Liberty, the South, and the Millennium Depression
B. P. Faulkner
B. P. Faulkner
(From the Vault: February 15, 2009)
Nearly a week before the worshipful installation of the current "chosen one" in the federal capital, in an event unrelated to said coronation, a search for an anthology of C.S. Lewis' greatest works led me through the doors of a Christian bookstore in Augusta, Georgia. Not three yards inside I was confronted with the face of Mike Huckabee beneath best-seller signage, imploring me to "do the right thing." Morbid curiosity soon had me thumbing through the pages of his train wreck of a book; I was fascinated to learn that, according to the ex-governor, those of us calling ourselves libertarians are "faux-cons" and by his estimation are little more than duped and decidedly pagan followers of the "Muhammad-like" prophetess Ayn Rand. I fought the urge to throw the book into the nearest light fixture, and left.
The idea that libertarianism is a pagan philosophy is just absurd. The label "misguided" would be one thing, but pagan? That is the type of stretch by which we can safely assume that the good reverend-governor hasn't a crumb of a clue concerning the intellectual origins of libertarianism, or how many liberty-minded thinkers have invoked the historical "do unto others" ethic of Christianity in defense of private property. To Huckabee, since libertarians don't go out of our way to use the name of God to garner support, we must be deficient enemies of the idea of a fixed moral law.
Of course, the governor's views are detached from reality, given that most libertarians do operate from some sense of moral concern, and more than a handful are devoted Christians. His statements are symptomatic of a creeping stagnation that has a stranglehold on Southern public life. From a careless blending of a genuine concern over basic decency, a hint of popular eschatology, a dash of the virulent aspects of neo-conservatism, along with a pinch of never-ending lip service to gun rights and tax reduction, a thick political ferment has emerged in these states. The ruling paradigm holds the federal government to be a great battleground between good and evil-rather than a regular source of evil. Government by its very nature is not suited for saving our souls or making us moral. Nonetheless, implying that one has God's endorsement has become a stock electioneering strategy in this region. Case in point: Mike Huckabee carried my state handily in last year's Republican primary with such tactics.
This begs a timely question of freedom-minded thinkers observing the South's affairs. Given the enthusiastic support first for Huckabee and then Sarah Palin as McCain's running-mate throughout the South, is the political culture of this region capable any longer of producing-and outside of a certain Texas district, electing-genuine advocates of liberty and limited government? A class of politicians who care little about absolute federal dominion over our lives today reign in states once possessed of enough gumption to actually secede; so long as "faith based" institutions and Israel can continue dining at the treasury-trough, and they can comfortably crow about "family values", the ever-expanding leviathan on the Potomac stirs them not. Are there any vestigial remnants, therefore, of genuine limited-government thinking once dominant in the South that can even be accidentally discovered by generations up and coming?
In my own trek into libertarianism over the last several years, I am certain that I personally have experienced some of the remaining nuggets in Southern culture that continue to preserve the thinking of the Revolutionary generation. For instance, the South is well-armed-and defiantly so; and every time I visit my nonagenarian grandmother, I am reminded of the fact that many here are certainly capable of powerfully resenting unjust property taxation. Perhaps the grandest legacy we have access to in our region's history that ought to render us consistent limited-government folks, however, should be terribly obvious. Many of us were reared with family stories of the war with Lincoln's government, and I refuse to believe that I could be the only young Southerner to have been spurred by stories of that sort and by the debate over the Confederate flag into deepening my understanding of the constitutional issues at stake in the 1860's. The entire episode of the War Between the States-and the political rape that followed-ought to impress on every living Southerner a hearty dislike of any concentration of arbitrary power, all moralizing relative to slavery notwithstanding. In the excellent company of Lysander Spooner and Murray Rothbard, we do have the option of condemning slavery as such and sorely lamenting the fact that its former existence is used to obfuscate what has proven to have been the great point of departure from limited government on this continent.
Alas, so confounded have we been in our public discourse, many of us down here haven't seen the inherent contradiction in supporting candidates advocating an all-powerful central government while wedding ourselves to the Confederate legacy. Waving the old banner while at the same time being some of the primary enablers of an imperial presidency is ridiculous; repudiating the original understanding of federalism to suit something as vulgar as "party loyalty" while simultaneously venting rage at the assault on the Confederate flag is likewise an absurdity. That said, with all the first signs of an economic depression upon us, I am observing cracks developing in the current edifice of Southern thinking, and perhaps these ruptures will reinstate liberty where a form of shallow pharisaic religiosity is now wed to an all-consuming quest for power, a union that has for decades been sapping the South of political vitality.
If the Federal Reserve Notes we are compelled to accept as money today go the route of the Confederate dollar, it will be a dreadful reckoning. Southerners can either respond with a Jeffersonian revival of sorts, as new advocates of liberty, decentralization and sound money-or, conversely, we can rush headlong into tyranny. The Obama administration thus far appears set on unleashing another New Deal, sure only to deepen and worsen the present fiscal crisis. It isn't inconceivable that the situation could deteriorate in a way that rips open once again the supposedly forever-shut question of the permanency of the Union. Secession and debt repudiation would together be difficult calls for any State to make, but these options would be infinitely preferable to being pinned to a federal government hell-bent on destroying its currency and impoverishing the citizenry.
Maybe Southern politicians can begin to see the urgent need to repent of being the useful allies of statists, and the need to rediscover the old constitutionalism from which we sprang. Now more than ever, the South needs to be reborn and its politics reinvented as a sanctuary of liberty. If this realization can occur in the mind of a young man such as myself, still in my first quarter century of life, certainly at least some of my elders ought to be intellectually penetrable by these notions. Here's hoping that Georgia, the South, and the rest of the United States can emerge from the first real depression of the new millennium with freedom fully restored, and with all of us wiser from surviving the experience.
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Has the Poltical Climate in Georgia and the Rest of the South changed since this was written in February? Have the excesses of the new administration galvinized a political reaction against government focused on liberty?
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