The
signers of the Declaration of Independence subscribed their names under this concluding
statement: “And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on the protection
of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes,
and our sacred Honor.” It expressed less
brotherly comradeship or political braggadocio than a life-and-death commitment
under threatening circumstances. What the
British called a rebellion we have called a revolution, and colonialists’ armies
were losing. So signers of the Declaration
were either British traitors or American patriots depending on the outcome of
their actions against the government in England, its designated colonial governors,
and its military forces. Had England suppressed
the rebellion, the signatories would have been hunted down and executed or imprisoned,
and their families impoverished and exiled from society in disgrace.
Americans
won the war and the peace. They achieved
not only political separation from England, but also a political rebalancing of
authorities between central and regional governments. However, it began with a false start. Fearful of concentrated power in a monarchy, political
leaders approved The Articles of Confederation, which limited the powers of the
federal government and immediately proved too weak to serve the shared
interests of the states. They soon corrected
their error with The Constitution of the United States, which gave greater but
still limited authority to the federal government. Since then, the boundaries of authority between
federal and state governments, though flexible and fluctuating in changing
circumstances, have made neither side too weak for effective government or too
strong for a robust democracy.
From
the larger perspective of a cross-Atlantic polity, the hostilities between England
and its colonies constituted a civil war—America’s first civil war (1775-1783). Its second was the Civil War (1861-1865), a rebellion
with a similar structure: a central government and secessionist states (not, as
the Southern misnomer would have it, “The War between the States”). The argument over causes of the rebellion—slavery
or states rights—relies on a verbal distinction without a material difference. All rebellious states viewed slavery as the, not
a, fundamental issue of states rights, so fighting for states rights was fighting
for slavery, and vice versa. United by only
this shared ideology, but divided by separate state interests, the Confederacy could
not—in the end, did not—prove successful as a functioning government of a cohering
country.
The
concepts of government and its appropriate purposes differ greatly between
those accepted by Americans at its founding and those asserted by Confederates,
as the different preambles to the U.S. and the Confederate constitutions
indicate, respectively:
“We the
People of the United States, in Order
to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide
for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution
for the United States of America.
“We,
the people of the Confederate States,
each state acting in its sovereign and independent
character, in order to form a permanent
federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God
— do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.
Indeed, the constitution of
the Confederacy made its failure inevitable because it gave no real authority to
its central government in Richmond. The
Confederacy thus repeated the first mistake of the Founding Fathers in
over-correcting for unrealistic concerns about excessive centralized authority.
The
Confederate constitution, drafted and adopted in wartime, asserts the states’
“sovereign and independent” status. It creates
a federal government concerned with only law and order, and liberty, for whites. Otherwise, it creates nothing viable. It says nothing about perfecting the Confederacy
as a whole; understandably, in view of slavery, nothing about promoting the
general welfare; and, not at all understandably, during an ongoing war, nothing
about ensuring the common defense.
In
the short term, in the midst of a war of succession, with some of America’s
best military leaders and most dedicated soldiers, Confederate politicians were
so parochially, polemically ideological that they could not create a federal
government with the powers to conduct a unified effort against what its members
regarded as a common enemy. At most, it
could request, not require, troops and supplies to fight for succession, to
which requests, states responded if, when, and to what degree they chose.
In
the long term, in decades of acrimony leading to hostilities, Southern politicians
thought more about a “Southern way of life” dependent on plantations and enjoyed
by their owners than about protecting an increasingly inefficient economy
increasingly less able to sustain it or satisfy the needs of other
Southerners. Indeed, twenty years before
the Civil War, poor whites began their emigration westward over the Oregon
Trail. Those politicians never
considered, before or during the war, whether, and if so, how, a federal
government with limited powers could assist a slave-based, soil-depleting, cotton-crop
economy and keep its member states from competing with or undermining one
another. Thus, Southern and Confederate
leaders inspired and fought America’s second civil war and first culture war
with no sense of what winning them would mean for their people in changing
economic and social circumstances. Since
defeat, they have romanticized and tried to restore that vanished way of life more
than recognized new realities and rebuilt a new life for the South. To this day, Southerners have retained and
spread their anti-government politics despite the fact that federal investment helped
improve their standard of living. And,
to this day, despite their patriotic rhetoric, they still resist the basic
values and virtues of America’s founding documents.
America
is approaching its third civil war, a war resembling its first two. The major issue remains the balance of
authority between the central, or federal, government and regional, or state,
governments. The partisan divide between
Democrats (also liberals) and Republicans (also conservatives) reflects the
divide between the preambles to the two constitutions. Democrats act in accordance with the U. S.
