Note to Jim DeMint: Ending slavery was a Big Government police action
by David Atkins
Jim DeMint, noted professor of history and respected race relations theorist, puts out his theory on the end of slavery:
“Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people,” DeMint said on “Vocal Point” with Jerry Newcombe of Truth In Action Ministries, as recorded by Right Wing Watch. “Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God.”
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DeMint added that “big government” did not end slavery, a Republican did.
Of course, the Constitution did no such thing. The Declaration of Independence in which those words are found somehow didn’t end slavery during the first whole century of America’s existence.
Moreover, the Civil War could rightly be seen as the grandest and most successful form of Big Government federal intervention in United States history. The slaveholding South had decided to form its own nation dedicated toward the eternal preservation of slavery, and the federal government essentially exercised the largest police action in American history. That was followed by a Constitutional Amendment and coercive enforcement of the beginnings of equality under the law over the top of a resistant population. Further coercive Big Government actions were needed over the following 150 years to desegregate schools, enforce voting rights, prevent indentured servitude, and remove barriers to education and housing.
In fact, every single action that has resulted in greater racial equality was in fact a product of Big Government refusing to allow local good old boys like Jim DeMint and Strom Thurmond to exercise their own form of self-regulation.
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