The best of times, the worst of times: Supreme Court rulings on the Voting Rights Act and gay marriage

It’s the time of year when Supreme Court rulings come one after another; this year we have a very mixed bag. The principles of liberty and justice for all were violated by yesterday’s ruling striking down Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They were upheld by today’s ruling striking down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

We will post at more length on both rulings shortly, as we all begin to grapple once again with the ups and downs of participating in the always ongoing, never finished fight against human nature and us v. them that is the price and privilege of being citizens of the United States.

Why the American Revolution is not a model for gun ownership today

Often one hears Americans on the news saying that the Second Amendment is necessary to us today because we may need to take up arms against an oppressive government in the 21st century, just as we did in 1775, and that those who anticipate doing so in the near future share the motivations of Americans during the Revolutionary War. Our thoughts on the Amendment can be found here; in this post, we will spell out why our situation in this century is not at all like that on the eve of Revolution in the 18th century, although we have the feeling this should be obvious without our intervention.

—During the Revolution, we fought a foreign government and a foreign occupation.

This is the key item to note. Granted, we overstate a little, so let’s go through it and be clear. The American colonies generally had popularly elected legislatures and royally appointed governors, so laws in the colonies came from two very different sources: representatives of the American people, and representatives of the British crown. Our experience of law was mixed. Legislatures generally made life difficult for governors who betrayed the people’s interests, especially in the realm of taxation, and so the influence of royal governors, who technically reported to no one but the king, was limited. Until, that is, the 1760s, post-French and Indian War, when London began direct rule of its colonies in North America. Parliament passed Acts (Stamp Act, Sugar Act, Tea Act, Coercive Acts) which were to be enforced without any input from legislatures. Indeed, even the governors were bypassed eventually as British soldiers were sent to America to make sure Acts were enforced. Americans who disobeyed Acts were to be sent to London for trial. This is the key moment, in the 1760s, when long-standing doubts about how much the American colonies owed to Britain were crystallized for many into clear convictions that London and Parliament did not consider Americans to be British citizens and did not grant them the rights of citizens, and were thus, through these Acts, imposing a foreign government on the American colonies. By refusing to allow American representatives in Parliament, the British government was confirming this. By sending troops to maintain order, the British government was occupying lands it believed to be hostile possessions; Americans were alien combatants.

It’s very clear that we are not remotely in that position today. Any Americans who oppose the government and/or its actions (taxation, immigration, welfare) are opposing their own government, popularly elected by their fellow Americans and even, perhaps, by they themselves. We don’t need to resort to arms to oppose our government because soldiers from another country are not in our streets and homes enforcing foreign laws. We resort to the voting booth, the referendum, and the ratification process to change or oppose our government. U.S. citizens today have rights that their government enforces and upholds—and if it doesn’t, we work through the courts and the political bodies to make it do so.

—Americans during the Revolution did not fight on their own.

They fought in their locally organized militias, which joined the Continental Army led by George Washington. They fought in the army, not as a vigilante group. Individual citizens submitted themselves and their guns to a government-authorized national army. That’s hardly what people today are picturing when they say they need guns to fight the government if it becomes oppressive. In 1775, Americans were fighting a formal war against a formal army. They weren’t sitting in their homes waiting for someone to challenge them and get blown away.

—Americans during the Revolution were fighting to keep their government alive.

Americans who fought in the Revolution were hoping to see the new government, represented by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, firmly and officially established as the government of their nation. They were not fighting to get rid of government, as so many Second Amendment fans seem to want to do today. They knew that the nation needed a strong government (though not necessarily fully centralized) to survive, and their aim was to make sure that government was fair once it was established—that’s why the Constitution was ratified by popularly elected officials, and why even common people clamored for a Bill of Rights to be added to it. Americans in the 1770s were fighting for government, not against it. They did not believe that armed individuals were a proper substitute for state and federal government.

So we have three good distinctions to draw between ourselves and our ancestors, and hopefully we can put this ridiculous argument to rest. We no longer have to use guns to maintain our freedoms; we have to use our rights as citizens to vote and participate in government to maintain our freedoms.

But what if our government becomes perverted and undemocratic, people ask? What if our political system fails? Then we’ll have to use force to protect ourselves.

it seems clear that the only way this could happen is if the American people fail in their participatory duty as citizens, so we are back to our original argument, which is that as long as we do our duty, the government we elect can never fail to be what we want it to be. It’s only by withdrawing from participation in our democracy that we lose it, and by looking for reasons to rise up in arms that we threaten ourselves with that dire possibility.

Oliver Stone’s untold history of the United States (and the Soviet Union)

Part 3 of our series on Stone’s “Untold History of the United States”, currently running in 10 one-hour episodes on Showtime. So far in our review of Episode 1—World War II, we have not encountered a lot of U.S. history; it has mostly been a retelling of world events with a loving focus on Stalin and the Soviet Union as lone crusaders against Hitler. More, unfortunately, on that below.

