The South will probably not rise again – but California might, for the same reasons. And if it does, maybe the right thing to do, this time, would be to let it go in peace.
Provided, of course, that California returns the favor.
On Wednesday, the state got some of the same medicine Abraham Africanus I administered to the South almost 160 years ago. This time, it was the Orange Man administering the corrective.
The state had issued a regulation on its own authority which would have required all new cars sold in CA to average almost 50 miles-per-gallon by 2025. This was done as a kind of here’s-mud-in-your eye maneuver to register the state’s irritation that a federal regulation which would have decreed the same thing nationally is in the process of being dismantled by the Orange Man – who has already rescinded an attending federal regulation that would have tripled the fines imposed on cars sold nationally that failed to average close to 50 MPG.
California – like the 11 states of the Confederacy – asserted its putative right to govern itself, a nice-sounding idea we’re all taught to give lip service to in school (like “freedom”) but which is among the most obvious frauds there is, short of Pat Robertson and Ernest Angley.
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Orange Man just gave CA a cold lesson about who really runs Bartertown.
The Trumpian argument is the same argument that Abraham Africanus purveyed – that of federal supremacy, period. The states are free . . . to do as they are told. That principle having been established by the spilt blood of half a million Americans on both sides of the Mason Dixon line almost 160 years ago.
The war upon the South has of course been enrobed in faux nobility – that it was a crusade to free the slaves. In fact, slavery was the convenient pretext needed by AA the First to make his point about who runs Bartertown.
Slavery was beside the point – as AA the First was the first to admit. The heterodox but historically accurate Thomas DiLorenzo has written in his several books on the subject; the Great Emancipator promised the Southern states he would support a constitutional amendment legalizing slavery where it existed (i.e., in the South) in perpetuity provided the Southern states would remain in the union.
Bend knee, and all will be well.
It’s a delicious irony of history that a state as progressive as California – which loves the federal cudgel when it aligns with its interests – is now the beneficiary of the same treatment it surely felt the South more than deserved.
This is what happens when principles are established. They tend to become precedents. Power acquired is rarely power ceded.
Not voluntarily.
