I have always been one of those really odd misfits: a partisan Southerner who has always harbored a profound admiration for the firebrands of what is now known as “the Old Right,” those almost exclusively Midwestern and Western political leaders, many of whom identified with Progressivism, who hewed closely to the principles outlined in George Washington’s Farewell Address.
They regarded the United States as an undertaking not only conceived in liberty grounded in the principles of the 18th century Enlightenment but also one sworn to oppose intervention and imperialism at every turn.
America, after all, was the outgrowth of a coalition of sovereign States, former colonies, that had broken free of the most powerful and extended empire in history. It was emerging even in Washington’s presidency as one of the most singular nations in history, one that soon would be regarded as history’s most successful post-colonial enterprise.
Why would these former colonials want to squander it all by building an empire of their own? That essentially was Washington’s reasoning as well as that the Old Right tradition that was most prominent in the years between the two world wars.
I was discussing a similar topic earlier this week with a relative. Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address not only is significant for what it warned about but also how it characterized the United States and how Americans historically have regarded themselves: as a people for which the task of empire-building not only was an entirely new and alien concept but also inimical to Ameican experience and identity.
That is why I read with great interest this article about the protests that spontaneously broke out among American troops in every theater of operation in the months following World War II.
If there is one thing that I have learned through my long reading of history it’s that old habits really do die hard. A burst of revolutionary idealism was released in 1776 and it has never dissipated. And even the Old Right, which many people had assumed had exited the American political arena after the Pearl Harbor attack, has staged a remarkable comeback, certainly within the last 30 years since the Pat Buchanan presidential insurgency.
South Carolina’s Iconic Palmetto and Crescent Flag
Speaking as one who has harbored a fascination with flags and symbolism for as long as I can remember, I have been intrigued with the amount of time legislators in several states have put into resolving issues related to their state’s symbols, notably flags.
Granted, the bulk of these challenges have been taken up by Southern legislatures as they are confronted with the sundry challenges associated the symbolism of the very late Confederate States of America, some of which is incorporated into their symbols.
Within the last generation two Southern states, Georgia and Mississippi, have undertaken wholesale revisions of their state flag, though Georgia opted in the end to retain a design inspired directly by the Confederacy’s first national flag, the Stars and Bars.
More recently, South Carolina is dealing with what could prove to be one of the most vexing challenges of all: settling on a standard for the state’s iconic Palmetto and Crescent symbol. Fortunately for South Carolina, this symbol predates the Confederacy and stems from the state’s distant Revolutionary past.
As it happens, the Palametto and Crescent flag hoisted daily over the Statehouse bears a somewhat different design than those displayed in the House and Senate chambers and the governor’s office.
Complicating matters is the fact that South Carolina, like many other frugal state governments, relies on private manufacturers to supply the flags it displays in official offices and on public grounds. And because the Palmetto and Crescent symbol never had been standardized, these companies supply different versions.
Consequently, the Legislature is now being challenged to adopt a standardized version of banner, one that has proven more challenging than any of the legislators anticipated.
Speaking as a proud Alabamian, I have to concede that I envy South Carolina immensely. No other state can hold a candle to the Palmetto and Crescent, except Texas, which possess the nation’s most iconic state symbol, the Lone Star flag, recognized the world over.
If only Alabama’s Yellow Hammer carried as much symbolic punch But alas, it is rooted in the Old Confederacy and sooner or later will be consigned to extinction – the symbol, not the bird – much like several Alabama college administrative buildings bearing the name of Gov. Bibb Graves, a noted educational reformer who also maintained KKK membership.
Whatever the case, I do think that the recent dust up over the Palmetto and Crescent is possibly highly instructive from a cultural standpoint.
In the face of an increasingly fraying American identity, state flags and symbolism are likely to become more significant in the future.
Way back in the mid-1970’s, I and my fellow classmates at Russellville Junior High School were blessed with an unusually gifted and dedicated 8th grade history teacher named Mary Alexander.