But at about 19.00 Stone introduces Henry Wallace, FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture, as our first unsung hero of U.S. history. Wallace directed the soil conservation program that helped reverse the Dust Bowl, and was an outspoken opponent of racism against black Americans and Jewish people worldwide. When FDR chose Wallace as his running mate in 1940, the Democratic party protested, leading the president to write a letter to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention saying he would not accept their nomination if they did not accept Wallace’s. Stone edits the letter, of course, to make a sound bite; there’s nothing wrong with that. But oddly, he changes the end of the letter fairly substantially. The actual text is:

“The party must go wholly one way or wholly the other. It cannot face in both directions at the same time. By declining the honor of the nomination for the presidency, I can restore that opportunity to the convention. I so do.”

Stone gives it as:

“The party cannot face in both directions at the same time. Therefore I decline the honor of the nomination for the presidency.”

The meaning is changed, from “I will refuse to run unless you let me unify the party on morally right terms” to “I’m not running.” This level of editing makes one wonder about the accuracy of all the other quotes given in the episode, and whether the goal of making a more dramatic soundbite led Stone and the editors to substantially change the content of other quotes.

Another basic law of documentary film-making is broken here, as Stone uses footage of Roosevelt delivering a radio address as a voiceover artist reads the letter text, seemingly saying to viewers that this is footage of Roosevelt actually reading from the letter. The lips don’t match the words well until the very end, where whatever Roosevelt was actually saying matches “the presidency” very closely. You don’t pretend to have footage of something you don’t have footage of.

FDR’s tough stance paid off, and Wallace was accepted as the vice-presidential nominee. So far in the episode, FDR is coming off pretty well, as someone who would have liked to aid the Spanish Republic, and forced his party into braving conservative pressure. The only real negative so far is the U.S.’s perversely small quota allowed for Jewish immigration from 1933-1945, for which FDR must take some blame.

At 27.40, Stone at last acknowledges Stalin’s paranoia by saying it would not allow him to believe that Germany would attack its new Soviet ally in 1941. But we veer back into Stalin-boosting at 29.28, when Stone says that after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was launched, “Stalin begged Britain for military material and to land immediately in Europe and engage Hitler on a second front. And for the west, it was now crucial to keep the Soviet Union in the war to absorb the main thrust of the Nazi war machine.” To say that the Allies wanted the Soviet Union in the war simply to let someone else be destroyed in their place is inaccurate, to put it mildly, and Stone himself contradicts this cynical view immediately before this clip, at 29.15, when he says the west feared that the Soviets would fall to the Nazis, and conclude a separate peace. The prospect of the Nazis controlling the Soviet Union and its massive resources of farmland and oil was so dire that Churchill, an entrenched anti-communist, “pledged support for the Soviet Union.” So the real reason it was crucial to keep the Soviet Union in the war was not so it could be destroyed by the Nazis while the west looked on laughing, but to keep it in the war so that its crucial resources would not be used to fuel the Nazi war effort. If the Soviet Union fell, the odds of defeating the Nazis shrank considerably.

But Stone continues to present the west as anxious to support a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union, explaining the reluctance of U.S. military leaders to send war materiel to the USSR, and the reluctance of the British to divert that war materiel from their own war effort to the eastern front, this way: “There were still many in the west who frankly were glad to see the Soviet Union finally on her knees.” It’s true that many American leaders would have been glad to see the Soviet Union fall. It’s not true to say that that is the reason why they did not want to provide war supplies to Stalin. American leaders hesitated to get involved in a war the U.S. was not part of—in the summer of 1941 the U.S. was officially neutral, and getting involved in the war might invite an attack on the U.S. British leaders hesitated to redirect war supplies from Britain to the Soviet Union because Britain was still fighting for its life at that point. They did not know, as we do now, that Germany would not attempt another invasion of Great Britain. Britain was the only western European nation still fighting the Nazis, and it’s reasonable that its leaders would not want their only outside supply line from the U.S. sent to the eastern front. Stone has just said Churchill pledged to support the Soviet Union because he needed them in the war. So how can he then say Britain was “frankly” glad to see the Soviet Union fall?

The real issue in 1941 was one that would persist for three more years: the Allies wanted to open up a western front but were unable to get the foothold in Europe to do so, and needed considerable firepower in the west to create that opportunity. There was no conspiracy to let the Nazis destroy the Soviet Union. If the USSR fell, then the Nazis could return their full focus to the west, and then the odds of carrying out the D-Day invasion would have shrunk dramatically.

