The New Irrepressible Conflict

Here’s an excerpt from Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America:

“We begin a great conservative reaction,” Virginia’s George Fitzhugh proclaimed in 1863 on the eve of the battle of Gettysburg. “We attempt to roll back the Reformation in all its political phases.” The first American Revolution, Fitzhugh argued, had been a mere reform. “But the revolution of 1861,” which raised the banner of Tories everywhere and resurrected even the dream of Filmer, was a social upheaval that would ultimately shake the world.

Here, surely, was a strange note to be coming out of America in the midst of its liberal tradition. What had happened? Had America suddenly produced, out of nowhere, a movement of reactionary feudalism? …

Certainly we cannot deny that the American Southerners, when they began to break with their Jeffersonian past around 1830, duplicated in every essential aspect the argument of Europe’s feudal reaction. We do not find here the mere parroting of a few of Burke’s phrases. We find a most fantastic array of theoretical schemes, some of them to be sure as Aristotelian as they are Burkian, some of them passionately Hebriac in their emphasis on the Bible, but all of them dominated in the end by the basic concepts of the Western reaction. There are a group of ardent traditionalists who cherish “the conservative principle”: the novelist N. Beverly Tucker, Governor Hammond of South Carolina, Albert Bledsoe. There are a group of “feudal socialists” who lashed out at Northern capitalism in the spirit of Disraeli and Carlyle: Fitzhugh, Chancellor Harper, George Sawyer, Edmund Ruffin. There are even a group of “sociologists” determined after the fashion of Bonald and Comte to turn the law of nature upside down and prove that Locke is “metaphysical”: Fitzhugh again, Professor George Frederick Holmes of the University of Virginia, and that Mississippi prodigy who published his system at the age of twenty five, Henry Hughes. Nor is Holmes the only academic figure in the reactionary renaissance. College professors rush to the Tory standard from all sides, Dew of William and Mary giving it a Hegelian touch, Smith of Randolph-Macon showering it with an indiscriminate idealism, J.B. DeBow of Louisiana buttressing it with a solid array of statistics. We have here, indeed, one of the great and creative episodes in the history of American thought.”

Professor Hartz points us in the right direction.

I think of this vanguard of Southern reactionary thinkers as the greats. Southerners know all about the great Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They’re aren’t as familiar with George Fitzhugh, James D.B. DeBow, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker and others.

These men and others like them were the “Alt-South.” They were breaking out of the liberal paradigm. They laid the foundation of the Confederate States of America. We’ve forgotten how much the “mainstream” changed in the antebellum South … science, ethics, political theory, myths, etc. Slavery’s transformation from an evil inherited from the colonial era into a “positive good” is only the most well known example of what was a metapolitical revolution.

Alexander Stephens acknowledged this metapolitical revolution in the Cornerstone Speech:

“It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. …”

Alexander Stephens is saying here that there had been a sweeping change.

The errors of the past generation about liberty and equality had been pushed aside. Starting in the 1830s, we have forgotten that the abolitionists, who were the radical leftwing vanguard of the antebellum era, were the aggressors in the “Irrepressible Conflict.” They prodded, poked and antagonized the South over the slavery question. It was a “social justice” issue for fanatics like John Brown. As the South began reacting to the abolitionist threat, its own self-image changed.

In Robert Barnwell Rhett, we can see it in full bloom:

“All the inexperienced emotions of the heart are against us; all the abstractions concerning human rights; all the theories of political dreamers, atheistic utilitarians, self-exalting and self-righteous religionists, who would reform or expunge the Bible, – in short, enthusiasts and fanatics of all sorts, are against us. …”

In George Fitzhugh, we can see the philosophy of Southern reaction:

“THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ISMS – SHEWING WHY THEY ABOUND AT THE NORTH, AND ARE UNKNOWN AT THE SOUTH.

The exploitation, or unjust exactions of skill and capital in free society, excite the learned and philanthropic to devise schemes of escape, and impel the laborers to adopt those schemes, however chimerical, because they feel that their situation cannot be worsted. They are already slaves without masters, and that is the bathos of human misery. Besides, universal liberty has disintegrated and dissolved society, and placed men in isolated, selfish, and antagonistic positions – in which each man is compelled to wrong others, in order to be just himself. But man’s nature is social, not selfish, and he longs and yearns to return to parental, fraternal and associative relations. All the isms concur in promising closer and more associative relations, in establishing at least a qualified community property, and in insuring the weak and unfortunate the necessaries and comforts of life. Indeed, they all promise to establish slavery – minus, the master and the overseer.” …

But we solemnly warn the North, that what she calls a transition, is what every leading Abolitionist is moving heaven and earth to attain. This is their real object – negro emancipation a mere gull-trap.

In the attempt to attain “transition” seas of gore may be shed, until military despotism comes in to restore peace and security.

We (for we are a Socialist) agree with Mr. Carlyle, that the action of free society must be reversed. That, instead of relaxing more and more the bonds that bind man to man, you must screw them up more closely. That, instead of no government, you must have more government. And this is eminently true in America, where from the nature of things, as society becomes older and population more dense, more of government will be required. To prevent the attempt at transition, which would only usher in revolution, you must begin to govern more vigorously.”

Slavery has been vanquished.

It is never coming back. No one is proposing to bring it back. Still though, just as Rhett, Fitzhugh and others predicted, the outlines of the struggle are still the same. The Left has renewed the conflict, but this time the object of their scorn isn’t slavery or segregation. It is whiteness.

