“Most Southerners, even ones who felt nationalistic toward the Confederacy, were not slaveowners.”

Of course they weren’t. In some parts of the Deep South, “most Southerners” were Black slaves.

But this misses the point. The question is about who the driving forces behind “the Southern cause” were, what they took the nature of their cause to be, and the reasons they gave for fighting for it.

And when you set out to answer that question, even a cursory glance at the public statements of men such as Jefferson Davis, Alexander “Cornerstone” Stephens, Robert E. Lee, and other members of the slaver aristocracy (who overwhelmingly dominated the secessionist conventions, the state governments, and the Confederate government)—not to mention at the Confederate constitution and other key sources—reveals that the prime motive of the people who were driving the process was the preservation of white supremacy and race slavery.

Certainly some whites who neither owned slaves nor were family members of anyone who did, still went out to fight for the Confederacy. But it’s essential to keep in perspective just how little sway they had in the reasoning or the decision-making that led into the hostilities that they later joined. And also that a lot of non-slaveholders weren’t interested in fighting for the Confederacy at all—which is why they were targeted by the “Twenty-Nigger” draft law, and why they led anti-Confederate uprisings across the large swaths of Virginia, Tennessee, etc. where the slaver population was very low.

Micha: “Uh, oh, Rad, you’re coming dangerously close to defining me back into the libertarian movement. When should I expect my Welcome Back party? ;)”

Hee hee. Well, I was on the “family resemblence” side of the definitional debate with you, so you won’t get any complaints from me here. I don’t think that you have to hold a rigorous natural rights theory of justice to count as a libertarian. You have to hold it to keep from counting as grossly mistaken, but that’s another issue entirely…

Stefan: “On the other hand, maybe Rand is afraid that if we let Micha into the fold of libertarians as a consequentialist …”

Ah, but remember that Rand and the ARIans think that Micha and others are already in the fold of libertarians; that’s much of why they object to “libertarianism” as such. The basic idea (as expressed, e.g., by Peikoff in “Fact and Value”) is that libertarianism involves not only specific claims about political outcomes but also a certain attitude towards those claims (i.e., that your primary political alliances are with anyone and everyone who agree with those claims, regardless of the reason for their agreement), and that the lack of “quality control” involved is pernicious, or unprincipled, or something.

Also, of course, ARIans have very strong disagreements with specific groups of libertarians over issues such as the legitimacy of an enforced monopoly government, legal protections of “intellectual property”, the advisability of annihilating Tehran in a nuclear massacre, etc.

gc suggests the following analogy: “Gould is to evolution … as … Freud is to psychiatry … as … Marx is to economics”

This gives significantly too much in the way of props to mainstream “quantitative” psychiatry and economics. Marx and Freud both have significant advantages over the status quo in psychiatry and economics—which is not a sign of their virtues, but rather of the fields’ vices.

“I don’t think one can ever really have too much quantitative thought in a field.”

What if it’s not a quantitative field?

Quoth John: ‘If a bank robber walks into a bank and points a fake gun at the teller screaming, “Give me the money in the safe within five seconds or I will kill you,” and the teller proceeds to shoot the assailant, it is self-defense because the teller thought her life was in danger.’

But there are three features here which make the situation you posit saliently different from the situation between Iraq and the United States.

1) The bank robber with the (unbeknownst to you) fake gun is making a specific, credible threat.

2) There’s no good way of determining whether the gun is real or not without using force.

3) There’s no good way of stopping the bank robber from using the gun against you if it does turn out to be real.

But (2) and (3) are manifestly not the case for Iraq. Here as elsewhere there’s an obligation to defend yourself by the least aggressive means that can be counted on to work—if the bank teller could have just as safely disarmed the bank robber with a karate chop, or could have discovered a fake gun quickly and without risk, then it would be murder to just shoot the bank robber without first availing herself of these means. And for all the faults of his ideas about foreign policy ideas (and oh, there are many!) Kerry is right about something here in relation to Iraq: if the goal was to ensure that Hussein disarmed himself of NBC weapons, then it’s quite clear that there was a way to achieve that goal without bombing the hell out of Iraq—that is, letting the inspections work. Bush presented no clear case whatsoever that inspections were failing; he just obstructed them and then decided around March that it was time for war.

What about (1)? Even if there were credible reasons to believe that Hussein had or was actively developing NBC weapons (and I find that much more dubious than you seem to, given what we now know about the politically-driven intelligence procedures leading up to the war), was there any specific, credible threat of using them against the United States? I certainly don’t recall that Hussein made any such threats; the administration’s case seemed to be founded on the speculation that he might have given weapons to terrorist groups that have made specific threats against the U.S.—a shaky speculation which we knew by the outbreak of the war to be completely unfounded, and which has only been confirmed as such since then.

