Happy Fourth Of July!

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“This government, the offspring of our own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support. Respect for its authority, compliance with its laws, acquiescence in its measures, are duties enjoined by the fundamental maxims of true liberty. The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. (…)

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositaries, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit, which the use can at any time yield.” — George Washington, Farewell Address

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” — Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

18 thoughts on “Happy Fourth Of July!”

  2. They wrote those speeches themselves, in specific contexts, with specific purposes.
    Ulysses Grant:Our Greatest President …Nathan Newman
    “So what went wrong and why isn’t Grant more honored. Basically, both his policies and reputation were murdered by Klan violence supported by the United States Supreme Court. For more read, the piece I wrote above, but the short story is that in 1873 there was a new surge of racist violence and this time the courts blocked the Grant administration from enforcing the new civil rights laws.
    Racist violence ran wild as the courts blocked prosecution of the ringleaders. The key legal case was based on an incident in Colfax, Louisiana where more than a hundred people defending black voting rights were murdered by a white mob, yet the prosecution against the leaders were thrown out by lower courts and the Supreme Court in 1875’s Cruikshank v. US would affirm that decision, saying that the federal government lacked any power to prosecute private individuals for racial crimes against other individuals. According to that Court, the 14th Amendment “adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another.” (BTW that is still, slightly modified good law, as one hundred twenty-five years later, the Rehnquist Court quoted that very sentence in declaring parts of the Violence Against Women Act unconstitution in a case called United States v. Morrison).
    With civil rights enforcement shut down, Reconstruction governments were driven from office throughout the South. Violence destroyed the Republican Party in Mississippi. Taking advantage of the void, Democrats recaptured the legislature and impeached the Republican governor and lieutenant governor, driving them from office by force of arms. Similar violence would “redeem” every state in the region, to use the term adopted by
    white supremacists. In 1876, Confederate General Matthew Butler led a white mob to murder an opposing black militia defending the South Carolina government – and was then elected to the United States Senate by the new, “redeemed” legislature. The effects on the federal government were almost as dramatic, as pro-civil-rights Republican representatives and senators were replaced by anti-civil-rights Democrats– enough that they could then filibuster any restoration of civil rights legislation for the next hundred years. ” …Newman
    Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito. And one more to come.

  4. “Ulysses Grant:Our Greatest President”
    I got Nathan to rewrite a line in this, actually, to correct a mis-statement.
    🙂
    “where more than a hundred people defending black voting rights were murdered by a white mob,”
    That’s the line, and the corrected version. His original version was this: “”The key legal case was based on an incident in Colfax, Louisiana where more than a hundred people
    were murdered by a white mob defending black voting
    rights,”
    You can see how that came out kinda wrong.
    It’s a good piece, though I quibble with his emphasis on the end that there wasn’t any popular support for Jim Crow, since that’s nonsense.

  5. The paragraph in question:
    “And it’s worth remembering that it was the democratic will of the country to have that equality, that it was only anti-democratic racist violence and a rightwing court system that frustrated that American ideal. Too many liberals buy into a myth that Jim Crow was democratically supported in this nation which just feeds its historic legitimacy.” …Nathan Newman
    Newman doesn’t say “wasn’t any popular support for Jim Crow” he says it was not the popular will. I think his point was that if the Southern blacks had retained their voting rights, Jim Crow could not have possibly endured for a century. Now the motivations of the Northern Republicans may have been a little complicated, revenge certainly being a factor, and I would not say the Yankees totally lacked racism. But I think the reconstruction agenda apparently had wide support in the North. The only popular support for Jim Crow lay among Southern conservatives and maybe those Southerners who escaped West after the war to the territories. I do not remember many stories of blacks being made widely unwelcome in Congress.
    At other points in the article, Newman explains how the post 1876 coalition was formed. Apparently, a voting coalition of recently freed slaves and Yankee veterans etc, many probably 2nd generation immigrants, was just a little too proletarian for property owners to feel secure.
    So that was the first “conservative” coalition of business interests and social issues. By helping Southern conservatives hold the Negroes down, business interests managed to hold off unionization and other liberalizations for several generations.

  6. Toward an American Revolution
    An online book I found at Yglesias, which looks pretty much like Charles Beard on steroids. But interesting and informative, with biographies of all the Constitution signers.
    We didn’t have a Revolution so much as a hostile takeover, or the dissolution of a partnership. But Happy 4th anyway.

  8. A number of years ago, when the kid was interested, we visited Williamsburg, the touristy former colony but, it turns out, a very educational place.
    At some point, strolling through some back streets, we came upon some colonists (actors in costume, always in role) doing some colonial-era agricultural grunt work. They looked up amd my wife took the opportunity to ask a big softball question about the controversy surrounding the fact that a few folks were loyalists to the Crown. One of the guys shouted out “God save the King” and began to argue pretty strenously against the whole concept of independence. He declaimed loudly to no one in particular.
    We were momentarily taken aback, just because it was so cool that this stuff was in the script (it’s not a tourist trap, it’s a debating society with funnel cake), and my wife did a sort of Jackie Gleason “homina, homina” and I began to laugh in a sort of loud hysterical way.
    I suppose the laughter was akin to the laughter described in a passage from Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”, which I reread on every vacation road trip just to see what Dean Moriarty might have to say about the scene outside the car window.
    Kerouac writes: “The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. This Mr. Snow began his laugh from the supper table when his old wife said something casual; he got up, apparently choking, leaned on the wall, looked up to heaven, and started; he staggered through the door, leaning on neighbor’s walls; he was drunk with it, he reeled through Mill City in the shadows, raising his whooping triumphant call to the demon god that must have prodded him to do it. I don’t know if he ever finished supper.”
    And thus I laughed in Williamburg, though I am not now and have never been a Negro. But I can imagine laughing like that at certain times, some mentioned by McManus above, or say, when Strom Thurmond joined the Republican Party or Richard Nixon had his southern strategy epiphany.
    Well, maybe a chuckle. Given history and all.
    As for the guy in Williamsburg, I’ve since heard he’s had visa problems and was seen getting off an unmarked plane in eastern Europe in leg shackles and a hood.
    Must have been a method actor.

