We all know what good came of that.

There is a very deep split among libertarians. My friend Timothy Sandefur, a libertarian legal scholar, calls the Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell crowd “doughface libertarians” (pro-slavery northerners were called doughfaces during the civil war). The crux of the split is the 14th amendment – the doughfaces absolutely despise it and claim that it instituted a new form of slavery as the Federal government took power over the states. Folks like me argue that the notion of “state's rights” is a misnomer – states are governments and governments have authorities, not rights. And we argue that if individual rights are truly unalienable, as the Declaration of Independence says, then it is unjust for any level of government to violate them and those rights ought to be uniform throughout the country. We agree with Madison that the Bill of Rights should have been applied to the states in the original constitution, but he lacked the votes to get that done.

A lot of the doughfaces are outright southern nationalists and slavery apologists. Many are associated with groups like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as White Citizen Councils). Their online home is lewrockwell.com.

There is a very deep split among libertarians. My friend Timothy Sandefur, a libertarian legal scholar, calls the Ron Paul/Lew Rockwell crowd “doughface libertarians” (pro-slavery northerners were called doughfaces during the civil war). The crux of the split is the 14th amendment – the doughfaces absolutely despise it and claim that it instituted a new form of slavery as the Federal government took power over the states. Folks like me argue that the notion of “state’s rights” is a misnomer – states are governments and governments have authorities, not rights. And we argue that if individual rights are truly unalienable, as the Declaration of Independence says, then it is unjust for any level of government to violate them and those rights ought to be uniform throughout the country. We agree with Madison that the Bill of Rights should have been applied to the states in the original constitution, but he lacked the votes to get that done.

A lot of the doughfaces are outright southern nationalists and slavery apologists. Many are associated with groups like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as White Citizen Councils). Their online home is lewrockwell.com.

We all know what good came of that.