Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It may be a little late for the putatively sophisticated and liberal parts to secede from the South.

Balkanization, or empire is a repeating motif. It should not be surprising that a specific kind of ruling class has preferred empire for the last four hundred years. Westphalia was a death knell and a birth pang.

As a middle of the road compromise, could we just rebuild the Berlin Wall? You know, just in case.

"Keeping the US together — on Northern terms — was a great idea in 1860."

Is that obvious? Slavery aside (we'll return to it), consider a 2012 USA without Texas, Alabama, Georgia, & the rest of them. OK, neither the North nor the South would have developed in the same way, but still...

As for slavery, how long could it have lasted in an independent South? Longer than the duration of the Civil War, sure, but how much longer than that? Assuming an trade embargo from the North, at least for slave-produced goods and commodities, and possibly the same from Britain, and Dred Scott a dead letter, might not avoiding Reconstruction and Jim Crow have been a better deal all around?

(Of course, the US losing the Revolutionary War would have been a better deal yet for slaves. And hey, we'd be part of Canada!)

jon
i agre with your conclusion

make me honest abe and
u know what i sez to these rebels
i sez

" go ..go ..and may the devil eat out your wife "

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but britain would hardly play the roll
you suggest
in fact perfidious albion in its liberal statesman mode
would surely booost the south and prolly cajole it with visions of regime change in washington

--if that remains the north states capital
which i very much doubt

in fact if i was abe i'd
add
"and you can take this capital city with you and jam it up the collective ass of southern gentility

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an end to chattel african slavery ?

yes i think in time
jim crow was a far more stable system
as it turned out
if not quite so productive in the short run

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oh what fun

oh ya

i agree with marx

war would come eventually

imagine that

the south backed by britain versus the north
facing this pernicious combine
alone and unafraid

thanx jon and father SS

you provoke the errant speculator in me

btw

it never hurts to remind us
britain offered freedom to africans willing to fight for the crown

but a greater canada ?
british north america a member of the empire in god standing

my celtic blood roars

plunk me in that alternative
say in 1896
and i'd end up
working for a pan catholic rebellion here triggered by quebec santa fe and south boston

arms and cheers coming
from france spain mexico and ireland

"Keeping the US together -- on Northern terms -- was a great idea in 1860"

father S follows engels here
and the moor of course

i'd prefer secession followed by an abolutionist armed slave rebellion
something like soutern africa saw in the 70-80

a protracted guerrilla action leading to emancipation
and ....jim crow

obviously perfectly acceptible to norther corporate interests

my guess war would come well b4 that point
but if the task of the north was to win that war and only win it
in fact to win that war and then leave again....
not liberate the slaves and reconstruct the south

obviously slavery would not survive that war
it was tottering during the actual war

my hunch
the south to win as well as squelch the slave insurrection
would offer much as the brits offered
freedom for taking up the gun
to defend old dixie
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imagine the mischief
northern raparation demands on a defeated south

revanche ?

ah
Clio why not that route?..... you sexy sadist

Balkanization, or empire is a repeating motif. It should not be surprising that a specific kind of ruling class has preferred empire for the last four hundred years.

That's an intriguing way to phrase it. I wonder if one big tyranny offers a ruling class more security and scope than lots of pocket tyrannies.

On the other hand...bad as empire is...many of the most tyrranical and corrupt and repressive regimes have been the tin pot tyrannies. Johnson's Federal Marshalls ensuring access to Little rock High versus Bull Connor's small town goons.

Renaissance Italy was a hotbed of violence and factional strife...and the centralizing forces of empire eventually took over anyway. A divided Germany was a Germany of the 100 Years War, engaged in petty but bloody religious warfare.

The Solution is Dissolution has always been my favorite pat similistic phrase. I love the Free Vermont movement. But for every free Vermont movement...or Ecotopia...there is 10 Neo Confederate Theocrats slavering to get their state's "share" of the nuclear missiles.

JL's observation that slavery probably wouldn't have lasted anyway seems sensible, but I never know how to approach arguments whose premises are expressed in the subjunctive mood. And of course the wider ramifications of a successful secession, with the Brits lurking in the wings, are really incalculable (though it's a great parlor game). I guess I look at it in terms of the stakes that were visibly on the table at the time, of which slavery was certainly the most consequential, and my simple-minded impulse is to be glad the slavers lost. Perhaps it's the only case I'll admit of a benign intervention. How I wish Reconstruction had been a great deal more thorough and long-lived.

"...glad the slavers lost."
ya from chattel to full on jim crowed
in under 30 years ('95 ?)

