Abraham Lincoln, Classical Liberal

On this blog, I have often written about the fundamental agreement between Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.  Darwin agreed with Lincoln that slavery violated the natural liberty and equality of all human beings.  And Lincoln agreed with Darwin that science could explain all life, including human life, as shaped originally by a history of natural evolution.  Both Darwin and Lincoln can be rightly understood as classical liberals, who saw all human beings as having an equal natural right to liberty rooted in the evolved natural disposition of all individuals for self-ownership and self-defense against arbitrary power.

And yet some American libertarians have denounced Lincoln as a despotic enemy of liberty and as the founder of the Progressive tradition of big government.  Amazingly, some of these libertarians have even defended the Lost Cause of the Confederacy as the last bastion of republican liberty in the world, and thus they lament its defeat by the superior arms of Lincoln's military.  Recently, this neo-Confederate libertarianism has received publicity through the campaigning of Ron Paul, because Paul has a long history of criticizing Lincoln and lamenting the loss of the Confederacy.  Moreover, Barack Obama's claim that the Progressive ideology of big government is in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln has been cited by some libertarians as confirmation for their loathing of Lincoln.  (Some of my thinking about this has been influenced by my reading of John Barr's book manuscript--Loathing Lincoln: An American Political Tradition, 1858-2012--which I hope will be published sometime soon.)

We now have two good refutations of this libertarian critique of Lincoln that show why he should be seen as a classical liberal defender of individual liberty and limited government.   Timothy Sandefur has written "How Libertarians Ought to Think about the U.S. Civil War."  And Allen Guelzo has written "Abraham Lincoln or the Progressives: Who Was the Real Father of Big Government?"  Another important work along these lines is Jason Jividen's book Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln's Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric, which shows how the Progressives had to distort Lincoln's political thought and practice to appropriate him to their cause.

Sandefur refutes those libertarians who argue that the Confederate states were justified by a constitutional right to secession or a natural right to revolution.  In fact, the Constitution does not provide for secession; and there is no natural right to revolt for the sake of enslaving human beings.  While some neo-Confederate libertarians argue that Southern secession had nothing to do with slavery, Sandefur rightly points to the Southern declarations of secession as clear and authoritative statements that preserving slavery was the primary reason for secession.

Guelzo offers a good survey of the evidence against the libertarian claim that Lincoln was the father of big government.  He shows that the growth of the federal government during the Civil War was mostly a temporary response to the extraordinary emergency of the war.  Libertarians or classical liberals should agree with Lincoln that fighting a war to protect liberty against the initiation of violence by slaveholders is a proper purpose of government.

As both Sandefur and Guelzo indicate, Lincoln was clear and consistent in his devotion to what he called "the principle of self-government"--"each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as he in no wise interferes with any other man's rights" (CW 2:493).

The neo-Confederate libertarians are confused in their understanding of liberty.  Lincoln explained:

We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.  Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name--liberty.  And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny.  The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.  Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty. (CW 7:301-302)
 

The neo-Confederate libertarians have mistakenly adopted the wolf's definition of liberty.  Lincoln and Darwin rightly defended the shepherd's definition.

Lincoln's Aesopian imagery in this passage suggests all the major questions that have arisen in the debate over Lincoln's words and deeds. 

If Lincoln believes that all human beings are created equal, why does he divide them into sheep, shepherds, and wolves?  Does the liberty of the sheep depend on the shepherd’s protecting them from wolves?  Why can’t the sheep protect themselves?  What motivates the shepherd?  Ambition?  If so, might not the shepherd be tempted to create a fear of wolves in order to satisfy his ambition? 

Are local shepherds more or less trustworthy than national shepherds?  Is the national shepherd justified in arguing that he must suspend civil liberties in order to liberate the sheep?  Must the shepherd deny the liberty of wolves in order to liberate the sheep? 

Should the sheep trust the shepherd since he has said that the wolves had the constitutional liberty to keep the sheep in slavery, although they could not take their slaves into new territories? 

If the shepherd believes that the sheep are all black does that show his racism—his belief that black sheep cannot govern themselves without the help of shepherds?  Does this cast doubt on the possibility of having government of the sheep, by the sheep, for the sheep?  Or does the natural resistance of the sheep to the wolf's attack and their enlistment in the war against the wolf vindicate their natural right to self-government?


Some of my pertinent posts can be found here, here. and here.

What Men Fought For in the Civil War: Confirming Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Scottish, Swedish, German, Irish, and French Soldiers of the Union Army at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, 1862

The casualty rate for soldiers in the Civil War was higher than any war in American history. Why were these men willing to fight in such a bloody war.  What motivated them?  Were they fighting for a cause--out of a sense of duty to their country or devotion to some political principle such as liberty and equality?  Or were they fighting only for their comrades in arms?  Or were they coerced into fighting by threats of punishment for those who refused to fight?  And were the motives for the Union soldiers different from the Confederate soldiers?  

To answer these questions, historian James McPherson studied more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries written by 1,076 soldiers--647 Union and 429 Confederate--to see what they said about their motives for fighting (For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]).  Of the almost 3 million men who were soldiers in the Civil War, about 2.1 million were Union soldiers.  So the Union army was more than twice as large as the Confederate army.

McPherson deliberately excluded writing that was written for publication--such as published memoires written or revised after the war was over--because he wanted to see what the men said candidly to their wives, fiancés, family members, and friends during the war, rather than what they might want to present to a public audience.  It was also important that they could speak bluntly and honestly because the Civil War armies did not censor the writing of their soldiers.

McPherson admitted that his samples of Union and Confederate soldiers were skewed in various ways.  The most obvious is that these samples of writing excluded the illiterate.  But that is not a serious limitation considering that about 90 percent of the soldiers in the Civil War were literate.  Most of the soldiers read the newspapers that were regularly circulated among the troops, which allowed them to follow the political news and debates throughout the war.

McPherson's samples were skewed in favor of those who volunteered early in the war in 1861-1862.  His samples contained disproportionately fewer men who entered the war in 1863-1864 as draftees, substitutes, or people who enlisted only because they were paid big bounties.  But McPherson saw this bias as actually beneficial because he wanted to explain the motives of Civil War soldiers for fighting, and it was known that draftees, substitutes, and those paid bounties tended to avoid the real fighting.  

In fact, it was widely reported that about one half of the soldiers were "skulkers" who found ways to hide or run away from the fighting.  Some deserted for good.  The diary entries of a private in the 101st New York candidly recorded his avoidance of the fight at the second battle of Bull Run:  August 29, 1862: "Marched about three miles and fought all day they marched us up to Reb battery and we skidadled then I fell out and kept out all day.  Laid in the wood all night with 5 or 6 others."  August 3o: "Laid in the woods all day while the rest were fighting" (7). 

The fighting soldiers were most likely to be killed, and so we can see that the soldiers in McPherson's samples were most likely to be real fighters.  The casualty rate for all Union soldiers was 5 percent.  But 17 percent of the soldiers in the Union sample were killed or mortally wounded.  Similarly, while the casualty rate for all Confederate soldiers was 12 percent, this was 29 percent for the Confederate sample (ix). 

After World War II, many studies of combat motivation in that war concluded that soldiers in combat are mostly moved by "primary group cohesion"--fighting for the survival of one's comrades--and that devotion to patriotic or ideological causes is unimportant.  Many historians have assumed that this must have been true for soldiers in the Civil War as well.  But McPherson's study of the letters and diaries that he collected refutes this.  Two-thirds of both Confederate and Union soldiers in his samples expressed some patriotic motives (duty and honor in fighting for one's country), and over 40 percent spoke about particular ideological principles such as liberty, self-government, and resistance to tyranny (114).  For example, an officer in the 54th Ohio said he was fighting for "the guaranty of the rights of property, liberty of action, freedom of thought, religion . . . that kind of government that shall assure life liberty & the pursuit of happiness" (112).

