and Historical Memory (Updated Again)

Maybe you’re reading a little too deeply into the phrase “over the last several years” ?

Not necessarily “recent”, no?

I can understand your mistake here, but it’s a mistake. Randy started out in the Lysander Spooner camp (and he was a longtime champion of Spooner’s philosophical as well as historical importance). That abolitionist anarchism has a hard time treating the Union or the Republican Party as morally serious about slavery, but *not* in the confederatista “Lincoln was a racist too, so there” kind of way.

It’s not that he spent time in the “maybe slavery mattered, maybe it didn’t” cloud of ignorance. It’s that he started studying abolitionist-Republicans and Reconstructionist Republicans as well as the abolitionist-anarchists for whom I think he had a lot more initial sympathy, and started to respect the Republican Party’s initial stance as being a genuinely antislavery one rather than only being culpable compromises. This also, by the way, has helped to generate his very serious treatment of the Reconstruction Amendments. 2004 is the latest date one could pick here, as these arguments start to appear in Restoring the Lost Constitution.

I guess I am not surprised that a reasonable, intelligent academic would come to these conclusions in the “last few years.”

And that makes me sad.

I cannot believe we live in a nation where high-profile conservatives and libertarians align themselves with a long-defeated government devoted to the idea that “our men can own slaves.”

In my gloom, I sometimes wonder if Lincoln was wrong in his efforts to preserve the union.

Let me be clear: I have no desire to impugn Barnett’s intelligence or learning, or to do that annoying academic thing of mocking someone for coming so late to the party. To the contrary: it’s because I have respect for Barnett that I am surprised.

This seems disingenuous to me . In any case , the whole process of arriving at some general truth about a community of thought (vaguely defined at that) based on some epistemological forensic investigation of a single individual , what he believes now, what he may have believed, and wrapping the whole thing in some exclamatory statement , seems quite dubious to me .

Arguments of type
wow_he_really_thought_that ( randy, “bush is a moron”)
should really be avoided
– not an reasoned argument about whether bush in fact is a moron (in fact the phrasing is a a way to posit the statement and remove it from critical examination )
– it makes dubious representations about what the randy believes
– it makes dubious representations about what randy may have believed in the past
– and it extends this whole hazy half-baked mess of phony conclusions to an entire group of people , over a long period of time

Not very serious

CJColucci @ 4: “When I read Barnett’s piece, I found it annoying because it was, to a great extent, a restatement of the obvious.”

George Orwell, in 1939: “we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

there is a substantial alternative history out there, which holds, among other things, that … Randolph of Roanoake and Calhoun were the Law and the Prophets

Since Calhoun seems to be a guiding spirit in Shelby County v. Holder, the alternative is going mainstream.

Robin’s gracious words about Barnett do him credit, but as I am not a respected academic, I can say that Barnett’s lobbying in Sebelius helped make crazy the new normal. Which is definitely an achievement.

Main Street Muse expresses the same ignorance of the libertarians in question, no offense. Go read the confederate constitution: it’s a perfect description of the US government today.

Hmm. Does he care about all his readers, or just about the ones rich enough not to need federal college loans?

Then, suddenly, in the 19th century, people began turning against it in large numbers, and today it’s an abomination

A bit earlier than that. Sommersett’s Case was 1775, and the abolition movement was gaining ground throughout the 1700s. And there were plenty of mediaeval abolitions…
“We order and command all and each of the faithful… that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands, and made captives since the time of their capture, and who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free, and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of money. If this is not done when the fifteen days have passed, they incur the sentence of excommunication…” that was a papal bull in 1435.

Jacob Levy writes: “I can understand your mistake here, but it’s a mistake. Randy started out in the Lysander Spooner camp (and he was a longtime champion of Spooner’s philosophical as well as historical importance). That abolitionist anarchism has a hard time treating the Union or the Republican Party as morally serious about slavery, but *not* in the confederatista “Lincoln was a racist too, so there” kind of way.”

Rather, the Lysander Spooner camp in which Randy Barnett started is the “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis–in fact, David is preferable because he at least is not a hypocrite” camp.

It asserts a different kind of moral equivalance between Lincoln and Davis from the confederatistas, but it does assert a moral equivalence between them. Lysander Spooner is the #slatepitch of the 1850s.

Lysander Spooner, writing before the election of 1860: “We entreat all… give no vote or support to those public men [Republicans], who give their rant, declamation, and pretended moral sentiments to liberty, and, at the same time, give over to slavery the constitution of the country, and their oaths to support it. These men are practically the best supporters of slavery there now are in the country…. They have power to deceive honest men as to their rights and duties under the constitution…. And this power they are exerting to their utmost for the security of slavery. The open [Democratic] friends of slavery have nearly or quite lost all power of this kind…. Should any one of the factions, into which they are divided, succeed in filling the executive department of the government, that acquisition will give them no real power in the country. Their possession of that department, therefore, is not a thing to be dreaded. Better, far better, that the presidency should be in the hands of an open, but powerless enemy of liberty, than in those of a powerful, but false, perjured, and traitorous friend. We, therefore, entreat that all, who give their votes at all, at the ensuing election, will give them unequivocally for freedom…. The great object is to procure the defeat of the Republicans.”

Re the OP’s ref to Renan: When Renan said that nations are founded on forgetting as well as remembering, and instanced the St Bartholomew Day Massacre as an example, I’m not at all sure (without taking the time to refresh my acquaintance with the relevant passage) he meant to say that that forgetting was a “deep historical error”; rather, didn’t he mean that it was necessary, in effect, to agree to bury some painful parts of the past? Now, he might have been right or wrong, but I thought that’s what he meant. Whereas Corey, in the OP, writes:

Barnett is grappling with a deeper kind of knowledge, or anti-knowledge, on the free-market right: the kind that Renan spoke of when he said that every nation is founded upon a forgetting. That forgetting—that deep historical error which held that the Civil War was a fight over tariffs or some other nonsense—lay for many years at the core of not only southern but also northern identity.

I would see this less as a forgetting than as a deliberate misinterpretation. Perhaps that is drawing too fine a distinction. But Renan’s forgetting, or such was my impression, has to do more with pretending that an event never happened, whereas what Corey describes has to do with pretending that the causes of an event were other than than what they actually were.

bob mcmanus: I continue to believe that the overemphasis on slavery as the only, necessary, and sufficient cause of the Civil War, at the expense of “states rights” as an additional and important cause works very much to the detriment and disadvantage of the left.

I am very much with bob on this. The dispute over tariffs was a vitally important proxy issue, deliberately created by Calhoun circa 1830, but very revealing about the constitutional fault lines, which led to conflict.

“Slavery caused the Civil War” is a defensible summary, but unpacking it into how the dispute over slavery became a constitutional crisis, arbitrated by a contest of arms, involves deep issues of constitutional politics and law — in which Barnett, of course, is deeply and professionally interested. The professional expertise requires an elaborate application of intelligence that can mask the viciousness and fundamental stupidity of the motivating ideology.

What Rich Puchalsky @ 16 said about the breakdown of constitutional order in our own time, and how that breakdown colors our ability to understand, by projection I suppose, the disputes of the past, seems remarkably insightful.

Barnett is not a political philosopher; he is a lawyer and ideologue, who is committed to, and vitally interested in, subverting the (small-c) constitution of the United States. That perspective is going to allow him to pick up a lot of subtle detail in the history, which most of us would scarcely notice.

RP 16.last:Me too. It could be fun.

Lysander Spooner

19: Objectively pro-slavery! But really, according to platforms and speeches in 1860, it looked more likely than slavery would survive the Lincoln election.

Spooner conspired with John Brown to start a slave insurrection, and tried to break Brown out of jail.

