Has a mainstream progressive found federalism?

In our age of government worship, this might be like a lost soul finding Jesus.

Not really, but small steps.

Jamelle Bouie at the The New York Times has recently pecked out a couple of pieces that make it seem like he has indeed discovered the beauty of federalism.

He seems to support trimming the power of the federal courts, and now he opines that federalism is the only way to save America.

I have been critical of Bouie in the past, and I still will be most of the time. He and I don’t agree on much of anything politically, but that is why federalism is so important.

I would be fine with Bouie living in his own little socialist Utopia somewhere in America. Just not in my State.

And he can leave my State alone, too.

I think he is starting to get it. I am cautious, as the core of any progressive is the dream of controlling others. It doesn’t matter if they are on the left or right, they want power.

It’s the Yankee in them.

Federalism is the only reason the Constitution was ratified in 1788. The “anti-Federalists” may have been right about the future of America, but the “friends of the Constitution” persuaded enough people that their opponents were wrong to get it through the ratification conventions.

It must be emphasized that while the “anti-Federalists” may have been perceptive about the way the general government would abuse power once the Constitution was ratified, the “Federalists” consistently argued they were wrong. That is why we should listen to the Federalists, not the anti-Federalists, when finding original intent.

Otherwise, we concede the field to the other side. The “antis” really wanted federalism and the “Federalists” promised we would get it.

Nationalism wasn’t on the table.

Both sides seemed to agree that centralization was the Shirt of Nessus and should be avoided in such a diverse federal republic.

The Federalists may have been lying–Hamilton certainly was–but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold the federal government accountable to original intent.

That is why the 10th and 9th Amendments exist. They were the check on the entire system. And what became the 10th Amendment was often the first on the list of proposed Amendments coming from the States.

If Americans could get this one civics lesson, the entire course of American government could change, and frankly, as Bouie argues in his essay, we could have lasting civic peace.

I discuss Bouie and federalism on Episode 760 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

Does the “tyranny of the majority” exist?

Short answer, yes.

Every astute political thinker has realized this inherent problem with democracy. It’s why the founding generation warned against excessive democracy in government.

The Constitution was designed to be primarily anti-democratic.

The rule of the 50+1 percent allows a very slim majority to plunder the other half of the population, or worse.

Of course, those who preen about “moral righteousness” always seem to have the high ground. “Are you opposed to helping poor people? Are you racist? Do you want to put people back in chains?”

This kind of stupidity is commonplace on the American campaign trail, and it grabs headlines in the mainstream press who believe that tax payers–the minority of the population–want to enslave the majority or throw grandma off a cliff.

John C. Calhoun understood that a simple numerical majority would constantly plunder the minority and destroy any written Constitution.

It’s why he advocated for a “concurrent majority”, meaning that the minority could always have a veto. This would require real, super-majorities, for any legislation to pass.

Not a bad idea.

Judge Andrew Napolitano recently wrote about the Tyranny of the Majority, and his piece provided a great starting point for a discussion of the problem.

It resulted in Episode 758 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

George Will thinks Americans need to return to “Midwestern values.”

What does this mean? I have many listeners from the Midwest, and they are all great people, but I don’t think any of them would identify with how Will defines “Midwestern values.”

To Will, like all Straussians and neoconservatives, “Midwestern values” rely on the Lincoln myth of America.

Will makes this clear in this Washington Post opinion piece.

You see, Midwesterners avoided the lash of slavery and righteously fought for the Union. They also grew a lot of corn to feed crusading Union soldiers singing His Truth is Marching On.

This is a clear distortion of the real underpinnings of Midwestern culture, namely the South and Jeffersonian America.

We have to remember that Southerners obtained the Midwest for the United States–George Rogers Clark–and Southerners, at least initially, settled the region. The Northwest Territory was at one time called Augusta Co., Virginia.

It wasn’t until later that Yankees started showing up, and coupled with outcast German revolutionaries, changed the dominant political makeup of the region. But I would argue not the character.

