Rebellion

Battle of Chickamauga, Tennessee in the U.S. Civil War, Sept. 18 and 19, 1863
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress/Kurz & Allison

Price of No Compromise

The image above was inspired by the Battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee, which had the largest two-day toll on human life during the U.S. Civil War. It was part of an almost unimaginable cost of not finding a modus vivendi for the contending sides in the republic. Modern day Americans find the loss of a few thousand American lives to be an unacceptable toll of war. Yet the American Civil War cost the lives of an estimated 750,000 soldiers and an indeterminate number of civilians. In 1860 the U.S. Census counted the total American population to be 31,443,321, making the butcher’s bill for the military dead approximately 2.4% of

the population. Even more horrific, John Huddleston, in his 2002 history Killing Ground: The Civil War and the Changing American Landscape, estimated the war cost us 10 percent of the lives of Northern young men in the ages 20 to 45, and 30 percent of all Southern white males aged 18–40.

As I noted in Compromise Between the Right and the Left, the Civil War is the only time in our history that we utterly failed to find an absolutely necessary compromise for the continuing peace of the nation. It was a compromise that was in fact impossible, given that almost everyone at the time found the beliefs of the other side abhorrent and unacceptable. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, uttered from the prospective of the North,

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Also, as I wrote in The Need for Dialogue, when the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia ended on September 18, 1787, a departing Benjamin Franklin was confronted by a woman who asked “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.”

We are only able to keep our republic so long as a social contract between all of us to abide by the Constitution continues to exist. With the anger, desperation, and contempt expressed between politicians, representatives of the media, and portions of the electorate, I think this continuation is becoming somewhat more doubtful.

Causes of the U.S. Civil War

I believe it is fairly universally acknowledged that a fundamental cause of the Civil War was the existence of slavery in the United States. During the Constitutional Convention, the representatives of the northern states had to make a “contract with the Devil” and accede to southern states’ demands to accommodate their institution of slavery. Otherwise, there would have been no constitution [Reference P1, Chapter VIII]. By the 1850s “our peculiar institution”, as many in the South described it, was becoming intolerable to much of the North, and all but indispensable to the South’s economy. With a loss of the social contract between the two sections of the country, civil war followed.

Fewer people recognize there was another cause for war: the southern states believed the northern states wanted a tyranny over the south through the dominance of the federal government. Some modern day Americans might find it difficult to believe, but in nineteenth century America, citizens generally considered the states to be the dominant, sovereign governments with the federal government being a loose confederation to ensure interstate trade, the enforcement of the Constitution, and the defense of the country from outside military and naval threats. Indeed, the American states tried out an even weaker confederation after independence from Great Britain under the Articles of Confederation.

Fortunately, the issue of slavery has been decisively settled. However, the growing dominance of the federal government over state sovereignty, and its intrusion in destructive ways in our everyday lives is rekindling opposition by conservatives and libertarians to the predominance of the federal government.

Deviations from the Founding Fathers’ Plan

The Civil War caused more than the abolition of slavery, It also established the federal government had a predominance over the states in some issues, such as the enforcement of the Constitution (especially because of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment) and the protection of the union. A state is not allowed to secede without an amicable separation that would have to be authorized by constitutional amendment. From the prospective of conservatives and libertarians, this new predominance can be good so long as some limiting principle or principles exist to keep the federal government from becoming a tyranny.

After the Civil War many people thought such a limiting principle had already been instituted in the Bill of Rights in its final 10th Amendment. In its entirety the 10th Amendment declares

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The United States federal government was to be a government with limited and enumerated powers listed in the Constitution. If a power is not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution, the federal government is explicitly barred from using it. The Tenth Amendment says that such powers can only be wielded by the individual states, if their constitutions permit it, or by the citizens themselves.

Beginning with the progressive movement in the late nineteenth century, this acceptance of limited government increasingly was questioned. New problems introduced by economic development, trusts and monopolies, and growing corporate power caused progressives to want increased federal government power to rule over the socially destructive aspects of the ongoing industrial revolution.

