Our
thanks once again to the Geopolitica
web site for posting an essay of ours.
It begins,
I. Introduction
Southerners place a high
value on written political constitutions and think highly of their
contributions to the understanding of them. Many books and articles about
either the [u]nited States Constitution of 1787 or the Constitution of the
Confederate States have been and continue to be written by Southerners. The
origins of this tendency, however, ought to dampen their enthusiasm: It
is not native to Dixie but instead has its roots in Puritan beliefs that
drifted southward in the 18th hundredyear. The Southern fervor for
written constitutions is in fact a secularized version of Puritan
millennialism: the Southern version of the ‘city on a hill’.
II. The Southern Tradition of Government
To understand this it is
necessary to know the earlier political practices of Southerners before this
change took hold. They are of two kinds, neither of which resembles the
obsession with written charters of New England and later Southerners: the
view of the Royalists/Cavaliers from southwest England who settled the coastal
regions of Virginia and the other Southern colonies, and the view of the
northern Irish, Scottish, and northern English who settled the backcountry of
the South.
For the parts of the South
settled by the Cavaliers, the system of government of county and vestry
gentlemen, House of Burgesses, Royal Governor and Council, and King (Fischer,
pgs. 407-8) was not one sprung from a philosopher’s pen:
This system of government developed in Virginia
by a process of prescription. As early as the year 1679 it was spoken of
as “the constitution of the country,” in the traditional British sense of
unwritten customs and established institutions, rather than the future American
sense of fundamental written law. This “constitution” was radically
different from the polity of Massachusetts. But the gentlemen oligarchs
of Virginia thought of it as the ordinary and natural way in which
English-speaking people ordered their political affairs.
William Fitzhugh wrote in
1684, “The laws we have made amongst us here since our
first settlement, are merely made for our own particular Constitution, when the
laws of England were thought inconvenient in that particular, and rather
disadvantageous & burdensome . . . Our continual usage and practice since
the first settlement, hath been according to the laws and customs of England.”
Any other idea of “laws and customs” was not merely uncongenial to
Virginia gentlemen. It was literally inconceivable (p. 410).
As for the backcountry
folk, they disliked any overly formal arrangement of government:
This system of order gave
rise to a special style of backcountry politics which was far removed from
classical ideas of democracy and aristocracy. It was a highly distinctive
type of polity which Charles Lee appropriately called “macocracy”—that is,
“rule by the race of Macs.” This system of macocracy was a structure of
highly personal politics without deference to social rank. In that
respect it was very different from Virginia. In the early eighteenth
century, William Byrd observed of the back settlements, “They are rarely guilty
of flattering or making any court to their governors, but treat them with all
the excesses of freedom and familiarity.” It was also a polity without
strong political institutions, and in that regard very far removed from New
England. There was comparatively little formal structure to local
government—no town meetings, no vestries, no commissions, and courts of
uncertain authority. But within the same broad tradition of
self-government common to all English-speaking people, the borderers of North
Britain easily improvised their own politics.
. . .
The politics of the
backcountry consisted mainly of charismatic leaders and personal followings,
cemented by strong and forceful acts such as Jackson’s behavior at Jonesboro.
The rhetoric that these leaders used sometimes sounded democratic, but it
was easily misunderstood by those who were not part of this folk culture.
The Jacksonian movement was a case in point. To easterners, Andrew
Jackson looked and sounded like a Democrat. But in his own culture, his
rhetoric had a very different function. Historian Thomas Abernethy
observes that Andrew Jackson never championed the cause of the people; he
merely invited the people to champion him. This was a style of politics
which placed a heavy premium upon personal loyalty. In the American
backcountry, as on the British borders, loyalty was the most powerful cement of
political relationships. Disloyalty was the primary political sin.
. . .
. . . For many
generations, backcountry politics were mainly a collision of highly personal
factions and followings, rather than ethnic blocs or ideological parties or
social classes. Charismatic appeals carried elections, which tended to be
decided on questions of personal style (pgs. 772, 775, and 776).
. . .
***
9-11:
It
is worth noting that for the first time in recent memory, the Sept. 11th
news cycle wasn’t dominated by the usual phony pageantry of honoring the
victims of the so-called terrorist attacks.
Instead the [u]. S. media was stuffed full of hurricane coverage. Is this a turning point in the globalist
agenda? Will ‘extreme weather events’
(manufactured by the military-industrial complex, http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/links-to-geoengineering-patents/,
via www.naturalnews.com) now share
center stage as an existential threat to the ‘chosen people’ of America? We will have to wait and see.
In
this same vein, Alan Jackson, please stop being a useful idiot for the CIA/deep
state/banksters:
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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