Response to Thomas Main 2

Editor’s Note: Instead of responding to you point by point, I will post your whole response and follow it with my own.

Dear Mr. Wallace:

In your post “Response to Thomas Main” you did not honor my stipulation that my contribution be run “without edits.” You inserted your own comments after almost every point I made, which is editing. I ask that abide by my terms this time. If you don’t you will be admitting that you cannot respond to a fair presentation of my argument.

The issue is this: Who better honors the American founding, its central principle that all people are created equal, and America today—the Alt-Right or progressives and protesters? In post you admit that you reject, not only the Declaration’s iconic phrase, but America itself. I cited a long list of your remarks attacking political equality and America, and you admit I was accurate. Here are your quotes that I cited and your responses:

1) “America has now evolved into its final form as a cultural and political dung heapof liberty and equality—just like every other republican experiment in the modernWest.”

“I stand by this statement.”

2) “In an article entitled “Why Do You Hate America?” you wrote: “Is this what youcall America? If so, then it makes sense to hate America, as this is a false America, notthe real thing.”

“Clearly, I do hate modern America.”

3) “You have also written: “. . . nothing is less self-evident to us than the notion that allmen are created equal.”

“This is indeed self-evident.”

4) “You scorn “the Constitution Cargo Cult” and the Union itself: “I dislike the Constitution because I believe the Union should have never been created in the first place.”

“I stand by this statement as well.”

But for the moment the questions are: What do you think and what do progressives think? Do progressives and protesters do more honor to America and its principles than you Alt-Rightists do?

You claim that “The Far Left…does not believe ‘all men are created equal.’” But you offer not a single example of any leftist saying this, while I have offered many examples of Alt-Rightists saying so explicitly.

For example, after you admit that you reject the political equality of all people you run a photo of an ugly man in drag. But so what? How does this prove the left dishonors America and its principles as you do?

You claim that the Far Left subscribes to Critical Social Justice Theory. Perhaps it does. But you don’t site Far Leftists or anyone else who rejects political equality as you do. You provide a long passage by a critic of Social Justice Theory. But you don’t cite any proponent of that theory explicitly denying all men are created equal.

Lucian K. Truscott IV and Charles Blow are critics of memorializing Jefferson and Washington.You say Truscott wants to raze the Jefferson Memorial and that Blow “disparages the character of George Washington.” Agree with them or don’t; but neither of them rejects the American foundational principle of political equality as you do.

Sometimes your citations are simply untrue. You write: “Al Sharpton considers the American Founding ‘the disgraceful days’ of our history…” But in the video clip of Sharpton you providehe says no such thing. His criticism is directed at our history of slavery.

One critic wants to change the name of Washington and Lee University. You say “He does not mean equal rights or equal justice or treating all people equally….He means taking away our rights and liberties in the name of Social Justice.” But you provide no evidence he so says and the term “Social Justice” is not mentioned by him at all.

The relevant evidence then is: You and the Alt-Right explicitly reject political equality and America itself. You attack American principles and reality. You have provided no evidence at all that progressives and protesters do the same. They protest monuments and symbols. Their objections is that famous figures of American history did not live up to the principle of political equality they espoused as well as they might have. No one can deny this is true. But they do not object to the principle as you do.

Who better honors a nation and its principles: the people who accept those principles and urge their nation to better live up to them; or the people who reject those principles and openly hate the imperfect but glorious America we have today? I stand with those who honor the actually existing America and its principles.

Finally, something must be said of the unreasonableness and unfairness of your argument. Here’s what you have said of perhaps the greatest of American leaders, Lincoln.

“Happy John Wilkes Booth Day!…I propose a toast: to the memory of the great John Wilkes Booth, slayer of tyrants, martyr for liberty, avenger of the South!”

Dislike Lincoln if you think your confederate ancestry so requires. But to toast the assassin whoblew Lincoln’s brains out is ghoulish and testifies to your extremism.

