Policy of Spite

“Dedicated to the Chicago Convention,” by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 3, 1864. (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

The South is different by virtue of identity politics.

You will hear people suggest that “identity politics” is something that leftist radical hippies invented in the Sixties. In fact, in his 1861 “Cornerstone Speech,” Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said,

“The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the [slavery] institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….”

[Author’s note: Regular readers have seen me cite the above passage before but, in my defense, it is perhaps the purest example of master race bullshit produced in public policy on the North American continent.]