April 27,
2021
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Lincoln, Chronicles
Magazine, and the Disappearance of Southern Conservatism
Friends,
Abraham
Lincoln has become, for most mainline conservatives, an icon, and, along with
Martin Luther King, Jr., no opportunity is lost—it seems—on Fox News or in the
establishment “conservative press,” to stress just how much conservatively-minded
Americans owe to these two canonized martyrs. Any demurer, any dissent or
disagreement, brings forth condemnations of the complainant as a “racist” or
“reactionary,” or worse, maybe some Southern redneck hick who hides his old
Klan robe but keeps it at the ready.
During
the past fifty or so years the old Southern Democratic Party has virtually
disappeared, died out, as millions of conservative Southerners, many motivated
by their sincere religious faith and resistance to radical and unnatural
change, migrated to the Republican Party. The GOP, beginning in the Nixon years,
employed what was called a “Southern strategy,” largely elaborated by
consultant Kevin Phillips and spelled out most clearly in his volume, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).
GOP spokesmen learned to speak a language and offer symbols that millions of
Southerner found attractive, even compelling.
Not only
that, but early on the election of former-Democrat Jesse Helms as a Republican
US senator from North Carolina (1972), with his huge following of
“Jessecrats”—mostly Democrats or soon-to-be former Democrats—and the conversion
of political leaders like South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond, turned what
had been a trickle into a kind of stampede into the ranks of what had hitherto been
seen as the discredited vehicle of the Reconstruction.
But this
new home, this refuge from the increasingly liberal, left-leaning modern
Democratic Party, would not be for Southerners a recreation of the type of
familial, regional and traditional conservatism which they had been accustomed
to. Increasingly as the 1980s and 1990s
progressed, the older traditional Southern conservatism, with its enduring
devotion to its Confederate heritage and its illustrious catalogue of admirable
statesmen and heroes, first became downgraded, then finally largely despised by
both a national conservative movement and national Republican Party dominated
by ideologues who were self-denominated “neoconservatives.”
These
former Leftists—in the main ex-Trotskyite Marxists who migrated into the
conservative movement and the GOP—with their mastery of communications and
conservative media, and their unswerving zeal which arguably was a carry-over
from their days advocating for a kind of Trotskyite universalism, soon
vanquished the older, much more inviting and older conservatism. Where once the
“conservative movement”—as exemplified by a Dr. Russell Kirk—welcomed
traditionalist Southerners; and where once the national Republican Party
accepted a Senator Helms and or Senator Thurmond and conferred on them
positions of authority; now with the zealous neoconservatives seizing control
of both the movement and the party, older icons—whether a Robert E. Lee (so
praised once by President Eisenhower) or a John C. Calhoun (given status as one
of America’s great conservative minds by Kirk) were shown the door, even
condemned as “racists,” often paralleling accusations made by those on the
further Left.
New
heroes and models were erected, and in the place of a Lee or Calhoun, Abe
Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., were pronounced as the conservative and
Republican models for Americans…and for Southerners. Indeed, arguably the
specter of Lincoln had never been far from Republican mythology. But at first,
as Southern traditionalists streamed into the GOP, it seemed that there might
be some co-existence with the party of Calhoun and his descendants.
But it
was not to be. At venues such as the formerly-conservative magazine of record, National Review, brilliant Southerners
like Mel Bradford were shown the door and unceremoniously removed as
contributors. Gone were the days when founding editor of the Modern Age quarterly, Russell Kirk,
could dedicate an entire issue to the South and an appreciation of Southern
traditions (cf. Modern Age, Fall 1958
issue).
Indeed, National Review led the Never Trump
charge in 2016, suspecting darkly that the MAGA movement was a not-so-subtle
attempt of unreconstructed Southerners and (largely marginalized) Old Rightists
to regain control of what Paul Gottfried has called “Con Inc.”—both the modern
conservative movement and the national Republican Party.
