Frank's Musings

Regarding Mr. Krugman’s essay in the 10/22/2024 NYT, it’s not so much putting a madman in charge of our WMD arsenal that should alarm us as rearming Trump with the administrative power diabolically to restrain U.S. citizens from pursuing their plans and dreams regardless of their wokeness or contravention of his perceived self-interest.  Furthermore, the abolition of slavery didn’t cause the Civil War; rather,  as Lincoln prescribed at Cooper Union, the North had lost patience with the South’s use of slavery not only as a key to economic gain but also as an audacious tool for enlarging its governmental influence. 

Re-electing Trump would threaten to make necessary another Civil War—This time setting the people against their own federal government.

I disagree with Mr. Chemerinsky's essay in the 10/20/2024 NYT, "College Officials Must Condemn On-Campus Support for Hamas Violence."

We can disabuse ourselves of the notion that the American civil War was fought mainly over the injustice enslaving  a specific class of US residents. This sanctification of the country’s motivations probably owes more to the politics of the twentieth century civil rights movement than to rigorous historical analysis.

The 3/5 Clause of the U.S. Constitution allowed the South to take advantage of the Cotton Boom by buying slaves and thereby increasing its influence in the federal government.  Furthermore, southern leaders wanted to extend legalized slavery to new states admitted to the Union so their enterprises  could enjoy the labor cost advantage there, too.

Why were Northerners ready to use force to heel the obstreperous southern slave states?  Southerners had benefited from the serendipitous cotton boom, owing  to the invention of the cotton gin, and used their increased wealth to invest in enlarging he number of enslaved pickers, which gave them a cost advantage on the world cotton market.  Moreover, Southern society benefited from relief from the hard work involved in its main source of income, which made possible a physically more leisurely style of life.  Beyond that, the popular view of life in the plantation sector insulted Northerners’ sense of democratic sharing of the burden of making a living.

In other words, it wasn’t the abolition of slavery that drove Northerners to fight the Civil War. Sure, slavery was  distasteful in their eyes, but not primarily for humanitarian reasons. It was believed, more critically, to give southern growers an unfair source of cheap labor.

Contrary to what Nikki Haley was forced to concede during the 2024 Republican presidential primary debates, slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War.  It certainly was a necessary condition for the events that made inevitable the clash between Northern and Southern states.  However, Northerners were ambivalent in regard to racial discrimination and would continue to be until the mid-twentieth century.

Slavery made the South wealthy as a competitive world supplier of raw cotton to UK textile mills. It provided the South with outsized voting power in the US legislature because of the Constitution’s 3/5 rule. It also led Southern politicians to seek extension of slavery to other territories newly to be admitted into the Union. In all, this allowed Southern entrepreneurs to enjoy a comparative economic advantage that was not available to  Northern business interests. A dualistic zero-sum view of the world prevented finding a collaborative solution to this resentful artifact of the Constitutional Congress.   What was deemed necessary for stitching together the original thirteen states was no longer acceptable for most Americans as the Union embarked on its manifest destiny.

Disgust with the cruel and demeaning subjugation of certain human beings only distinguished by the color of their skin and their cultural and geographic origin didn’t compel northerners to fight against the recalcitrant and aggressive Confederacy. The driving force behind the North’s and Lincoln’s (cf. his Cooper Union speech) desire to discipline the southern slave states was impatience with having economically and culturally indulged the southern states ever since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

Making the abolition of slavery the leading  motive behind northern leaders’ and soldiers’ willingness to fight against the disintegration of the Union is an after-the fact rationalization, probably owing more to the rhetoric of the civil rights movement than to rigorous historical analysis.

It was clear to the ambitious Southern leaders in 1860 that despite what they considered their dominant contribution to the financial strength of the U.S. they could only expand their model of slavery-based business growth in the westward expansion of  civilization by seceding from the Union.  Whether slavery would be allowed to follow was going to be determined by a federal administration under the leadership of the author of the Cooper Union Speech.  In that address Abraham Lincoln had meticulously laid out the historical basis for banning extension of slavery to any of the new territories to be admitted to the federal Union. 

Southern leaders were surprisingly able to disregard the peculiar circumstances of the creation of the Constitution and not realize (a) that the U.S. would not  permanently  hinge  the country’s future on indulging an inhumane proclivity of a select number of states, and (b) that the more populous  and more economically diversified  portion of the country would not sheepishly allow the South temperamentally and violently break from the Union.

You can almost hear the public in the North say, “They certainly have their nerve!”   That is the main  reason that  Union enlistees as well as their influencers were willing to make the sacrifices that warfare would entail.  Defense of an abstract value such as the basic law of the land does not usually compel citizens to risk their lives; nor do the civil rights of a minority group of people.  Therefore, although the ugliness of slavery was undoubtedly a contributing factor, the real cause of the War between the States was Noreterners’ resentment of more than six decades of privileged living conditions in the South. 

