RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Don't Mess With Texas ... Get Rid Of It

chant you and your fudge!

Get rid of it? More like set it free.

It would make me even prouder to call myself Texan if they seceded from the union.

I was born in Texas.

What would California look like broken in three? Or a Republic of New England? With the federal government reaching for ever more power, redrawing the map is enticing, says Paul Starobin


By PAUL STAROBIN

Remember that classic Beatles riff of the 1960s: “You say you want a revolution?” Imagine this instead: a devolution. Picture an America that is run not, as now, by a top-heavy Washington autocracy but, in freewheeling style, by an assemblage of largely autonomous regional republics reflecting the eclectic economic and cultural character of the society.

There might be an austere Republic of New England, with a natural strength in higher education and technology; a Caribbean-flavored city-state Republic of Greater Miami, with an anchor in the Latin American economy; and maybe even a Republic of Las Vegas with unfettered license to pursue its ambitions as a global gambling, entertainment and conventioneer destination. California? America’s broke, ill-governed and way-too-big nation-like state might be saved, truly saved, not by an emergency federal bailout, but by a merciful carve-up into a trio of republics that would rely on their own ingenuity in making their connections to the wider world. And while we’re at it, let’s make this project bi-national—economic logic suggests a natural multilingual combination between Greater San Diego and Mexico’s Northern Baja, and, to the Pacific north, between Seattle and Vancouver in a megaregion already dubbed “Cascadia” by economic cartographers.

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Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Patrick Henry declares ‘give me liberty, or give me death’ in his 1775 speech urging the colonies to fight the British.

Devolved America is a vision faithful both to certain postindustrial realities as well as to the pluralistic heart of the American political tradition—a tradition that has been betrayed by the creeping centralization of power in Washington over the decades but may yet reassert itself as an animating spirit for the future. Consider this proposition: America of the 21st century, propelled by currents of modernity that tend to favor the little over the big, may trace a long circle back to the original small-government ideas of the American experiment. The present-day American Goliath may turn out to be a freak of a waning age of politics and economics as conducted on a super-sized scale—too large to make any rational sense in an emerging age of personal empowerment that harks back to the era of the yeoman farmer of America’s early days. The society may find blessed new life, as paradoxical as this may sound, in a return to a smaller form.

This perspective may seem especially fanciful at a time when the political tides all seem to be running in the opposite direction. In the midst of economic troubles, an aggrandizing Washington is gathering even more power in its hands. The Obama Administration, while considering replacing top executives at Citigroup, is newly appointing a “compensation czar” with powers to determine the retirement packages of executives at firms accepting federal financial bailout funds. President Obama has deemed it wise for the U.S. Treasury to take a majority ownership stake in General Motors in a last-ditch effort to revive this Industrial Age brontosaurus. Even the Supreme Court is getting in on the act: A ruling this past week awarded federal judges powers to set the standards by which judges for state courts may recuse themselves from cases.

All of this adds up to a federal power grab that might make even FDR’s New Dealers blush. But that’s just the point: Not surprisingly, a lot of folks in the land of Jefferson are taking a stand against an approach that stands to make an indebted citizenry yet more dependent on an already immense federal power. The backlash, already under way, is a prime stimulus for a neo-secessionist movement, the most extreme manifestation of a broader push for some form of devolution. In April, at an anti-tax “tea party” held in Austin, Governor Rick Perry of Texas had his speech interrupted by cries of “secede.” The Governor did not sound inclined to disagree. “Texas is a unique place,” he later told reporters attending the rally. “When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.”

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Polaris Images

Thousands of Texans hold a ‘Tea Party’ in downtown San Antonio in April protesting federal bailouts.

Such sentiments resonate beyond the libertarian fringe. The Daily Kos, a liberal Web site, recently asked Perry’s fellow Texas Republicans, “Do you think Texas would be better off as an independent nation or as part of the United States of America? It was an even split: 48% for the U.S., 48% for a sovereign Texas, 4% not sure. Amongst all Texans, more than a third—35%—said an independent Texas would be better. The Texas Nationalist Movement claims that over 250,000 Texans have signed a form affirming the organization’s goal of a Texas nation.