Ah so many interesting questions–so few electrons..
More important than who read what and when is the revival of the Confederate project as a veiled but serious political program of that portion of the oligarchy opposed to the centralizing federalism of the New Deal and on. That alternative political program, oligarchic independence from countervailing federal power, is pretty much Calhounist. The reason for the opposition was that a strong federal government undermines the control of a population through control of money and resources that made Southern style oligarchic fiefdoms –and all that went with that–possible. Molly Ivins warned us about this some time ago.

blavag @26:

You might want to read Ira Katznelson’s last two books.

Until a few years ago, torture would’ve been a good example of another practice universally accepted and then universally renounced.

“When all was over, Tor­ture and Can­ni­bal­ism were the only two expe­di­ents that the civilized, sci­en­tific, Chris­t­ian States had been able to deny them­selves: and these were of doubt­ful util­ity.” – Churchill, The World Crisis

the first sentence is Bruce Wilder’s.

bob mcmanus: according to platforms and speeches in 1860, it looked more likely tha[t] slavery would survive the Lincoln election.

Huh!? “more likely” to whom? Obviously, quite a few Southerners were panicked over the prospect that slavery would not survive, and found little comfort in Republican assurances that “eventual extinction” would remain a long ways off.

If your point is that Lincoln’s was a typical conservative hypocrisy with no revolutionary intent, and that the American Civil War started in a kind of pre-emptive reactionary’s counter-revolution, then, of course, but you cannot make sense of the feelings of urgent necessity that drove that attempt at counter-revolution, if you don’t acknowledge how real, albeit vague and indefinite, the looming revolution must have seemed.

CR @36: don’t know Renan at all well. Did he in fact forget the occurrence of La Barthelemey?

How do people here feel about Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History? Some excerpts:

Calhoun declared slavery to be ‘a positive good’ that civilization could not possibly renounce. Calhoun repeatedly denounced intolerance and the crusading spirit, not in order to challenge the enslavement of the blacks or the ruthless hunting down of fugitive slaves, but exclusively to brand abolitionists as ‘blind fanatics” who ‘consider themselves under the most sacred obligation to use every effort to destroy’ slavery, a form of property legitimized and guaranteed by the Constitution. Blacks were not among the minorities defended with such vigour and legal erudition. In fact, in their case, tolerance and the spirit of compromise seem to turn into their opposite : if fanaticism actually succeeded in its mad project of abolishing slavery, what would follow would be ‘the extirpation of one or the other race […] blacks could only survive on condition of being slaves.

So is Calhoun a liberal? No doubts on this score were harboured by Lord Acton, a prominent figure in liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, an advisor and friend of William Gladstone, one of the major figures in nineteenth-century England. In Acton’s view, Calhoun was a champion of the cause of the struggle against any form of absolutism, including ‘democratic absolutism’ ; the arguments he employed were ‘the very perfection of political truth’ . In short, we are dealing with one of the major authors and great minds in the liberal tradition and pantheon.

Albeit in less emphatic language, the question has been answered in the affirmative by those who in our time celebrate Calhoun as ‘a strong individualist’, as a champion of the ‘defense of minority rights against the abuse of an overbearing majority’, or as a theorist of the sense of limits and the self-limitation that should characterize the majority. In no doubt is one US publishing house, committed to republishing in a neo-liberal key ‘Liberty Classics’, among which the eminent statesman and ideologue of the slaveholding South features prominently.

Adam Smith constructed an argument and expressed a position that warrants being cited at some length. Slavery could be more easily abolished under a ‘despotic government’ than a ‘free government’, with its representative bodies exclusively reserved in practice for white property-owners. In such circumstances, the condition of the black slaves was desperate: ‘every law is made by their masters, who will never pass any thing prejudicial to themselves’ . Hence ‘ [t]he freedom of the free was the cause of the great oppression of the slaves . . . And as they are the most numerous part of mankind, no human person will wish for liberty in a country where this institution is established.’ Can an author who, in at least one concrete instance, expressed his preference for ‘despotic government’ be regarded as liberal? Or, differently put, is Smith more liberal or are Locke and Calhoun, who, along with slavery, defended the representative bodies condemned by Smith as the prop, in a slaveholding society, of an infamous institution contrary to any sense of humanity?

The first country to embark on the liberal road is one that exhibited an especially tenacious attachment to the institution of slavery. It appears that colonists of Dutch origin offered the most determined resistance to the first abolitionist measures, those introduced in the northern United States during the Revolution and in its wake. As regards Holland itself, in the States-General formally declared that the slave trade was essential to the development of the colonies’ prosperity and commerce. Still in this period, clearly distinguishing itself from Britain, Holland recognized the right of slave-owners to transport and deposit their human chattels in the mother country before returning to the colonies. Finally, it is to be noted that Holland only abolished slavery in its colonies in 1863, when the secessionist and slaveholding Confederacy of the southern United States was going down to defeat.

[Jean] Bodin also rejected Aristotle’s thesis, adopted and even radicalized by Grotius, that some individuals and peoples are naturally slaves. As proof of this, universal diffusion, temporal and spatial, of the institution of slavery was often cited. But (objected the French author) no less universally diffused were slave revolts :

“As for the argument that slavery could not have been so enduring if it had been contrary to nature, I would answer that the principle holds good for natural agents whose property it is to obey of necessity the unchanging laws of God. But man, being given the choice between good and evil, inclines for the most part to do that which is forbidden and chooses the evil, defying the laws of God and of nature. So much is such a one under the domination of his corrupt imagination, that he takes his own will for the law. There is no sort of impiety or wickedness which in this way has not come to be accounted virtuous and good.”

While it had long seemed obvious and been generally accepted, and still continued to be, the institution of slavery pertained not to nature but to history-more precisely, to a deplorable and execrable chapter of history, which must rapidly be closed once and for all. It made no sense to try to justify it on the basis of right of war (as did Grotius) : ‘ [W]hat charity is there in sparing captives in order to derive some profit or pleasure from them as if they were cattle?” In short, Grotius and Bodin were contemporaries. While the former was an expression of liberal Holland, the latter was a theorist of absolute monarchy. But it was he — not Grotius — who questioned the absolute power wielded by the master over his slaves.

Bodin traced a brief history of slavery in the world or, more precisely, the West (and the geographical area dominated by it) . Certainly, the institution had been vital in Greco-Roman antiquity. As late as the American Civil War, the theorists and defenders of the southern cause appealed to the example and model of that splendid civilization in order to condemn abolitionism. By contrast, Bodin drew a rather realistic picture of classical antiquity. It was based on the enslavement of a number of human beings that was Significantly greater than the number of free citizens. Consequently, it lived under the constant menace of slave revolts and, in order to solve the problem, did not hesitate to resort to the most barbaric measures, as proved by the massacre of 30,000 helots in Sparta ‘in a Single night’ . Subsequently, as a result also of the influence of Christianity, things seemed to change : ‘Europe was freed of slavery after about 1250’ , but ‘we see it today newly restored’ . Following colonial expansion, it was ‘in the process of being renewed throughout the world’ . There had been a massive restoration of slavery, and already Portugal ‘derives from it veritable herds as of beasts’ .

Hence, far from being affected by vulgar historicism’s attempts at repression, the paradox that characterizes the American Revolution and early liberalism in general not only survives, but proves even more marked. We are in the presence of a political movement counter to the trend of authors who, centuries earlier, had pronounced an unequivocal condemnation of the institution of slavery. While Locke, champion of the struggle against absolute monarchy, justified the white master’s absolute power over the black slave, a theorist of monarchical absolutism — Bodin — condemned such power.