Under these influences the first progressive American president to be openly contemptuous of the Constitution’s limitations of federal power — especially on the power of the executive branch — was Woodrow Wilson.

In his 1912 campaign for president, then Governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson expressed his intentions to institute a revolutionary change in American government. Much like Democrats today expressing their outrage at Republicans always saying “No!” to their proposals, Wilson proclaimed opposition to the “stand-patters” in government who stood in the way of progressive change. In his view of reality, both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence had out-lived their usefulness. Instead of the old view of the Constitution limiting the powers of government with a separation of powers between the branches of government, he wanted Americans to take the Constitution as a “living”, evolving document. Instead of a Constitution guaranteeing ironclad rights for individuals, Wilson wanted a Constitution constantly evolving the relationship between government and its citizens. Evolving human nature renders unnecessary the protection of individual rights. Instead of a separation of powers between government’s branches, Wilson believed society’s needs required cooperation between the branches — even if that cooperation involved using a power not constitutionally enumerated.

Ever since Wilson’s time, progressives (once erroneously called “liberals”) have enthusiastically embraced this vision of a “living, evolving constitution”. The Constitution has in their view become a vast field of implied  “penumbras” and “emanations” to be discovered by judicial interpretation and evolving social attitudes. This view of the Constitution has the advantage for progressives they need only appoint like-minded justices to the Supreme Court or judges to the federal bench to get the powers they want. This is a much easier procedure than going through the arduous process to amend the Constitution.

However, over the past two terms of President Obama, Democrats and other progressives have been especially frustrated by the opposition of Republicans in Congress to their latest plans. During the first two years of Obama’s first term, the Democrats had complete control over both the Presidency and the Congress. They used this total control to push both Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act through Congress to be signed by the President. After the 2010 midterm elections when the Republicans captured the House of Representatives, the Democrats lost their ability to drive their bills through Congress and legislate their will. This Republican ability to frustrate Democratic ambitions was enhanced by the Republican capture of the Senate in the midterm elections of 2014, in which their hold on the House was maintained.

President Obama’s reaction to being stymied by a Republican Congress has been to pass his programs, not through Congress, but by Presidential edicts called “executive orders”. Infamously, he has issued an edict of this nature to allow large numbers of illegal aliens to remain in the country, and to ignore the enforcement of long established immigration law. Currently, that executive order has been declared unconstitutional by some federal courts, and the case will undoubtedly end up before the Supreme Court. He has also issued an executive order to implement U.N. climate plans, rather than to submit the Paris international agreement to the Senate as a treaty. He has done the same with the nuclear deal with Iran. Additionally, he has used an executive order to enhance EPA regulatory power on carbon dioxide emissions and coal production, an order temporarily suspended by the Supreme Court for further judicial review. Other extra-constitutional actions by the Democratic Party to get the Republican Party out of their way are listed in the post The Corruption of the Democratic Party.

The Remaining Cause of the U.S. Civil War and the Current Rebellion

So it appears the second major cause of the Civil War (many confederates would have said it was the first) is becoming a cause for American dissent and conflict yet again. During this election season we are witnessing outright rebellion (not armed, thank God!) by citizens on both the Left and the Right against our current ruling elites. This rebellion has lead to the presidential candidacies of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) on the Left and Donald Trump, putatively on the Right. It would appear that a very large fraction of the electorate is mad as hell and is not about to take it any more.

What is really interesting about these two rebellions is that they want diametrically opposite changes in the government. The Left of course wants to give much more power over the economy to the government. They would like to move our mixed economy more toward the socialist direction. The rebels on the Right on the other hand, having been ground under by eight years of the oppressive Obama regime, are even more enraged than the Left and demand reduced government spending and intrusions in their lives.

No matter which side wins in the coming election, the other side will be greatly disappointed and not greatly disposed to live in peace with what they view as their opponents’ oppressive depredations. Unless we can find a way to discuss issues civilly and rationally with each other, and somehow find a modus vivendi in some set of compromises, we could conceivably move a long way toward a second Civil War.

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