Nanny State Waxes … While Our Representative Government Wanes

Nanny State Waxes … While Our Representative Government Wanes

            Today in our national life there is a growing number of things that are very hard to take.  I’ll be specific and name three.  These three trends illustrate the direction toward which the country has been heading for some time.  I don’t believe for a second that they reflect the will of the people.  In fact, they are being forced on us.

            For starters, it is hard to take that our federal system is fading slowly into a national system.  Federalism spreads power to the states and local communities; nationalism centers power in a nation’s capital.  In the last half century, America has not strayed but has bolted from its historical, prosperity-producing spread of power.  When power is centralized, freedom and creativity are diminished.  Currently the enterprise most sought by the nationalists is education.  We need only to pick up a newspaper to see this.

            Secondly, consider the nation’s First Lady and her initiative to dictate what our children will eat at school.  Why do First Ladies need a “cause” in the first place?  Seems to me that just being First Lady and exemplifying grace, intelligence and concern for others through, say, volunteerism would be “cause” enough.   But no, our current First Lady, though not the first to do so, has taken on policy.  Through the Department of Agriculture and regulatory law (the most egregious kind), she has dictated what children may and may not eat at school. 

            Countless reports have come from local school systems saying students won’t eat the school meals the government now requires.  But so what?  Our nanny government knows better than parents.  If the government can actually require us to purchase certain things, it’s not a great leap to dictate our diet.  This school lunch issue is one of the best examples of regulatory law’s naked power.

            Most onerous, however, is the breakdown of the co-equal branches of government.  We all know that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but what is Congress doing while their own authority is being stripped by both the executive and the judicial branches?  The President’s executive orders and the unelected judiciary’s strike down of state-passed laws are almost a weekly occurrence.    

One case in point is the strike down of state marriage laws.  No silver-tongued devil will ever convince me that a majority of Americans now think it’s ok, or even truly possible, for a man to “marry” a man or for a woman to “marry” a woman. Forget polls.  Look at what duly elected state legislatures do.

 Yet, defying the will of voters in state after state, federal judges are changing an institution that has served the human race for millennia.  And still nobody has answered the obvious slippery slope question, “Why, then, can’t I have four wives if I wish, or two wives and two husbands?  Why should the government not adjust laws to favor any arrangement I can conjure?”

            Yes, the transformation of marriage is being forced on us.  It’s hard to take, one reason being that the co-equal branches of government are now whop-sided with the judicial branch ruling the roost.  Another reason is that the entire same-sex marriage issue defies logic and nature.  If a homosexual couple, for instance, wants to raise a child, what must they do to get one?  They must yield to the laws of nature, against which they have rebelled, and call on one of those old-fashioned, behind the times heterosexual couples to produce a baby.  

            There is no seismic shift in America in favor of so-called “marriage equality,” but there does exist an epidemic of judicial tyranny that would appall Jefferson and Madison. 

            So what do we tell our children?  Well, schools in quite a few states are already telling them: gender is a social construct, not a fact of nature; we can change our gender; “male and female created He them” is out; androgyny is in; one of our state governors is bisexual, so that too is just dandy.

            Accepting this New Sexuality, we are told, is just joining the 21^st century.  No, no, no.  Accepting it is returning to ancient Rome (partially to Greece) where in their last days of empire families disintegrated and “sexual liberty” was rampant.  The most secular of historians chronicle this.

            If our new Congress, that promised much, doesn’t help us with presidential overreach, judicial tyranny, and the slide of our federal system, then it’s time to create new coalitions and gather together people who still view things as did the signers of the U.S. Constitution.

            Those signers weren’t dumb, and neither was their admirer de Tocqueville who wrote, “The chief concern of good government should be to get people accustomed to managing without it.”

           

Roger Hines

2/18/15

Jefferson Davis Revisited and Reconsidered

                                       Jefferson Davis Revisited and Reconsidered

            Richard Nixon was accurate when he groused that most historians are on the political left.  His claim is particularly true of those who come from academia.

            One historian who is definitely an academic is James M. McPherson, Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University.  McPherson is the bestselling author of several books on the Civil War including his Pulitzer Prize winner, Battle Cry of Freedom.

            If McPherson writes from a leftist persuasion, one would not know it from his objective 2014 book titled Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief.  Objective because in his introduction McPherson writes, “My sympathies lie with the Union side in the Civil War. Yet I have sought to transcend my convictions and to understand Jefferson Davis as a product of his time and circumstances.”

            McPherson goes on to praise Davis for his many admirable qualities, arguing that he was never a rabid secessionist.   McPherson portrays Davis as a loyal Southerner, a stately Mississippian who, like the respected Robert E. Lee, could not turn against his own state and side with the Union.

            McPherson’s favorable portrait doesn’t mean he embraces everything about Davis.  In 2009 McPherson signed a petition asking President Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument in the Arlington National Cemetery. In part the petition read, “The monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates and neo-Confederates.”  The President placed the wreath there anyway, to the joy of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

            As his title implies, McPherson is analyzing Davis’ role and performance as the head of a new nation and its army.  He definitely views Davis as being “embattled” and defends him from the criticism of his fellow confederates, particularly his vice-President, Georgia’s Alexander H. Stephens and his Secretary of State Robert Toombs, also a Georgian. (Toombs once called Davis a “false and hypocritical wretch.”) 

            The tone of McPherson’s book is much like that of William J. Cooper of Louisiana State University in his 2001 biography, Jefferson Davis, American.  And an American Jefferson Davis truly was.  He was the son of an American Revolution veteran, a graduate of West Point and a soldier in the Mexican War.  Although casting Davis as an “American,” not a renegade, Cooper’s book has won accolades from the most liberal newspapers and college history departments in the country and is now considered the most definitive biography on Davis.

            Neither McPherson nor Cooper subscribe to the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War, pointing out that there were several times during the war that the outcome could have gone either way.  They both view Davis as a dutiful politician and a sincere, if complex, leader who reluctantly deemed secession a necessary action.

            Davis lived 24 years after the war, 2 of which were spent in prison.  Though indicted for treason, he was never tried.  After prison, he was offered the presidency of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee but declined the offer.  His last years were spent in considerable impoverishment at Beauvoir, his home on the Mississippi coast.  Visiting Beauvoir recently, I learned that although Hurricane Katrina damaged it severely, it has been restored and is a beautiful and remarkable place for learning about Civil War history.      

            Why should we spend time reliving history and revisiting its players?  Because we need to know what brought us to where we are.  We also need to be fair to the deceased when new light is shed on them.  Today’s Generation DotNet isn’t too fond of history.  For all its marvels, technology and social media are producing a generational cocoon to which youth are escaping and enwrapping themselves, eschewing history.

            But young minds can be excited about history again if we make it a study of people, not just wars and elections.  McPherson’s contribution to this cause is that he focuses not so much on a major conflict itself as on one of its major participants.  In doing so, he himself was enlightened.  In doing so he shows us how to study the past and how to help our children see that history really is about them and their tomorrows.

            McPherson’s remarkable last sentence veers from conventional wisdom: “Davis was not responsible for losing the war; the salient truth is not that the Confederacy lost but that the Union won.”

            Jefferson Davis gave many talks to young people in his last days.  He stated often that he was happy America was re-uniting.  Without apology, he asserted that he never viewed himself as a rebel, but as a defender of freedom.

Roger Hines

January 11, 2015