October 31, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Newest Abbeville
Institute Essay
What Jefferson Davis
Would Tell Us Today
Friends,
Back on October 21, I offered to you as an installment in the
MY CORNER series my essay, “What Jefferson Davis Has to Say to Us Today.” I
edited that essay a bit, and it has now been published by The Abbeville
Institute. I pass it on to you now:
ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE
The Abbeville
Institute
What Jefferson Davis Would Tell Us Today (And Why It
Matters)
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/what-jefferson-davis-would-tell-us-today-and-why-it-matters/
Boyd Cathey on Oct 28, 2019
In our turbulent times it is
increasingly evident that our government is disconnected to the citizens of the
republic. Rather, what we behold is a zealous managerial class, an elite buried
deep in an aggressive bureaucracy which is, essentially, a “government within a
government.” It is an unelected, self-perpetuating oligarchy that offers the
illusion of popular participation, and the chimerical mirage of two political
parties which tussle back and forth, each claiming to represent the wishes and
views of the citizenry. Voting takes place, of course; and then one party or
the other claims victory to implement its agenda. Yet, in Washington D.C. (and
in many state capitals) the administrators who actually run government and its
agencies—those dour faces—remain the same, and very little changes at all.
In fact, for some time now as detailed
by acute observers, including most notably the late Dr. Sam Francis (and before him James Burnham),
and more recently by authors such as Professor Paul Gottfried, the current American political system
has been largely a charade, parading as a “democracy,” but in reality an
insatiable and ruthless oligarchic Behemoth…a caste system more severe, more
self-aggrandizing, and more domineering than anything traditional aristocracies
ever envisaged or dreamed of.
The totally unexpected—and totally unplanned—election
of Donald Trump in 2016 unleashed an immense revulsion and violent push-back by
this Managerial State—by what we are now accustomed to call the Deep State and
its agents and minions in both political parties, who saw that Trump in the White
House might in some manner, even in a small way, endanger their power and
prerogatives. It could not stand, and thus we have witnessed since November
2016 a steady attempt to reverse and nullify the results of 2016, and by any
means available expel the “rabble rouser” from office. And return things back
to normal.
The roots of this situation go back some
distance in our history. There have been historical markers along the way—the
enormous Federal seizures of power during the Great Depression and during the
presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, or earlier, during the two
terms of Woodrow Wilson. And the Federal courts have echoed and canonized
this growth by the managerial state by confirming its authority and reach in
such judicial acts as the Supreme Court’s Everson decision (1947), which essentially perverted and
abrogated the Framers’ intent in the Bill of Rights on the relations between
church and state. Subsequent serious research has demonstrated just how
ideological, ahistorical, and anti-constitutional that decision was. But the
critical damage was done, inflicted, and chances for repairing it seem scarce
to none.
Then followed the Brown v. the Board of Education ruling of 1954, which was a major blow against the
original understanding of the Constitution on the rights of the individual
states respecting education. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, in his volume The New Color
Line: How Quotas and Privileges Destroy Democracy, has provided a detailed account of how
this decision and others similar to it and since it have all but destroyed what
remained of the inherent and retained rights of the states—creators of the
American Constitution—as guaranteed to them by that Constitution.
These more recent events, critical
presidencies, and pivotal court actions, however, all lead back to the War
Between the States and its outcome which set our republic on the road to the
Managerial State. For there is a direct, if sometimes partially obscured line
from the defeat of the Southern Confederacy in 1865 to the events swirling
along the Potomac in our day. And it is something that all citizens of
the American republic should be deeply concerned about, not just traditional Southerners
devoted to their heritage and traditions, or honoring their ancestors.
In a very real sense all Americans,
if they are truly exercised by what is happening to and what has happened in
the country should proudly proclaim themselves “Copperheads,” for it was the
arguments of the great Southern solons, writers, and authors during those
crucial years that indeed represented the Framers’ designs; they were pledged
to defend them, even at the cost of ending the precarious union once so
hopefully erected by those same Framers.
In June 2014 The Abbeville Review republished a remarkable essay
which had been originally published (posthumously) by President Jefferson Davis
in the distinguished journal, the North American Review in 1890. The title of Davis’ long
essay was “The Doctrine of State’s Rights,” but it is far more than just a
panegyric for the defeated Confederate cause or a recapitulation of
pro-Secessionist arguments. In it Davis, a veritable constitutional scholar of
evident profundity and first rank, examines in some detail both the founding
and nature of the American system, just how the Constitution came to be, what
the Framers explicitly intended, and why the concept of “states’ rights”—so
reviled today as “racist” or reactionary—was in fact the view on which this
country was founded.
Jefferson Davis is often pilloried and
criticized in our time for his actions as president of the Confederacy, in
particular for his military decisions. Much of this criticism is unfair. But in
his profound understanding of the nature of the American confederation as the
Framers devised it and of the doctrine of states’ rights, so essential to the
successful and beneficial operation of the country, he was in many ways
unparalleled and prescient.
As with authors such as Robert Lewis
Dabney, Davis’ writings demand our attention, for they have much to say to us,
much to teach us in an era when the demonic Deep State, unleashed upon the
corpses of hundreds of thousands of young men on the battlefield 158 years ago,
threatens to completely overwhelm us.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in
European history from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain,
where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from
the University of Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative
author and philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as
State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has
published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as
classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations
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