That
battle continues, and it continues not just politically since the election back
in 2016 of Donald Trump (who probably didn’t realize the full import of his
initial success). For it is at base a contest of fundamental ideas about what
is a country—what is our country—and
the role and position of the American South in (and outside) of that
geographical entity we call the United States.
For the
most part, the neoconservatives still control “Con Inc.” Every night on Fox
News or Newsmax one is likely to see a Nikki Haley, Jonah Goldberg or Victor
Davis Hanson (he who praised Sherman’s blitzkrieg through South Carolina as
exemplary and a “good thing for South Carolinians—they deserved it!”). Save for
occasional minutes on the Tucker Carlson
Tonight program, a continual drumbeat for “equality” as the central
principle—the essential element in what is termed “American exceptionalism”—is
heralded as undebatable. Globalism—a key tenet of neoconservative (and
Trotskyite) thought—marinates conservative news coverage. And, of course,
Lincoln and King have been turned into plaster, canonized “conservative”
saints, untouchable, undefilable. Monuments to Confederate heroes, indeed, symbols of most anything honoring
Southern tradition are shunned and now condemned…perhaps not as hysterically or
“woke” as by the demonic denizens of the far Left, but certainly the targets
are the same.
The words
recently written by David P. Goldman ring, in retrospect, ever so
true: Now under Biden the neoconservatives, partially sidelined under Trump,
are back. And “their ideology is a sort of right-wing Marxism,” which
definitely has no room whatsoever for defenders of a Lee or Calhoun and those who
reject the idea of a “proposition nation,” those in opposition to across the
board domestic and global equality and imposed universal democracy. To paraphrase
the Kennedy brothers, Ronald and Donald, who in turn quote General Lee, this is
the legacy of Lincoln: a country "aggressive abroad and despotic at home," now
conjoined with the evangelical zeal of the neocons.
There
are few print magazines left that boldly and intelligently oppose the dominant
neoconservative vision of America and the world with its increasingly explicit
rejection of a Kirkian Old Right conservatism that once-welcomed defenders of Southern
heritage and tradition. The most significant is Chronicles magazine.
In the
April/May issue, the magazine took pains to answer some questions of newer
readers regarding the differences between traditional conservatism and the
newer ersatz neocon version, which although at times appearing to defend what
Kirk once called “the verities,” is in reality exactly how Goldman described
it: a warmed over, right wing re-incarnation of Trotskyite globalism,
anti-Communist—yes, but inimical to the older traditions and inherited beliefs
of both Southerners and other Americans, concerning not just the nature of
these United States, but about the very founding and creation of it.
The
editors at Chronicles, in response to
several letters inquiring about these differences, which, I would suggest, are
fundamental to our understanding of our history as well as our current
politics, have offered a somewhat detailed answer. And that answer also
admirably offers a critique of Lincoln and his disastrous legacy in both
America and in the world.
With
the permission of the Chronicles
editors (Paul Gottfried and Ed Welsch), I offer their full explanation and
response. I believe it is an excellent summation of what defines so-called “Con
Inc.” is today, the stark cleavages that separate members of the Old Right and
traditional Southern conservatives from the dominant neocon globalists, and the
dastardly role of Father Abraham in unleashing successive devastation on America
and eventually the world.
That
same issue, April/May, includes a superb
analysis by the Abbeville Institute’s Dr. Brion McClanahan of both the “1619
Project” and the “1776 Commission” counter-project (initiated unfortunately
under Trump). Both emit from the same fetid
swamp that assures us that America is founded on a “proposition”: the principle
of universal equality. The editors end their response with a gloss from Bruce
Frohnen, summing up the late Wilmoore Kendall and George Carey (in Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, 1971): “…any principle is a dangerous thing for any
tradition to take as its common, collective goal. Traditions, societies,
peoples, are not dedicated to principles. Ideologies are dedicated to
principles. And ideologies are the motive force for armies and for campaigns to
punish heretics and enforce a uniformity of life that spells death for human variety
and living tradition."
The critical analysis of Lincoln and his
inheritance is something all Southerners should read.