Mrs. Alexander, now long deceased, loved pointing out the irony of history, particularly in terms of how facets of it – whether these happened to be political or cultural ideals or ways of doing things – often re-expressed themselves at times when we least expected them, even when we thought that they had become discredited or simply had played out.
I never forgot her lesson. Indeed as an avid reader of history I am reminded of this on a frequent basis. Just when we think that some ideas have been discredited or forgotten and, consequently, consigned to history’s ashbin, they return with a vengeance, even with the sense of vibrancy and relevance that had distinguished them in previous decades or even centuries.
The rekindling of American federalism and even, perish thought, states rights, serves as an unusually timely example. I grew up at a time when federalism expressed as states sovereignty seemed throughly discredited. What seemed to have been an inexorable march toward human progress, LBJ’s Great Society programs, locked arm and arm with the civil rights struggle and the federal courts’ efforts to expunge the stigma of racial discrimination, seemed to have dealt, if not a fatal blow to states rights, at least a searing defeat that would leave this constitutional doctrine in what amounted to a semi-comatose state.
We were assured by teachers at every level of public education that states rights was a relic of the past – not just a quaint but even a disquieting one. I recall several political science courses in which the professor, a Great Society liberal, likened federalism to a marbled cake. The federal government was the cake, though states provided measure of enhancement, sort of like chocolate marbling.
Yet, history seems to be repeating itself with a vengeance. In the face of American federal impasse and national division, states, large and small alike, are reasserting the themselves. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions on this forum, it started more than a decade ago when then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger began characterizing his state as something resembling a nation within a nation. He successor, Jerry Brown, even began conducting a kind of incipient foreign policy related to climate change.
Recently, a prominent GOP leader, Allen West, has lobbied for a secession vote in the Texas State Assembly, a move that at least one GOP leader in another Western state characterizes not only as a positive move but also one that bears close watching.
More recently in Oregon, state Sen. Jeff Golden (D-Ashland) has proposed legislation that would reintroduce a state bank concept for Oregon, primarily with the aim of serving as a backstop for community banks and credit unions.
Golden holds up the Bank of North Dakota as the model for his efforts, stressing the role that this bank played in minimizing foreclosures during the Great Recession.
The Washington Post reports that small businesses in North Dakota, compared with their counterparts in other states, were ably served by this model. In fact, they secured more Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans relative to the state’s workforce than other states, with more than $5,000 per private-sector worker as of May 8, 2020.
Yet, why is all of this surprising? States, by their very nature, possess the accoutrements of nationhood. And this is as much a matter of practicality as a historical fact.
As a student of constitutional history, I not only find this fascinating but also instructional in terms of how it underscores the increasing inefficiency of centralized federalism. If developments such as these demonstrate one thing, it’s that no central government, certainly one so big, bloated and overextended as the imperial behemoth in Washington, possesses the omnicompetence to manage a polity of the scale of the United States.
The late Mrs. Alexander was spot on: History does repeat itself.
Confederate Provisional Congress Meeting in Montgomery, AL, in 1861
I wondered how much longer it would be before the Confederate Constitution, much like Confederate statues, would fall victim to cancel culture. Quite honestly, though, I don’t know what is more maddening: cancel culture or the intellectual laziness evincedby journalists, even relatively elite ones, who, either intentionally or unintentionally, aid and abet this malignant cultural trend.
AP journalist Jay Reeves characterizes the Confederate Constitution, which, incidentally, was debated and drafted in the Capitol in Montgomery in my native state of Alabama, as a vestige of white supremacy without even bothering to consider the document within its full historical context. And let’s make no mistake here: The Permanent Confederate Constitution was conceived within a wide intellectual and historical Anglo-American constitutional context and, for that reason alone, is worthy of serious discussion, despite its provisions safeguarding the institution of slavery.
It is appalling to me that Reeves never even bothered to explore this unusually rich context, which would have been standard practice among journalists as recently as a decade ago.
A Watershed Document
Before public discourse became so poisoned, the Confederate Constitution, despite the controversy associated with it, would have been characterized by some writers and academics as a watershed document, one that represented the outcome of a protracted, intense and often acrimonious debate on the nature and scope of federal power that began immediately following the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1789.