Secessionist feelings also percolate in Alaska, where Todd Palin, husband of Governor Sarah Palin, was once a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party. But it is not as if the Right has a lock on this issue: Vermont, the seat of one of the most vibrant secessionist movements, is among the country’s most politically-liberal places. Vermonters are especially upset about imperial America’s foreign excursions in hazardous places like Iraq. The philosophical tie that binds these otherwise odd bedfellows is belief in the birthright of Americans to run their own affairs, free from centralized control. Their hallowed parchment is Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, on behalf of the original 13 British colonies, penned in 1776, 11 years before the framers of the Constitution gathered for their convention in Philadelphia. “The right of secession precedes the Constitution—the United States was born out of secession,” Daniel Miller, leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement, put it to me. Take that, King Obama.

Today’s devolutionists, of all stripes, can trace their pedigree to the “anti-federalists” who opposed the compact that came out of Philadelphia as a bad bargain that gave too much power to the center at the expense of the limbs. Some of America’s most vigorous and learned minds were in the anti-federalist camp; their ranks included Virginia’s Patrick Henry, of “give me liberty or give me death” renown. The sainted Jefferson, who was serving as a diplomat in Paris during the convention, is these days claimed by secessionists as a kindred anti-federal spirit, even if he did go on to serve two terms as president.

The anti-federalists lost their battle, but history, in certain respects, has redeemed their vision, for they anticipated how many Americans have come to feel about their nation’s seat of federal power. “This city, and the government of it, must indubitably take their tone from the character of the men, who from the nature of its situation and institution, must collect there,” the anti-federalist pamphleteer known only as the Federal Farmer wrote. “If we expect it will have any sincere attachments to simple and frugal republicanism, to that liberty and mild government, which is dear to the laborious part of a free people, we most assuredly deceive ourselves.”

In the mid-19th century, the anti-federalist impulse took a dark turn, attaching itself to the cause of the Confederacy, which was formed by the unilateral secession of 13 southern states over the bloody issue of slavery. Lincoln had no choice but to go to war to preserve the Union—and ever since, anti-federalism, in almost any guise, has had to defend itself from the charge of being anti-modern and indeed retrograde.

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Jack Molloy

The U.S., as envisioned by some percolating secessionist movements.

But nearly a century and a half has passed since Johnny Rebel whooped for the last time. Slavery is dead, and so too is the large-scale industrial economy that the Yankees embraced as their path to victory over the South and to global prosperity. The model lasted a long time, to be sure, surviving all the way through the New Deal and the first several decades of the post-World War II era, coming a cropper at the tail end of the 1960s, just as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith was holding out “The New Industrial State,” the master-planned economy, as a seemingly permanent condition of modern life.

Not quite. In a globalized economy transformed by technological innovations hatched by happily-unguided entrepreneurs, history seems to be driving one nail after another into the coffin of the big, which is why the Obama planners and their ilk, even if they now ride high, may be doomed to fail. No one anymore expects the best ideas to come from the biggest actors in the economy, so should anyone expect the best thinking to be done by the whales of the political world?

A notable prophet for a coming age of smallness was the diplomat and historian George Kennan, a steward of the American Century with an uncanny ability to see past the seemingly-frozen geopolitical arrangements of the day. Kennan always believed that Soviet power would “run its course,” as he predicted back in 1951, just as the Cold War was getting under way, and again shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, he suggested that a similar fate might await the United States. America has become a “monster country,” afflicted by a swollen bureaucracy and “the hubris of inordinate size,” he wrote in his 1993 book, “Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy.” Things might work better, he suggested, if the nation was “decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment.”

Kennan’s genius was to foresee that matters might take on an organic, a bottom-up, life of their own, especially in a society as dynamic and as creative as America. His spirit, the spirit of an anti-federalist modernist, can be glimpsed in an intriguing “mega-region” initiative encompassing greater San Diego County, next-door Imperial County and, to the immediate south of the U.S. border, Northern Baja, Mexico. Elected officials representing all three participating areas recently unveiled “Cali Baja, a Bi-National Mega-Region,” as the “international marketing brand” for the project.

The idea is to create a global economic powerhouse by combining San Diego’s proven abilities in scientific research and development with Imperial County’s abundance of inexpensive land and availability of water rights and Northern Baja’s manufacturing base, low labor costs and ability to supply the San Diego area with electricity during peak-use terms. Bilingualism, too, is a key—with the aim for all children on both sides of the border to be fluent in both English and Spanish. The project director is Christina Luhn, a Kansas native, historian and former staffer on the National Security Council in Ronald Reagan’s White House in the mid-1980s. Contemporary America as a unit of governance may be too big, even the perpetually-troubled state of California may be too big, she told me, by way of saying that the political and economic future may belong to the megaregions of the planet. Her conviction is that large systems tend not to endure—“they break apart, there’s chaos, and at some point, new things form,” she said.