Then there the dishonesty of what you say about George Fitzhugh, whom you have quoted favorably and at length.1 I accurately noted Fitzhugh was “the notorious defender of Southern slavery.” But in describing Fitzhugh’s book Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society you claim “It is not a defense of slavery.”

In fact, two entire chapters of the book are titled “Slavery Justified.” Fitzhugh boasts of “being the first to write the Justification and Philosophy of Slavery,” speaks of “our own theory of the necessity of slavery,” and explains “we… became satisfied that slavery was morally right, that it would continue ever to exist, that it was as profitable as it was humane.”

Your account of Fitzhugh is just dishonest. But I can understand why. The alternative you offer to today’s progressives and protesters is mere slavery, and that is hard to admit.

Save that miserable system for yourself and other Alt-Rightists if you ever by some misfortune end up in the white ethnostate you are looking for. The rest of us will take the real America and its foundational principle that all people are created equal.

THE FOUNDING

We have a very different account of the American Founding.

In my view, America was founded in 1607 at Jamestown and at the time of the planting of the other colonies on the eastern seaboard in the 17th century. These founding settlers who came from England to the Tidewater, New England, the Middle Colonies, Deep South, New York City and Appalachia laid the foundation of enduring regional cultures which had different beliefs about liberty. Among these regional cultures, it was the Cheseapeake though that set the mainstream of American culture.

From Jamestown in 1607 to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, this formative period that lasted nearly 170 years passed. To put this in perspective, 170 years ago from our time was 1850 when the telegraph and railroad were new technology. During this critical gestational period when everything that is essentially American came into existence and took shape, the colonies did not share a common national government and certainly did not consider themselves an experiment in liberalism. Virginia and Massachusetts were founded before liberalism was conceived. John Locke himself played a hand in writing a constitution for South Carolina, but it was rejected by its founding settlers.

By the mid-18th century, Americans had become a confident, prosperous and largely self governing people. The Great Awakening swept the colonies and created the thread of a common evangelical religious culture for the first time in history. Republican ideas percolated in the colonies which lacked a hereditary aristocracy due to the abundance of land which did not exist in the Old World. Colonial elites adopted the “country ideology” of the mid-18th century British opposition. Largely forgotten today, it was men like Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who gave Americans their ideas about liberty, which resonated with them because of the peculiarities of the American environment. Living in a frontier society was conducive to strong feelings about liberty and property and individualism.

Americans were already free by the British Constitution, the colonial charters and by custom when the American Revolution began in 1776. We were the freest people in the world. Being a free man was an essential part of English identity in the 18th century. Unlike the Spanish or the French and their absolute monarchies, Englishmen thought of themselves as free and Protestant. This is why when Great Britain began to reassert greater control over the colonies after the Seven Years’ War after a long period of neglect during its conflicts with France that the reassertion of authority felt like tyranny to the colonists. Americans were being asked to contribute their fair share of taxes to pay for the expense of a global war against France which had expelled the French from North America.

The issue of equality arose because Americans felt that they were being taxed without representation by the British Parliament. It was this issue which caused the divide over the British Constitution which ignited the American Revolution and fueled the grown of republicanism in the colonies. The divide in the colonies in that conflict was between Patriot and Tory over republicanism and American independence. The American Revolution had already begun when John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was first printed in America in Boston in 1773 when it was seized on to justify the Boston Tea Party. Colonial Americans didn’t sit around reading Locke and when they did in New England it was his interpretation of the biblical story of Jephthah in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Judges that resonated with them. When the Israelites begged Jephthah to take up their cause against the Ammonites, he in turn asked God to decide the controversy. Jephthah made an “Appeal to Heaven.” Locke argued in the Second Treatise that in extreme cases when a ruler betrayed his people and the judges with the authority to hear their cause sided with the tyrant, the people could make an “Appeal to Heaven” when all other avenues had been exhausted. Americans had not gotten their ideas about liberty from John Locke, but from their own ethnic identity and English culture and their lived experience in the American environment.

