South Carolina's ordinance of secession complains that the North is doing too much nullifying, and that the South is sick of it.
In particular, the North was interfering with the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court got so uppity that it stood up to ... the U.S. Supreme Court, and declared the Act unconstitutional...
Nullification was used throughout American history on behalf of free speech and free trade, and against unconstitutional searches and seizures, military conscription, and the fugitive slave acts. [the press never] mentions this. No one ever does. We must stick to the narrative: the states are stupid and backward, the federal government is a progressive force, and anyone skeptical of this version of events belongs on a watch list.
The implication being that Jeffersonian decentralism is forever discredited because states have behaved in ways most Americans find grotesque. They are states, after all, so we should not be shocked when their behavior offends us.
By exactly the same reasoning, incidentally, any crime by any national government anywhere would immediately justify a world government. Anyone living under that world government who then favored decentralization would be solemnly lectured about all the awful things that had happened under such a system in the past.
Centralized governments gave us hundreds of millions of deaths, thanks to total war, genocide, and totalitarian revolutions. In the U.S. we can point to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese and a horrendously murderous military-industrial-congressional complex, among other enormities. Our federal government is so remote from the people that it has managed to rack up debts (included unfunded liabilities) well in excess of $100 trillion.
In light of this record, what intellectual and moral pygmy [ZOMBIE!] would urge nationalism as the solution to our problems?
If California decriminalizes marijuana, they will be the first to call for locking people up in government cages anyway. For how dare they resist their wise overlords in Washington! What's that, comrade? "Question Authority," you say? Wherever did you learn that? What are you, some kind of "neo-Confederate"?
--Tom Wood
Interview with a Zombie
"Slaaaavery!"
"Neeeeeo-Confederate!"
"Braaaaains!"
