Thread by @kiralio

I have a theory that abolition, the Civil War, and Reconstruction basically broke America's brain and were huge contributors to the specifics of modern political "decorum".

Before the war, and while the abolition movement was still relatively small and marginal, there was a willingness to discuss "oh yeah, sure, slavery is a moral evil but we also need the labor force" that's shocking not just for its inherent evil, but for its open self-awareness.

But as we go from, say, the 1830s up to the eve of the war, abolitionists proved that it was possible to mobilize Americans on a massive scale by appealing to moral + religious principles.

Southern intellectuals *freaked the fuck out*, and then swung away hard from their earlier admissions of pragmatic guilt and produced reams of sociological "research", books, speeches, and essays arguing for the Christian, civilizing value of slavery as a moral good.

Northern industrialists were pretty ambivalent to slavery; they were still hella, racist but they didn't like the competition. An ideal of "free labor", capital and labor in harmony, was promoted not just as a practical approach to economics but as the key to a utopian society.

A lot of modern conservative dog whistles and bad faith arguments about hard work, job creators, bootstraps, etc. actually have their origin in this era... but in a historical context where they were relatively progressive ideals and way more people earnestly believed them.

So basically, capital fractured over the issue, and the South was *forced* to engage with the issue in the form of a nation-wide, public referendum on morality.

There was also a tremendous sense of urgency to the issue, because the US was incorporating a huge amount of new territories into statehood, and whichever side's representation in Congress broke the deadlock would probably get slavery enforced or abolished at the federal level.

It was incredibly vicious, and incredibly dirty. Some of you may have learned about the Caning of Charles Sumner in high school: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of…

tl;dr - trollish, pro-abolition firebrand congressman beaten with a cane on the floor of congress when someone got sick of him

The violence of the event was just as horrifying then, but it's also important to remember that these are a bunch of people who are still full-on huffing the Enlightenment's farts and had an almost unshakable belief in the power of reason & debate to determine moral truth.

A surprising number of abolitionists were from wealthy, respected, even aristocratic families. Their families and peers hated violence, direct action, civil disobedience, etc, but you could hold pretty wild opinions and still be socially acceptable, more or less.

But the moral furor over slavery made it increasingly impossible to stay out of the mud. Abolitionists forced their hand on this on purpose -- William Lloyd Garrison, especially, was INFAMOUS for this. No compromise, no gradual emancipation, freedom now, slavers are heretics.

Garrison even pissed off other abolitionists by supporting insane wackadoo causes, like women's rights, or letting ex-slaves stay in America after they were freed instead of shipping them back to Africa. This was seen as extremely divisive.

There was also a significant split among abolitionists when it came to direct action. Some refused to take part at all; some would act only in extremely respectable modes (e.g. legal representation of runaway slaves). Some would hide slaves on the Underground Railroad.

A few (among white men, to be clear -- black abolitionists are a whole different story) even joined mobs directly confronting bailiffs/jailers to rescue captured runaways, plotted criminal conspiracies, or, well, were John Brown:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brow…

Laws regarding slavery were in the pro-slavery side's favor in the short term: they secured legislation requiring free states to return slaves to their masters. This REALLY pissed people off, and pushed a lot of respectable fence-sitters over to the abolitionist side.

At the same time, the long-term prospects of slavery were getting worse and worse. The Missouri Compromise, originally expected to protect slavery, had basically failed; a bunch of what are now midwestern states were going to end up as free states and tip the balance in Congress.

Rather than honor the agreement, pro-slavery congressmen repealed the Missouri Compromise and let each state vote for whether it was going to be free or slave rather than have it be determined by geography. As you might imagine, this was wildly controversial.

A not-insignificant number of agitators (and voters) from both sides flooded the new territories; things got UGLY. It went from disorganized brawls and electoral fraud to the outbreak of guerilla war between paramilitary gangs on the Kansas-Missouri border, aka "Bleeding Kansas".

Anyways I'm getting a little lost in details, so I'll try and step back a bit. Basically, rational discourse had completely failed to resolve a moral disagreement, and even before the Civil War, Americans were slaughtering each other over it.

Finally, the South secedes, the Civil War happens -- I'm not going to even summarize here, you could spend your entire life talking about any given aspect of the conflict. For our purposes, the point is it's culturally traumatic on a level nothing had been for Americans before.