To understand the radical character of the paradox we are examining, let us return to Bodin. He primarily attributed the return of slavery in the world to the ‘greed of merchants’ , and then added: ‘If the princes do not set things in good order, it will soon be full of slaves.’ Not only was slavery not a residue of the past and backwardness, but the remedy for it was to be sought not in the new political and social forces (liberal in orientation), but, on the contrary, in monarchical power. Thus argued Bodin, but thus likewise argued Smith two centuries later. On the other hand, in recommending the conversion of beggars into slaves, Fletcher polemicized against the Church, which he rebuked for having promoted the abolition of slavery in classical antiquity and for opposing its reintroduction in the modern world, thus encouraging the sloth and dissipation of vagrants. In this case, too, the institution of slavery was felt to be in contradiction not with the new social and political forces, but with a power that was pre-modern in origin.

The Virginian property-owners who prevented the baptism of slaves in the late seventeenth century, so as not to spoil the spirit of submission and to avoid the emergence of a sense of pride in them because they belonged to the same religious community as the masters, provoked complaints from Church and Crown alike. Once again, we see that it was the forces of the ancien regime which acted to check and contain the novelty represented by racial slavery.

Until a few years ago, torture would’ve been a good example of another practice universally accepted and then universally renounced.

Which seems to cast a certain doubt on the idea that the moral arc of the universe has a preferred direction of bending, as opposed to just being some sort of drunkard’s walk. Although, of course, that quote did come from a minister, so maybe it was a profession of faith rather than an empirical observation.

Tom Bach @ 34

I don’t think we should be drawing straight lines on graph paper three millenia back to Aristotle, and thinking that is history.

The late 18th century Whiggish Anglo-American consensus was that slavery was morally wrong in principle, though perhaps something of a regrettable practical necessity, and the ideology of the American Revolution embraced a political ideal of equality in personal liberty, which clearly conflicted with the institution of slavery. So, moral disapproval of slavery was not a 19th century innovation. And, the doctrine that slavery was a positive good, aggressively pushed by apologists for slavery after 1825 or so, was a strong contrast to the standard 18th century trope of regrettable practical necessity.

Did the “slavery is good” apologists take hints from Aristotle’s natural law schtick? Sure, but I’m pretty sure Aristotle’s patent on the slavery concept had run out — there’s no continuous institution of slavery or cultural category and apology running from Aristotle’s classical Greece to British North America or the US of A. Whole institutional schemes of domination and involuntary servitude had died and been invented and died again several times in the interim. American plantation slavery was invented in the 17th century, even as institutions of manorial domination and servitude were fading away.

St Patrick, at one time a British slave in Ireland, had perhaps an unusual perspective on the evils of slavery.

Apart from the other slaves, that us. I imagine quite a few of them over the years haven’t thought much of slavery, but as the subjects rather than the perpetrators, I guess their view doesn’t count.

Lincoln’s position was always consistent — he never believed that slavery could be abolished by the federal government in existing states (a meaningless concession in any case, since there was no chance Congress would pass such legislation, and in a context where it was possible this limitation should be abandoned.) His argument was that slavery would die if it was not allowed to expand — an argument that the confederates evidently agreed with.

Jacob McM @ 41: Domenico Losurdo

Kind of amusing. Though how the Most Catholic Lord Acton becomes a defining exemplar of liberalism must remain something of a mystery; perhaps, we should recall Voltaire’s correspondence with Catherine the Great or the crusade of the Parlement of Paris against the alleged despotism of Louis XVI, as well.

Treating polemicists as if they are disinterested Euclids, their principles moral axioms, and their arguments, deductive proofs, seems likely to lead to no end of mischief and confusion, should they ever embrace and redefine some term, or concede some ephemeral shibboleth, in the hopes of hooking and persuading the prejudiced.

As a mass movement, abolitionism was a novelty, made possible by the rise of the reading public and particularly through the writings of Rousseau and Diderot through the French encyclopedia and the Abbe Raynal’s very popular Histoire des deux Indes (really largely written by Diderot). But of course enlightened people had decried it throughout the ages.

At least one scholar (Paul Vernière) traces Rousseau’s concept of inalienable human rights to an unacknowledged debt to Spinoza, a chapter of whose work on Ethics is called “Of Human Bondage” and (interestingly, for Corey Robin) who is cited as a precursor by both Renan and Nieztsche. According to wikipedia the latter wrote in a postcard to a friend:

I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and make my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange!

And here it comes, as predicted:

“That said, Brad DeLong is right to point out in the comments that that anarcho-abolitionist view doesn’t necessarily take us very far from some of the underlying historical assumptions of the neo-Confederate position. To wit: the “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Civil War was an unjust war on both sides” claim, and all the associated historical baggage around it, that I cited in the OP.”

Spooner not only thought that a guerrilla war against the South was justified, he tried to help start one. To gloss anarcho-abolitionist views as in some ways not too far from the historical assumptions of the neo-Confederate is pretty much perfect. It’s exactly like the people who currently make no distinction between people who oppose the current-day Democrats from the right or from the left or really from any non-conventional-wisdom position. You have to be objectively for one or other of the parties, just as you had to be either objectively pro-Saddam or not. Bush’s crew really did write the rhetoric of our time.

You have to be objectively for one or other of the parties

The best is the enemy of the good. Condemning the Republicans as equivalent to the Democrats because they were not so advanced as Spooner was fine as ideology; it was stupid as politics.

And as you note, consistent with the impression gleaned on the other thread, Spooner’s purity meant he found it necessary to resort to force, which is the expected result when argument and compromise are heathenish.

I’m not writing a pro-Spooner tract, or saying that it was a good idea to support John Brown. But this is supposed to be a discussion about historical memory, and the people involved can’t distinguish anarcho-abolitionism from neo-Confederacy in any important way.

Spooner’s purity meant he found it necessary to resort to force, which is the expected result when argument and compromise are heathenish.

But not state force, which makes him intolerable to me. But argument and compromise with the likes of the slavers is what is heathenish.

Well then, Lincoln took at least as an expansive view of State Sovereignty as the Slavers. Then Lincoln be damned.

Perhaps I have a spiritual ally in Charles Sumner, praise be his name, and his allies, and I think whatever protections of the right for the sovereign states to massively abuse US citizens that Lincoln and the Slavers believed was necessary (and their descendants in our current political parties sustain) was put profoundly to question by the 14th amendment. As in, none.

I will do my own unique gloss on the Privileges and Immunities Clause here and say Obama has the right, nay the duty, to send a few divisions down here to Texas and open up 50 Planned Parenthood abortion clinics.

Because I sure am not seeing a plan or even an effective discourse from Democrats that will bring back an effective Texan right to choose. Ever.

I understand that you think that “let’s start a guerrilla war against the slaveholders” doesn’t take us very far from “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Civil War was an unjust war on both sides”. I haven’t seen a better recent illustration of the logic by which e.g. pacifists were held to be pro-Saddam. Followed, angrily, by “Of course there are differences between them!” when someone points out what you’re saying.

Inalienable human rights follow logically from the Christian teachings that man is made in the image of God and that every person possesses a unique soul. It’s not hard to find precursors for the idea prior to the 18th century.

In a slight demur to Corey’s explanation @ 50, it really wasn’t that the Republicans were thought to be committed to a specific and concrete abolitionist program, as a general sense that the South was losing its hegemonic control of the Federal government, a hegemony which had rested on several pillars, all of which appeared to be crumbling.