The Permanent Confederate Constitution could be accurately characterized as embodying the Jeffersonian School argument, which maintains that the federal government – the “general government,” as it was characterized by many in the decades following constitutional ratification – simply functioned as the agent of the contracting sovereign states. This was underscored by the Confederate Constitution’s preamble, which affirmed that each state, in ratifying the document, was acting in its “sovereign and independent character.”
Aside from reaffirming the Jeffersonian view of federal power, this revised constitution also introduced some remarkable innovations that not only are instructive today but that still hold currency as contemporary Americans struggle to rein in federal power and even more significant, contend with mounting interest in sectionalism and even secession. Indeed, the case could be made that these innovations are especially relevant today amid new sectional divisions pitting predominantly liberal blue-coastal states against predominantly and implacably conservative red heartland states – issues not all that different from the ones that plagued federal relations in the early 19th century.
A Six-Year Presidency and a Line-Item Veto
One notable innovation was how the Confederate framers altered the office of the presidency, both limiting and strengthening it. While restricting the chief executive to a single 6-year term, the Confederate Constitution also empowered him with line-item veto power. Such a constitutional prerogative potentially would have gone a long way toward reining in the Leviathan federal state, one that not only extends its hand into increasing facets of American life but even holds tremendous sway over the affairs of nations in far-fling corners of the world. Moreover, with such a constitutional safeguard, we likely wouldn’t be contending today with a $20-million deficit.
The constitution also prohibited Congress from levying protective tariffs that tended to benefit one section of the country over others, an issue that proved contentious in the formative stages of the young American Republic and that virtually rent it apart in the early 1830’s.
The long-term effects of protective tariffs arguably have had an especially deleterious effect on the fortunes of American development and national cohesiveness, not only by allowing one section of the country, namely, the mercantile Northeast, to grow rich at the expense of most of the others but also by enabling it to transform much of the rest of the country, notably the war-ravaged, economically prostrate post-Civil War South, into an economic extraction zone.
Reining in Federal Judicial Power
In what arguably could be regarded as the most noteworthy innovation of them all, state legislatures were entitled to remove corrupt or constitutionally unscrupulous federal judges living in their states by a two-thirds vote of both houses. Ponder for a moment all of the contentious 21st century issues that could have been resolved by this provision. It would have obviated the need for state legislatures to resort to strategies such as interposition and nullification that contributed significantly to two serious constitutional crises stemming from passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 and the Tariff Act of 1828. Each of these contributed significantly to the protracted political impasse that culminated in a national breakup in 1861. Even more significant, though, such a constitutional safeguard likely would have contributed significantly not only to higher levels of restraint in the judicial branch but also in the federal legislative branch, as lawmakers would been more cognizant of the futility of passing laws that encroached on state sovereignty.
Yes, the Confederate Constitution was both an innovative and instructive, one among a long line of written constitutions within the Anglo-American tradition, one that also incorporates those of Commonwealth realms. And that is why it, along with others, should figure in prominently in any undergraduate or graduate coursework dealing with the protracted historical debate about the nature and scope of central power within a federal system. But like so much else in woke 21st century America, the Confederate States Constitution is now so thoroughly tainted by the stigma of white supremacy that it can never be regarded as anything more than a “forgotten relic of an ignoble cause,” borrowing Reeves’ description, and, consequently should remain locked away in archive and forgotten.
This only ensures that substantive debate in this country will grow even more constrained. But, of course, by now it should have dawned on most of us that this is one of the underlying aims of wokeness and cancel culture, which aren’t so much about fairness and inclusiveness as they are about stigmatizing views that threaten their hegemonic standing within American politics and culture.
Reeves’ article only served to underscore that we no longer function aa vibrant, open and free society, only one that pretends to be. And many of us are beginning to wonder how much longer elites, increasingly confident of the political and cultural power they increasingly wield, will bother with maintaining this pretension.
The outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections, especially in terms of how it is reflected in the composition of the U.S. Senate, underscores the perennial wisdom of the Founders. But the left’s dissatisfaction with this outcome and its increasingly strident criticism of the “undemocratic” nature of this upper chamber demonstrates two things: its ravenous thirst for power and its growing awareness of its power, especially as it’s manifested in the most influential facets of American culture, namely academia, the Establishment media and the arts.
Two other important points must be mentioned: First, the Senate represents the essence of America union and nationhood, and there would not have been a United States without this indispensable compromise. Second, no other institution established by the Constitution better embodies the limited nature of our federated republic
Indeed, the compromise reflects one of the primary concerns of the Founders: to establish a federal republic with sharply delineated powers and scope, one that enabled the individual states to carry on with virtually all the attributes of nationhood.
To put it another way, the Senate was conceived as a sort of chamber of state ambassadors to serve as a counterweight to the larger popular chamber: the House of Representatives. Its purpose was to ensure that the United States remained what Madison called a “republic of republics,” a federation with sharply circumscribed powers that chiefly functioned to protect the states against against dissolution and the inevitable threats from the chief European maritime powers, Britain and France.
Through its increasingly harsh criticism of the Senate, the left is calling one of the most vital safeguards of the Constitution and our federal republic into question. And, of course, there is an ulterior motive driving this, because abolishing or, at least, radically altering the composition of both the Senate and the Electoral College would confer the blue coastal regions of the United States with virtually unbridled power to dictate to the rest of the country.
This demonstrates one of the perennial challenges of large, extended federal republics such as ours: the specter of sectionalism, the desire of one part of a federation to dominate at the expense of the others. It was one of the factors that led to the outbreak of the bloody Civil War. And without the vigilance of present-day Americans, it could lead to a similar upheaval.
For more insight into all of this, I recommend a thorough reading of the writings of South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun – that is, if you are able to wrangle a contraband copy of it.
Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey. (Photo: Courtesy of the Alabama Republican Party.
Based on the resultsof the June 5th primary, Alabama continues to affirm its reputation as one of this nation’s reddest of red states.
Case in point: My native northwest Alabama county of Franklin. Based on my quick but possibly faulty math garnered from The New York Times’ election data, I noticed that some 4,500 voters participated in Franklin County’s GOP primary, while only around 600 participated in the Democratic one.
This is a remarkable turnaround from the early 80’s, when I was a young Franklin county voter and GOP poll worker. The first GOP primary was held in Alabama in 1978. Before then, a GOP state convention nominated candidates, who generally served as sacrificial lambs in the November general elections.
The only basis for excitement for Franklin County Republicans way back then was the presidential elections in which GOP presidential nominees were generally competitive. With the exception of 1976, when Jimmy Carter swept the South, Republican presidential nominees carried the state. Franklin County, a historically yellow dog Democratic county, generally proved no exception to this rule, though Democrats continued to dominate the down-ballot offices, as they did in mf the rest of the state.
Early GOP Forerunners
Even so, there were a few talented Republican outliers holding aloft the Republican banner in spite of all these daunting obstacles.
One especially memorable Republican insurgent was an unusually gifted and charismatic GOP forerunner named James Douglas Martin, a highly decorated WWII combat veteran.
James Douglas Martin
He was one of a handful of Republicans who secured a seat in Congress during the Goldwater sweep in ’64. How? By positioning himself to the right of Alabama Democrats, which, needless to say, took some doing.
He even employed a phrase about “returning to the principles of ’61 – 1861,” which, needless to say, sounded like a veiled call for secession – certainly a statement laced with irony, considering that he was a candidate of the party of Lincoln.
Martin was an unusually gifted public speaker with a very polished and charismatic bearing that rivaled Reagan’s. I can vouch for that, having attended in the late 70’s a Reagan Rally at the Jefferson County Civic Center, featuring Martin as a warm-up speaker to Reagan.
