History

I just finished reading the excellent "Tried by War (Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief)" book by James M. McPherson.  In addition to a great discussion of the trials and troubles President Lincoln went through dealing with recalicitrant generals and military setbacks Mr. McPherson discussed the political travails and considerations that Lincoln had to keep in mind at the same time.

Mr. McPheson discusses the Copperheads and toward the end of the book he discussed the 1864 Presidential election which Lincoln sincerely believed that he was going to lose.  The Democratic platform made the "demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practical moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union."  This was a demand for "peace" without precondition allowing for the continuation of slavery and and end to the attempts by the military to defeat the Southern armies still in the field, still fighting to maintain the Confederacy.

I guess defeatism is in the Democrat blood.  I was so reminded of the "Peace Now" signs I saw for so many years in the yards here around Austin.  As I said so many times to my wife as we drove past those signs how they were not calling for peace they were rather calling for defeat.    And the Democrats during the Civil War were basically calling for  defeat then also.

P.S.  I forgot to mention one other thing I meant to bring up when I first wrote this.  There were only 3 Northern State legislatures controlled by Democrats.  They were the only legislatures that did not set up a procedure for absentee voting for their citizens serving in the U.S. Army...

African Americans were a liberal leaning constituency prior to the 1960s and partly for good reasons.  Breaking the Jim Crow system would inevitably involve the aggressive use of federal government power and the most reliable supporters of civil rights laws were among northern liberals. The intensity of the African American community's antipathy towards conservatives was born in the civil rights struggles of the mid 1960s (and every conservative really should read William Voegeli's Summer 2008 CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS article on conservatives and the civil rights movement).  But we should not mistake the roots of the division between African Americans and conservatives to be the sole cause of this division.  How many Americans of any race remember Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and relate it to contemporary politics?

In my experience, younger and better educated African Americans have a much clearer (and more hostile) collective memory of Ronald Reagan than of Goldwater or William F. Buckley.  The memory of the "welfare queens" remark has been passed down as a slur on black women in general, and this (among other hostile impressions) has influenced how many educated African Americans view Reagan and the conservatives who admire Reagan.  It is worth remembering that different communities can remember the same person in different ways and that for many African Americans, "welfare queens" is much more intensely remembered than "tear down this wall".  This collective memory of Reaganite hostility (whether this hostility was real or not) is also much more powerful in shaping their view of Reagan and conservatives than Reagan's record on economic growth or anything else.

This hostile communal view of Reagan and conservatives is not an accident or a conspiracy.  It is a dominant narrative that is passed on by politicians, journalists, academics, and of course family members.  Conservatives should not dismiss the sincerity of much of this collective memory.  Sure hacks like Charles Rangel manipulate (and help perpetuate) this hostility for partisan purposes, but millions of people truly believe it and pass it on.  This narrative forms the screen through which contemporary events and personalities are viewed. 

The assumption that conservatives are hostile or indifferent helps make sense of events.  If the Democrat controlled government of Louisiana fails in Katrina relief it is incompetence.  If a Republican (which is by association conservative) administration fails in the same task it is racist indifference at best or racist conspiracy at worst.  This is a case in which rapper Kanye West's comments that Bush did not care about black people have particular importance.  Conservatives are used to hearing celebrities slander conservative politicians, but they should listen a little closer to West.  West's mother was a college professor.  He was raised as part of the educated, striving, black upper middle class.  West's opinion was hardy unanimous but it does indicate that conservatives have a problem that extends beyond Grammy winners.

