Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  What if a majority of Americans believe that to free a million or several million slaves and release them into the general population would endanger the safety and welfare of that population? The progressive answer is: Well, that’s just ridiculous! Too bad for them! Let them learn to deal with it! But in a democratic society, the deference of rulers to people’s opinions and even to their fears is no mere technicality.

  The case for democracy, no less than the case against slavery, relies on the consent of the governed. Consider Alexander Hamilton’s definition of freedom: “The only distinction between freedom and slavery is this: in the former state, a man is governed by the laws to which he has given his consent; . . . in the latter, he is governed by the will of another.”30 This applies no less to democracy than to slavery. The freedom principle in both cases is the same.

  If it is wrong to govern a man without his consent—the essential definition of slavery—it is equally wrong to govern a people without their consent. To outlaw slavery without popular consent would be to destroy democracy, and thus to outlaw the very basis for outlawing slavery. Lincoln understood this, as did the American founders.

  All statesmen must deal with the gap between principle and practice. But the founders also had to deal with the tension between two principles that had become rivals, “created equal” and “consent of the governed.” It is this tension that produced the founders’ plantation dilemma, or what political scientist Harry Jaffa calls the “crisis of the house divided.” Let’s see how the founders attempted to solve it.

  LESSER EVIL

  It is tempting when considering the problems of the past to ascribe to the people involved a freedom they did not have. It is tempting to ask them to choose things that were not on the table to choose. This may be termed the utopian temptation, which in this case has become a progressive strategy deployed against the founders. The key to the strategy is to blame the founders for not securing ideals of perfection that they affirmed in principle but were not in a position to secure in practice.

  Let’s put ourselves in the place of the founders, gathered in that small dusty room in Philadelphia, and ask: what were the actual choices available to them with regard to slavery? The question before them was not slavery but union, the challenge of forming a durable union. This was a hugely controversial issue, with powerful opponents—the so-called Antifederalists—contending against the new constitutional union being proposed in Philadelphia.

  So the choice before the founders was not, should we have a union based on slavery or one based on antislavery? Rather, the choice was to have a union that permitted slavery to continue, at least for a time, or to have no union at all. Slavery was less prevalent in the North but nevertheless legal in all of the thirteen states represented in Philadelphia, and it was obvious to all that many states—and certainly the Southern states—would never join a union that forbade slavery at the outset.

  Let’s suppose the founders chose to outlaw slavery and form a union only made up of states that agreed to join on that basis. In that case, at best, America would be a northern confederacy made up of a handful of northern states. The southern states might quite likely have formed their own confederacy—similar to the one they attempted to form in 1861—entirely free of pressure from the other one. So, not one America but two.

  Let’s assume that as western territories were formed, they could join either the northern or the southern confederacy and become states, and that in general the northern ones joined the northern union and the southern ones the southern union. Now we still have two Americas, each one significantly larger than before. If things had happened this way—the most reasonable conjecture in this exercise of counterfactual history—there would be virtually no leverage on the part of the north over the south: the south would have created a slave empire that would most likely have lasted much beyond 1865, and the predicament of blacks today would be far worse than it is.

  Given the choices before them, the founders, who were mostly antislavery men, made what they considered to be the best antislavery choice. They founded a union on antislavery principles, anchored in the Declaration. Their hope and expectation was that the people of this union would recognize, as Lincoln repeatedly stressed, that if they wanted freedom for themselves, they could not tyrannize over others. Consequently, the founders believed, in their novus ordo seclorum or new order for the ages, slavery would be placed, as Lincoln put it, in a “course of ultimate extinction.”

  According to Michelle Alexander, in her influential book The New Jim Crow, “Under the terms of our country’s founding document, slaves were defined as three fifths of a man, not a real, whole human being.”31 We can’t fault Alexander alone; we’ve heard this before, and Alexander is simply echoing progressive orthodoxy. Yet the implication of her statement—that the three-fifths clause represents the founders’ dehumanization of blacks—is completely wrong.

  The three-fifths clause of the Constitution emerged as a consequence of the founders’ balancing act to secure a union. The issue between the Northern and Southern states involved political representation. The South, of course, wanted more representation—which meant more power—and thus Southern states wanted blacks to count as full persons. Northern states wanted blacks to count as zero, to reduce the power of the slave-owning faction. The three-fifths clause was the compromise that enabled the North and South to come to terms on this issue.

  While historians debate its impact, this was a compromise that seems to have favored the South. Historian David Brion Davis points out that the Democratic Party’s national domination, beginning with Andrew Jackson in the late 1820s and continuing through 1860, was made possible largely by the added voting power supplied to Southern states by the three-fifths clause.32 It should be obvious from this context that the clause had nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of black people and that progressive efforts to invoke it to prove the white supremacy of the founders is both unfair and ridiculous.

