Yeah, I’m definitely not on, um, whatever side this is (and I’ll ask the OP to, in the future, leave me out of this sort of craziness). I think Lincoln made a good call in using force of arms to prevent the southern states from seceding from the Union, I think he made the tough calls during the war, and I think it’s one of histories great lost chances that he was assassinated before he could push through his own plans for reconstruction. He was flawed, sure, but he was a great man at a time when this country desperately needed a great man.
Not for his time, he wasn’t. True, he held preserving the Union first, as he should. And his views became much less racist as he went on.
So, let’s not judge men by presentism.
The greatest philosophers of the past: Plato (428-348 BCE)
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
Kant (1724-1804)
Hume (1711-1776)
Descartes (1596-1650)
Socrates (469-399 BCE)
Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Locke (1632-1704)
would all be considered terribly racist and sexist *today. *
Can we please stop with the canard that the antebellum South or the CSA was ever interested in state’s rights. They knew without strong federal support of slavery in all the states, slavery was untenable. They were all for federal power to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act against the will of the people of the North. The Confederate Constitution gave less power to the states, specifically banning any state from ending slavery in their borders and specifically banning any state from leaving the CSA.
The State’s Rights narrative is part of the effort to rewrite the history of the war.
Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk
Agreed. Reading the CSA Constitution shows examples of where the States lost power to the Confederate government.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Actually, I do believe that “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is an aspect of traditional conservative philosophy. More precisely, it’s a belief in incremental change that accounts for cost and benefits, in contrast to sweeping changes driven by inspiration. That’s only part of the definition of traditional conservatism of course. I will concede that modern American rightism, as expressed by 2/3 of the current government, doesn’t match to traditional conservatism. Neo-reactionary cronyism, maybe?
Tying this back to the Civil War, North Carolina Democrats in 1860 are an example of conservatives of that era who sought to maintain the status quo. They were opposed to both abolition and secession. Here’s a write-up of their position:
https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/exhibits/show/compromise/opposition-to-secession
BTW, acknowledging that past conservatives supported slavery does not imply that modern conservatives support slavery. I certainly don’t.
His zealousness resulted in many dead and decades of domestic strife, so pardon me if I present an alternative assessment.
Yes but they point to things he did. Foner loves how he crushed a secession by force. Iraq War supporters love his squashing of due process.
My point is why would I point out CSA were terrible, everyone already knows and agrees on this.
My reading of history places men who artfully avoided bloodshed over those who pursued it in defense of political unions or empires.
As I said, Iraq War lovers claim Lincoln.
No, he pursued deportation to his last days. He was a supporter of Black Codes and was against the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Law.
Lincoln was too haaaaaard on the poor Confederate! They were traitors to their nation and vile human beings but he was so meaaaaaan to them which caused so many deaths!
How DARE Lincoln negotiate with the southerners! :smack:
Cite? (He favored Colonization (voluntary) rather than deportation (forced).) Racist, probably, but not authoritarian.
Cite? He accepted some, but where did he promote them?
He opposed Nullification regardless of the law being nullified by the states (and the debate over nullification of the Fugitive Slave Law occurred a decade before he was president).
Wait a second. You’re saying Lincoln favored white supremacy and slavery and declared war on the Confederacy to defend those principles?
I tend to put a large share of the blame for the death and destruction caused by the war on the person who declared war. Which was Jefferson Davis not Abraham Lincoln.
Getting back on topic, I agree with others who have said right wing is a difficult term to apply to 19th century politics. But I’d have no problem saying that the Confederates were conservatives.
They were pretty open about it. They said that they were staying true to the principles of the founding fathers while the federal government was trying to change the political system. They were also trying to maintain a traditional agriculture-based economy while opposing the new industrial economy. They often invoked classical societies like the Greeks and the Romans and citing the Bible in defense of slavery. So they were clearly a political system that looked to the past rather than the future.
