One hundred and fifty years ago this January, with nothing much left of his country except for the Army of Northern Virginia and the foul, fundamentalist catechism of white supremacy, Jefferson Davis entertained the proposition that it was time to arm the slaves to defend their status as property ... or something. (Yes, the proposal stated that any slave who took up arms to defend the Confederacy would be freed after the war, a promise that likely was worth precisely dick.) The governments of the sovereign states of the Confederacy predictably went up the wall. Old Howell Cobb down in Georgia lost his shit entirely.

"Use all the Negroes you can get, for the purposes for which you need them. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong."

(Cobb, of course, presaged Marshall McLuhan's lament in Annie Hall: "You're saying that my whole fallacy is wrong." Well, yes.)

As a result, Davis was struck by a moment of fleeting clarity. "If the Confederacy falls," he said, "there should be written on its tombstone: died of a theory."



Which, a century and a half later, brings us to the curious doings in the state of Idaho, wherein live not a few Confederate nostalgists. In brief, the state legislature there killed a measure that would have brought Idaho into compliance with federal law regarding federal support for child care, and for the enforcement of child-support agreements, and you are not going to believe why they did it.

The conflict started last week after a House committee narrowly rejected a bill that had sailed through the Senate. The vote came after state Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll, a Cottonwood Republican, testified that federal regulations incorporated an international agreement regarding child support payments that would subject the state to Sharia law. None of the nearly 80 countries involved in the treaty — the Hague Convention on International Recovery of Child Support and Family Maintenance, which the U.S. entered in 2007 — is under Sharia law. But Nuxoll and other skeptics said some involved nations informally recognize Sharia courts. They added that Idaho wouldn't have the authority to challenge another nation's judgment.

There are a number of people I would like to congratulate for their hard work in injecting this primeval American idiocy back generally into the political culture of the nation. (In the middle of the last century, it was mainly focused on resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.) First among them are the Tenthers, whose most visible champions are Ted Cruz, who is running for president, and Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah who's out there peddling a Tenther book about how the Constitution was "lost," and how he found it again. The conservative echo chamber that has been drifting increasingly to the right as a result of having been driven mad by a black president. However, there were other hands put to the job as well: the people who secretly negotiate international trade deals that cost American jobs under the veil of a system of "globalism" that looks to the paranoid mind very much like one-world government, and our increasingly militarized local police forces. It is a very good time to be a paranoid nutball in America these days, and you can really turn a fine buck on exploiting that situation, too.

So now, in Idaho, we have state legislators who look at $46 million in federal aid that will help track down deadbeat dads and see the first stirrings of an American caliphate. And why shouldn't they believe that? They hear it every day from their favorite radio and electric teevee news-stars. They read it in widely circulated e-mails all over the country. Government is not the solution. Government is the problem, and the national government is the worst problem of all. And they go to the polls and elect the likes of Sheryl Nuxoll, an accountant who sees the fine hand of Islamic radicalism in the Department of Health and Human Services, and who herself is no stranger to the strange.

And the paranoia inevitably comes cloaked in what is perceived by these people to be the noble constitutional heritage of "states rights." This ignores the fact that we've tried that system at least twice in our history -- first, under the Articles of Confederation, and second, in the Confederate States of America -- and it failed miserably both times. It is founded in the fundamental American political heresy that holds the Constitution to be a pact between states and not an agreement undertaken by all the American people, as the Constitution says in its first three words. One entire political party is now dominated by this heresy. I am not aware of a single Republican presidential candidate, real or potential, who is not a Tenther in some way. Out of the national spotlight, they are succeeding wildly in many states. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of marriage equality, for example, you're going to see an explosion of this heresy all over the country. They are trying to recreate in fact the Confederacy that they hold dear in their hearts. My god, there are better theories from which a country can die.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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