“A Disease of the Public Mind”

by

 

That is the title of a book about the first US Civil War that resulted in the assassination of President Lincoln. The soldiers in the South hated those in the North and vice versa. Northern soldiers have since been credited with undeserved virtue while Southern rebels were labeled racist enemies of the state, a moniker that still survives in the present day. But neither side was fighting over the abolition of slavery.

 

Trump’s opponents claim he will re-institute Jim Crow oppression, put black people back in chains, end democracy and put people in Hitler’s concentration camps. The continuous character assassinations, legal persecutions, numerous impeachments, unfounded accusations and insinuation caused what has been called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), a disease of the public mind resulting in a recent assassination attempt.

 

Follow the Money
The Constitution the North and South agreed upon in 1788 enshrined the economic principles of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, fostering equality under the law, individual sovereignty and limited government. Slavery was still too contentious an issue to settle. Starting in the next century the British led a moral crusade to eliminate slavery globally. While politically virtuous, Britain could afford to pay off slave owners and generally didn’t face the the vexing question for US plantation owners of whether freed slaves could support themselves and, if not, whether this would lead to murderous riots as had happened elsewhere. Abolition was a contentious issue everywhere slavery was practiced, typically with long drawn out steps to complete. But the long simmering political dispute that came to a head in 1860 wasn’t about abolition, but money. The federal government relied almost exclusively on tariffs raised in Southern ports – most of which went to northern states – on imports financed with the fruits of slavery, cotton exports.

 

Since the Civil War, limited government has given way to big government. The Democratic Party has created many dependent constituencies whose continued prosperity depends upon continuing Democratic power and largess: the bureaucracy, the government at all levels, teachers, labor leaders, academic educators and administrators, trial lawyers, government contractors, social security recipients and what are still euphemistically called journalists, among many others. The current Civil War is also about money. Trump has been in both political parties, fits in neither. But ”you are fired” represents an existential threat to Party members.

 

For contemporary Democratic politicians, almost all trained as lawyers, money beyond what is available by taxing the rich exists in banks, especially the Federal Reserve Banks, to be distributed according to the spoils system. For Republican politicians (but not RINOs), mostly former businessmen, prosperity comes from productive work and from savings productively invested. For those businesses and workers who are not on the receiving end of the spoils system, whose taxes pay for political largess, limited government is the only solution. There is very little middle ground.

 

America, the Land of Opportunity
Work hard and you will survive and ultimately prosper. Work smart and you might get rich. That has always been the American way, and has worked for every immigrant group, no matter their starting point. The descendants of slaves are a partial exception. Politics, or more precisely Democratic politicians, imposed roadblocks to their progress, protecting slavery before the War, then Jim Crow for another century after. The progressive wing was founded on the “scientific” belief in Eugenics to cull the black population (later adopted by Hitler for Jews). LBJ was the second coming of FDR; Biden was the third. But unlike FDR, Johnson’s mentor, the LBJ Administration, with Republican support, extended black de jure equality.

 

Then the socialists in Johnson’s administration doubled down on New Deal socialism with the Great Society. Instead of accelerating, black economic progress stalled as massive transfer payments undermined traditional incentives for citizens of all races, with black families most affected given their then-current economic status. The welfare state destabilized the black family, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the socialist who designed it, resulting in 70% of children growing up without fathers.

 

Progressive politicians got many black people hooked, and like drug dealers made them dependent on the Party. Many in the black community today have as a consequence been open vessels for the Party’s anti-capitalist Marxist ideology, including college graduates, particularly journalists.. Even black NBA players, who outnumber whites 4 to 1, who are paid tens of millions of dollars annually by white owners, much more than average white salaries, openly promote an anti-capitalist white-racism explanation for contemporary black income inequality. The Party’s tempting solution, massive slavery reparations, is radical black racism intended to incite a white racist reaction. The belief that systematic white racism is the source of income inequality is a contemporary disease of the public mind more infectious and deadly than COVID 19.

 

The Red, White and Blue
By the 1948 Presidential election the Progressive Party was a front for the communists, according to Truman. While Stalin’s Russia, then the Soviet Union, was America’s ally, socialism and its inherent totalitarianism was totally incompatible with the American constitutional system of limited government, setting the stage for a global ideological challenge. The US outlawed the Communist Party in the 1950s to avoid repeating the mistake of so many Latin American democracies, most notably Argentina, lured by socialist promises which inevitably led to totalitarian one-party rule.

