Tom did a nice post earlier about Larry Pratt’s, of the Gun Owners of America (GOA), remarks about resorting to the bullet box if a Democrat should win the Presidency. I don’t want to delve into the shifting understanding of the 2nd Amendment right now, but I do have a certain subject matter expert on the belief that violent rebellion and/or revolution is permitted under the US Constitution. Here with a rebuttal to Mr. Pratt is Balloon Juice special late night/early morning commenter President Abraham Lincoln:
It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.
— Letter to James C. Conkling 1863
But you will break up the Union rather than submit to a denial of your Constitutional rights.
That has a somewhat reckless sound; but it would be palliated, if not fully justified, were we proposing, by the mere force of numbers, to deprive you of some right, plainly written down in the Constitution. But we are proposing no such thing.
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican* president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”
To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.
* In regards to Pratt’s remarks this would be Democratic if the speech was being given today, however, I didn’t want to edit/amend President Lincoln’s remarks.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Mr. Lincoln certainly made his opinion on the subject quite clear. I agree with him.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Timeless.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Hungry Joe
Not exactly to the point, but when and why did robbers stop saying “Stand and deliver”? It’s such a terrific line; it’d almost be worth pulling a stickup, just to say it.
Especially if, later, someone were to refer to me as a highwayman.
Adam L Silverman
@Hungry Joe: Take it out for a spin and give it a try. Report back if it helps your strong arm robbery go smoother.//
Adam L Silverman
@efgoldman: I’m neither a lawyer or a law enforcement officer and I’m not sure if his remarks were specified enough to be construed as a threat rather than political hyperbole. Some were speculating in the comments to Tom’s post that he made an explicit threat against Judge Garland. If that’s the case, then the Marshal’s Service will not be amused.
Hungry Joe
@Adam L Silverman: There’s another fine old expression: “strongarm robbery.” Don’t hear that much anymore, either. Criminals these days, I tell you. No pride in workmanship.
James E Powell
@Hungry Joe:
I don’t know exactly when it became not-cool to say “Stand & Deliver” but this certainly did not help.
NotMax
@Hungry Joe
Semi-obligatory link to Phil Ochs.
jl
What they hey? No love for James Madison?
” A political system which does not contain an effective provision for a peaceable decision of all controversies arising within itself, would be a Govt. in name only. Such a provision is obviously essential; and it is equally obvious that it cannot be either peaceable or effective by making every part an authoritative umpire. The final appeal in such cases must be to the authority of the whole, not to that of the parts separately and independently. This was the view taken of the subject, whilst the Constitution was under the consideration of the people. [See Federalist No. 39.] It was this view of it which dictated the clause declaring that the Constitution & laws of the U. S. should be the supreme law of the Land; anything in the constn or laws of any of the States to the contrary notwithstanding.”
Notes on Nullification
James Madison
http://www.constitution.org/jm/18341200_nullification.htm
Edit: quote from end of a long and verbose note. Earlier Madison makes an important point that there is always a natural right to violence, but it is not a Constitutional right. IF you go that route, you can’t claim Constitutional protections, and you take your chances. I think people spouting about a right to violent resistance in the Constitution are extremely dangerous. Which I think this guy is doing.
NotMax
A favorite Lincoln quip:
“If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what’s said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
Miss Bianca
You make me laugh, but I hurt. Is extremism truly baked into the American Pie, or does it just seem that way? You’d think with Lincoln that the question would have been answered. But then, reflect upon *his* end. We haven’t finished fighting the Civil War.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: That link locked up my computer. I prefer Lorena McKennit’s version better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqmOm81YZ6U
And there’s always The Highwayman’s Lament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqmOm81YZ6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_XgghFZt1o
Adam L Silverman
@jl: I love Madison. But decided on Lincoln for tonight’s guest post. I promise to use Madison in the future.
NotMax
Couple more favorite Lincoln moments:
“I would rather be a little nobody, than to be a evil somebody.”
“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”
Jewish Steel
Not a bad stylist for a yokel out of Central Illinois.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: We have several cycles. A religiosity cycle – we’re in one now. Economic cycles, which we’re all familiar with. And criminality cycles too, though there’s a good argument to make that this may be changed forever because of the elimination of lead from everyday life (for the most part…). And we have an extremism cycle. The first one was shortly after the founding of the country and the ratification of the Articles of Confederation. That’s why Madison wanted to and did hijack the Constitutional Convention and refounded the country. The next was in the 1830s and seated in South Carolina (imagine that…), then the Great Rebellion. There was another one in the late 19th Century. Then the 1930s taking advantage of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. And the most recent one, slowly developing in the late 1960s/early 1970s and coming into its own in the 1990s and fully flowering since Obama was elected President.
