Transcription
People keep trying to take you to Germany in 1933. I do it sometimes, too. So, I get why. If you understand what that was, then you understand what this is, and maybe what you're supposed to do with it.
Well, the comparison does two things that don't really help us. First, it borrows an example from somewhere else when we have plenty of our own homegrown examples of an authoritarian government using the power of the state to run roughshod over our open's rights in a race to turn the violent exploitation of human beings into wealth for a few people and calling all that greatness. That's not just Germany. That's the first American Republic. It ran for 80 years on our political language, shaping the political culture we live with today within our institutions under and as a product of our Constitution.
Second, and this one might be more to the point, the people reaching for the Nazi comparison to imply what you should do about it. Well, resist, of course. But rarely follow it where it needs to go and just leave it hanging there in an assumption. So, fine, you'd resist the Nazis, but how? Like the Germans didn't? Political opposition in Germany, elections organized and institutional led by establishment parties, they got bulldozed early. A real resistance operating at scale to actually slow things down never got any traction for reasons that also apply to us.
So, if you actually believe that analogy, that Germany of 1933 is like the United States today, then it pushes those of us interested in resistance to some pretty unsettling conclusions. But of course, as people have been pointing out, we don't need Germany. Let's look at one of our own examples. Same pattern, our context, our institutions, our opposition gatekeepers, our historical resistance liberals explaining why everyone but the establishment is doing resistance just the wrong way. Think about Boston in 1859. Not Berlin in 1933, Boston in 1859. What would you have done then?
Hey folks, I'm Chad Sturmer and I'm the author of a Resistance History of the United States. Let's play a kind of choose your own adventure with it. Imagine you are a lawyer in Boston in the fall of 1859. Not a radical, you're professional, you've got a nice practice, you've got a family that you care about, and you have an opinion about slavery. It's wrong, it needs to end, and you've held that opinion more or less consistently for about 20 years. You're a patriot, you believe in the Constitution, you love the founders. You have believed that slavery and the power of enslavers would yield to the good old American political process, to democracy, to conscience, the will to do the right thing before God. You have believed that, and you have voted on that, and that's pretty much the most you've done about anything.
But here's what the last 10 years just handed you. In 1850, the Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Federal commissioners were paid $10 to return a person who had escaped from slavery back to bondage, and only $5 when they didn't. The men who insisted they represented your interest and reflected your priorities, the opposition leaders, men like Daniel Webster, but not only Webster, they made the Fugitive Slave Act possible. Not the enslaver power that introduced it and pushed for it, but the reasonable men in the middle who compromised pushing it over the finish line. Webster stood on the Senate floor and said he was speaking not as a Massachusetts man, or as a northern man, but as an American. And he delivered the argument that brought it all home, that delivered those votes declaring that the founders had protected slavery and their judgment outweighed any man alive and always should. Newspaper editors then held Webster up as the measure of principled statesmanship. And the gatekeepers of the time explained to you that his patience and his process were not only the only viable path, but a mark of courage to hold the line against the radicals who were intent on tearing the Union apart. The next election, they told you, that would make things right.
Well, the next election produced Franklin Pierce. From New Hampshire, Bowden, one of yours, people said to you. What they didn't tell you was why the Democrats landed on him as their presidential candidate after 48 ballots. They needed someone with no enemies, which meant someone with no positions. Pierce said he found slavery abhorrent, but he also said the Fugitive Slave Act was the law of the land, so he would enforce it. And once he reached the White House, he followed the enslavers' line. He signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and opened the western territories to the expansion of slavery in the worst possible way by leaving it up to whomever would vote for it, popular sovereignty. He recognized a fraudulent pro-slavery government that armed men from Missouri installed in Kansas after riding across the ballot border to stuff the ballot boxes and drive off anyone who voted wrong. Now, when anti-slavery settlers worked to remove that government by voting, Pierce expressed outrage at the resistance. Stay patient, though. The next election, the gatekeepers said, that one is the answer.