Most Presidents had been Southerners, and the last two Democrats — Pierce and Buchanan — were northerners, whose strong southern sympathies were their principal qualifications for nomination. Half of the States had been slave States, until the admission of California in 1850 (and California agreeably elected one anti-slavery and one pro-slavery Senator to keep the balance), but the admission of Minnesota as a free state paired with slave state Kansas, which had become free state Kansas, had finally and fatally tipped the balance there. The Supreme Court had had a southern majority, because of the custom of choosing one Justice from each of 9 circuits, 5 of which were drawn across the South; the passionate Republican rejection of Taney’s Dred Scot decision made clear no effective Southern veto would persist there for long. Southerners walked out of the Democratic Convention, when northerners would nominate no one other than Lincoln’s Illinois rival, Stephen Douglas, who had championed the right of Kansas to choose to become a free state.

That the industrializing North (and its Greater New England expanding across the Great Lakes) would outstrip the South (and the Greater Charleston of the cotton plantation Deep South) in population and economic development was long anticipated. Calhoun had anticipated the loss of Southern hegemony, and prepared for it, with his doctrine of States’ Rights, with its claim of an Ace-in-the-hole, unilateral state secession. It turned out to form a fatal hand of Aces and Eights.

If the prospects were a bit vague, and uncertain of operation, the immediate past was, nevertheless an absolutely clear prologue.

The popularity of the Republican Party, and its ability to elect a President by a constitutional majority in the electoral college, did not rest on a simple and abstract philosophical opposition to slavery, though that is how Lincoln framed it rhetorically. It rested on a sense that the “Slavepower” (as the southern interest was subtly named in the North) in Congress was blocking the most popular measures for western development: opening the West to settlement and the admission of new States, free homesteading, land-grant colleges and subsidies for a transcontinental railroad. In his rivalry with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln and Douglas agreed with the desirability of these measures, as did the vast majority of Americans, across the country (including, theoretically, in the South). But, Douglas had been rolled in the past by the Slavepower over Kansas and Dred Scot, and Lincoln, by narrowing the issues to one — opposition to the expansion of slavery on principle — could bring the focus down to whether Douglas could be trusted to resist his fellow Democrats at the South. Douglas could argue that he alone, as a Democrat, could bring the Democratic South along, right up until the Southerners walked out of the convention, where he was to be nominated.

The “moral wrong of slavery” which Lincoln affirmed, without endorsing any definite and “radical” measure of abolition, made Lincoln a more credible champion of western development, against the supposed opposition of the Slavepower, than Douglas.

Between Lincoln and the Southerners, as well as between Lincoln and the radical abolitionists, it was a constitutional issue. Lincoln would argue the constitutional issues, over and over, from Cooper Union onward, redefining the small-c constitution in the process.

I’ve seen the Nietzsche quote about Spinoza before, but I don’t grasp Spinoza well enough to understand how he could be a source for “inalienable human rights.” Presumably that’s in the Tractatus, whereas N. was rejoicing over the Ethics?

For a discussion of Spinoza and inalienable rights, see Jonathan Israel: http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Enlightenment-Philosophy-Modernity-ebook/dp/B0071YOVIK/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374279101&sr=1-4&keywords=jonathan+israel

Bruce
Your point, as I understood it, was that what made the 19th century different was a full throated defense of slavery. My point was and is that all slave societies actually defended slavery as a natural good. The issue was and is who is a human. The Greeks called, if I remember correctly, slaves human footed animals. The Iberians who enslaved indigenous peoples of the new world used to read them something in Spanish that offered them the option of conversion or enslavement, obviously as the native couldn’t understand what was said led to enslavement. Lisbon was in the 16th centuries largest slave market. The decision of whites to deny black humanity wasn’t new and the defense of slavery wasn’t new. What was new and interesting was the decision of whites, how ever so defined, to insist on the common humanity of all man footed beasts and to make it stick . This isn’t graph paper but, as per David Brion Davis, who last i checked was something of an expert on the subject, but rather a history of the long term development of slavery as institution in the new and old worlds.
And, for what it is worth, I am actually a professionally trained historian and I find your grasp of history kind of a joke.

Tom Bach: “all slave societies actually defended slavery as a natural good”

Did you read the Declaration of Independence?

Spooner’s logic isn’t my logic. If I had to pick someone of the time to sort-of share my logic, it’d probably be the Garrisonites. But since you’ve felt free to call me stupid, I should mention that calling Spooner either a concern troll or someone making a #slatepitch is mightily stupid. Concern trolls are actually trying to sabotage the people who they are giving advice to — they don’t attempt to support guerrilla wars for those causes. And people don’t make ritually contrarian gestures for attention that involve doing the quite radical things that Spooner did; he was an actual contrarian. You can of course condemn him for being an unpractical radical, but instead you’ve chosen to do so in a register that’s both false and designed to cast him as being like one of the people de jour that you oppose.

Brad DeLong @ 76

That comment contains several shades of crazy.

Bruce:
if we leave aside the fact that blacks were not men; you might have a point. Gee golly.

@84:

Undoubtedly Jefferson had a sinuous gift for hypocrisy, but still, there’s this:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h33.html

Tom Bach @ 84 the folks that wrote the declaration and the constitution were perfectly okay with slavery and perfectly okay with making black men and women sub humans.

Perhaps some were. On the record, the consensus, even among slave owners, was the attitude exemplified by slave owner, Charles Carroll, “Why keep alive the question of slavery? It is admitted by all to be a great evil”.

Quite a few of the Founders were actively opposed to slavery on principle, or supportive of schemes of gradual abolition, curtailment of the slave trade, colonization, manumission, etc. Benjamin Franklin founded an antislavery society. John Adams copied the Declaration’s words into the Massachusetts’ Constitution of 1780, which a court subsequently held, abolished slavery in that state. The Constitution contains a provision, permitting Congress to abolish the international slave trade. The Northwest Ordinance, organizing the territory north of the Ohio, prohibited slavery. In Maryland and Virginia, manumission on the master’s death became customary, and in the years after the Revolution, several states, which did not adopt immediate abolition, undertook measures of gradual abolition.

The past is different, never uniform, neither constant nor progressive. I have no doubt that people have returned again and again to arguments from nature for all kinds of artifactual social arrangements, but neither the arguments nor the arrangements are the same from time to time, and your blithe assertions about all all slave societies are indefensible on their face.

In any case, I think this is as far as I wish to go in this increasingly off-topic direction.

A #slatepitch is knee-jerk contrarianism to gain attention, generally done in a facile way that you don’t think that the author really believes. I’d call Spooner’s piece honest radicalism, with all of the problems that that implies. Not every contravention of received wisdom or even real wisdom is a #slatepitch.

And you seem to have misrepresented it. You seem to be reading the text from here. You stopped quoting before the end, here’s the rest:

The great object is to procure the defeat of the Republicans. If defeated on the sixth of November, the faction itself will be extinct on the seventh. Those of its members who intend to support slavery, will then go over openly into its ranks; while those who intend to support liberty, will come unmistakably to her side. She will then know her friends from her foes. And thenceforth the issue will be distinctly made up, whether this be, or be not, a free country for all? And this one issue will hold its place before the country, until it shall be decided in favor of freedom.

Why do you think that Spooner thinks that the Republican Party would be dead on the 7th? Not because John Browns will rise up. From a brief reading, although I’ve hardly studied it, I see that he thinks that the Republican Party is divided in half:

Duplicity and deceit seem to be regarded by them as their only available capital. This results from the fact that the faction consists of two wings, one favorable to liberty, the other to slavery neither of them alone strong enough for success ; and neither of them honest enough to submit to present defeat for their principles. how to keep these two wings together until they shall have succeeded in clutching the spoils and power of office, is the great problem with the managers.

And that the wings will split if the party is defeated, as the end of his piece says. Was this a good plan, politically? Probably not. Was it an expectation for hordes of John Browns? No.

