On the very same day, official voices of the ruling regime celebrated one group of rebels in American history while condemning another. You would have to be an expert in the peculiar politics of race and government power to untangle the meaning, and understand the inherent contradictions.
First, we had officially sponsored events in all major urban centers heralding M. L. King, er, sorry, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, as the man of the century, if not of all time. The story is familiar: he courageously stood up to established power and nonviolently defied the technicalities of law in order to see that justice was done, and became a victim of a government smear campaign bent on destroying him. Yet he persevered to the end, even to the point of giving his life for a principle that is higher than any government.
Second, we had tens of thousands bused in to protest the Southern battle flag-itself a symbol of rebellion against government — atop the state capitol of South Carolina. The protestors say that the flag represents the wrong kind of rebellion, one that defied the kind of government power that official organs of opinion favor.
Defiance in one case is good; defiance in the other case is bad. Apparently, the lesson that government should be resisted cannot be generalized. Those who insist on flying the Southern battle flag are "giving honor to treason," explains Glenn Loury of Boston University (writing in the New York Times).
"I am disgusted by the spectacle of civil authorities in South Carolina officially and publicly embracing a symbol of illegal rebellion against legitimate national authority," says the sometime champion of law and order. "In retrospect, we can now see that those who fought under the Confederate flag were treasonous rebels bent on the destruction of our union."
Let’s change a few words and see how it sounds. "I am disgusted by the spectacle of self-appointed black leaders embracing Martin Luther King, a symbol of illegal rebellion against legitimate authority." Continuing: "In retrospect we can now see that those who marched for civil rights were treasonous rebels bent on the destruction of our Constitution."
Not much between the two sentences to change. They both celebrate established legal authority and condemn those who would violate it. Both sentiments are consistently anti-rebel. And yet you won’t see the words in the second rendering printed in any major newspaper, and, if they were, the writer and the editor would be fired, or ordered to undergo psychiatric testing.
How is it that on the same day, the same groups and the same people, can on the one hand uphold rebellion against legal authority as morally required, and on the other hand as morally reprehensible? Why are the Southern secessionists who bravely stood up to a ruling regime that was oppressing them called hateful and treasonous, while the civil rights protestors who defied a ruling regime called saintly models of courage in the pursuit of justice?
On the face of it, the movements were not that different in tactics. The South was non-violent in the sense that the Confederates had no desire to go to war. They did not want to overthrow the central government in Washington, DC. They had no desire to tell any Northerner how to live. They merely wanted to secede, which means to be left alone, and went to war only to defend their homeland against brutal invasion.
Loury himself hints at the answer by saying that those who fly the battle flag are "obstructing social justice" while those who favor civil rights are promoting the same. But this is not really an answer to our question: it merely raises the issue of what constitutes social justice, and what means are permitted to achieve it.
How can we know ahead of time what rebellions the media will like and which ones they will oppose? Perhaps we are supposed to hate the South’s rebellion because it was supposedly pro-slavery (a tiny minority of Southerners held slaves) while the civil rights rebellion opposed the remnants of slavery in segregation. But this explanation doesn’t hold up. Citing only two points of a hundred, Northern legal codes enforced the fugitive slave laws and even after the war freed slaves were rounded up by the feds and forced to serve in union military escapades.
As for the civil-rights protestors opposing petty forms of slavery, what is forcing private employers to hire on grounds of race, compelling restaurant owners to wait on all comers, and coercing private landlords to rent against their will, but involuntary servitude? What is the threat of million-dollar lawsuits for the failure to promote members of approved groups other than a form of legal terror, a threat no different from that cited by civil-rights partisans as intolerable violations of human dignity?
Let’s try out a different theory, which reveals the importance of centralized power in the moral imaginations of left-wing cheerleaders. On the one hand, the Southern secessionists and those who invoked the cause of states rights in the 1960s were openly defying Leviathan: the monstrous federal government that permits no challenge to its authority, particularly not state and local governments that would like to go their own way.
On the other hand, the civil-rights movement was rebelling against local and state legal authority, and in so doing backing changes in the legal code that the federal government favored. Now, it’s true that J. Edgar Hoover spied on King’s personal antics, which he had no business doing. And it’s true that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations didn’t have much taste for non-violent protest tactics, for fear that they could be broadened to oppose their wars.
But, generally speaking, the intellectual class and the federal government in the 50s and 60s favored using the 14th amendment against the states and abolishing even the freedom of association in private contracts. For all the pieties offered up over the holiday weekend about civil rights, there is only one unambiguous result of that movement: federal bureaucracies intruding into our private lives more than ever.
Data show that lawsuits and settlements concerning alleged civil-rights violations are at historic highs. And all the campaigns that claim to have learned from the civil rights movement-whether speaking for women’s rights, disabled rights, gay rights, animal rights, or whatever-are united in their promotion of more government authority over private decision-making.
These days, as in openly totalitarian regimes, wrongful speech in the workplace is punished with a severity that surpasses crimes against person and property. There is no such thing as freedom of contract, and business owners can forget about managing their workforces without cowering before the social-justice commissars.
The much-glorified "rebellion" against power was in fact a thinly disguised movement in favor of ever-more power to the center at the expense of lower orders of society. In contrast, the much-traduced Southern rebellion of the 19th century was an authentic effort to overthrow an illegitimate central power in favor of the rights Southerners believed to be guaranteed by the Constitution.
Here, then, is the real reason why we are supposed to hate the South’s rebellion and love the civil rights rebellion: the former opposed centralized power and the latter favored it. The consistent strain, then, is unwavering love of consolidated government.
There’s a lesson here for those who aspire to gain media accolades, and to rest in the safe knowledge that their beliefs are certifiably politically correct. Believe what the federal government wants you to believe, do what the federal bureaucrats want you to do, and choose political opinions that give ever more power to the central state, and you can be guaranteed high praise, especially on the government’s holidays.
For those who really do believe that principle is more important than power, and that higher law and the demands of justice must always come before administrative edict, American history is filled with real martyrs, real heroes, and real models of courage and defiance. But the only kind of rebellion the ruling elites approve is the kind that results in loss of liberty.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com.