Stone then moves on to FDR’s secret meeting with Churchill in Newfoundland in August 1941, and notes that FDR was reluctant to help Churchill protect and extend its empire; the Atlantic Charter that came out of the meeting that set the Allied goals for a post-war world specifically ruled out “territorial aggrandizement” as a goal. Stone then has audio of FDR explaining the “Four Freedoms” (freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear), and ends it by saying “These were big words, but the Atlantic Charter was a truly visionary document.” (34.03) The Four Freedoms, however, were not in the Atlantic Charter; they were introduced in a speech by FDR 7 months earlier, in January 1941. Yes, the principles of the Freedoms are upheld by the Atlantic Charter, but the articulation of the Freedoms is not in the Charter, and it’s sloppy history to say they were. And just another red flag about the accuracy of the series as a whole…

…as we see when we move on to the origins of the Manhattan Project. Stone describes how it was turned over to the U.S. military and the oversight of Major General Leslie Groves. He says that Vice President Wallace “had a low opinion of Groves, believing him ‘a slightly pathological, anti-semitic Roosevelt-hater, and outright fascist.'” (42.54) Then Stone moves on to the team Groves created. Wallace may well have believed Groves was all those things, but the responsible historian cannot simply present Wallace’s opinion as the objective truth about Groves, as Stone does here. What if a history of the U.S. 50 years from now introduces President Obama by quoting a neo-conservative politician claiming that Obama was a Kenyan citizen posing illegally as a U.S. citizen, and then just moved on, letting that stand as the only description of the president, tacitly saying it is true? What if a history of the U.S. 50 years from now introduced President George W. Bush by quoting an activist claiming that Bush was in on the September 11th attacks and then moved on, letting it stand as true? If you present incendiary charges in what is supposed to be a documentary, you have to prove them. Stone does not.

On to another go-around at 44.22 about Stalin “pleading” for a second front, and here at least gives a few accurate reasons why this didn’t happen, from Eisenhower’s estimation that it would take much longer than the U.S. had thought to create the opportunity for a landing in western Europe to Churchill’s concerns about holding North Africa, in part hoping that the second front could be opened up in southern Europe from British North Africa.

We are almost done; next time will be the last time, but it will be an enormous dose of truth v. myth, so be ready.

Next time: “historians agree”

Gay marriage and the tyranny of the majority—no more?

Yes, it’s the seventh appearance of this post, which we run each time the issue of gay marriage comes up in high court in the U.S. The first time was back on May 21, 2008, when California’s Supreme Court decided that banning gay marriage was unconstitutional. The original point was that whenever a court overturns a law, there are always those who squawk—incorrectly—that it has overstepped its authority. The judiciary in the U.S. is meant to overturn laws, even laws with great popular support, that are unconstitutional because they restrict peoples’ liberty for no good reason.

Overturning bans on gay marriage started out as an example of thwarting this “tyranny of the majority”, as de Tocqueville called it, but now that the majority of Americans support or do not care to ban gay marriage, this type of legislation is becoming a rebuke to tyranny of the minority. That’s heartening.

Here is the original post, resurfacing now as we circle back to California. The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a challenge to that original California ruling that made banning gay marriage illegal in the state:

The California Supreme Court’s decision that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional has been met with the by-now common complaint that the Court overstepped its bounds, trampled the wishes of the voters, and got into the legislation business without a permit.

A review of the constitutionally described role of the judiciary is in order.

The famous commentator on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, talked a great deal in his books Democracy in America about the tyranny of the majority. This is when majority rule—the basis of democracy—ends up perverting democracy by forcing injustice on the minority of the public.

For example, slavery was an example of the tyranny of the majority. Most Americans in the slave era were white and free. White and free people were the majority, and they used their majority power to keep slavery from being abolished by the minority of Americans who wanted to abolish it. The rights of black Americans were trampled by the tyranny of the majority.

Before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the majority of Americans were fine with segregated schools. They used their majority power to oppress the minority of Americans who were black, or who were white and wanted desegregation.

In each example, the majority is imposing and enforcing injustice which is incompatible with democracy. They are tyrannizing rather than governing.

The judiciary was created to break this grip of majority tyranny. The legislature—Congress—cannot usually break majority tyranny because it is made up of people popularly elected by the majority. But the appointed judiciary can break majority tyranny because its sole job is not to reflect the wishes of the people but to interpret the Constitution.

If the judiciary finds that a law made by the legislature perverts democracy and imposes the tyranny of the majority, it can and must strike that law down. This is what happened in California. The court found that although the majority of Californians (as evidenced by a previous referendum) had voted to ban gay marriage, that majority was enforcing and imposing injustice on the minority. So the court found the ban unconstitutional.

This is not beyond the scope of the judiciary, it’s exactly what it is meant to do.

I heard a commentator yesterday saying the California court should have left the issue to “the prerogative of the voters”. But if the voters’ prerogative is to oppress someone else, then the court does not simply step aside and let this happen.