A General Reply to Some Recent Letters and a Reflection on the Legacy of Abraham Lincoln, From the Editors of CHRONICLES Magazine - April/May 2021
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/no-mere-christian/
[Two letters from confused or angry
readers, appeared in the April/May issue of Chronicles
as examples of others that had arrived at the journal. In general several
expressed the concern: “In simple terms, what separates Chronicles conservatism
from the neoconservatives, in your mind? Also, I’ve been confused by more than
one of these writers who seem to have a problem with Lincoln—what’s that all
about?... Can you enlighten me there?”]
RESPONSE from the Chronicles Editors:
We
have been noticing lately a spate of letters from a small handful of angry
readers who demand that Chronicles cease publishing articles that challenge their political
or religious world views. Despite often threatening to unsubscribe, some of
these correspondents write month after month, seemingly unwilling to follow
through with their threats.
The
complaints of this group are varied, and often their letters are too
long-winded to publish in full in this section. Some recent examples that we’ve
published in this “Polemics & Exchanges” section include the letter in this
issue, which objects to our profile of (the apparently morally retrograde) C.
S. Lewis. Another was upset with our critique of a well-known popular historian
“On Victor Davis Hanson” (January 2021 Chronicles). Our perturbed correspondents also include a
handful of piqued Poles who are hypersensitive to any mention in the magazine
of Polish history, and who took umbrage in lengthy, unpublished letters at
matters too minute to be of interest to a general readership.
Other
letter writers have more substantial objections to disagreements with one or
another Chronicles writer’s definition of
true versus false conservatism, or the true versus the false ideals of the
Founding Fathers, or—perhaps especially—of matters relating to the Civil War
(or the War of Northern Aggression, if you like).
Even
as we have received these letters of outrage, our list of subscribers continues
to grow. We think these things are not unrelated. Unlike many bland magazines
that are the products of establishment conservatism, Chronicles continues to be a
provocative outsider voice that challenges the establishment orthodoxy, and
which allows debate within its pages.
Our
commitment to publishing a selection of interesting reader letters every month,
even (or especially) angry or critical ones, sets Chronicles apart. What
distinguishes us from the “cancel culture” in either its standard leftist or
Conservative Inc. form, is that we take our commitment to a free exchange of
ideas seriously.
This
does not, of course, mean that Chronicles is not committed to traditional conservative tenets,
because it most certainly is. The magazine’s publishers and editors believe in
traditional families with assigned gender roles, the eternal validity of
biblical morality, the unmitigated evil of the modern administrative state, and
the perversity of egalitarian politics. We also believe the conservative
establishment in the United States has done pitifully little to hold back the
advance of the left for several decades, and that its only major accomplishment
has been to disable everything to its right.
Chronicles also has a record of
being quite open to views that the conservative movement does not want to talk
about, for example, the right of Southern states to secede from the Union in
1861 without having their section decimated by invading Northern armies, the
unfortunate consequences of Reconstruction, and the international disaster of
American military intervention in the Great War or in the Kosovo fiasco (which
resulted in the wholesale expulsion of Serbian Christians from that
region).
Although
we do take positions for which the left may hate us, we are also keen on open
debates, and have often featured articles that express different views from
those held by our staff.
The
second letter writer in this number is surprised that our contributors have
dared to criticize Abraham Lincoln, and, to his bemusement, we don’t address
the problem of unbalanced budgets and other matters that are standard
Republican Party talking points.
But
we are not part of the GOP or of the standard “movement” conservatism. There
are lots of magazines, websites, and cable news programs that are covering
those topics that our reader thinks we should engage. Why must we duplicate
what others are already doing?
Furthermore,
why are we not permitted to raise questions about the rhetoric or war policies
of Abraham Lincoln? Is our 16th president a divinity who stands above critical
judgment? In his life Lincoln was a controversial figure, and we see no reason
he should be treated differently in historical perspective.
