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xtruss · 1 year ago

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Illustration of Painting Over the Words ‘We and The’ Leaving Only the Word ‘People’ Legible. By Nicholas Konrad/The New Yorker

How Do We Survive The Constitution?

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

— By Corey Robin | October 4, 2023

Donald Trump caught academics off guard. Historians and social scientists had long studied the American right, amassing a vast library on its relationship to race, gender, sex, the media, the Cold War, religion, and big and small business. Less explored was the role of the Constitution, which has always been more friend than foe to the American way of repression. This gap in the literature left the field wide open for experts in authoritarianism abroad and scholars of authoritarianism past.

The most important contribution to this genre was “How Democracies Die,” by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Studying how democracy was undermined elsewhere, Levitsky and Ziblatt defined the threat of Trumpism as an attack on the Constitution, the rule of law, and institutions. They also claimed that these pillars were less sturdy than people supposed. The Constitution was riddled with holes. Restrictions on Presidential prerogatives were not written down. Institutions designed to check extremists, whether specified in the text (a bicameral legislature) or not (political parties), were vulnerable to extremists.

Most worrisome of all, the ligaments joining these parts, what Levitsky and Ziblatt called “norms,” were frayed. Two norms in particular—tolerance of one’s opponents and forbearance in the exercise of power—were foundational to constitutional democracy. But since 1965, 1994, or 2010 (Levitsky and Ziblatt never settled on a date), those norms had been eroding. Traditionally, élite “gatekeepers” had been the custodians of norms, exercising “peer review” over norm eroders such as Charles Lindbergh and George Wallace. But, in the wake of reforms initiated by the Democrats after 1968 (another date), and later copied by the Republicans, ordinary voters, rather than insider élites, were empowered to choose the Presidential ticket of each party. For a while, the establishment held the line against outsiders. Then came 2016, when Republican leaders failed to stop Trump and rallied behind him.

Within a month of its publication, in January, 2018, “How Democracies Die” hit the Times best-seller list. It’s easy to see why. The book gave voice to liberals who felt betrayed not by their country but by its voters, the gate-crashers who put Trump into power. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s readers believed in norms, trusted élites, and valued institutions, particularly the Supreme Court. They revered the Constitution. The problem was the half of the country that didn’t.

But spring came, as it does, and a new wind began to blow on the left. After the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, progressives started seeing the Court less as a counter to Trumpism than as its conduit. “Defend institutions” may have made sense at the beginning of Trump’s reign. By the end, it sounded like a call to protect the Electoral College and other struts of the right. In 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt had recommended building coalitions with “red-state Republicans,” abandoning abortion as a litmus test for candidates, and making unnamed but “tough” concessions to moderate voters. Now liberals were ready to play hardball: abolish the filibuster, pack the Court, admit new states to increase Democratic votes in the Senate, and stop all coöperation with the G.O.P.

None of this agenda has been enacted, but its pressures are felt throughout “Tyranny of the Minority,” Levitsky and Ziblatt’s follow-up to “How Democracies Die.” There’s little talk of norms in the new volume. Instead, Levitsky and Ziblatt reaffirm the call to end the filibuster and remake the Court, norm-eroding measures they previously cautioned against. More surprising is their revised view of democracy itself. The primary threat to the system is no longer demagogues; it’s the very institutions that Levitsky and Ziblatt once rallied readers to protect. If the United States is to remain—really, become—a democracy, Americans must stop treating its founding text “as if it were a sacred document.” The Constitution, the deepest norm in American politics, must be eroded.

In 1857, the British historian and statesman Thomas Macaulay set out a grim forecast for the United States. In Britain, political power was safely tucked away in the pockets of élites, who were “deeply interested in the security of property.” America had foolishly handed power to the “discontented” masses. For now, there was land for them to settle in the West. But, when that safety valve failed, the working classes, “none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner,” would vote to strip the minority of their wealth. The Constitution wouldn’t stop them. It was “all sail and no anchor.”

