“The Bulwark of Freedom”

States’ rights, federalism, divided sovereignty, decentralization, home rule, whatever you want to call it.

As Frank Chodorov wrote in The Income Tax: Root of All Evil (pp. 84-86):

“Long before Hitler came on the scene, Bismarck had liquidated the autonomous German states.  Mussolini’s march on Rome would not have gotten started in the nineteenth century when Italy was an aggregation of independent units.  And of course, the Czars handed Lenin a thoroughly centralized government.”

And, as I wrote in The Real Lincoln (p. 169), quoting Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War:

“The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century . . . and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks.  The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin.  They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers . . . .  Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples.  Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin . . . began the work of binding Russia . . . in a tight bureaucratic net . .. . .  Each of these men became an uncompromising dictator . . .”

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