Adam L Silverman
@Jewish Steel: He, Madison, and Dr. Franklin are my favorite most important Americans ever. President Grant and General Sherman are also on that list, as is Brigadier General Buford, without whom there would have been no victory at Gettysburg.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Alternate Ochs link.
BTW, finished watching The Assets. Worth the time. Jeanne Vertefeuille was quite the investigator, nearly Vulcan in her procedure..
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Thanks. I’ve seen the video before and have no idea why it locked up my computer.
Mike J
Just back from the monthly LD Democratic party meeting. The forces of stupid were at least brushed back from the plate when we overwhelmingly voted against their resolution about superDs rigging the system. Now for a drink.
Jewish Steel
@Adam L Silverman: I work right across the street from what was once part of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Lincoln’s earlier gig. You can’t swing a dead Reb without hitting a Lincoln scholar ’round these parts.
Adam L Silverman
@Jewish Steel: I’m sure.
DH
That is cool.
Abraham Lincoln, prospective hipster :)
trollhattan
@Jewish Steel:
Swinging a few live Rebs might be more productive. Just sayin’.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, but if we are in an extremism cycle now…I shudder to imagine. I’d hate to think we were stupid enough to allow misogyny to overwhelm the prospect of Madame President – with all the pushback *against* extremism that that Presidency must build on, and entail – and instead usher in the era of President Trump.
@Mike J: : )
DH
Speaking of Madison, I highly recommend Garry Willls’s boook: Explaining America for a brilliant look at the Federalist Papers, which Madison wrote(with help from Hamilton and Jay).
Mnemosyne
@James E Powell:
At least go with the MTV version with the cool costumes.
Watching that, it makes me wonder how/if Prince was influenced by the New Romantic fashion in the UK, or if everything just happened to converge at the same time.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: Doesn’t mean they have the numbers to swing the election. We’ve largely pushed them to the extremes. What Dave Neiwert is worrying about, and rightly so, is fascistic impulse within movement conservatism and its chosen host the GOP. This is, at least for now, different, than the extremists on the fringes.
Mnemosyne
@DH:
/repressing show lyric
ETA: Though the show is slightly unfair to Madison — they end up assigning Monroe’s role in the Reynolds affair to Madison for simplicity’s sake.
Wapiti
The Lincoln quotes brought to mind a post I glanced at, but didn’t read, in Kos: apparently some Cadets who happened to be Black and female were holding up fists in a group photo. Some people were offended and thought that something that looked like the black power salute was inappropriate…
No, inappropriate is when a Black officer goes into a senior officer’s office and sees paintings of civil war generals – and all of them are rebels.
Jewish Steel
@trollhattan: There is one strange little house next to the park where I walk my dogs that had the nerve, the fucking nerve, to fly that flag. Before I could figure out what to do about it, the flag and pole disappeared. I’ve since wondered how that played out.
Adam L Silverman
@Wapiti: That whole thing started when a retired senior NCO, who has made an online name for himself as a race baiter, homophobe, xenophobe, and bigot did a post on it claiming they had violated the Hatch Act and engaged in prohibited political activity as they were endorsing a political organization/movement while in uniform. Aside from the fact that this isn’t a Hatch Act violation, it also ignores the number of pictures of white cadets who have posed for similar group pictures. Of course it got picked up by Chuck Johnson – not the LGF guy – who wanted info on these cadets in order to dox them.
EconWatcher
Few “great” historical figures can really live up to their hype, but Lincoln does. What an extraordinary man.
trollhattan
@Jewish Steel:
Just never know when or where these folks will pop their tiny pates up. More than a scattering live in California’s Sierra foothills. They can send my blood to a boil quicker than a convection cooktop.
greennotGreen
@Jewish Steel: You should live where I do. One house flies that flag plus the Gadsden flag and a big Trump sign. Most of them just opt for one of the three.
Adam L Silverman
@greennotGreen: They’re looking for the quarterly achievement award.
Adam L Silverman
@EconWatcher: It would have been interesting to have seen, or been able to read as history, what would have happened had he lived to implement Reconstruction. And, perhaps, to live in that America.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: forgive me if I appear obtuse, but how so? How is extremism in the GOP substantively different, at this point, from movement at the extremes? If the GOP can endorse a candidate like Trump, for example, isn’t the difference between ‘mainstream’ and ‘extreme’ pretty much obliterated? What am I missing?