One of Martin’s most memorable acts of chutzpah was running against the wildly popular Lurleen Wallace as the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in 1966. It proved to be another ill-fated Republican attempt at storming what remained an all but impregnable Democratic electoral wall. He polled only 31 percent of the vote and carried only Greene County and the maverick and perennial Republican county of Winston, known as the Free State.
He made a last attempt at a statewide office in 1978 against a relatively liberal Alabama incumbent senator named Donald Stewart. His campaign slogan: “Alabama Needs Another Jim,” referring to the late conservative Democratic Senator Jim Allen.
Martin was defeated handily and suffered a severe heart attack shortly thereafter but recovered and lived to be almost 100.
Comparatively late in life, he was appointed director of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Several of my Cooperative Extension colleagues worked with him and described him as one of the most brilliant and dynamic people they ever encountered.
In a very real sense, Jim Martin was the John the Baptist of Alabama Republican politics, one who entered the political fray as a Republican about 20 years prematurely. If he he had been born a generation later, he not only would have secured high office but also would be remembered today as one of the most gifted and influential statesmen in Alabama history – of that I have little doubt.
The 1986 Breakthrough
Republican fortunes improved markedly after the election of 1986, when the Alabama Democratic Party was widely perceived among voters as stripping conservative Democrat Charlie Graddock of his gubernatorial nomination on highly specious grounds and handing it to party stalwart Bill Baxley. That was the first sign of fissures within what had been the indomitable Alabama Democratic Party.
The obscure 1986 GOP nominee, Amway salesman and former Cullman County Probate Judge Guy Hunt, was swept into office and subsequently won reelection in 1990.
Corruption charges forced Hunt out before the completion of his term and he was succeeded by Lt. Governor Jim Folsom, Jr., who was upset in the 1994 election by former conservative Democrat-turned-Republican Fob James.
James was defeated in 1998 by the Democratic nominee, then Lt. Gov. Don Siegelman, but this Democratic resurgence proved short-lived.
Siegelman was defeated by congressman Bob Riley in 2002. Less than a decade later, the GOP secured control of both houses of the Legislature in 2010, the first time in 136 years.
Today the Republicans dominate the Democrats by more than a 2-1 margin in the Alabama House of Re and by 5-1 in the Alabama Senate.
With the possible exception of Utah and Oklahoma, Alabama, once considered virtually synonymous with the Democratic Party, is now the ruby-reddest Republican of U.S. states.
A recent column in Vox explores the decline of dominant American identity and the ways that this identity could be rebuilt amid widespread demographic division and economic distress.
Ezra Klein, the author, contends that the vibrant, effusive American identity that prevailed throughout the 20th century was forged primarily on the basis of two world wars and the 70-year threat of Soviet communism.
I’m inclined to take a slightly different view. The modest imperial standing America acquired in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War formed a critical component of 20th century America identity too. Millions of Americans were carried on a wave of imperial euphoria, confident that the acquisition of a modest, backwater empire heralded our virtually unimpeded ascent to national greatness. And much of this was bound up in the war’s success in re-enlisting the defeated South in nation- and empire-building that followed in the aftermath of this war.
Up to that time, many people in the former Confederate states spent the Fourth of July commemorating the fall of Vicksburg rather than celebrating American Independence.
At the turn of century, some 35 years after one of the bloodiest struggles in history, the South reasoned that if it couldn’t have its own nation, it at least could participate in the building of a nation destined to ascend to the front ranks of global leadership.
This was a fortuitous turn of events for the American national enterprise: The post-Civil War South ended up supplying this nation not only with a significant share of its patriotic ballast but also a generous portion of men and women to guard the outposts of the global American empire that emerged after World War II.
Yet, we seem to be reaching an critical juncture, if not a major impasse, in defining American identity. And one wonders: How much practical value is derived from doubling down on one-nation rhetoric and insisting on more dialogue?
In the view of a growing number of heartland Americans, the only rhetoric deemed unifying by our ruling classes is that which conforms to the agenda of the left.