 

The US Constitution, democratic institutions and the Supreme Court Justices have been the only obstacles. Under continuous Party assault. During the Obama Administration the Party removed many of the accumulated institutional constraints, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was sufficiently confident that he could sweep away the constitutional constraint on big government and one party rule by eliminating the filibuster. No one could have predicted that the multiple attempts to cover for, then forgive the tens of thousands of felonies committed by candidate Clinton’s use of a private email server would backfire, resulting in the election of Trump and three “constitutional originalist” judges.

 

Yet by 2020 openly lifetime socialist candidate Bernie Sanders had all but locked up the Democratic Party nomination, relinquishing it only after assurances that the substitute would implement it, which were honored. Socialism is the most common disease of the public mind.

 

The 2024 election
The term “liberal” historically referring to limited government principles was co-opted by big-government progressives. In the late 1990s Britain introduced the colored campaign map, with the liberals colored red to reflect their historic ties to communism and the red Russian flag. The US followed the same color code in 2000. But several years later the New York Times unilaterally switched the colors, and the media followed. This color switch may have even confused the CIA, which had historically been involved in foreign election interference to keep countries from electing socialists/communists and entering the Soviet block. Their interference in the 2020 domestic election was, as far as we know, the first domestic interference since the Kennedy assassination by a sniper and the first on the side of the left.

 

So the election is between a constitutional republic and an illiberal democratic autocracy. Pundits say this may be the most important ever. Probably not. Republicans haven’t previously been able to rein in crony capitalism. More distressing, Franklin’s republic is already at the beginning of the inevitable end.

 

Empires go bust generally as a consequence of war costs and internal rot, but no large empire spent itself into bankruptcy as fast as the US spending on itself. The Founding Fathers thought their system of checks and balances pervasive, including limiting money to gold and silver. But a hidden footnote in the documents of the new gold-backed international monetary agreement signed at Bretton Woods in 1944 allowed gold-backed currency to count as reserves. The dollar alone had that status, then the US reneged on gold convertibility a few decades later.

 

The CBO forecasts a national peacetime debt of $146 trillion in three decades, 172% of GDP. But their forecasts are always too rosy because they are forced to make internally inconsistent assumptions. In any event, we are well beyond fixing the problem with tweaks as creditors domestic and foreign will liquidate well before that. It will end sooner, badly. Democratic politicians will claim “nobody could have seen this coming,” then blame Republicans, capitalism, the Supreme Court and foreign conspirators.

 

The 4th of July fireworks celebrating the nation’s birth are over. NATO just met in the US to discuss the threats to the US and its allies, engrossed in wishful thinking. That defense of empire isn’t included in the $146 trillion debt. It is time to reflect upon the Republic’s terminal diagnosis. We are in the first stage of grief, denial.

 

The question is whether it ends with a bang or a whimper. The next three stages, anger, bargaining and repression could bring decades of misery before we finally enter the final stage, acceptance. Unfortunately for T.S. Elliot’s Britain, acceptance came after the worst bang in history, and still only grudgingly.

 

Most recognize that the inevitability of WW II, which ended the power of the British Empire – just the pomp and circumstance survives – grew out of the peace after the Great War. Going back further in time, that war was made Great with US loans to Britain and the battlefield stalemate broken (to bail out those bankers) by President Wilson’s US entry into the War, and many blame him. But the Empire’s ultimate fate may arguably have been sealed by the switch from coal (plentiful in Britain) to oil prior to the Great War. To fend off imperial competitors, Britain first had to control Mid-East oil. (Consider what happened to the Japanese island empire that was dependent on the US for 80% of its oil.)

 

“What if” history is fraught with speculation. But consider what might have happened had Churchill, rightly credited for standing up to Germany in 1939, not advocated for the first WW to eliminate competition to the British Empire. It is hard to conjure images worse than the reality of the first half of the 20th Century. Britain was in the position of still having the power to negotiate a better future, as does the US today.

 

But continued denial is the most likely course.

 

—-
Kevin Villani

10 thoughts on ““A Disease of the Public Mind””

  1. But neither side was fighting over the abolition of slavery.

    Initially, this was the case for the Union. However, slavery was the overriding reason for secession. Absent slavery, there would have been no secession. Confederate States of America – Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union

    For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

    It can be argued that the average Confederate soldier, not himself a slaveholder (only about 36% of Confederate soldiers were from slaveowning families) was fighting to defend his land from the Yankees, not to defend slavery. Undoubtedly that was the motivation for many Confederate soldiers. But not all.