For much of American history, it’s been the reverse: all anchor, no sail. The most influential authors of the Constitution were terrified of democratic majorities. They devised a government with a sluice of filters—at least six, which Levitsky and Ziblatt note is “an unusually large number”—to push majorities to the side. More than two centuries later, we still have this “uniquely counter-majoritarian democracy,” which is hardly a democracy at all.

Congress has two of the filters. A bicameral legislature is one; the Senate is the other. Many countries have learned that, in a real democracy, upper chambers either don’t exist or have highly limited powers. The U.S. Senate doesn’t just have power equal to (and, in some cases, greater than) the House; it also represents states rather than individuals. Wyoming, with a population of about five hundred and eighty thousand, has as many votes as California, which has nearly forty million people. There’s a reason that most democracies don’t operate in this way: it’s undemocratic. This has been apparent for centuries. All of the antislavery bills that passed the House between 1800 and 1860 were killed by the minoritarian Senate.

If the House and the Senate agree on a bill, they still need the approval of the President, who’s elected not by the voters but by the Electoral College. That’s the third filter. With a bias toward smaller states and a winner-take-all structure, the Electoral College can send the loser of the popular vote to the White House. In this century alone, that’s happened twice.

Even if the elected branches agree on a bill, the Supreme Court can strike it down. Justices are put on the bench by the Senate and the President, so we can have a Supreme Court majority, like the one we have now, created by a combination of Presidents who lost the popular vote and senators who represent a minority of the voters. That’s the fourth filter, a creature of the preceding three.

Meanwhile, another course runs parallel to the national one. Our federal system, the fifth filter, grants states tremendous power, including the right to design electoral rules—how district lines are drawn, who can access the ballot, how elections are conducted, and so on��that privilege minorities over majorities. Between 1968 and 2016, the party with fewer votes has won a state house a hundred and twenty-one times and a state senate a hundred and forty-six times. Those legislatures, in turn, can gerrymander federal election districts, turning the putatively majoritarian House into another counter-majoritarian chamber. They also can pass laws, such as bans on abortion, that abridge the most basic freedoms of the people.

Many nations entered the twentieth century saddled with the yoke of counter-majoritarianism. They got rid of it. We haven’t, thanks to our mega-counter-majoritarian requirement for constitutional change, which is the sixth and most important filter. Two-thirds of both houses in Congress propose an amendment, and three-fourths of the states must then ratify it. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, a political scientist has devised something called the Index of Difficulty to measure how hard it is to change a country’s constitution. Ours tops the list, by a wide margin.

This news comes at a bad time. Today’s Republicans—many of them white and living in rural areas—hold fast to the Constitution for protection against Democratic majorities. Those majorities increasingly live in large cities, where the jobs are, and many of those cities are in highly populated, Democratic states. The combination of these factors leaves blue voters vulnerable to malapportionment in the states, where they needlessly pile up their votes in cities, and in the Senate and Electoral College. A minority of voters can now inflict a legislative wallop of racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, transphobia, and economic misery on the rest of us—and never have to pay for it at the polls.

This is the “tyranny of the minority” that Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly fear. No lawless strongman or populist autocracy, it’s a product of the very Constitution that we have been taught to admire.

Once we set aside the compass of the Constitution, where should we look for our North Star? Levitsky and Ziblatt point to “multiracial democracy.” Either we become a multiracial democracy or we cease to “be a democracy at all.” The battle, in other words, is existential.

Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt aren’t equipped for war. Like many analysts, they believe that today’s right is driven by a primitive fear. Conservative voters fear the simple fact of demographic change. As immigrants, people of color, women, and sexual and gender minorities assume greater visibility, dominant groups—straight, white, cis, native-born men—fear a loss of status. That fear of erasure fuels the G.O.P.’s “turn to authoritarianism.” Holding on to government power is an “existential” imperative for the Party and the groups it represents.

This argument, now ubiquitous on the left, has come to seem like a natural law of the political universe, describing our most elemental drives of identity and anxiety. It makes sense that conservatives would believe it, as they’ve been pushing it since the French Revolution. But it poses a problem for the left, and for Levitsky and Ziblatt, in particular.