  9. “I think his point was that if the Southern blacks had retained their voting rights, Jim Crow could not have possibly endured for a century.”
    And I’d agree with that.
    I wrote a long paper on Beard in AP History in high school, incidentally (the only really decent class I ever had in high school; we only worked with primary sources and a wide variety of the major historians, all on the Civil War).
    But Beard and Reconstruction are also among the handful of topics I know a little about. (Though, of course, I have no books at hand; merely the internets.)

  11. It’s always depressing as hell to read anything by Lincoln, and then reflect on the worthless criminals running the country now….

  12. I’m sure it was meant as a celebratory friendly gesture.
    And soon they’ll be able to shower the West Coast with expressions of their patriotic love!

  13. That is good, Katherine, and America.
    …
    I keep coming back to the Washington address,
    cause hilzoy deserves more than threadjacks. No offense to anyone.
    Washington:
    The first paragraph makes me uncomfortable.
    The first sentence of the second paragraph seems radical. Are two Senators trading votes an obstruction? I been studying on paragraphs 2 & 3. It is like really heavy. “I am not a us, and you are not a them” as a theory of representation and dialogue.
    The fourth paragraph is about Separation of Powers and encroachment. Was Cruikshank vs. US, stopping reconstruction dead in its tracks, and creating the opportunity for Jim Crow, a correct decision? Did Grant go too far? The stakes were so high.
    Billmon over the weekend thought that Stevens had overstepped re Eisentrager, and then Billmon reversed himself. Do we who care, really care about such things, put ourselves at great disadvantage? Bush says he loses no sleep over his decisions, and I believe him. How about Yoo and Addington, Graham and McCain?
    …
    Lincoln is the conscience of America, he bore
    the sorrow and shame and grief of America. “Lincoln died for our sins, and we are redeemed in his compassion”? Lugubrious and blasphemous stuff, but hey it’s late.
    …
    It bugs me, scares me to read those dude’s words. Washington holds a mirror to my mind, Lincoln a mirror to my heart. Together they are America looking back at me reflecting judgement, mercy, honour. Hope.
    …
    I never give back a tenth of what hilzoy gives me.

  14. Timestamps oughta give ya an idea of my regular sleeping habits. And I eat ambien like candy.
    The Two Americas
    Billmon, riffing off of John Tierney’s secessionist dreams, compares America to 1936 Spain.
    “What’s most sobering about all this is what happened in Spain when the moment of truth came. Because the two sides didn’t begin the war with neat geographical boundaries between them — e.g. the blue states and the gray — the result was a chaotic bloodbath. Every city, town and village in Spain became a battlefield where old scores were settled and new ones made. Priests and nuns, union leaders and policemen, peasant activists and local landowners were slaughtered by the thousands. Those who happened to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (like Lorca) were imprisoned, tortured and/or executed by the tens or hundreds of thousands…”
    “But the historical truth is that civil wars aren’t made by vast majorities, but by enraged and fearful minorities. Looking at America’s traditionalists and the modernists today, I see plenty of rage and fear, most, though hardly all, of it eminating from the authoritarian right. For now, these primal passions are still being contained within the boundaries of the conventional political process. But that process — essentially a system for brokering the demands of competing interest groups — isn’t designed to handle the stresses of a full-blown culture war.
    Compared to most countries, America has been very lucky so far — those kind of passions have only erupted in massive bloodshed once (well, twice if you count the original revolution.) By definition, however, something that has already happened is no longer impossible. It’s easy for newspaper columnists to fantasize about disunited states, but only madmen would actually try to make them so. Unfortunately, the madmen are out there. It’s up to the rest of us to keep them under control.”

  16. Happy July 4th to all of you. I just made a flash game where uncle Sam is seen throwing knives at Joe Lieberman called Back Stabbing Lieberman. Check it out at my site here: http://zenwire.com/flashmedia-lieberman.php. There are also other games there: bush rampage, bush-rice-terror, bush shootout, dancing bush and Blair and other political games as well. Feel free to comment for I plan to make more.

  17. Staying simply to make the previous deaths mean something is a recipe for never leaving. We all create our own meaning for our lives, it is not something provided for us by others.
    Andrew, thank you so much for this. There are no attractive choices, but it makes a huge difference not to be told that it dishonors the fallen even to consider any choice but more of the same.

  18. Y’all are going to think I’ve lost my mind. I could have sworn I clicked on a post by Andrew… Anyway, thanks, Hilzoy!

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