Jeffrey Paul is a research professor at West Virginia University and author of Winning the Second American Civil War: The Authoritarian Threat of Progressivism, Where It Came From, and How to Defeat ItHe spoke with City Journal Co-editor Daniel Kennelly.
Which two sides are facing each other in the Second American Civil War and what political philosophies underlie them?
On one side are those who believe that government power is limited by the individual’s natural (pre-legal) rights to life (i.e., self-determination), liberty, and property. These people are represented primarily in the Republican Party. On the other side are people who believe that natural rights are a fiction. Rather, government is the source of all the rights enjoyed by individuals—and it can impose duties on citizens that violate individual rights and liberties as Americans have traditionally understood them. People who agree with this view are represented primarily in the post-New Deal Democratic Party. The two views are obviously incompatible.
Where does this rejection of the natural law philosophy that was America’s founding principle come from?
The nation was founded on the principles of natural law, which John Locke first introduced in his Second Treatise on Civil Governmentwhich Thomas Jefferson championed in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But the unresolved contradiction between freedom and slavery inevitably led to the American Civil War.
With the Union’s victory, the principles of the natural rights of the individual and limited government triumphed. Yet barely four decades later, university professors rejected that ideal. That it happened was an accident of history – essentially the result of a mistake.
In the years following the Civil War, presidents of leading universities sought to transform their educational institutions into research centers with doctoral programs and graduate students. They were modeled on German universities, which had been awarding doctoral degrees for centuries. That country’s universities began to hire Americans who had earned doctorates in Germany, the only country that awarded such degrees.
This proved a tremendous success in the purely empirical natural sciences and medicine, but was a disaster for the social sciences and humanities. The views of German philosophers, political scientists, historians, and economists were at odds with America’s founding principles. German academics viewed the nation as an organism whose cellular units were individuals. Individuals themselves had no rights, no claim to self-determination, but only a duty to maintain the life and well-being of the organism—that is, the nation. These duties were to be assigned by the brain of the organism (the nation), which included the university professors and their students in the bureaucracy.
German social science professors instilled these autocratic ideas in hundreds of American students. This perspective became doctrine after these students created the modern American graduate programs and gained the power to hire future faculty (a power that traditionally belonged to university presidents) and to award doctoral degrees to their students.
In 1903, the founder and head of the University of Chicago’s political science department wrote that the academy had “discredited and rejected” the individualistic idea of natural rights. The founder of Columbia University’s doctoral program added, “The state is the source of individual freedom.” American professors imbued with this German view called themselves progressives; from the 1890s onwards they dominated the social sciences and humanities. They poured into journalism, law and politics, and since the 1930s have dominated the Democratic Party.
Why are income taxes incompatible with a natural law republic?
In the 19th century, the protection of the person and property of citizens, except in time of war, was the duty of the state governments. The states levied the “general property tax,” which was to be collected from each citizen in proportion to the benefit he derived from it, that is, the protection of his person and property.
But today’s federal income tax represents only a fraction of what is protected and is inconsistent with the principle of natural justice. It takes little account of what is protected for some citizens while effectively plundering others who depend primarily on their labor income – that is, most Americans.
For this and other reasons, personal and corporate income and payroll taxes, as well as taxes on realized capital gains, inheritances, and gifts, should be replaced by a 1 percent universal sales tax (not a VAT or retail sales tax). This would reduce the burden on the middle class while still generating more revenue than the current system, since the lion’s share of revenue will come from the sale of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and derivatives. In 2019, for example, the federal government collected $3.5 trillion, while a 1 percent universal sales tax would have collected $1.1 trillion more and balanced the budget. The years 2011–2021 would have produced similar results.
How can one side “win” the Second Civil War?
Winning the Second Civil War requires the passage of my tax proposal in the short term! The economic relief it would bring to the vast majority of working Americans would make Republicans the majority party for some time – ideally enough time for Republicans to push through other reforms, such as universal school choice and ideological balance among faculty at state or state-supported “private” universities, that Democrats would not adopt. In addition, the federal bureaucracy must be drastically reduced and its powers severely limited.
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