    Here are some excerpts from Colin Edward Woodward’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marching-Masters-Slavery-Confederate-Divided/dp/0813935415"Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

    Ferdinand Boesel, who served in the Fourth Texas Cavalry, said the North was fighting not to save the Union, but to free the slaves, “so the blacks can subdue 6 million whites.” As did many Confederates, he feared subjugation, and he had little sympathy for the plight of African Americans, claiming they had little to complain about. They had “an easy life compared to a day laborer in Germany,” he wrote. Were it not for slaves, “the South would be a desert . . . [and] no white man could live there.”9 For him, a South without slavery was a land not worth living in.

    Consider what General Longstreet had to say. After the war, he became a Republican- an uncommon decision for a Confederate General, so he was far from the most fanatic of Confederates. Nonetheless, he was quite clear during the Civil War that slavery was what the war was about.

    Longstreet nevertheless was among those Southerners who felt the need to defend slavery and racial control on the battlefield. Shortly before the Seven Days Battles, he warned his troops about abolitionism. The North, he charged, wanted to “make the negro your equal by declaring his freedom,” and he claimed Northerners “care not for the blood of babes nor carnage of innocent women which servile insurrection thus stirred up may bring upon their heads.” The Yankees were “encouraging the lust of his hirelings to the dishonor and violation of those Southern women.” In this way, Longstreet sought to plant in the minds of the Confederate soldiers images of slaves let loose on innocent and dutiful Southern white women, and he hoped his men would prevent such atrocities. “If ever men were called upon to defend the beloved daughters of their country,” he said, “that now is our duty.”53

    Many Confederate soldiers were fighting to defend their homes from the Yankees. But for many Confederate soldiers, that also meant defending slavery.

  2. I don’t know where you got this, but it is the most complete and utter Lost Cause nonsense. Every contemporary source points to the abolition/preservation of slavery as the cause of the war. Lincoln was identified as an abolitionist and it was his election which triggered South Carolina to attempt to secede. Point me to any original contemporary source discussing the causes for secession that doesn’t point to abolition as the cause. Identify any southern politician who said “we’ve gotta secede, these tariffs are unfair”. You might find it as a secondary cause mentioned in passing but never on an equal or near-equal level. When you look at states’ rights, the right that was always at the root was the right to hold other human beings in bondage.

  3. Tariffs and slavery were connected. There wasn’t any law prohibiting the South from making its own manufactured goods. Indeed, there were some attempts: William Gregg’s efforts with cotton mills, in particular. But the property-owning classes never really got behind it from either an investment or a public support standpoint, it wasn’t the sort off thing that Gentlemen did.

  4. “Many Confederate soldiers were fighting to defend their homes from the Yankees.”

    So it was said. But that “explanation” begs the question of why Union troops were there in the first place. The answer to that was “to suppress armed rebellion against the lawful authority of the US government” – which included the persecution and even murder of loyal citizens who denied the purported authority of the “Confederacy”. That rebellion was made to protect slavery.

    Longstreet is quoted above. Another famous Confederate generl (Nathan Bedford Forrest) put it more concisely: “If we aren’t fighting for slavery, then what are we fighting for?”

    Also: there were Confederate who did not own slaves, but many of these were sons or brothers or nephews or in-laws of slaveowners. In 1861, Robert E. Lee owned no slaves, but he was serving as executor of his late father-in-law’s estate, which included over 100 slaves.

    On the other side: 178,000 US Colored Troops served in the War. They certainly fought to end slavery.

    In 1861, the pro-Confederate governor of Missouri conspired to bring Missouri into the Confederacy by a coup d’état with the state militia. The plot was thwarted by the Unionist “Home Guard”, largely recruited from German immigrants in St. Louis. They were refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848; one regiment’s flag depicted a hammer smashing chains.

  5. “Politics, or more precisely Democratic politicians, imposed roadblocks to their progress, protecting slavery before the War, then Jim Crow for another century after. ”

    This is half true. “protecting slavery before the War” was the agenda of all political parties except the post-1854 Republicans. Federalists, Jefferson Republicans, “National Republicans”, Jackson Democrats, Whigs, and Know-Nothings were all complicit in slavery.

    And after Reconstruction, while the Democrats propped up Jim Crow in the South, the Republican Party did essentially nothing to challenge it.

    “The federal government relied almost exclusively on tariffs raised in Southern ports…”

    This is neo-Confederate hooey. Customs revenue was mainly collected in northern ports. In 1860, the US collected $53.2M in customs; in 1861, with all southern ports in rebellion, the US collected $39.6M.

