Well, as I suspected might happen, I have now run into another version of events than that described by Bevin Alexander, a few posts earlier.
Listening to The Teaching Company’s History of Conservatism, he points out that while the profitability of slavery was declining, that a doctrine of the inherent MORALITY of slavery had come into being. On this account, slave-holders were not just people living off the forced labor of others, but rather agents of moral elevation, and paternalistic guardianship.
Remember, now, that the absolutely overwhelming majority of Southerners held no slaves at all. Those who did were the equivalent to the Captains of Industry in our own time. Figure out what the nicest, priciest part of your city is, and that is where they lived. Quite literally, they believed themselves to be aristocrats of the British variety, and held not just black people, but most white people around them in contempt.
This contempt was expressed in a fundamental conceit that their role in life was to take care of their “inferiors”. In the British formulation this was the “White Man’s Burden”.
Here is the interesting part: they argued that because people are not born equal, that some are meant to rule. Now, socialists reject this, of course. They hold, rather, that all people are born equal and–here is the kicker–it is the role of the STATE to MAKE them equal, by “hatchet, ax, and saw”, as that Canadian philosopher Neil Peart put it.
You have, on the one side, the People. These are the ones you are trying to help. You help them by making them equal. You make sure no awful nasty rich people live off the backs of others.
On the other side, you have the State. The State doesn’t really “exist”, per se. It is sort of like God; it guides through an innate wisdom, that far surpasses that of “the people”, and thus SAVES them from all the terrible things that would happen but for the guidance of the State.
And who runs the State? The intellectuals, the modern slave-holding aristocrats. Socialism, pushed to the limit, is the political process of turning the world into plantation owners and slaves–literally, in the case of Cuba.
When you reject Reason, you reject peace, and you reject justice. If you watch carefully, this is the invariant pattern.