May 15, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
The AMERICAN EXPERIMENT Has Failed, So What Now? Walt Garlington Writes
Friends,
As readers of these installments know, many of my
occasional essays originally for MY CORNER eventually show up, usually in a
slightly edited form, on The Abbeville Institute site where they may be read by
a larger audience. Over the past several years I’ve been fortunate to have at
least thirty-three items published more widely that way.
Abbeville, Reckonin.com, TheDissidentMama, and a few other
sites have become a major—if not the
major—source for superior writing about the South, our traditions, our
heritage, and the intelligent and reasoned defense of those beliefs we hold
dear, and which are under extreme and severe attack these days.
Every now and then I come across a really outstanding essay
or article at Abbeville that expresses what I think, what I would like to
have said, and does it even more eloquently, intelligently, and
thoughtfully. And today I pass on to you
such an essay.
It is by Walt Garlington, a resident of Louisiana and regular
Abbeville writer, who also has his own Web/blog site: “Confiteri: A Southern
Perspective” at: http://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/
Titled “The
Procrustean Constitution,” it caught my eye and echoed in one fairly succinct but
reflective essay major themes of both American and Southern history, as well as
touching on the fundamental issues confronting the rickety and expiring “American
Experiment” in our day.
I offer
it to you; in addition to being thoughtful and thought-provoking, it is
eloquently written—the type writing we once saw more widely in America, but now,
in the age of Twitter and Instagram, appears a dying art.
The Procrustean Constitution
Walt Garlington on May
15, 2019
We have seen how Mississippi,
with its campus free speech bill, totally ignored its own State constitution in
favor of federal 1st Amendment arguments. Now Texas is
doing likewise in response to the San Antonio City Council’s decision to reject
Chick-fil-A’s request to be a vendor in the San Antonio International
Airport. The opposition to this decision rests mostly on federal 1stAmendment
grounds:
AUSTIN, Texas (BP) — Religious liberty advocates held “Save
Chick-fil-A Day” at the Texas Capitol yesterday (April 17) after the restaurant
was banned from the San Antonio airport for donating to religious non-profits.
Religious freedom group Texas Values hosted the event in support
of two bills before the Texas Legislature banning religious discrimination,
weeks after the San Antonio City Council cited Chick-fil-A’s religious outreach
as the sole reason for blocking the franchise from the San Antonio
International Airport.
Texas Values sponsored the event as the legislature held public
hearings on House Bill 1035, dubbed the Free to Believe Act, which would
provide freedom of conscience protections; and House Bill 3172, the First
Amendment Defense Act, which would protect religious beliefs and moral
convictions regarding marriage. Both bills are still in committee. —Diana Chandler
Thankfully, local laws
haven’t been forgotten entirely in this case; there are references to
city codes.
But this is a definite
trend: Legal challenges based on local and State laws and charters are
overlooked in favor of those based on the federal charter. This is not
how the constitutional system was promised to function (though the reader
should, and probably does, know full well that Hamilton et al. knew all along
that the promise was only a deception). We were told that it would allow
for a wide freedom in how localities (States, counties/parishes, cities,
neighborhoods, etc.) organized their respective corporate lives. What we
are seeing now is the opposite: The U. S. constitution has in effect
become a Procrustean bed on which all local variety of law and custom is being
hacked into a one-size-fits-all system.
Whether it is 2nd Amendment
lawsuits by the Right against city or State gun restrictions, or 14th Amendment
lawsuits by the LGBT Left against the Christian marriage laws of States, the
trend is only growing stronger. There are a number of organizations
dedicated to making every nook and cranny in the union fit a particular
pattern: the ACLU, Gun Owners of America, Fourth Amendment Center, First
Liberty Institute, and the rest of them.
But why must Bangor, Maine,
live exactly like Pawnee, Oklahoma, or Phoenix, Arizona, like Eau Claire,
Wisconsin? Because we no longer have cohesive communities in the States
with their own common history and identity. Folks no longer even know the
stories of their own families. They must either go to a genealogist, or
humiliate themselves by sending part of their most secret self, their DNA, to
stand naked before some faceless lab technician working for Ancestry.com, to
discover something about their past.