Note also that George Washington freed his slaves in his will (pending his wife’s death, if I recall aright). Jefferson didn’t follow his example, though he died so indebted he might not have been able to. Madison likewise thought slavery a blot on the country’s reputation.

I know that David Graeber is much beloved, indeed, worshipped, at CT, but in “Debt” he points out that slavery has been abolished (or ‘abolished’) many times in human history. For example, in the 3rd Century AD, almost all ‘progressive’ ‘liberal’ European intellectuals believed in slavery. By the 7th century AD, almost none of them did, and slavery had more or less died out in mainland Europe. I know crude progressive Marxism is out of fashion, and deservedly so, but it is worth pointing out that feudalism, (or ‘feudalism’), bad as it was, was still better than what came before it.

According to Wikipedia, FWIW, the first legal attempt to ban slavery was in the 3rd century BC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

It is amusing to see, over the centuries, how many slavemasters bewailed the burden under which they so unwillingly labored — how bitter it was for them to apply lash and chain to the images of God, when relief and liberation were staring them in the face.

But how often slavery has been abolished — that is not amusing, but ominous.

73: thanks, Mark!

I really admired what Rich Puchalsky @ 18 said, in relation to Lysander Spooner and how CT commenters might treat him: “As political systems approach failure some cranks become, in a sense, more and more right. . . . ”

I wasn’t sanguine about Rich’s prospective expression of contempt: “I think that the chances of any poster here being able to understand Lysander Spooner are more or less negligible.” Just seemed a little arrogant and mean, but . . . whatever.

Then Brad DeLong, alleged Berkeley historian, came along, jumped in the mud puddle, splashed a bit, sat down and began to bathe. Wow. The lesser evilism of 2012 projected backward on Lincoln was curious, but “the #slatepitch of the 1850s” was so completely over the top as to astonish.

For Brad’s timely performance alone, I think the thread must be awarded to Rich, though I note that Rich was patiently analytical, despite Brad’s provocations — so bonus points.

Job well done, thesis proven. I stand in awe.

What do you think Abraham Lincoln thought of Lysander Spooner’s calls for Republican defeat in 1860 as the most important task for the anti-slavery movement? What do you think Jefferson Davis thought of Lysander Spooner’s calls for Lincoln’s defeat in 1860 as the most important task of the anti-slavery movement?

I had really hoped that by waiting till today to congratulate Rich, Brad might have been gone. No such luck.

“…. despite Gore’s refusal to debate Nader or to countenance vote-swapping in safe states, …”

I can’t recall Nader asking for that – perhaps you could help me here?

Nader publicly and repeatedly stated that he saw no difference between the two parties, and that he wanted the Democrats defeated. He repeatedly acted according to this, and succeeded (with a little help from a Florida voter purge and SCROTUS).

His words and actions were very well aligned; I’ll judge him on that.

despite a Gore campaign so lukewarm and incompetent that it couldn’t carry the candidate’s home state,

I think what liberal Democrats fail to understand about Nader – and Nader supporters often fail to understand about liberal Democrats – is that we aren’t on the same side. A hypothetical Al Gore who is able to take Tennessee – and one who is forced to take Tennessee to win the election – is a considerably worse candidate than the one we had, as these things are judged by liberal Democrats.

(Similarly, a Romney who could take Massachusetts would have been a less bad candidate.)

PS: Barry and pf, what do you think of the Electoral College and first-past-the-post?

Thanks Rich, I went looking for what Douglass though of Lincoln, but couldn’t find it.

I did read that Douglass said Spooner’s insurrections “wouldn’t work” but I still have had much fun spinning alternate histories where a thousand John Browns and a thousand Nat Turners, provided arms and logistics from a post-Secession Lincoln government or private sources, create a South free of, wait, free from whites. The images are beautiful.

But before success, probably Lincoln would have sent troops down to make the sure the slaves didn’t deprive citizens of their property, violate the Constitution, or foster social disorder.

Oh, and also note that in 1864 Douglass had a meeting with Lincoln of which Douglass wrote in his autobiography:

I was the more impressed by his benevolent consideration because he before said, in answer to the peace clamor, that his object was to save the Union, and to do so with or without slavery. What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had even seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.

So John Brown’s original plan was more or less carried out, as part of war policy.

This whole thing about candidates losing their home state isn’t really on topic, but I can’t resist…

In the leadup to the 2000 election, a reporter asked George Bush what he thought about the fact that Gore was on track to lose his home state, and Bush corrected the reporter by pointing out that Gore was actually doing just fine in the District of Columbia

(as that is where Gore had actually grown up, see).
(there was never much discussion of the states where Bush really had grown up, but he did attend prep school, college and graduate school in states that Gore won, and also had his youthful drunk driving arrest incident near the family compound in another state that Gore won).

But yes, talking about failure of a candidate to win a “home state” which also happens to be ideologically hostile ground for his party is a bit silly. Still though I have to give a shout out to the all time champ of the category – the 2012 candidate who not only lost the state where he served as governor, but also lost the other state where he grew up while his father was serving as governor. Big props to Mitt!

stubydoo: Yes, I suppose it is a bit silly to blame a candidate for losing his home state. I’m sorry I brought it up. He did run a pretty poor campaign, though.

116: Political parties have multiple objectives, but successful ones (for certain values of “successful”) place a high priority on winning power. Nader never aimed to be successful in those terms, and that’s a key – and really intractable – difference between Nader supporters and Democrats. It puts the two groups on different sides of most electoral-related conflicts.

And no, I didn’t mean to suggest that Democrats shouldn’t address the Electoral College and first-past-the-post, any more than I was suggesting that they shouldn’t address Naderites or Republicans. I was just suggesting that the terms of that dialogue with the Nader folks should change to be more along the lines of the dialogue between Democrats and Republicans. I don’t accept your premise that Democrats have been indifferent to the Electoral College – pretty much all of the impetus for change in that area is coming from Democrats.

sorry, I meant RP @110

LFC, almost all radical movements are non-monolithic. But I didn’t introduce abolitionism into the discussion, really — as soon as Spooner became the topic, people like Corey and Brad might have been tipped off that the phrase anarcho-abolitionist actually means something. Instead, a grotesque flattening occurred, in which history was misrepresented in order to serve present-day rhetorical aims badly. But in terms of the movement being non-monolithic, Spooner served the important purpose of giving Douglass a justification to break from Garrison’s anti-Constitutionalism, which freed up Douglass to play more of an inside game than the outside game that Garrison stuck to. I don’t for a minute agree with Spooner’s method of Constitutional interpretation, which holds that the 3/5ths compromise wasn’t really about slaves because the word “slaves” doesn’t appear in the document and because documents unlike people can’t have hidden motives. But I see no sign that the people criticizing Barnett have the least idea what it means when he says he’s influenced by Spooner, or that they are aware of what Spooner did for Douglass, or really that they know anything at all about supposed similarities between Spooner attacking the Union side of the war and neo-Confederates saying that both sides were unjust.

More generally, I don’t see any sign that the people arguing in this way really understand radical movements or radicals at all. You can be, as I think that Bruce Wilder is (sorry if I misrepresent him) a New Deal influenced liberal and still have an appreciation as he does for what radicals do and what use they are to non-radical movements. But when they have to ask why radicals aren’t voting for a mainstream party, why they keep insisting on impossible things, why they can’t just have the advanced political understanding of high school bromides that they do, how they can possibly be serious about the crazy things they believe rather than being trolls or having hidden motives to boost the other side — it’s not showing political sophistication. Anything but.