The same people who rage against the partial and biased justices who lifted this ban are generally the same people who would celebrate justices who imposed a ban on abortion. People who cry out for impartiality are generally only applying it to cases they oppose.

So that’s what the judiciary does: it prevents the tyranny of the majority from enforcing injustice in a democracy. Like it or not, the “will of the people” is not always sacred, and sometimes must be opposed in the name of equality.

The Voting Rights Act under attack

The Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to strike down sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This has been a top news story, particularly after Justice Antonin Scalia called the VRA itself (not just the sections in question) a “racial entitlement”. Let’s look at the VRA of 1965 and the debate over it in the Court.

The VRA was passed in 1965 as part of President Johnson’s civil rights legislation. The U.S. Department of Justice website describes it this way: “Pursuant to the Act, the Voting Section undertakes investigations and litigation throughout the United States and its territories, conducts administrative review of changes in voting practices and procedures in certain jurisdictions, and monitors elections in various parts of the country.” This means that voting procedures anywhere in the U.S. can be reviewed, especially when those procedures are changed, and that elections can be monitored to make sure they are fair. Notice the language goes from the entire U.S. and its territories to “certain jurisdictions”—this was originally directed at the southern states, where repression of black voters was well-documented. The Act does not say “southern states” because its authors knew that while it was the south that had a demonstrable problem with fair elections in 1965, the problem could crop up anywhere else at any time. So wherever unfair elections were discovered, those “certain jurisdictions” would come under scrutiny.

Sections 2, 4 and 5 of the Act are the most critical. Section 2 forbids race discrimination in poll worker hiring, voter registration, and redistricting plans. Section 4 sets out the criteria for determining when a jurisdiction is violating fair elections and voting. And Section 5 states that once your state or territory has been designated as problematic and unfair in its voting and election process, any change with respect to voting there can’t be legally enforced until it’s been reviewed by the U.S. District Court or Attorney General. Any jurisdiction with a proven history of voting discrimination had to prove that the change being proposed is not discriminatory—not just another attempt to prevent minorities from voting freely. The jurisdiction has to prove the absence of racial discrimination, and if it can’t, the proposed change cannot be made law. If the suspect jurisdiction can prove that it has gone 10 years without any voter discrimination, it is no longer subject to Section 5.

The key word in all this, of course, is proof. The suspect locale has to prove it is not discriminatory. This represents a rejection of the federal government’s traditional tactic, post-Reconstruction, of listening to southern political leaders say everything was just fine and there was no threatening or lynching of black voters and saying, Great—that’s good news.

The VRA as a whole has been re-approved by Congress several times, most recently in 2006, when it passed by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House. At that time, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the VRA was “an effective tool in protecting a right that is fundamental to our democracy.”

But in the summer of 2012, Shelby County, Georgia, challenged the 2006 reauthorization, saying that Congress had exceeded its authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and violated the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the United States Constitution. To quote from SCOTUS Blog:

“…lawyer Bert Rein, representing Shelby County in its challenge to the statute… began by reminding the Court of its 2009 decision in Northwest Austin Municipal Utilities District No. 1 v. Holder, in which it acknowledged that “the South had changed” and “questioned whether current remedial needs justified” the costs – both financial and to the jurisdictions’ autonomy – of the pre-clearance requirement. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor quickly jumped in, observing that even if the South as a whole has changed, Shelby County itself has not. Because Shelby County’s track record of discrimination at the polls remains poor, she suggested, it ‘may be the wrong party bringing this’ case.”

In short, Shelby County said the VRA was outdated and permanently labeled the south as racist, violating the south’s right to equal protection and due process under the law. Justice Sotomayor said this was not about the past but about the present, as Shelby County could not prove it was not discriminatory at the moment, in 2012. Between 1984 and 2010, Shelby County underwent a shift from majority Democratic to Republican, and in 2010 100% of all elected county officials were Republican. The county has not proved that this is the result of the free will of all voters, regardless of race, and not election fraud or voter intimidation, and so it must remain subject to Section 5 of the VRA.

The Court began hearing arguments in the case on February 27, 2013. This was the day Justice Scalia made his controversial claim that Section 5 was a “racial entitlement”, but his 2006 run-up to that statement is even more illustrative of how he sees the VRA:

“The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: ‘The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.’

