Just finished reading preeminent Civil War historian James McPherson's 2015 book, "The War That Forged A Nation: Why The Civil War Still Matters" (Oxford University Press). In the decades leading up to the Civil War, McPherson reminds us of the bloody, violent disagreements over slavery that erupted after the Mexican-American War all over the American West, then in "Bloody Kansas," then in John Brown's raid, and eventually spilling over in the halls of Congress before the Southern slave state traitors left the Union. We have yet to see anything near the chaos and violence of those decades that preceded the Civil War, and it was actually reassuring in an odd way to be reminded that, yes, this country has been through even more horrific times than what we're seeing today. We also heard a Democratic leader assure us on Monday that change will come. And yet here we are.
The "here we are" part also has antecedents in the Civil War and the failed Reconstruction that followed. It involves the "Two Concepts of Liberty" that have played out in our politics from our founding. Here's McPherson (pp. 12-14):
"...The two concepts are negative liberty and positive liberty. The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar, It can be defined as the absence of restraint, freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. Laws requiring automobile passengers to wear seat belts or motorcyclists to wear helmets would be, under this definition, to prevent them from enjoying the liberty to choose not to wear seat belts or helmets. Negative liberty, therefore, can be described as freedom from.
Positive liberty, by contrast, can best be understood as freedom to. It is not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty but has a different focus or emphasis. Freedom of the press is generally viewed as negative liberty -- freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he pleases not because some authority prevents him from doing so but because he cannot read or write anything. He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty (freedom from) but of a positive liberty (freedom to read and write). The remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the capacity to read and write."
McPherson notes that, with the end of the Civil War, there was an "historic shift in American values in the direction of positive liberty," citing the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. He continues:
"Positive liberty is an open-ended concept. It has the capacity to expand toward notions of equity, justice, social welfare, equality of opportunity. For how much liberty does a starving person enjoy, except the liberty to starve? How much freedom of the press can exist in a society of illiterate people? How free is a motorcyclist who is paralyzed for life by a head injury that might have been prevented if he had worn a helmet? [snip]
"The tension between negative and positive liberty did not come to an end with the Civil War, of course. That tension has remained a constant in American political and social philosophy. In recent years, with the rise of small-government or anti-government movements in our politics, there has been a revival of negative liberty. The presidential election of 2012 [i.e., Obama v. Romney] pitted the concepts of positive and negative liberty against each other more clearly than any other recent election..."
It should be hard, reading those passages, to miss the point that the current fascistic manifestation of the negative liberty side of the equation is the Malignant Fascist's MAGA cult, as it is fighting positive liberty's "expansion of equity, justice, social welfare, equality of opportunity" (basically, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion!). Just as telling, McPherson quotes then- Missouri Sen. Carl Schurz speaking of racist Southern resistance to Reconstruction laws:
"As they once asserted that true liberty implied the right of one man to hold another man as his slave, they will tell you now that they are no longer true freemen in their States because... they can no longer deprive other men of their rights."
That's not far off from "Wilhoit's law" of conservatism ("There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect") and the Malignant Fascist's and the entire Republican Party's -- executive, legislative, and judicial branches -- operating philosophy.
So, again, "here we are" 160 years after the epic struggle was fought, with the trappings of 20th Century fascism gilding the Trump/ Republican "negative liberty" turd. It's vitally important that we adopt the non- defeatist posture that our philosophical "positive liberty" antecedents did entering into the Civil War, which sustained them through the darkest times until victory. As a modern Illinois politician said this week, "This country has survived darker periods than the one
that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will
swing back" (see below). Our history didn't start with our 20th / 21st generations, but now it's on those generations to make sure it won't end with us either, as long as we help that pendulum move toward justice again.
(Image: "This 1868 drawing shows a man representing the Freedman's Bureau standing between armed groups of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans" / artist, Alfred R. Waud)
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