The notion that small is better and even inevitable no doubt has some flavor of romance—even amounting to a kind of modern secular faith, girded by a raft of multi-disciplinary literature that may or may not be relevant. Luhn takes her philosophical cue not only from Kennan but also from the science writer and physicist M. Mitchell Waldrop, author of “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.”
Associated Press

Some Vermont residents have proposed that the state secede from the U.S.
Fighting to Secede

From Texas to Hawaii, these groups are fighting to secede

American secessionist groups today range from small startups with a few laptop computers to organized movements with meetings of delegates from several states.

The Middlebury Institute, a group that studies and supports the general cause of separatism and secessionism in the U.S., has held three Secession Congresses since its founding in 2004.

At the most recent gathering, held in New Hampshire last November, one discussion focused on creating a new federation potentially to be called “Novacadia,” consisting of present-day New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. An article highlighted on the group’s Web site describes Denmark as a role-model for the potential country. In the months following the convention, the idea “did not actually evolve into very much,” says Kirkpatrick Sale, the institute’s director.

Below the Mason-Dixon Line, groups like the League of the South and Southern National Congress hold meetings of delegates. They discuss secession as a way of accomplishing goals like protecting the right to bear arms and tighter immigration policies. The Texas Nationalist Movement claims that over 250,000 Texans have signed a form affirming the organization’s goal of a Texas nation.

A religious group, Christian Exodus, formed in 2003 with the purpose of transforming what is today South Carolina into a sovereign, Christian-run state. According to a statement on its Web site, the group still supports the idea, but has learned that “the chains of our slavery and dependence on Godless government have more of a hold on us than can be broken by simply moving to another state.”

On the West Coast, elected officials representing greater San Diego County, Imperial County and Northern Baja, Mexico, have proposed creating a “mega-region” of the three areas called “Cali Baja, a Bi-National Mega-Region.”

Hawaii is home to numerous groups that work toward the goal of sovereignty, including Nation of Hawaii. The group argues that native Hawaiians were colonized and forced into statehood against their will and without fair process, and therefore have the right to decide how to govern themselves today. In Alaska, the Alaska Independence Party advocates for the state’s independence.

There is also a Web site for a group called North Star Republic, with a mission to establish a socialist republic in what today is Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

A group of American Indians led by activist Russell Means is working to establish the Republic of Lakotah, which would cover parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. In 2007, the Republic presented the U.S. State Department with a notice of withdrawal.

Even for the hard-edged secessionist crowd, with their rapt attentiveness to America’s roots, popular texts in the future-trend genre mingle in their minds with the yellowed scrolls of the anti-federalists. “The cornerstone of my thought,” Daniel Miller of the Texas Nationalist Movement told me, is John Naisbitt’s 1995 best seller, “Global Paradox,” which celebrates the entrepreneurial ethos in positing that “the bigger the world economy, the more powerful its smallest players.”

More convincingly, the proposition that small trumps big is passing tests in real-life political and economic laboratories. For example, the U.S. ranked eighth in a survey of global innovation leadership released in March by the Boston Consulting Group and the National Association of Manufacturers—with the top rankings dominated by small countries led by the city-state republic of Singapore. The Thunderbird School of Global Management, based in Arizona, has called Singapore “the most future-oriented country in the world.” Historians can point to the spectacularly inventive city-states of Renaissance Italy as an example of the small truly making the beautiful.

How, though, to get from big to small? Secessionists like Texas’ Miller pledge a commitment to peaceful methods. History suggests skepticism on this score: Even the American republic was born in a violent revolution. These days, the Russian professor Igor Panarin, a former KGB analyst, has snagged publicity with his dystopian prediction of civil strife in a dismembered America whose jagged parts fall prey to foreign powers including Canada, Mexico and, in the case of Alaska, Russia, naturally.

Still, the precedent for any breakup of today’s America is not necessarily the one set by the musket-bearing colonists’ demanded departure from the British crown in the late 18th century or by the crisis-ridden dissolution of the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 20th century. Every empire, every too-big thing, fragments or shrinks according to its own unique character and to the age of history to which it belongs.

