Tag

Southern Political Tradition

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Triumph and Subjugation

In 1935 Lyon Gardiner Tyler – descendant of 10th President John Tyler – wrote: “The old Union was a union of consent; the present Union is one of force. For many years after the war, the South was held as a subject province, and any privileges it now enjoys are mere concessions from its conquerors, not rights inherited from the…
Valerie Protopapas
April 21, 2022
Review Posts

Chaining Down Leviathan

A review of Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865 (Abbeville Institute Press, 2021) by Marco Bassani How is it that America became a “strong but limited” government, and the world’s richest and most free country? That is the central question both considered and answered by Luigi Marco Bassani in his new work, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American…
Dave Benner
August 10, 2021
Blog

The Disappearance of Southern Conservatism

Abraham Lincoln has become, for most mainline conservatives, an icon, and, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., no opportunity is lost—it seems—on Fox News or in the establishment “conservative press,” to stress just how much conservatively-minded Americans owe to these two canonized martyrs. Any demurer, any dissent or disagreement, brings forth condemnations of the complainant as a “racist” or “reactionary,”…
Boyd Cathey
May 3, 2021
Blog

A Fig for the Constitution

“A fig for the Constitution” if it does not protect our most basic rights was John Randolph’s nineteenth century estimation of the value of the Constitution. In 2021 his words of warning are even more applicable. What power does the Constitution have to protect the First Amendment’s guarantee to peacefully assemble and the free exercise of religion when the government…
James Ronald Kennedy
February 11, 2021
Blog

Defining Southern Conservatism

Southern conservatism is considered an enigma when juxtaposed against the bipartisan political configuration having been imposed upon us since the beginning of the American experiment. The candor of its echoed sentiment as a past relic meets the ears of many contemporary Americans with halted sails as its message could never penetrate their intellect. When the essence of its subject is…
Brad Pond
February 4, 2021
Blog

A Red and Blue Divorce?

The red and the blue—states that is-- are as different as the colorless black and white landscapes absent from the color spectrum. The concept of separate states for separate cultures is as old as Canaan and Egypt. The concept of separation for moral law is as old as these two, as well. Today on any given "news" outlet, maps are…
Paul H. Yarbrough
December 14, 2020
Blog

A Neo-Confederate Prediction of Post-Election America

The political chaos that has accompanied President Trump’s first term will not abate anytime soon. From the Russian Collusion hoax to rioting in the streets to the public policy responses to the Covid-19 so-called pandemic, there appears to be something afoot that does not bode well for the future. Whether the motivation is ideological, economic, official incompetence, or a toxic…
Marshall DeRosa
October 27, 2020
Blog

Federalists Still Attack Calhoun

John C. Calhoun was the last eloquent political philosopher to stand against the ideology and intentions of the Federalists. He was the last to stand firmly in the halls of the Senate and articulate exactly what it would mean to allow power to become centralized under an unconstrained federal government. He died in 1850.  His words are ignored and personage…
Barry Clark
March 18, 2020
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Democracy vs. Aristocracy in Virginia in 1830

There is in some of our libraries a certain book which the writer of this article ventures to believe is not gener­ally as familiar as it should be to the student of politics. For himself, he chanced one day, several years ago, to blow the dust from off its time-worn binding and nine hun­dred dreary-looking pages of fine print, to…
Jeffrey R. Brackett
June 14, 2019
Blog

The Limits of a Politics of Tolerance

Secession, nullification, and interposition, like the poor, we shall always have with us. These are as American, indeed more American, than apple pie and baseball. Our new federal union, outlined in the Constitution written at the Philadelphia Convention and ratified by the independent states in their separate conventions, was barely out of the gate before the first constitutional crisis hit…
John Devanny
June 10, 2019
Blog

Remembering Real Southern Statesmen

Over the years I have known a few—very few—politicians whom I have admired greatly. It seems that the age of those remarkable statesmen and political leaders who once gave substance and guidance to this nation and to our states has passed for good. Think of it: during the first half century of the existence of the old American Republic we…
Boyd Cathey
June 5, 2019
Blog