While “right-wing” is not language mid-19th-century Americans used much, the Confederates were certainly at some pains to portray themselves as “conservatives”. From the notorious “Cornerstone Speech” of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens:
And from the Address Of Congress To The People Of The Confederate States:
Nm
I don’t think that’s quite right. I mean, I agree with you that aristocrats stand and have stood firmly on the right of the spectrum for all recorded history, but IMO right vs left is less about aristocracy vs. plebeians than more generally about property rights and special rights. That is to say, right wing thought boils down to individual property and the rights (and privileges) of a given individual or group lying above the needs of anyone else and deserving of protection from these somebody elses (be they an underclass or a foreign entity) ; whereas left wing thought is much more concerned about the rights and (lack of) property of the majority and/or across borders.
Which makes the Confederacy squarely right wing, since it fought to preserve the right of certain individuals to a specific type of property that the federal State deemed they should forfeit (to whit other human beings) and deemed their right and privilege to own said property above the well being of others - not just the slaves mind you, but also everybody who had to fight and died in their damned war. A war which was decided not by poor Southern shitkickers with barely a farthing to their name, but by landed plantation owners.
No matter the political system they exist in the rich and privileged are nigh always right wingers, almost by definition - since they have more property than the rest, or more rights than the rest, they typically want to preserve the status quo that enables their fortune because, not to put too fine a point on it : fuck all o’y’all, got mine. It’s a rare aristocrat who says “you know what, they’re right, this is fucked up”. Hats off to the marquis de Sade.
Yeah but dude, every US politician *ever *has said that. That’s the beauty of your founding fathers : you can find something in their writings to support any policy whatsoever (might have to distort and out-of-context it, but hey) and they’re all dead so none can say “Now just wait a goddamn minute, you asshole, that’s not…”
They’re very much like Jesus that way, only with more wigs and less shredded abs.
Let me introduce you to Dr Karen Stenner who has a PhD in Political Psychology. In her paper “The Three Kinds of Conservatism” the first paragraph reads:
Openness to new experiences, and the converse of generally being closed to new experiences, is considered one of the five big underlying personality traits. Twin studies even point to a significant heritable component to those big five - “around 40–60% of the variance in the Big Five is heritable.” That’s in the range where similar studies put the heritable component of sexuality, as a comparison of strength. It seems unlikely to me that all those people born with a strong predisposition towards being uncomfortable with change don’t show up somewhere in our politics.
It seems like there’s two issues with your not believing those people exist. One might be a unwritten assumption that I usually see in arguing the point you make. It’s that all conservatives are the same. If Stenner is right that conservatives are not a homogeneous group, proving that many conservatives are comfortable with change doesn’t mean that they all are. The second issue is treating it as less of a distribution and not wanting any change. Being open to some smaller and more deliberate change doesn’t mean being comfortable with big and fast changes.
Swinging back to the civil war the theory presents an interesting take. Those who didn’t want big changes in the North and South didn’t necessarily want the same things. They both would be predisposed to trying to limit changes to the culture they lived in. Since those cultures were different those types of conservatives would take different positions. Northern change averse conservatives and Southern change averse conservatives were not necessarily political allies.
I know this thread isn’t yet another thread about the gold standard :smack: but a remark may be in order for those following along at home.
In 1816 President Madison chartered a public-private Second Bank of the United States which became “the largest monied corporation in the world.” President Andrew Jackson came to power as a populist demagogue in 1833 and waged a vendetta against the bank, partly based on the perennial idea that only gold is real money. The destruction of that bank and the resultant financial crises led directly to the Depression of 1836-1843 (coincident with Lincoln’s terms in the Illinois legislature), perhaps the worst depression in American history. Henry Clay’s Whig Party, and later the Republican Party, were founded in large part in reaction to Jackson’s financial follies.
Yes, Abraham Lincoln, like Henry Clay, had learned from Jackson’s mistake and advocated a national (central) bank to mitigate the chaotic financial roller-coasters associated with a pure gold standard. For some, this is unforgivable. Compared with advocating a central bank, the whole moral issue of slavery pales into insignificance.
Actually, there is a separate word for conservative: they are called ‘conservatives’. That’s because right wing / left wing doesn’t map very well to concepts like ‘radical / conservative’. The term "radical right wing’ is well known, and if party like the Democrats can get people like Obama elected then they can’t be very radical.
I could explain what I think that right-wing and left-wing could usefully mean, but I’m unlikely to get any more agreement on the terms than there is now. 