Poll: 37% of Miss. Republicans would back new Confederacy

[General Zod]

Fascinating. Does that logic of a lack of representation legitimising insurrection apply to Native Americans, African Americans, and anyone else not in the White Guy Voting Club?

Are you implying that they don't have representation now, or in the past?

How many Natives do you know of in Congress?

[Gandalf]

However, none of that entitled the Slave Power to run off with nearly two million square kilometers of territory and millions of dollars worth of U.S. property, because whatever one may think of the legitimacy of slave rebellion and native reconquest, their leaders were neither slaves nor natives, but rather fully vested members of the White Guy Voting Club who were pissed off because a single election, the results of which they were bound to respect, hadn't gone their way and who, it cannot be stressed enough, intended precisely the opposite of restoring the natives and liberating the slaves, rather having the stated goal of expanding slavery (and their territory) to the west and south.

What a sentence!

Anyway, can you please explain what makes it the US's land to lose, without appealing to an idea of the Northern Slave Power's moral superiority?

[Gandalf]

Fascinating. Does that logic of a lack of representation legitimising insurrection apply to Native Americans, African Americans, and anyone else not in the White Guy Voting Club?

Are you implying that they don't have representation now, or in the past?

I'll admit I wrote that statement with the past in mind, but if you want to discuss it with respect to the present I'd gladly have a read.

[Maraxus]

How many Natives do you know of in Congress?

Two. Markwayne Mullen and Tom Cole. Both from Oklahoma. There'd be more if you counted certain members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

I'll admit I wrote that statement with the past in mind, but if you want to discuss it with respect to the present I'd gladly have a read.

Based on Congress, minority representation isn't super great. The Congressional Black Caucus exercises real influence over Democratic policy in the House. The House Congressional Hispanic Conference (Democratic) and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (Republican) have degrees of influence, with the Dems giving far more power to Hispanic representatives. We have a small but rapidly growing number of Asian American reps, each with very diverse constituencies.

Don't get me wrong. People of color are still super unrepresented in Congress and will probably stay that way, unless they start collectively voting as often as whities do. But one of the two parties has a much better track record when it comes to electing, and more importantly representing, people of color. Or they're exploiting people of color for their votes and are basically full of incompetent boobs who aren't much more than marginally better than the GOP. It's so hard to gauge sometimes.

[Simon_Jester]

Fascinating. Does that logic of a lack of representation legitimising insurrection apply to Native Americans, African Americans, and anyone else not in the White Guy Voting Club?

Arguably.

The key point, though, is this. Not having representation may or may not justify you rising up in armed revolt. But you cannot reasonably rise up in armed revolt against a government that does represent you, just because you happen to have lost one election in a fair contest.

In other words, taxation without representation may be tyranny.

But taxation with representation definitely isn't tyranny.

If democracy is going to function at all, there has to be a concept of a loyal opposition- the party that is represented in the government but lost has to be willing to abide by the ballot box rather than trying to appeal to the bullet box to change the result. Otherwise, if the idea that military force can be used to override election results takes root, the logical endpoint is that democracy collapses in a spray of military dictatorships and coups.

This is especially true when the party that just lost the election is one that held power for decades previously and was able to extract massive concessions from the rest of the nation about the shape of future events, using nothing BUT the political leverage made available by repeated threats to secede.

However, none of that entitled the Slave Power to run off with nearly two million square kilometers of territory and millions of dollars worth of U.S. property, because whatever one may think of the legitimacy of slave rebellion and native reconquest, their leaders were neither slaves nor natives, but rather fully vested members of the White Guy Voting Club who were pissed off because a single election, the results of which they were bound to respect, hadn't gone their way and who, it cannot be stressed enough, intended precisely the opposite of restoring the natives and liberating the slaves, rather having the stated goal of expanding slavery (and their territory) to the west and south.

What a sentence!

Anyway, can you please explain what makes it the US's land to lose, without appealing to an idea of the Northern Slave Power's moral superiority?

1) You didn't actually address that at all.
2) You obviously have no idea what "Slave Power" means; please refamiliarize yourself with the history of the political debates running up to 1860.
3) The operational point here is that regardless of who the land actually was, it didn't in any sense 'really' belong to the class of rich white plantation-owners who controlled the Confederacy and whose interest in sustaining slavery brought about the revolt, because they simply could not abide the idea of losing the political debate.

[Patroklos]

I think you are being a bit disengenuous by saying the South controlled the government. The House flopped almost every to every other election decades before more nor was there a lock on the presidency which was much less relevant back then anyway. The only place your narrative remotely holds true is in the Senate, where Democrats held sway from 1845 to the war but even then they relied on New England Democrats to hold the majority.

It's not as clear cut as you make it sound, especially since the democrat and republican dichotomy didn't show up until the 1850s as solid ideological blocks. Political party affiliation in the first half of the nineteenth century as fluid and evolving at best.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presiden ... ted_States

http://history.house.gov/Records-and-Research/

https://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/histo ... rtydiv.htm

Influence they had, as in they were not being run over roughshod at every turn. Control? No.

[Simon_Jester]

To be more precise, the South didn't have absolute control, but they did have enough leverage to stop anything from threatening the institution of slavery. And to impose federal laws on the free states to prevent them from even trying to help slaves that escaped onto their soil.

While the specific party affiliations of the era were fluid, there was a solid block of Southern political figures that coalesced around John Calhoun, who held a very strong position in American politics from the 1820s clear up through the 1850s. They didn't have everything at all times, but they had everything at some times, and at least had enough at all other times.

[Rogue 9]

However, none of that entitled the Slave Power to run off with nearly two million square kilometers of territory and millions of dollars worth of U.S. property, because whatever one may think of the legitimacy of slave rebellion and native reconquest, their leaders were neither slaves nor natives, but rather fully vested members of the White Guy Voting Club who were pissed off because a single election, the results of which they were bound to respect, hadn't gone their way and who, it cannot be stressed enough, intended precisely the opposite of restoring the natives and liberating the slaves, rather having the stated goal of expanding slavery (and their territory) to the west and south.

What a sentence!

Anyway, can you please explain what makes it the US's land to lose, without appealing to an idea of the Northern Slave Power's moral superiority?

What made it the Confederacy's to take?

Also, Slave Power doesn't mean what you think it means, but Simon already pointed that out. The term Slave Power refers to the political power of the slaveholding class of the South. The Confederacy was simply an extension of it.