The American Revolution settled the questions of republicanism and independence. The phrase “all men were created equal” was an assertion of republicanism and a blast against monarchy and aristocracy. The U.S. Constitution settled the question of our form of government. As the Preamble to the Constitution states, its purpose was to “secure the “Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  The Founding Fathers created a federal republic that divided sovereignty between the states and the new federal government. They created a composite structure of republics – each state determined who was a citizen and who was not, who had civil rights and who did not, who had political rights and who did not as well as matters of culture like the establishment of state churches and regulation of morals.

Progressives have a false view of the American Founding. The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution explicitly secures “the Blessings of Liberty” for “ourselves and our Posterity,” however, it says nothing about human equality. Insofar as “equality” is mentioned in the Constitution, it is understood to refer to state sovereignty. The states were entitled to equal representation in the Senate. The Constitution refers to “excluding Indians not taxed” and “three fifths of all other persons.” It even includes a Fugitive Slave Clause. The Founders established equality between the states, not between individuals.

The Founding Fathers explicitly created a White Republic. Progressives condemn this as “white supremacy,” but this was indisputably a pillar of the American Founding whereas their obsession with social equality most certainly was not. Their complaints do not change the fact that the Founders restricted naturalization to Whites and this standard remained in effect in law and shaped our demographics all the way down until the Immigration Act of 1965. Originally, each state was left to define American citizenship and American citizenship was a byproduct of state citizenship. Each state was left to determine for itself who was entitled to vote in elections and as well as the boundaries of propriety.

The American Founding did not establish a unitary liberal state. It established a federal republic. As I have explained, federalism has nothing to do with liberalism. The federal republic established by the Founders created a polity which had vast room for illiberal social structures – all the things for which progressive liberals CONDEMN the American Founding as illegitimate whether it is settler colonialism or white supremacy or patriarchy or heteronormativity or white privilege, & co. The Founders did not establish a liberal state defined by social equality because in their view “all men are created equal” meant republicanism. This system was extended West at the expense of Indian tribes by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and theirs successors – all of whom were White males – in the 19th century.

If this is the truth about the American Founding, then where did this progressive delusion about it arise? Why do progressive liberals see the phrase “all men are created equal” as a divination well from which they have deduced a train of absurdities like “black trans” liberation? As I have explained, the answer is that later in the early 19th century it became fashionable to conflate liberalism with republicanism. This was easy to do because both are concerned with “liberty” and “equality” but give different answers to the question of sovereignty with the former attributing to the individual and the latter to the collective or the state. The American Founding decisively vested sovereignty in the Res publica.

In the 1830s, the American historian George Bancroft who had been imbued with early 19th century liberal ideology due to his studies in continental Europe began publishing the volumes of his magisterial work, History of the United States, which first articulated the notion that America had a divine providential mission to spread liberty and equality throughout the world. Starting with Bancroft whose work was highly influential, liberalism began to gain traction in America in the antebellum era – especially in the “Burned Over District” of the Second Great Awakening – and the ancestors of progressive liberals like Thomas Main began ripping a single line from the Declaration of Independence out of context in order to justify various social revolutions to transform America from being a republic into a liberal state. They did not succeed in accomplishing their mission to redefine America though until the Reconstruction era. While the Bill of Rights had restricted the power of the federal government and reserved vast powers to the states, it was the Reconstruction Amendments which established birthright citizenship and empowered the federal government to enforce equal protection of the laws against the states. Originally, the states had been equals in the Republic created by the Founding Fathers, but under liberalism the federal government was empowered to determine and enforce equality against the states.

Would the Founding Fathers see themselves in my account of the American Founding, OR, rather in Thomas Main’s account and the violent leftwing mobs toppling their statues? My account explains why they created our structures of government. In contrast, the violent leftwing mobs are utterly alienated from these structures and ignorant of American history and unable to explain why their vision of America was not adopted at the outset of the Republic. It wasn’t adopted because their vision came later.

1 – 4

Liberalism ends in a cultural and political dung heap. Absolutely true! No exceptions!

Hating modern America. Absolutely true! It is a bottomless pit of infidelity and moral and cultural degeneration thanks to liberalism.