Without crazy abolitionists like Spooner, no movement. Without the movement, Lincoln has nothing to be great about. If they’d all buckled down and voted for Lincoln rather than denouncing him, they’d have done the cause of freeing the slaves actual harm. Some people don’t understand this yesterday or today or any time. Frederick Douglass wrote something about thunder and agitation and struggle but it’s a meaningless mishmash of words to people who don’t understand, so I won’t bother quoting it.

As tepid as Lincoln was, his mere election caused the south to secede, which eventually achieved a result the radicals wanted. If the other side is evil enough, you can be pretty lousy yourself and yet work great good.

BDL @122:

But doesn’t Rich’s 113 pretty much cover this? Also, the weird thing about “FD was smarter in [etc.]” is that it elides how Lincoln’s position and rhetoric itself changed over the course of the war (or his campaign and presidency, say). This is exactly the kind of thing that the quoted bit in Rich’s 113 shows; it’s also something that Eric Foner, e.g., stresses over much of his work.

(And re the “#slatepitch” comment that kinda sorta started all this, I’ll set a quite low bar and ask for a link to one, umm, let’s say Andrew Cockburn article published by Slate. [Tho if they managed to publish some bullshit by him on climate change in the last couple of years of his life it doesn’t count, sorry.])

As always, there’s a difference between Lysander Spooner the actual person and Lysander Spooner the source of some quotes many libertarians love and use as justification in argument. We don’t find a lot of libertarians out actually supporting liberation movements – there are even fewer such people than there are Radley Balkos, as nearly as I know. On the other hand, we find quite a few libertarians talking about how the police power as such is innately morally worse than robbery, going on about the moral advantages of the Mafia and Triads over the Environmental Protection Agency, and of course happily playing the “no difference” card and doing their little bit to get Bush elected. Spooner the guy prepared to back John Brown has shrunk to Spooner the guy you quote while pushing the latest sovereign citizen scam.

@Bob in post 111

You might like to give Terry Bisson’s “Fire on the Mountain” a quick read. It’s a short novel based on the idea that John Brown was successful, set as “Nova Africa” is about to send its first mission to mars in 1959…

“I really don’t see that: I see Lincoln as working consistently throughout his career ”

I’ll review the thread for a moment. I’ve shown that what you presented as Spooner’s being “a piece of work” in 1860 was actually common to most of the abolitionists of the time. Spooner was more vociferous than most, but others like Douglass did more to actually oppose Lincoln electorally. So you don’t like the abolitionists of 1860, and think they’re stupid. You’re quite happy to generalize your criticism of Spooner to a criticism of Douglass for essentially the same reasons — the escaped slave turned orator and activist was, according to you, too stupid at the time to see that the white politician was on his side from the first.

I can imagine the post that Corey Robin would write from that, had it appeared on a libertarian blog. ‘I don’t mean to be condescending, but you seem to have forgotten high school level truths about the Civil War. It was about slavery. Abolitionists, you see, opposed slavery.’ I’m not even going to go into what later historical assumptions your calling Douglass not smart in 1860 is like.

I don’t agree with what libertarians have done to Spooner. As Bruce Baugh writes in #129, I don’t recognize the Spooner who was a member of the socialist First International in their writings either. But the original post was about a dispute between two parties that were each eager to misremember and misrepresent history in favor of present-day rhetoric — present-day rhetoric that is turned, in both of your ways, against the same kind of people who make the changes that you profess to admire as long as they are safely in the past.

It seems to me that the correct historical judgment here is that the South was right about Lincoln in 1860, Frederick Douglass was wrong, and Spooner was playing with fire to no good end. As Rich Puchalsky says, though, the dynamics of the time required all three to be present with their hopes, their fears, and their abhorrences intact, not to mention their relative willingness to speak openly, or to play their cards closer to their vests. More importantly, their foresight, or lack of it, had nothing to do with stupidity, and to take credit today for Lincoln’s political acumen, while decrying Spooner’s lack of it, is much too easy, and worse, it falsifies the political processes at work at the time to our own advantage.

As for the real impetus behind this debate, I have no real idea whether Obama is another Lincoln, or an imitation created by a mixture of hubris and good public relations, but as Douglass didn’t know Lincoln personally in 1860, I don’t know Obama now, and unlike Douglass, I’m not going to be invited in for a chat. What I do know, though, is that to say that the left should just shut up, realize that the time is not now, and grin and bear it is at best self-serving, and at worst a pretension to an understanding that no one can legitimately claim.

135: William Timberman: “Spooner was playing with fire to no good end.”

Yes, definitely.

But: William Timberman: “[Spooner’s] foresight, or lack of it, had nothing to do with stupidity…”

Seems to me that if I were looking for one-word labels for “playing with fire to no good end”, I would inevitably come up with “stupidity” and “#slatepitch”…

The idea that abolitionists should have written “Lincoln is great, let’s all go vote for him” is suitable for condemning the abolitionists, but might have sunk Lincoln if they’d done it.

This mischaracterization seems pretty necessary to your argument, but surely you see that nobody is saying this.

pf: “This mischaracterization seems pretty necessary to your argument, but surely you see that nobody is saying this.”

I knew that I should have given up on this thread once I’d won it. You’re asking me to slog through showing you that Brad is really writing what he’s writing?

That’s boring, and I’m not going to do it. I’ll just keep quoting what he actually writes. Here: “Seems to me that if I were looking for one-word labels for “playing with fire to no good end”, I would inevitably come up with “stupidity” and “#slatepitch”…”

And it all keeps coming back to what I wrote at the start. All good radicals play with fire to no good end. It’s what they do. If you characterize it as stupidity, you’re casting all radicalism as stupidity. It means that not just that Spooner was stupid — he was obscure, and some libertarians like him, so there’s no necessity of historical accuracy or fairness there from our guardians of history — it equally means that Garrison was stupid, and Douglass, and everyone else who stupidly demanded more than they possibly could get, and disarranged safe and reasonable politics.

It’s as if someone once wrote something about wanting rain without thunder and lightning, wanting the ocean without the roar of its waters. Something that I won’t quote in this thread because the people who most deserve to hear it will never hear it. People want fire, but they always want it to be directed to good ends. They want a mysterious non-spreading fire that never has the ability to burn anyone. They want the end of slavery, but never someone ready to condemn the Republican Party as being composed of half those for liberty, half those for slavery. Who then was supposed to have started the movement in the first place?

MPAV@142: I don’t think he meant it like that. If he’d said: “… once I’d been declared the winner of it” — which I suspect is what he meant — the humorous intent would have been clearer.

Brad@137: Doesn’t it depend on whether “to no good end” means “foolishly” (ie, with no prospect of success, immediate or eventual) or just “unsuccessfully”? If the latter, then “stupidly” is indeed a bit tendentious.

WT@140: Which did you mean? And what is the “historical process” currently thumbing its nose at Brad’s predictions?

OBAMA SAID THE TRIAL WAS CONDUCTED FAIRLY:

“The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner.  The prosecution and the defense made their arguments.  The juries were properly instructed that in a case such as this reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict.  And once the jury has spoken, that’s how our system works.”

THEN OBAMA WENT ON, TO ADDRESS FEELINGS:

“I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences [i.e., the experience many black people have had of being followed] inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.  And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.  The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws — everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.  And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.”

THEN OBAMA SAID THAT BLACKS ALREADY KNOW THAT THEIR YOUNG ARE DISPROPORTIONATELY CRIMINAL:

“…this isn’t to say that the African American community is naïve about the fact that African American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system; that they’re disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence.  It’s not to make excuses for that fact — although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context. … so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. …I think the African American community is also not naïve in understanding that, statistically, somebody like Trayvon Martin was statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.  So folks understand the challenges that exist for African American boys.  But they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it and that context is being denied.”

