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Tag Archives | Abraham Lincoln

Glenn Beck Misses the Point (Again)

By on November 22, 2009 in Activism, Big Government, State Sovereignty 23

LincolnMemorialAfter weeks of teasing his audience with cryptic allusions to “The Plan,” on Saturday, Glenn Beck revealed key aspects of a new strategy he believes will help to restore constitutional sanity to American government. It won’t.

Given a perfect opportunity to embrace the concept of Jeffersonian federalism and state sovereignty as a check against the federal leviathan, Beck instead opted to push self-help seminars all over the country to teach ordinary folks “community organizing.”

Organizing is fine, but without a solid intellectual alternative to Washington, D.C.-dominated politics, all Beck’s legions are likely to do is get riled up and vote a bunch of Republicans back into Congress.

A bunch of Republicans that will still have no reason whatsoever to acknowledge the fundamental constitutional limitations on federal power.

Pardon me if I’m less than thrilled about partying like it’s 1994 all over again.

According to Beck’s website, these seminars will culminate in a rally on August 28, 2010 in Washington, D.C. at the feet of – who else? – Abraham Lincoln.

The irony of hosting an event designed to promote the Constitution at the feet of one of its worst enemies is almost painful.

Abraham Lincoln? You mean the Great Centralizer?

The president who shut down newspapers, imprisoned political opponents, and suspended habeas corpus? All while waging an illegal war that killed 620,000 Americans to prove the right of peaceful secession does not exist in a nation founded on that very principle?

Right, that Abraham Lincoln.

Let me be fair: Glenn Beck has been on point about a lot of things. He clearly has a knack for finding stories no one else is willing to report. But no plan to restore our Constitution can succeed unless it focuses on state sovereignty.

We don’t need new politicians in Washington, we need less power concentrated there in the first place.

America has been heading down an unsustainable path of centralization for more than a century and a half. Until we decide that freedom itself is incompatible with a one-size-fits-all government, we will continue to be pillaged by elected national monarchs from both political parties.

Once again, Glenn Beck seems to have missed a chance to use his very prominent platform to make that case.

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The Death of Federalism: Lincoln’s Real Legacy

By on October 6, 2009 in Federalism, History 2

Any discussion of reclaiming freedom in America is pointless without an accurate understanding of how our rights were lost in the first place. The Real Lincoln, Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s controversial book on the subject, makes a compelling case that it was Abraham Lincoln himself who set us on our present course.

From the book’s foreword by Walter E. Williams:

The War between the States settled by force whether states could secede. Once it was established that states cannot secede, the federal government, abetted by a Supreme Court unwilling to hold it to its constitutional restraints, was able to run amok over states’ rights, so much so that the protections of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean little or nothing today.

the-real-lincoln

Since its publication in 2002, there have been many supposed rebuttals of The Real Lincoln, but none that credibly addresses damning historical evidence of the war’s origins, President Lincoln’s motives, or his documented usurpation of constitutional liberty.

Contrary to assertions by Lincoln apologists and the man himself, no serious person could believe that the founders, having just won a war of secession over England prior to writing our Constitution, ever intended the Union to nullify the sovereignty of the states or constitutional liberties to be suspended at the whim of the first chief executive who found them politically inexpedient.

But as DiLorenzo and history make clear, Lincoln did not fight the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century, against his own people and at a cost of 620,000 American lives, to free the slaves. He fought it to set a precedent of federal supremacy over the states. And in the process turned his apparent belief that the ends justify the means into federal dogma.

The Real Lincoln offers perhaps the most lucid diagnosis to date of the disease of centralization that is currently devouring the soul of this country. The principles of the Tenth Amendment and federalism are its only cure.

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