We have not got fully formed
people who are united by their common faith, history, songs, poems, and the
like. What we have got are millions of uprooted, disconnected individuals
(the ‘virtual communities’ of Twitter
and Instagram don’t count) who move from one place to another every few years
or so in order to cash in on a better job offer from a national or
transnational corporation. They may live in a place, but they are not
part of it in any substantial way. Towns, cities, neighborhoods:
They are all super-sized hotels now, temporary holding pods for men and women
constantly on the move up the corporate ladder who have jettisoned their
past.
One of the few things they
have that gives them a sense of belonging is politics. And people who are
not grounded in a particular place, culture, family, etc. will walk with their
heads in the airy regions of the sky; they will be drawn to the most
idealistic, theoretical, and abstract proposals presented to them. This
is why the idea of America as a ‘propositional nation’ has such a powerful hold
on so many in the States nowadays. Local, concrete institutions and
traditions consecrated by the mists of time, to them, do not offer the same
sort of power to ‘make a difference’ that national politics does. They
are too rigid, slow-moving, cautious. But transformative, eschatological
change must happen now, without any waiting. Let all of them–birthplace,
family, church, graveyard, neighborhood schoolhouse, county courthouse, and the
like–be thrown into the seething cauldron of Progress to be fashioned anew
according to the whims of the hour.
Thus, the U. S. constitution
is now the iron bed, and ideology the knife, that these disciples of Procrustes
use to shape their universe. To quote the Holy Apostle James, ‘My
brothers, this should not be so’ (James 3:10). It is time we stopped
fooling ourselves. This system isn’t going to get any better. It
was not designed to; it was supposed to resolve itself into an all-powerful,
anti-Christian national city. We have got to replace it with something
that encourages the formation of healthy people and places, something that does
not allow the politics of ideology to become entrenched.
Perhaps one of the best
examples to look at for folks in the States is what existed during their
colonial-tide, the happier and more normal years of ‘salutary neglect’ that
Edmund Burke spoke about in his speech to Parliament (‘Speech on Conciliation
with America’, 22 March 1775). While the States have made great strides
physically, they have declined dramatically in other ways, with bureaucracy,
technocracy, apostasy, idolatry, and so forth all choking the life out of the
peoples of North, South, Midwest, and elsewhere.
Things were not quite so dire
then. Before we became part of the great epoch-shattering,
world-transforming, new religion of the AMERICAN EXPERIMENT, most people
understood that they belonged to a place here in North America (whether
Georgia, Delaware, etc.), and yet they remembered their ties to their mother
countries and did not let them wither (with the exception of New England,
unfortunately, who started the whole idea of forming a new ‘body politic’
divorced from the past from their very beginning).
Each colony was secure in its
own laws and customs. No one would have imagined that he could walk into
a neighboring colony or go before the King’s Bench in England and sue to have
that other colony’s laws overturned to conform to some fanciful ideology he
worshipped.
Each colony had its own
religion-ways that formed the communal life of the people of that colony:
Congregational in New England, Quaker in Pennsylvania, Anglican in Virginia,
etc. To have the self-gratifying, fragmenting spirit celebrated by Bon
Jovi running through the houses of worship is a dangerous thing for community
cohesiveness.
Much is made of religious
freedom today, but that only breeds religious indifference, as we are
witnessing now with the rise of the ‘nones.’ What we are after is a vibrant but
balanced and stable Christian life/culture (both individual and communal) that
we can pass on to our offspring. In order for that to be a reality, the
government must in some way embrace and be embraced by the Church (as it was in
colonial times and beforehand). For
there is no such thing as a religiously neutral government. It will
always be animated by some kind of belief system, which will become incarnate
in its laws and other acts.
For these kinds of things to
come about again, the States must return to their ancient constitution, with
its mix of hereditary and elected elements that draw their life from the soil
of Christianity and common law. As keen political observers from Plato to
some of the Antifederalists have noted, a people with mainly elected
magistrates is quickly ensnared by demagogues. Nobility AND commons,
crown AND altar; these all together, not in dialectical opposition but in
Grace-filled cooperation, secure the welfare of a country.
Many will be quite irritated
at even the hint of a king here in the States, but such jealousy is unnecessary
and even unnatural. There is a reason that we are so enchanted when we
read about the great kings of the past like Arthur in Wales and Alfred of
England, or those in fiction like Tolkien’s Aragorn. Just as the
unwritten constitution of the nuclear family calls for a father; just as the
unwritten constitution of the extended family, the clan, calls for a patriarch;
so too the unwritten constitution of the ethnos, which includes within it all
the extended families of the land (which is a picture of the South – a ‘vast
cousinage’ as some have called it – and of most other traditional folk), calls
for a father-figure, a king.