The Southern Tradition Promotes Domestic Peace

I want to tell you a story that you won’t read in the mainstream news. It is a positive story, about people from different backgrounds, who have different cultures, coming together to work for a shared dream. It is a story of people who know they are different from each other, but recognize they can still respect each other and…
Marcus Ruiz Evans
June 3, 2019
Blog

The Southern Critique of Centralization

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique…
Donald Livingston
January 28, 2019
Review Posts

John C. Calhoun and “State’s Rights”

  The following is an abridged version of a chapter which will appear in the forthcoming, From Founding Fathers to Fire-Eaters: The Constitutional Doctrine of States’ Rights in the Old South  “Union among ourselves is not only necessary for our safety, but for the preservation of the common liberties and institutions of the whole confederacy. We constitute the balance wheel…
James Rutledge Roesch
August 25, 2015
Blog

We Are All Jeffersonians

Thomas Jefferson is perhaps the greatest enigma of the American age. He wrote and spoke on so many topics that he has become the symbol of virtually every strain of uniquely American political thought. Jefferson is the democrat, the agrarian, the federalist, the republican, the radical, the conservative, the statesman, the planter, the intellectual, the philosopher, the educator. Volumes have…
Brion McClanahan
April 13, 2015
Blog

The Antidote for Yankee Self-Righteous Delusional Disorder

The closing days of the sesquicentennial has offered media outlets the chance to reflect on the outcome of the War. The results were to be expected. Both “conservative” and “liberal” websites have lamented that the end of the War did not produce the sweeping political and social revolution that could have been, or in their minds should have been. Three…
Brion McClanahan
April 10, 2015
Blog

John Tyler Son of Virginia

From the Confederate Veteran Magazine, Volume 4, 1916, pages 4-5. John Tyler, distinguished Virginian and tenth President of the United States, has received fitting, though long-deferred, honor from the country he served. Fifty-three years after his death the United States government has erected a handsome monument at his last resting place, in the shades of beautiful Hollywood Cemetery, at Richmond,…
Abbeville Institute
April 2, 2015
Clyde Wilson Library

A Southern Tradition: Restraining Bad Government

In talking about the Southern political tradition, it is most appropriate to point to the North Carolina Regulators and the Battle of Alamance Creek. This event was, in fact, only one of many such episodes in the colonial South--in the first 169 years of our history as Southerners before the first War of Independence. There was Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia…
Clyde Wilson
April 1, 2015
Blog

Calhoun on American Government, Politics, and War

"When it comes to be once understood that politics is a game; that those who are engaged in it but act a part; that they make this or that profession, not from honest conviction or intent to fulfill it, but as the means of deluding the people, and through that delusion to acquire power, when such professions are to be…
Clyde Wilson
March 19, 2015
Blog

Please “Dump Dixie”

Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast believes “It’s Time to Dump Dixie.” Please do. He also thinks that there may be a point in the future when the South should have its independence. Hallelujah, but we tried that once and were forced to keep company with our “kind” neighbors to the North, those like Tomasky who call the South, “one…
Brion McClanahan
December 10, 2014
Blog

Cheesehead Secessionists

In April, several members of the Wisconsin Republican Party inserted a resolution in the State Party platform expressly recognizing the right of their State to secede from the Union. It was voted down May 3, but the move received national press. The Daily Beast published an article on both the resolution and modern secession movements in Vermont and Alaska, and…
Brion McClanahan
May 22, 2014
Blog

Cheesehead Secessionists

In April, several members of the Wisconsin Republican Party inserted a resolution in the State Party platform expressly recognizing the right of their State to secede from the Union. It was voted down May 3, but the move received national press. The Daily Beast published an article on both the resolution and modern secession movements in Vermont and Alaska, and…
Brion McClanahan
May 22, 2014