“That was an unusual comment when it was made, but Scalia’s expansion on it today raises concerns that his suspicion of the Act is rooted much more in racial resentment than in a general distrust of unanimous votes. Scalia noted when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965, it passed over 19 dissenters. In subsequent reauthorizations, the number of dissenters diminished, until it passed the Senate without dissent seven years ago. Scalia’s comments suggested that this occurred, not because of a growing national consensus that racial disenfranchisement is unacceptable, but because lawmakers are too afraid to be tarred as racists. His inflammatory claim that the Voting Rights Act is a ‘perpetuation of racial entitlement’ came close to the end of a long statement on why he found a landmark law preventing race discrimination in voting to be suspicious.” [our italics]

Here is Scalia’s 2013 statement: “[The VRA was] reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term. Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”

Scalia’s point, and that of most of the VRA’s opponents, is that the Act is no longer necessary, for two main reasons: a) the south isn’t racist anymore; b) other regions are racist but not being subjected to the Act. As we’ve seen, the Act is not written specifically for the south, but for any jurisdiction, state, or region that has provable voter repression and unfair elections. Yes, repressive new voting laws in northern and western states, usually strict voter ID laws, should be investigated as well… yet how can they be if the VRA is revoked? If the complaint is that all other regions of the nation should be equally suspect of racial discrimination in elections and should be punished for that, how can they be punished if the Act making that illegal is taken away?

What the push to revoke Section 5 and, one can’t help believing, the VRA as a whole, reveals is not a rejection of Civil War-era prejudice against the south but the very modern push to get rid of “big government”. Anti-VRA activists don’t want the DoJ involved in regulating and investigating state voting procedures. They want voting procedures to be regulated by the states, with no federal oversight, which is exactly the situation that made the VRA so necessary, when states violating fair elections were allowed to do that because there was no federal law to stop them. States with a history of racial discrimination in voting—whether it goes back to 1865 or started in 2012—have to be subject to federal oversight because they will not change their own laws.

We’re not sure if members of Congress voted to re-authorize the VRA in 2006 because they were afraid to be labeled as racist if they didn’t; we’re not sure that’s a bad thing. One would hope that being racist would always be a red flag in the United States, and something politicians would want to avoid. But we do know that there is a new trend in play, in which laws that have outlawed discrimination against minority populations have been called reverse discrimination, or revoked because they were successful. The latter is like saying, “Why do you take pills for your high blood pressure? You haven’t had high blood pressure in years. Why are you wasting all that money taking medicine for something you don’t have?” And if one replies, Well, if I didn’t take the pills my high blood pressure would come back, so the pills are preventive, the other party would say “So you’re paying good money not to fix a real problem, but to make sure a problem doesn’t happen? What evidence do you have that the problem might ever happen?” And one might say, My history of high blood pressure. And the arguer would say, dismissively, “History! You’ve got to respond to conditions as they are today, not spend money based on what happened in the past.”

But we would hold that a history—no matter how long or how short—of racial discrimination is a red flag, and needs to subjected to federal investigation in the present, to ensure the future. The fact that states all over the nation are regularly introducing discriminatory voting laws proves that we need the VRA, and need it to be more stringently enforced than ever, not that it’s time to realize that the south isn’t racist and the government’s too big and everything is just fine with voting in the U.S., and all the other claims being made in the Court and the nation as we follow this case.

State of the Union trumped by state of Vatican?

One just heard a discussion on the radio of the decision of the current pope to step down in which the host of the morning program—alright, it’s NPR’s Morning Edition—asked if this news upstages President Obama’s pending State of the Union Address, due to be delivered tomorrow. The veteran political affairs reporter confidently said oh yes, this [the pope stepping down] is much more important than the State of the Union.

One could see how, perhaps, the news from the Vatican could steal the spotlight for this morning of Monday, February 11. But it’s harder to see how it could still be uppermost in the minds of the American people tomorrow evening, February 12, when their president outlines his domestic and foreign policy plans for 2013 and likely his second term. But why don’t you tell us?

Ron Paul, secession, and twisting history

Yesterday on the radio show Talk of the Nation (click that to see the transcript we’re working from) Republican Representative Ron Paul was a guest, along with independent Senator Joe Lieberman, talking about what lies ahead after their respective retirements from Congress next year. The host of the show brought up comments Paul made about secession after President Obama’s re-election in November. Some Texans have been talking about their state seceding from the union as a result of this election, and Paul joined in to confirm the right of any state to secede, comparing it, as people defending secession so often have, to the Revolutionary War. Paul made the comments the show was referring to on Fox News’ Cavuto program on December 1 (the lead-in for which was a host saying “Well, President Obama’s in, now more states want out”—surely an exaggeration, given that the number of people signing secession petitions in all of the states involved but Texas range in the low ten-thousands out of populations of millions). Paul began by saying he did not support secession, but averred that secession is allowed in the U.S. He couldn’t say it’s constitutional, of course, because secession is not provided for there, but called upon those ever-flexible Founders to say that secession is a non-extreme idea that they would have supported.

The states which have residents signing petitions are strangely familiar as a group: Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South and North Carolina (and Arizona, the odd man out here).

