AS THE 2010 mid-term elections approach, it is all but certain that those candidates closely associated with the “tea party” movement will receive support from the public so robust that they might take not one but both houses of Congress. For whatever good that this may do in streamlining how this country is run and how its money is spent, their penchant for hysterics and their likely would-be habit of making up their positions as they go along can lead them into having their fortunes reversed come 2012. And if it’s failure that is in store for them then it is only best that they should fail, not so much because I feel they deserve failure but more because they are so completely unprepared for success. Though I believe those who make up the movement to be well-intentioned, and some of their positions to be justified, I cannot trust any movement that lives by a central principle that is so completely at odds with itself.

The Tea Party movement’s primary ambition is to “take back” the country from those who would seek to rid it of what the movement believes is most valuable to it: individual liberty (personhood) and American exceptionalism (nationhood). In fact this is their only ambition, simply restated several times over with semantic adjustments where needed. Their ideal is some equation that is missing a component. By granting more freedom to us as individuals we grow closer to the nation. This ludicrous proposition is no secret among either the movement’s critics or its sympathizers; however these observers are just as bad as the movement in refraining to explain why they know this dynamic to be impossible. They themselves do not want to have to choose between personhood and nationhood. The tea party attendees are hardly sinister in believing that their ambition makes sense; the worst crime they can be accused of is misunderstanding the evolution of our nation and seeing what little sense it makes to return to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian vision of American individualism while not wanting to weaken their nation as a superpower. Whether they are aware of that is unclear at this moment, but both cannot go together.

Whether or not the movement is one steeped in explicit nationalism depends on which kind of Tea Party attendee one asks, but it’s clear that national identity brings them together. Assuming that their success with the midterm elections goes as swimmingly as the pundits, pollsters, and candidates themselves predict, their tenure will resemble in actions what William F. Buckley conveyed in words: That for America to endure–in his case it was against World Communism–libertarian notions of civil liberties could reasonably be put on the back burner for an indefinite period. Though considered an extreme position as much now as it was then, if not more so, Buckley was simply stating what was and still is required to run America, or any nation for that matter. That there are individual liberties at all in this country is entirely alien to this basic logic, and the new crop of Republican legislators, likely led by one who is more nationalist than most, will take steps to correct this error.

In a nation there is no such thing as an “individual” or a “person,” only a “citizen.” Though the nation’s very being is linked to these citizens, they having founded and built it, they do not own it or control it; their function is limited to powering its organs and providing it with sustenance. Every action undertaken by the citizen, though often in the guise of individual determination, is done as part of their function to keep the nation alive. Whereas customs such as labor, education, marriage, and family have no beneficial bearing on the welfare of an individual, they are crucial to the health of a nation.

Likewise, political leaders are as subject to this dynamic as everybody else. Though his sense of individuality is more apparent than in others, it is only because it is so tightly cuffed to the nation. In fact a nation’s leader is a leader because he is more in tune with the non-individualistic workings of the citizens, and knows that he must to all in his power to put the citizens in the nation’s employ to the use most beneficial to the nation. As such, the leader can decree whatever he feels best for that purpose, whether it be to draft soldiers for a war (be it a war for feeding the nation or for virus protection), to take over corporations and their means of production, to prosecute and eliminate perceived internal disease, or to institute communal production programs like that of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” and he cannot be reproached for having done so.

This is appalling to “individuals,” and no doubt there are those citizens going about their days with that delusion of themselves–they will be found of course. These would prefer to be anything other than servants, and there isn’t much option for those in leadership positions to do anything else other than order them to serve.

If the new class of legislators come into Congress with no understanding of this, it is only proper that they learn it. Those who learn will do well, while those who don’t will be told what to do. What’s to be learned is that time spent in session is not so much how to save their voters’ money, but to redirect where it is spent. The nation’s fat is easily enough found, and likely to be burnt, at NPR, NEA, NEH, the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the President’s Council on Bioethics, etc. Their funds will be put instead into defense, industry, biological research, intelligence, Planned Parenthood, Medicare, welfare, education, etc., all of which are crucial to strengthening the nation. The life of a citizen, then, is inextricably tied to service.