I see evidence in McPherson's work that the Union soldiers were more moved by liberal principles, and the Confederates more moved by antiliberal principles, and that Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address correctly saw that the Civil War would be the ultimate test of the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence.  

As Lincoln said, the Civil War was a test of whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long endure.  If that nation could survive the Civil War and then be dedicated to a new birth of freedom, this would show to the world that popular or republican government shall not perish from the earth.   In McPherson's sample of letters and diaries, we can see that many of the men who fought in the Civil War saw the truth of Lincoln's interpretation of the war.

LIBERTY AND EQUALITY IN 1776 AND 1861

In 1861, both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis appealed to the revolutionary spirit of "our fathers" who fought for American liberty in 1776.  Similarly, both Confederate and Union soldiers said they were fighting for the cause of liberty that began with the American Revolution.  The Confederates said they were defending their liberty from a tyrannical government.  Unionists said they were fighting to preserve the nation conceived in liberty from being destroyed by secessionist anarchy.  Clearly, Northerners and Southerners disagreed in their definitions of liberty.

A Mississippi Confederate private wrote to his wife in 1862 that "if we was to lose, we would be slaves to the Yanks and our children would have a yoke of bondage thrown around there neck."  A Kentucky Confederate wrote: "We are fighting for our liberty against tyrants of the North . . . who are determined to destroy slavery" (106).

Confederates who were slaveholders stressed their right to hold property in slaves as the basis of their liberty.  Even soldiers who were not slaveholders stressed the property they held as members of the white race as the basis of their liberty.  A Louisiana artilleryman in 1862 wrote: "I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person.  There is too many free niggers . . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions."  A private in the 38th North Carolina wanted to show the Yankees "that a white man is better than a nigger."  A soldier from the Shenandoah Valley told his fiancée that he would fight to assure "a free white man's government instead of living under a black republican government" (109).

The Confederates believed in equality, but it was, as McPherson observed, "the equality of all who belonged to the master race," which supported "herrenvolk democracy" (109).

Thus, as Lincoln had said, the dispute between the North and the South was a conflict between contradictory definitions of the liberty and equality affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. 

In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas gave a speech in Peoria, Illinois, defending his support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow the people in the western territories to decide by majority vote whether they would become a slave state or a free state.  He insisted that a congressional prohibition on the expansion of slavery into the western territories would violate "the sacred right of self-government" by denying the right of the people to decide by popular vote whether they would have slavery.

Lincoln was in the audience for this speech, and he immediately responded with his own speech arguing that Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act would violate the policy set by Thomas Jefferson and other American founders--starting with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787--that prohibited the expansion of slavery into the western territories.  Lincoln denounced Douglas's claim that the "right of self-government" could establish slavery because this assumed a peculiar view of liberty: "That perfect liberty they sigh for--the liberty of making slaves of other people--Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never thought of themselves, a year ago" (1989, 1:309).

In 1864, Lincoln saw this same disagreement about liberty as the underlying cause of the Civil War:

"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one.  We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.  Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name--liberty.  And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny."

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one" (1989, 2:589-90).

This is the contradiction between a liberal definition of liberty and an illiberal.  In 1858, Lincoln had stated the liberal definition of liberty as the principle that "each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights" (1989, 1:449).  Notice that this is also a liberal definition of equality--every individual is equally free in his right to do as he pleases so long as he does not interfere with the same right of every other man.

"THE GOD OF BATTLES" AND "THE PROGRESS OF OUR ARMS"

Many of the soldiers in the Civil War--both Unionists and Confederates--believed that this conflict over the definitions of liberty and equality would be decided by God in war--the "God of Battles" as they called Him (67, 72, 122, 157).  These men had been shaped by the Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening that swept over America in the first half of the nineteenth century.  In many military units, the soldiers organized their own revival meetings before and after battles to stir themselves up to a religious frenzy.  The armies in the Civil War might well have been the most religious armies in American history (Ahlstrom 1972, 385-509).

A Pennsylvania soldier explained that "religion is what makes brave soldiers."  One reason why that might be true is that the Christian belief in eternal salvation and life after death in Heaven could lessen the believer's fear of death in war.  A private in the 33rd Mississippi wrote to his wife: "Christians make the best soldiers as they would not fear the consequences after death as others would."  This was confirmed by the worries of nonbelieving soldiers.  A South Carolina artillery officer admitted that death terrified him because "I am not a christian--a christian can afford to be a philosopher because he believes in a certain reunion hereafter but a poor devil who cant believe it hasn't that support" (68).

Another reason why religion might make brave soldiers is that they can believe that God is on their side, and they can pray for God's help.  The problem here, of course, is that both sides in the Civil War thought they were fighting for God's cause.  As I have noted previously, the Civil War created a theological crisis for America that was sharply stated by Lincoln in his Second Inaugural.  "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.  The Almighty has His own purposes."

The Christian churches were split over the Civil War and particularly the issue of slavery.  Many of the Southern churches pointed to the Bible's clear endorsement of slavery.  But many of the Northern churches insisted that a just God must surely condemn slavery.  Lincoln suggested that God had given no clear answer to the question of whether He willed the preservation of slavery: "The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation--the Bible--gives none--or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning" (1989, 1:685).

Both Union and Confederate soldiers prayed to God to give them victory.  This is what Locke and the American Revolutionaries called the "Appeal to Heaven"--resolving a political dispute by going to war and allowing God to decide the winner.  Preparing to go into action at Vicksburg in 1863, a soldier in the 37th Mississippi declared: "Surely the God of Battles is on our side."  An Alabama artillery lieutenant wrote in February of 1863 that "I have always believed that God was with us--if I had not my arm would long since have been palsied."  Even after the fall of Atlanta in 1864, he still could not "believe that our Father in Heaven intends that we shall be subjugated by such a race of people as the Yankees" (72-73). 

But that is exactly what some devout Yankees believed.  A Pennsylvania private was sure "that God will prosper us in the movements about to be made against this cursed rebellion."  A lieutenant in the 16th New York, who would win the congressional medal of honor, wrote in 1862 that "the cause for which we battle is one in which we can in righteousness claim the protection of heaven.  Humanity is largely interested in the issues of this monstrous rebellion hence He who is the embodiment of humanity will bestow in great abundance His blessings upon his and our cause" (73).  In their letters and diaries, many Union soldiers expressed the same confidence that God was on their side of their just cause.

Did Lincoln agree with this?  Many people have interpreted his Second Inaugural Address as implying that God had been on the side of the Union, and that the Union soldiers were fighting a holy war.  But in the passage I just quoted, Lincoln suggests that we cannot know whether God is on one side or the other in this war: "The Almighty has His own purposes."

Moreover, in the first paragraph of the Second Inaugural, Lincoln suggests that the outcome of the war will be decided not by God's intervention but by the military actions of the armies: "The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.  With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured."  By the time of the Second Inaugural (March 4, 1865) the victory of the Union over the Confederacy was clearly imminent.  Four weeks later--on April 9--Lee would surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

As Commander in Chief, Lincoln had always believed that a Union victory would depend on a military strategy to guide the movements of the Union armies and a political strategy for holding together a complex coalition of groups supporting the Union cause.  His private secretary John Hay, who lived in the White House, often heard Lincoln walking back and forth in his bedroom late into the night as he read and digested books on military strategy.  Every day, he studied the military reports coming in from the field; and he questioned his generals and admirals about what they were doing, meeting with them in Washington or in the field, or corresponding with them.

By early in 1862, Lincoln had formulated a military strategy based on the concept of "concentration in time."  In his book on Lincoln as Commander in Chief, McPherson explains this:

"Because the Confederacy's basic military strategy was to defend the territory that lay behind its frontier, Southern armies had the advantage of interior lines.  That advantage enabled them to shift reinforcements from inactive to active fronts, as they had done at Manassas in July 1861.  This concentration in space could be overcome only if the Union employed its greater numbers (a reality despite McClellan's belief to the contrary) to attack on two or more fronts at once--concentration in time" (2008, 70).