If dominant groups can get members of subordinate groups to identify with them, they may not need minoritarian tyranny to stay in power. That scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Until recently, that was the story of the American right, whose foot soldiers created large voting majorities and cultivated explicit support for big business from the ranks of its victims. Whiteness is insidiously capacious, forever incorporating new arrivals into its enveloping fold. Small shifts of nonwhite voters away from Democrats and the rise in the number of Republican candidates of color suggest that this phenomenon remains salient, even in the age of Trump. In today’s environment, where elections are won at the margin, the effects can be lethal.

More important, if the laws of identity and anxiety are as primal and potent as many progressives believe, resisting those laws risks turning the left��s project into a purely moral crusade, an exhortatory ought against the right’s is. Levitsky and Ziblatt call themselves political realists, yet they often resort to an earnest moralism to explain the world. What makes politicians capitulate to authoritarians in their midst? The absence of courage. How will multiracial democracy be advanced? By “loving America with a broken heart.” “History is calling again,” and “future generations will hold us to account.” More than a lapse in style, platitudes like these, stacked one on top of the other, reveal how difficult it has been for progressives, of all stripes, to mount a political argument for democracy.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are refreshingly clear that only a popular movement can create the constitutional reforms that democracy needs. But they define democracy narrowly, as “a political system with regular, free, and fair elections in which adult citizens of all ethnic groups possess the right to vote” and “enjoy equal protection of democratic and civil rights.” Quoting the political scientist Adam Przeworski, they add that it is “a system in which parties lose elections.” Given this straitened sense of what a democracy can do, it’s not clear why any contemporary movement would take on the task of creating it. It’s probably no accident that, thus far, none really has.

It wasn’t always so. The United States has seen many movements for democracy. The successful ones have treated the Constitution not simply as a document of constraint, weaponized by the courts and politicians, but as a charter of expanding freedom, wielded by and for the people. As Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath detail in their wonderfully counterintuitive book, “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” the very document that Levitsky and Ziblatt are so dissatisfied with is annotated with statements of astonishing democratic vision, penned by the great social movements of the past.

From the earliest days of the Republic, those movements insisted that the greatest threat to democracy is not the tyranny of one man but the oligarchic rule of wealth. Poor citizens, at the mercy of richer ones, could not be full citizens. More than a moral or political argument, this is a foundational claim about the Constitution and the economy, or what we might call the political constitution of the economy. When we think of the Constitution today, our minds drift to civil rights or to the obstacle course described by Levitsky and Ziblatt. Historically, Fishkin and Forbath remind us, Americans have thought of the Constitution as a weapon in the struggle for economic equality, as a real presence in their material lives.

Among the most successful movements against oligarchy were the Populists and Progressives, who used the document to treat the disabling economy of the Gilded Age. At the end of the nineteenth century, land promised to farmers in the West was gobbled up by banks, railroads, speculators, and cattle companies. Suddenly jobless, a new proletariat scuttled back East, praying for work in factories and cities. “Unemployment” appeared as a census category for the first time. Vagrants shattered store windows to get a bed for the night in jail. Meanwhile, the top one per cent owned half of the wealth.

When the United States was an agricultural society, distribution of property seemed like the fount of equality. But, as Macaulay anticipated, industrial capitalism—with its wrenching shift to wage labor, complex production lines, and corporate behemoths—had rendered that vision moot. The Populists and Progressives realized that they needed a new conception of democracy, one tied less to physical notions of land and labor than to the social facts of economic combination and coöperation. Mass parties, labor unions, public schools, strikes and boycotts, social insurance, minimum-wage laws, state banks and currency reform, antitrust regulation, income taxes, even economic planning: these were the new priorities, the material resources of freedom. They deserved all the constitutional fervor and protection that once attached to yeoman land.

In their quest to enact these changes, the Populists and Progressives hit a familiar wall—the Senate and the courts. The Senate was “a paradise of millionaires,” one critic cried. Edgar Lee Masters, the author of “Spoon River Anthology,” wrote that “plutocracy appoints the federal judges.” After Grover Cleveland sent in the troops to crush the Pullman Strike, which was organized by thousands of railroad workers, Illinois’s governor declared that “never before were the United States government and the corporations of the country so blended.”

