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Speaking of “Bad History”…

The Akaka bill is a terrible piece of legislation. Every aspect of it—from its premises to its goals to its methods—undermines the American belief that we are one people from many. ~National Review This “belief” is a lot of rot–E pluribus unum referred (and still refers) to the Union of the thirteen independent colonies. It […]

The Akaka bill is a terrible piece of legislation. Every aspect of it—from its premises to its goals to its methods—undermines the American belief that we are one people from many. ~National Review

This “belief” is a lot of rot–E pluribus unum referred (and still refers) to the Union of the thirteen independent colonies. It was not a precocious slogan for multicultural synthesis or the blather about a “nation of immigrants.” Since NR has taken it upon itself the task of giving us the “good” history and castigating the “bad,” it hardly helps that they don’t seem to know what the motto from the Great Seal actually means.

Complaining about the 1993 Apology Resolution, which forms part of the basis for the new law’s claims, NR offers this:

But the United States had only a tangential part in that insurrection, which was primarily carried out by inhabitants of the kingdom acting outside U.S. jurisdiction.

Now where did these “inhabitants” come from and what were their interests in the kingdom? I expect Smedley Butler would have had some choice words in his later years about the use of Marines in facilitating the sugar planters’ coup. That is what our “tangential part” was–providing the force that made the coup successful. The Marines were deployed in Honolulu from January 16 until April 1, 1893. Doesn’t sound very tangential to me. It seems like the crucial difference keeping the republicans in power.

National Review doesn’t like Akaka’s bill and the “native Hawaiian” government idea–fair enough. I see that it certainly works to the detriment of the non-“natives” (though, if intermarriage is as common and widespread as the critics claim, wouldn’t “native rights” extend to a large part of the population?). Couldn’t NR make their argument without resorting to deception about the nature of the coup against the Hawaiian monarchy? Perhaps they could enlist Max Boot to give us a lecture on the virtues of interfering in other nations’ affairs. But they could spare us the pose of defending the real historical record, when it seems clear that they are less than eager to pay attention to what the record shows.

More laughable is the conclusion of the editorial:

Even so, the greatest victim of the Akaka bill would not be non-native Hawaiians. It would be, rather, the belief that every American belongs to a single, indivisible society.

The Akaka bill might or might not be wise (in a decentralist order, it would be a problem for Hawaiians, not one for New Mexicans and New Yorkers to sort out!), but if its success means that we are no longer labouring under the delusion of belonging to “a single, indivisible society” I think I am all for it. When Baroness Thatcher said that society did not exist, it was this sort of society she was rejecting. Elsewhere, Rich Lowry cites Reconstruction-era Court rulings bantering on about the “indestructible Union composed of indestructible States” (which is actually impious–only God is indestructible) as if it were absolute truth. For my money, the states ought to be a good deal more indestructible than the Union, but somehow it has worked out the other way round.

In truth, the Akaka bill will not actually loosen the federal government’s grip on anything (if it did, do you suppose it would even get a hearing in Congress?) but simply introduce a new actor, the “native Hawaiian” government, into the mix. But clearly the critics desperately fear anything that smacks of decentralism. They also seem to find it difficult to grasp that the means by which Hawaii was brought into the Union were, shall we say, less than honourable (and it was because of this, as well as his basic aversion to imperialism, that motivated Cleveland’s resistance to annexation), or that imperial gains might ever be reversed.

Daniel Akaka and Daniel Larison (as an aside, isn’t it odd that the only national politicians still around today with the first name of Daniel are the two Hawaiian Senators?) alike do not belong to “a single, indivisible society,” but to a whole range of intermediary associations, groups and loyalties. By the way, what is this weird obsession with everything being indivisible? A society is not like the Incarnation!

Multiple multi-layered, complex societies are the sorts of societies, which is very often divisible and composite, that mean something to real people. No one belongs to “a single, indivisible society,” at least not an earthly one, and claims to this effect suggest a basic hostility to all other forms of belonging other than belonging to the consolidated society of the consolidated nation-state.

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