On Talk of the Nation, Paul offered this bizarre scenario when asked about his statements: “What if today, Greece, seceded from the European Union? The European Union got together, invaded Greece and killed about 50,000 people? We would frown on that.” One can only extrapolate that Paul is comparing the U.S. Civil War to this EU scenario, and criticizing the U.S. decision to fight the Civil War against the Confederacy (though one can’t figure out where the 50,000 number comes from).

Paul went on to say: “I think the freedom to leave is the description of whether or not you’re free. The Soviet system was so bad you could not leave. If you left, you got shot. So you have to have the right to leave. In secession, leaving—coming together is voluntary, so once you can’t leave, you lose your right of independence and self-determination becomes a very bad situation.”

This is a constant argument that Americans touting the right of secession use and, except for the Soviet reference, of course, the argument proslavery southerners made before the Civil War. The idea is that the United States are united by choice, not force, and therefore are free to leave the union whenever they want. This is simply untrue. Joining was voluntary; continued participation in the union is not. There is no protocol in the Constitution for states to leave the union, because if any state could leave at any time, it would be impossible to maintain a functioning nation. The only attempt by states to leave the union was answered by war. Being required to continue within the union is not equivalent to being imprisoned in a police state. The difference between the Soviet Union and the United States is that citizens of the states are able to participate in politics and create the change they desire.

Referring to the Revolution is also invalid, because the situation of colonies within an empire is not the same as states within the U.S. Colonies are goverened as satellites, without full rights as citizens. Colonies that break away from an empire know they must fight a war to do so, because they have no representation within the government of the empire, and are controlled for profit alone, a profit the empire will not want to lose. The states of the U.S. are not in that situation, as the American colonies once were, and so secession since the War is not the same as fighting for independence from an imperial government.

So far in the radio interview, Paul had only toed the usual misinformed line on secession that aligns it with the Founders and 1776, just as proslavery secessionists did in the late antebellum period. But then he veered into even more myth, claiming that during the War of 1812, New England tried to secede: “If you study history carefully, I think you’ll recognize that it was well accepted and recognized north – the New England states, you know, were much more into secession than South was, you know, early on in the 19th century.”

Unfortunately, host Neal Conant affirmed this myth. The facts, however, are that during the War of 1812, which, like the Revolution, hit New England harder than other regions of the country, some New England Federalists threatened to call a convention to discuss secession. Like all Americans who call for secession, they claimed that they were “defending the true principles of the Constitution and of the nation itself” (Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, by Elizabeth Varon, 37). This Federalist fringe was immediately attacked by Democratic Republicans north and south, and by the time of the Hartford Convention in December 1814, any support New England secessionists had had withered away to almost nothing, and attendees of the Convention did not even discuss secession. Southerners, however, would hold the Convention over New England’s head for decades, at first chastising the region for its treason, and, in the 1850s, using the incident as proof that secession was legal (Ibid., 38-9 – for more on the changing nature of secession talk between 1787 and 1861, see Disunion: the battle over slavery before the Civil War).

So secession was never “well accepted and recognized” in the north, nor is it true that “New England states, you know, were much more into secession than South was”. New England was shamed and humiliated for decades afterward by its brief and very partial interest in threatening to secede, and most of that shame and humiliation was heaped on by the south—until the south wanted to defend secession as patriotic, at which point it praised New England for its early bandwagoning.

Paul went on to add to his misinterpretation of history by saying, “they recognized that it wasn’t like – it wasn’t evil, that they weren’t evil people because they wanted to separate themselves”. But of course New Englanders were made to feel evil because of the actions of a small fringe group, and New England in general did not want to separate itself.

Paul then wrapped up by dragging out the tired horse of states’ rights, saying “just having the right to secede or nullify would restrain, you know, the advancement of the central state. Now, if you lean towards saying, well, no, we need a stronger, more centralized control, then, of course, you don’t want that. But those of us who are strict constitutionalists and libertarians and all, we want government, local and at home, and not at the central level because we don’t believe in the central economic planning, whether it’s social planning or economic planning.”

The idea here is that if all the states were individual, not bound in a federal union, each would just have its state government, and we would not be subject to the horrors of big federal government. How “strict constitutionalists” could hold this position,which is clearly not part of the U.S. constitution, is unclear. But the idea that state governments are all good and pure, and would never trample the rights of state citizens like the federal government, and that the states are locked in an eternal battle with the evil empire in Washington, is not only an old one but one that is patently false. If the complaint against the federal government is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so states must strip the federal government of its power, what happens when states have all the power? Then each absolute state government will become absolutely as corrupted as the federal government is believed to be, because each will be the only government for its citizens. If the idea is that a state government is more responsive to its constituents because it is closer to them, and answers only to the people of its own state, that would surely be undone if the state government became the only government, with absolute power, and no outside, federal power to monitor its fairness.

