I'm literally in shock by what I've just read. I've long held that something bad happened to America as a result of the civil war, and that our entire view of government subsequently changed from that of a federation of sovereign states to a far more strongly centralized nation.
The Litmus Test for American Conservatism, by Donald W. Livingston, has some strong words to say about Lincoln and his role in that change:
These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of preserving an indivisible Union. But Lincoln had inherited no such Union from the Framers. Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of blood and iron. What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president. He claimed legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an historically false theory of the Constitution which held that the states had never been sovereign. The Union created the states, he said, not the states the Union. In time, this corrupt and corrupting doctrine would suck nearly every reserved power of the states into the central government. Lincoln seared into the American mind an ideological style of politics which, through a sort of alchemy, transmuted a federative “union” of states into a French revolutionary “nation” launched on an unending global mission of achieving equality. Lincoln’s corrupt constitutionalism and his ideological style of politics have, over time, led to the hollowing out of traditional American society and the obscene concentration of power in the central government that the Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.
And the article argues exactly what I've been thinking. In fact, this is what I wanted to write a long weblog post about:
A genuinely American conservatism, then, must adopt the project of preserving and restoring the decentralized federative polity of the Framers rooted in state and local sovereignty. The central government has no constitutional authority to do most of what it does today. The first question posed by an authentic American conservative politics is not whether a policy is good or bad, but what agency (the states or the central government—if either) has the authority to enact it. This is the principle of subsidiarity: that as much as possible should be done by the smallest political unit.
Emphasis mine. And like I've posted about before, there's no longer any party in America which truly cares about limited government. Livingston makes this point, and places the schism squarely back in the 1860's.
The Democratic and Republican parties are Lincolnian parties. Neither honestly questions the limits of federal authority to do this or that. In 1861, the central government broke free from what Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution,” and we have, consequently, inherited a fractured historical memory. There are now two Americanisms: pre-Lincolnian and post-Lincolnian. The latter is Jacobinism by other means. Only the former can lay claim to being the primordial American conservatism.
I want to check Livingston's facts about Lincoln that he presented earlier in this essay. If all true, and I don't have much reason to doubt that they are, well... I don't know what. It'll certainly change my opinion about Lincoln, and alter my perspective on America in general. And I'll certainly be able to understand how the Civil War was understood in the South to be "The War of Northern Aggression". I just wish I had a better mind for history.
Thanks to Dane Carlson for the link. I'm going to have to go exploring around the Chronicles Magazine web site.
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
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