The most hopeful prospect for the USA, should the decentralization impulse prove irresistible, is for Americans to draw on their natural inventiveness and democratic tradition by patenting a formula for getting the job done in a gradual and cooperative way. In so doing, geopolitical history, and perhaps even a path for others, might be made, for the problem of bigness vexes political leviathans everywhere. In India, with its 1.2 billion people, there is an active discussion of whether things might work better if the nation-state was chopped up into 10 or so large city-states with broad writs of autonomy from New Delhi. Devolution may likewise be the future for the European continent—think Catalonia—and for the British Isles. Scotland, a leading source of Enlightenment ideas for America’s founding fathers, now has its own flourishing independence movement. Even China, held together by an aging autocracy, may not be able to resist the drift towards the smaller.

So why not America as the global leader of a devolution? America’s return to its origins—to its type—could turn out to be an act of creative political destruction, with “we the people” the better for it.

Awesome.

Civil War.

Wouldn't there have to be a conflict for a war to start? Nobody has a problem with it. Texas can fuck off/be free and everyone wins!

You can't just let states secede from the Union.

For one you look week in front of the rest of the Insurgency messageboard.

I didn't read all that, BSAMS, but I do think the USA is a bit big for a single country full of so many people raised to think of themselves above anyone else. I personally wouldn't have any problem letting the USA split into more localized groups. I mean, from the three presidents I've been cognizant enough to notice, they have only really reflected about half the people in the nation (Clinton, Bush, Obama). Might it not benefit everyone to split up and have locations more appropriate to the general mindset of the inhabitants? I mean, the nations in Europe are state-sized! Russia and Canada are bigger than the USA, but they also have huge areas of mostly uninhabitable land. I dunno. Just some stuff I been thinking on for a few years.

which I would also say the invasion of privacy foisted upon us in the past eight years

You know. The whole wire-tapping stuff the previous administration pulled...

Whatever you say, chief. I saw the hook on the bait when he ignored every point I made except for the one that might give either of you an "attack path". You believe what you like, I'm not getting lured into your co-dependency...

You know. The whole wire-tapping stuff the previous administration pulled...

do you know of anyone whose privacy was invaded other than terrorist?

*apparently* the friends and family of people that did the wiretaps, as well as apparently Bill Clinton.

In 1798, the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky approved resolutions that affirmed the states’ right to resist federal encroachments on their powers. If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, warned the resolutions’ authors (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively), it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. The Virginia Resolutions spoke of the states’ right to “interpose” between the federal government and the people of the state; the Kentucky Resolutions (in a 1799 follow-up to the original resolutions) used the term “nullification” – the states, they said, could nullify unconstitutional federal laws.

These ideas became known as the “Principles of ’98.” Their subsequent impact on American history, according to the standard narrative, was pretty much confined to South Carolina’s nullification of the tariffs of 1828 and 1832. That is demonstrably false, as I shall show below. But it isn’t just that these ideas are neglected in the usual telling; as I discovered not long ago, these principles are positively despised by neoconservatives like Max Boot and the leftists at the New York Times (or do I repeat myself?). Neither one, in their reviews of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, so much as mentioned Jefferson’s name in connection with the Principles of ’98. It is hard to view such an omission as anything but deliberate. To mention Jefferson’s name is to lend legitimacy to ideas that nationalists of left and right alike detest, so they simply leave him out of the picture.

Jefferson once wrote, “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” To resist this centralizing trend, the sage of Monticello was convinced, the states needed some kind of corporate defense mechanism.

Our betters have already told us that the only reason anyone might wish to vindicate the cause of states’ rights is for the purpose of defending slavery or upholding some lesser form of local oppression. What follows is the tip of the iceberg of the history that, by what I shall assume is an entirely well-meaning and innocent oversight, these great scholars of American history consistently fail to acknowledge.

The Embargo of 1807–1809

In retaliation against British and French depredations against American neutral rights on the seas, the federal government under Thomas Jefferson in late 1807 declared an embargo, according to which no American ship could depart for any foreign port anywhere in the world. (The rationale was that trade with the U.S. was a key ingredient in British and French prosperity, and thus that economic pressure might persuade them to change their policies.) The U.S. Navy was granted the power to stop and search any ship within U.S. jurisdiction if its officers had “reason to suspect” the ship was violating the embargo. Likewise, customs officials were “authorized to detain any vessel…whenever in their opinions the intention is to violate or evade any provisions of the acts laying an embargo.” Such standards fell far short of the “probable cause” requirement that generally governed the issuing of warrants for searches.