In a letter to Generals Buell and Halleck on January 13, 1862, Lincoln explained this strategy:

"I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much" (1989, 2:302).

Unfortunately, for two years, Lincoln could not find any generals willing to take his advice.  But, finally, in early 1864, Lincoln found the general who recognized the shrewdness of Lincoln's military strategy: Lincoln appointed Grant the general-in-chief of the armies.  Grant worked out a coordinated strategy for all major fronts.  Grant ordered five separate armies to advance simultaneously from exterior lines against five smaller Confederate armies so that they could not use their interior lines to reinforce one or another of them.  Lincoln told John Hay that Grant's plans reminded him of his own "suggestion so constantly made and as constantly neglected, to Buell & Halleck et al to move at once upon the enemy's whole so as to bring into action our great superiority in numbers" (Hay 1997, 193).  As carried out in 1864 by the team of Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan, this strategy won the war (McPherson 2008).

Notice that the key to this strategy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.

Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field (McCurry 2010).

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.

Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81).

Previously, I have written about immigration as cultural group selection that favors liberal regimes.

The number of Union soldiers was also increased, beginning in 1863, by the recruitment of emancipated slaves as soldiers.  By the end of the war, there were as many as many as 200,000 black Union soldiers.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was controversial, however.  And it did provoke debates among the Union soldiers.

I will take that up in my next post.

REFERENCES

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 1972. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.

Hay, John. 1997. Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay.  Eds. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner.  Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings.  2 vols.  Ed. Don Fehrenbacher.  New York: Library of America.

McCurry, Stephanie. 2010. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

McPherson, James M.  1997.  For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought In the Civil War.  New York: Oxford University Press.

McPherson, James M.  2008.  Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.  New York: Penguin Press.

The White Freedom to Dominate Versus the Lockean/Lincolnian Liberal Tradition in America: A Response to Jefferson Cowie

Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for history.  It deserved the prize because it is a deftly written history of freedom understood as the freedom of white Americans to dominate others as vividly manifested in the history of Barbour County, Alabama, from the 1830s to the present.  Barbour County is in southeastern Alabama, on the Chattahoochee River bordering Georgia.  Cowie chose Barbour County because that was George Wallace's home county, and Cowie presents Wallace as the leading proponent of white freedom in resistance to federal power in the last half of the twentieth century.

Cowie's historical insight is in seeing how Wallace's assertion of American freedom as white supremacy was rooted in almost 200 years of history in Barbour County, which was a microcosm for the history of most white Americans.  Whenever the federal government has intervened to protect nonwhite people from oppression, many white Americans have resisted this as an infringement of their freedom--their freedom to dominate others.  

This supports Cowie's general argument that the history of freedom in America has been predominantly not a liberal history of all people seeking freedom from oppression but an illiberal history of white people seeking freedom to oppress others.  This then allows him to argue that the illiberal conservatism of Donald Trump's Republicans is not an unusual departure from America's liberal tradition of politics but a continuation of America's illiberal tradition of white freedom to dominate others.

There are, however, four problems with Cowie's arguments.  The first problem is that while Cowie says we need a "better freedom" than the white freedom to dominate, he never clearly explains the standard by which we might identify that "better freedom."  Abraham Lincoln argued that the best freedom--and the alternative to freedom as domination--was the equal liberty of all men affirmed in the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental principle of American politics.  But Cowie never takes this seriously.

The second problem is that Cowie ignores the importance of black armed resistance to white violence in the black struggle for freedom.

The third problem is that in arguing that the American political tradition is predominately illiberal, Cowie supports the anti-liberals who claim that only they speak for the true America.

The fourth problem is that Cowie falsely claims that the "Second Reconstruction" (the post-World-War-II Civil Rights Movement) was a complete failure because it was defeated by Wallace's "white freedom."

But before I consider those four problems, we need to survey Cowie's history of Barbour County.

BARBOUR COUNTY, 1830-2000

Cowie's illiberal history of Barbour County can be divided into four periods.  First, Barbour County originated in the 1830s from the seizure of Creek Indian land by illegal white settlers who fought federal troops who tried to enforce a federal treaty that guaranteed the land to the Creek Nation.  The federal defense of Native American rights was regarded by the white intruders as a violation of their freedom to dominate the land that they wanted to settle.  The state government of Alabama legalized the white settlers' land claims in violation of the federal treaty and justified this as an exercise in "states' rights" and resistance to federal tyranny.  After two wars with the Creek Nation, the Indians were finally forced by federal soldiers in 1836 and 1837 to move to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, which was authorized by the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830.  This began the American tradition of white freedom to dominate nonwhite people.

This also initiated the second period of Barbour County's history when the white settlers brought in their black slaves to work the land and grow cotton for the white plantation owners.  Previously, white people had asserted their freedom to dominate Indian land; now they asserted their freedom to dominate black labor.  The number of slaves in Barbour County grew rapidly, and by 1860 there were 16,150 enslaved people working for 1,143 masters.  In defense of their freedom to enslave against the tyranny of Northern abolitionists attacking slavery, the white people of Barbour County were enthusiastic in support of secession and the Confederacy in its war with the Union invaders.

Abraham Lincoln explained the Civil War as a war between two definitions of the word liberty.  Speaking in Baltimore, in the spring of 1864, he observed:

"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one.  We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.  Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name--liberty.  And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny."

He then expressed this thought in the form of an Aesopian fable:

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.  Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and are professing to love liberty.  Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as sthe destruction of all liberty" (Lincoln, 2:589-90).

Cowie quotes these remarks as showing that Lincoln had "a crystal clear idea about the ideas of freedom at stake" (112).  But Cowie devotes only two paragraphs to this; and he says nothing about how Lincoln had justified his definition of liberty--"for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor"--as grounded in the Lockean liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence.  As I have indicated in previous posts, Lincoln repeatedly affirmed this Lockean conception of individual liberty as "the principle of self-government"--"each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as he in no wise interferes with any other man's rights" (1:449).  And he set this in opposition to the slaveholders' tyrannical definition of liberty--"the liberty of making slaves of other people" (1:309).

Having issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address the following November, in which he explained the Civil War as testing the endurance of a nation born in the Declaration of Independence, and thus conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  If that nation could endure, it could have a "new birth of freedom," which was Lincoln's forecast of how the amendments to the Constitution after the war and the Reconstruction of the South would become what some historians now identify as the "Second Founding" of the United States--a renewed dedication to the Lockean principles of equal liberty in the Declaration of Independence.

This would confirm what Lincoln had said in 1857 about the principle of equal liberty in the Declaration of Independence as a "standard maxim for free society" that "even though never perfectly attained," would be "constantly approximated" in the forward movement of American history, and "thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (1:398).  This was Lincoln's philosophy of American moral and political history as the progressive enforcement of the Lockean liberalism of the Declaration of Independence.

Cowie says nothing about this.  He does not even mention the Gettysburg Address.  Nor does he say anything about how the letters written by soldiers in the Civil War (as collected by James McPherson) show that many of them had accepted Lincoln's interpretation of the war as a test of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Nor does he recognize how much of the rhetoric of Reconstruction and of the Civil Rights Movement appealed to the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental statement of America's Lockean Liberal Tradition.

Cowie does recognize, however, how the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865 marked the beginning of the third period in the history of white freedom in its struggle against what white Southerners regarded as federal tyranny.  The 13th Amendment abolished slavery.  The 14th Amendment established the equal liberty of all people as citizens of the United States.  The 15th Amendment declared that the right of citizens to vote could not be denied or abridged "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."  The final section in each of these three amendments declared: "The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."  This allowed the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress to order by legislation the Reconstruction of the South enforced by federal military occupation.