All men are not created equal. As experience has shown, George Fitzhugh and the Confederacy got it right. There are ineradicable natural distinctions between men. The failed utopian experiment in equality is the ultimate proof that liberals were completely wrong about human nature. True equality only exists in a spiritual sense as the equality of souls before God. Lucifer was the first egalitarian.

The Constitution Cargo Cult. The notion that America be held together solely by self evident liberal ideals and civic nationalism is failing before our eyes. The failure is replicated in all Western liberal democracies.

What Do Progressives Think?

They are a bunch of self-righteous, deracinated, uneducated brats. I can run circles around them in any discussion of American history. The Founding Fathers would not recognize them as their legitimate heirs as proven by the glee with which they topple their statues and erase their memory and engage in violence and destroy the property of others. These violent leftwing mobs are actually proof of the inexorable cultural decline that takes place under liberalism. They can’t make heads or tails of morality.

The Far Left and Equality

The Far Left, which is defined by their belief in Critical Social Justice Theory, believes in equity, not equality. Specifically, they do not believe in treating White Americans equally because that is inequitable. It perpetuates “white privilege” and “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.” This is their view of the subject which is reflected in their profound alienation from the American Founding. Clearly, they do not respect the lives, liberty and property of others. They do not respect the rights of others.

The Far Right does not believe in “equality” as progressives liberals understand the term and neither did the Founding Fathers. As I have explained, they distinguished between different shades of equality – civil equality (basic rights and liberties), political equality (voting rights), social equality (equal treatment in a social context) and religious equality (equality of all souls before their Creator). Progressive liberals collapse all these various types of “equality” into one thing. They conflate “equality” in the republican sense of the term (state citizenship) with “equality” in the liberal sense of the term (between individuals) and furthermore with the socialist sense of the term and the anarchist sense of the term.

We do not believe “all men are created equal” in the sense that there are no natural distinctions between them. It is absurd to say, for example, that the strong and the weak are equal or the virtuous and the vicious or the intelligent and the cunning and the dim witted or that men and women are exactly alike in every single way. Even within families, brothers and sisters who are full biological siblings are not equal. They have different personality types, levels of intelligence, strength, etc. Progressive liberals hold that there are no natural differences between the races or sexes and that all observed differences are the product of “racism” and “sexism.” This is a view which we completely reject as being false.

The Founding Fathers did not establish a unitary liberal state. They did not level all distinctions between men in the name of “equality” whether in civic, political, economic or the social sense.

The Man in Drag

I posted that photo to illustrate the train of absurdities that is progressive liberalism who argue that republicanism somehow implies social equality. The Founding Fathers did not believe in social equality.

The Far Left and Critical Social Justice Theory

How is the rejection of political equality inconsistent with the American Founding? As woke supremacists never cease to remind us, the Founding Fathers were all English-speaking White males. They did not consult their wives or their slaves or the poor or the Indians when created America. They did not consult “black trans” people while crafting the Constitution. They were republicans who established equality between the states.

Lucian K. Truscott IV and Charles Blow 

Clearly, political equality wasn’t a foundational American principle. Indians were excluded and not taxed as American citizens. Charles Blow’s ancestors were likely subject to the Fugitive Slave Clause and were counted by the 3/5ths Clause in determining congressional representation. Originally, many of the Founding Fathers even took a dim view of democracy and some states excluded White males who lacked property from voting rights.

Al Sharpton

I was quoting directly from what you wrote. In any case, I will just say the character of the “Rev.” Al Sharpton isn’t exactly held in high esteem. I can only burst out in laughter at the thought of the Rev. Al judging the Founding Fathers. It is hard to believe there was a time when these “reverends” were actually taken seriously by Boomers. It sounds absurd to us today.

Washington and Lee University

The term “racial justice” has a very specific meaning. It means someone who believes in Social Justice ideology or woke supremacy. It is the delusion that people who consider themselves “woke” on racial issues – fanatics who devoid of actual moral qualities like honor, courage and loyalty – are morally superior to all other Americans even men like Robert E. Lee.

