Reagan Contra Lincoln - and Harry Jaffa

Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo calls it "Lincoln's Specatular Lie" - Abraham Lincoln's claim that the states do not possess sovereignty because the federal government preceeded and therefore created the states. In reality, the exact opposite is true: the states preceeded and created the Union.

With the Declaration of Independence - which DiLorenzo correctly describes as a declaration of secession from the British Empire - the thirteen colonies seceded as individual states. This sovereignty was later affiirmed in the precursor to the Constitution - the Articles of Confederation, a governing system created by the thirteen states for their common defense.

In ratifying the Constitution itself, the states entered the compact individually. Morton Borden, editor of a 1965 edition of the Antifederalist papers claims that "the people" of the states as a whole ratified the Constitution and that it was the intent of the Framers to establish a "sovereign whole" separate from the thirteen states. However, this runs against the original understanding entirely, as DiLorenzo documents:

No less a figure than James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist 39 that the Constitution as to be ratified by the people "not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong" (emphasis added).

Lincoln admirer and neoconservative Harry Jaffa of the Claremont Institute has fashioned a career out of perpetuating Lincoln's logic and the concept of "secession as treason" in general.

In the midst of the War in Iraq, neoconservatives like Jaffa have invoked the name of Ronald Reagan to justify our war of "global democratic revolution," implying that the Gipper would have supported such an attack. When folks like Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes trot out this point on Fox News it is never challenged - not that that this is surprising considering the utter lack of right-leaning voices on Fox that aren't neoconservatives.

While the late President Reagan has been recast in the popular mind - particulary among young conservatives - as a full-fledged neoconservative, it is interesting to note that Reagan disagreed with Lincoln - and by extension Harry Jaffa - about what (the states or the federal government) created what first. In his First Inaugural Address, Reagan declared explicitly:

It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government. (emphasis mine)

There you have it: Reagan contra Lincoln - and Jaffa.