Up The Union

The seal of the Commission on Presidential Debates reading, “THE UNION AND THE CONSTITUTION FOREVER,” hangs above the stage of the first presidential debate of 2016 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Photo cropped from photo by Brian Allen, Voice of America (Public Domain).

In one of the greatest moments in American rhetoric, FDR leaned to the microphone to announce publicly that D-Day had commenced, and then lead the nation in prayer for the in-progress Allied invasion of Normandy. His words weaved imagery of home and loved ones with the brutal realities of a world at war. Though framed as a plea to the Almighty, it is one of the greatest speeches on the necessity of fighting for freedom, the cost such fighting demands, and how the price must be paid, though it be high. “Lead us to the saving of our country,” he intoned to close what is now known as “A Mighty Endeavor”, “and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.”

The enemy of peace and prosperity — to both our great nation and the world, and the greatest threat to this, the greatest experiment in human history of a free people self-governing — is always the schemings of unworthy folks. The power-thirsty who will fill their mouths with their doublespeak of law & order and patriotism while their hands work against both and their hearts burn with resentment at the limitations such things place on their own ambitions. Machiavellian parasites who declare they are doing the right thing but insist it can only be done the wrong way. This is what makes them unworthy to be entrusted with something so precious as the future of the coutry and the relative peace and prosperity modern America enjoys. You cannot do the right thing the wrong way, and the unworthy folks would rather burn it all down than not get their way. Such a mentality of self before all is the antithesis of patriotism, of freedom, of law and order, and most of the rest of the buzzwords the unworthy treat as incantations to try and make their desires manifest into reality.

Now we have those in America who, upset that the election of 2020 did not go their way, are choosing to once again trod the paths of unworthy scheming in an attempt to get what they could not otherwise obtain. “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” Texas GOP Chairman Allen West mused in a released statement after the “Texas Lawsuit” was summarily dismissed by the Supreme Court. “The Texas GOP will always stand for the Constitution and for the rule of law even while others don’t.”

What insipid, duplicitous nonsense. Spouting law and order out of one side of your mouth while musings of unlawful secession drool out the other is disgusting enough on its face. The underlying reasoning, the need to grift so hard that you must destroy the country just to keep your unworthy scheme going, makes it even more so. That both are now being perpetuated under a flagrant lie — that Donald Trump somehow, someway, against all available evidence and common sense, won the 2020 presidential election bigly and everyone is conspiring to steal it — is utterly depraved to someone who dares call themselves an American patriot, a former Army officer, and one-time US Congressman from Florida. Those experiences and qualifications mean that West, short of actually losing his mind, knows well and good exactly what he is proposing and insinuating here. He wants to be the champion of the keyboard warriors and LARPing social media revolutionaries that are utterly convinced they will be the heroes of a second American revolution and the legendary figures of the coming Second Civil War. Some of these wannabe new-age civil warfighters have no concept of civil or war or much of anything outside their own self-created bubbles.

They should heed the words of a master of the art of civil war, who warned: “You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about…You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.” William Tecumseh Sherman surely knows more of civil war than TruPatriotMAGA8675309. Far from the existential issues of human freedom, representative government, and the rights of nations and states, these online warmongering dullards want to rend the country in two over…Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Two men who, with all due respect, will be footnotes far down the list of presidents of note a generation from now. Far from the actual American Civil War that Lincoln called “a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” this is mere online, masturbatory chest-thumping bravado.

We’ve heard this garbage before, almost verbatim. The screams and demands of civil war in the name of states’ rights, as if that consideration alone is the ultimate authority in the land. States’ rights above all other considerations is at the heart of the now-dismissed Texas filing, with the writers of that lawsuit arguing that it was other states that were to blame and “led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Pennsylvania…Michigan, Wisconsin…have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.”

Oh, wait, my bad, that was actually South Carolina’s argument to “form a Union of states that will abide by the Constitution,” to use Allen West’s phrasing, when the Palmetto State formally seceded from the Union. For their part, Texas at the time declared “The States of…Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan…by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 4th article of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy”. Both states were referring to slavery-related issues in their 4th Amendment arguments, but when your 2020 argument can so easily be cut and pasted into the declaration of causes of seceding states ready to defend the unmitigated evil of slavery with force under the guise of state’s rights, you got problems.