As for Jefferson’s foreign policy, it’s certainly the case that he would have despised both Bush’s unrestrained warmongering and Kerry’s longing for as many entangling alliances as possible. His hope for the spread of liberty worldwide (as, for example, in his early support of the French Revolution) makes for some superficial resemblence between him and the “Freedom is on the March” crew, but of course he would have absolutely detested the imperial and militaristic means by which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. have gone about it.

Jefferson also would have detested the notion that the United States hs no obligation to make a credible case to honest observers around the world (which is what Kerry protested—rightly or wrongly—that we had not done in the case of Iraq) that taking arms was both legitimate and being used as a last resort. I take this to have been Roderick’s main point (however ineptly put by me).

Phelps: “Justified or not, I intend to win any war we are in, the same that I intend to win any fight I am in, whether I started it or not.”

If you honestly think that a war is unjustified, what possible moral grounds could you have for trying to stick through and win it?

Obviously you do think that war is justified—that’s why you keep fighting to win.

Oh, a more substantive difference that I neglected: orthodox Objectivists hold that libertarianism, as a political movement, is premature. The official line from Rand and from the ARI has been that philosophical and cultural change needs to precede any serious or lasting political shift towards a free society, and that therefore libertarian political organizing amounts to time wasted pushing on a string.

“While we’re on the topic, could someone explain why Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff hate libertarianism? I remember reading an essay by Peikoff on the subject a few years ago, but most of it sounded like objecto-babble.”

The official orthodox reason for refusing to identify with “libertarianism” is, roughly, that “libertarianism” is claimed to involve an uncritical alliance with anyone who happens to share your views about political outcomes, without concern for why they hold those views. I.E., “libertarianism” can encompass not only an Objectivist theory of politics founded on an Objectivist theory of morality founded on Objectivist theories of knowledge, reality, and human nature; but also consequentialists, anarchists, Rothbardians, constitutionalists, pot-smoking hippies, and other ne’er-do-wells that Miss Rand wouldn’t want to be caught dead associating with. Peter Schwartz has a ridiculous essay (“Libertarianism: the perversion of liberty” or somesuch) in which he expounds the theory in much more polemical terms than even Rand ever mustered, which goes on at length about how libertarians broadly, and Murray Rothbard especially, are a bunch of whim-worshipping nihilists held together by nothing but the urge to destroy.

I think the real reasons have more to do with the antagonism between Rand and Rothbard, and with Objectivists’ revulsions at the aforementioned post-smoking hippies.

Kennedy: “No, it’s a contract for specific performance.”

Let’s say I sign a contract with you, selling myself into bondage as a farm worker for the rest of my life (in return, say, for an annuity given to my children). After a few weeks I realize that this really sucks, refuse to work, and when you threaten to whip me, I run away.

If human rights are inalienable (and they are), there’s no legitimate basis for you to send out the hounds and force me to come back. Most people would say that what you are doing is using force to keep me in slavery—even though I signed a contract for specific performance.

Is this relevantly different from the situation of a soldier being forced not to “desert” if he decides that he’s not going to fight anymore, such that one is slavery and the other is not? If it is, then how?

Kinsella: “it seems simply to express the view that political units have a right to secede; which of course was also Calhoun’s view.” Except for the “political units” that happen to be made up of Black people, of course. Oops!

Fulwiler: ‘Re: Calhoun’s views. Well, he obviously did not consider the master /slave relationship to be a “political” association.’ False. Here’s Calhoun, defending the freedom to beat, whip, or kill Negroes if they don’t do what you tell them to in “Slavery a Positive Good”: “But I will not dwell on this aspect of the question; I turn to the political; and here I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions. It is useless to disguise the fact. There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict; and which explains why it is that the political condition of the slaveholding States has been so much more stable and quiet than that of the North.” (Bonus points for endorsing the Marxist theory of class when it comes to the Yankees!)

Fulwiler: ‘Do you? I don’t see that it is.’ Of course it was; slavery was a creature of the law—defended and enforced by agents of the government. Slavery as a political institution in the South was based on the claim that Black slaves were not citizens of the several states, and so not entitled to self-defense or help from the government in defending against abduction, assault, robbery, rape, murder, etc. The subordinate political status was the essential part of Southern slavery; without it, there could be no legal basis whatever for holding others in bondage.

(In fact there was no legal basis whatever, since there is no such thing as legitimate authority to make a law that enslaves other human beings. But it should be quite clear that Southern slavers claimed a political basis for their ability to keep black Southerners enslaved.)

… although Tom DiLorenzo and I would say the Southerners were right to defend themselves …

Throughout the Civil War, the Confederates were actually fighting a two-front war: about 1/3 of all Confederate military forces were continually held behind the lines in order to capture fugitive slaves and suppress slave revolts (which had been escalating for decades, and erupted across the South during the war).

I agree that Southerners had a right to defend themselves against aggression. Including the Black ones. Describing the Confederate war effort (1/3 of which was directed against Black Southerners seceding from their slave pens) as self-defense seems dubious at best.