Here of course Fitzhugh proved to be wrong. Despite resolute attempts by the Northern Democrats to “sell” the plantation, the Northern states did not adopt the plantation way of seeing things. Rather, they adopted the way of a new and, from Fitzhugh’s perspective, most dangerous party, the Republicans, under a man Fitzhugh found surpassingly strange, Abraham Lincoln. Yet Lincoln agreed with Fitzhugh that the house would not stay permanently divided; either his way or Fitzhugh’s way—the free system or the slave system—would eventually prevail.
Fitzhugh’s run was of course ended by the Civil War. His home in Port Royal, Virginia was leveled by Union troops, and he fled to Richmond. After the war he was employed, strangely enough, by the Freedman’s Bureau. Refusing to retract his theories, Fitzhugh, as a judge of the Freedman’s court, lectured emancipated blacks about how they were better off under slavery. In 1857, he even told a group of snickering abolitionists, “Is our house tumbling about our heads? No! No! Our edifice is one that never did fall, and never will fall.”31
In a sense, he was right. Certainly the plantation that Fitzhugh knew and loved—populated with what he took to be happy, contented slaves—was no more. But Fitzhugh’s paternalistic philosophy of the plantation as a kind of infant welfare state did not completely die with it.
Fitzhugh’s arguments—we cannot expect people to compete in the market, self-reliance is a chimera, people are happiest when they are looked after in the Big House—have a startling contemporary relevance. In fact, we see recognizable elements of his thinking among our own progressive Democrats, confirming my point that the pro-slavery Democrats of the South, for all their distance in time, are not so distant in ideology from the Democrats of today.
LINCOLN’S REFUTATION
Before I get to Lincoln’s refutation of these pro-slavery schools of thought, it’s important to emphasize that Lincoln was not merely refuting Southerners; he was refuting Democrats. Lincoln was not a hater of the South. “I have no prejudice against the Southern people,” he said in his first debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa in 1858. “They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up.” If Southerners were reluctant to abolish slavery at one stroke, Lincoln said, “I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.”32
Yet Lincoln showed no comparable gentleness in taking on the Democratic apologias for slavery, whether coming from the North or the South. “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” That’s what Lincoln told the 140th Indiana Regiment toward the end of the Civil War. It echoed what Lincoln had said earlier. “Slavery is good for some people!” he wrote in an undated fragment around 1858, mimicking the Democratic positive-good argument. Then he commented on it. “As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.” Here Lincoln’s charge of hypocrisy is evident. And he deepened the charge with what followed. “Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it is good for the lambs!”33
Here, with deadly accuracy, Lincoln struck at the Democratic pose of taking advantage of the slave while pretending to be his best friend. Yet while Lincoln was sarcastically dismissive of the Southern Democrats, he took a more serious—though ultimately not less indignant—stance against the Northern Democrats led by Stephen Douglas. Douglas was a follower of Andrew Jackson. A fiery, diminutive man, Douglas was called the Little Giant because of his formidable intellect and debating prowess. Lincoln regarded him as his supreme antagonist.
On slavery, Douglas took what we may call the pro-choice position. Like Taney, he insisted he was not in his personal views pro-slavery. But neither, he acknowledged, was he antislavery. Rather, his was a stance of public indifference. “It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.” This was something for each particular state or community to decide for itself. The issue, for him, was not one of principle. The issue was one of free choice.
Douglas noted that we live in a big country. Naturally, people will have differing views on a subject as contentious as slavery. In some places slavery seems to make sense, in others it doesn’t. “In Illinois,” Douglas said, “We tried slavery, kept it up for twelve years, and finding that it was not profitable, we abolished it for that reason, and became a Free State.” Illinois’ approach illustrated Douglas’ national model: let’s agree to disagree. “Diversity,” he said, “is the great safeguard of our liberties.”34
Why impose a uniform position—whether it be pro-slavery or antislavery—on the whole country? This was a recipe for confrontation and strife. To prevent that, Douglas took a stance that he regarded as disinterested and statesmanlike. Essentially his stance was not to take a position, but to step aside and let each community or territory or state make its own decision and live with it. What, Douglas asked, could be a more democratic remedy than that?
Douglas called his stance “popular sovereignty.” In a famous article in Harper’s, Douglas affirmed “the right of every distinct political community . . . to make their own local laws, form their own domestic institutions, and manage their own internal affairs in their own way.” Applying popular sovereignty to Kansas, he said, “If the people of Kansas want a slaveholding State, let them have it, and if they want a free State, they have a right to it.”35 And this approach, Douglas insisted, was congruent with the intentions of the founders.
Douglas may have been indifferent regarding slavery, but he was not indifferent regarding blacks. In one of his debates with Lincoln Douglas said, “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the Negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, but for my own part I do not regard the Negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever.”36 As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Douglas was a white supremacist. So were virtually all Democrats in the antebellum era.
