Thomas DiLorenzo's Rebel Yelling
Frank Cocozzelli printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Sun Aug 31, 2014 at 04:02:29 PM EST
I have written a great deal in the past few years about the odd phenomenon of Catholic Neo-Confederatism.  Let's add one more name to the pantheon.

Thomas DiLorenzo is a man of contradictions. He teaches university level economics yet he is best known as an avatar of Neo-Confederatism. He teaches at a Catholic university, but subscribes to economic views that have more in common with the libertarianism of Ayn Rand than anything in Catholic social teaching. He is also a leading loather of Abraham Lincoln and a contemporary advocate of nullification and secession -- two zombie ideas that are being resurrected as a means of religious oppression -- often in the name of religious liberty.

Although born in 1954 north of the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania, DiLorenzo has been a vociferous defender of the Southern Lost Cause. He has earned a B.A. in economics from Westminster College in his home state as well as a Ph.D. in the same subject from Virginia Tech. But DiLorenzo's education in economics is not reflected in his writing (save his allusions to his Austrian school philosophy) which is more devoted to the agenda of nullification and secession. To that end, he serves as not only as a senior fellow to the uber-libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute, but also as an associate scholar with Abbeville Institute which promotes a revisionist view of the Confederacy.

DiLorenzo writes from the battlements of history, taking particular aim at the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.  He believes the US Constitution allows for the rights of secession and nullification and that the Confederacy fought a just war against the Union.

And like his Neo-Confederate cohort Tom Woods, he is a well-educated man who is oddly prone to hyperbole. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is increasingly cited as a source in the right-wing echo chamber. For example, FOX News host, Judge Andrew Napolitano frequently cites DiLorenzo's work. So much so that twenty three of the twenty four end notes in Napolitano's The Constitution in Exile were sourced to  DiLorenzo's work. His neo-Confederate libertarianism has also gained him recognition by the contemporary godfather of the movement. In 2011 DiLorenzo testified before he House subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve, which was chaired by none other than then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he adheres to many of the crank notions of contemporary libertarianism.  He rails, for example, against Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Food and Drug Administration in his book  The Food and Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies, and Petty Tyrants or in the book Cancerscam, that government's war on smoking is an unnecessary government intrusion. (Both co-authored with James Bennett, professor of economics at George Mason University). DiLorenzo teaches economics at the Jesuit-run Loyola University Maryland, but scorns the Catholic order's progressive economic outlook.

Less well known is DiLorenzo's involvement with the Neo-Confederate League of the South. But it is not hard to find. For example, in a July 2011 essay in the League's newsletter, The Magnolia, he defended it against the charge that it is a "hate group" as designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  In the small world department, Michael Peroutka, (the 2004 presidential candidate of the Constitution Party, 2014 Republican nominee for County Council Maryland and a longtime member of the League of the South) once said of his fellow Neo-Confederate:

I read a lot of material, but Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln comes to mind.  He makes a convincing case for the fact that slavery, however immoral, should have come to an end in the United States as it did in the rest of the Western, industrialized world-without a war. ...  As DiLorenzo puts it, Lincoln was the Great Centralizer and Consolidator of Federal power.  Now we see the wholesale transfer of Federally usurped powers to the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Import-Export Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, NATO, and the like.

Peroutka not only references DiLorenzo's works -- he currently sells them via his web site -- alongside a photo of the professor.

I asked John McKee Barr, author of Loathing Lincoln: An American Tradition from the Civil War to the Present about DiLorenzo's appeal to the Confederate flag waving wing of the Religious Right.  In an e-mail interview, Barr told me:

"Clearly, the idea that the Civil War was a theological war is a very old one and it continues in the writings of Lincoln's critics today,"he observed. "...[I]n reviewing Ward Hill Lamon's biography of Lincoln in the early 1870s Albert Taylor Bledsoe (a former friend of Lincoln's and vociferous defender of secession) said that if the Union's cause "was the cause of infidelity and atheism, and against the principles and the spirit of the Christian religion, then who more worthy to muster its motley hosts, and let them slip with the fury of the pit, than the low-bred infidel of Pigeon Creek, in whose eyes the Savior of the world was `an Illegitimate child,' the Holy Mother as base as his own." (p. 88-89 Loathing Lincoln)."

Barr explains that "while DiLorenzo emphasizes these things in his critique of the president," it is his sense that DiLorenzo "stresses much more his belief that Lincoln was a tyrant, that Confederate secession was constitutional and thus the war was both immorally begun and conducted by the president, and that Lincoln was the founder of (I think these words are Murray Rothbard's) `the warfare-welfare state.'"




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DiLorenzo is both a crank and cranky. I remember DiLorenzo's fatuous column calling Lincoln a tyrant, which is par for the course with his worship of the imagined virtues of the Confederacy. The Southernization and retreat to the Gilded Age of the United States continues apace, as ordinary people see their standards of living fall and we seem unable to come together as a nation. Michael Peroutka sings from the same hymnbook as DiLorenzo in his worship of the Confederacy. Peroutka was once a Catholic, but decided to adopt the extreme Presbyterianism that he imagines all Confederates to have professed. In the 1950s and 1960s, William F. Buckley was very hostile to the cause of civil rights, in large part because his mother Aloise was a native of Louisiana and had an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh.

These guys remind me of some of the American and European paleoconservatives that believe in absolute monarchy and unity of state and faith. I thought we had left this nonsense behind, but I guess our nation has not advanced as much as I hoped we had. They have a closed loop system in which they rely upon one another for their arguments and historical falsification. It reminds me of the zeal with which creationists argue for Biblical literalism in the face of contrary scientific evidence.

by khughes1963 on Sun Aug 31, 2014 at 08:42:46 PM EST


It is true that Lincoln put people in prison for speaking against the Civil War (I) (I expect another which has been going on since 1934, 1980) with the idea to keep the Union together. In the end these guys want a Union too---under their rule and they would be more ruthless than even Lincoln was at his worst.

This Reich Wing Libertarianism is so skewed as to be a fun house mirror parody of what they speak of. And contradictory as well in many cases.

However anyone who has read the Bible understands that slavery was not considered bad, it was considered as normal as living. So for DiLorenzo to support such things he must understand that he is defacto advocating slavery again. Even if it is Whites enslaving Whites as something that would be a Godly Institution. I have met idiots who are advocates of Black slavery again. Though the benefits of slaver they tout disappear when they would be the ones enslaved.

Sadly the USA for a long time has been bubbling with eruptions of religious fervor and fever building to a possible crescendo into a full fledged religious based state. We are more at risk now than in a long time. Just becoming a Plutocracy is a coupe in itself without a shot fired. We are in dire trouble. Similar forces were at work 1933 - 1934 under the noses of the FBI and wanted to make us a member of the Axis as an American NS Nation. It was thwarted, barely. None of the very rich and well known backers of it were prosecuted and in doing so we lost a chance to kill the idea. So instead they rethought and began to work in the back ground. To kill the Republic from all sides and it has been working all too well. Especially since 1980 when the changes began. I don't see a way to stop it.

by Nightgaunt on Sun Sep 07, 2014 at 09:10:20 PM EST



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