TRUE SOUTH
YANKEE FASCISTS
BY KEN WARD

Americans of almost every political persuasion were agog when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that government has the right to take private property and turn it over to other private users. This fits the very definition of fascism: capitalism with the mask ripped off.

The collusion of government and business in Kelo v. New London, Conn., was stunning, yet hardly surprising. The hidden hand of Adam Smith was trampled by the jackboot of the federal Leviathan long ago. The Supreme Court merely provided more damning evidence.

When did things go so far off the rails? Ask an unreconstructed Southerner, and he’ll give you the year: 1865.

Long before Kelo was a gleam in the beady dark eyes of Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Co., another Yankee lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, sowed the seeds of American empire. Dedicated to dismantling constitutionally founded state’s rights, Lincoln concocted a “proposition nation” that would transform the Founding Fathers’ federalist system into a command-and-control enterprise from Washington. Whiggish public-works projects were crucial to ol’ Abe’s machinations on behalf of “the people.”

Slaves to Lincoln’s legacy traded the old republic for a new imperium. Today, our multicultural mega-state preaches and fights for “democracy” abroad while constricting liberties at home. Black-robed justices have become the high priests of an increasingly secular state derivative of other, lesser lights — Marx, Lenin and Hitler.

America’s march toward fascism invites the ultimate “what if” question from the antebellum period: What if the South had won the Civil War, the Third War of Independence?

A group of scholars researched congressional votes over the years and found that, despite the crass designs of Mr. Lincoln and his spawn, representatives from below the Mason-Dixon line have maintained a distinctly different view of the country and its culture.

If the 11 states of the Confederacy were on their own, here’s how these landmark bills and legislative showdowns would have been decided, North and South:

• Immigration (1965, 1990, 1996): Northern states voted to expand world immigration; Southern states voted against it.
• Amnesty to illegal aliens (1986): North, yea; South, nay.
• Delete welfare cap (1995): North, yea; South, nay.
• Brady gun-control bill (1993): North, yea; South, nay.
• Assault weapons ban (1994): North, yea; South, nay.
• Right to voluntary prayer (1971, requiring two-thirds vote as a constitutional amendment): North, failed; South, passed.
• Return abortion policy to states (1983, requiring two-thirds vote as a constitutional amendment): North, failed; South, passed.
• Balanced budget (1995, requiring two-thirds vote for passage): North, failed; South, passed.
• Supreme Court filibuster (2005): North continued; South, ended.

A different country, indeed.

In view of these persistent differences, one tragedy, among many, was how the South was brought (forced) back into the “Union.” The requirement for readmission — ratification of the 14th Amendment — was a dubious, if not wholly illegal, exercise that irreparably harmed North and South alike.

Ostensibly codifying the rights of former slaves, the 14th Amendment has become the chief battering ram for the national government and its courts to be the arbiter of all rights. Contradicting the spirit of the first 10 amendments, it completed the war against the South by fatally undermining state sovereignty.

Whether you agree with all the Southern positions enumerated here, there can be no dispute that the South differs from its Northern cousin. It remains more Christian, more culturally conservative, more individualistic and more suspicious of government power (i.e., fascism).

French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed these attributes 170 years ago, and the “irrepressible conflict” lingers today. That’s not to say every Southern politician trumps his Northern counterpart. Of course, all clans have their embarrassments, like, for instance, Bill Clinton. But make no mistake: Kelo v. New London was a quintessentially Northern case dictated by Northern judges acting in the proto-fascist fashion of witch-burning Yankee Puritans. 

In an era when the dogma of diversity has morphed into a government-mandated mantra, every freedom-loving American should exclaim, “God Save the South!” LW