Moreover, another vital adhesive of American identity, centralized federalism, seems to be losing its efficacy too. Americans seem less inclined than ever to operate off the same page on issues that were once seen as vital to national security, such as regulating immigration and guarding our borders. Some on the left are even calling for the elimination of the Immigration and Customs Service (ICE).
Perhaps most disturbing of all, though, we seem to be rapidly approaching a cultural impasse that surprisingly few pundits have considered: namely, how this country will manage to soldier on when it is no longer regarded by ordinary Americans as standing at the pinnacle of the world’s most successful and exceptional nations.
So much of American unity and national identity is bound up with its perceived greatness and singularity.
A recent study ranked tiny Finland and several of the other Scandinavian countries as the world’s happiest, although the United States failed to rank in the top ten. Indeed, the results of the study point out a remarkable anomaly: Despite the United States possessing the world’s largest economy, millions of its citizens grapple with rising levels of obesity, substance abuse and high rates of depression, not unlike the problems that plagued the Soviet Union in the years leading up to its collapse.
Some on the left have expressed a desire to build a new national identity on the basis of socialism and identitarian politics, with the long-term goal of ridding the country of what they characterize as a historically evil and malignant white patrimony that has existed since the nation’s founding.
Given all these deep divisions over how to define the American enterprise in the future, perhaps we will return to some version of Thomas Jefferson’s 18th century vision of an American Empire: a continent of smaller states, either loosely tied or wholly independent of each other, sharing some degree of historical and cultural affinity.
Jefferson, it seems, may prove to a prophet of post-national American unity. At least, one can hope, amid all of this national division and rancor, that we can muster some semblance of mutual affinity and continental unity.
Whatever the case, a socialist, identitarian America should hold no appeal for any decent person, irrespective of race or ethnicity, who cherishes ordered liberty and constitutional government.
But if, God forbid, such an America emerges in the next 30 years, I suppose I’ll be one of those passing my autumn and winter years in a socialist gulag, at least, deriving a measure of solace that I will be living among what remains of sane people in America.
Hollywood will release Chappaquiddick, a movie Chronicling the sordid behavior of Massachusetts Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, next month.
It’s long overdue. The movie will only underscore why I and millions of other conservatives around the country harbor such as deep loathing for our liberal ruling class.
Think about this for a moment: Following the incident on the bridge, Paddy Caligula IV (following in the footsteps of Joe, Jack and Bob), “walked back to his motel, complained to the manager about a noisy party, took a shower, went to sleep, ordered newspapers when he woke up and spoke to a friend and two lawyers before finally calling the police.
As it turned out, Mary Jo Kopechne survived for hours due to an air pocked in the car and then presumably died of slow asphyxiation. If he had called for help immediately after the incident, she conceivably would still be alive today.
Yet, thanks to a combination of three things – Kennedy money, media complicity and the herd mentality among the rank-and-file left – Lascivious Ted lived out his life as the apotheosis of American progressive liberalism. He was lionized not only as the heir of Camelot but even posed a serious intra-party challenge to incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Yes, his sexual predation apparently rivaled that of the notorious Harvey Weinstein, who inspired the #MeToo movement. In fact, Kennedy’s lechery even exceeded his older siblings and his father, which is saying a lot.
And yet, the enlightened progressive voters of the Bay State overlooked all of this time and again. A time or two in my life, I’ve been subjected to ribbing for coming from a state that idolized the likes of George Wallace and that even carried this adulation over to his ill-fated wife, Lurleen. Yet, it seems to have paled in comparison to the Kennedy cult of Massachusetts.
To be sure, there are certainly some very bad apples in conservative/Republican ranks, but I really would contend that they simply can’t get away with as much.
Honestly, if Ronald Reagan or one of the Bush siblings had run a woman off a bridge and waited hours to inform police, they not only would have been indicted but also would have faced utterly derailed political careers.
They would not be lionized to the ends of their lives as paragons of conservative virtue.
Under the circumstances, isn’t it just a little easier to grasp the rage that Richard Nixon, American political history’s classic underdog, felt for the Kennedy siblings – all of whom essentially were entitled, spoiled brats who carried on the philandering, exploitative lifestyle of their father, Bootleggin’ Joe?
