Looming Red

On the eve of the people getting their power back from the state, we hear about compromise with the losers by the winners:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/10/issa-defines-compromise-on-top-line.html

The word compromise has more than one meaning. It can mean to make concessions on either side of a debate, true. Another meaning of compromise is to weaken something like a ship or state security. When either side of the argument have some common ground than the concession to get to the common ground fits in the first compromise definition. When both sides are incompatible it is the weakening of the whole. Abraham Lincoln understood this when he decried the expansion of slavery to the new states calling the compromise a house divided.

We are facing a similar division of the house. We are stuck between the side of the founding principles of individual liberty and responsibility and the side of state control and the recession of individual liberty. Where state control is, there individual liberty cannot be also. We need compromise with this unconstrained vision of statist leftists like the Hindenburg needed compromise. We need compromise like the Titanic. We need compromise like Pearl Harbor.

These elitist fools in Washington who go out from our states, supposedly representing us, compromising with that which will corrode the whole have got to go. This is not compromise like Madison compromising in the apportionment in the congress and the senate. This is compromise like a breach in the hull, like static electricity on a hydrogen zeppelin, it is compromise like enemy radio silence before an attack on your whole Pacific naval force.

We are through compromising with socialism, because it is not compromise in the first sense. It is really incremental Marxism. It is the devil with his toe in the door. If compromise is needed to get things done, then it should be pure gridlock. If republicans or any other politicians do that they will be Heroes. If not, they will be unemployed.

Passing through the public schools, one will hear about the racism that had made its way into the constitution when black slaves were called three fifths of a person. As if there were no debate in the constitutional convention, this arbitrary fraction of a person is said to demonstrate the racism of the people at the convention. The teacher of the seventh or eighth grade class will then lament that blacks were not said to be a whole person. Without knowing about the debate that went on to arrive at this 3/5 fraction and why that fraction came about, the ignorant student’s lack of background falls prey to the teacher’s ineptitude.

The uninformed objection is as simple as it gets. Blacks are a whole person and therefore the fraction was racist because it didn’t define blacks as a whole person. The no-less ignorant student then goes home thinking that he/she has learned about a great sin of our nation’s past and promptly forgets about it during after-school game time.

Some time later in life that same ignorant student will hear a politician, pundit, or other ignoramous refer to the famous fraction and recall back to when they heard it the first time and formulated an uninformed opinion. Now their uninformed opinion attracts them to the ignorant commentator or candidate who reminded them of it. Continuing to think themselves smart and well versed in at least the basics of America’s fundamental sins, they are again distracted only to repeat the cycle some time in the future. On and on this goes with the person never realizing that the whole premise was a three fifths lie.

Why don’t they just think? How did the fraction even come about? It came about because of a compromise. Some in the convention wanted blacks to count as whole people and others wanted them to not count at all. What the ignorant fool politicians and poor students do not understand today is that it was the anti-slavery delegates who argued for blacks to not count at all.

The pro-slavery delegates wanted blacks to remain slaves, but wanted them to count in the apportionment of representatives in the congress. That would have meant that a state with a large slave population with not only no property owning rights but actually being the property of those with rights to own property and vote, would still have those slaves counted the same as free people. Imagine, where the issue of slavery would become an issue ripping at the thread of the nation in congress after congress what would have happened to further the cause of the pro-slavers if they had more representatives in congress counting those with no civil and free rights.

The argument of the delegates in the constitutional convention who aimed to have blacks not counted at all, zero fifths of a person, was not to make a philosophical statement about blacks and whites. Their argument was to have the constitution declare to the world the evil reality of the plight of the black slave in the former colonies. The pro-slavers wanted no statement in the constitution of any kind regarding their plight. They wanted the benefits of the free labor to the wealthy slave owners, as well as the benefit of their numbers to apportion them power in the congress. It was a great victory to get that 1 whole person down to three fifths.

The world reading about the new American constitution could see plainly that some had fought to make the slave-holding states less powerful by declaring more truly the reality of life in some of the former colonies for black people. The only tragedy of the three fifths apportionment was, given slavery could not be abolished in he convention without losing states in the union, that truer statement could not be made, that blacks in early American states were not people to those who considered them property of other men.

The above is a fairly lengthy but enlightening, uplifting, edifying speech by Clarence Thomas on the subject Lincoln, jurist prudence, and slavery.

In this speech Justice Thomas talks about Lincoln’s famous rebuttal of the support of the Kansas-Nebraska act extending slavery to the Louisiana purchase territories. Many people think that Lincoln used the phrase “House divided” in reference to the civil war, but it was well before the civil war and even before he was president.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new–North as well as South.

The battle against slavery that had begun in the very beginning of the federation during the constitutional debates, culminated in the civil war. Then after the civil war, the quest for equal civil rights based on rights culminated in the civil rights movement. In each case, the journey to equalize the house divided took 80 to 100 years.

In the 20th century, the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR administrations began to divide the house again. We will either become fully socialist as it was called by the progressives of the Wilson era or we will re-liberalize our individual sovereignty back from the state and be fully the nation that we fought for in the revolutionary war.

I fear that Lincoln’s words are prescient for our time as well. On the issue of Marxism in America “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved–I do not expect the house to fall–but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”