This is not to say that any of this will explicitly happen, let alone between 2011 and 2013, but these are some of the things that Tea Party attendees must consider when they vote for a Sharron Angle, a Joe Wilson, a Christine O’Donnell, or a Marco Rubio. Will they adhere to the needs of the nation or will they damn it all and make the first strike for anarchy? It is my suspicion that they’re more reconciled with the nation than is generally assumed. After all, those who have reconciled in the other direction are not seen and don’t want to be seen, having resolved to take to the wilderness and incubate into a formidable virus, a fatal unity of individuals.

LAST DECEMBER, when Tennessee Rep. Susan Lynn, R-Mount Juliet, said she would introduce legislation which would declare null and void any federal law the state deems unconstitutional, some people were horrified. Rep. Lynn was specifically targeting the health-care reform legislation that was pending at that time. But the reaction that many people had to her language was not an expression of their support for Obamacare.

Too many Americans hear the terms “states’ rights” or the word “nullification” and immediately think of racial prejudice, Jim Crow laws and school segregation. Honestly, if all I had to rely on was what I remember being taught in public school, I would probably tell you the history of it all went like this:

The theory of nullification was first invented in the 1800s’ by advocates of slavery. They used nullification of tarrifs as a test run in the 1820s. Of course, what they really had in mind was maintaining the institution of slavery against any possible attempt by the federal government to abolish it. Then America fought the Civil War in order to end slavery, but the ideas of states’ rights and nullification were later revived in the 1950s’ by belligerent white southerners in an attempt to block the racial integration of schools. The Civil Rights Movement started and the feds had to step in and force the southern states to treat everyone equally. THE END.

That’s a rough, abbreviated version of the narrative that was handed to me, but it gives you an idea of what many Americans think they know about states’ rights and nullification. Fortunately, thanks to people like Tom Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo, and many others, I know today that this was a gross misrepresentation of the classical liberal states’ rights tradition. Then again, (and it’s not my intention to be prideful here), I’m not like most Americans. And If you’re reading this, you probably aren’t either.

Civic Illiteracy

In 1798, Jefferson and Madison articulated the concepts of nullification and interposition in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which were passed in response to to the hated Alien and Sedition Acts. But the ideas which support nullification and interposition were actually expressed earlier during the ratifying convention of Virginia by the Federalists themselves!

Given the fact, however, that most Americans cannot even correctly name all three branches of our federal government, it’s probably a safe bet that they have never heard of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions or the fact that nullification was used to assist runaway slaves.

So should it really come as any surprise that many people in Tennessee recoiled in horror at Rep. Susan Lynn’s comments about nullification? Rep. Mike Turner of Tennessee’s 51st District responded with a sarcastic and condescending comment that probably expressed the sentiment of many Tennessee’s left-liberal elites:

“Susan Lynn is yearning for times gone by,” Turner said. “Maybe we could put the poor people back to sharecropping and slavery and let the people up at the big house have all the nice things. We’ve already had that fight about states’ rights.”

Lynn responded to Turner’s comment by saying:

“I can’t even imagine that’s a serious comment.”

Rep. Turner’s comments resemble some of the incredibly ignorant and / or vicious comments directed against today’s advocates of nullification that frequently appear in the bologoshpere. One particular blogpost I stumbled upon really embodies the either extremely ignorant or wholly deceptive attempt to associate today’s proponents of states’ rights and nullification with segregationists, white supremacists and domestic terrorists:

“Why is it that the extremist teabaggers are not called traitors even though they are basically calling for an overthrow of the democratically elected U.S. government? There latest stunt should seal it. They are calling for a long rejected theory called Nullification, and at least one treasonous..blogger and teabagger is pushing it.”