Instead of accepting oligarchy as the inevitable consequence of the Constitution, the Populists and Progressives looked for alternatives in the text. Through a close reading of James Madison’s notes and papers, they uncovered an argument for the national government’s design and regulation of the economy. In the commerce clause, they found a tool for Congress to “secure the Blessings of Liberty,” which later proved critical to the passage of the Wagner Act—the cornerstone of workers’ right to organize unions—and the Civil Rights Act. The Gold Standard, which enriched bankers and burdened farmers, was deemed a violation of the equal-protection clause. And, in a brilliant marriage of substance and strategy, the Progressives joined forces with the feminist movement, arguing that women voters would help strengthen child-labor laws, health and safety protections, and so on.

By insisting that “the people are the masters of their Constitution,” these armies plowed through Levitsky and Ziblatt’s sixth filter. In rapid succession, the country adopted the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), which gave the government the power to enact an income tax; the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), which established direct election of senators; and the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), which secured for white women the right to vote. The amendments were linked. A democratically elected Senate would lead to income taxes that, by the middle of the twentieth century, were the envy of social democracies across the globe. The right to vote would empower women in the household economy, overturning what Susan B. Anthony had called the most “hateful oligarchy” of all, the “oligarchy of sex.”

Fishkin and Forbath also push against the reductive identitarianism of today’s defenders of democracy. Any movement of constitutional reform requires racial and gender equality, and vice versa. But the laws and norms of race and sex are part of the economy, from the distribution and rewards of labor, in the household and the workplace, to the operations of finance and the regulation of marriage and inheritance. To overcome oligarchy—and Levitsky and Ziblatt’s tyranny of the minority—that political economy must be remade.

Reconstruction and the New Deal offer instructive examples. “By building up a ruling and dominant class,” the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction declared, slavery “produced a spirit of oligarchy averse to republican institutions.” Slaveholders had accumulated vast wealth and power, not just through enslavement but by forcing wage workers, Black and white, in the North and South, to accept harsh conditions on the ground that they weren’t as bad as slavery. The slaveholders also thwarted a much-needed land-grant bill for public colleges and universities, fearing that any exercise of federal power might be turned against them.

Because the slaveholders’ power derived from a racial caste system, labor exploitation, and a privileged position in government, the leaders of Reconstruction vowed to destroy all three. Like the amendments of the Gilded Age, the Reconstruction amendments linked profound changes in political economy (the end of enslaved labor and an extensive expropriation of private property, in the case of the Thirteenth Amendment) to a democratization of the political process (the right to vote for Black men, in the case of the Fifteenth Amendment). The Fourteenth Amendment—which included the citizenship clause, the equal-protection clause, and the due-process clause—transformed the standing of many Americans, and each amendment gave Congress the unprecedented power to take “appropriate” action to insure its enforcement.

Leaders of the New Deal followed a similar course. “A small group,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced in 1936, had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives.” Now the enemy was a coalition of pro-business Republicans and white-supremacist Democrats, whose power depended on stifling a multiracial social democracy. Advocates of the New Deal saw it as the continuation of Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment became the rallying cry of organized labor, inspiring half a million Black workers to join the ranks of the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations. New Deal officials, the N.A.A.C.P., labor organizers, and Communist Party activists fanned out across the South to rally Black workers and tenant farmers. Summarizing the movement’s credo in 1945, the Black legal theorist Pauli Murray wrote that the only way to end racial discrimination in the workplace was to create a full-employment economy for all. Civil rights meant social democracy.

We’ve come to think that Reconstruction and the New Deal were defeated by racism and violence in the factories, fields, and streets. But the higher reaches of reaction took a different form: severing race from class and class from race. If overthrowing oligarchy required racial equality in the economy, the oligarchs could best maintain their position by hiving off civil rights from economic issues. Beginning in the eighteen-seventies, reactionary courts and liberal politicians narrowed the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments, applying them to Black Americans only, rather than to workers as a whole. Freedom from economic domination had no friend in the Constitution; with time, neither did Black America.