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: That’s Neiwert’s worry: that with Trump the barrier is breaking down and the fringe is moving to infect movement conservatism, which has itself captured the GOP. What I think we’re seeing, in terms of professional Republicans endorsing Trump, is what we’ve always known: they’re cowards. They don’t even have the courage to stand up for the ideology and theology and dogma that they’ve been peddling for forty years. There are, as we’ve seen, some holdouts. Some will holdout all the way. Some will eventually cave. Some will publicly seem to do the former, while privately and in the ballot booth do the latter. Some, should Trump truly capture and remake the party, will leave and either migrate to the Democratic Party, further reducing the GOP to an extremist, revanchist rump party or try to start a new party and movement claiming they’re the real conservatives. This too will further reduce the GOP to an extremist, revanchist rump party. What’s interesting is watching the cowards cowards. Specifically Speaker Ryan. He’s too scared to make a stand and too scared to capitulate. So he’s twisting himself into knots and looks ridiculous.
EconWatcher
@Adam L Silverman:
It’s funny you say that, I was actually just thinking that. He was so talented, and his yearning for reconciliation was so intense, that you can imagine him somehow finding a way to get Southerners to accept the new reality.
On the other hand, his racial views were not entirely “modern” (almost inevitably)–he wasn’t a radical racial egalitarian like, say, Thaddeus Stevens–so it’s also possible that he might have made some compromises in pursuit of reconciliation that we might not like. Perhaps he would have made unpleasant compromises that still would somehow have avoided a century of backlash and Jim Crow.
Of course, we’ll never know.
Adam L Silverman
@EconWatcher: No one is cut from a single bolt of cloth. It is clear he had a strategy for Reconstruction, just as he had one for winning the war. Unfortunately he never seemed to have related that strategy to anyone. Not that it would have mattered given that he was succeeded by Johnson.
trollhattan
This, I can get behind.
Jewish Steel
@trollhattan:
@greennotGreen:
Our plates might say Land of Lincoln, but below Joliet often feels like the Mason Dixon line.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: are we, then, do you (or Neiwert) think, in one of those crux points in American history where a political party/faction is breaking up for good and all – and a new one forming? So with the Republicans at the time of Lincoln. I find it easy to see the current Republican Party shattering, for example, But I find it hard to see what’s coming to replace it.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: FYWP won’t allow me to tack on. But do you think Speaker Ryan actually has room and gravitas to maneuver and say: “Fuck you, we stand for something other than screwing the poor”? – I don’t know.
ETA: On that note, crawling to bed. Good night!
EconWatcher
@Adam L Silverman:
On this score, Ben Sasse is an interesting figure to watch. He’s clearly going to hang tough and will not be getting on the Trump bandwagon. He’s going to be sitting pretty when Trump melts down. And Sasse is the only Tea Partier I’ve ever heard of with a PhD in history from Yale. Good looking guy, too.
As I say, watch that boy. He’s going places.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: I can’t speak for Neiwert, though I’ve read his stuff and appreciate it – he is very good and I’ve used his work as cited source material before. I honestly do not know whether we’re seeing a break up. At one level there really is no GOP as a coherent, formal institution anymore. Charles Pierce hammers this point a lot and he’s right. Because of Citizens United the different independent money sources within movement conservatism have all set up – nationally, state by state, or both – their own alternate political institutions to promote their specific interests along how they define conservatism. So you’ve got the Kochs and Adelson and Friess and Thiel and Pope and a bunch of others. In this respect, as I wrote the other day, the GOP exists only in name, as a brand, and those claiming to be Republicans do so as an identity affiliation at this point. The real question, I think, is how much longer the charade goes on before the new, post Citizens United reality really sets in. Some of this is dependent on the news media actually reporting on it and explaining it, which I hold little hope of them doing. So its possible that the GOP, as a potemkin party, will manage to survive for a while. But Trump may in fact be able to seize it and remake it for his own purposes and do so in a way that survives/outlives his actual candidacy should he lose. The real question is where the movement conservative parasite goes next. They attached themselves fully to the GOP almost sixty years ago and have so weakened the host that it is institutionally weak and hollow. Movement conservatism, what the blogger who calls himself Dr. Leo Straus calls the Movement, won’t die, but it will go looking for a new host to latch onto. What that host will be I do not know. Here’s one of his very good explanations of the Movement:
http://www.stiftungleostrauss.com/bunker/why-the-movement-is-more-dangerous-today-than-1993/
And here’s the link to all his posts on the Movement/tagged with “Movement”.
http://www.stiftungleostrauss.com/bunker/tag/movement/
I highly recommend taking the time and reading some of these. Also his stuff on Russia and Putin.
Adam L Silverman
@EconWatcher: He is certainly not a mouth breather.
Adam L Silverman
bed time for me. Goodnight all!
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for the ‘Straus’ links, looks like a particular rabbit hole I’d enjoy reading about, for certain values of enjoy.
NotMax
@EconWatcher
Saddled with an impossible not to mock name, though.