American principles and reality.”

Oh really?

Am I the one who attacked the federal courthouse?

Am I the one who pulled the trigger and shot the black child in Atlanta?

Am I the one who burned the American flag or who toppled George Washington’s monument or who physically assaulted the police and rioted and looted and vandalized other people’s property?

Please tell me how any of that is remotely consistent with LIFE, LIBERTY or PROPERTY. Violent anarchists, communists and socialists reject property rights as a matter of principle. They do not respect the rights of others. They do not believe in free speech which is “hate speech.” And so on.

Unlike all those people, I haven’t KILLED anyone. I haven’t deprived anyone of their liberty. I certainly haven’t destroyed their property. In your absurd worldview, someone who lays siege to the White House or a federal courthouse IS NOT “attacking America,” but I am doing it by writing blog posts that criticize progressive liberalism too harshly and reject all this Marxist and postmodernist garbage!

“Who better honors a nation and its principles”

Umm … not the violent leftwing mobs toppling statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and intimidating others while spouting slogans from Critical Social Justice Theory which is derived from the foreign and alien ideologies of Marxism and postmodernism?

It is true that I reject the vision, beliefs and principles of progressive liberalism. I’m not dumb enough to believe that Thomas Jefferson believed in racial equality or social equality or that his words had anything to do with causes other than ending monarchy and aristocracy.

The fact that you can peer into the Declaration of Independence and divine toppling the Jefferson Memorial and silencing all dissent on the internet and this train of absurdities that you identify as social progress speaks for itself. Thomas Jefferson would have unquestionably sided with us.

Who would Jefferson see as his heirs? The Far Right or Far Left?

“The Anglo-Saxons, thought Jefferson, had lived under laws based on the natural rights of man; after 1066 these rights had been eroded by the impositions of kings, clerics, lawyers, and by the whole system of feudalism.

Jefferson never lost the admiration for Anglo-Saxon England that he had gained studying law and politics in the 1760s and early 1770s. Throughout his life he was fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon language, and he wrote a simplified grammar in the hope of making it more accessible to American students. He included Anglo-Saxon as part of his curriculum for the University of Virginia because, he wrote, “As the histories and laws left us in that type and dialect, must be the textbooks of the reading of the learners, they will imbibe with the language their free principles of government.” Jefferson’s interest in the language continued throughout his life. As late as 1825, when he was eighty-one, he commented that the study of Anglo-Saxon “is a hobby which too often runs away with me.”

The depth of Jefferson’s reading can be seen not only from his later arguments and the cast of his mind, but from the overt evidence of his Commonplace book. In these collections of quotations and extracts Jefferson goes beyond the English legal historians to display a fascination with the history of the northern nations in the years before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England. This interest in the Teutonic peoples generally , which was becoming of increasing importance in England and on the Continent in the late eighteenth century, was eventually to be an important factor in transforming an emphasis on Anglo-Saxon society and institutions into an emphasis on the racial group to which the Anglo-Saxons supposedly belonged …

The ideal of Anglo-Saxon England that Jefferson believed in was a land of small political units and a land in which local rule prevailed in most concerns. …

“Anglo-Saxon studies represented no abstract academic exercise for Jefferson. When in the years from 1773 to 1776 he established first an American and then a European reputation, his arguments impressed upon his contemporaries the extent to which he believed that the Saxon government and way of life should become a model for the new America. His Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, suggested that the king should be reminded that in coming to America the emigrants from England had exercised the same natural right which “their Saxon ancestors” had left the woods of northern Europe and settled in England. Their mother country had exerted no claim on them in Britain, and there was nothing to distinguish the emigration of Englishmen to North America from that of the Saxons to England. Land in America, like land in Saxon England, should be completely free from feudalism.

It should come as no surprise that a large section of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence echoed the old seventeenth century argument that a usurping king had taken away immemorial liberties, and in the months following the Declaration Jefferson clearly revealed the historically based Revolution he had in mind. In August 1776 John Adams told his wife about the work of the committee which he was suggesting inscriptions for the Great Seal of the United States. “Mr. Jefferson,” he wrote, “proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” On the previous day Jefferson had written: “Has not every restitution of the antient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?”