And if even so zealous a
proponent of political liberty as Patrick Henry could offer some praise on
behalf of the King of England during the Virginia Ratification Convention of
1788, how much less difficult ought it to be for us to speak of restoring
monarchy here amongst the States in light of all that we have experienced from
John Adams onward vis-à-vis the elected federal president:
From that noble source have we derived our liberty: that spirit
of patriotic attachment to one’s country, that zeal for liberty, and that
enmity to tyranny, which signalized the then champions of liberty, we inherit
from our British ancestors. And I am free to own that, if you cannot love a
republican government, you may love the British monarchy; for, although the
king is not sufficiently responsible, the responsibility of his agents, and the
efficient checks interposed by the British Constitution, render it less
dangerous than other monarchies, or oppressive tyrannical aristocracies. –Patrick Henry, speech delivered 9 June 1788
The written constitution
itself has proven to be too perfect a vehicle for the propagation of positive
law. Its most basic act, the act of voting, inflames within a person the
idea that he is not bound by any kind of law, nomos, or precedent but is instead autos, creator of his own
law. And this, too, is a powerful cause of the subversion of tradition we
have been dwelling on. Thus, the attempted cure for the abuse by
Parliament of the common law the colonists loved so much has become an even
greater source of woe for their descendants. Much more thought needs to
be given as to how the unwritten customs of society can be defended and
strengthened against the seemingly unending onslaught of legislative laws,
executive orders, and innovative judicial rulings that bombard us from all
levels of government.
One other thing seems
necessary to suggest here at the end, which is at least as old as Thomas
Jefferson: Let each cultural region making up the current union become
its own confederation. There is no reason for them to go on antagonizing
each other by staying under one roof, trying to force their folkways each upon
the others through the power structures of Washington City. There are
sufficient ethnic, religious, and other kinds of differentiation between them
to justify this: Viking-East Anglian New England, Mormon Mountain States,
Scandinavian-Germanic Great Plains, Spanish Southwest, and so on. And
poor Hawai’i: Can we finally give her back to the descendants of Queen
Lili’uokalani with our deepest apologies for Washington’s hostile takeover in
the 1890s?
Politics will always be an
essential part of Southern culture, or of any culture. But politics must
not grow to such a magnitude of importance as to swallow up all other areas of
culture. ‘Constitutional values’ in and of themselves, the kind Hannity
and Levin are constantly rhapsodizing about, are not a culture (not a healthy
one, at any rate). The Christian virtues, Church Fathers, shape-note
singing, harp and fiddle, Virginia reel, giant live oaks, blackberries from the
cane, a white egret flying over a dark, slow-moving bayou, the front porch,
county squires, the wise, grey-headed black man of the neighborhood, Greek
tragedies, Roman pastorals, Eudora Welty’s stories: This is a
culture. More particularly, it is all part of Southern culture. Yet
it must be stressed that this is only part of
it. A culture is an incredibly complex organism; it can never be reduced
to a political or economic or some other kind of formula. But that is
precisely what we are getting more and more of here in the South and the rest
of the States: a cultural life truncated to fit within the clauses of a
constitution, and we can scarcely bear going an hour without hearing the
precious wisdom of Rush Limbaugh or Judge Jeanine.
But they ain’t gonna save
us. And Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi and the 2020 elections ain’t
gonna save us. If any of the present gloom is going to be dispelled, the
States will have to muster the courage and humility to say that the glittering
American Experiment has failed and go back to what has worked in our past, to
our pre-Modern, medieval European inheritance, from Spain and Portugal to the
Ukraine and Russia; with its kaleidoscope of communities great and small
(cities, hamlets, duchies, manors, villas, guilds, schools, monasteries, and
such like) all united in the Christian Faith; with its respect for the mystery,
the antinomy, of unity and diversity; not the social engineer’s dream of ‘Out
of many, one’, but rather the balancing of oneness and manyness together.
How we should re-integrate that inheritance into present conditions is where
our discussion ought to begin.
About Walt Garlington
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer (and, when
able, a planter). He makes his home in Louisiana and is editor of the 'Confiteri:
A Southern Perspective' web site.
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