New England was especially hard hit by the embargo because so many of its people were employed either directly in foreign commerce or in proximate fields, and it was there that opposition to the policy was concentrated. In 1808 a federal district court, in the case of United States v. The William, ruled the embargo constitutional. The Massachusetts legislature begged to differ. Both houses declared the embargo acts to be “in many particulars, unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional.” “While this State maintains its sovereignty and independence, all the citizens can find protection against outrage and injustice in the strong arm of the State government,” they said. The embargo, furthermore, was “not legally binding on the citizens of this State.”

In the midst of the crisis, a New York congressman, giving his explicit sanction to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, said, “Why should not Massachusetts take the same stand, when she thinks herself about to be destroyed?” “If any State Legislature had believed the Act to be unconstitutional,” asked a Connecticut congressman, “would it not have been their duty not to comply?” He added that the state legislatures, “whose members are sworn to support the Constitution, may refuse assistance, aid or cooperation” if they regarded an act as unconstitutional, and so could state officials.

Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull shared these views. “Whenever our national legislature is led to overleap the prescribed bounds of their constitutional powers, on the State Legislatures, in great emergencies, devolves the arduous task – it is their right – it becomes their duty, to interpose their protecting shield between the right and liberty of the people, and the assumed power of the General Government.” Connecticut’s General Assembly passed a resolution that, among other things, directed all executive officials in the State not to afford “any official aid or co-operation in the execution of the act aforesaid.”

The General Assembly furthermore declared: “Resolved, that to preserve the Union, and support the Constitution of the United States, it becomes the duty of the Legislatures of the States, in such a crisis of affairs, vigilantly to watch over, and vigorously to maintain, the powers not delegated to the United States, but reserved to the States respectively, or to the people; and that a due regard to this duty, will not permit this Assembly to assist, or concur in giving effect to the aforesaid unconstitutional act, passed, to enforce the embargo.”

Rhode Island, when the embargo was at its end, declared that her legislature possessed the duty “to interpose for the purpose of protecting [the people of Rhode Island] from the ruinous inflictions of usurped and unconstitutional power.”

Interposition – the language of the Principles of ’98.

The War of 1812

During the War of 1812, Massachusetts and Connecticut were ordered to call out their respective militias for the purpose of defending the coast. The call derived from the federal government’s authority to call the state militias into service “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel invasions.”

Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong, however, maintained that the states reserved the power to determine whether any of these three conditions held. At Strong’s request, the Massachusetts Supreme Court offered its opinion. That court agreed with the governor: “As this power is not delegated to the United States by the Federal Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, it is reserved to the states, respectively; and from the nature of the power, it must be exercised by those with whom the states have respectively entrusted the chief command of the militia.”

Connecticut followed suit:

It must not be forgotten, that the state of Connecticut is a FREE SOVEREIGN and INDEPENDENT state; that the United States are a confederacy of states; that we are a confederated and not a consolidated republic. The governor of this state is under a high and solemn obligation, “to maintain the lawful rights and privileges thereof, as a sovereign, free and independent state,” as he is “to support the constitution of the United States,” and the obligation to support the latter, imposes an additional obligation to support the former.

Thus if the militia were called out for any purpose but those listed in the Constitution, it “would be not only the height of injustice to the militia…but a violation of the constitution and laws of this state, and of the United States.” The president had no authority to call upon the militia of Connecticut “to assist in carrying on an offensive war” (some New Englanders were convinced that the war was aimed primarily at the annexation of Canada). Connecticut would not comply with the federal order until New England should be threatened “by an actual invasion of any portion of our territory.”

From a political point of view, the War of 1812 would wind up essentially a draw, and the Treaty of Ghent signed in December 1814 reestablished the status quo ante bellum. From a military point of view, though, it was a British rout. As a result, Congress seriously entertained the prospect of military conscription.

Here is where Daniel Webster, so often a villain in American history, emerges as positively heroic. With his usual eloquence he spoke out against military conscription as incompatible with both the Constitution and the principles of a free society. “Where is it written in the Constitution,” he asked, “in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?” (Predictable quarters can now be expected to call Daniel Webster – than whom there was no greater or more eloquent defender of the federal Union – an unpatriotic, America-hating leftist.)