Lincoln

As a Southern patriot, I salute John Wilkes Booth who saw himself as a republican Brutus striking down the tyrant Caesar and avenging the South.

“After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and … chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every mans hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cuttthroat … I hoped for no gain. I knew no private wrong. I struck for my country and that alone … I do not repent the blow I struck. I may before my God but not to man.”

Last time I checked, the South was equally American. We are a part of this country too. My ancestors fought for the South. They fought for nationalism and republicanism and against liberalism.

“Fellow citizens and brethren of the Confederated States of America – for now we are brethren, not in name merely, but in fact – men of one flesh, one bone, one interest, one purpose, of identity of domestic institutions – we have henceforth, I trust, a prospect of living together in peace, with our institutions subject to protection, and not to defamation. It may be that our career will be ushered in the midst of a storm; it may be that, as this morning opened with clouds, rain and mist, we shall have to encounter inconveniences at the beginning; but, as the sun rose and lifted the mist, it dispersed the clouds and left us the pure sunlight of heaven. So will progress the Southern Confederacy, and carry us into the harbor of constitutional liberty and political equality. We shall fear nothing, because of homogeneity at home and nothing abroad to awe us; because, if war should come, if we must again baptize in blood the principles for which our fathers bled in the Revolution, we shall show that we are not degenerate sons, but will redeem the pledges they gave, preserve the rights they transmitted to us, and prove that Southern valor still shines as bright as in 1776, in 1812, and in every other conflict.”

As George Fitzhugh said:

“Religion is the cornerstone of government; its whole fabric rests upon it. It needs not governmental aid, for it is stronger than government itself. Dynasties may pass away, republics and monarchies perish, all other human institutions be destroyed – but religion will last as long as man.

There is no infidelity in our Confederacy. Religion is universal. It binds us together, and makes us one patriotic and moral people. If the pockets of our soldiers slain in battle were searched, prayer books and hymn books would often be found; in none free-love epistles.”

George Fitzhugh

Slavery is a moot issue.

I’m not interested in George Fitzhugh because of slavery. As a natural conservative, his critique of liberalism is what interests me. He argued it was absolutely incompatible with all subordination, government and order and that it would unravel the social fabric and degenerate into anarchy and oligarchy. I have to say it is an impressive prediction because it came true.

Slavery Justified

There is an appendix attached to the book which includes a few articles that Fitzhugh had previously written in the Virginia press.

Fitzhugh and Slavery

I invite anyone to read Sociology for the South and Cannibals All!, or, Slaves Without Masters and judge for themselves whether the books are primarily about defending slavery or criticizing liberalism and free-market capitalism. Fitzhugh defends slavery and attacks liberalism within a larger intellectual framework of Tory conservatism which was adopted by the Southern Reactionary Enlightenment.

The Real America

Well, I don’t recognize the “Real America” in the violence, intimidation, ritual shaming, struggle sessions and moral and cultural degeneration of woke supremacy. I don’t think I am alone either.

“Permit me, in conclusion, again to refer to the great danger to the State which has brought you from your homes, and to exhort my countrymen not to be “caught by the fatal bait of temporary ease and quiet,” not to submit to the great, disgraceful and certain evils, from a dread of others which may prove to be imaginary. If we falter now, we and our sons must pay the penalty in future years, of bloody, if not fruitless efforts to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the State, which if finally successful must leave our fair land blighted – cursed with Black Republican politics and free negro morals, to become a cesspool of vice, crime and infamy.

Can we hesistate! when one bold resolve, bravely executed, makes powerless the aggressor, and one united effort makes safe our homes? May the God of our fathers put into the hearts of the people to make it.”

I see nothing but the bottomless pit of absurdities that my Southerners fought against in 1861. The whole world has been perverted and turned upside down by liberalism.

We intend turn it right side up.