  6. “Tariffs and slavery were connected”. Well, then, so were the corsets my great-great grandfather made at that time. Or the pickles sold in Pittsburgh. So what? Economics weren’t mentioned as a cause by principal actors at the time except regarding the personal loss to be incurred by freeing the slaves. The facts, the evidence are against you.

  7. Bill
    Identify any southern politician who said “we’ve gotta secede, these tariffs are unfair”. You might find it as a secondary cause mentioned in passing but never on an equal or near-equal level.
    In the South Carolina Declaration of Secession, there are eighteen instances of the “slav” root. “Tariff?” Nothing.

    When you look at states’ rights, the right that was always at the root was the right to hold other human beings in bondage.

    A big complaint that the Secessionists had with the rest of the country was that the northern states were reluctant to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. They wanted Federal law enforced even though northern states didn’t want to recapture escaped slaves. So much for states’ rights. The Secessionist view was, “States’ rights for me, but not for thee.”

    My understanding is that the “states rights,” tariff, anything but slavery argument that arose after the Civil War was a result of people realizing that slavery was wrong, and a reluctance to admit that their relatives fought to retain slavery.

    David Foster
    Tariffs and slavery were connected. There wasn’t any law prohibiting the South from making its own manufactured goods. Indeed, there were some attempts: William Gregg’s efforts with cotton mills, in particular. But the property-owning classes never really got behind it from either an investment or a public support standpoint, it wasn’t the sort off thing that Gentlemen did.

    There was substantial Southern support for the 1816 Tariff Act, as Southern oligarchs believed that with nearby cotton, and water power supplied by the Piedmont-Coastal Plain drop, textile mills would be a resounding success in the South. Alas, even with the transportation advantage, Southern textile mills couldn’t compete with Yankee textile mills.

    As a result , Southern opinion turned against tariffs. The late and great Venezuelan journalist Carlos Rangel, had an interesting take on those tariffs. From The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States:

    Barely fifteen years after Southern Congressmen such as Calhoun and Lowndes of South Carolina had established themselves as effective spokesmen for tariffs on goods brought in from Great Britain, the South began to justify its subsequent failure by charging that protectionism had been invented by the North as a means of
    enriching itself at the expense of the South. Southern leaders stirred up their audiences by claiming that of every hundred bales of cotton sold in Boston or New York, forty had been “stolen” from the South. They were preparing the dialectics of the Civil War. The argument became more heated, and the North found itself charged with having accumulated capital, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, by defrauding the South through financial trickery. One contemporary writer says: “When they [the Southerners] see the flourishing villages of New England, they cry, ‘We pay for all this.’ ”
    A myth was manufactured that attributed Northern prosperity to the South’s paralysis, and vice versa. Southerners went to war in 1860 quite convinced that if they succeeded in breaking their dependence on the North, not only would they prosper miraculously; the abhorred Yankees, deprived of raw materials and the Southern market for their manufactured goods, would be condemned to an economic crisis as well.

    Thus, well before the birth of Hobson, Hilferding, and Lenin, the “Third World” arguments had been invented by
    Southern slaveholders.

    (I first read the book in Spanish, where the title is Del Buen Salvaje al Buen Revolucionario which translates as From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary.)

  8. I think Kevin meant Thomas Fleming’s thesis about the Civil War to be a jumping off point. Not an invitation to you all to re-fight it and miss his point.

  9. One thing not mentioned is that the Constitution of the Confederacy included the institution of slavery as requisite.
    That seems to put a point on the secession/slavery question in a certain way. The authors felt it was important enough to include it as required.

    My impression is that the run of the mill combatant of the Confederacy was fed a lot of ‘honor’ and ‘duty to defend the homeland’ while the real reason for the secession/war was to keep slavery intact to the benefit of the minority that were slave holders. Just my opinion.

  10. For the Southerns, the increasing wealth of Europe meant increasing prices for cotton and increasing profits for cotton growers using slaves.

    “The lure of easy money has a mighty strong appeal…”

    The profits of the primary producers, the plantations, meant “trickle down” economics for the rest of the Southerners.

    In addition, the South inherited the slaves. Abolition raised the legitimate security and economic issues of what to do with the several million former slaves. Eventually, many of them left the land and headed North to work in factories.

    I think the truest view of the South during this period was “Gone with the Wind,” at least within its social scope.

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