Why Did the Confederate Constitution Have a Single-Term Presidency?

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dcharles

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Eventually even the most stubborn redeemer/stalwart whatever they call themselves would see by the 1950s that they, their children, grandchildren or great grandchildren are never going to become part of the plantocracy.

Like they did in South Africa?
 
It's certainly better than the previous form of slavery.

Considering how many died under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others I am not sure about that. Bad as Southern slavery was it didn't deliberately starve its slaves like the USSR under Stalin, China under Mao or Cambodia under Pol Pot. Stalin's gulags were at least as bad as the plantations of the South and Pol Pot's "killing fields" were even worse. To get as bad as them you need Haitii .
 

dcharles

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Technically speaking, the Confederate Constitution did not deny the states the right to abolish slavery. Yes, it says "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed" but that is in the context of the portion of Article I which deals with the powers of Congress, not of the states.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp When the Confederate Constitution wants to limit the powers of the states, it uses language specifically referring to the states: " No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, or ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts; or grant any title of nobility." Note that this passage does not say anything about the "right of property in negro slaves."

Indeed, Davis actually considered gradual emancipation as a term upon which to gain recognition from the French (in 1862, IIRC, when McClellan was bearing down upon Richmond), and his solution to the unconstitutionality of such a measure was to make the Congressional action null until ratified by the states.
 
Indeed, Davis actually considered gradual emancipation as a term upon which to gain recognition from the French (in 1862, IIRC, when McClellan was bearing down upon Richmond), and his solution to the unconstitutionality of such a measure was to make the Congressional action null until ratified by the states.

IOW, he was toying with the idea of trying to bluff the French into recognizing the CSA by doing something clearly against the CSA Constitution and not noticing it or being able to pretend not to notice it. The "Right of sojourn" made state emancipation meaningless. The Dred Scott Decision (which would be cited in the CSA) said that no matter how long a Black person spent in a free state or free territory he was still a slave. That" Black men had no rights a White Man was bound to respect." The "sojourn" would be perpetual.
 

dcharles

Banned
IOW, he was toying with the idea of trying to bluff the French into recognizing the CSA by doing something clearly against the CSA Constitution and not noticing it or being able to pretend not to notice it. The "Right of sojourn" made state emancipation meaningless. The Dred Scott Decision (which would be cited in the CSA) said that no matter how long a Black person spent in a free state or free territory he was still a slave. That" Black men had no rights a White Man was bound to respect." The "sojourn" would be perpetual.

The right of sojourn may have made emancipation by any particular state meaningless, but you never know what the actual statutory language might have been.

But in any case, it would certainly have been meaningless from the standpoint of actual racial equality.
 
At least they will not think about buying favors for reelection, just about their legacy as a one-term president. All the presidents would then have a more long-term orientation regarding their political agenda.

And six-years is worse than eight-years for a man who is trying to corrupt the system and become a wannabe dictator.

Parliamentarian system is still better, though.

In several countries they have a single 6 year term, it makes the biding for power even more intense. Every president of Mexico leaves office a Billionaire. A Parliamentary System involves the most deal making. Try to form a coalition government without making deals, look at just what happened in Israel. The chief executive holds his office while his party has a working majority, and they can remove him with a vote of no confidence. The politicking never ends, and every interest group has their hand out. A fixed term executive, in a two party system forces the voters to make binary choices, up or down, him or her, and you can only have one president at a time, your not facing a shadow government trying to force an early election.

That's not to say a Parliamentary System doesn't have it's advantages, it forces the executive to act in a collegial manor, rather then being able to go completely rogue. I'll refrain from using a contemporary example.
 

Slan

Banned
In several countries they have a single 6 year term, it makes the biding for power even more intense. Every president of Mexico leaves office a Billionaire. A Parliamentary System involves the most deal making. Try to form a coalition government without making deals, look at just what happened in Israel. The chief executive holds his office while his party has a working majority, and they can remove him with a vote of no confidence. The politicking never ends, and every interest group has their hand out. A fixed term executive, in a two party system forces the voters to make binary choices, up or down, him or her, and you can only have one president at a time, your not facing a shadow government trying to force an early election.

That's not to say a Parliamentary System doesn't have it's advantages, it forces the executive to act in a collegial manor, rather then being able to go completely rogue. I'll refrain from using a contemporary example.
The only successful country with a pure presidential system is the US, all other presidential countries, regardless of being six-year term or four-year term, are nations in development in the best case.
 
The right of sojourn may have made emancipation by any particular state meaningless, but you never know what the actual statutory language might have been.
Anything short of "The sojourn ends upon the death of the slave" is going to be struck down by the CS Supreme Court.
 
They also would have expanded the slavery system to the frontier territories.

I always find it a great irony that the civil war war primarily over the expansion of slavery to frontier territories, when the climate of those territories wouldn't have actually been viable for plantation slavery anyway.
 