From Douglas’ abstemious rhetoric it might seem that his position on slavery was quite modest, seeking for it a limited reach and legitimacy. But in fact Douglas envisioned a massive slave empire south of the Mason-Dixon line, one that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and incorporated Mexico, Central America and the islands of the Caribbean. “Expansion was the keynote of Douglas’s foreign policy,” Harry Jaffa writes, “popular sovereignty of his domestic policy.”37
Let us now zoom in on Douglas’ reasoning about slavery. If we pay attention to it, we can see how close Douglas’ position is to the progressive Democratic stance today on abortion. Obviously Douglas referred to a choice made by communities, not individuals. But that is the sole difference. Otherwise, the reasoning is the same. Who is to say when life begins? Let’s agree to disagree. The right to choose is paramount.
This pro-logic was directly challenged by Lincoln. First, Lincoln showed the radicalism behind Douglas’ supposedly modest stance. He pointed out that not only did Douglas seek to create a transcontinental slave empire, but “he has no desire there shall ever be an end of it.”38 Douglas emphatically rejected the founders’ wish that slavery be placed on a path to ultimate extinction. If Douglas had his way, states and communities in America now would be deciding for themselves whether or not to enslave blacks.
Lincoln also exposed the inner contradiction in Douglas’ position, and in doing this also supplies us today with the most powerful refutation of so-called pro-choice logic. Lincoln argued that for individuals no less than communities, choice is in general the correct approach. No one would dream, Lincoln said, of interfering with “the cranberry laws of Indiana or the oyster laws of Virginia.” But slavery laws, Lincoln emphasized, are not in the same category. In other words, choice is not an absolute principle. Choice
, Lincoln suggested in response to Douglas, can never be unequivocally affirmed without regard to the content of the choice.
Lincoln’s argument applies equally to slavery and abortion. Let us consider what is being chosen. In these cases, we are talking about enslaving other people—forcibly taking away their lives and liberties. Or, in the abortion case, killing them in the womb. In both instances, choice is invoked in order to cancel out the choices of others. In both cases, self-government is a pretext for the denial of self-government. In both cases, persons who have the same rights as everyone else are being sacrificed to the convenience and welfare of others.
The problem with Douglas, as Lincoln put it, is that he has “no very vivid impression that the Negro is a human.” Lincoln took Douglas to be arguing that “inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to you taking your slave. Now, I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and Negroes.” Lincoln summarized Douglas’ position this way: “If one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall have the right to object.”39
In the end, Lincoln regarded the position of Douglas and the Northern Democrats to be no less pro-slavery than that of the Southern Democrats. It would do as much “to nationalize slavery as the doctrine of Jeff Davis himself.” In some ways Douglas’ view was more dangerous than that of Davis, Fitzhugh or Calhoun, because Douglas’ professed neutrality could seduce well-meaning people into believing that popular sovereignty was the solution for slavery.
Yet Lincoln saw that popular sovereignty was merely a cover for the protection and even extension of slavery. In a manner that echoes contemporary pro-lifers who contend that pro-choice really means pro-abortion, Lincoln contends that pro-choice really means pro-slavery. Of Douglas’ popular sovereignty he said, “This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate.” In the end, he warned, it will “blow out the moral lights around us.”40
Here, in the muck and meanness of slavery, lie the roots of the Democratic Party. The plantation was its original stomping ground. The Democrats fought tenaciously for the plantation, and when they were defeated they fought just as tenaciously for the revival of the plantation. But the first step for the party, taken even before the Civil War, was to figure out how to apply the plantation model to the North, where immigrants by the millions and ultimately tens of millions were pouring into this country. The party of enslavement had big plans for them.
4
Urban Plantation
Martin Van Buren and the Creation of the Northern Political Machine
Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.
—George Washington Plunkitt, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall1
To hear the Democrats tell it, their love for the Mexican people has simply grown, and grown, and grown. This is now reflected in the unabashed loyalty that leading Democrats—and the Democratic Party platform—show toward illegal aliens. In the past, Democrats at least paid lip service to the necessity for immigration laws to be enforced, and for all people to obey the law.
No more. The Democratic platform of 2016 didn’t even use the term “illegal” or any variation of it. It described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration. “A decade or two ago,” remarked Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.”2 The Democrats as a party are on the side of the illegals.
Under the Obama administration, illegals became a sort of privileged lawbreaking class. Initially, Obama did not hesitate to deport illegals, essentially carrying out the law and continuing the policies of the preceding Bush administration. Then Obama changed course and publicly announced that through an exercise of “prosecutorial discretion,” immigration laws would only be enforced against certain types of illegals—namely violent criminals—while ordinary, run-of-the-mill illegals would be left alone.
