Editor's Notes: Destroy the Slave Power

Today we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in America, the darkest stain in a history that is not otherwise unblemished. To celebrate the end of an evil is also to celebrate those who were freed of it, even if their struggle did not end there, and indeed continues to this day. And it is also to celebrate those who fought to free them.

Enemies of slavery referred to the institution as "the slave power." They recognized that the institution was not merely evil, but actively strengthened evil men, gave them social power beyond their unchecked dominion over the human beings they treated like property. Republicans like Lincoln recognized quite clearly that they needed to fight slavery not just to save the slaves, but in order to liberate the country as a whole from the grip of the slave power.

Since the Gilded Age, more and more Americans have come to recognize that social power of that kind can be produced by economic organizations more benign than slavery, and indeed sometimes nominally quite good. On its face, producing electric vehicles is a worthy endeavor. On its face, subsidizing that activity is good policy.

Creating a trillionaire, on the other hand, is not good policy. Especially when that trillionaire is a white nationalist, willing to interfere in elections at home and abroad, and just in general follows his every destructive and divisive whim. The economic power he has amassed has turned into a political power that allows him to act on those impulses with impunity.

So on the Juneteenth, I am thinking about what it truly took to destroy the slave power, as well as the fact that, in some ways, the Republicans actually failed to do so.