THEN OBAMA SAID THE JUSTICE DEPT. IS UNLIKELY TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS CASE:

“I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here.  Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government, the criminal code.  And law enforcement is traditionally done at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.”

THEN OBAMA MENTIONED A BUNCH OF THINGS WHERE WE “COULD POTENTIALLY FOCUS” AT “STATE AND LOCAL LEVELS”,  e.g. law enforcement training to reduce mistrust; examine “stand your ground” laws to see if they encourage use of firearms; help black kids.

THEN OBAMA SAID WE WON’T DO ANYTHING LEGISLATIVELY ABOUT IT:

“I’m not naïve about the prospects of some grand, new federal program.  I’m not sure that that’s what we’re talking about here. But I do recognize that as President, I’ve got some convening power, and there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front.  And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes, and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed — I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation.  And we’re going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.”

YET AFTER THAT, OBAMA SAID THAT HE ISN’T EVEN GOING TO DO MUCH JAWBONING ABOUT IT:

“There has been talk about should we convene a conversation on race.  I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations.  They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.  On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s the possibility that people are a little bit more honest…”

geo # 143

I was referring to BD’s support for the Great Moderation, and his apparent belief prior to the Great Surprise of 2007 that the major problems of political as well as macroeconomic stabilization had been solved. To his credit, he’s come to terms with that misjudgment, which he was by no means alone in making, and has done so very publicly at that, even though there was no clamor for him to do so. Nevertheless, I still find it hard to excuse him his contempt for the Left in general, his impatience with political processes which violate his behavioral norms, or his willingness to wave away the many casualties of the so-called American Century which have driven so many to rebel against the neoliberal consensus.

It’s tempting to think of yourself as wise when you’ve nothing much personally at stake, and even more tempting to grant yourself the right to sit in judgment on the aspirations of others. The truly wise, it seems to me, would resist the temptation.

“MPAV@142: I don’t think he meant it like that. If he’d said: “… once I’d been declared the winner of it” — which I suspect is what he meant — the humorous intent would have been clearer.”

Yes, intended as a joke. Though really, I used to have a self-set rule that once one person understood what I meant, that was good enough. Since Bruce evidently understood I probably should have just stopped. William too, so that’s double the usual right there.

“Brad@137: Doesn’t it depend on whether “to no good end” means “foolishly” (ie, with no prospect of success, immediate or eventual) or just “unsuccessfully”? If the latter, then “stupidly” is indeed a bit tendentious.”

From my point of view, it doesn’t really matter what sense of “to no good end” is meant. Foolishly, unsuccessfully, counterproductively, impossibly…. to take Garrison as an example, someone doesn’t set out to do something that almost everyone scorns, and that may quite possibly get them lynched, and still have the same laudable caution and small-c conservative judgement as we expect of most people. Here’s the first thing Garrison wrote in his newspaper:

On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard.

So let’s look back and tsk-tsk and say that he really should have taken only courses of action of the sort that would be approved of by an academic blogger.

Or here, the end of his speech linked above on John Brown and the principles or nonresistance:

We have a natural right, therefore, to seek the abolition of slavery throughout the globe. It is our special duty to make Massachusetts free soil, so that the moment the fugitive slave stands upon it, he shall take his place in the ranks of the free. God commands us to “hide the outcast, and bewray not him that wandereth.” I say, LET THE WILL OF GOD BE DONE! That is “the head and front” of my “fanaticism”! That is the extent of my “infidelity”! That comprehends all of my “treason”! THE WILL OF GOD BE DONE! (Great applause.)

Who do you want as the leader of the abolitionist movement? Someone who can say, in full fervor and sincerity, “the will of God be done!” Or rather, not who do you want, but who becomes the leader of that movement, because no other will do it?

Then why, afterwards, do you bring up this person’s historical memory and say that they were stupid not to trust Mr. Lincoln right away? That by speaking of the equivalence of the parties, they weren’t doing their cost / benefit analysis correctly?

After it’s respectable to oppose slavery, then people can conveniently forget what it took to oppose slavery, and ask why the historical abolitionists couldn’t be respectable. But if you approve of the end of slavery — really approve, not just mouth a pious meaningless statement — then you approve of Spooner. You approve of his angry, useless letter saying that no one should vote for the Republicans, and that America would be better off if the Democrats won. Because you can’t have one without the other.

Lee @ 145 and to reinforce JCH @ 150:

Lee you missed one:

THEN OBAMA SAID THAT RACE RELATIONS ARE IMPROVING AS THE YOUNGER GENERATIONS REPLACE THE OLD:

…But when I talk to Melia an Sasha and listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are -they’re better than we are- on these issues. An that’s true in every community I’ve visited across the country.

john c. halasz #150; ” ‘Deft’ actually means evasive, non-committal and determined to leave the status quo intact.”

Yes but with concision and panache. You have to specify what was evaded and determined, however, to make this anything really worth responding to.

We recently had a go-around on CT about being anti-war, and whether the idea that war is bad had any actual content, the way most people said it, in the sense that they’d actually be against any particular war. There were the usual bits about how if you were willing to say that the number of justifiable wars was greater than zero, you really couldn’t say anything, even though N=2 (American Civil War, WW II) out of however many wars there have been. Luckily people gave of a list of which other wars they thought were wise and / or justified and / or generally had to be done, and one of them was the Falklands. I plan on bringing up the Falklands every time from now on.

b9n10nt #151 –Thank you I did miss that.

Jim Henley 07.21.13 at 11:51 pm

” One factor nobody has mentioned so far is that orthodox libertarianism is genuinely, passionately antiwar. The general case against war is excellent, and the ex ante case against almost any conceivable war is as good. But there are two inconvenient use cases: the American Civil War and the war against Hitler. Each of these wars ended the greatest abomination of their day. Just plain did. You can cavil about whether either did this accidentally or on purpose or accidentally on purpose. But the destruction of race-based chattel slavery and the genocidal conqueror-state as a model were great boons to humanity.”

The problem is that by this definition (which I accept, and also accept Jim’s sound judgement), the number of actual libertarians shrinks by a *huge* factor. This is a problem for a real libertarianism in the USA, because it’s been hijacked by a very selectively ‘anti-government’ right-wing movement.

@158
I echo JW’s praise.

Spooner pops up from time to time in serveral different contexts but I’ve never troubled to learn all the ins and outs other than his basic abolitionist stance. Now I feel like I have at least some context (though far from a full education).

Thanks to all who added

@158 — Agreed.

In regard to orthodox libertarians being pacifistic, that seems to depend on the orthodox libertarian. There are certainly some. In recent Net-slumming tours, I have noticed a considerable effort by shills and trolls to set libertarians and proggies against one another using wedge issues, lest their common interests in opposing war, imperialism, and plutocracy perhaps combine. One wonders if the effort is volunteered or paid for.

I thought Smiley’s objection to Obama’s speech was a helpful thing, as is Lee A’s above. And I say this despite generally having liked Obama’s speech a lot, and the fact that I sympathize with the position that Obama in.

But if we were to say that Obama’s dithering made him the equivalent of a Republican, I’d have to disagree there.

The reason I insulted libertarians on Obamacare is because it is another issue where they have gotten it wrong, yet stick to their position religiously, causing the harm of others. Western liberalism is great, but going beyond that to suppose that markets always bring more freedom, along the lines of neoliberalism, is a mistake, apparently coming directly out of Hayek’s misappropriation of “spontaneous order” to be a god-principle. (This godlike misappropriation is also pointed out in Mirowski’s new book, wherein by the way he quotes from Quiggin’s Zombie Economics and Corey’s The Reactionary Mind). Among many blue-collar environmentalists like me of course, libertarianism always sounded wrong. After 30 years of deregulation and market reforms leading to increasing inequality and no diminution in the need for a welfare state or environmental repair, you would think the game is over. Leftist do not appear to be ready to do anything about it, however, so perhaps not.