That's actually a very good point. You can learn good things even from evil guys.

I would argue they got it the wrong way round. Presidents get way more shit done in their first term, whereas they seem like a lame duck pretty soon into their second.
 
Which didn't stop China and a number of 3rd World countries from imposing Marxism.

That's the difference between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. The second says that the proletariat AND the peasantry should bring about the revolution together. Hence the hammer and the sickle.
 
The only successful country with a pure presidential system is the US, all other presidential countries, regardless of being six-year term or four-year term, are nations in development in the best case.

There is substantial evidence in post-colonial countries that presidential systems are a lot more prone to fall into authoritarianism than parliamentary ones. The US was always considered in the literature to be the notable exception, although political scientists did note that the US had a "paranoid style" not seen in other Western democracies.


While not wanting to get into current politics, as that is against forum rules, I would point out that the EIU Democracy Index downgraded the US from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" in recent years.
 
That's the difference between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism. The second says that the proletariat AND the peasantry should bring about the revolution together. Hence the hammer and the sickle.

My point is that real world doesn't care what Marx thought. Despite his delusions the history of the world isn't dependent on what he thought. It doesn't give a damn. Marx turned out to be wrong about nearly everything so why do people even take him seriously anymore?
 
While not wanting to get into current politics, as that is against forum rules, I would point out that the EIU Democracy Index downgraded the US from a "full democracy" to a "flawed democracy" in recent years.

While I am sure this is not the reason IMO the flaws are more a reaction TO Trump than Trump himself, and I don't even like the guy. Read my 2016 pre-election posts on him However, once he won everyone should have accepted it and moved on. Once that happened he should have been treated like every other president.

Like him or hate him he won and there can't be one rule for Trump and another for everyone else. Just because it's Trump doesn't make it right that you use a fake dossier on him paid for by his political opponent to spy on him and then try to use it to impeach him when it is clearly fake. This is far worse than what Nixon did. Nixon used Cuban exiles to spy on the Democrats but he didn't use a fake dossier claiming McGovern was plotting with the Russians and then use the FBI to spy on him.

I didn't vote for him last time but this time I am out principle. The principle being when someone is elected you accept it and move on . You have a right to oppose him but you don't have a right to throw a temper tantrum for four fricking years! Democracies can only remain stable if the losers accept their loss and move on.
 
While I am sure this is not the reason IMO the flaws are more a reaction TO Trump than Trump himself, and I don't even like the guy. Read my 2016 pre-election posts on him However, once he won everyone should have accepted it and moved on. Once that happened he should have been treated like every other president.

Like him or hate him he won and there can't be one rule for Trump and another for everyone else. Just because it's Trump doesn't make it right that you use a fake dossier on him paid for by his political opponent to spy on him and then try to use it to impeach him when it is clearly fake. This is far worse than what Nixon did. Nixon used Cuban exiles to spy on the Democrats but he didn't use a fake dossier claiming McGovern was plotting with the Russians and then use the FBI to spy on him.

I didn't vote for him last time but this time I am out principle. The principle being when someone is elected you accept it and move on . You have a right to oppose him but you don't have a right to throw a temper tantrum for four fricking years! Democracies can only remain stable if the losers accept their loss and move on.
Wow, that is quite frankly the dumbest take towards governmental opposition to a sitting president i've seen. Also flatly ignores the intricacies of the Democrat-GOP rivalry and assumes a precedent-breaking image of Trump, when in fact his archetype was always there.
Marx turned out to be wrong about nearly everything
Such as?
Marx was, at least to my view, not actually wrong about the vast majority of his theory on the interests of classes in capitalism and what drives inequality to perpetuate itself. He wasn't in any way "delusional" as you claim neither did he believe he could change the world -- to the contrary, he was quite pessimistic. What soured his image among the general public was how statesmen who followed his ideals applied "socialism" to their respective regimes; none of those who are the most infamous (Russia, China, Cambodia) ever had anything near the conditions argued by Marx to be the crucial prerequisite to it, which was industry and a working class forming the backbone of the economy in a given territory-- Pol Pot, for example, openly admitted to have had difficulty studying him in his time in France and instead took to Stalin's notoriously reformistic works as a guide.
You can disagree with Marx's frame of historical analysis, yes, but to dismiss his ideas through a strawman vision of his character is simply immature and way too common in this site, imo.
 
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dcharles

Banned
While I am sure this is not the reason IMO the flaws are more a reaction TO Trump than Trump himself, and I don't even like the guy. Read my 2016 pre-election posts on him However, once he won everyone should have accepted it and moved on. Once that happened he should have been treated like every other president.

