Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/John T Takai
May 30, 2013
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One reasonable way of looking at democratic governance is that it
carries out the collective will of a society, especially in areas where
the private sector can’t do the job or needs regulation to prevent it
from doing harm. Of course, there are always many variables and points
of disagreement, from the need to protect individual rights to the
wisdom of each decision.
But something extreme has surfaced in
modern American politics: an ideological hatred of government. From the
Tea Party to libertarianism, there is a “principled” rejection – at
least rhetorically – of almost everything that government does (outside
of national security), and those views are no longer simply fringe. By
and large, they have been embraced by the national Republican Party.
There
has also been an effort to anchor these angry anti-government positions
in the traditions of U.S. history. The Tea Party consciously adopted
imagery and symbols from the Revolutionary War era to create an illusion
that this contempt of government fits with the First Principles.
However, this right-wing revision of U.S. history is wildly askew if not
upside-down. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, and even many of
their “anti-federalist” critics, were not hostile to an American
government. They understood the difference between an English monarchy
that denied them representation in Parliament and their own Republic.
Indeed,
the key framers – James Madison, George Washington and Alexander
Hamilton – might be called pragmatic nationalists, eager to use the new
Constitution, which centralized power at the national level, to build
the young country and protect its fragile independence. While these
framers later split over precise applications of the Constitution –
Madison opposed Hamilton’s national bank, for instance – they accepted
the need for a strong and effective federal government, unlike the weak,
states’ rights-oriented Articles of Confederation.
More
generally, the founders recognized the need for order if their
experiment in self-governance was to work. Even some of the more radical
founders, like Sam Adams, supported the suppression of domestic
disorders, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whiskey
Rebellion in Pennsylvania. Adams' and his cohorts' logic was that an
uprising against a distant monarch was one thing, but taking up arms
against your own republican government was something else.
But the
Tea Partiers are not entirely wrong when they insist that their hatred
of “gubmint” has its roots in the founding era. There was an American
tradition that involved resisting a strong and effective national
government. It was not, however, anchored in the principles of
“liberty,” but rather in the practice of slavery.
Southern Fears
The
battle against the Constitution and later against an energetic federal
government — the sort of nation-building especially envisioned by
Washington and Hamilton – emanated from the fears of many Southern
plantation owners that eventually the national political system would
move to outlaw slavery and thus negate their massive investment in human
bondage. Their thinking was that the stronger the federal government
became the more likely it would act to impose a national judgment
against the South’s brutal institution of slavery. So, while the
Southern argument was often couched in the rhetoric of liberty, i.e. the
rights of states to set their own rules, the underlying point was the
maintenance of slavery.
This dollars-and-cents reality was
reflected in the debate at Virginia’s 1788 convention to ratify the
Constitution. Two of Virginia’s most noted advocates for “liberty” and
“rights” – Patrick Henry and George Mason – tried to rally opposition to
the proposed Constitution by stoking the fears of white plantation
owners. Historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg recount the debate
in their 2010 book,
Madison and Jefferson, noting that the
chief argument advanced by Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source
of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected” and that
this danger was exacerbated by the Constitution’s granting the
president, as commander in chief, the power to “federalize” state
militias.
“Mason repeated what he had said during the
Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for
‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’
slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the
by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he
believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”
Henry
floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal
government might employ to take away black slaves from white
Virginians. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg wrote:
“Congress,
if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate
them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by
population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say:
‘Every black man must fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled
Congress might tax slavery out of existence.
“Mason and Henry both
ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the
strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the
slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if
the North should have its way.”
Madison, a principal
architect of the new governing structure and a slaveowner himself,
sought to finesse the Mason/Henry arguments by insisting that “the
central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress
would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by
stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered
into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it
ever will.’ …
“Yet Mason struck a chord in his
insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry
roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his
rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”
Right to Bear Arms
Despite
the impassioned arguments of Henry and Mason – and after Madison gave
assurances that he would propose amendments to address some of these
concerns – Virginia’s delegates narrowly approved the Constitution on a
89-79 vote.
The key constitutional revision to allay the fears of
Southern plantation owners was the Second Amendment, which recognized
that “a well-regulated militia [was] necessary to the security of a free
State,” echoing Mason’s language about “domestic safety” as in the
protection against slave revolts.
The rest of the Second Amendment
– that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed” – was meant by definitions of the day to ensure the right to
“bear Arms” as part of a “well-regulated Militia.” Only in modern times
has that meaning been distorted – by the American Right – to apply to
individual Americans carrying whatever gun they might want.
But
the double-talk about the Second Amendment didn’t begin in recent years.
It was there from the beginning when the First Congress acted with no
apparent sense of irony in using the wording, “a free State,” to
actually mean “a slave State.” And, of course, “the right of the people
to keep and bear Arms” didn’t apply to black people.
The Second
Congress enacted the Militia Acts, which mandated that military-age
“white” men must obtain muskets and other supplies to participate in
bearing arms for their state militias. Thus, the South was guaranteed
its militias for “domestic safety.”