"Perhaps it's the only case I'll admit of a benign intervention."
benign in outcome

"How I wish Reconstruction had been a great deal more thorough and long-lived. "
that really constitutes a separate intervention
if one recognizes the spontaneous emergence
of a proto jim crow or ur jim crow
right after the war
and during the semi stalemating duel
between lincoln-johnson presidential
reconstruction and
congressional rad republican reconstruction

real substantive reconstruction
was quite
distinct in motivation
from the north's war aims

i must say that period
1866-76 and the period 1933-39
are the only times since the we signe on to this damnable constitutional gimcrackery
when the federal level of "the state"
played at least for that period
a progressive role in american society

okay one failed
the other succeeded
one was republican led
one democrat led

difference between
radical republicans and new dealers ?

economic realism and a clearer view
to the underlying class dynamics

fortunately for the new dealers
bi-national black/white dynamics
never successfully
subverted
job class type progressive actions

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btw
most humanist interventionists see progressive hegemony
ie the american century
as so many
reconstruction projects

the paradigm obviously
from TR on

the rad republicans
aborted
dixie make over

reconstruction works
when goals and economics can be reconciled
vide germany and japan

but
when they don't
when the necessary changes to the economic base are not made

( here radical land reform and the creation
of amajority bi national yeomanry)

then its doomed...
its an occupation not a reconstruction

the white nation of the south
was the first nation
to repell we white yankee hegemonists

and our alliance
with the black nation of the south
a helot minority nation
was strategically doomed

by not creating a mass black/white yeomanry

if the carpet baggers and the grand army of the republic
had taken all the planter's land
and distributed it to both blacks and whites
on a ro rated per capita basis
and if the federal government
had openned the settler lots out west
to co ordinated black migration
maybe the rad-publicans' ostensively
noble project
might just have worked out
but hey
they were bourgeois

" I wonder if one big tyranny offers a ruling class more security and scope than lots of pocket tyrannies."

to state the all too obvious

depends on social context and ruling class

the cycles of integrations and dis integration of existing state systems
are the very respiration of world historical
class society

as class cloven society's
underlying contradictions propell it along
thru its stages
this respiration
just goes on and on

i suspect
till final stateless cometh
to us foolish liberty and community loving beings

The grand bananas and their acolytes are lacking in characteristics that would distinguish one from another, so perhaps my curiosity is not going to be satisfied. The outcome is easier to know. Their consensus, whatever drives it, is towards a managerial utopia; consolidation at all costs, including frustrated ambition for all but the luckiest, most adroitly servile and most ruthless. Empire equates to a security that makes up for all the bootlicking they have to do to climb their status ladders.

OP observes that yeah, the slavers lost but then along came Jim Crow. True enough, but isn't this a little like saying the French revolutionaries got rid of the Bourbons and promptly got Napoleon? It may sound like an odd thing to say, but perhaps results aren't the right way to 'judge' historical events, assuming that historical events call for any judgement at all (a fairly big, though for some reason near-universal, assumption).

To Owen's list of two constructive phases of federal power over the states I would add a third: the dismantling of Jim Crow in the 50s and 60s, starting under a Republican and continuing under Democrats. This particular historical experience is what led many people of my generation to be convinced (wrongly, I think) that national is always 'progressive' as compared with local.

There are far too many unknowns to make straightforward judgements about various alternative histories. I argue simply that we (in the US) are taught through school, anyway, that the Civil War and War of Independence are unquestionably Good Things (experiences may vary somewhat in the American South), and that there are at least plausible scenarios in which the world would be no worse, and perhaps better, if one or the other had gone the other way.

Those examples (and WW2, for that matter) are more lively possibilities (in conjecture) because they all might well have gone the other way; none of them were foregone conclusions.

Absent an independent USA, would there even be a transcontinental county where we are now? Would there be a Texan (or Texican) Republic? Surely California would be hispanic. Would Parliament have made the Louisiana Purchase? (OTOH, Canada did end up transcontinental, so...)

Entertainment merely.

Entertainment indeed. But useful too; it's always a good idea to take a second look at received wisdom of every kind.

"the slavers lost but then along came Jim Crow"

if i said that or close to that
then sure enough
i'm the purple assed baboon
my late bedeviling brother js
always said i was

for sure this is patently true
on both counts:

"results aren't the right way to 'judge' historical events, assuming that historical events call for any judgement at all "

its more like
that damn sense of ergotics one gets
reading history
which i take it
jon is alluding to

the slaughter bench of it all
and then where are we

but the mood passes
fire is restored to the belly

perhaps this time
its the fluttery roll in vulture mitts eye
that retrieves me

but something always does

ODIN is no longer my favorite type
cosmic CEO

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btw

if this is the passage that done the dirty deed:

"...glad the slavers lost."
ya from chattel to full on jim crowed
in under 30 years ('95 ?)

expressing a sarcastic perhaps overly juvenile
regret
was more my intention

"This particular historical experience
is what led many people of my generation to be convinced (wrongly, I think) that national is always 'progressive' as compared with local. "

great point father S

That was the passage I had in mind, Owen. Of course -- I believe you & I have talked about this before -- human history might be summed up in the proverb 'out of the frying pan, into the fire'. Not that this should stop us trying to get out of the frying pan.