The Authoritarians

Their Assault on Individual Liberty, the Constitution, and Free Enterprise from the 19th Century to the Present

Jonathan W. Emord, Jonathan W Emord

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780374537456
• eBook ISBN: 9781631953934
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The untold story of how Authoritarians from the Progressive Era to the present removed all constitutional barriers to the deprivation of individual rights, upending the promise of the Declaration of Independence and inviting a new socialist state in America.

CHAPTER 1

THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN AMERICA

Authoritarianism in America has its roots in the antebellum South. Confronted with northern cries for abolition of slavery along with a loss of majority control of Congress, southern leaders rejected the classical liberal model of the Founding generation (individual rights, limited government, and free enterprise) and embraced an authoritarian collectivist model, socialism, derived from the German Historical School of the 1820s. In 1821, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a darling of modern-day Progressives, socialists, and Marxist communists (indeed, Karl Marx was for the most part his doting student), heralded slavery as a form of societal progress, by which an “inferior” people (Africans) could be lifted to a higher level of social progression by association with a “superior” people (Europeans).¹¹ Endeavoring to fend off abolitionist attacks on the evils of slavery rooted in the promise of the Declaration of Independence (that all men are created equal), southern leaders latched on to Hegel’s view¹² and condemned the Declaration and its principal author, fellow southerner Thomas Jefferson.

Hegel’s defense of an all-powerful state that would dictate the collective will and impose it on the people was celebrated by social, economic, and political reformers in the antebellum South. Later, after the South was vanquished by the Civil War, Progressives continued to demand a Hegelian socialist state.

Today’s authoritarians who advance Hegel’s philosophy include leading members of the Democratic Party and almost every chairman of every committee in the House of Representatives. Joe Biden is a captive of this way of thinking. Those who dominate the Democratic Party routinely define collectivist objectives, then command adherence to those objectives at the expense of individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and condemn any form of dissent. Consistent with Marxism, dissenters are the victims of character assassination and doxing. Once the Marxists overthrow the government, then dissent becomes a crime against the state (seditious libel) and dissenters are variously arrested, tortured, or killed for that crime.

The Hegelian construct devalues the individual, except as he or she is useful to the state. It calls for the creation of an unelected, independent government of so-called experts, unrestricted by a separation of powers and need to account to the electorate, entrusted with authority to define the universe of lawful pursuits of industry and improvement. While the classical model at the Founding gave legal protection to each person’s freedom to decide for him or herself all pursuits of industry and improvement, save those which resulted in a violation of the equal rights of others, the Hegelian model gives that power to a highly paternalistic state and denies the public any freedom to deviate from the state’s sanctioned path. In this way, control over basic life-affecting decisions is removed from the individual and given to the state, and all thereby become de facto slaves of the state.

In short, the Hegelian model was adopted as a primary defense for slavery in the antebellum South. It was then adopted as the justification for the authoritarian administrative state by Progressives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And it has again been adopted in our time as the basis for massive redistributive tax programs, wholesale elimination of private property and industry, government regulatory control over all industry, reparations for populations based on race, destruction of the rule of law, cancel culture, and mob violence. It aims fundamentally at transferring control over all attributes of ownership and life-affecting decisions from the individual to the state. The authoritarians mean to constrict individual liberty to such an extent that no private action of any significance can occur without state sanction, thus placing the state in the role of the plantation slave master.

While in days past servitude was the legacy of those enslaved by plantation owners in America, increasingly today, servitude has become the universal fate of all Americans. To halt and reverse that trend requires that we oppose the authoritarians’ quest for control at the ballot box, in court, and in legislative and executive decision-making; end the administrative state; and revivify constitutional barriers to the exercise of government power.

THE BIRTH OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH

Before the Civil War, southerners were forced to confront a dilemma created by the Lockean teachings enshrined in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, a preamble their forebears taught them to revere:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

In the antebellum South, southerners had strong familial affections for the struggle for Independence in which their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers fought to harvest from British usurpations the Declaration’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including among them “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Having been taught in very personal terms how freedom wrenched from the British should remain a protected inheritance for all generations to come, they struggled to explain how the promise of the Declaration could be squared with the reality of human bondage.