The Compromise of 1850 and How Abolitionists Used Nullification

In 1850, Congress compromised in order to hold the Union together against the divisive issue of slavery. Since the preservation of the Union (Northern control of the South’s economy), rather than the abolition of slavery was foremost in the minds of influential Republican bankers, manufacturers and heads of corporations, this compromise made perfect sense.

Part of this compromise was the passage of more stringent fugitive slave legislation that compelled citizens of all states to assist federal marshals and their deputies with the apprehension of suspected runaway slaves and brought all trials involving alleged fugitive slaves under federal jurisdiction. It included large fines for anyone who aided a slave in their escape, even by simply giving them food or shelter. The act also suspended habeas corpus and the right to a trial by jury for suspected slaves, and made their testimony non-admissible in court. The written testimony of the alleged slave’s master, on the other hand, which could be presented to the court by slave hunters, was given preferential treatment.

As would be expected, this new legislation outraged abolitionists, but also angered many citizens who were previously more apathetic. In 1851, 26 people in Syracuse, New York were arrested, charged and tried for freeing a runaway slave named William Henry (aka Jerry) who had been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act. Among the 26 people tried was a U.S. Senator and the former Governor of New York! In an act of jury nullification, the trial resulted in only one conviction. “Jerry” was hidden in Syracuse for several days until he could safely escape into Canada.

The government of Wisconsin went even further and in 1854 officially declared the Fugitive Slave Act to be unconstitutional. The events that lead up to this monumental decision, which is a milestone in the history of the states’ rights tradition, is one of the best stories most Americans have never heard.

In 2006, H. Robert Baker, assistant professor of legal and constitutional history at Georgia State University wrote a book called, “The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War“. In its review of the book, The Journal of American History wrote:

“Terribly conflicted about race, Americans struggled mightily with a revolutionary heritage that sanctified liberty but also brooked compromise with slavery. Nevertheless, as The Rescue of Joshua Glover demonstrates, they maintained the principle that the people themselves were the last defenders of constitutional liberty…”

Joshua Glover was a slave in Missouri who managed to escape from his master. In 1854, with the help of the Underground Railroad, he made his way north, all the way to Wisconsin. There he found work at a mill in Racine, a community in which anti-slavery sentiment ran high. Unfortunately for Glover, his former master, B.S. Garland eventually managed to find out where Glover had taken up residence.

Accompanied by two US Marshals, the three of them took Glover by surprise. In spite of his resistance, Glover was subdued with a club and handcuffed. Thrown into a wagon, he was surreptitiously transported to Milwaukee, where he was thrown in jail. Glover’s abduction was discovered somehow or another, however, and in no time one hundred or so men landed by boat in Milwaukee.

The men marched towards the courthouse, which was adjacent to the jail, and crowds of people began to join their ranks or follow along as spectators. An abolitionist named Sherman Booth, who published a local daily newspaper there called the “Free Soil Democrat” rallied the supporters of the citizen army shouting:

“All freemen who are opposed to being made slaves or slave-catchers turn out to a meeting in the courthouse square at 2 o’clock!”

When the meeting at the courthouse adjourned, those who had assembled eventually resolved that Joshua Glover was entitled to at least two things: A writ of habeas corpus and a trial by jury. A local judge concurred and delivered the writ to the US Marshals at the jail. As might be expected, the federal officers rejected the writ as invalid. After all, federal law trumps state judicial authority, does it not?

The assembly of citizens from Racine and Milwaukee must have decided that such was not the case in this instance. In fearless defiance, they broke down the doors of the jail and freed Joshua Glover. In an act that probably would have filled Sheriff Mack with joy, had he been there, the Racine County Sheriff arrested Glover’s former slave master and the two US Marshals who had kidnapped him. They were charged with assault and put jail. In the meantime, the Underground Railroad assisted Joshua Glover as he crossed the border into Canada.

Although Glover escaped to freedom, it was not without a price. Glover’s former master, B.S. Garland was released on a writ of habeas corpus and in the long run would sue Sherman Booth, turning him financially upside down.

