On
the very same day, official voices of the ruling regime celebrated
one group of rebels in American history while condemning another.
You would have to be an expert in the peculiar politics of race and
government power to untangle the meaning and understand the inherent
contradictions.
First, we had officially sponsored events in all major urban
centers heralding M.L. King -- er, sorry, the Reverend Doctor Martin
Luther King Jr. -- as the man of the century, if not of all time.
The story is familiar: he courageously stood up to established power
and nonviolently defied the technicalities of law in order to see
that justice was done, and became a victim of a government smear
campaign bent on destroying him. Yet he persevered to the end, even
to the point of giving his life for a principle that is higher than
any government.
Second, we had tens of thousands bused in to protest the Southern
battle flag -- itself a symbol of rebellion against government --
atop the state capitol of South Carolina. The protestors say that
the flag represents the wrong kind of rebellion, one that defied the
kind of government power that official organs of opinion favor.
Defiance in one case is good; defiance in the other case is bad.
Apparently, the lesson that government should be resisted cannot be
generalized. Those who insist on flying the Southern battle flag are
"giving honor to treason," explains Glenn Lowery of Boston
University, writing in the New York Times.
"I am disgusted by the spectacle of civil authorities in
South Carolina officially and publicly embracing a symbol of illegal
rebellion against legitimate national authority," says the
sometime champion of law and order. "In retrospect, we can now
see that those who fought under the Confederate flag were treasonous
rebels bent on the destruction of our union."
Let's change a few words and see how it sounds. "I am
disgusted by the spectacle of self-appointed black leaders embracing
Martin Luther King, a symbol of illegal rebellion against legitimate
authority." Continuing: "In retrospect we can now see that
those who marched for civil rights were treasonous rebels bent on
the destruction of our Constitution."
Not much between the two sentences to change. They both celebrate
established legal authority and condemn those who would violate it.
Both sentiments are consistently anti-rebel. And yet you won't see
the words in the second rendering printed in any major newspaper,
and, if they were, the writer and the editor would be fired, or
ordered to undergo psychiatric testing.
How is it that on the same day, the same groups and the same
people, can on the one hand uphold rebellion against legal authority
as morally required, and on the other hand as morally reprehensible?
Why are the Southern secessionists who bravely stood up to a ruling
regime that was oppressing them called hateful and treasonous, while
the civil rights protestors who defied a ruling regime called
saintly models of courage in the pursuit of justice?
On the face of it, the movements were not that different in
tactics. The South was non-violent in the sense that the
Confederates had no desire to go to war. They did not want to
overthrow the central government in Washington, D.C. They had no
desire to tell any Northerner how to live. They merely wanted to
secede, which means to be left alone, and went to war only to defend
their homeland against brutal invasion.
Lowery himself hints at the answer by saying that those who fly
the battle flag are "obstructing social justice" while
those who favor civil rights are promoting the same. But this is not
really an answer to our question; it merely raises the issue of what
constitutes social justice, and what means are permitted to achieve
it.
How can we know ahead of time what rebellions the media will like
and which ones they will oppose? Perhaps we are supposed to hate the
South's rebellion because it was supposedly pro-slavery (a tiny
minority of Southerners held slaves) while the civil rights
rebellion opposed the remnants of slavery in segregation. But this
explanation doesn't hold up. Citing only two points of a hundred,
Northern legal codes enforced the fugitive slave laws and even after
the war freed slaves were rounded up by the feds and forced to serve
in union military escapades.
As for the civil-rights protestors opposing petty forms of
slavery, what is forcing private employers to hire on grounds of
race, compelling restaurant owners to wait on all comers, and
coercing private landlords to rent against their will, but
involuntary servitude? What is the threat of million-dollar lawsuits
for the failure to promote members of approved groups other than a
form of legal terror, a threat no different from that cited by
civil-rights partisans as intolerable violations of human dignity?
Let's try out a different theory, which reveals the importance of
centralized power in the moral imaginations of left-wing
cheerleaders. On the one hand, the Southern secessionists and those
who invoked the cause of states' rights in the 1960s were openly
defying Leviathan -- the monstrous federal government that permits
no challenge to its authority, particularly not state and local
governments that would like to go their own way.
On the other hand, the civil-rights movement was rebelling
against local and state legal authority, and in so doing backing
changes in the legal code that the federal government favored. Now,
it's true that J. Edgar Hoover spied on King's personal antics,
which he had no business doing. And it's true that the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations didn't have much taste for non-violent
protest tactics, for fear that they could be broadened to oppose
their wars.
But, generally speaking, the intellectual class and the federal
government in the '50s and '60s favored using the 14th amendment
against the states and abolishing even the freedom of association in
private contracts. For all the pieties offered up over the holiday
weekend about civil rights, there is only one unambiguous result of
that movement: federal bureaucracies intruding into our private
lives more than ever.
Data show that lawsuits and settlements concerning alleged
civil-rights violations are at historic highs. And all the campaigns
that claim to have learned from the civil rights movement -- whether
speaking for women's rights, disabled rights, gay rights, animal
rights, or whatever -- are united in their promotion of more
government authority over private decision-making.
These days, as in openly totalitarian regimes, wrongful speech in
the workplace is punished with a severity that surpasses crimes
against person and property. There is no such thing as freedom of
contract, and business owners can forget about managing their
workforces without cowering before the social-justice commissars.
The much-glorified "rebellion" against power was in
fact a thinly disguised movement in favor of ever-more power to the
center at the expense of lower orders of society. In contrast, the
much-traduced Southern rebellion of the 19th century was an
authentic effort to overthrow an illegitimate central power in favor
of the rights Southerners believed to be guaranteed by the
Constitution.
Here, then, is the real reason why we are supposed to hate the
South's rebellion and love the civil-rights rebellion; the latter
favored centralized power, while the former opposed it. The
consistent strain, then, is unwavering love of consolidated
government.
There's a lesson here for those who aspire to gain media
accolades, and to rest in the safe knowledge that their beliefs are
certifiably politically correct. Believe what the federal government
wants you to believe, do what the federal bureaucrats want you to
do, and choose political opinions that give ever more power to the
central state, and you can be guaranteed high praise, especially on
the government's holidays.
For those who really do believe that principle is more important
than power, and that higher law and the demands of justice must
always come before administrative edict, American history is filled
with real martyrs, real heroes, and real models of courage and
defiance. But the only kind of rebellion the ruling elites approve
is the kind that results in loss of liberty.