Once the war is over and slavery is legally abolished, though, you have: millions of displaced slaves, countless acres of private land seized from confederates, state governments that basically have to be held in military occupation because *they rebelled*; just an ungodly mess.

Reconstruction is the name for... our attempt to fix the South, via military rule. The Freedman's Bureau is established to provide aid to freed slaves and poor Southern refugees alike; Confederate officials are tried, put on house arrest, banned from political life, etc.

The government basically tries to transform the legal, economic, and social fabric of half the country to reflect the winning ideology. They were right to do so. The Confederates were the original fascists; read up George Fitzhugh if you think that's an exaggeration.

It's also a borderline impossible task, especially since changes in Congress and the Presidency mean policy constantly shifts. Again, too much to detail, but the short version is: forcibly re-educating white people to be less racist is a lot less popular than abolition itself.

Reconstruction is slowly defunded, de-manned (remember it was mostly carried out by the military, so the President could just send troops home and tell Congress to pound sand) and a shitload of former Confederates get official pardons and their land back.

At this point, I risk talking a little outside of my lane, so: my specialization, such as it is, is the history of law. I think it's a good weather vane, especially for what rich, educated white dudes in general think, but I could be over-generalizing with the following theory.

That said, this period -- from right after the Civil War up to the turn of the century -- is exactly where law and legal education turn away from moral arguments and towards a weird, internally contradictory model of law as a science, or even as, like, applied formal logic.

Moral Philosophy slowly disappears from law school curriculum; Christopher Colombus Langdell transforms the Harvard pedagogic model; Oliver Wendell Holmes pushes against "natural law" and towards legal realism, which is not exactly the same as what I'm talking about, but related.

"Natural law" says that morality has an objective existence and we can get to it; legal realism is skeptical that we can ever know moral truths, but proposes that we CAN arrive at true legal conclusions by applying empirical, science-like methods.

But here's the problem. Langdell is teaching lawyers, more or less, that they can Pure Reason their way to legal truth -- all theory, no practice needed. Holmes proposes that law is like a science (it isn't) but his approach is at least grounded in real-life experimentation.

The two ideas sort of merge (as students are molded by a pedagogic model and then apply their blinkered methods to a similar but subtly incompatible one) and leave us with a lawyering culture that is both super amoral, and completely certain of its own innate access to Truth.

It takes until the 1950s and 60s before this incredibly fucked up idea starts to break down, and the methods that Langdell, in particular, pioneered are still the basis of law school education to this day.

I don't think it was just lawyers. We're an arrogant bunch and enamored of logic, but I think the desire to retreat from moral arguments and rebuild an *unspoken* cultural consensus, was driven by educated white men's fear of their own inability to reconcile moral differences.

It's a combination of Enlightenment ideals, the genuine trauma of brother killing brother, and abject cowardice when it comes to admitting that there's a right and a wrong side in this fight and a whole lot of us came down on the wrong side of it.

And this fear and insecurity, combined with the use of "logic" and technocratic expertise as a shield, continues to this day. When it's challenged at points in the 20th century, it's often by educated black Americans going "wait a sec, my experience and education don't add up."

Thurgood Marshall is an especially prominent example; he developed a whole legal theory grounded in morality, and jurisprudential conservatives (like the late Scalia, rest in piss) hated him for it.

Another funny thing is that even if this was more localized to lawyers than I suspect, it matters less than you would think. Law school is treated like training for political leadership, even more than, like, fucking political science or economics or sociology. It's insane.

Exactly 1 in every 3 United States Presidents attended law school, although a few of them didn't graduate, and not all of them practiced. It's also not counting the ones who studied the law before formal US law schooling was a thing. (Or Bush Jr. who applied & got rejected, lol.)

Of the recent democratic primary field? Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Michael Bennet, Amy Klubuchar, and Deval Patrick are ALL LAWYERS.

And John Delaney went to law school but never practiced.

*Klobuchar, dammit. Anyways.

Needless to say, legal education is in many respects THE intellectual milieu of American political leadership, especially when we're talking Democrats.

Consequently, even when they're talking about social justice -- honestly, I suspect even when they really mean it -- their thinking is strongly influenced by a framework that shies away from moral conflict as a direct reaction to the horror and shame of the Civil War.

And that's how you get from a country where everyone speaks in term of moral righteousness & Christianity (across the political spectrum!), to one where moral outrage is mostly at the fringes & not the same framework, while the center is dominated by bloodless, amoral decorum.

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