What did Webster think should be done if the conscription bill should pass? In that case, he said, it would be “the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power.” Interposition – the language, once again, of the great resolutions of ’98.

In December 1813 a new and more obnoxious embargo than that of 1807-1809 was instituted. The Massachusetts legislature found itself inundated with petitions and statements of grievances. A special committee, headed by William Lloyd, was established to devise a response to the situation. The Massachusetts General Court approved the committee’s report early the following year. It read, in part:

A power to regulate commerce is abused, when employed to destroy it; and a manifest and voluntary abuse of power sanctions the right of resistance, as much as a direct and palpable usurpation. The sovereignty reserved to the states, was reserved to protect the citizens from acts of violence by the United States, as well as for purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign and independent State of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without power to protect its people, and to defend them from oppression, from whatever quarter it comes. Whenever the national compact is violated, and the citizens of this State are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized laws, this Legislature is bound to interpose its power, and wrest from the oppressor its victim.

Need we point out yet again the language of the Principles of ’98?

Fugitive Slave Laws

At a time when the federal government was using its police powers to enforce the capture of runaway slaves, it was the state governments, expressly recalling the Principles of ’98, that determined to resist. (See Mark Thornton here [.pdf] on how the federal government socialized the costs of slaveholding.) Although the Constitution did, unfortunately, contain a clause calling for the return of runaways, some Northern states resorted to the argument that that document spelled out no particular enforcement mechanism behind that requirement.

In addition, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was especially obnoxious and repugnant. It placed all fugitive slave cases under federal jurisdiction. Fugitives were denied jury trials and the right to testify in their own defense. Special commissioners were empowered to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, and according to the terms of the act were to be paid $10 if they found the accused fugitive guilty and only $5 if they found him innocent. Still more obnoxious features included the right to force bystanders to participate in the capture of a fugitive and stiff penalties for sheltering or obstructing the capture of a fugitive.

Several Northern states simply refused to comply. Especially interesting is this 1859 statement of the Wisconsin Supreme Court – taken, in parts word for word, 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.

Many more examples of the ongoing relevance of the Principles of ’98 could be cited. In the midst of a dispute with the federal government over the Second Bank of the United States, the Ohio legislature voted to affirm the Principles of ’98. In 1825, Kentucky’s governor said: “When the general government encroaches upon the rights of the State, is it a safe principle to admit that a portion of the encroaching power shall have the right to determine finally whether an encroachment has been made or not? In fact, most of the encroachments made by the general government flow through the Supreme Court itself, the very tribunal which claims to be the final arbiter of all such disputes. What chance for justice have the States when the usurpers of their rights are made their judges? Just as much as individuals when judged by their oppressors. It is therefore believed to be the right, as it may hereafter become the duty of the State governments, to protect themselves from encroachments, and their citizens from oppression, by refusing obedience to the unconstitutional mandates of the federal judges.”

These are facts. They are facts that constitute a central part of antebellum American history. Yet to say that the standard American history text does not trace the influence of the Principles of ’98 over the course of the ensuing years, as I have done all too briefly here, would be the understatement of the century. The profession at large has essentially ignored the issue; other than Bill Watkins’ excellent study, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single book-length treatment of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 over the past hundred years.

Thus when I resurrected these long-neglected ideas in chapter four of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, did this inclusion merit the praise of your average scholar? To the contrary, the general complaint was that I hadn’t spent more time on subjects people already know inside and out. As for the Principles of ’98 themselves, discussing them with left- or right-wing nationalists is like waving garlic before Dracula.

Not that raising the issue makes them clam up entirely. To the contrary, they’ll find some silly photos of you (which, I confess, exist in embarrassing abundance), or dredge up something you did or said a dozen years ago, or generally suggest you’re a bad person. (Everyone who’s ever met me knows I’m just a great big meanie.)

They may behave this way because they think doing so will make me shut up (no such luck there), but it’s also a lot easier than cracking a book on a subject they don’t seem to know the first thing about.

Well... in between Obama's puppetmasters and glowing liberal media coverage comparing him to Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Harry Truman ...Obama was compared to Abraham Lincoln.

Although I doubt Obama has the balls to live up to any of these comparisons, let alone wage a war to reclaim secessionist states. He'd rather manifest himself as a pussy than risk lowering his popularity polls in the remaining states.