Constitution; Republicans, the party of the “Southern strategy,” with the Confederate
constitution. The differences begin with
their first words: Democrats mean “We the People” to mean all people; Republicans
mean “We, the people” to mean white people—with one notable difference between
upper- and lower-case spellings. Corresponding
differences are evident in Democratic support and Republican opposition to
programs and practices respecting the rights and benefits of people, in civil
rights, education, health, safety, and the environment; accordingly, they size
the role of the federal government large or small. The differences are also evident in the
Democrats’ and the Republicans’ respective views of what it means to be an
American; Democrats embrace equality and diversity, and Republicans, inequality
and conformity. Thus arise the
controversies and conflicts—or culture wars”—over moral, religious, and social
issues, and the size of the role of the federal government in them. The paradox is the inconsistency on this
critical point. Between the two sets of
issues, Democrats and Republicans switch their positions on large or small
government.
All
of these issues still involve, directly or indirectly, America’s fundamental issues,
the ones which divided the country when it wrote its Constitution and when it
fought its second Civil War: equality and race.
Because of changing historical circumstances, these issues have metastasized
by association with others: gender, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. A federal government which advances equality
for all citizens rejects “states rights,” a stance used to justify legal discrimination
on the basis of membership in one or another group, and thereby sanction the bigotries
of Americans who have inherited the cultural legacy of Tories and Confederates,
sustained the bigotries of their European countries of origin (e.g., Reagan
Republicans), or embraced bigotry to prop up their self-assurance against their
insecurities. Thus, Republican-controlled
state governments have enacted laws which impose restriction on members of the
LGBTQQ community or which impede voting for racial minorities as well as other groups
inclined to vote for Democrats: naturalized citizens, Muslims, women, and
students.
At
the same time, the election of Donald J. Trump as president has given
expression in legislation, regulation, executive orders, and appointments to traditional
Republican ideological impulses akin to those of the Confederate, not the U. S.,
constitution. He is the modern Republican Party’s proxy to represent small-federal
government positions on deregulation favoring business, and limitations on rights
and benefits for citizens; and to represent large-federal government prejudices
on “real Americans” and the “American-way-of-life,” biases, which have been
dominant in the Republican Party since Goldwater’s GOP opposed the Civil Rights
Act of 1964.
Necessarily,
Republican leaders House Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell approve of Trump’s fronting for them.
Indifferent to his sins of office, they must appear uneasy about his nepotism,
conflicts of interest, influence peddling, profiteering, and possibly treason. They allow Trump to denigrate and dismiss experts
and professionals, discredit and debilitate agencies, and disrupt and disregard
civil and political norms. They propose
a Confederate-style mix of small government deregulation favoring corporations
and oligarchs—the new plantations and their owners—and reduced programs for all
others; and of big government meddling favoring Christian and conservative
culture warriors—the new “states rights” advocates of inequalities and
injustices affecting minorities of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and
national origins. As a prologue to a
putsch against the state, they support the growing size, strength, and scope of
paramilitary agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the
growing callousness of their client and other federal courts, especially a reactionary
activist Supreme Court. They accept the increasingly
unrestrained police powers of the Border Patrol (BP), the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS), and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The activities of these agencies are
preliminary skirmishes in an incremental Republican coup against the government
and rebellion against its Constitutional democracy. America’s third civil war has begun.
I
close with a personal note of contempt for the agencies (BP, INS, and ICE) and
their uniformed agents. When I served in
Vietnam, I was a member of armed forces which faced an armed enemy in its
country. I admit that American military
forces did kill many thousands of civilians as a matter of inadvertence or
recklessness in wartime, or of weak or corrupt officers in the field. But no government policy or legal
discretionary practice intended to make war on civilians, especially unarmed women,
children, and old men; we did not make war on Vietnamese who sought our
protection or a better way of life.
By
contrast, these paramilitary agencies (BP, INS, ICE) and their uniformed agents
make war on civilians in this country, either those who have fled recently to this
country from extreme distress and terrorism in theirs or on those who have
lived peacefully and productively in this country for years and decades. They target the weakest and most vulnerable
first (whatever their purported priorities): those who have obeyed the laws or
have committed misdemeanors because they are easier to apprehend than those who
have committed felonies. They harass and
terrorize them before arrests and raids, violate traditional sanctuaries of
schools and churches, arrest them without distinction, incarcerate them for
long periods of time, and treat them badly throughout the process. They intend cruelty to families; they
specialize in separating members of families from one another, including small
children from their mothers, in humiliating and painful ways—just like
slaveowners who broke up black families for advantage. These BP, INS, and ECI agents have no excuse
for their inhumane conduct, even if the law allows it; they voluntarily joined these
paramilitary agencies and can just as voluntarily quit them. Their conduct in obedience to brutal orders disgraces
their pose of professionalism. Shame on
these agencies and shame on all these uniformed agents for the dishonor which
they bring on America, for their mockery of the Statue of Liberty, and for
their part in debasing this country’s best values.