There is also the problem of being a black conservative in the black community.  This is not the same as having conservative opinions on abortion, the death penalty, or taxes.   This is a problem of associating yourself with conservative tainted organizations - the Republican Party most of all - and thereby cooperating with the enemy.  Even if one has basically conservative opinions, the social barriers to joining such an organization are significant.  Most of all is the disinclination to join groups that one has assumed are hostile.  There is also the knowledge that such association opens you up to all kinds of hits big and small.  The rules of civilized debate will only sometimes and partially apply to you and you are vulnerable to social ostracism.  Emerge magazine (a news monthly marketed towards African Americans) put Clarence Thomas as a lawn jockey on its cover.  Conservatives bitterly complained that Michael Steele did not stick up for them when D.L. Hughley compared Republicans to Nazis.  What conservatives would do well to remember was that Hughley was trying to slyly portray as a Nazi collaborator.  This suspicion was only to be expected when he took on the RNC chairmanship.  There is the Spike Lee movie Get On the Bus in which a (demonized) African American conservative is thown off a bus going to the Million Man March and is symbolically expelled from the African American community.  Real life is generally less dramatic than Spike Lee fantasies (though the fantasies have their own subtle influence), but conservatives should not dismiss the less overt pressures.  Picture a person in a predominantly conservative community who has a strong affinity for Code Pink.  It can't be easy. 

Well, that is one (white) guy's opinion about some and only some of the challenges that conservatives face.  What can we do about them?

The below is bumped from an earlier discussion thread.  Many conservatives have trouble understanding the depth of the majority of the African American community's alienation from conservatism as a political movement.  Conservatives wonder how some African American voters can have many opinions on the right but vote for candidates on the left when they are faced with a conservative Republican vs. a liberal Democrat.  The answer has much to do with history and how that history is remembered.  The public coming out party for modern conservatism that was the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign and how the Goldwater campaign appeared  to the African American community might be a good place to begin

The conservative case that Goldwaterites opposed the great civil rights acts for benign reasons butts up against two big obstacles in convincing the African American community.

1. Why should African Americans care about the professed principles of people who would have preserved a system that made a mockery of every maxim that was spoken of in Fourth of July celebrations ("no taxation without representation", "one man one vote", "give me liberty or give me death") as it applied to southern blacks?

2. Many people who voted for southern white segragationists for the worst reasons suddenly started voting Republican in presidential reasons around the time the GOP nominated a Senator who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You can argue that it was because the Jim Crow system was no loger tenable and that the interparty competition for southern whites switched to issues like national defense, crime, taxes, abortion, whatever. There is a lot of truth to that argument, but African Americans can clearly see white southerners moving from the Democratic party to the faction of the Republican Party that was most opposed to the key civil rights law.

So if it seems like many black people assume that conservative Republicans are their natural enemies, they have their reasons.

That is not the whole story of course since one can hardly explain the conservative side's unpopularity with African Americans based totally on an almost fifty year old campaign.  The Goldwater campaign and related events did much damage to political conservatism's name among African Americans, but much has also happened to keep the antipathy alive these many years later. 

I'll have some more ideas a little later.

One of the things that is striking to me about our politics is that it is, from a conservative perspective, insufficiently ideologically sorted out. What I mean is that there is a sizeable fraction of voters who, if given an exam on the issues, would mostly answer in favor of the "conservative" positions on taxes, regulation, abortion, ect. But those same voters would vote for a liberal Democrat over a conservative Republican. These same voters might consider political conservatives to be their political enemy. A lot of times these are cases of racial and ethnic politics trumping ideology as we have come to think of it.

But I also think that we should take seriously the reasons why these voters are choosing liberal candidates with whom they have so many disagreements. That doesn't mean we have to agree with all of the reasons, but to try to understand the history that has brought us to this place and try to plan approaches that will work better. This is destined to be very complicated. William Voegeli's  terrific and brutally honest essay in the Summer 2008 issue of the CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS really only illuminated a small corner of the tortured relationship between conservatives and the African America community. Similar work could be done about the relationship between the political expressions of conservatism and Latinos. That does not mean that we should always be looking for blame on the conservative side. Sometimes liberals do as well as they do because of the use of slander to create a false sense of ethnic/racial siege. But sometimes conservatives have taken approaches that have ended up being counterproductive in winning the votes of nonwhites. In some cases conservatives have needed to fight harder (possibly with a harsher and more aggressive communication strategy) for the votes of people in those communities. I don't really have a final answer, but I do think that conservatives need to think alot harder about how to bring over nonwhite Americans who share our issue preferences but think of conservatives as the villains of politics.  

I can't believe I pulled this off:

I was out tonight and I ran into my cousin's girlfriend at a bar.  She and her friends were going out of their way to praise 44 and bash 43.  When I demonstrated my lack of comfort with such suppositions, my cousins' gf said "don't worry about it, he loves George Bush."

