Joseph Stromberg, M.A., former Rothbard Chair in History at the Mises Institute, adjunct scholar with the Mises Institute, and frequent contributor to the Mises Institute’s LewRockwell.com, has responded to my recent posts on the Civil War. He begins by saying he certainly does not work for the Mises Institute. I, of course, did not say he does. But this indicates the degree of candor which characterizes Stromberg’s writing.
Certainly there’s little substance to his post; it consists mostly of quotations from me followed by a sentence or two of insubstantial smirking. For example:
Still, Sandefur allows a “minute element of truth” in this interpretation that is not mine and arrives at an irrelevant comparison: “One might just as well argue that Allied victory in World War II is morally tainted by the subsequent erection of LBJ’s ‘Great Society.’” No again: The tainting involves saturation bombing, atomic bombing, etc., during that war. LBJ need not appear. But I move along, for Sandefur seems very protective of the warfare state.
Now, the point I made in the paragraph at issue was that one might plausibly say that 19th and 20th century government manipulation of the economy resulted from Union victory only in the same way that, for example, the Great Society programs were the consequence of World War II. That is, one came before the other, and set in place certain very basic building blocks for future policies. The atmosphere of moral crusading that marked the Populist and Progressive eras, for example, certainly drew on the Civil War generation’s prior experience of regimentation and sacrifice in the Civil War, just as LBJ’s invocation of a “war on poverty” acted upon the sensibilities of the World War II generation, which by that time had become parents. So it’s not totally absurd to say that the Welfare State is a consequence of Union victory in the Civil War…but damn near! Because so many different factors had so much more effect in that regard. The Welfare State owes far more to the Progressive intellectuals, to Hegelian philosophers and Christian social activists, than to Lincoln Administration policies, that it’s really a rather absurd stretch for Stromberg to blame Union victory for today’s government overreaching.
This was all pretty clear in my post, but rather than face this issue directly, Stromberg resorts to a totally irrelevant point, seeing in it an opportunity for rhetorical advantage. World War II was about saturation bombing and whatnot. Um…okay. But that has nothing to do with what I was saying. And to suggest that I’m an enthusiast for LBJ? Or is that what Stromberg is doing? Note to Joe: smearing your opponents as “protective of the warfare state” would probably work better if you phrased it in a way that anyone could understand what the hell you’re talking about.
Certainly Stromberg never actually responds to the substance of my argument, here or anywhere else. His rhetorical tactic—one shared by most of neo-confederates—is instead basically the Gish Gallop, applied to history or law instead of to biology. By avoiding any explicit thesis statement and deluging the reader in a rapidfire sequence of distortions, misrepresentations and irrelevancy, Stromberg hopes to put a degree of respectability on his argument while staying lubricated enough to wiggle out of any substantial critique. Readers can decide for themselves whether he has succeeded.
Oh, and P.S.: I was not making fun of southern pronunciation. The title of the series is a reference to Mel Brooks’ classic The Producers. Research, man. It helps.
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