Go ahead, say “Stay tuned for a statement direct from President Sasse, seated in the Oval Office” out loud.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: Now I’m imaging a Scott ‘Buddy Cole’ Thompson monologue.
mvr
@efgoldman: You both need to be President in times that require great performance and you need to have some cooperation from the other branches of government who recognize that. FDR had both. Obama had one. And less time to pull it off in, and he’s black and that constrains his options even had he had the wind at his back. He did alright with what he had to work with, I figure.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
I love Buddy Cole. “So then Yoko Ono said to Jean-Paul Sartre . . .”
Steeplejack
@mvr:
Obama is a Formula One driver who was given a mom-van in a ditch to start with. What he has accomplished has been in some ways phenomenal, but it could have been so much more.
(Not his fault, in case that wasn’t clear.)
piratedan
to be fair, I think we’re simply witnessing the death of a major political entity and something will rise from it’s ashes. Perhaps we’ll see multiple entities rise, some good old fashioned know-nothing luddites, some christianists basking in their own self righteousness. This may even usher in the destruction of the Democratic party. As the old conservative interests splinter off into smaller sections of the radical pie, will the left do the same? Can we see what Sanders has done (is doing) to splinter off progressives so that The Democratic Party becomes the de facto centrists/moderate party?
I believe that the splintering of the GOP into their own flavor of idiocy won;t doom them as long as we think, because money still buys legislators and who knows who may be susceptible to a fatter purse in order to protect the 1%.
Villago Delenda Est
Pratt is a terrorist.
Deal with him accordingly.
Matt McIrvin
@efgoldman:
Either that, or Obama will be remembered as the foreign devil usurper whose misrule brought down the curtain on the corrupt, effete government preceding the glorious White Empire of Jesus America, and all historians who disagree will have been killed and turned into puppy chow.
I’m always a little nervous about statements that posterity will have better judgment than we do… I don’t entirely trust posterity.
Chris
@Hungry Joe:
Well, maybe they do still say it. Or at least some of them. How many times have you been robbed, anyway? :D
Chris
@efgoldman:
I put Truman somewhere pretty high up there, if only because it’s on his watch that I see the modern Democratic Party that I identify with as having come into being. FDR was good on the economics, but still basically silent (and, occasionally, horrific) on civil rights. Truman was the guy under whom that became a thing.
Chris
@Adam L Silverman:
My thing with all this is that to me, at least, that breakdown and fringe infection happened basically in 2009 with the rise of the teabaggers. I remember a few people at the time speculating that there’d be a civil war within the party – hogwash. It takes two sides to make a war, and everybody from the wealthiest elites to the poorest rednecks in the party was lining up behind the teabaggers. The fringe has been the mainstream, within the GOP, for at least that long.
Paul in KY
Pres. Lincoln was so badass. Saying ‘that is cool’ back in 1860!
Greatest President we’ve ever had.
Paul in KY
@Hungry Joe: Then we’d get to string you up as a highwayman.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: @Major Major Major Major: I’ll echo M4 with my thanks (as always) for the links and thoughtful words.
D58826
SHouild not have opened the article. Just to depressing
Maybe it’s time for a 2nd amendment solution to Platt and Lapierre. Time they personally experience the consequences for their words
boatboy_srq
@Adam L Silverman: “moving to infect”? More like “exposed as the core.” Trump isn’t saying anything Ryan, Gingrich, McConnell, Boehner, Romney or any of a host of others haven’t been saying for well over a decade. He’s just using different words to express the same things. What’s happening is not the Triumph of the Racist Sexist Xenophobic Fringe, but the postmortem serial assassination of Atwater and the shredding of the veneer of politesse granted to the Southern Strategy.
Pappenheimer
Paul in KY:
Re Lincoln’s words “That is cool.” Given the context, I think he meant “That’s cold” in modern parlance.
Paul in KY
@Pappenheimer: Still, he said that in 1860!
Matt McIrvin
I remember distinctly realizing during the Reagan years that Reagan would be generally remembered as one of America’s greatest Presidents, and that everyone would be wrong.
D58826
@Matt McIrvin: I think he will be remembered as a consequential president, after all he did define the terms of the political/economic debate for more than 30 years. But a great president is remembered in terms of positive achievements whereas Reagan’s ‘achievements’ are very much in a negative direction. The end result of the Reagan revolution is ‘old little hands’ Trump. The irony is that with all of the Reagan worship in today’s GOP, he would probably be labeled a RINO given some of the things he did when in office. After all he did raise taxes, after cutting them to much, saved social security, signed an immigration reform law and perhaps worst of all he signed two arms deals with the evil empire.
john fremont
@D58826: And Very relevant to this thread, Ronald Reagan after leaving the Presidency, campaigned for the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Ban. Reagan was a Gungrabber!
Larryb
@Paul in KY:
I’ve been reading the memoirs of US Grant and TE Sherman. They both sound remarkably modern.
Paul in KY
@Larryb: Will have to read them sometime!