During Reconstruction, freedmen joined organizations--Loyal Leagues and Union Leagues--that built schools and churches while also mobilizing freedmen for political action and teaching them how to negotiate contracts for work.  All of this activity was supported by the Freedmen's Bureau--an office created by Congress and put into the control of the military.  New state governments were established, and freedmen became voters and candidates for office.  White Northerners who moved to the South and white Southerners who accepted the fall of the Confederacy supported Reconstruction and the political dominance of the Republican Party.  For the first time in human history, there was a biracial democracy.  But for many white people in Barbour County and the rest of the South, this was a denial of their freedom enforced by a military tyranny that supported the corrupt rule of the Republican Party over the southern states.

Reconstruction began with statewide conventions of blacks held throughout the South in 1865 and early 1866.  Hundreds of black leaders attended.  They demanded their rights--such as the right to bear arms, serve on juries, assemble peacefully, and vote--and they repeatedly justified these claims by appealing to the Declaration of Independence, which one speaker described as "the broadest, the deepest, the most comprehensive and truthful definition of human freedom that was ever given to the world."  One gathering declared: "By the Declaration of Independence, we believe these are rights which cannot be justly denies us."  Other speakers portrayed the Civil War and emancipation as events in the forward march of "progressive civilization" as embodying "the fundamental truths laid down in the great charter of Republican liberty, the Declaration of Independence."  One observer said in 1868 that "the colored people had read the Declaration until it had become part of their natures."  By the end of 1867, almost all black voters in the South were enrolled in a Union League or some other similar local organization.  It was common at these meetings to have a Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and an anvil or other symbol of labor laying on a table.  Radical Republican leaders of Reconstruction like Charles Sumner claimed that the Declaration of Independence ought to have equal legal standing with the Constitution, so that "anything for human rights is constitutional" (Foner 1988: 110-115, 232, 283, 317, 320; Foner 2019: 13-14, 19).  Cowie says nothing about this.

There were violent attacks on Reconstruction from its beginning in 1865.  The peak of this violence was the Colfax Massacre on Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana.  After a contested 1872 election for governor of Louisiana and local offices, there were violent battles between white and black militia groups.  In Colfax, 60 to 150 black militia men were murdered after they had surrendered to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and Ku Klux Klansmen.  This example became contagious as angry white people joined violent mobs and militia groups that formed what was called the "White Line" to stop Reconstruction.

In Barbour County, this violent movement erupted in the election of 1874.  In Eufaula, the largest city in Barbour County, as many as 80 to 160 black people trying to vote were shot.  Hundreds of people fled from the violence and were not able to vote.  This depressed the Republican vote in Barbour County.  The Black Republican congressman, James T. Rapier, was replaced with a Democratic white supremacist Jeremiah Williams.

Because of such violent resistance to Reconstruction by many white Southerners, support for Reconstruction in the North waned during President Grant's administration.  In 1877, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, which was the effective end to Reconstruction.

This allowed white Southerners in Barbour County and across the South to restore white supremacy through the violent intimidation of blacks (such as lynching) and by finding ways to evade the three Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution.  The 13th Amendment stated: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."  Notice the exception--"except as a punishment for crime."  For white Southerners, this provided a new way to enslave blacks.  Once blacks were convicted of crimes based on flimsy charges, they could be leased out to private employers to labor without pay.  Leased convicts could be forced to pick cotton or work in coal mines under brutal conditions.  The leasing of convicts became a primary source of revenue for Southern governments.  Moreover, convicts were often charged for their own court costs, sheriff fees, jurors' fees, and costs of trial.  White businessmen could then pay off these fees, and they could take the prisoners into indentured servitude.

The 14th Amendment protects the equal liberty of all persons as citizens of the United States.  But in a series of decisions, the Supreme Court distorted the original meaning of the amendment in ways that eviscerated it so that the white supremacist regimes in the South could not be challenged in the federal courts.  For example, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruled that laws of racial segregation did not violate the 14th Amendment if facilities were "separate but equal."

The 15th Amendment declares: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."  White Southern lawmakers found clever ways to evade this amendment.  The right to vote was not "denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," but it was denied by many other restrictions that effectively disenfranchised blacks.  To vote, one could be required to pass a literacy test, be employed for a year, show that one had never been convicted of a crime, pay a poll tax, or prove to a white voter registrar that one was not mentally or morally defective.

This rule of white supremacy prevailed in Barbour County without any serious challenges from the federal government from the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War II.  But Cowie shows that after the war, Barbour County entered a fourth period in its history, in which white segregationists had to defend their white freedom against a new civil rights movement demanding what some historians have called a "Second Reconstruction."  When Barbour County's George Wallace was elected Governor of Alabama in 1962, he became the leading defender of white freedom, not only in Alabama but across the nation.

This new period began in 1947 when President Harry Truman began to turn the federal government towards enforcing the principles of the Declaration of Independence in the American South by overturning the system of racial segregation.  Truman appointed a Committee on Civil Rights to recommend to him legislation that would advance civil rights.  The fundamental principle for the Committee's Report was stated in the words of the Declaration of Independence: "Man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights.  Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men."  The italicized words show that, as the Report said, "there is no essential conflict between freedom and government" as long as government is instituted to secure freedom, and freedom means "the right of a man to manage his own affairs as he sees fit up to the point where what he does interferes with the equal rights of others."

Cowie recognizes that the Report was referring to the Declaration of Independence (295), but he does not see how the Report was embracing Lincoln's idea of the Declaration as setting the "standard maxim for free society," in which freedom for Lincoln meant that "each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as he in no wise interferes with any other man's rights," which denies freedom as domination.

In a speech before ten thousand members of the NAACP gathered at the Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Truman asked the Congress to follow the recommendations of the Report.  To justify the federal enforcement of individual rights, he appealed to four "inspiring charters of human rights--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation."  Cowie refers to Truman's speech, but he does not notice that Truman was endorsing the Report's Lincolnian idea of the "standard maxim for free society" as the guide for American historical progress.

Truman's "Civil Rights Program" split the delegates to the Democratic Convention in 1948 that nominated Truman for President.  Southern delegates failed to defeat a civil rights plank in the party platform.  In the debate over civil rights at the convention, Hubert Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, delivered a speech that appealed to the Declaration of Independence as justifying a civil rights program that would enforce Jefferson's principle "that all men are equal" in their "right to enjoy the blessings of free government."  He declared: "to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late.  To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this:  The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights."  Cowie refers to this speech, but without noting Humphrey's invocation of the Declaration of Independence or the significance of his remark that "we are 172 years late"--pointing to 1776.

Many of the Southern delegates to the convention walked out--including half of the Alabama delegation--and they then held their own convention in Birmingham, Alabama, where they formed the States' Rights Democratic Party (the "Dixiecrats"), which nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for President.  In the election, Thurmond won Alabama along with Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.  But despite the split in the party, Truman was elected president, which was a kind of victory for his civil rights program.

This split the Democratic Party--with most northern Democrats agreeing that the principles of the Declaration of Independence required federal enforcement of a civil rights program, and many southern Democrats rejecting those principles as a violation of states' rights.

George Wallace was a young alternate delegate to the 1948 convention, but he chose to support Truman rather than join the Dixiecrats.  As a young politician, Wallace was a moderate on racial issues, and he was a protege of "Big Jim" Folsom, a New Deal populist who appealed to the Declaration of Independence as supporting racial equality (Carter 1995: 72).  Although Cowie identifies Folsom as "a believer in racial equality," he does not mention Folsom's appeal to the Declaration (299).

When Wallace ran for governor in 1958, he campaigned as a New Deal populist who was moderate on racial issues.  He was moderate enough to have the endorsement of the NAACP!  By contrast, his opponent John Patterson campaigned against racial integration, and he was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Wallace lost.  A few days after his defeat, he told a friend of his: "I was outniggered by John Peterson, and I'll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again."  When Wallace returned to win the governorship in 1962, he had perfected what Cowie calls Wallace's "winning formula": generate some conflict with federal authority over civil rights, and resist the feds on the grounds of "states' rights," which would generate votes for Wallace even when the feds won.  