Like him or hate him he won and there can't be one rule for Trump and another for everyone else. Just because it's Trump doesn't make it right that you use a fake dossier on him paid for by his political opponent to spy on him and then try to use it to impeach him when it is clearly fake. This is far worse than what Nixon did. Nixon used Cuban exiles to spy on the Democrats but he didn't use a fake dossier claiming McGovern was plotting with the Russians and then use the FBI to spy on him.

I didn't vote for him last time but this time I am out principle. The principle being when someone is elected you accept it and move on . You have a right to oppose him but you don't have a right to throw a temper tantrum for four fricking years! Democracies can only remain stable if the losers accept their loss and move on.

Can y'all take this to chat?
 
Remember, having a weak industrial sector compared to the US does not mean that the CS had a weak industrial sector compared with the world.

This is a point that's often missed in discussions. If Britain, France, and the US were the top three, the CS certainly competed for fourth at the time. Germany hadn't unified yet.

My point is that real world doesn't care what Marx thought. Despite his delusions the history of the world isn't dependent on what he thought. It doesn't give a damn. Marx turned out to be wrong about nearly everything so why do people even take him seriously anymore?

The interesting part of the Kaiserreich mod is that things actually happen in there as Marx expected. That's one of the things about alternate history. Set up a scenario and work within some realms of plausibility. Real history has smart people doing stupid things and stupid people getting lucky. Implausible does not always mean impossible. But that's getting a bit off topic from the point of this thread.
 
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Marx was, at least to my view, not actually wrong about the vast majority of his theory on the interests of classes in capitalism and what drives inequality to perpetuate itself. He wasn't in any way "delusional" as you claim neither did he believe he could change the world -- to the contrary, he was quite pessimistic. What soured his image among the general public was how statesmen who followed his ideals applied "socialism" to their respective regimes; none of those who are the most infamous (Russia, China, Cambodia) ever had anything near the conditions argued by Marx to be the crucial prerequisite to it, which was industry and a working class forming the backbone of the economy in a given territory-- Pol Pot, for example, openly admitted to have had difficulty studying him in his time in France and instead took to Stalin's notoriously reformistic works as a guide.
You can disagree with Marx's frame of historical analysis, yes, but to dismiss his ideas through a strawman vision of his character is simply immature and way too common in this site, imo.

Among other things the poor did not get poorer and the rich richer over time, both got richer over time. A typical 1900 worker was richer than the typical 1850 worker., a 1920's worker was richer than that. If it weren't for the stupidity of WW1 and the economic aspects of the Versaille Treaty I think the typical 1936 worker would have been richer than that. The triumph of socialism was clearly not inevitable. The whole social determinism idea is stupid. The idea that the state will eventually wither away is asinine. No state has simply withered away after seizing power, it fights tooth and nail to keep it.

The whole system is guaranteed to wind up a dictatorship. If everyone works for the government why would the leaders pay their workers more than a pittance? There is no competition for workers. There is no competition for anything so any crap will do. There is a reason all Communist economies produced almost exclusively garbage, without competition how do you know how you measure up? How do you innovate when you have no idea whether whatever you come up with is actually good or not as it is never truly tested? How does a government actually set literally millions of prices efficiently?
 
Among other things the poor did not get poorer and the rich richer over time, both got richer over time. A typical 1900 worker was richer than the typical 1850 worker., a 1920's worker was richer than that. If it weren't for the stupidity of WW1 and the economic aspects of the Versaille Treaty I think the typical 1936 worker would have been richer than that.
Marx's prediction on wage changes in regards to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are more complex than that -- the argument is actually that worker's wages are not keeping up with productivity. There may be raises and such but they do not point to the working class being able to challenge or become the capitalist bourgeoisie politically or materially. You're also neglecting to factor in the issue of prices.
The whole system is guaranteed to wind up a dictatorship. If everyone works for the government why would the leaders pay their workers more than a pittance? There is no competition for workers. There is no competition for anything so any crap will do. There is a reason all Communist economies produced almost exclusively garbage, without competition how do you know how you measure up? How do you innovate when you have no idea whether whatever you come up with is actually good or not as it is never truly tested? How does a government actually set literally millions of prices efficiently?
Competition? Money in a socialist system? This is all just asinine posturing so i'll stop right here and ask you to actually read the Marx you're so railing against.
 
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Competition? Money in a socialist system? This is all just asinine posturing so i'll stop right here and ask you to actually read the Marx you're so railing against.

The fact that there isn't competition is the problem. Without competition there is no way to know if what you making is worthwhile or not., in an economic sense. If the only pie making factories are owned by the government and don't compete against each other they can survive even when making very crappy pies. THAT is the problem.

Like it or not the world does not have infinite resources, so you have to determine how to allocate them one way or another. The problem with centralized planning is that it takes way too many calculations to do efficiently. You are talking about millions of products which all need to be planned with highly recursive calculations. The number is far too large even for the fastest theoretical computer , IIRC the number of calculations needed are numbered in hundreds of orders of magnitude.
 
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