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I’ve been
occasionally watching Glenn Beck on the Fox News Channel and think he has
done an admirable job of smoking out and identifying the shockingly hardcore,
radical socialists who dominate the Obama administration. He has also done a
generally good job talking about the libertarian founding principles of
America, how they have been lost, and our duty to regain them. But he has
been absolutely abysmal when discussing the subject of Lincoln, the War to
Prevent Southern Independence, and its legacy. I suspect that the reason for
this disconnect with historical reality is that: 1) The Fox News Channel is essentially
a propaganda arm of the neoconservative political cabal that has captured the
Republican Party; 2) One of the cornerstones of neocon ideology is Lincoln
idolatry and hatred of the South and Southerners. (Professor Paul Gottfried,
for one, has written extensively about this.) 3) Therefore, if Glenn wants to
keep his gig at Fox, he must toe the party line on Lincoln. Being otherwise
libertarian – while the Democrats are in power – serves
the purposes of the neocon cabal nicely.
To the neocons,
Lincoln idolatry serves the purpose of helping to prop up the centralized,
bureaucratic, liberty-destroying, military-industrial complex that defines
their existence. As William F. Buckley, Jr., the original neocon, declared in
1952, fighting the Cold War meant that "we have got to accept Big
Government for the duration," including "a totalitarian bureaucracy
within our own shores" with its "large armies, atomic energy,
central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization
of power in Washington." In case you haven’t noticed, for quite
some time now the Republican Party has stood for war, war, and more war, and
little else. How on earth genuine conservatives who favor limited
constitutional government came to embrace Buckley as one of their leading
spokesmen is a bizarre mystery.
When I debated
one of the gurus of neocon Lincoln idolatry – Harry Jaffa –
shortly after The Real Lincoln was
published in 2002, he bellowed at one point that "9/11 proves more than
ever that we need a strong central government." (In reality, it proved
the failure and incapability of "the central government" to
protect even its own D.C. headquarters from a few nuts armed with box
cutters.) "We need big, totalitarian government to fight all the new
Hitlers and potential Hitlers in the world" is the neocon mantra, in a
nutshell.
To neocons,
Lincoln is the poster boy of militaristic big government that runs roughshod
over civil liberties while bankrupting the country with taxes and debt and
murdering thousands of innocent foreigners (not that Southerners during the
1861–1865 war were foreigners; they were fellow American citizens).
Doesn’t this sound like the Republican Party of today, as embodied in
the recently dethroned Bush administration?
Despite his
admirable performances discussing the founding fathers, socialism,
progressivism, and other topics, Glenn Beck has been absolutely awful and
sometimes untruthful when discussing Lincoln and his legacy. During one show
he claimed to have read the actual original copy of The Confederate
Constitution. I assume he made this assertion to show that he must really be
quite the expert on the document. I didn’t believe him when he said
this, and his next sentence proved to me that he did not read the document.
The next sentence was the statement that the formal title of the document was
"The Slaveholders’ Constitution . . ." Anyone can look the
document up at Yale University’s online Avalon Project, which
warehouses all the American founding documents, commentaries, and more, to see
for yourself that Beck was wrong about this.
Beck’s next
false statement was that "I read it" (the Confederate Constitution)
and "it wasn’t about states’ rights, it was all about
slavery." Read it yourself online. It is a virtual carbon copy of the
U.S. Constitution, with a few exceptions: The Confederate president had a
line-item veto; served for one six-year term; protectionist tariffs are
outlawed; government subsidies for corporations are outlawed; and the
"General Welfare Clause" of the U.S. Constitution was deleted.
The act of
secession was the very essence of states’ rights, contrary to
Beck’s proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were
sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central government for
their own mutual benefit, but all other powers remained in the hands of
the people and the states, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns,
they had a right to secede for whatever reason. If a state needed the
permission of others to secede, as Lincoln argued, then it was not really
sovereign.
The U.S.
Constitution adopted a federal, not a national system of government. That is
another way of saying a states’ rights system of government. The
Confederate Constitution was nearly identical.
As for slavery, the
Confederate Constitution was not essentially different from the U.S.
Constitution as it existed at the time. Beck was grossly deceiving when he
told his audience that the Confederate Constitution protected slavery while
saying not one word about how the U.S. Constitution did the exact same thing.
