Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) did not so much "win" as survive a recall election, and upon reflection over Wisconsin, his survival is not surprising. I do not think the recall election has major implications for the Presidential election, although it does suggest that Romney could win overwhelmingly white, Republican Wisconsin in 2012.
I am always puzzled when otherwise decent people vote for Republicans. However, I remind myself that in 1860, a large majority of the United States either was neutral about slavery or was even willing to die to defend it. Only a minority favored abolition and not many supported forcible abolition. The experience of slavery in the United States demonstrates that people in general tend to have an ill-developed moral sensibility. They will go along with whatever they are told by their social superiors to go along with. What matters to most people is how they seem to others. The people who vote Republican today are the descendents of those that fought and died for slavery. In that light, they have progressed a long way toward morality, and one should not expect much more from them. However, I suspect that they would accept slavery once again if they were told by their social superiors that it was okay.
On a different subject, Gore Vidal maintained that the Civil War was not about slavery, but was about President Lincoln waging war to force the South back into the Union. I suppose he felt that the South should have been permitted to go its own way, or else that Lincoln should have made the war about slavery from the very beginning. Vidal said he would have supported the war if it had been about slavery, but since it was about states' rights versus federalism, he did not support the war. Vidal is technically correct about Lincoln's initial intentions I think, in that Lincoln was not adamant about ending slavery in the beginning, but intentions don't matter so much as the final result. Vidal does tend to quibble quite a bit, for what reason I don't know, but he seems to favor radical opinions (the Civil War was unjust, and Lincoln was a dictator) just for the sake of provoking obscure scholars. I think he craves attention. Lincoln was a few shades closer to dictator than some other Presidents, but he was no Mussolini. The Civil War probably could not have been avoided, because the South fired the first shots and seized federal forts and lands. The South did not even wait for Lincoln to make a provocation, but acted in a precipitous fashion based on dislike of Lincoln's anti-slavery views.
I would prefer that the Civil War had been avoided, but the Southern elite was extreme and radical itself, eager for conflict and unwilling to compromise. Their ideological descendents now populate the Republican Party, weaving conspiracy theories about Obama (socialist, communist, Muslim, gay, non-American, and the list goes on) and, before him, Clinton and just about anyone who is a Democrat or liberal.
I don't know whether it would have been a good idea for Lincoln to let the South go its own way. I think that slavery would have persisted for a long time, and that the South would likely have remained a thorn in the side of the Union for generations to come, even allying with Hitler during WW2 and bringing at least one of the world wars, if not both, to North America. Where I fault Lincoln is in his poor choice of generals. Commanders should always be chosen based upon ability, not political or social connections. Lincoln was also impatient for victories and tended to press his generals to attack even when their troops were not ready or the conditions were not favorable. It takes cold blood to wage successful war, and hot heads tend to lose themselves. Conditions at the military hospitals were abominable. Either Lincoln did not devote sufficient time or thought to the prosecution of the war or else did not have sufficient ability.
No comments:
Post a Comment