The moral of the interview is: follow whatever political course you like—that’s the premise of the United States. But get the details right, and don’t ignore, or remain ignorant of, historical facts that interfere with your preferred world view. …and if you’re going to advocate “studying history carefully”, make sure you lead by example.

Americans who want stuff, or, election 2012

Part 2 of our short posts on the 2012 election and the changing demographics and mixing and merging voter identifications coming into play sees us taking a quick and close look at Bill O’Reilly’s election night complaint about how “traditional America” is changing, not just to talk about 2012, but to put “tradition” in perspective.

What O’Reilly said on air was:

“It’s a changing country. The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America any more.”

—It’s hard to think of a time in American/U.S. history when you could not say this. This is the story of America from 1607 on. “Traditional” America is always the America of about 50 years previous to whatever year it currently is—just long enough ago that people who were young then are still around to miss and mourn it, but people in their prime were small children who can’t really remember it or who missed it completely, being born a decade later. This magical formula allows older people to claim that the time they grew up in was normative and permanent and how things were 100 years before them, but is now being destroyed. Americans made this claim in 1700, 1800, 1900, 2000… and will continue to do so for as long as we live in this country, it seems.

“And there are 50% of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it.”

—Doesn’t every presidential candidate run on giving the people what they want? Whether it’s lower taxes, social programs, avoiding war, or raising incomes, people running for president generally tell Americans they are going to give them what they want. By using the word “things”, O’Reilly is deprecating Americans for wanting material goods—one assumes he means cars and iPads and other consumer items, and is therefore shaming us for no longer wanting ideals, like people did 50 years ago, like freedom and power and equality.

“And, whereby twenty years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney, the white establishment is now the minority.”

—There’s the key: 20 years ago, whites wouldn’t have voted for a man who was offering “things.” They would have voted lofty ideals. But now, whites are in the minority, and the non-white vote is dominant, and that’s why the vote has turned crass and materialistic. “Establishment” here means white, “traditional”, moral, and, of course, imaginary. 100 years ago the votes being disparaged were those that today are considered white: Italians, Slovaks, Czechs, Russians, Hungarians, Catholics (from anywhere), Greeks. 100 years ago the Establishment did not consider these people to be white, and warned the nation continually that they were sullying the vote and democracy and the nation itself. So again, this is not a new tactic in 2012, to blame immigrants who are considered non-white for ruining the nation by voting.

“And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.”

—This seems to make sense. But the implication here is that the economic system is not really stacked against these voters, and they are whining, lazy, “47-percenters” (even though they are now the majority) who want more than they deserve. Note that when white people want something it is valid to give it to them, but when non-white voters want something it is not valid to give it to them.

“You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for President Obama.”

—Natch. A black man could only ever want to help non-white people. The implication is that he is a sham president, someone who broke the windows of the Establishment store and is now handing out its contents to fellow looters.

“And women will probably break President Obama’s way.”

—Here the race line is crossed to damn women of all colors. This too is fairly standard, as the only prejudice stronger than racism is sexism. Women will “break” for the president; this language subtly damns women as unintelligent beings who will follow the stampede of other sub-par voters to the non-Establishment president.

“People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

—Of course it is the black president. The white candidate for president would never give non-Establishment people things because… well, it’s hard to say. Because they don’t deserve them, they shouldn’t want them, Establishment candidates focus on ideals not things, the list goes on, and is manipulated according to audience.

So we see that O’Reilly’s rant is not really about 2012, but the constant complaint of those who see the time they grew up in receding fast, and don’t like what they see replacing it. This has gone on for as long as non-native people have lived in this country, and likely went on long before that time as well. Our job as Americans is to accept change, resist racism and sexism, and most importantly to refuse to draw a line between “things” and “ideals” when it comes to politics, since the Establishment ideal is often to give things only to certain people and not to others.

Election 2012 and the white minority (and Bill O’Reilly)

In many ways, elections are in the same vein as census results for the historian: they are snapshots of the U.S. population taken at regular intervals whose results lend themselves to nearly infinite analysis and extrapolation. The 2012 election is particularly rich, as it seems to show—

—women voting for Democrats and men voting for Republicans

—such sex-based voting trumping other demographic factors (race, income, immigration status, rural/urban, religion, education level, etc.)

—the older vote (45 and over) going Republican (as it has trended for about three decades) and,

—white votes becoming a smaller bloc

That is the way it’s being presented, at least: whites are becoming the minority population, and so the “white vote” is no longer critical to those running for office. But it’s more complicated than that; race is actually not the primary characteristic to count votes by. The best case to be made from the 2012 results, it seems, is that your sex matters most, as the majority of women of all races, incomes, etc., voted Democratic and the majority of men voted Republican. Age might come second, as people 18-45 vote Democratic and those 45-over vote Republican. Your job is up there, too, as union members voted pretty solidly Democratic.