Midwesterners have been primarily rural people, Jeffersonian to the core. The “Midwestern values” that Will trumpets are in fact, Southern.

Slavery had nothing to do with the cultural norms of Southerners. As David Hackett Fischer has shown in Albion’s Seed, slavery did not create Southern culture. Nor did “racism,” which was a feature of American life North and South for generations.

Southerners defined America for much of the antebellum period. New Englanders like Charles Sumner knew it, which is why they tried desperately to foist their version of America on the rest of the United States.

Will is really suggesting that America needs to be saved by “Yankee New England” values, something we already have. Just look around.

The United States is governed by California and New York, and not the good parts of either State.

But as usual, a bad George Will column makes for great Podcast fodder, so I hammer his faux “Midwestern values” on Episode 757 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

While many dopes in American still hold this view–see the “Naming Commission” and Ty Seidule–the term has found new life in the 21st century.

There are multiple secession movements across the United States and people around the world are looking to decentralization as a remedy for the out of control State.

The desirability and efficacy of secession can be debated, but no one in the United States should think secession is treason or illegal.

The compact fact of the Constitution and the reserved powers of the States to secede is easily discernible.

Many libertarians have jumped on the secession train, including Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute.

He has a new book out on the subject, and gave a nice talk about secession at the Mises 40th Anniversary event last year.

My most substantial critique concerns his avoidance of John C. Calhoun as a real American political thinker concerned with the “tyranny of the majority.” McMaken correctly identifies the root problem of American government, namely numerical majorities, but does not mention the one man who provided a real proposal to give the 10th Amendment teeth.

Why? Slavery and racism, of course. It’s better to cite Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard than John C. Calhoun, even though left libertarians like to claim Mises was a Nazi and Rothbard a Klan member.

Go figure. You should never try to appease those people.

Secession should be discussed, but Americans, in my estimation, are not ready for it, particularly when you have large segments of the population who can’t get out of their own way without hoisting a Ukrainian flag while wearing a mask.

These sheep love the State, and if the State says secession is treason and racist, it is.

Yet, McMaken’s talk was great Podcast fodder, so I discuss it on Episode 756 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

We can dream. While the House debates who should be the next Speaker, they can’t do any business. Which means they can’t make anything worse.

I wrote a book titled 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America, but as John C. Calhoun pointed out in the 19th century, it was really Congress that kept screwing up America.

Writing a book on that topic would be a multi-volume endeavor.

We are seeing something beautiful develop at this point: principled representatives who won’t cave to the establishment. That doesn’t make any of them worthwhile. I don’t trust a Republican to do anything right, but it does mean that perhaps there could be some changes in Congress.

I recorded episode 755 of The Brion McClanahan Show last week, before the current dust up over the Speaker position, but I did allude to it on the show and opined that it was going to make for great political theater. I also suggested that someone should vote for Donald Trump. Matt Gaetz did just that. Twice. Hilarious.

The people blocking “Conservative, Inc.” from holding on to power in Congress are doing yeoman’s work. They also have all the power in a evenly divided legislative body. If the establishment wants to get work, they have to compromise with these people.

The progressive “Squad” has followed this plan for the last several years, and the House lurched left as a result. They’ve also added more members.

This sets up an interesting 118th Congress. “MAGA Republicans” and “The Squad” could make things interesting for years, that is if they both keep playing hardball.

I love it. The less Congress does, the better we are.

Check out Episode 755 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

It seems Michael Anton wants to define American conservatism. He accuses the other side of playing this game, but there are not many “conservatives” who have spilled as much ink on the topic as Anton in the last couple of years.

I had it out with him in 2021. Now, he has directed his fire at others who are questioning the underpinnings of the West Coast Straussian view of the American founding.

Much of the debate centers on the role of “tradition” versus “natural rights” in the founding period. Were leaders of the founding generation simply Enlightenment “natural rights” thinkers who wanted to codify some Utopian order, or was the founding influenced by the Anglo-American tradition sans ideology?

This is perhaps too simplistic of a dichotomy, but it certainly drills to the root of the problem.