An image of George Wallace turned up on my Facebook news feed yesterday. Seven years ago, I posted a photo along with speculation about how George Wallace’s political career would have turned out of he had somehow managed to chart a different course during the segregationist era. He was a moderate Democrat at heart with no serious animus toward blacks and no seriously vested interest in segregation – at least, no more than the average white Southerner of the time.
I’ve written many times about the Wallace legacy – I find him one of the most fascinating and enigmatic political figures in Southern and U.S. history – and I’ll probably keep thinking and writing about him for the rest of my life. He was not only a gifted politician but also an uncharacteristically intelligent one. He was also a visionary who transformed American politics despite coming from what was considered by pundits to be a provincial backwater.
He started out no conservative. His former close friend and fellow University of Alabama law student, U.S. Judge Frank Johnson, once related that arguing with Wallace essentially amounted to debating a New Deal socialist.
As a student at the University of Alabama, Wallace was an outsider. His idol was Carl Elliott, a wonder kid from my native Alabama county of Franklin who worked his way through Alabama and eventually was elected student body president, beating the student establishment know as “The Machine,” which exists to this day. Elliot is remembered as one of Alabama’s most progressive-leaning Alabama congressmen.
Wallace was a Democratic Party stalwart who refused to bolt the 1948 Democratic Convention over the party’s proposed civil rights plank in the party’s platform. As an Alabama circuit judge, he cultivated a reputation for affording black litigants courteous treatment in his courtroom. His bitter defeat in 1958 at the hands of John Patterson changed all of this, driving him to become an ardent segregationist.
In a very real sense he sold his political soul for the sake of political expediency.
I’ve always wondered how differently the Wallace legacy would have been if our 45th Alabama governor had somehow managed not to carry the segregationist legacy.
Moreover, I have also wondered about how differently Wallace’s fortunes may have turned out if he had avoided an assassination attempt. Would he have brokered some sort of John Connally-style arrangement with Nixon, perhaps even serving in a cabinet post? Could he have prevented Jimmy Carter’s assent in 1976? All of these historical what if’s are the grounds of lots of fascinating historical speculation.
The American Thinker recently painted a disturbing picture of the American future. We are embroiled in a Civil War – for now, a cold one, though one that bears many hallmarks of one that eventually could run hot.
And from my perspective as a conservative, the left seems implacably opposed to compromise. And why shouldn’t it be? They control most of the institutions that define cultural hegemony: the mainstream media, the arts, popular entertainment and higher education, not to mention, elements of the so-called Deep State. As I have argued in this forum many times, a Democratic victory last year would have sealed its victory.
The rancorous divisions in this country have prompted some thoughts about an observation Jefferson offered throughout the post-revolutionary period of American history. He presumed that this continent was too big to encompass one American nation. He expected that settlers, as they spanned across broad American continent, would establish several republics, though all of them would share mutual affinities.
That was not to be. As it turned out, our forebears essentially hewed a kind of middle way between the ideals of Jefferson and his arch ideological rival, Alexander Hamilton. We have tended to place great emphasis on the Jeffersonian fixation with individual liberties, while tacking more closely to the Hamiltonian ideal of a centralized federal union.
And I wonder: Could the case be made that this push toward centralization has simply prolonged the inevitable? Isn’t it natural for a country this big to develop distinct regional identities, even fissiparous ones? Would we be getting along better on this sprawling continent if we had been allowed to develop several polities, albeit with strong shared mutual affinities?
Hollywood will release Chappaquiddick, a movie Chronicling the sordid behavior of Massachusetts Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, next month.
An image of George Wallace turned up on my Facebook news feed yesterday. Seven years ago, I posted a photo along with speculation about how George Wallace’s political career would have turned out of he had somehow managed to chart a different course during the segregationist era. He was a moderate Democrat at heart with no serious animus toward blacks and no seriously vested interest in segregation – at least, no more than the average white Southerner of the time.
Ruby Red Republic 