Northern abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, salted southern wounds by condemning slaveholders as unchristian and hypocritical in not allowing the blessings of liberty to reach all peoples, regardless of race and gender. As sectional strife mounted between the societies of North and South, southerners were forced to defend slavery as moral. Indeed, they were forced to provide an explanation for why southern slavery was not only consistent with Christianity but also superior to free labor in the industrialized North.

In their quest to defend what South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun called the “peculiar institution” (a term he meant to depict slavery in a positive light), southern slaveholders found themselves unable to reconcile black bondage with the Declaration’s promise, the inherent logic of which begs universality: that all men are created equal. Thus stymied, they turned to Hegel’s argument in defense of slavery, which is born of a paternalistic prejudice: that slaves benefit by association with an allegedly more sophisticated race, the race of those who enslave them.

Acting on the command of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, that all slaves in the states then in rebellion “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” the Union Army ended the institution of southern slavery, but it was not able to terminate the Hegelian doctrine, which justified enslavement. Forced out of the plantation, that doctrine simply relocated itself in the salons of “Progressive” intellectuals, who cleaved to the Hegelian idea that no one is born endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, that all rights are effectively privileges permitted by the state, and that the state is the absolute master of all, controlling all life, liberty, and property. Upon that basis, Progressives justified enforced segregation via Jim Crow laws and eugenics, among other forms of identity politics that persist to this day.

As C. Bradley Thompson explains in America’s Revolutionary Mind, “Proslavery thinkers came to realize that the greatest intellectual obstacle to promoting slavery in the United States was the Declaration of Independence and its psychic hold on the minds of ordinary Americans, including patriotic Southerners.”¹³ Among southern leaders who rejected the Declaration’s promise were South Carolina’s Governors James H. Hammond and George McDuffie, who stated (the former quoting the latter): “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.’” Adopting Hegel’s rejection of the Lockean concept of unalienable rights expressed in the Declaration, slavery’s advocates held to be false that man was born with rights; rather, rights were not inherited, they were acquired from the state based on earned privileges, they said. South Carolina Congressman William Porcher Miles was a famous advocate of this Hegelian view, which he held in common with Hammond and McDuffie. Historian Eric H. Walther summarizes:

[Miles held to be false doctrine] the idea that liberty was a birthright at all. He maintained that liberty was an “Acquired Privilege,” not an unalienable right. Asserting that individuals and societies must prove themselves worthy of liberty, he maintained that not every person or society could do so. Those who believed otherwise subscribed to the “monstrous and dangerous fallacy of Thomas Jefferson,” which proclaimed that all men were created equal. “Men are born neither Free nor Equal,” Miles insisted . . . Miles categorically rejected any faith in natural equality, thereby fitting African slavery comfortably within American republicanism.14

Moreover, advocates of slavery believed fundamentally that this bifurcated system wherein liberty was acquired by a “superior” white race but never by an “inferior” black one undergirded a state of plantation socialism said to be far superior to northern capitalism. Southern sociologist George Fitzhugh explained that slaves lived in a socialist plantation system that was paternalistically compassionate and enabled southern whites to achieve a standard of living substantially greater than could be achieved by northerners dependent on hired labor. Slaves were cared for from cradle to grave, he emphasized; the plantation system gave them food, shelter, health care, and opportunities to learn skills, all without need for payment. In this way slaveholders fulfilled the role of caretakers, fitting neatly within Hegelian doctrine, which teaches the state to be the paternalistic caretaker of all people without need for recognition or defense of individual rights. As Thompson writes:

Anticipating Marx’s famous slogan—‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’—[George] Fitzhugh claimed that the plantation system holds ‘all property in common’ and divides ‘the profits, not according to each man’s input and labor, but according to each man’s wants.’ Plantation socialism, he continued, provides ‘for each slave, in old age and in infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants.’ The kind of ‘free society’ built into the principles of the Declaration, he wrote, is an unmitigated ‘failure’ and must be replaced by ‘domestic slavery,’ which he called ‘the oldest, the best, and the most common form of socialism.’ In fact, a ‘southern farm,’ he continued, ‘is the beau ideal of communism.’¹⁵