The national reputation he won from this as a feisty fighter for Southern white freedom against federal tyranny allowed him to campaign for the presidency and to gain a large political following even in the Northern states.  But Cowie exaggerates Wallace's success in promoting white freedom and challenging the civil rights movement.  Ultimately, Wallace failed; and by the mid-1970s, Wallace was asking forgiveness from the civil rights leaders that he had previously opposed.  Wallace's rhetoric of white freedom was defeated by the more powerful Lincolnian rhetoric of equal liberty as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence.

I will explain this in my next post.

REFERENCES

Carter, Dan T. 1995. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics.  New York: Simon and Schuster.

Cowie, Jefferson.  2022. Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. New York: Basic Books.

Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.  New York: Harper & Row.

Foner, Eric. 2019.  The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. New York: W. W. Norton.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher.  New York: Library of America.

Lincoln, Darwin, and the Progressives: Jason Jividen's Book

Northern Illinois University Press has just published Jason Jividen's book--Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln's Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric. Jason is presently an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

I take some special pride in this book, because it originated as a dissertation in political theory that I supervised at NIU. This is the latest addition to a distinguished list of books that were originally political theory dissertations at NIU.

This book is a study of how American presidents in the progressive tradition--Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama--have invoked Abraham Lincoln in their rhetoric as supporting progressivism. Jason's argument is that in doing this, they had to distort Lincoln's political thought. Jason writes:

Lincoln sought to secure individuals' equal liberty to exercise diverse and necessarily unequal talents and abilities in the pursuit of happiness, under rule of law. This dedication to equal liberty expects an inequality of results or outcomes among individuals in pursuit of their interests. Lincoln showed in both word and deed that this pursuit of equality ought to recognize the necessity of various political and constitutional goods in moderating democracy and the pursuit of equality itself. Lincoln's pursuit of equality recognized the worth of the constitutional forms and institutions that help to structure and shape a measured and sober popular government. A large measure of the duty of democratic statesmanship is to foster a moderate love of equality rather than to allow the passion for equality to prompt us to pursue equality at all costs, destroying the institutions that help to make free government possible.

Beginning in the Progressive Era, many who invoked Lincoln's name in the pursuit of modern egalitarian principles nevertheless rejected this Lincolnian understanding of equality. The progressives and their heirs argued consistently that the pursuit of new and expanded notions of egalitarianism necessitated an overcoming of the institutions that Lincoln believed fostered a healthy republican government. This pursuit was guided, above all, by a self-conscious and deliberate turning away from the natural rights principles and constitutionalism that lay beneath the Lincolnian notion of equality in favor of a push for equality under the rubric of progressive history. Appealing to the Lincoln image in their writings and speeches, the progressives and their heirs must reject, revise, or reinterpret Lincoln in order to incorporate the Lincoln image into the rhetoric of progress and modern egalitarianism.

. . .

Progressivism and modern liberalism's rejection of modern natural right thinking leads to an indifference to constitutionalism, separation of powers, and limited government. Again, the choice-worthiness of such institutional arrangements follows from the assumption that there is an enduring and necessarily imperfect human nature that we can comprehend through human reason. Our reason tells us that all men are born with inalienable rights, which by definition place limits upon government. Moreover, given the imperfections of human nature, our reason suggests that political power ought to be constitutionally balanced and limited. Insofar as these principles are rejected in light of historical progress, it is probable that limited constitutional government would be deemed obsolete. The modern pursuit of equality is necessarily limited and tempered by these principles. The denial of an enduring and imperfect human nature, the rejection of the principle that all human beings are equally endowed with natural and inalienable rights, the radicalization of the pursuit of equality, and the willingness to alter constitutional forms and structures in this pursuit, are all intimately related. (175, 178)

As I have argued in Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I believe that a Darwinian view of "enduring and necessarily imperfect human nature" supports Lincoln's principles of equal liberty and limited government.

Against this claim, however, many of the defenders of Lincoln against the distortions of the progressives--particularly, the students of Harry Jaffa--have insisted that the mistake of the progressives was in viewing Lincoln through the lens of Darwinian historicism. It certainly is true, as Jason indicates in his book, that the progressives commonly linked Lincoln and Darwin as manifesting the new organic science of historical progress that transcended the mechanical, Newtonian science of the American founders.

But if the progressives were bad interpreters of Lincoln, they were equally bad interpreters of Darwin. They failed to see how Darwin's science sustained Lincoln's opposition to slavery and his affirmation of equal liberty and limited government.

This historicism of the progessives came not from Lincoln or from Darwin but from the biblical historicism of Hegel--the idea that history can be understood as the unfolding of the intelligent design of a cosmic mind directed to absolute freedom.

Some of my previous posts on these points can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Discovery of the Declaration of Independence by the American People: A Response to Pauline Maier

Pauline Maier's American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997) is the best single book on the history of the Declaration of Independence.  I say that because I have learned more about the Declaration from this book than from any other.  Nevertheless, I disagree with some of her primary claims.

Here is her summary of her argument:

". . . The Declaration was at first forgotten almost entirely, then recalled and celebrated by Jeffersonian Republicans, and later elevated into something akin to holy writ, which made it a prize worth capturing on behalf of one cause after another.  The politics that attended its creation never entirely left its side, such that the Declaration of Independence, which became a powerful statement of national identity, has also been at the center of some of the most intense conflicts in American history, including that over slavery which threatened the nation itself.  In the course of those controversies, the document assumed a function altogether different from that of 1776: it became not a justification of revolution, but a moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation could be judged" (154).

Here and throughout her book, Maier was elaborating ideas first set forth in 1962 in an article by Philip Detweiler--"The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years."  She was also developing the arguments from people like Willmoore Kendall, Mel Bradford, Garry Wills, and the young Harry Jaffa about Lincoln's "inventive" interpretation of the Declaration at Gettysburg.

Although I agree with much of this, I disagree with three points:  her sneering scorn for the elevation of the Declaration "into something akin to holy writ," her claim that the Declaration was "at first forgotten," and her assertion that originally the Declaration did not provide a "moral standard" for government.

POLITICAL RELIGION

As suggested by her mocking title, Maier was disdainful of the religious language and rituals that treated the Declaration as "American Scripture."  She began and ended her book describing her visit to the "Shrine" for the Declaration of Independence and the other "Charters of Freedom" in the Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington.  This reminded her of "the awesome, gilded, pre-Vatican II altars of my Catholic girlhood," and she was disgusted by it all (xiv).

Well, of course, many of us--particularly, those who are academic scholars--will find this sacralization of American political documents a bit ridiculous.  But what's the harm in doing this?  Maier thought this really was harmful.  Here's the last sentence of her book:  "The vitality of the Declaration of Independence rests upon the readiness of the people and their leaders to discuss its implications and to make the crooked ways straight, not in the mummified paper curiosities lying in state at the Archives; in the ritual of politics, not in the worship of false gods who are at odds with our eighteenth-century origins and who war against our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time" (215).

But she offered no evidence to support this claim.  And a few paragraphs before this passage, Maier praised Martin Luther King for his "I have a dream" speech in 1963--the centennial of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation--delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.  King's quoting from the Declaration was part of a sermon filled with Biblical references and imagery.  And so, he was promoting the religiosity of "American Scripture."  But he did this to advocate political change to fulfill the Declaration's promise of equality of rights for all, which advanced the Civil Rights Movement, and thus expressed "our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time."

ALMOST FORGOTTEN?

Maier said the Declaration was "at first almost entirely forgotten."  That "almost" is significant.  I agree that from 1776 to 1790, there were few prominent references to the Declaration--particularly, the second paragraph (the self-evident truths).  But even so, it was not entirely forgotten during this period.

In his critical review of Maier's book, Michael Zuckert pointed to two important references to the Declaration in the 1787 debate over the Constitution (Zuckert 1998:358-59).  First, Zuckert cited Federalist Number 40, where James Madison quoted from the Declaration.  Second, Zuckert quoted the Antifederalist writer Brutus as saying: "If we may collect the sentiments of the people of America, from their own most solemn declaration, they hold these truths as self-evident, that all men are by nature free.  No one man, therefore, or any class of men have a right by the law of nature, or of god, to assume or exercise authority over their fellows.  The origin of society then is to be sought, . . . in the united consent of those who associate."

