Barrel Strength

IN 1860, when the Confederate States of America established themselves, a constitution was passed that had several interesting features. “Congress was forbidden to pass a protective tariff or to appropriate money for internal improvements.” So wrote Shelby Foote in his magnificent “the Civil War: A Narrative” (at page 42). Now what could that mean, no appropriations for internal improvements? The pressing need was to settle the West. Railroads needed incentives to build out their infrastructure, as we would call it today. In the North, the withdrawal of the Southern Democrats, the then conservative party, freed the northern Yankee improvers to grant land to railways, endow colleges with state land, and to pass the Homestead Act, which gave 150 acres in freehold to any man or woman who settled and farmed a piece of land in the western states for three years. All these statutes were first passed in the years 1860-1865 when the South seceded. The Southern bottleneck that opposed the passage of progressive legislation voluntarily withdrew.

The Republicans were then the party of the North, of New England and its western colonies, such as Kansas, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota. They were the progressive party. They were the ones pushing the slaveholding states into secession, by electing that Republican radical abolitionist (so the South thought), Abraham Lincoln. The colours of the parties were then appropriate to the traditional connotations of red and blue. Democrats - blue -conservative: Republicans - red - liberals. More than people care to recall these days, the US Civil War was a battle between progressive Republican New Englanders against conservative Southern Democrats. Can we agree that people who believe in the right to own slaves are conservative of an extreme interpretation of private property?

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In today’s NY Times, Fouad Ajami, one of the leading critics of Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” and its preceding essay in Foreign Affairs, throws in the towel:

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.

“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)