In the short run, Booth and two other men were arrested and indicted by a grand jury. While Booth maintained that he had never incited the crowd to liberate Glover or that had helped Glover escape in any way, he did not mince words either. Speaking in his own defense in front of the US Commissioner, he proclaimed:

“..I sympathize with the rescuers of Glover and rejoice at his escape. I rejoice that, in the first attempt of the slave-hunters to convert our jail into a slave-pen and our citizens into slave-catchers, they have signally failed, and that it has been decided by the spontaneous uprising and sovereign voice of the people, that no human being can be dragged into bondage from Milwaukee.”

According to his account of these events, Henry E. Legler wrote in 1898:

“Byron Paine made an argument in behalf of Booth that attracted attention all over the country. It was printed in pamphlet form and circulated on the streets of Boston by the thousands. Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips wrote the author letters of hearty approval and commended his force of logic and able presentation of argument. This pamphlet is now excessively rare; but half a dozen copies are now known to exist.”

Judge Smith of the Wisconsin Supreme Court made the following declaration, that ought to inspire and motivate champions of the Tenth Amendment and state sovereignty today. Speaking not only for Wisconsin, but of all the states, he said that they would never accept the idea that:

“..an officer of the United States, armed with process to arrest a fugitive from service, is clothed with entire immunity from state authority; to commit whatever crime or outrage against the laws of the state; that their own high prerogative writ of habeas corpus shall be annulled, their authority defied, their officers resisted, the process of their own courts contemned, their territory invaded by federal force, the houses of their citizens searched, the sanctuary or their homes invaded, their streets and public places made the scenes of tumultuous and armed violence, and state sovereignty succumb—paralyzed and aghast—before the process of an officer unknown to the constitution and irresponsible to its sanctions. At least, such shall not become the degradation of Wisconsin, without meeting as stern remonstrance and resistance as I may be able to interpose, so long as her people impose upon me the duty of guarding their rights and liberties, and maintaining the dignity and sovereignty of their state.”

The United States Supreme court eventually reversed the action of the Wisconsin’s courts. Booth and one other man accused of helping to liberate Joshua Glover were found guilty. Both spent months in jail in addition to having to pay stiff fines. This was the price that was paid for Joshua Glover’s freedom.

Wisconsin Historical Marker

Rather than being deterred, however, Wisconsin, along with several other states, such as Connecticut (1854), Rhode Island (1854), Massachusetts (1855), Michigan (1855), Maine (1855 and 1857), and Kansas (1858) all went on to pass even more personal liberty legislation designed to neutralize federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

It was no coincidence that the 1859 statement of the Wisconsin Supreme Court borrowed words directly from the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798:

“Resolved, That the government formed by the Constitution of the United States was not the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.

Resolved, that the principle and construction contended for by the party which now rules in the councils of the nation, that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it, stop nothing short of despotism, since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers; that the several states which formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infractions; and that a positive defiance of those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done or attempted to be done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.”

The End, or Just the Beginning?

Signpost up ahead

Few Americans have ever heard the heroic story of how the people of Wisconson and several other states stood up to the federal government’s tyrannical, unconstitutional slave laws with the help of their elected state officials.

Today state sovereignty and the Principles of 1798 are being invoked again, for a variety of reasons, just as they were invoked for a variety of reasons all throughout American history, in spite of what you may have been taught or are being told today.

States legislatures all over the Union today are standing up and re-asserting their sovereignty, which is guaranteed by the 10th Amendment. They are proposing and passing legislation which would nullify a whole host of unconstitutional federal laws including: The federally mandated national “REAL ID” card, restrictions on the use of Medical Marijuana, unconstitutional deployments of State National Guard units, federally mandated health insurance, unconstitutional regulations of state manufactured firearms and much more…

It is tragic that left-liberals have seemingly abandoned the classical liberal states’ rights tradition in favor of nationalism and the centralization of power. It is also shameful that they have made a concerted effort to associate nullification with slavery in the minds of average Americans. As Josh Eboch, State Chapter Coordinator for the Virginia Tenth Amendment Center observes:

“Of course, even though activists on the left supported nullification for Real ID and also for medical marijuana, those calling for state sovereignty with regard to health care will have to deal with the standard cries of racism and references to the Jim Crow…But just because nullification was used [unsuccessfully] in the past to deny rights to certain groups doesn’t mean it can’t be used to regain our rights today. In the end, ‘for desperate people whose freedoms are being systematically usurped by all three federal branches and both political parties, nullification may be the key to restoring our republic’.”