  The bottom line is that the founders chose the lesser of two evils. It was a difficult choice, yet both Lincoln and the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, himself a runaway slave, considered it the right choice. Douglass noted that by keeping the slave-owning South within the union, the founders enabled Northern political pressure to work against slavery. “I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of Union more closely, and bringing the slave States more completely under the power of the free States.”33

  Lincoln compared slavery to a cancerous growth on the body and argued that “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time,” in the same manner the founders treated slavery as an evil they must tolerate with a view to its future removal.34

  Lincoln’s argument was that lesser evils are always preferable to greater ones, and it is the task of the statesman to achieve as much good as is practical under the circumstances. If the framers had sought to guarantee all the rights of all men, they would most likely have ended up securing no rights for anyone. The statesman must not merely know what is good but also how much good is achievable, and to achieve it without foolishly striving for more.

  “Much as I hate slavery,” Lincoln said in Peoria in 1854, “I would consent to the extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one.”35 For Lincoln, the union is the mechanism—the only mechanism—for permanently ending slavery, which is why saving the union becomes his paramount goal. Lincoln implies that it is in the slaves’ interest too to sustain the union, even if the cost involves continuing or prolonging their servitude.

  Of the Declaration’s assertion of equality, Lincoln said of the founders, “They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon th
em. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”36

  In other words, the founders declared the timeless rights that apply to all men at all times, while also creating a political union in their time that would eventually elect an antislavery government in Lincoln’s time, one that could finally make good on the rights that could not be secured for blacks until then. This is how the founders, not in their lifetime but two generations later, finally reconciled human equality with democratic consent.

  LAYING THE FOUNDATION

  In the end, we may ask: was it worth it? The founders may be exonerated of the charge of being white supremacists or being pro-slavery. But did their project succeed, not just in the end, but also in their own time? Here we must recall that up through the American founding, slavery was a universal institution. “If slavery be wrong,” one of the founders, Charles Pinckney, said, “It is justified by the example of all the world.”

  While progressives term slavery America’s “peculiar institution,” political scientist Orlando Patterson responds, “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history . . . in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region on earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”37

  American Indians had slaves on the American continent before the white man arrived here. The British, as we have seen, supervised slavery in the American colonies for a century and a half prior to American independence. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every part of America. In Northern states like New York and New Jersey, slaves didn’t work on plantations but built roads, cleared land, cut timber and herded cattle; they also worked in skilled trades like carpentry, stonemasonry and blacksmithing, and also as domestic labor.

  Yet after the Revolution, there was a big change. By 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery, either immediately or gradually. Thus by the end of the founding era, more than a hundred thousand slaves had been freed—around one-sixth of the total number in the country at the time—and slavery was gone, or on its way out, in seven of the thirteen original states. Southern and border states prohibited further slave importations from abroad. Congress was committed to outlawing the slave trade in 1808, which it did. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.

  How did this happen? The simple answer—the only answer—is what historian David Brion Davis terms “the effects of Revolutionary ideology.” Historian Gordon Wood, the preeminent scholar of the founding, concurs. It is no coincidence, he points out, that Americans in Philadelphia in 1775 started the first antislavery society existing anywhere. It was the Revolution that made American slavery “peculiar” in that it was out of place in a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. In this sense, as Wood writes, “The Revolution in effect set in motion ideological and social forces that doomed the institution of slavery in the North and led inexorably to the Civil War.”38

  The founders are not to blame for killing America or giving America a “false start.” Far from introducing slavery or white supremacy, they laid the moral and political foundation for a new country that became a model for freedom in the world. Based on the principles they enunciated, this country would, in the measure of time, overthrow slavery and establish equality of rights under the law. Lincoln recognized this.

  The progressive attack on the founding is a decoy, an attempt to shift the blame for other, far greater sins perpetrated by other, far greater sinners. We—especially those of us who are nonwhite—owe the founders a debt of gratitude, and if we ever “take a knee” for the flag or the national anthem, it should be to say a prayer and thank God for the United States of America.

  3

  Party of Enslavement

  The Psychology of the Democratic Master Class

  Socialism proposes to do away with free competition; to afford protection and support at all times to the laboring class . . . these purposes, slavery fully and perfectly attains.

  —George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South1

  The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new, expanded slave plantation, with a new ideology to sustain and promote it. For the first time in world history, slave-owners had an elaborate philosophy—actually two elaborate philosophies—to protect slavery from moral and political attack. This ideology was formulated by the leading thinkers of a new political party, the Democratic Party, which became, from the 1820s to 1860, the party of the plantation. This chapter explores the mind of this Democratic master class, because it has shaped Democratic thinking and strategy right down to the present.