Anton does not think the Anglo-American tradition can apply to people like him–sons of immigrants without English blood–and he bases his “conservatism” on a Lincolnian understanding of American history and society with his reading of “natural rights” and the classical tradition added to the recipe. The result is an inedible dish served up cold.

Traditions are rich, warm, and meaty, the type of stick to your ribs meal that maintains vigor and order. This is not to suggest that Anton’s understanding of American history has not been morphed into a type of American tradition. It has, but it’s influence has largely resulted in the growth of American progressivism, not the solidification of anything “conservative.”

There’s a reason 1860s Republicans called their opponents “conservatives” in order to differentiate their positions from their own.

These are the same people Harry Jaffa and Michael Anton want to champion as modern American “conservatives.” Perhaps so if you are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

No, real American traditionalism dates to the Christian roots of the Magna Charta and the development of the “liberties” of Englishmen. They used that term more frequently than “rights,” and had a much different view of “rights” and “liberties” than modern political thinkers.

Paul Gottfried offered a nice reply to Anton’s latest rant at American Greatness, an exchange I had to cover on The Brion McClanahan Show.

I don’t want to steal my thunder on the “natural rights” vs. “liberty,” so you’ll have to check out Episode 754 of the show.

I’m back in the saddle again.

It feels good to get behind the microphone again and to welcome in another exciting year of Podcasting and more.

I hope you had a great New Year and a Merry Christmas and that 2023 brings you great joy and blessings.

It should be interesting.

I made some changes to the Podcast. You should notice immediately.

But the content is hopefully still just as good, if not better.

I’ve got some interesting episodes for this shortened week, and I kick it off with a discussion of State mottos.

That might sound dull, but the dichotomy between Virginia and Massachusetts explains a lot about political culture.

And politics should be downstream from culture.

The Massachusetts State motto clearly indicates a people dedicated to cultural imperialism. Now you might say that the modern version is a truncated form of the Latin, but regardless, going to war to preserve peace is rather Orwellian. Or Yankee.

Either way, it’s bad.

Contrast that with Virginia’s very simple warning to tyrants. That’s the original Old Dominion in a nutshell. Individual–and ancient–liberty of the highest order.

It doesn’t apply to the current Virginia socialist republic, but 1770s Virginia was invested in the ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen.

This discussion will naturally lead to my episode on natural rights, natural law, and liberty on tomorrow’s show, but until then, check out Episode 753 of The Brion McClanahan Show.

For the penultimate episode of The Brion McClanahan Show for 2022, I tackle a topic I’ve been asked about dozens of times.

What was the North’s role in slavery and “white supremacy”?

Short answer: a lot.

This history was generally suppressed for nearly a century. Southerners, of course, talked about it, but the Lincolnian Myth would not allow for such a complex story of the American past. It would be an indictment of the North.

C. Vann Woodword pointed the finger back at Northerners for starting Jim Crow. He was right.

Northerners never showed much commitment to “equality” or had any qualms about slavery until it did not work with their economy or geography.

Many Yankees continued to be absentee slave owners in South America (and the South) well into the 19th century. For example, one of the largest plantations in what is now Russell County, Alabama was owned by a Northern business conglomerate.

This was commonplace.

We also know Northerners made boatloads of cash on the international slave trade. They dominated the business in the United States. The largest slave trader in Charleston, South Carolina was born in Rhode Island.

Northern States did abolish slavery and made at least surface attempts to incorporate blacks into society, but most people understood this to be a paper fix. Most blacks still could not vote or sit on juries on the eve of the War in almost every Northern State. They could own property, and some prospered, but the same could be said in the South. In fact, it was the South, not the North, that started the earliest anti-slavery organizations in the United States, and many Northern theologians were fiery pro-slavery ideologues in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In other words, the moral high ground that Northerners believe they have is a myth propagated by a purposeful distortion of American history.

Around twenty years ago, an amateur historian put together a wonderful web resource on Northern slavery. I highly recommend you take a look.

In the meantime, you can also listen to me discuss the issue on Episode 751 of The Brion McClanahan Show.