Well, you sitting there in Boston, something starting to lose you about that. Not enough to do anything with it right yet, but starting to bug you. You had begun paying attention ideas circulating at the edges. Transcripts of sermons by a guy named Theodore Parker, some essays by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. And they were making a different argument than the ones you'd been hearing. Not about slavery as a labor question, free labor against unfree, which is the way most people talked about it, but about power. About the power that enslavers held over the American Union. Not just over the people they enslaved, but over the courts, the Congress, the presidency. Was that what sent the US Army to invade Mexico in 1846? To expand the enslavers' territory? Someone put a note pamphlet in your hand written a writer from Concord named Henry Thoreau called Resistance to Civil Government. He had called out who was responsible for that. Not only the enslavers defending the invasion and demanding laws like the Fugitive Slave Act, but men like Webster, followers Thoreau called them, servants of the men of '87 who made a career out of constitutional difference while people were dragged back into bondage. Politicians, lawyers, editors, writers.
Then Thoreau escalated in the early 1850s. A man who had freed himself from slavery, Anthony Burns, had been arrested in Boston. The enslaver power reached into New England, captured him, marched him through your streets under the guard of soldiers from your army, and then shipped him back to Virginia. The threat had come to your home. The abuse of authority was on your doorstep. Thoreau called his next piece Slavery in Massachusetts. And in it he reserved particular fire for the media, the men who had made the newspaper the new Bible, a moral authority outsourced to editors and essayists. So now you're no longer convinced that ending the power of enslavers demands a purely political solution. And you're paying attention differently.
Then your world was shaken even more. In May 1856, a South Carolina enslaver and a member of the House of Representatives walked onto the Senate floor and beat your Senator, Charles Sumner, unconscious at his desk. And Sumner is you. He's Boston. He's middle class. Harvard made possible only by his father's somewhat small salary as a sheriff, the leading opponent of slavery in that whole Senate chamber. But you knew him, as everyone in Boston did. He's 6'4, he's got a big voice. You voted for him probably without a second thought. When that enslaver beat him down in the United States Senate in broad daylight, enslavers beat Massachusetts. They beat Boston. They beat you.
So, the gapers now have a different message going into the next elections that fall. The old opposition party, the Whigs, finished. But, there's a new party. It's formed around opposition to the expansion of slavery. Not opposition to slavery itself, of course. Don't believe that from anybody. Not the power behind it. Still not that. Strenuously opposed to its expansion, which of course meant strenuously committed to leaving 4 million people in chains exactly where they were. They call themselves Republicans. This time will be different, the clever opposition people are saying. Then the votes come in after the election. John C. Fremont, the Republicans' first presidential candidate, carried 11 states, 11 whole states. The new party had made a real showing with its message. Progress. But, the Democrats, having thrown Pierce overboard in favor of James Buchanan, kept the White House and the Senate, and they took back the House. The party that had been the political instrument of enslaver power since Andrew Jackson, that gave you the Fugitive Slave Act, that embraced the enslaver insurgents in Kansas, ran the table. The election that was supposed to be different produced the same result. In fact, things actually got worse.
A few months later after the election, Buchanan told you in his inaugural address that the question of slavery in the territories would be settled by the Supreme Court, not through politics, not through elections. And that had a certain logic to it that you were beginning to understand. The Democrats held the White House, the Senate, and the House. Nothing was going to change through any of those. They would make sure of it. So, Buchanan deferred to the one institution left, the court, under Maryland's Roger Taney. Buchanan would cheerfully submit, he said, to whatever those justices decided. What Buchanan did not tell you was that he already knew what a majority of justices were going to do. Two days later, they issued the ruling in Dred Scott versus Sanford. Seven justices, five of whom had been enslavers themselves, ruled against Dred Scott. It was not even close. Taney wrote the opinion and he gets all the heat, but six other justices joined the judgment and a majority agreed to use Scott's case to declare that black people were not and had never been intended to be citizens under the Constitution and they never would be. Moreover, Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Two years later, mostly the same justices, one was swapped out, ruled in Ableman versus Booth, unanimously this time, that state courts had no power to obstruct federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. That was not the law drifting to a bad result just to piss off people in Wisconsin. It was the constitutional order declaring, as plainly as it could, what things had always been, what it had always meant.