Combine that with the habit of the right wing fringe to openly call for a new civil war, or threaten one if their various and ever-evolving demands are not met, and you have a powder keg of stupid, mixed with ignorance, fueled by arrogance, and armed with the technological ability to only ingest self-affirming information. Which people like the Allen Wests of the world shovel into their soft minds as fast as possible because their own Grifting Matrix needs the bioenergy and disposable incomes of the plugged in faithful to keep the whole system from collapsing into reality. What better story to tell those upon which the grift is reliant for its very lifeforce, that by breaking from the rest of the world they are the warriors for truth, they are the only ones who really understand, they and only they can understand the world as it is presented to them through the narrow funnel of only friendly sources. It’s wickedly brilliant, a self-contained impenetrable ecosystem where the cost of entry is making yourself self-contained, impenetrable, and fully reliant on that system. This is the tactic of every unworthy schemer in history from dictators to cult leaders to fully control people.

Wicked as that is, the truly horrifying variable is the truly demented and twisted among those listening to all the calls for open warfare and destruction and killing very well might pick up weapons and start executing their plan for civil war in the real world. Most of those pounding the keyboard for civil war don’t really want to get their hands dirty with pesky things like combat. They believe themselves to be some protected class of online opinionator that would be exempt from the true horror that civil war has inflicted on every people that have ever had to suffer through one. Or maybe they confuse their online avatars, slogans, and memes for what they are truly capable of, not understanding what happens at the business end of the weapons trained on not just willing combatants but the innocent caught in the middle. Others think the wrongs of their political and ideological opponents justify any amount of retribution they might seek against them, be it rhetorical or physical.

We’ve heard this garbage before, almost verbatim. The screams and demands of open warfare when the political process of laws and elections don’t give the aggrieved the result they want. “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile…This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”

Oh, sorry, no that was South Carolina’s declaration of causes of seceding again. Again, remove the terms and references to slavery and the language is shockingly similar, as the darker parts of human nature, untethered from basic human concepts such as all men are created equal, tend to migrate to a similar place. In its own declaration of causes of seceding, Georgia specifically mentioned “The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state.” The cry for states’ rights was, again, just the nomenclature and cover for what the true goal was: subjugation of others under a pretense of law and order.

The intolerable wickedness of slavery might be in our past, but those same human failings that allowed such a horrible national wound, whose scar still threatens to bleed anew if not cared for, remain. That unworthy folks are so given over to their own passions that they would now openly abandon the country they have spent years using their supposed love of as the excuse for everything they do, shows the ability to maintain the veneer of excuses is slipping. They are not an on-the-rise revolutionary movement as they suppose, or tell each other, or convince themselves they are. By abandoning the very processes that give them freedom and a voice in the first place they show their ignorance to what it is that makes America work.

There is nothing new under the sun, and so once again we come to it. The peace and prosperity of the United States of America is threatened by the scheming of unworthy folks. Folks who could not get what they want with ballots now feel justified in any number of schemes against whoever it is they think has wronged them. The hypocrisy of those same folks insisting the last presidential election meant carte blanch for their viewpoints because elections mattered then, now find themselves repudiated by the most recent election. In their ignorance they cannot see that a temporary electoral setback does not mean an end to their freedom, blind to the fact that threatening the whole foundation of the nation very well might. In their increasing rage they scream law and order while at the same time justifying why they should break the former and are right to shatter the latter. And in their unmitigated greed, the Allen Wests of the world insist the only way to truly love the country is to kill it, or at least all parts of it that are not acceptable to the whims and fancies of those who didn’t love the country enough to endure a minor inconvenience like a lost election, or slow down in fundraising, or a lessening of their own power and role in the grand scheme of things. And now the truly dangerous and unhinged leading edge of retribution rhetoric calls for open civil war, the worst of things that can befall a nation. A blight that last time saw 2% of the population dead, millions more affected, untold economic damage, moral scars from the failed reconstruction after it, and the bungled and far too long processes integration of an enslaved people into full citizenship that our nation is still dealing with to this day.

Anyone, regardless of their prior accomplishments, titles, experiences, or appeals who calls for secession or civil war is not doing so for the good of America. They are not after the peace and prosperity of all, or the rights of all citizens to purse them. They are not “merely asking questions” or being clever or coming up with anything new. It is not quite treason, narrowly defined by the Constitution and the Supreme Court as actually “levying war” against the government or “adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort,” not just talking, conspiring, or hoping for it online or for fundraising. But the same wicked spirit is there, and those skirting that line for personal gain should be seen, marked, and called out for what they are: the unworthy schemers who, far from wanting law and order and freedom, only use such words to entice others into subjugation. Such folks have always been, and always will be. And they must be constantly contended against, and defeated, and scattered to the far recesses of our society generation after generation, if the Union and the Constitution are to endure. And endure they must, if the greatest experiment in a free people self-governing is to outlive the unworthy schemers constantly arrayed against it. Both from within and without.