Yet, the South still faced the
broader political imperative of constraining the power of the federal
government so it would never get so strong that it could end slavery.
So, during the early decades of the Republic, leading Southern
politicians tried to sabotage many of the federal plans for
strengthening the United States.
For instance, when James Madison
pressed ahead with his long-treasured plan to use the Commerce Clause to
justify federal road-building – and thus improve national
transportation – he was mocked by Thomas Jefferson for his excessive
support of government, as Burstein and Isenberg noted in their book. In
the years after the ratification of the Constitution, Madison gradually
pulled out of the Washington-Hamilton orbit and was drawn into
Jefferson’s. The key gravitational pull on Madison was Jefferson’s
opposition to federal initiatives grounded in the agrarian interests of
the slave-owning South.
Madison’s realignment with his Virginia
neighbor, Jefferson, bitterly disappointed Washington and Hamilton.
However, after Jefferson gained the presidency in 1801, he and Madison
joined in one of the biggest federal power overreaches in U.S. history
by negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France –
despite the absence of any “enumerated power” in the Constitution that
envisioned such an act by the central government.
March Toward War
As
the national divisions over slavery sharpened, the South escalated its
resistance to federal activism, even over non-controversial matters like
disaster relief. As University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh noted
in his book,
A Government Out of Sight, Southerners asserted
an extreme version of states’ rights in the period from 1840 to 1860
that included preventing aid to disaster victims.
Balogh wrote
that the South feared that “extending federal power” – even to help
fellow Americans in desperate need – “might establish a precedent for
national intervention in the slavery question,” as
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted in a May 22
column.
As
it turned out, the fears of Patrick Henry, George Mason and like-minded
Southerners proved prescient. The federal government would become the
enemy of slavery. As the United States grew in economic strength, the
barbaric practice became a drag on U.S. global influence.
With the
election of Abraham Lincoln from the anti-slavery Republican Party,
Southern states saw the writing on the wall. Defense of their beloved
institution of owning other human beings required extreme action, which
manifested itself in the secession of 11 Southern states and the
enactment of a Confederate constitution explicitly enshrining slavery.
The
South’s defeat in the Civil War forced the Confederate states back into
the Union and enabled the Northern states to finally bring an end to
slavery. However, the South continued to resist the North’s attempts to
reconstruct the region in a more race-neutral way. The South’s old
aristocracy reasserted itself through Ku Klux Klan terror and via
political organization within the Democratic Party, reestablishing white
supremacy – and oppression of blacks – under the banner of “states’
rights.”
There were, of course, other American power centers
opposed to the intrusion of the federal government on behalf of the
broader public. For instance, the robber barons of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries used their money and their political influence
inside the Republican Party to assert laissez-faire economics, all the
better to steal the country blind. That power center, however, was
shaken by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great
Depression. Recognizing the abject failure of the “free market” to serve
the nation’s broader interests, the voters elected Franklin Roosevelt
who dealt a New Deal that stimulated the economy, imposed securities
regulations and took a variety of steps to lift citizens out of poverty.
In
the post-World War II era with the United States asserting global
leadership, the South’s practice of racial segregation became another
eyesore that the federal government haltingly began to address under
pressure from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. By
the 1960s, the South had lost again, with federal laws prohibiting
racial segregation.
The momentum from these two government
initiatives – intervention to create a more just economy and racial
integration – helped build the American middle class and finally
fulfilled some of the grand principles of equality and justice espoused
at the founding. However, the energy behind those reforms began to fade
in the 1970s as right-wing resentment built.
Finally, in the
election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the combined backlash against
Roosevelt’s New Deal and King’s new day prevailed. Too many whites had
forgotten the lessons of the Great Depression and had grown angry over
what they viewed as “political correctness.”
Over the last several
decades, the Right also built an imposing vertically integrated media
machine that meshes the written word in newspapers, magazines and books
with the spoken (or shouted) word on TV and talk radio. This giant echo
chamber, resonating with sophisticated propaganda including revisionist
(or neo-Confederate) history, has convinced millions of poorly informed
Americans that the framers of the Constitution hated a strong central
government and were all for “states’ rights” – when nearly the opposite
was true as Madison, Washington and Hamilton rejected the Articles of
Confederation and drafted the Constitution to enhance federal power.
Further,
the Right’s hijacking of Revolutionary War symbols, like yellow “Don’t
Tread on Me” flags, confuses the Tea Party rank-and-file by equating the
founding era’s resistance against an overseas monarchy to today’s
hatred of an elected U.S. government.
Amid this muck of muddled
history, the biggest secret withheld from the American people is that
today’s Right is actually promoting a set of anti-government positions
that originally arose to justify and protect the South’s institution of
slavery. The calls of “liberty” then covered the cries of suffering from
human bondage, just as today’s shouts of outrage reflect resentment
over the first African-American president.
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