One of the random chicks asked me: "How can you love George Bush?"

I asked: "Does National Security Mean Anything to You?"

She shot back: "What does George Bush have to do with National Security?"

I said: "George W. Bush was a highly imperfect President.  That said, he was and is a fine man who both kept this country safe AND liberated 50 million people from two of the worst tyrannies in human history."

She said: "We're still in Iraq and Afghanistan, how is that a liberation?"

I don't remember exactly what I said at that point except that I pointed out how I would rather live under chaos than live under the Taliban or Saddam.  On top of that, I made a huge deal out of the fact that Iraqi's voluntarily elected a whole bunch of pro-American candidates two weeks ago.  Suffice to say, she was awed by George W. Bush's historical legacy once it was properly explained.

Money quote: "I hate you for making me love and respect George W. Bush."

My favorite example of the bizarre censorship practices of early modern academia is this: there were, indeed, varying lists naming every book banned by Church and/or College. The lists became more and more comprehensive as time went by, and in some cases became more and more in demand…as people used them as a sort of Zagat’s Guide for finding out what books might make a good, scandalous read.

In one instance, and in what can only be characterized as the inevitable conclusion to any system embracing censorship, the list itself was banned. Fabulous.

135 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettsyburg Address.  Since we're in need of Republican leaders these days, I thought it appropriate to call out one of the big guns.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Historically, it is not very frequent that we see an incumbent United States Senator get elected President of the United States.  It is even rarer that we see a U.S. Senator elected to both the Presidency and the Vice Presidency.

Bucking this historic tradition, our President-elect and Vice President-elect are incumbent United States Senators.  And now, Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel has been offered the Chief of Staff position in the Obama administration.

This development that we are witnessing is largely unprecedented: a Presidential administration filled with incumbents from Congress.

So why is this a big deal? Well, we all know from elementary school history that the founding fathers built this great nation with three separate branches built into our Constitution: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.  This level of participation by legislators in the executive branch will serve to eliminate the barriers between the executive office and the Congress – already low due to the Democrats’ increased control of both Houses – threatening the entire premise of separation of powers that has helped make this country so great.

Thus, this begs the question, "How many more Congressional officials will we see in the Obama administration?"  Regardless of the answer, in seeing an Obama administration composed of Democratic officials from the previous Congress, we are witnessing President-elect Obama's mantra of change get thrown out the window.

This entry has been cross-posted at NextGenGOP.com.

NOTE:  Cross Posted at Political Capital

It has become very obvious over the last month or two that Barack Obama is on the verge of a monumental landslide, and the democrats in congress are poised to push the envelope on supermajorities as well.  We are looking at a one party state, and not only that - its one that has been thirsting for power and will have a great deal of it in January.

Because of this reality, I think it is more than appropriate that we consider what has happened in the past when one party has taken over control of all levels of government.  This is important, because whenever one party gets beat that badly, they always feel as though the world is ending, and they will be permanently relegated to irrelevance.

What is interesting, though, is that this is hardly the case.  When you look back at history, one party dominance does not maintain itself for very long, and it often leads to utter disaster for the party that commands said unbridled power.

Why is that?  Perhaps its because the party in power over-reaches, believing they have more support of the American people than they actually do - as detailed here.  Perhaps it is because the minority party ends up looking at themselves in the mirror and diagnosing their issues, actually addressing the problems that caused them to be so roundly defeated - as I recommended here.  Perhaps its a little of both.

But one thing is for sure - one party controlling the government is not something that the American people tend to like very much.  Lets take a gander at some examples.

Dr. Bill Smith, ARRA Editor: Is the doctrine of Posse Comitatus coming to an end? The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 and has been an important law. Wikipedia reflects:

"The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services ... from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain 'law and order' on non-federal property. . . . The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. . . . The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement."

Gina Cavallaro at the Army Times announced reports: 3rd Infantry’s 1st BCT trains for a new dwell-time mission. Helping ‘people at home’ may become a permanent part of the active Army.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys. Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home. Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or man made emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas. But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities. . . .

