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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I guess I'll make the obligatory cynical post pointing out the fact that the Declaration of Independence wasn't really a legal document, but essentially just a very eloquently worded piece of Patriot propaganda, primarily meant to rally stateside on-the-fence loyalists and potential overseas allies over to the cause.

Certainly, I agree.

It was not, as many now seem to want to interpret it, an actual good-faith attempt to justify their cause to the British government. (Basically an "open letter" to the crown. Most of the grievances were incredibly exaggerated, bordering on fabricated, which the actual British government would have realized; the drafters didn't care, because again, it wasn't actually intended for that audience.)

I agree that the Declaration was not an attempt to persuade the British--either the Crown, Parliament, or the British people--but it did not claim to be that. As Jefferson himself explicitly notes in the Declaration itself, those appeals had already happened, and the colonists did not find the prior responses to be tolerable. The entire point of the Declaration is a statement that the colonists were past the point of making their case by petition, and intended to resort to force of arms instead.

However, as much as Jefferson's dramatic flair is clearly in play, I think an in-depth review of the period shows that the British abuses were real, pervasive, and relatively severe compared to the expectations of the average British citizen. It's trendy to be cynical about the motivations of the Founders; this cynicism is badly misplaced.

Just as the South did; it's not prominent nowadays for obvious reasons, buts there's plenty of equally eloquently written justification for secession by the moral and philosophical heavyweights of the Southern Cause.

Some of those writers dodge the issue (others embrace it), but the central issue under dispute was slavery, full stop. Yes, there were absolutely other political disputes between the South, broadly, and the North or the West, but none of them held a candle to the central dispute over slavery. Take away slavery, and there would not have been a secessionary movement. It was both a necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.

Yes, the American colonists succeeded at seceeding, and the Confederacy did not; that's a fact of history. However, when we're evaluating other secessionary movements in different times and contexts, I think it's much more useful to realize that the American colonists were fighting for free expression, the right to self-defense, the sanctity of the home against intrusion, the rights of the accused and convicted, etc., while the Confederacy was fighting for the right to own slaves. If your modern movement bears more similarities to the first, then I will probably agree that it's justified; more like the second, and no.

...the only real moral justification to the American Revolution, or secession, or whatever you want to call it, is the fact that they won the military conflict.

I completely disagree. 'Justification' is an appeal to morality, and I reject the idea that successful efforts are justified, and failures are not. One who robs a bank and gets away unpunished is not morally justified in his theft.

Some of those writers dodge the issue (others embrace it), but the central issue under dispute was slavery, full stop. Yes, there were absolutely other political disputes between the South, broadly, and the North or the West, but none of them held a candle to the central dispute over slavery. Take away slavery, and there would not have been a secessionary movement. It was both a necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.

Yes, the American colonists succeeded at seceeding, and the Confederacy did not; that's a fact of history. However, when we're evaluating other secessionary movements in different times and contexts, I think it's much more useful to realize that the American colonists were fighting for free expression, the right to self-defense, the sanctity of the home against intrusion, the rights of the accused and convicted, etc., while the Confederacy was fighting for the right to own slaves. If your modern movement bears more similarities to the first, then I will probably agree that it's justified; more like the second, and no.

I think I would at least partly disagree with this. In my view, the best description of the role of slavery in the Confederacy's secession is that it was the lynchpin that made the secession and war possible and dictated the way it would be fought. I don't think most of the people actually fighting would describe their cause as fighting for the right to own slaves, and I don't think it's the true cause of the war. I think the real cause is the cultural split that goes back before the founding of the country, as described by Abilon's Seed and Scott's piece on it. I've been meaning to write a longer piece on this idea, but consider - why were the borders of the Confederacy what they were? Why did these people decide to embrace a plantation slavery economy while those other people rejected it in favor of industrialization?

I completely disagree. 'Justification' is an appeal to morality, and I reject the idea that successful efforts are justified, and failures are not. One who robs a bank and gets away unpunished is not morally justified in his theft.

I actually agree with you on disagreeing with myself on this, haha. I realize I phrased that very poorly such that it came off as a kind of "might makes right" appeal, which was not what I was trying to get at. I was more gesturing towards something like "history is written by the winners" and butchered it.

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