Derek Sheriff  is the state chapter coordinator for the Arizona Tenth Amendment Center

Read the full article at the Tenth Amendment Center

“Is white the new black?”

So asks Kelefa Sanneh in the subtitle of “Beyond the Pale,” his New Yorker review of several books on white America, wherein he concludes we may be witnessing “the slow birth of a people.”

Sanneh is onto something. For after a year of battering as “un-American,” “evil-doers” and racists, and praise from talk-show hosts and Sarah Palin as “the real Americans,” Tea Party America seems to be taking on a new and separate identity.

Ethnonationalism — the recognition of an embryonic people that they are different from their neighbors, and the concomitant drive to live apart — is, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 20 years ago, a more powerful force than any ideology, be it communism, fascism or democracy.

Ethnonationalism is the pre-eminent force of the age we have entered, the creator and destroyer of empires and nations. Even as Schlesinger was writing his “Disuniting of America,” Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were disintegrating into 22 new nations, along the lines of ethnicity. In Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Ossetia and Abkhazia, the process proceeds apace.

It has happened before — and here.

In the American colonies, the evil institution of slavery, followed by a century of segregation, created out of the children of captured Africans who had little in common other than color a new people, the African-Americans, who went out and voted 24-to-one for Barack Obama.

In 1754, the 13 colonies consisted of South Carolinians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, all loyal subjects of the king.

But after the contemptuous treatment of colonial soldiers in the French and Indian War, the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, the Quartering Act and the Quebec Act, by 1775 a new people had been born: the Americans.

In 1770, New York colonists had erected a statue of George III in Bowling Green in grateful tribute for his repeal of the Townshend taxes. In July 1776, they pulled it down and melted it for lead bullets after Washington read his soldiers the Declaration of Independence portraying George III as another Ivan the Terrible.

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” said Golda Meir. When she said it, she may have been right. But as generations have grown up under the occupation and two intifadas and a Gaza War, the Palestinians are a people today.

Adversity and abuse increase the awareness of separate identity and accelerate the secession of peoples from each other.

Obama in the campaign of 2008 recognized that “out there” in Middle America existed another country, far from the one he grew up in, far from the privileged Ivy League community to which he belonged.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and … the jobs have been gone now for 25 years. … So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Palin and Tea Partiers now repeat Obama’s disparaging line about their clinging to Bibles and guns — with defiant pride.

As others have done in our multicultural and multiethnic nation, this people is beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically.

Sioux gather at Little Bighorn to celebrate the massacre of Custer’s command. Hawaiian natives demand a new ethnically based government — and receive Obama’s blessing. Hispanics march under Mexican flags in Los Angeles to demand citizenship for illegal aliens.

Now Southerners are proudly commemorating ancestors who fought and fell in the Lost Cause and demanding recognition of Confederate History Month. And state governors are acceding.

In 2004, when Howard Dean reached out to “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks,” Shelby Steele wrote that this was “absolutely verboten. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America” because of their history and white guilt.

This, Sanneh suggests, is changing. The imputation of racism to Tea Partiers has not intimidated or cowed them.

When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there was no hesitation in blistering her for showing contempt for the rights of Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven, cheated of the promotions they had won in competitive exams.

When black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by Cambridge cop James Crowley, most Americans, despite Obama and media suggestions of racial profiling, sided with Crowley.

Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?

First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.

Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.

Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.

Source: Buchanan.org mailing list