“Neo-Confederates” Are Gaining Ground

About twenty years ago a few academics including myself, Clyde Wilson, Don Livingston, and a number of  Mises Institute scholars began writing and speaking in favor of secession.  Why must the American union be held together with violence, death, and destruction (or threats thereof), just like the Soviet Union?, we asked.  Why was it necessary to abandon the original constitutional ideal of a voluntary union?  And, is Abe Lincoln really “the martyred Christ of democracy’s passion play,” as one neocon (Walter Berns) has described him?

The immediate reaction from the Keepers of Official Establishment Opinion, from the history profession to the neocon propaganda mills (i.e., the Claremont InstituteAmericanEnterpriseInstituteNationalReviewReasonMagazine, etc.), to the state’s kept-puppy “journalists,” and the Soviet Poverty Law Center was to denounce us all as Hitler admirers, racists, slavery defenders, hate groups, and of course “neo-Confederates.”

But now the Keepers of Official Establishment Opinion are on the run.  A recent Rasmussen poll reveals that 17 percent of adult Americans favor seceding and forming a new state, with 13% undecided.  Only 55% believe that secession is unconstitutional.  In saying this, they are also saying that the state has the “right” to mass murder the citizens of any state that secedes, bomb and burn its cities to the ground, and plunder whatever wealth is left.  That of course is exactly the policy of “Father Abraham,” as they call him, in 1861-1865.  You cannot be a Lincoln defender-idolater/anti-secessionist without also endorsing this murderous policy path.  Such a view is consistent with endorsing a Soviet-style union, but not the original American union of the founding fathers.

 

 

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12:51 pm on September 26, 2013