“Right now, the response force requirement will be an enduring mission. How the [Defense Department] chooses to source that and whether or not they continue to assign them to NorthCom, that could change in the future,” said Army Col. Louis Vogler, chief of NorthCom future operations. “Now, the plan is to assign a force every year.” . . . they’ll learn new skills, use some of the ones they acquired in the war zone and more than likely will not be shot at while doing any of it. They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack. . . .

Obviously, we would appreciate the military's assistance if we had a massive terrorist attack in the United States; especially with the taking out the "bad guys."  But do we want the military doing police actions related to routine national, regional or even local "civil unrest and crowd control"? When did the transfer of authority occur which granted military control within the the borders of the Unites States? Before proceeding, let me note that military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. In the study of military doctrine and history, military officers confront the theory and past applications as to the extent military officers and the people under their command may be or have been called upon to intervene in domestic affairs. However, Posse Comitatus has provided a clear line in the sand.

Presidents have used the military to enforce their will within the United States. For example George Washington, our first president, used his authority as commander-in-chief in 1794 to call out the militia to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion. President Andrew Jackson ignored the 1832 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court and forced removal of Native Americans from East of the Mississippi which lead to the infamous Trail of Tears. In 1878, after the bitterness of the Civil War and the quartering of Union troops in the South, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act. However, Presidents continued to use the military and the National Guard to enforce their will on the citizens of the Unites States.

One of the worst examples of the use of the military was in the summer of 1932 against 43,000 fellow military veterans, their families and affiliated groups who had assembled in Washington D.C. in what became known as the famous Bonus March. Skipping the merits of the Bonus Army and moving to the conclusion, we find President Herbert Hoover using the military led by General Douglas MacArthur to suppress and disburse fellow veterans. By the time the events ended, hundreds of veterans were injured and several were killed. In this situation, "The Posse Comitatus Act — forbidding civilian police work by the U.S. military — did not legally because Washington, D.C. is a federal district directly governed by the U.S. Congress (U.S. Constitution, Article I. Section 8. Clause 17)."

In 2005, we saw National Guard assist in the aftermath of Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. However, the National Guard and the New Orleans police overstepped their legal authority, per the U.S. District Court, and illegally confiscated the personal firearms of vulnerable civilians after the hurricane's devastation left property and lives subject to looters and other criminals. Have we and our leaders accepted that Constitutional Rights granted by the US constitution are sacrosanct?

Apparently not! Currently, individual rights may be more at risk as we address the potential of terrorist threats against the United States. The effects of the infamous terrorists attacks on 9-11 continue to ripple through our country. For example, in 2006, the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 passed and was signed into law. The Act included a section titled "Use of the Armed Forces in major public emergencies." This section provided that "The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines...." However, in 2008, Congress while passing the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, restored the restrictions of Posse Comitatus. President George Bush signed the Act into law but he also attached an Executive Order identifying that the Executive Branch does not feel bound by the changes enacted by the repeal of the use of armed forces to restore public order in the United States. As previously presidents have done, Bush signaled that he does do not feel bound by Posse Comitatus.

We are now brought full circle to the announcement of the assignment of an Army brigade as well as other service units to enforce the will of the President and or the Department of Defense with regard to homeland security. Even if military units are not used for several years to respond to domestic threats and are not used in any way for several years to restrict the rights of Americans, the result will still be the continued implied transference of authority as troops continue to be assigned to a domestic charter and the leaders of these units develop a comprehensive doctrine designed to cope with domestic situations. Historically, the year 2008 may become identified as the year that the doctrine of Posse Comitatus ceased to have authority.
---------------
William (Bill) Smith, Ph.D. is editor of the ARRA News Service and National Political Director of Let's Get This Right. He is a conservative political activists working for limited government, traditional family values, individual freedom and responsibility. He is a retired Air Force officer who served as Director of the $2 billion European F-16 co-production program. In his career, he also taught military political science and spent a 3 year tour with the U.S. Army. After retiring, he was a graduate professor and held varied administrative and faculty positions. He has authored professional journal articles on varied topics. He also blogs as Ozark Guru.