{"id":30573,"date":"2015-03-08T05:00:59","date_gmt":"2015-03-08T09:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30573"},"modified":"2015-03-07T23:43:17","modified_gmt":"2015-03-08T04:43:17","slug":"the-war-of-1812-as-a-statist-enabling-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/03\/08\/the-war-of-1812-as-a-statist-enabling-event\/","title":{"rendered":"The War of 1812 as a statist enabling event"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the right side of the border, the War of 1812 is viewed as a key event in the progress towards independence. On the south side of the border, the war is usually considered to be a minor error, but as <a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2015\/03\/01\/the-war-of-1812-and-us-liberalism\" target=\"_blank\">Sheldon Richman<\/a> points out, it was an inflection point in the road to bigger, more coercive government in the United States:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In 1918, having watched in horror as his Progressive friends gleefully jumped onto Woodrow Wilson\u2019s war wagon, Randolph Bourne penned the immortal words: &#8220;War is the health of the state.&#8221; As he explained it,<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man\u2019s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again,\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>[I]n general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty\u2014or mystic devotion to the State \u2014 becomes the major imagined human value.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An earlier group of Americans would have agreed, although they would not have shared Bourne\u2019s horror. These are the men who sought war with England in 1812.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>The retired founders were not the only ones who worried. They were joined by the men who still exercised power, especially Republicans James Madison and James Monroe, and such influential men of the next generation as John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. As war with England approached, Republicans (as opposed to the Federalists) had no problem finding silver linings. War would not only inject government with a new dynamism\u2014with important implications for trade policy, money and banking, and internal improvements \u2014 it would also give the people a shot of badly needed national spirit.<\/p>\n<p>Thus the War of 1812 is an underrated turning point in American history, rivaling the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the two world wars. Indeed, the War of 1812 helped to launch the empire that manifested itself in those later conflicts. In its aftermath, America\u2019s rulers could believe that their continental and global ambitions, backed by the army and a global navy, were fully realizable. They just needed a government equal to the task.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the right side of the border, the War of 1812 is viewed as a key event in the progress towards independence. On the south side of the border, the war is usually considered to be a minor error, but as Sheldon Richman points out, it was an inflection point in the road to bigger, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10,13],"tags":[566,942],"class_list":["post-30573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-warof1812","tag-woodrowwilson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7X7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30574,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30573\/revisions\/30574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}