Slavery had been protected by the U.S. Constitution since 1789. That’s
seventy-two years of slavery protection under the U.S. Constitution. A
Fugitive Slave Clause was written into the original U.S. Constitution, and
the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress was never challenged
constitutionally. That in fact is why the great libertarian abolitionist
Lysander Spooner launched so many vitriolic attacks on the Lincoln
administration. As a trained lawyer, he had laid out the constitutional case
against slavery, but the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party
wanted nothing to do with him or his peaceful route to emancipation –
the same route all other countries of the world (and the Northern states)
took during the nineteenth century to end slavery.
Moreover,
Beck’s hero, Lincoln, orchestrated passage through the U.S. Senate and
the U.S. House of Representatives of the Corwin Amendment to the
Constitution, which would have formally and explicitly enshrined slavery in
the U.S. Constitution by prohibiting the government from ever interfering
with Southern slavery. This amendment passed the Senate and the House just
days before Lincoln was inaugurated. In his first inaugural address he said
he believed slavery was already constitutional and then, alluding to the
Corwin Amendment, said: "I have no objection to it [slavery protection]
being made express and irrevocable" in the Constitution. This was by far
the strongest defense of slavery ever made by an American politician, coming
from the president himself. Beck and the wacky preacher posing as an
intellectual made no mention of this.
More recently,
Beck has admirably attacked the idea of "collective salvation" that
Obama himself espouses, and which is apparently as much a part of the
ideology of the American Left today as militarism fueled by Lincoln idolatry
is of the Right. According to the doctrine of "collective
salvation," a Christian cannot be saved and go to Heaven unless one
first embarks on a crusade to have government "save" the
"oppressed" of society by expanding the welfare state, raising
taxes, making taxation more "progressive," adopting more racial
hiring quotas, and regulating and nationalizing as much of private industry
as possible. It is a variant of "liberation theology" which,
according to Pope John Paul, IV, is essentially Marxism masquerading as
Christianity.
What Beck and his
wacky preacher/faux Lincoln expert do not know is that the main supporters
of the Lincoln regime believed in the exact same quasi-religious ideas.
Indeed, it defined their very existence. As explained by Murray Rothbard in
"America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861" (in John Denson,
ed., The Costs of War, Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 128):
The North, in
particular the North’s driving force, the "Yankees" –
that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from
there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and
northern Illinois – had been swept by a new form of Protestantism. This
was a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent
"postmillennialism" which held that, as a precondition for the
Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God
on Earth.
To the Yankees,
their "kingdom" was to be a "perfect society" cleansed of
sin, the principal causes of which were slavery, alcohol, and Catholicism.
Furthermore, "government is God’s major instrument of
salvation," Rothbard wrote. This is why the Yankees never seriously
considered ending Southern slavery how THEY had ended it in their own
states – peacefully through some kind of compensated emancipation.
They were not so concerned about the welfare of the poor slaves. Indeed, even
Tocqueville noticed that "the problem of race," as he phrased it,
was worse in the North than it was in the South. Instead, as Rothbard
continues:
The Northern war
against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful
willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to
plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the
birth of a perfect world. The Yankee fanatics were veritable Pattersonian
humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the
Bolsheviks, of their era.
"Collective
salvation," as opposed to the individualistic salvation that the Bible
teaches, was what motivated the Yankees and their war on the South. This of
course is exactly what Glenn Beck has been ranting and raving about recently
when it is practiced by opponents of the neocon establishment – the
exact same establishment that embraces the Lincolnite, Yankee millennialist
fervor as one of its defining characteristics. That’s why the neocons
constantly invoke Lincoln’s "all men are created equal" words
from the Gettysburg Address (via Jefferson’s Declaration of Secession)
to "justify" their endless military meddling in over 100 countries
of the world. ALL men deserve "equal" liberty, they tell us, and it
is OUR job to invade, conquer, and occupy any nation on earth where there is
a lack of such liberty.
America was
founded with the George Washington/Thomas Jefferson foreign policy of
commercial relationships with all nations, entangling alliances with none.
The neocon establishment, which is influential in both major political
parties, believes in just the opposite: "entangling alliances" and
endless military interventionism with as many nations as possible, all in the
name of some undefinable Great Moral Cause, in the tradition of Dishonest
Abe.
Of course, all of
this high-handed talk about the Republican Party supposedly being "the
party of great moral ideas" is also a convenient smokescreen for the
economic greed that is its real motivation, and has been ever since the party
first gained power. As Rothbard further explained: "On the economic
level, the Republicans [in 1860] adopted the Whig program of statism and big
government: protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central
government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by
government." It
hasn’t changed much since.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about
Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His
latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed
the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Article
originally published on www.Mises.org. By
authorization of the author
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