[Another Installment in the Series* “The Spirit That Drove Us to Civil War is Back"]
One indication that people are being driven by an evil spirit is that they are led to destroy the very thing that they believe they are working to strengthen and expand.
A dramatic illustration of this self-destructive quality is the fate of Germany under the dark spirit behind the Nazi regime. Hitler, and those who followed him, had as their conscious intention and expectation the building of a thousand-year Reich that would dominate the world. Twelve years after Hitler came to power, that Reich lay in ruins.
Their plan was to install themselves as the Master Race, enslaving those “inferior” races (like the Slavs) that they had not exterminated. In just a few years, the German nation was dismembered under the domination of four outside powers. The German nation the Nazis intended to exalt was rubble.
Some years ago, I observed a parallel between this and the consequences of the choices of the Bush/Cheney administration.
This was an administration that seemed to have two main objectives.
First, as the rulers of the world’s “only remaining superpower,” they intended to use the opportunity of their unchecked power to extend American hegemony in the world.
Their two wars of choice seem to have been motivated by that goal. But instead, the course they chose did the opposite. Instead of increasing the primacy of the United States, they reduced both the nation’s power and its global standing more than any other American presidency in history.
Second, they intended to fortify and enrich American corporate capitalism. It was for this purpose, presumably, that they neglected and dismantled the government’s regulatory systems.
But instead of boosting American capitalism, they left the American economic system in shambles, facing its worst economic crisis –recession combined with a financial meltdown—since the Great Depression.*
This pattern of people, in the grip of an evil spirit, destroying what they profess to love is, if anything, more dramatically demonstrated by the conduct of the Southern leaders in the era of the Civil War.
If one looked at America in 1850, one would hardly been able to imagine how, within fifteen years, slavery could possibly be abolished. Slavery may have been on “the wrong side of history,” as the expression goes nowadays. But it was not under immediate threat. (Lincoln imagined that the eventual extinction of slavery would take 100 years.) It would have been difficult, in 1850, to come up with any plausible plan by which so wuick an end to slavery might be achieved.
The abolitionists may have wished for such a termination, but they were marginal even in the North. And even a politician like Lincoln –for whom the anti-slavery position was key to his mission-- regarded slavery as protected by the Constitution where it already was, and he regarded interferences with it in the states of the South as off limits. It was only the expansion of slavery that Lincoln was determined to block.
Nonetheless, fifteen years later, slavery was gone. And it was not the enemies of the institution of slavery, but its defenders, who drove the process that destroyed it.
Throughout that era, the over-riding goal of the slaveholding elite of the South, fully dominant in the politics of their region, was to preserve and expand their “peculiar” institution. To preserve slavery for the foreseeable future, they had only to navigate the realities of their situation in reasonable and constructive ways. But the intense spirit that inflamed the leaders of the South drove them to act unreasonably and unconstructively.
• They pressed for the expansion of slavery’s realm and of slaveholders’ powers in a way that inflamed the North and polarized the nation. (For example: the Compromise of 1850, with its harsh provisions in the Fugitive Slave Act; the Kansas and Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820; the Dred Scot decision, which forbade Congress from interfering with slavery’s spread; the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution, which betrayed the promises by which the Kansas issue might have been settled in a manner that calmed sectional strife).
• This polarization broke in two the political party that, when united, had given the South a dominant hand on the helm of the country.
• It was the break-up of the Democratic Party, and the consequent nomination of one presidential candidate by the Northern Democrats (Stephen A. Douglas) and another presidential candidate by the Southern Democrats (Breckenridge), that allowed Abraham Lincoln to be elected president.
• It was Lincoln’s election that precipitated the process of secession.
• It was secession that, for the most part unsurprisingly, precipitated the Civil War.
• It was the Civil War that, through a variety of steps and for reasons military and moral and political, led to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1983 and the full abolition of slavery in the 13th Amendment in 1865.
The slaveholders thereby accomplished what would have seemed impossible, and what was the very opposite of what they intended.
That’s what evil spirits do.
Those whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.
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* A third objective of the Bushites, to be sure, was to make the Republican Party a “permanent majority.” The elections of 2006 and 2008 demonstrated that this effort also produced its opposite result. The fact that the Republicans were thenceforward rewarded rather than punished for their conduct in opposition is, I am convinced, merely a function of their having been rescued by the cowardice of the Democrats who could have completed the process –if they’d had only the clarity of vision and willingness to fight one would expect of an American political party—of either destroying the Republican Party or compelling that Party to abandon the destructive spirit that’s continued to animate it. The issue of the wimpiness of the Democrats in our era, and perhaps of the Northerners in the years prior to the Civil War, is another side of the coin, worthy of separate treatment.
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*The first nine entries in this series have been
The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back: Introduction,
The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back: The Wolves' Version of Liberty,
The Spirit That Drove Us to Civil War Is Back: Looking Closer at that National Nightmare, and
The Spirit That Drove Us to Civil War Is Back: A Spirit that Made Slavery Its Priority.
The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back: The Spirit of the Slave Power Since Slavery
The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back-- Who Chose War? I: Today's Crisis
The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back-- Who Chose War II: Responsibility for the Civil War
How We Can Know that the South's Decision to Secede Was an Act of Outlawry
Was Lincoln Wrong to Fight to Preserve the Union?
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Andy Schmookler, recently the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District, is an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher. His books include the award-winning The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution. His website is at www.nonesoblind.org/ .