When the South had the temerity to begin firing on Union assets like Fort Sumpter, the citizens of the Northern states reached their limit.  They embarked on a bloody and costly action of discipline against what surely was a hopeless defense of personal  honor by the residents of what became the Confederacy.  Allegiance to that principle of self-regard lasts to this day for a dwindling portion of Southerners in their celebration of the “Lost Cause.”  Slavery was only abolished nationally after Lincoln and the Union were confident that removal of that canker sore from America’s body would surely help bring an end to combat.

Thomas Edsall’s essay in the NYT of 9/25/2024 characterizes the appeal of lying demagogues to members of the classes that are losing status to the inevitable progress of knowledge as confirming their dislike of losing their place in the social pecking order.  This is a natural regret of having less privileges than they have been accustomed to.  They call this change “political correctness,” but it really shows that time marches on; and if you lose step, you will be left behind.

In fact, the strength of the demagogue also has a shortening half-life.  Fortunately, the number of the demagogue’s followers will diminish over time.  That will  make him a political artifact and only a temporary threat to social advancement; however, during his heyday, he will be ridiculed by forward-looking critics for his backwardness and futile but dangerous threat social progress.

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has fomented a serious political conflict in the U.S.  Overturning it under the Constitution requires a variety of extremely difficult action plans: (1) election of  politically sympathetic controlling parties to two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the fifty state legislatures (and governors?) allowing the proposal and adoption of a Constitutional amendment; (2) the morbid strategy of anxiously awaiting changes in the membership of the Supreme Court, or in the Justices’ philosophies, that allows it to countermand the Dobbs decision and accept an Act  of Congress restoring the terms of the Roe v. Wade decision; or (3) the election of abortion-favorable majorities in all  the state legislatures and governorships.  Therefore, the promise of a 2024 Presidential election candidate to “sign into law” a Congressional bill that restores Roe v. Wade holds little weight.

In the meantime, the tragic deaths cited by that candidate were inevitable consequences of the barriers to reproductive health care erected by the Dobbs decision.  There have probably been and there surely will be others.  Moreover, before the Roe v. Wade decision more than fifty years ago, such tragedies were probably common.  The ideologue who’s running for VP on the Republican ticket would probably say, “That’s life.”  I await his debate performance next month to see how he rationalizes that sentiment.

Michael Hirschorn’s guest essay in the 9/13/2024 NYT makes me wonder whether those of us who still read the Times aren’t the ones living in a fantasy world. Trump, Hatch, Santos and other remarkably “unmoored” celebrities demonstrate how to succeed in the popularity sweepstakes by catering to the nearly half of people who think that only diversion from the awful truth is worthwhile.

All the news media, including FOX, agree that Donald was shown up by Kamala. The former prosecutor kept the former President off balance by prompting him to explain his policy proposals.

Is there a disconnect between the ideals of democracy and equity?  We are caught in our democratic system of government in the anomaly that majority rule doesn’t mean that everyone will agree with the foundation of each other’s conclusions.

FDR accused the Hoover administration of ignoring that recovery from the Depression had to start with rebuilding the liquidity of America’s consumer economy.  Just as his New Deal program would revive the economy by making available the liquidity needed by the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, the Democratic candidates in the 2024 election are proposing to restore confidence in the political ideals of America’s government.

We can all be committed to the benefits of equality before the law and still disparage each others' value systems. Kamala Harris famously claims that her values haven’t changed despite some changes in her policy goals.  However, we may not all be able to make that distinction. Similarly, we may not all agree that life is worth living when the only people who reap rewards from our actions are others or persons unrelated to us. How real is the satisfaction that is felt by a do-gooder who won’t be alive to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor?

Of course, most systems of faith advocate a continuum that transcends the relatively brief human lifespan.  In addition, the Rawlsian Theory of Justice proposes a rationale for far-sighted selection of one’s actions that does not depend on faith. But as Nicholas Kristof points out in the 9/1/2024 NYT, whatever the reason for one’s value system, all persons deserve respect in a true democracy and not dismissal as deplorable.

Some of us proudly display our ability to subsume personal advantage in the general welfare owing to luckily having achieved higher education. But that academic training should also have taught us that democratic self-government doesn’t allow discriminatorily weighting individuals’ influence based on the luck of the draw. Democracy also prescribes that the majority rules if everyone can be equally exposed to respectful presentation of unbiased information. When that condition is distorted, however, the democratic model can easily lead to tyranny.

Forgetting the man at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid in a formally democratic system of government leaves him open to exploitation by a demagogic manipulator of majority rule.  That can corrupt its structure and achieve the opposite of the general welfare.