It is true that White Americans will be in the Minority by 2019, and that our youngest populations in the U.S. are already minority white. But more important is that as our national population becomes more racially mixed, race is less of a card to play either way for a candidate—appealing to a certain race does not yield big rewards. Those who felt sure whites would vote for Romney were wrong when it came to women and the young, and right when it came to men and the elderly. Those who felt sure that blacks would vote for Obama were more right, but he is our first black president, and that’s a factor (he won 70% of the Latino vote as well). In 50 years, after (one hopes) a few more black and a couple of female presidents, a non-white presidential candidate will not be so new, and will have to fight for non-white votes.

The interesting point here is that race is just one factor, and “the white vote” does not mean “white people” but “white, older men”, the small group for whom race may be the primary factor in an election. But race is just one in a string of adjectives candidates need to pay attention to now, along with age, income, education, location, religion, sexuality, and others.

And so Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News analyst, is wrong when he pins the election on race. In his instantly infamous stream of consciousness monologue on election night, he stated:

“It’s a changing country. The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America any more. And there are 50% of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it. And, whereby twenty years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

In our next post we’ll do a close reading of this text, as historians do, to get at the heart of its inaccuracies. For now, we leave feeling some relief, perhaps, that race is no longer the be-all and end-all of election politics, and our diverse society is reflected more completely in its diversity of makeup than in previous elections.

Next time: here’s your stuff

The Peculiar Institution of Disunion

Wlecome to part 3 of our perusal of Michael Woods’ very interesting article in the latest issue of the Journal of American History (published by the Organization of American Historians) called “What Twenty-First-Century Historians have said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature.” Here we’re looking at how the depiction of disunion changed in the 1850s.

In earlier decades, going right back to 1787, any mention of disunion—of breaking up the United States through the secession of any of its member states—provoked real dismay and even horror. It was the threat of last resort, and anyone talking about breaking up the Union was reproached vehemently for even invoking the spectre of civil war. All sides of the slavery debate, from antislaveryites to aboilitionists to prosleveryites, lambasted any opponent who threatened disunion or accused that side of provoking it. Now, proslaveryites in the south often threatened disunion all the same, saying that northern states or the federal government were trying to kill slavery and thus invalidate the Consitution, and that they would rather leave the Union than remain in an adulterated, ruined version of the nation. Disunion here was still threatened as the ultimate evil, and those claiming they might be forced to leave the Union wasted no adjectives in describing the bloodshed and miscegenation that would follow if disunion were forced on the nation. So even as some southerners threatened disunion, they still painted it as an evil they would never willingly embrace, and predicted dire, dire consequences for all Americans if it ever came to pass.

But by 1850, the language began to change, and proslavery radicals began to shift southern public perception of secession and disunion. To set the stage, remember that Southerners immediately after the Revolution, when attacked for their hypocrisy in enslaving people after they had fought for a free republic, had made the case that of course slavery was evil but there was no way to get rid of it right away—it was a regrettable evil that had to be endured until it died away. But in the early decades of the 1800s, slaveholders began to shift that argument, gradually introducing the idea that slavery was not actually evil in nature, because it provided food and shelter and loving care to inferior peoples who could not function in educated society. It also kept those inferior peoples from making trouble in society. Slavery, over a few decades, changed from an unavoidable evil to a positive good. Slavery, from this new angle, was a terrific benefit to the enslaved that also encouraged slaveholders to be kind and loving protectors of the enslaved.

The same odious logic was now turned on disunion. Over the 1850s, secession was transformed by radicals from the worst nightmare that could befall the nation to a positive good. Disunion would preserve the slavery enabling Constitution. Disunion would create a new, slaveholding American nation that lived up to the principles of the Founders completely. Disunion would leave the antislavery, abolitionist north a weak, isolated half-nation dangling over the abyss of worldwide scorn and shame—and economic collapse. Disunion would protect white southern homes, families, women, children, and race purity. Disunion, eventually, became one’s civic duty as a southerner/real American. Destroying the Union meant destroying the ties that bound the south to scheming, unAmerican northerners.

By the presidential election of 1860, much of the Deep South’s political leadership was ready for secession should necessity (Lincoln’s election) call for it, and the Upper South would be fairly easily persuadable by spring 1861. While most southern citizens did not want civil war, they too would be convinced that there was no alternative for the patriotic southerner.

Northerners up to the last moment before the war rolled their eyes in disgust at southern “bluffing” on secession. They still believed the south would never try to leave the Union, and used the old reproaches against disunion talk as the ultimate evil right up to First Bull Run. But they were no longer reaching their audience. This disconnect was the result, in part, of northern sectionalism, a phenomenon not often fully appreciated by Americans today, and the focus of our next post.

Next time: the North was a section, too