So, now, you in Boston, you're beginning to understand things a bit differently. The men who led every branch of the federal government had spent a decade showing you what it was all for in the first place. The reason none of it was going to change was sitting in the Constitution the whole time. The 3/5 clause counted enslaved people as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of representation. People who could not vote, who had no rights, fully serving the men who enslaved them. The Constitution gave enslavers more seats in the house, more power in the Senate, more votes in the Electoral College, more presidents and more justices and judges, and no incentive whatsoever to ever change any of that. In fact, that would take a constitutional amendment that could never pass without their support. They hadn't captured the government. They built it. The institution wasn't drifting toward justice. It had been designed from the very beginning to prevent it. That was the American Union. Not just a union with enslavers, but a union for them. That's what you're starting to recognize.
Now, today, this morning, calling at your front door is Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The famous Worcester minister is in your sitting room, and he wants your help. He wants to talk to you about John Brown. He's not come to explain John Brown to you. You know who John Brown is. Everyone in Boston knows who John Brown is. You know what he did in Kansas. You know about Pottawatomie. You know what Higginson is going to ask. And you know what he's going to mean. What you're trying to figure out is whether to say yes.
Higginson did not go to William Lloyd Garrison with that conversation. He did not go to Lydia Maria Child. He knows what they're going to say because they've been saying it for 30 years, and they've been saying it directly to him. Slavery is a moral abomination. The Constitution is, in Garrison's words, covenant with death. Something must be done. Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in Framingham 5 years ago. And Child has written more eloquent words against slavery than most men write in about anything in a lifetime. They're not wrong about any of it. But what they have not done, and what they're not prepared to do, is act in a way that stops a single person from being taken, frees a single person from bondage, or costs the enslavers a single dollar or a single minute of concern. Their consciences are clean and will stay that way. The Fugitive Slave Act is still law. The damage in Kansas is mounting. Sumner's seat sat empty for 3 years while he recovered as South Carolina framed Brooks's cane. All of it enforced. All of it ratified. All of it continuing. That's why Higginson is here with you and not visiting them. And he's not here because you have done what he has done. He's here because you have watched what he has watched, and you've not yet decided what it requires of you.
So, he's going to walk you through it. When Shadrach Minkins was seized in Boston, men stormed the courthouse and got him out. When Thomas Sims was taken, Higginson tried to stop it. When Burns was arrested, Higginson joined a group of black men to break down the courthouse door. He might point to the scar in his face to remind you the cost. Each of those actions followed from the failure of the prior one. Legal challenges had not worked. Petitioning had not worked. Publishing and preaching and voting had not worked. When the courts became the instrument of the injustice, the question was whether to physically intervene or just to stand aside. Funding the vigilance committees was not the same as shipping rifles to Kansas, which is not the same as what Brown was proposing now. But each step followed directly from what the prior step failed to do. And each step followed specifically from the failure of the men who kept promising to handle it through the process.
Higginson needs you understand one thing before you decide. The men you are going to call Brown violent, and they will, and they have, your colleagues, your editors, your anti-slavery congressman maybe. They are not making a serious argument. They're making a choice about where the argument lives. Once that argument lives on violence and focuses on that word, it doesn't have to live anywhere else. Not on what's being done to 4 million people every day, by whom, under what sanction, protected by which courts, enforced by which army. Preston Brooks beat your senator unconscious at his desk on the floor of the United States Senate. On plantations across the South, you multiply Brooks' hands by the tens of thousands. What Brook did that afternoon in the Capitol Building is done every day at scale, under law, and with the full protection of the constitutional order you have spent a decade watching close every single door. Nobody is calling that violence. It has other names. Property, order, the rule of law, American Union. Brown did not bring violence into that situation. He's proposing to intervene in it at a place called Harpers Ferry, to to the fight home and push the final confrontation with enslaver power. It was not the existence of the crisis that escalated the resistance to the ultimate form of direct action. It was the behavior of the people who claimed to be managing it and were failing.
