On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:48:53 +0000, John Thompson wrote:

Marc Carter <marcMUNGEcarter@speakMUNGEeasy.net> wrote in message
news:<pan.2004.11.11.12.31.08.833286@speakMUNGEeasy.net>...

[snipperolio]

It continues to amaze me that when I was a kid, people were still pissed
off about the Civil War (when I was in school we were taught that
secession was prompted by "states rights," not slavery, which is an
example of the coded language that GOP has contemporarily tapped in to).

I have read that this shift started before the war even ended. The
speeches made by the politicians from seceding states in 1860/61 leave no
doubt that slavery was the issue at that time. But when people realized
they were probably going to lose the war, and that slavery would be gone,
they changed the issue in their own mind to avoid facing the fact that it
was their actions in trying to defend slavery that actually destroyed it.
(Without secession slavery would have eventually gone in the US, but it
would have been much later and might have included compensation for slave
owners).

I think this is right; might be this is a fairly early case of political
spin (I'm not sure about the cognitive dissonance interpretation, but it

bears thinking about). I would think that everyone knew "states'
rights" meant "keep the federal government from taking our slaves," and in
some senses it's still the code used today. When Bobby Kennedy was sending
federal marshals in to desegregate schools, George Wallace was screaming
about "states' rights."

There might actually be a reasonable federalist argument about states
rights, but today it's gotten so accreted with other meanings, I'm not
sure how to tease it all out, and I default to the cynical
interpretation. So when I hear the GOP southerners talking about states'
rights, I am somewhat skeptical about motives. Notice how conveniently
states' rights for Florida was trumped in the 2000 election by Federal
activist judges.

m