  The Democratic Party’s deep involvement in administering the slave plantation and vigorously defending slavery is a historical truth that progressives and Democrats have desperately sought to camouflage. This is the significance of the left-wing rampage through the South, in the wake of the infamous Charlottesville rally, which resulted in the pulling down of Confederate monuments. The Charlottesville rally itself was called to block the proposed removal of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s monument from Emancipation Park.

  In the heated aftermath of Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter and Antifa groups forced the dismantling of dozens of other monuments, with still others under consideration for relocation or removal. In Austin, Texas, the statues of Lee and another Confederate general, Albert Sidney Johnston, were taken down. Maryland authorities removed a statue of native son Roger Taney from in front of the State House.2 On social media, I watched a video of angry protesters yanking down a statue to an unnamed Confederate soldier, shouting obscenities at him and kicking him.

  Seeing the sheer venom of the protesters, I thought to myself, “Oh wow. They’re acting like this lifeless statue can actually hear them and feel pain.” I tried to imagine this soldier, most likely a dirt-poor farm worker who didn’t own any slaves. One of these soldiers was asked after the war what his reason was for fighting in the war and he replied, “Because the Yankees are down here.” In Chicago, strangest of all, someone even tried to burn a bust of Abraham Lincoln, the president who won the war and freed the slaves.3

  This campaign is far from over. Some Democratic activists demand that all Confederate monuments go, including, for example, the ones that stand alongside the monuments to Union generals and soldiers at Gettysburg National Monument. So far the Gettysburg authorities have said no, which is why leftists are keeping up the pressure with articles in Politico like “Why There Are No Nazi Statues in Germany.” The author, Joshua Zeitz, remarks, “In Germany, you won’t see neo-Nazis converging on a monument to Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Hitler, because no such statues exist.”4 In this view, the Confederacy is Nazi Germany, and America needs its own thorough denazification.

  What can we make of this? At first glance, we see Democratic activists pulling down the statues of other Democrats. With the exception of Lincoln, every other statue defaced or removed seems to be one of a Democrat. The naive may be forgiven for thinking, just for a minute, that Democrats may finally be acknowledging and taking responsibility for their history. This the Democratic Party has never done before. Is it possible—could it be—that Democrats are now actually apologizing for their past history of oppression and demanding that their own party’s pro-slavery leaders no longer be publicly honored?

  Wishful thinking. No, that is not what’s going on at all. In all the acres of media reporting on the Confederate leaders, scarcely anyone has pointed out that they were all Democrats. In fact, the whole point of the campaign to topple Confederate statues is to disguise it. It is an effort not at historical exposition but at historical concealment. The point of blaming the Con
federacy is to blame slavery entirely on the South, and the point of blaming the South is to blame the party that is now politically dominant in the South, namely, the Republican Party. Thus the left targets Confederate statues in order to promote its big lie that racism and white supremacy are the province of the right.

  We can see this clearly by observing one statue that has not been pulled down, the monument in Chicago to Stephen Douglas. Douglas was far more of a white supremacist than Robert E. Lee. True, Lee inherited slaves on his wife’s side, but he was also opposed to slavery, as he admitted in a letter to his wife in 1856: “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.”5 In this respect, Lee sounds exactly like his political idol and fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson.

  Douglas lived in Illinois—a free state—and did not own slaves. But unlike Lee, he never expressed any opposition to slavery as an institution. On the contrary, he was, together with South Carolina Democrat John C. Calhoun, the most effective political defender of slave society. Douglas did far more to uphold slavery than Lee, who as a military man was not even involved in the antebellum debate, opposed secession when it was proposed, and joined the Confederacy, refusing Lincoln’s offer of command of the Union army, only when his home state of Virginia seceded against his will.

  Moreover, Douglas derided blacks in the classic language of white supremacy; nothing from Lee corresponds to this. Here’s Douglas, in one of his debates with Lincoln: “Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the Negro to be the equal of the white man . . . He belongs to an inferior race, and must always occupy an inferior position.” And again, “This government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.”

  In another speech—cited by Lincoln—Douglas said that in any contest between a Negro and a white man he was for the white man, although in any contest between a Negro and a crocodile he was for the Negro. Here, as Lincoln pointed out, Douglas’ reference to the crocodile was to reduce blacks, from the white man’s perspective, to the level of beasts. “As the Negro ought to treat the crocodile as a beast, so the white man ought to treat the Negro as a beast.”6