So, the question Higginson is asking you is not whether you can guarantee a new outcome. You can't. The question is whether you're going to do something anyway because it's the right thing to do. While Higginson is sitting in your parlor though, the responsible voices, the resistance liberals of the time, the establishment opposition leaders are already having a different conversation. The answer they're saying is and you guessed it, 1860, the elections. Nominate the right man. Win the presidency, work through the process. There's already a candidate, an Illinois lawyer who ran for the Senate two years ago and made himself a national name doing it. Sound on the question of slavery, they say, electable in ways that more outspoken men aren't. And you know what he said in those debates and that makes you take a pause. Well, the one every paper, he said it plainly without any embarrassment in front of crowds across Illinois and the country. He's not in favor of the equality of the races in any way. Not in favor of black men voting, serving on juries, holding office, marrying white women. He believes there's a physical difference between the races that will always prevent them from living as equals and he's comfortable with that. He's a fan of Thomas Jefferson after all. He'll enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. He has no intention of touching slavery where it exists, no authority to do so, no desire to try. What he opposes is the extension of slavery into new territories, not what it is, not what it does, not the 4 million people living under it right now, just the question of whether it spreads.
This is what the responsible voices are asking you to wait for. This is the best the process has produced. It is quite literally more of the same. You do not have to oppose that Illinois lawyer to sit with the question his candidacy raises. You simply have to ask what means that this this after 30 years after the Fugitive Slave Act after Kansas after Dred Scott after Sumner's empty seat is what working through the process has delivered as its answer. Not even an abolitionist, not even a man who will say that slavery is wrong in any way that costs him a single vote. A man who has made his position on racial equality as clear as any enslaver Democrat. The responsible voices though call that progress and they call it realism. And they're asking you to measure your hopes for a better future and a better future for all those other people against that. So Higginson is sitting across from you asking a different question. Not whether the Illinois lawyer is better than the alternative. Whether the process that produced him is the one you've been waiting for. Or the one that's been waiting for you. Higginson knows what waiting has produced. So do you. So his waiting is over. And his right man is John Brown.
So now the year is 2026. Democrats filed war powers resolutions to stop the war against Iran. The Constitution's clear, Congress declares war. The House voted them down. The Senate blocked them. The bombing with million-dollar missiles against tens of thousand-dollar drones continues. Senate Democrats are at the microphone and all over social media declaring that what is happening is unconstitutional. They're right. They're explaining that the founders never intended this. Well, they're mostly right about that, too. So they're quoting the framers, they're quoting the Constitution, but what they're not doing is using it. The president has announced he will sign no legislation until the Save Act is passed. All those men and women quoting the framers sit yelling that the tenant is being held hostage do not appear to know or maybe they just don't want you to notice that if Congress stays in session, a bill becomes law without a signature. The tool is right there in the document. Sign, don't sign, Trump allowed to veto bills if he wants to stop them. That's what Thoreau was railing against when he wrote about the men of '87. The people who invoke the founders to sanctify inaction, who treat the constitutional order not as a problem to confront, but as a reason just to submit.
So, the answer, the responsible opposition voices, today's resistance liberals, institutional Democrats who have turned loyalty to existing political institutions into a moral alibi, are insisting this November, win the house, maybe win the Senate. The people who should be furious at Democratic inaction are busy writing and sharing posts about Republican villainy, which is real enough, and yet does not explain why anyone already in a position to act has not done anything. No, you need to act. You need to just attend the next no kings rally, get the t-shirt, go home, please donate, remember to vote blue, and that's all you really need to do. But, do not for a single solitary second think about doing anything that might materially change anything.
So, go back to being that lawyer in Boston in 1859. Take out a copy of the Constitution and put it in your hands. Hear, one more time, that the next election is the answer. That the right people are working the problem. That the process is slow, but sound. That anything more would be reckless, divisive, dangerous. Hear all that. You know by now what that has actually delivered. You know what the courts have done. You know what the parties have done. You know what the Constitution has been made to mean by the men who claim to revere it most. And you know what the gatekeepers call courage and what they call excess. We don't need Germany in 1933 to find ourselves in that question. We have Boston in 1859. We have the lawyer. We have the men of process. We have the responsible voices. And we have the old American habit of confusing being against something with doing something that could stop it. What you are doing now is not what you would have done in Germany in 1933, not necessarily. It's what you would have done in Boston while every door was being closed in front of you? What would that have been? That's all I got for today, folks. Alouzi.