Southern leaders celebrated the slave plantation as a socialist ideal. They explained that capitalism produced an underclass of labor that was destitute and depraved with living conditions beneath that of plantation slaves. In substance, they argued that slavery benefited the slave in ways that capital did not benefit northern labor. Thompson cites The Political Economy of Slavery (1857) by Edmund Ruffin as illustrative of this southern dogma. Ruffin was a Virginia slave owner and “Fire-eater” who claimed falsely that he fired the first cannon shot of the Civil War against the United States garrison at Fort Sumter; he committed suicide rather than be taken captive by the Union Army at the war’s end.¹⁶ Ruffin believed socialist doctrine “right” and reasoned: “Our system of domestic slavery offers in use, and to the greatest profit for all parties in the association, the realization of all that is sound and valuable in the socialists’ theories and doctrines . . . Thus, in the institution of domestic slavery, and in that only, are most completely realized the dreams and sanguine hopes of the socialist school . . .”¹⁷ Ruffin applauded the authoritarian nature of socialism and its reliance on an all-powerful governor to dictate the course of labor. He said that the institution of domestic slavery best achieved the socialist ideal. Indeed, if capital were replaced by one all-powerful ruler in the northern states, Ruffin expected the North would soon resemble the South by raising northern labor to a presumed higher living standard defined by “domestic slavery.” He wrote: “Supply the one supreme head and governing power . . . [with] the association of labor . . . and the scheme and its operation will become as perfect as can be expected of any human institution. But in supplying this single ruling power, the association is thereby converted to the condition of domestic slavery.”¹⁸

As Thompson explains, like their modern Marxist comrades, authoritarians in the South “challenge[d] the Declaration’s understanding of truth, nature, and reason, as well as its four substantive truth claims about equality, rights, consent, and revolution, and they also turned against the political, social, and economic institutions of a free society.”¹⁹ To justify slavery, they of necessity moved away from defense of individual liberty and cleaved to an alleged superior social progress derived from forced labor, wherein natural rights theory could stand as no impediment to the betterment of the white race achieved on the backs of the black.

Reverend James Warley Miles of South Carolina, who Thompson identifies as “the South’s leading Hegelian,” wrote that man should not be viewed as an individual but, rather, as part of “the organic body of humanity” who could only reach his full potential through “the organism of the state.”²⁰ At the South’s stage of historical development, Miles explained, “the slave plantation . . . represented a new kind of state superior to all others.”²¹ Consistent with Hegel’s view, Miles argued that blacks benefited from slavery in ways they could not if they were free. “[T]he inferiority of the black to the white race is an actual fact,” he wrote, “the former race is benefitted by its subjection to the latter.”²² In particular, like Hegel, he concluded that the black race was naturally savage and a product of inferior social development and progress. By associating with whites of European descent, blacks acquired refinement, beyond what they achieved in social progress over millennia in their native Africa. Miles wrote: “Left to himself, he is a savage . . . placed as a permanent peasant in the Southern States, he reaches his highest development, and he fulfills an important mission in the world.”²³ Slavery’s antebellum apologists form a chorus on this point, uniting in their defense of slavery as the best means to achieve progress for the white race and to elevate the black race from savagery. Quoting Ruffin: “When the Caucasian mind thus commands and directs the bodily powers of the ignorant Negro, it is the best possible form of slavery, and the condition which conduces most to the benefit of both the white and the black race—and especially is best for the happiness and improvement of the latter. Indeed, it is the only condition in which the Negro race has received much enlightenment, or civilization, or real Christianity, in the thousands of years during which African barbarism has been known to exist.”²⁴

Another Hegelian, William Harper of South Carolina, believed that “without slavery . . . there could be no accumulation of property, no providence for the future, no taste for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Birth and Growth of Authoritarianism In America
• Chapter 2: The Presidents Who Embraced Authoritarianism
• Chapter 3: The Denial of God-Given Rights
• Chapter 4: The Father of the Administrative State
• Chapter 5: The Dismantlement of Constitutional Barriers
• Chapter 6: The Cartelization of Favored Enterprise
• Chapter 7: The Abandonment of Meaningful Judicial Review
• Chapter 8: Administrative Tyranny
• Chapter 9: The Misery of Socialism
• Chapter 10: The Blessings of Liberty
• Chapter 11: Beyond Slavery
• Chapter 12: Just Governments
• Chapter 13: The Democratic Party’s Embrace of Authoritarianism
• Chapter 14: A Wake-Up Call from Victims of Socialism and Communism
• Chapter 15: The Way Back to Liberty and Prosperity
• Chapter 16: Conclusion
• Afterword
• About the Author
• Endnotes