I have a copy of a letter that Maier sent to Zuckert about his review (October 16, 1999), in which she said that this evidence actually supported her argument.  She noted that Zuckert had not actually quoted the passage from Madison, which referred to "the transcendent and precious right of the people to 'abolish or alter their governments as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'"  She said that since this "imprecise quotation" referred to the Declaration's assertion of the right to revolution, this supported her argument that the Declaration was originally understood as declaring the Americans' right of revolution, but without giving any attention to the Declaration's assertion of equality and inherent rights and the government's duty to secure those rights.

Maier said that the passage from Brutus also sustained her book's argument.  Although Brutus's reference to "self-evident" truths echoes the Declaration of Independence, his statement "that all men are by nature free" sounds more like Virginia's Declaration of Rights adopted in June 1776 after revising George Mason's draft--"all men are by nature equally free and independent."

In her book, Maier did indeed argue that Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights had much more influence on the other revolutionary state bills of rights than did the Declaration of Independence.  But it's hard to see the point of this argument given that she had written that Jefferson's "rewriting of Mason produced a more memorable statement of the same content" (134).  If Jefferson's Declaration had "the same content" as Mason's Declaration, then it would seem that the two declarations were in agreement in their principles.

In her article in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Maier rightly noted that Zuckert had misquoted the passage from Brutus. Brutus had not referred to the Americans' "most solemn declaration" but to their "most solemn declarations" (Storing 1981, 2:372).  Brutus was surely referring not just to the Declaration of Independence but to the state declarations of rights, such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights.  But if these state declarations of rights have "the same content" as the Declaration of Independence in their statement of principles, it's hard to see Maier's point here.

Moreover, there were other clear examples of the Declaration of Independence being cited in the constitutional ratification debates that Zuckert did not mention.  An Antifederalist--"A Georgian"--referred to "our glorious Declaration of Independence" as a model for "the principles of republican liberty and independence" that should be the model for a federal constitution (Storing 1981, 5:129, 135).  In the Pennsylvanian Ratification Convention, John Smilie complained about the lack of a bill of rights in the proposed Constitution, and insisted: "Let us recur to the memorable declaration of the 4th of July, 1776."  He then quoted in full the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence (Bailyn 1993, 1:805).

Clearly, the Declaration of Independence was not "completely forgotten" during this period from 1776 to 1790.

A MORAL STANDARD FOR GOVERNMENT

Maier's most fundamental argument in her book is that the Declaration of Independence as written in 1776 had only one function--to declare and justify revolution--and that it was only many years later that it was transformed so that it had a second function: to provide "a moral standard by which the day-to-day policies and practices of the nation could be judged," with the most prominent principle of that moral standard being the Declaration's assertion that "all men are created equal" and endowed with equal rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (154-55).  

That "moral standard" was stated in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.  But Maier claimed that from 1776 to 1790, almost no one thought that opening section of the Declaration was important.  It was only later, after the Jeffersonian Republicans had transformed the interpretation of the Declaration, that the "self-evident truths" of the second paragraph became the most important part of the Declaration.

Elaborating the story first told by Detweiler, Maier said that in the early years after 1776, the Declaration was celebrated as a practical event--the effective declaration of America's independence from Great Britain--but not as a statement of theoretical principles ("We hold these truths to be self-evident").   In the annual Fourth of July celebrations, almost nothing was said about those principles.

That began to change in the 1790's.  One early sign of the change was an article in a Philadelphia newspaper published on July 7, 1792, where the writer said that the Declaration was "not to be celebrated, merely as affecting the separation of one country from the jurisdiction of another; but as being the result of a rational discussion and definition of the rights of man, and the end of civil government" (Detweiler 1962, 565).

But in 1792, talk about "the rights of man" conjured up images of the French Revolution, which was politically polarizing for Americans.  The Federalists and the Republicans had become the two major parties, and while the Federalists were anti-French and pro-British, the Republicans were pro-French and anti-British.  The Federalists were not inclined to celebrate the Declaration of Independence because it was associated with the French revolutionary spirit, and it was critical of Great Britain.  And since the Federalists were opposed to Jefferson, they could not revere Jefferson's Declaration.

Once Jefferson became President in 1801, his party gained political dominance, and the Jeffersonian Republicans began to create the new image of the Declaration of Independence as the statement of the distinctively American credo of the natural equality of man and government as securing the natural rights of man.  After the War of 1812, the Federalist Party disintegrated, and the Jeffersonian Republican view of the Declaration became pervasive.

As the American debate over slavery intensified during this period, many abolitionists invoked the Declaration's principle of human equality as a moral standard for condemning slavery as naturally unjust. while many proslavery Southern leaders denounced that assertion of equality as a dangerous falsehood.  Although Lincoln did not agree with the abolitionist demand for the immediate abolition of slavery, he did agree that the Declaration's principle of equality was morally right, and that this justified prohibiting the introduction of slavery into the western territories.

Against this, Stephen Douglas argued that the principle of popular sovereignty should allow the people of the western territories to decide by majority vote whether they wanted slavery or not, and that the Declaration was never intended to assert a principle of human equality by which slavery could be morally condemned.  For Douglas, the Declaration had only one purpose--to explain and justify American Independence from Great Britain.

According to Maier, Douglas was right about the original meaning of the Declaration: it was only a Declaration of Independence, and it was not intended to assert the moral standards for a free society, as Lincoln believed (203-206).  What Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address--finding the national identity of America in the Declaration's principles of equality and liberty--was morally inspiring but historically false.

What Maier failed to see, however, is how the actual text of the Declaration explained and justified the Revolution through a general theory of just government (in the first two paragraphs) that also set the moral standards for judging the conduct of any government.  Michael Zuckert has made the best case for this in his essay on "Locke in America: The Philosophy of the Declaration of Independence" (Zuckert 2002, 203-234).  But as I have said in a previous post, I disagree with Zuckert on one point:  while he says that the Declaration assumes a "mythic history" of human politics beginning in the state of nature, I see that history as an empirically true evolutionary history from the state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

When the Jeffersonian Republicans directed public attention to the high moral standards for politics set in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration, they were not creating a fictional "myth," as Maier claimed, but making a true discovery of what was really there in the text of the Declaration.  As one historian of the American Revolution has described it, this was "The Discovery of the Declaration of Independence by the People of the United States" (Fitzpatrick 1924, 9-20).

REFERENCES

Bailyn, Bernard, ed.  1993.  The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification.  2 volumes.  New York: The Library of America.

Detweiler, Philip F.  1962.  "The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years."  William and Mary Quarterly 19: 557-574.

Fitzpatrick, John C.  1924.  The Spirit of the Revolution: New Light from Some of the Original Sources of American History.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Maier, Pauline.  1997.  American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Maier, Pauline.  1999.  "The Strange History of 'All Men Are Created Equal'".  Washington and Lee Law Review 56: 873-888.

Storing, Herbert J., ed.  1981.  The Complete Anti-Federalist. 7 volumes.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zuckert, Michael.  1998.  "A Work of Our Own Hands."  Review of Politics 60: 355-360.

Zuckert, Michael.  2002.  Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy.  Lawrence, KS:  University Press of Kansas.

Trump and the History of Fascism: He Cannot Take Power by Majority Vote or by Force

The Roman Fasces, A Symbol of the Authority and Unity of the Ancient Roman State

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                                 The January 6th Insurrectionists Storm the Capitol Building

Is Donald Trump a fascist?  If he is, does the history of fascism help us to predict whether he is likely to take power as a fascist ruler?

My answer to the first question is Yes.  My answer to the second question is that the history of fascism tells us that fascists cannot take power by majority vote or by force, because they need to be given power by conservative elites.  For Trump to become a fascist ruler, he would have to be put into power by the political and military elites.

