I recently began another historical journey through the American Civil War (as I am wont to do) with The Coming Fury: The Centennial History of the Civil War, Volume 1. Unfortunately, my recent “reading” has been anything but. My literary consumption has, in fact, taken place via the spoken word. That is to say, I have been listening to audio books. To my own misfortune, this makes it very difficult to review books. I would like to be perceived as a fair person, so I try to include the words of the author when I review books. Unfortunately, this medium does not lend itself well to making notes. Writing anything down while driving is considered unsafe. Apart from book reviewing, however, I am often unable to do something more important. When I hear quotes from an antebellum Southern Democrat, I cringe. In many cases, it is like the words were taken from a modern Republican politician. I should say, rather, that the rhetoric sounds similar except for a fact that most Southern Democratic fire-eaters were considered learned men. In today’s Republican Party, ignorance is considered such a badge of honor that politicians purposely exaggerate regional accents, knowingly use poor grammar, and interject obsolete slang phrases into their daily speech.

But I digress…

The point is that the Republican rhetoric of 2012 is recycled from a century and a half ago. It strikes me as interesting that we rarely hear in the media that the obsession the Constitution by people who fail to understand it at all is not new. The only differences between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution are the addition of the Christian god, the protection of the institution of slavery, and the focus changing from the rights of the individual to the rights of the states. In other words, the Constitution was rewritten in such a way as to codify explicitly what the pro-slavery politicians claimed was already implied.