We
repeatedly hear the same bizarre historical interpretation about Lincoln’s
moral mission from Conservative Inc. and with vehemence from Mark Levin and
Glenn Beck. These media celebrities insist that slavery was our collective
original sin as a country, which Abraham Lincoln helped us expiate in a
purgative ritual that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
This
was apparently well worth the price since we have now been shriven (at least on
Fox News) of our shared guilt. The tens of millions of advocates of reparations
for American blacks would naturally differ on whether we’ve been absolved. If
our sins were as wicked as both the leftist media and the establishment
conservative media would lead us to believe, these special pleaders may have a
point.
Some
historical perspective may be helpful here. When the United States came into
being in the late 18th century, slavery existed in much of the world, including
in the British and French empires, and perhaps most brutally in Africa, from
whence most of American slaves came. If slavery were a collective sin, it
existed everywhere since the dawn of humanity as a desirable form of labor. The
American South did not produce a slave system of unsurpassed brutality, but one
that allowed the slave population to multiply at an unsurpassed rate for
servile labor. We may point this out even when speaking about an institution
that we are well rid of.
We’ve
never bought the argument that slavery was especially wicked on these shores
because of the passage in the Declaration about all men being equal. The French
proclaimed their Declaration of the Rights of Men and of Citizens in August
1789 but still maintained a vast slave population in the West Indies. Robert
Paquette, a leading historian of slavery in the western hemisphere, raises the
rhetorical question: Does anyone think that a slave in 19th-century Virginia
would have preferred being relocated to a sugar plantation in Cuba or Brazil,
or to becoming a serf in Russia or China? Unlikely.
Paquette
also finds it remarkable that the data he learned as a university student from
a Jewish Marxist professor, Robert Fogel, about the relatively benign condition
of slaves in the American South (relative to other places where slavery was
practiced) can no longer be discussed even in supposedly conservative journals.
If
there were a conflict between the notion of universal individual rights and
human bondage for non-citizens, this was not as obvious to most people in the
18th century as it would be to a more passionately egalitarian posterity.
Although opponents of slavery could be found at the time of America’s founding,
at most these opponents with very few exceptions favored manumitting slaves
without granting them full rights of citizenship, which, as far as we can tell,
was the position of the author of the Declaration.
Jefferson
wanted slaves gradually freed and colonized outside the United States. Although
Lincoln changed course during the Civil War, he too long favored the settlement
of manumitted slaves in Haiti or Central America. One could accuse these
critics of slavery of not being as sufficiently committed to egalitarian
principles as they should have been, or as committed as Glenn Beck, Mark Levin,
or perhaps Kamala Harris would have wanted them to be.
There
is also no evidence that most of those who died in the American Civil War gave
their lives specifically to rid this country of slavery. Lincoln grasped
Northern sentiment properly and for that reason fought a war motivated
primarily to save the republic. In his famous letter to New York Tribune Editor Horace Greeley
on Aug. 22, 1862, and in his second annual address to Congress, Lincoln made
clear that he was prosecuting war against Southern secessionists to keep the
Union together.
Lincoln’s
“paramount object in this struggle,” as he told Greeley, “is to save the
Union.” He was first and foremost a nationalist, not an abolitionist. It is
also inconceivable that slavery would not have disappeared even without the
bloodbath that Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states brought about. Slavery
disappeared elsewhere without the catastrophe that befell the United States in
the 1860s.
Allowing
for local variations, Lincoln, the nationalist and consolidator, was a child of
the mid-19th century, like the unifiers of Italy and Germany, Camillo Cavour
and Otto von Bismarck. All these figures fought against regionalists wedded to
agrarian, and partly seignorial economies, and they established centralized
nation states, or states that were more centralized than those that preceded
them. Lincoln has been the most honored of the three, but his state-building
was by far the most destructive of human life, and his legacy perhaps the most
dangerous in its ultimate consequences.
Unlike
other nationalists of the 19th century, as Willmoore Kendall correctly pointed
out, Lincoln urged his country to spread the ideal of equality, “the
proposition” to which America had committed itself in becoming a nation. This
ideal was assigned universal significance, and Kendall correctly observed that
it provided a moral basis for perpetual crusades on behalf of a mischievous
abstraction.
