Abraham Lincoln on our Internal Divisions

On this July 4th, Revisit Lincoln's Lyceum Address

This is Lincoln as a 20-something with the wisdom of the ancients and profound messages for us today!

Lincoln began by expressing gratitude to our ancestors who founded and built our nation. Demonstrating conservatism at its very best, he connected the generations of the living, dead, and yet unborn in a community of mutual obligation. It is our task, Lincoln said of the living, to protect and then pass on to posterity what we have inherited.

Where, Lincoln asked, will the threat to our inheritance and our survival as a nation come from? Will it come from an army overseas? Profoundly not, Lincoln asserted. No military force could “take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” The great danger to the United States will come from inside America, he said. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

What are the dangers Lincoln saw that may come to undermine the United States? He warned first of the “mobocratic spirit”—“the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of the Courts.”
When I recently discussed this text with students, many of them immediately saw parallels with today’s “social media mobs” passionately denouncing those with whom they disagree or sentencing people for perceived crimes of political incorrectness. To counter this spirit of the mob, Lincoln taught a strict dedication to the Constitution and the rule of law, going so far as to say that everyone must remember that “to violate the law, is to trample the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty.”

Second, he warned in very stark terms of the dangers of political leadership. Rather than celebrating great leaders who would come in the United States, he feared that men would arise with grand ambitions to be satisfied. Where our founders were able to satisfy their ambitions by founding the United States, he feared future leaders, having inherited America already built, would seek to gain their own fame in destruction and rebuilding. Those who scorn “to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious,” he said, belonged to “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”

Read my full article here.

Yes, George Washington warned us of the politics surrounding the Mueller Report more than two centuries ago!

Read the full story here.

He warned us against permanent alliances and the need for impartial commercial relationships with foreign nations. And, as if speaking directly to the daily headlines of 2019, warned that against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence … the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Those most actively supporting the Mueller investigation might find support in that warning. But, he added a caveat that we all should pay close attention to: “But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial,” he instructed, “else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.”

Washington predicted that foreign governments would use the political party system that might develop in the United States as a means of sowing division and gaining favor. But he also understood that there was an equally bad tendency of people to use such concerns for their own partisan agenda rather than for the good of the whole.

How prescient Washington’s Farewell Address seems to still be today, more than two centuries after it was offered to the American people. If we would return to it again on the day of his birth and meditate on his many lessons for the United States, we might end up being a better nation able to manage our journey together through the choppy waters of the 21st century.

Tocquevillian Thought of the Day--Local Authority and Fracking

Local Authority, the Nurturing of Citizens, and Hydraulic Fracturing

by

Gary L. Gregg, Ph.D.

I just returned from a terrific visit to my homeland of southwestern Pennsylvania, one of the nation's hotbed areas for hydraulic fracturing.  Recent news out of Pennsylvania has a distinctly Tocquevillian tone, I think, so I decided to share it.

This is not a blog either defending or attacking the extraction of natural gas through the method of fracking. This is a note about local authority and the nurturing of citizenship.

Last winter the centralized government of Pennsylvania decided that zoning for fracking was too important to be left to local authorities and wiped out the right of local areas to create their own zoning laws when it comes to this practice.  A Commonwealth Court overturned this "Act 13" recently, though the Governor has vowed that he will appeal that decision.  The state, and the industry, argue for the need for centralized and uniform regulations. The Court argued that to allow the state to intervene in such a zoning issue will effectively eliminate all restraints on state power over such traditionally local decisions.


What would Tocqueville have to say?

Tocqueville argued very strongly that vibrant local authority was s key to the preservation of American liberty.  His history shows American society growing up and out from the local authority rather than being handed down from a centralized government. This "direction" in his history/ sociology is very important and contains numerous policy and philosophical implications that I don't have time for here.

But he goes even further. He argues that it is in local politics, towns in particular, that free people learn how to be free. "Town institutions are to liberty," he says, "what primary schools are to knowledge; they put it within the grasp of the people; they give them a taste of its peaceful practice and accustom them to its use" (102).  Summarizing his ideas he says it is in such local institutions where the American "gathers clear and practical ideas about the nature of his duties as well as the extent of his rights" (114).

Again, this note is not about fracking or economics and related questions can be debated. But, Tocqueville, I think, teaches that in terms of nurturing citizens and preparing them for liberty, the right decision is to leave such decisions to the local authorities. If local governments don't have power over such important things as what types of businesses will be permitted in their community and what type of environmental damage might be prohibited, what would encourage citizens to be engaged? Why would the best in our communities want to run for office or show up at town hall meetings if they could only influence the leash laws or garbage routes?

Whatever its other merits, it seems to me the Court's decision was the right one from the Tocquevillian perspective and the state of Pennsylvania is thinking more about economics and jobs than it is about citizens and liberty. If you had to choose, would you choose to have more jobs or to have more informed, engaged, and empowered citizens who know their duties and their rights? Which would George Washington or Thomas Jefferson prefer?