Whiteness itself is illegitimate. Instead of the abolition of slavery, “social justice” now requires that “white privilege” be vanquished. White people are the obstacle standing in the way of achieving the utopia. Political violence in the name of “social justice” is legitimate. That’s what John Brown thought. That’s what the fanatics and enthusiasts at Berkeley thought too.

As the old saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Fitzhugh believed that negro emancipation was “a mere gull trap” and that the “transition” was the real issue. It follows that the conflict wouldn’t go away with the abolition of slavery.

Fitzhugh predicted the rise of -isms and -phobias in the 1850s:

“In the first place, the character of the enemy we have to contend with prevents anything like regular warfare. They are divided into hundreds of little guerrilla bands of isms, each having its peculiar partizan tactics, and we are compelled to vary our mode of attack from regular cannonade to bush-fighting, to suit the occasion. …

“Why have you Bloomer’s and Women’s Right’s men, and strong-minded women, and Mormons, and anti-renters, and “vote myself a farm” men, Millerites, and Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians, and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and infidel isms at the North ?

Why is there faith in nothing, speculation about everything? Why is this unsettled, half demented state of the human man mind co-extensive in time and space, with free society?

Why is Western Europe now starving? and why has it been fighting and starving for seventy years? Why all this, except that free society is a failure ? Slave society needs no defence till some other permanent practicable form of society has been discovered. None such has been discovered. Nobody at the North who reads my book will attempt to reply to it; for all the learned abolitionists had unconsciously discovered and proclaimed the failure of free society long before I did.”

Uniquely in his time, Fitzhugh saw beyond the conflict over slavery and warned that the North was “the true battleground” of the transition:

“Socialism, not Abolition, is the real object of Black Republicanism. The North, not the South, the true battle-ground. Like Fanny Wright, the author of American Socialism, the agitators of the North look upon free society as a mere transition state to a better, but untried, form of society. …”

There is a connection here.

Just as the abolitionists ripped apart the social fabric in the antebellum era, which inspired the Fire-Eaters and the South’s reactionary vanguard, who gradually broke with liberalism and culminated in the dissolution of the Union, the same thing is happening again in our own times. The Alt-Right is racing toward similar reactionary conclusions.

Since whiteness is the object of the current dispute within “free society,” the conflict is now global, not regional. It is going on all over the Western world which is in thrall to liberal democracy. The very same debate is playing out, for example, in France and Germany.

Will it end in a similar way? Are we seeing the beginning of a “Bleeding California”? There’s a striking resemblance between the America of the 1850s and the America of the 2010s. It is not to difficult to project a looming Second Civil War between a kind of Heartland Confederacy and an alliance between the rabidly leftwing West Coast and Northeast.

Maybe it will be California that secedes this time? It’s not to difficult to imagine either that a Heartland Confederacy would emerge as the victor in the conflict. We could have a Second Reconstruction in which “Heartland” would impose a new Constitution on the coasts. The West Coast and Northeastern Jewish oligarchy would be shattered and destroyed, not unlike the Southern planter class. After its power and influence is broken, America would then solider on into the 21st century.

I grant that I could be letting my imagination run wild here. It is worth noting here that Nathaniel Beverly Tucker predicted the Civil War in his 1836 novel The Partisan Leader:

“Tucker is probably best remembered for his 1836 novel The Partisan Leader. Set in the United States of 1849, the story depicts a war between secessionist guerrillas in Virginia and a despotic federal government led by President-turned-dictator Martin Van Buren. In Tucker’s future, the slaveholding states south of Virginia have already seceded, driven out of the Union by Van Buren’s centralizing government and exploitative tariff policy. While the Old Dominion itself remains under federal control, the plot of The Partisan Leader concerns the efforts of patriotic Virginian irregulars to defeat government forces and join the independent Southern Confederacy.

At the onset of the American Civil War, the novel was regarded by many in the North and South as a prophetic vision of the collapse of the Union. It was republished in 1861 in New York with the subtitle “A Key to the Southern Conspiracy”; a Richmond edition of 1862 is subtitled “A Novel, and an Apocalypse of the Origin and Struggles of the Southern Confederacy.” …”

Kurt Schlichter has already written the book.

Is Colonel Schlichter the Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of our times? It’s worth thinking about. I share the feeling that everything we are seeing is all leading up to the grand finale. The new Irrepressible Conflict will answer questions like 1.) will the White Western world will go quietly into the night and 2.) is the liberal world order is capable of surviving this demographic storm? These are the great questions of the 21st century and it is getting harder and harder to avoid them.

My prediction is “No” on both counts. This is the final act of liberalism. It is racing toward the inevitable crackup. In the Trump era, we might already be in the onset of the final act. It’s own self destructive logic which Fitzhugh and Carlyle noted will finally bring the whole system down. The demographic transition we are experiencing in the West will be more radically destabilizing than the conflict over slavery.

It’s kind of amazing, you know, how they just assumed that it would work out. France and Germany would become majority Muslim. The United States would become majority Afro-Hispanic. Not only that, but Europeans could jettison traditional sexual morality and give up having children. Progress would roll on. We could base our whole social order on Martin Luther King, Jr’s fever dream. And it would work!

Boomer naiveté is going to have world-historical consequences. Buckle up.