THE CONCEPT OF FASCISM

Since he is one of the leading historians of fascism, Robert Paxton has often been asked whether he identifies Trump as a fascist.  Up to the end of Trump's term as president, Paxton said No.  But on January 6, 2021, as he watched the Trump-inspired insurrection on Capitol Hill, which was meant to overturn the election of 2020 and keep Trump in power, he changed his mind.  A few days after the insurrection, he wrote an essay for Newsweek explaining how that insurrection was the final piece of evidence pointing to Trump's character as a fascist.

We now have even more evidence for that conclusion coming from General Mark Milley, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump's presidency, and retired General John Kelly, who was Trump's Chief of Staff for almost a year and a half.  They have reported that Trump wanted to use the military against his political opponents and that he expressed his admiration for how Hitler had used his generals.  Both Milley and Kelly told Trump that their oath to uphold the Constitution would take precedence over their loyalty to the President.  And both concluded that Trump was a fascist.

Paxton's position in the debate over Trump's fascism is unusual.  There are two questions in this debate.  Is Trump a fascist?  And is it helpful to identify him as a fascist?  Most people in the debate either say yes to both questions or no to both.  As he told the New York Times, Paxton says yes to the first question but no to the second.  Yes, Trump is a fascist.  But no it doesn't help the debate to say that, because "fascist" is "a word that generates more heat than light."  

I agree that most of the time "fascist" is a sloppy epithet that we throw around to express our moral disgust with someone we disagree with strongly, and therefore using that word enflames emotions without clarifying the debate.  But when a historian of fascism like Paxton says that Trump is a fascist and explains the exact similarities and differences between Trump and fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, that illuminates the debate by showing how the history of fascism might explain and predict Trump's behavior.

Recently, Trump has said that he is planning to use military force against the "enemy within," which includes "bad people" like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.  This convinced John Kelly (Trump's Chief of Staff from July 2017 to December 2018) that he needed to speak out, and he was interviewed by the New York Times.  Kelly read aloud a definition of fascism:

"Well, looking at the definition of fascism:  It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy."

"Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators--he has said that.  So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

Much of the discussion among historians is about whether there really is a "general definition of fascist."  Some historians argue that since Benito Mussolini originated the term, it should apply only to the specific historical movement of Mussolini's Italian fascism.  In 1919, Mussolini coined the Italian fascismo from fascio--a bundle or sheaf--recalling the Latin fasces:  an axe encased in a bundle of rods carried in public processions to symbolize the authority and unity of the Roman state.

This explains why the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the primary definition of "fascism" as "a nationalist political movement that controlled the government of Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini."

But then the OED also provides a generic definition of "fascism": "an authoritarian and nationalistic system of government and social organization which emerged after the end of the First World War in 1918, and became a prominent force in European politics during the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in Italy and Germany; (later also) an extreme right-wing political ideology based on the principles underlying this system."

As Paxton indicates, there are two reasons for why it's hard to reach agreement on these or any other definitions of fascism.  First, it is hard to define fascism as an ideology because the fascists did not care very much about ideas or doctrines.  They were devoted more to action than thought--they were driven more by feelings than by reason.  That explains why there is no authoritative statement of their ideas comparable to say Marx's Communist Manifesto as a statement of communist doctrines.  Mussolini and Hitler did issue some programmatic statements of fascist ideas.  But then their actions often contradicted what they had promised to do, and they never felt compelled to justify their actions as consistent with their ideas.  By contrast, Marxist leaders like Lenin and Stalin had to make elaborate arguments for why their actions were in conformity with the texts of Marx and Engels.

The second reason for why it's so hard to define fascism is that fascism never had a fixed or static identity because it changed as it passed through five stages: (1) the initial creation of a fascist movement, (2) the rooting of the movement as a party in a political system, (3) the acquisition of ruling power by the fascist leader and his party, (4) the exercise of that ruling power, and (5) the long term development of fascist power towards radicalization or dissolution.  Fascism looks different at each of these stages.  And while every fascist movement reaches Stage One, only a few reach Stage Two.  And very few--maybe only in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany--reach Stage Three by actually gaining ruling power.  (Most of what have been commonly assumed to be examples of fascists taking power--like Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal--are really examples of traditional authoritarianism rather than pure fascism.)

Paxton has explained this fascist history of five stages in an article--"The Five Stages of Fascism" (1998)--and he has elaborated this history and analysis in a book--The Anatomy of Fascism (2004).

Despite his reluctance to reduce fascism to a single definition, Paxton does think that from this history of fascist actions in five stages, one can deduce the ideas implicit in those actions, which he summarizes in one long "functional definition of fascism":

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion" (1998: 21; 2004: 218).

He also states this as nine "mobilizing passions" that "belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions":

(1) "a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;"

(2) "the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;"

(3) "the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;"

(4) "dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;"

(5) "the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;"

(6) "the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;"

(7) "the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;"

(8) "the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;"

(9) "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Do Trump and his MAGA party manifest most of these fascist passions?  You can answer this for yourself by watching the video of the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Garden and checking off the items on this list.

Okay, so you're not going to watch all six and a half hours of this!  But you can skip around it and see if it shows the "mobilizing passions" of fascism.

Now there are a few items in Paxton's definition and list of passions that don't show up here.  For example, Trump and his people don't express any interest in "external expansion"--they're not proposing to invade other countries.

We also might question whether there's any "collaboration with traditional elites" here, since the speakers repeatedly attack the "elites" in the Democratic Party.  But there is certainly a collaboration with some economic elites (such as Elon Musk) and some of the conservative elites in the Republican Party.

On the other hand, there are some distinctive traits of American Fascism here that are not prominent in Paxton's sketch of fascism.  While fascists like Mussolini and Hitler have been secular or perhaps pagan, American Fascists are often Christian Nationalists defending American Christians as the Chosen People of God against their godless enemies.  So, you'll notice that the Madison Square Garden rally begins with a prayer read by Tiffany Justice, one of the founders of "Moms for Liberty," who prays for God to intervene in support of Trump's election, and she thanks God for His miracle in saving Trump from being assassinated.  Later in the rally, David Rem holds up a cross at the podium and declares that Kamala Harris is the "Devil" and "the Antichrist."  Thus, we have the image of Trump as God's Chosen One fighting for America against the forces of demonic evil led by the Antichrist in the Last Battle as described in the book of Revelation.

Previously, I have written about the Christian Evangelicals who identify Trump as being the Messiah like Cyrus in the Old Testament.

NEITHER BY VOTE NOR BY FORCE

So, how do fascists come into ruling power (Stage Three)?  And does the history of fascists taking power help us to predict whether Trump's fascism could come into power in America?

It has been commonly assumed that fascists have come to power by force alone--through a coup d'etat.  Or, occasionally, you'll hear people say that fascists like Mussolini and Hitler took power through majority vote at the ballot box.  As Paxton and other historians have shown, both claims are false.

"Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors.  Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg.  Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted."  We should see then that "no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power" (Paxton 1998: 17; 2004: 96-97).

The story that Mussolini's Fascists seized power over Italy through their "March on Rome" is fascist propaganda.  It is true that on October 28, 1922, about nine thousand Blackshirts marched to the gates of Rome.  But they were "poorly armed, wearing makeshift uniforms, short of food and water, and milling about in a discouraging rain" (Paxton 2004: 89).  Mussolini arrived in Rome from Milan on the morning of October 30, and he met with the King.  Although the King had plenty of soldiers who could have dispersed the Blackshirts, he foresaw that this would be bloody.  He decided, instead, to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister.  Mussolini was bluffing, and his bluff worked.

The next day--October 31--with Mussolini already in office, ten thousand Blackshirts marched in a parade through Rome.  That evening, Mussolini had all of his Blackshirts sent out of town in fifty special trains.  The parade had established the myth that his Blackshirts had taken power by their own will and force.  October 28 became a national holiday and the first day of the Fascist New Year.

