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, II, 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.