The Civil War and Health Care Reform

The New York Times published an op-ed by Gail Collins, complaining about the Governor of Alabama proclaiming April as Confederate History Month, and more generally about Southern revisionism.  I think Ms. Collins is slipping into the classic partisan mode of taking certain things for granted and being unable to fathom the possibility that the other side might see it differently.  True, I do believe the current socio-political chasm in this country is mostly the fault of the conservatives who hunt for wedge issues, but this type of myopia doesn't help.  The truth is, the state vs. federal debate was far from closed at the end of the Civil War, and legitimately lives on today.

The first major example is the Great Depression.  The Supreme Court struck down the first few bills of the New Deal because they ruled--correctly--that the Constitution didn't permit that level of federal involvement.  Of course, the Depression was a nationwide issue that could only be solved on the federal level.  The result: Congress and the President essentially ganged up on the Supreme Court until they capitulated.  (The real history is, of course, more complicated than that, but that's the essence of it.)  The truth is, the Founding Fathers never intended the central government to have this much power.  The counter-argument, of course, is that what the Founding Fathers intended doesn't matter as much because this isn't 1776 any more - it's 2010 (or 1930, depending on how you're counting), and reality has changed.  The beauty of our democratic system is that it can change with the times.  That's why Rousseau predicted that the United States would never face a revolution, because it's not necessary under democracy.  A democracy evolves by itself.

The next good example is Civil Rights.  A hundred years after the Civil War, a state governor thought he could mobilize state troops for the purpose of keeping blacks as second-class citizens, in defiance of the Union government.  The Union president responded by sending Union troops to the South.  I'm talking, of course, about Governor Wallace and JFK in 1963.  The difference between 1863 and 1963 was that in 1963, the South knew they couldn't defeat the North militarily so they didn't try.

In the 1990's, the Republicans made another push by talking about "States' Rights" and "Small Government," which of course meant small federal government.  The logic is that if you reduce the size of the federal government, you reduce its ability to regulate and enforce, thus tipping the balance back in favor of states' rights.

Now the debate is reignited with the Economic Recovery Act and (more recently) health care reform.  Both of these are massive federal programs which impinge on states' liberties.

Of course, we as liberal democrats see all this as a good thing.  There are--and always have been--massive problems that faced this country as a whole.  The whole point of the federal government is to solve these problems, which include international trade (which led to the Smoot-Harley tariffs - another Southern complaint before the Civil War).  More recently the problems tackled by the federal government have included child labor, minimum wage, the 40 hour work week.  Did you know that before Social Security, the #1 cause of death among people over 65 was starvation?  These are the kinds of problems that must be solved by the federal government.  The problem is when the minority doesn't agree with what the majority is doing.  But guess what, that's democracy.  Right now it's working in our favor and the Democrats are making the most of the opportunity.

But federal power can be a double-edged sword.  The next hot topic will be gay marriage.  So far, Congress has left that up to the states.  But now with the federal lawsuit that was brought in San Francisco, the issue will make its way to our conservative Supreme Court.  I'd be amazed if the SC denied review; they are going to take this case and they are going to make a landmark ruling that will harm gay rights on a federal level, maybe even undoing the gay marriage laws in places like Hawaii, Colorado, and New Hampshire.  This is going to be our Roe v. Wade, and we will find ourselves on the other side of the debate, arguing in favor of states' rights.

Funny enough, most of my friends in the ACWA are Republicans in favor of states' rights and a smaller federal government.  And yet they portray Union soldiers, whose job it was to enforce the power of the strong Union government, at the expense of states' rights.

J<

(Original Op-Ed below.)

April 8, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

A Confederacy of Dunces

By GAIL COLLINS

April is the cruelest month. Or, if you live in Virginia, Confederate History Month.

The state is buzzing over Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation urging citizens to spend the month recalling Virginia’s days as a member of the Confederate States of America. Although since McDonnell had previously turned April over to child abuse prevention, organ donation and financial literacy, perhaps it was O.K. to just pick your favorite.

The original Confederate History proclamation was a miracle of obfuscation. It did not even mention slavery. On Wednesday, the governor apologized for that and said that slavery “has left a stain on the soul of this state and nation.”

People, what’s our bottom line here. The governor of Virginia has decided to bring slavery into his overview of the history of the Confederacy. Good news, or is this setting the bar a wee bit too low?

Maybe we had better be grateful for small favors. It’s been a tough time lately for those of us who take social studies seriously.

History took a hit in Texas, where the state Board of Education tried to demote Thomas Jefferson, presumably because of his enthusiasm for separation of church and state. This week, John McCain rewrote his own political biography, telling Newsweek: “I never considered myself a maverick.” And on the geography front, Representative Hank Johnson of Georgia took time during a recent Congressional hearing to express his concern that stationing additional Marines on Guam would make the island “so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

Obviously, all these developments are not equally problematic. The admiral being questioned somberly assured Johnson that the military does not anticipate any island-toppling. And if McCain wants to re-imagine the 2008 presidential campaign, he is free to give it a try. Although if you are planning to deny that you ever thought of yourself as a maverick, it would be better not to have subtitled one of your memoirs “The Education of an American Maverick.”

The love affair with all things Confederate is way more worrisome. Once again, it’s in to talk secession. The Republican attorneys general are lining up to try to nullify the health care bill.

“Many issues of the Civil War are still being debated today,” said Brag Bowling of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which led the push to get that proclamation in Virginia. That seems extremely depressing, as if we were Serbs stewing about what the Turks did at the Plain of Blackbirds in 1389.

Actually, a national discussion of Civil War history sounds fine — as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea. In the proclamations, it generally sounds as if everything went swimmingly until the part where the South lost and grudgingly rejoined the country.

Virginia has been making big leaps lately in the category of general craziness. We all remember the Legislature’s heroic work in passing a bill to protect Virginia citizens from having microchips planted in their bodies against their will. And that the sponsor said he was concerned the chips could be a “mark of the beast” that would be used by the Antichrist at the end of days.

Confederate History Month was promoted by former Gov. George Allen, who was fond of Confederate flag-décor and suffered from a sense of history so imperfect that he did not discover his mother was half-Jewish until he was 54. Allen’s proclamation celebrated the Civil War as “a four-year struggle for independence, sovereign rights and local government control,” with such cheer that you would really think the fight was all about zoning.

Allen’s Democratic successors took a pass on celebrating Confederate history, while the Republicans followed his lead with differing degrees of enthusiasm. McDonnell, like Allen, seems to have a rather shaky grasp of the principles of intellectual inquiry. During last year’s campaign, reporters discovered that the master’s thesis he wrote at 34 denounced working women and feminists. McDonnell waved it off, saying that his work was “simply an academic exercise” that “clearly does not reflect my views.”

When he came up with his original proclamation this week, many people wanted to know why McDonnell didn’t say anything at all about slavery. “I wasn’t focused on that,” he explained.

No, for McDonnell, Confederate History Month was all about “tourism,” so much so that slavery slipped under the carpet. This was also a theme in Georgia when the State Senate recently passed a bill to dedicate April to remembering the Confederacy. “It’s for education and to help benefit tourism in the state,” said Bowling.

Have you ever noticed that tourism has been the excuse for more dreadful developments in modern history than anything but Twitter? Cheese museums. Highways to nowhere. Confederate History Month.