A year later, Hitler showed that he had been taken in by Mussolini's propaganda about the "March on Rome."  He attempted his own "march" on November 8, 1923.  During a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, he tried to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to launch a coup d'etat against the federal government in Berlin.  This "Beer Hall Putsch" was easily put down by police who fired on the Nazi marchers.  Hitler was arrested and imprisoned.  He learned the lesson that fascist political power could not be taken by force alone as long as the police and soldiers remained loyal to the government.

Hitler also learned that while he would have to work within the parliamentary party system, he could not come to power by winning a majority vote for his party.  The Nazis became the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary elections of July 31, 1932, when they won 37.2 percent of the vote.  But this dropped to 33.1 percent in the election of November 6, 1932.  Even when Hitler had become chancellor, and he could use his Storm Troopers to intimidate voters, the Nazi Party won only 43.9 percent of the vote in the elections of March 6, 1932.  By comparison, the Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats in the parliamentary election of May 15, 1921.

Just as Mussolini had become the Italian Prime Minister by the appointment of the King, Hitler became the German Chancellor by the appointment of President Paul Hindenburg.  In both cases, conservative elites decided that appointing fascist leaders as the heads of government was the only way to form parliamentary majorities capable of vigorous governing without having to form coalitions with radical socialist and communist parties.

These conservatives saw this as the only way to resolve the unprecedented crises that they faced.  The first crisis was the social and political crisis created in the wake of World War One, which included the threat of a communist revolution in Western Europe sparked by the Russian Revolution.  The second crisis was the Great Global Depression that began in 1929.  By 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, over 30% of the German workforce was unemployed.  Part of this was the "crisis of liberalism" insofar as it seemed that liberal democracy could not solve these problems.

On February 28, 1933, a fire set by a Dutch communist youth gutted the Reichstag building in Berlin.  This was generally believed to be the beginning of a communist coup.  This provoked President Hindenburg into using his emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, and he issued a decree suspending the legal protection of personal liberties.  This allowed Hitler's Brownshirts to use violence against Jews and others suspected of left-wing activities.  Then, on March 24 of 1933, parliament passed an Enabling Act that delegated its legislative powers to the executive.  This allowed Hitler to rule by his own personal authority from 1933 to the end of the war.  He was free to use violence against the "enemies of the people."  Here we see the fatal flaw in the Weimar Constitution--its openness to unchecked executive prerogative powers.

So, what does this history suggest as to whether and how Trump's fascism could gain ruling power in America?  First, we should say that Trump has never won an election by majority vote, although he won in 2016 in the Electoral College.  Like Hitler, he seems to have about 35-40 percent of the voters as a solid base.  When he ran in 2016, he was not clearly identified as a fascist candidate.  But now, after the January 6th insurrection and his open threats to use military force against the "enemy within," his fascist propensities have become clear to many voters.  And that's why I am predicting that Harris will win this election.

But if he does win, perhaps only in the Electoral College, can't we predict that he will make himself a fascist dictator?  And even if he loses, can't we predict that Trump will say the election has been stolen again, as it was in 2020?  And won't he lead his MAGA movement into a violent insurrection to take power by force alone?  

Well, sure, we can imagine that he will try something like this.  But from what we have seen from his failure to overturn the election of 2020, we can predict, as I argued a few years ago, that Trump will not have the guts or the guns to launch a successful coup.  

In his last year in office, Trump's fascist advisors told him that he needed to declare martial law (under the Insurrection Act) and order the military to suppress the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and to overturn the election.  He did not act on their advice because he lacked the courage to try this, and because his generals had told him they would not obey his orders if they violated the Constitution.  There is no reason to believe that there will be any change in these circumstances after the election.

Here is where I disagree with Robert Kagan's argument that regardless of whether Trump wins or loses the election, his fascism will destroy liberal democracy in America.  As I explained in my response to Kagan, the "crisis" that America faces today is nowhere near as deep as the crisis faced by Italy and Germany between the wars.  There is no threat of Communist Revolution in America despite Trump's silly assertion that the Democrats are Communists.  There is no Great Depression in America.  The American economy is more prosperous than it has ever been.

And, most importantly, there is no "crisis of liberalism" in America today comparable to what may have happened in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.  While I agree with Kagan's claim that Trump's fascism is rooted in an American tradition of illiberalism, the American liberal tradition is stronger today than it has ever been.  One sign of that is that Trump and his supporters must insist that of course Trump is not a fascist, and of course the theme of his campaign is "freedom."

Moreover, even Kagan recognizes that illiberal fascists like Trump are desperate to win this election because they recognize that America is experiencing a "demographic shift" that favors liberalism over illiberalism:  as America becomes ever more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, and religiously pluralistic, it becomes impossible for any single ethnoreligious group to dominate American politics and culture, and the appeal of liberalism as the only means of holding such a pluralistic society together will grow ever stronger.

In this election and its aftermath, we will see the confirmation of Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history":  liberalism will prevail over fascism.

THE LIBERAL REFUTATION OF ILLIBERALISM: BY FORCE OF IDEAS AND ARMS

Remember the ninth "mobilizing passion" of fascism:  "the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle."

Lockean Liberals can accept that challenge and agree that liberalism must prevail over illiberalism through Darwinian cultural group selection in the war of ideas and arms.

Although ideas don't matter very much to fascism, particularly in its later stages when it takes political power, ideas do matter in the early creation of fascist movements.  I have written about the "Nazi philosophers"--from Plato and Fichte to Nietzsche and Heidegger.  And I have suggested the ways in which liberalism wins the intellectual war with illiberalism.  Indeed, the intellectual victory of liberalism has been so clear that even those who pose as antiliberals--Patrick Deneen, for example, turn out ultimately to be liberals.

Moreover, as Locke saw, there is a practical expression of the theoretical appeal of liberalism when people "vote with their feet" and choose to immigrate to those countries with more freedom, which is one form of cultural group selection.

But Locke also saw that the power of liberal ideas must ultimately be backed up with the power of liberal arms in the "Appeal to Heaven."  So, for example, the Declaration of Independence was not only a declaration of the "self-evident truths" of equal natural rights but also a declaration of war, in which the outcome would depend on the "popular Lockeanism" of the Americans fighting in the war.

Then, in 1861, the Confederate States of America declared themselves a nation conceived in the liberty of white men to enslave others and dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal; and they engaged in a great war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.  That nation did not endure because it was defeated by a Lockean liberal regime with a larger population of well-armed fighting men, including emancipated slaves, many of whom understood that they were fighting for the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  As the proslavery Southerner George Fitzhugh admitted, the Union defeat of the Confederacy was the victory of John Locke over Robert Filmer.

But that was not enough to ensure the "new birth of freedom."  The use of military force to suppress the fascist militias of the Klan in the Reconstruction Era and then in the Second Reconstruction (the Civil Rights Movement) to reform the Jim Crow South was required for overthrowing the illiberal tradition of the American South.  This included a Black tradition of armed self-defense and rebellion.  Ultimately, Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty defeated George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as domination.

Similarly, in World War Two, we saw a test in war of the fascist "right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint."  And with the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in war, we saw that there is a sense in which might does make right, when people in the state of nature exercise "the executive power of the law of nature" to resist and punish those who would dominate them.

REFERENCES

Kagan, Robert.  2024.  Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart--Again.  New York: Knopf.

Paxton, Robert O.  1998.  "The Five Faces of Fascism."  The Journal of Modern History 70 (March): 1-23.

Paxton, Robert O.  2004.  The Anatomy of Fascism.  New York: Random House.

Paxton, Robert O.  2021. "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist.  Until Now."  Newsweek, January 11.

Schmidt, Michael S.  2024.  "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator."  The New York Times, October 22.

Zerofsky, Elisabeth. 2024. "Is It Fascism?  A Leading Historian Changes His MInd."  The New York Times, October 23.