Now, under Trump, Democrats in blue states are fighting hard to protect illegals from being sent back to their home countries. We all know about the sanctuary cities that now dot blue states across the country. Mayors of these cities have made it clear that they have no intention of cooperating in the enforcement of immigration laws. On the contrary, they will give sanctuary to lawbreakers who seek to evade those laws.
Progressives in California and New York go even further. California Democrats recently passed a law forbidding law enforcement from asking anyone’s immigrant status or holding them for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents—unless they have been convicted of a crime. California also passed a law making it a crime for landlords to report illegals to the federal government. And recently the mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf, generated controversy for tipping off illegal immigrant groups that they were going to be raided by ICE authorities.3
In New York, even a criminal conviction is not enough to deny illegals the protection of the state. New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo recently pardoned eighteen alien criminals—no murderers, mostly thieves and drug dealers—for the express purpose of saving them from potential deportation back to Mexico. “These actions,” Cuomo said, “take a critical step toward a more just, more fair and more compassionate New York.”
What idealism! What moral fervor! Ah, yes. I can envision Cuomo—himself descended from Italian immigrants—staring wistfully at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island as he signed those pardons. He was probably remembering his parents and grandparents, who still spoke with Italian accents, or his original ancestors, not many generations removed, who came to this country speaking no English at all. Democrats, Cuomo believes, are the party of the new immigrants just as they were the party of the old immigrants, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews.
Trump, Cuomo alleges, “continues to target immigrants” and “threatens to tear families apart.” Democrats are quick to tar immigration enforcement policies with the brush of racism and white supremacy. Part of the strategy is to disguise the fact that illegals are lawbreakers. The New York Times headline reads, “In Rebuke to Trump, Cuomo Pardons 18 Immigrants.”4
But illegal aliens are not immigrants. An immigrant is someone who has emigrated legally to this country through a sanctioned immigration process. The point of conflating illegals and immigrants, however, is to pretend that in resisting illegal immigration, Trump and the Republicans are against immigrants themselves.
So the media is complicit with the Democrats in making the case that progressives are the partisans of the poor wretched masses that have poured into this country for nearly two centuries and have inevitably faced intolerance, bigotry and exclusion. Look, say the Democrats—with media outlets like the New York Times cheering wildly in the background—the Latinos are voting for us over the Republicans two to one, and this by itself proves that we are their friends and protectors.
Yet imagine if Latinos voted two to one for the Republican Party. Imagine if illegals, upon securing citizenship, started wearing Make America Great Again hats. How enthusiastic would Democrats be about fighting for illegal aliens and giving them a path to citizenship? It seems safe to say, not very. Progressive affinity for illegals seems contingent upon a kind of implicit bargain, one in which Democrats secure benefits for illegals and in exchange illegals agree to become Democrats.
Remove this condition and Democratic support for illegals evaporates. My wife, Debbie, a native of Venezuela, is sympathetic to the plight of the so-called DACA children of illegals who have grown up in this country. She cannot see sending them all back to their parents’ nations. Many of them, she points out, don’t even speak Spanish. They could not survive there.
So why not—she suggests—give t
hem a way to live and work legally in this country? Give them all rights except one: the right to vote. This is not unfair because they are, after all, lawbreakers. (As a convicted felon, I can’t vote either.) In the Rio Grande valley of South Texas, where Debbie grew up, virtually everyone is a Democrat. Yet not a single Democratic official to whom Debbie has mentioned this idea has expressed any interest in pushing forward with it. Very telling.
In 2010, speaking to a group of Hispanics, Obama emphasized Democratic fealty to Latinos as a group and invoked border security and strict immigration enforcement as proof that Republicans “aren’t the kind of folks who represent our core values.” Obama warned that if Hispanics stayed home on election day, Republicans would be elected and “then I think it’s gonna be harder.” He urged Hispanics to coalesce as a group and say to themselves, “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends.”5
While he later denied it, recasting his argument in the anodyne language of Democrats fighting for the little guy, Obama knew he was appealing to ethnic resentment as a form of political motivation. This is a core part of Democratic political strategy in the twenty-first century. The rest is largely humbug to camouflage this fact. So progressive enthusiasm for the masses clamoring to get into this country seems rather more self-interested than progressives are generally willing to admit.
Some of them, however, do admit it. As progressive political scientist Adam Bonica told the New York Times, the immigration issue offers a “strategic advantage for the Democrats.”6 What he means is that the politics of ethnic mobilization work, as long as the ethnics keep their end of the bargain. Democrats are happy to bring more Latino illegals here as long as Latinos deliver the vote for Democrats. Politics is a two-way street and as long as the Latinos appreciate this, there is a place reserved for them on the Democratic urban plantation.
A NOVEL THEFT SCHEME
Death of a Nation Page 10