If,
as Conservative Inc. now insists, Lincoln’s idea that a “proposition” has made
America an “exceptional nation” unique in human history, we would rather find
some other reason to be exceptional or unique. For example, by especially
exemplifying ordered liberty in a particular time and place, or by being
uniquely successful in allowing citizens to prosper in a lawful society.
We do
not write this to demonize Lincoln, who was an extraordinary historical figure
and one of the most impressive orators in the English language. Also, like
historian and philosopher Richard Weaver, we are impressed by the argument from
principle that Lincoln makes in his debates with Stephen Douglas in their race
for the U.S. Senate in 1858.
Unlike
Douglas, Lincoln emphatically challenged whether a deep moral question, which
is what he considered the extension of slavery into the territories, could or
should be settled by majority votes. Of course, back then there were real
majority votes, unlike the current imitation of an electoral system, in which
the media and their friends in the Deep State shape the outcomes.
But
Lincoln was also a problematic hero, who was fully complicit in initiating a
bloody, fratricidal war and seeing it through to its brutal end. Among the
long-range consequences of the Civil War was the permanent damage done to the
dual sovereignty with which the American republic was established, with shared,
inalienable powers assigned to both the federal and state governments. Lincoln
further launched the never-to-be fulfilled mission of bringing equality first
to American citizens and then to the rest of the world. We are still living
with the consequences of that dubious achievement.
We do
not intend to do what Lord Acton urged us to do when he encouraged historians
to “play hanging judge over the past.” The students of the past should
generally avoid indulging that obnoxious habit. But it would be unfair to
Lincoln’s legacy if we did not mention the political implications of what he said
and did. And since he is today honored precisely as an upholder of a universal
value that it behooves Americans to bestow on humankind, it would be remiss of
us to look at his statesmanship without noting that fact.
It
may be less noteworthy that Lincoln (along with the very leftist children’s
book author Dr. Seuss) is now being “canceled” by those on the left than the
fact that he appealed to the very idea of radical equality that the left
glorifies. And, that Lincoln asserted the primacy of that value in the context
of a national mission to be vindicated through war.
It is
also futile to make academic distinctions between Lincoln’s armed pursuit of
equality and the more extreme forms that ideal has taken 150 years later. As a
Genevan critic of the French Revolution warned as the Jacobins were taking
power in France : “Like Saturn, revolutions devour their children.”
As we
on the right work desperately to quell the egalitarian passions that are
destroying constitutional government in this country and elsewhere in the West,
it would be proper to pose the question of whether Lincoln should have been
turned into a living god by the conservative establishment. There are other
candidates for national honor (but not the divinization bestowed on Lincoln)
whom we would gladly put before him, starting with George Washington.
A
second problem with the current Lincoln-worship was stated by the
political-legal thinker Bruce Frohnen in the once-illustrious but now
discontinued online magazine, Nomocracy
in Politics. Frohnen offered this critical observation while
discussing Basic
Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1971) a study published by George Carey
after the death of Willmoore Kendall, with whom Carey collaborated in producing
this work. Frohnen expresses the deep reservations of Carey and Kendall
regarding the cult of Lincoln when he wrote:
The problem with Lincoln, for Kendall and
Carey, is that he dedicated the United States to a principle. And dedication
to any principle would be a problem for the American way. Certainly a
case can be made for a certain definition of equality as a good thing. But any
principle is a dangerous thing for any tradition to take as its common,
collective goal. Traditions, societies, peoples, are not dedicated to principles.
Ideologies are dedicated to principles. And ideologies are the motive force for
armies and for campaigns to punish heretics and enforce a uniformity of life
that spells death for human variety and living tradition.
It would be hard for us to improve on that criticism.
--------------
Reprinted with permission of Chronicles magazine. The editorial is
available fully online.
Thanks Dr. Cathey; I'm afraid that the South is dead. I live only 4 miles outside the city limits of the old capital--Richmond-- and I know of nobody, other than myself, who has any interest in what Paul Gottfried just wrote in Chronicles.
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