You know, I find that if you just drop the idea that “ad hominem” is necessarily a fallacy and adopt the rule that libertarians are always wrong, even when what they are saying might be right when said by someone else:

a) you will pretty much invariably arrive at the correct conclusion

and

b) you will save yourself a lot of pointless nit picking in arriving there

Douglass is indelible. Nowadays I think everybody can agree to being sideswiped by the neoliberal putsch, the question is what to do about it.

Rich, I don’t understand. Doesn’t the neo-Confederacy take the Civil War as an imposition upon the Southern states’ rights by a more centralized government, and therefore an imposition upon their freedoms? Spooner’s objection, that “freeing the slaves” was a diversion to impose essentially (I will hazard it) neoliberalism (“political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white”), is not that far from the rhyme scheme, is it?

Lee A. Arnold: “Doesn’t the neo-Confederacy take the Civil War as an imposition upon the Southern states’ rights by a more centralized government, and therefore an imposition upon their freedoms? Spooner’s objection, that “freeing the slaves” was a diversion to impose essentially (I will hazard it) neoliberalism (“political, commercial, and industrial slavery, to which they have subjected the great body of the people, both black and white”), is not that far from the rhyme scheme, is it?”

If you worked for the better part of two decades to actually free slaves, then writing that “freeing the slaves” was a diversion takes on a very different quality than when a neo-Confederate says something superficially similar later.

From the neo-Confederate, it’s concern trolling — it says “Don’t be concerned with my racism, that’s not what’s important. Isn’t it much more important for you to be concerned with abstract economic issues instead, especially those that go along with the denial that the Federal government has the power to do anything?”

From Spooner, it’s actual concern, linked to actual anarchism, not “state’s rights”. A quick look through _No Treason_ doesn’t see any mentions of more centralized government, or of state’s rights. There is none of the neo-Confederate idea that the states had magical rights which the Federal government didn’t; there are just individuals who choose or don’t choose whether to enter into social contracts.

Here, I’ll quote Mike Huben, who I think I saw commenting here recently. From his non-Libertarian FAQ:

28. Have you read “No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority”?

“No Treason” is a lengthy rant that doesn’t take longer than the first paragraph to begin its egregious errors.

For example, in the first paragraph: “It [The Constitution] purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago.” Thus he focuses his attention on the Preamble, and evidently ignores Article VII, which says EXACTLY who contracted for the Constitution:

“The ratification of the conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same. Done in Convention, by the unanimous consent of the States present, the seventeenth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the twelfth. In Witness whereof, we have hereunto subscribed our names.”
[signatories FOR STATES omitted.]

He’s wrong on this simple matter of fact: the constitution says who contracted with whom. But then he goes on to make a big deal about the people of that era being dead, as if contracts between organizations lapse when their office holders depart.

The rest of his “analysis” is equally shoddy, and consists largely of calling government a collection of thieves and murderers at least 75 times. David Friedman, in “The Machinery of Freedom”, says Spooner “attacks the contract theory of government like a lawyer arguing a case”: but REAL presentations of cases have to cope with counterarguments, and can’t depend so heavily on invalid presumptions which are easily shot full of holes.

This kind of thing is why Garrison, who was a lot more polite about confronting actual Spooner than Huben has to be later about people who are just misusing Spooner’s work, wrote “We admit Mr. Spooner’s reasoning to be ingenious – perhaps, as an effort in logic, unanswerable” but rejected its conclusions.

I understand that states’ rights is different from individual rights, but I also understand that libertarians prefer less hierarchical governmental structures (say: state, as opposed to federal) in pursuit thereof. Which is why some of libertarianism has been so comportable in neo-Confederate locales. Concern trolling (“Don’t be concerned with my racism, that’s not what’s important”) is surely the description of, say, Rand Paul’s campaign lieutenant Jack Hunter, who is now hoping to delete many of his comments from the web and memory, — and, it is just now being reported, resigned from Paul’s staff last night… But there are lots of people, particularly young people, who think it’s okay to hang the confederate flag in southern statehouses today, and they may not always be racist: it is because they are young and don’t like the Washington-Wall Street axis. Individually they may not be racists, though they are automatically tapping into a deeper history which they do not know. So then other people (“northerners”, “blacks”) take offense, and this spurs more similar behavior, why? Because there is nothing for p.r. like Controversy, and everyone only gets 15 minutes of fame anyway.

I am conditioned with far lower expectations.

Yeah, a Republican president would’ve, on behalf of the nation, apologized to the Zimmerman family.

Bruce: “Libertarians are fascinated with the constitutional crisis aspect, because libertarianism of certain stripes revolves around fantasies of constitutionalism. Barnett, in particular, belongs to a constitutionalist strain of libertarian thinking. (And, he’s reading Spooner, as a theorist of constitutionalism, not as an anarcho-abolishnist, whatever that might be.)”

Yes. This is why, although Corey Robin says that my argument wasn’t an argument with him, it really was, even before he agreed with Brad’s comment. The original post has him not really being sure what Barnett is saying but being sure that it has to do with a “forgetting—that deep historical error which held that the Civil War was a fight over tariffs or some other nonsense”. But Barnett was influenced not by a forgetting, but by a tract written only 5 years after the end of the Civil War by a participant in those events. The forgetting was in the other direction.

Corey Robin doesn’t want to argue about it, so I’ll stop there. Thanks to the various people who liked my comments, but of course I was largely cribbing from Douglass. The bit about “People want fire, but they always want it to be directed to good ends. They want a mysterious non-spreading fire that never has the ability to burn anyone” would be a wonderful metaphor if only I’d invented it.

In California, it sounds like the legal system is becoming effectively two-tier on strictly economic lines, and if you are in the bottom tier no matter what race, court dates and geographic venue may be distant, perhaps impossibly distant. In this case, cutting government spending directly impacts availability of Constitutionally-guaranteed remedy. Yet another reason why the entire population is finally likely to overthrow neoliberalism. There are less transaction costs in having a well-funded state.

The notion that America will work hard to pass the exam if only the Lecturer-in-Chief makes sure to cover all the necessary topics is … strange.

Gotta blame somebody.

Things are ever so much easier that way.

It’s of course true that whatever hold the notion [of crimes against humanity] had after World War II has been entirely dissipated, not to say actively stomped down, in the US and elsewhere, and that there’s no prospect of restoring it anytime soon that I can see.

Bit of an overstatement, to say the least. The indictments on which Mladic and Karadzic (misspelled,sorry) are currently on trial I think incl. crimes vs humanity among the counts. Plus there’s the Intl Criminal Ct which many countries, though not the US of course, joined. It’s true there are others who probably should face charges of some sort who won’t, and we know who they are.

LFC @ 186

Point taken.

@b9n10nt:

I’m not unsympathetic to the kind of complaint you’re raising, but given that Obama is who he is (let’s say, someone who could become the US president), the speech was actually quite good. These remarks by Coates, while brief, are I think very much on point.

“yeah, I read them.”

Then I don’t know why you misreported them.

“Are you also satisfied by the Democratic Party’s general efforts on behalf of legal, economic, and political equality for black America?”

There are efforts?

(Leaving aside whatever “economic equality” means … regardless, it ain’t happening soon. See the news today on which areas have the least upward mobility; the old Black Belt in the South lights up like Vegas.)

I just don’t think presidents accomplish much by speeches. Tho I’m actually a bit surprised by the relatively mild reaction to this one from the usual wing nuts.)