In the wake of multiple defeats in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, the New Dealers reached a different settlement. Hoping to end decades of judicial activism on behalf of big business, they agreed that economic questions would be left to Congress and the President. Meanwhile, the Court, assuming sole custody of the Constitution, would tackle racial (and, later, gender and queer) equality. That settlement came to haunt the left, as Republican Presidents appointed more and more conservative Justices.

This is the real story of the Constitution. A document of and for the people has become, for one half of the country, a structural support, and, for the other, an imperilled instrument of the marginalized. The choice seems clear. Return it to the people or scrap the whole damn thing. ♦

#The New Yorker #Corey Robin #Books | Politics | Democracy | U.S. Constitution | Tyranny

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foreverlogical · 1 year ago

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Well-known political expert, author, journalist, and CEO David Rothkopf is blasting conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court after their disastrous rulings last week, warning the Court is now a “threat to democracy” and suggesting some justices should be “considered” for impeachment.

Rothkopf, also a national security and foreign policy commentator, is a columnist for The Daily Beast and the author at least seven books, including American Resistance.

“Watching debates about Supreme Court here and elsewhere is the latest study in GOP efforts to normalize the unconscionable, the corrupt, and the contra-constitutional. This is a court in which a majority of those on the right took their seats under questionable circumstances,” Rothkopf said at the start of a lengthy thread on Twitter.

“Of them, a cloud of corruption hangs over Thomas & Alito. Kavanaugh took [his] seat despite allegations against him that were not properly investigated. Questions surround his payoff of personal debts. Gorsuch’s ascension is also clouded by questions surrounding Kennedy’s departure,” he says.

READ MORE: ‘Treacherous March of Normalization’: ABC News Slammed for ‘Puff Piece’ Profile on Moms for Liberty

Justice Clarence Thomas has been under fire for months over his relationship with billionaire GOP donor and businessman Harlan Crow, who reportedly has had business before the high court. The far-right wing justice and his wife, Ginni Thomas, (who has been accused of working to undermine the 2020 presidential election results,) may have received gifts totaling over $1 million in luxury vacations, travel, food, lodging, and clothing. Experts say Thomas was required to disclose portions of those gifts and that he did not.

Justice Samuel Alito is also the beneficiary of luxury travel, including a fishing trip to Alaska courtesy of another billionaire, and a trip to Rome during which he delivered a highly-criticized speech just days after delivering his opinion striking down Roe v. Wade. That trip was reportedly paid for by a religious liberty organization whose leader reportedly bought Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Indiana home.

Indeed, Rothkopf also skewers Justice Barrett, or at least her confirmation.

“Barrett received her seat in a rush to judgment that was unlike any we have ever seen and completely contrary to the way the GOP Senate treated prior Dem nominees (Garland). In the time since the majority took over, they have cast aside one core principle after another,” he observes.

READ MORE: ‘Tyranny’: Legal Expert Says Ruling in Favor of Anti-LGBTQ Discrimination Makes It ‘Impossible’ to Respect Supreme Court

“Stare decisis went out the window. (Precedents were ignored without any sound justification.) Promises to honor past decisions as established law (like Roe) proved worthless. Past claims that the right valued originalism and condemned judicial activism were wholly ignored,” Rothkopf charges.

“When precedent went against them, absurd arguments drawing on ancient and irrelevant legal decisions were used to supersede the clear intent of the framers and decades, sometimes centuries of legal precedent.”

Last week, he says, we saw “a decision on affirmative action that ignored precedent, reality, and justice and contained, in its carve-out for military academies, a sub-decision that refuted the logic of the main opinion. In the case of reversing the Biden student loan decision,” Rothkopf writes, “a brand new doctrine was presented out of whole cloth. The decision regarding the ‘right’ of a website designer to refuse to do work for a ‘gay’ couple was based on both a lie and a hypothetical, should never have been taken on as a case and was grossly wrong on the law,” he adds.

Rothkopf appears to believe the conservative justices will not stop.

“These judges are acting with impunity because they believe a GOP controlled Senate will never challenge them and that a fundamental flaw in the way the Constitution grants power to underpopulated states assures that the document that was created to evolve never will,” he writes.

And he suggests some of the Supreme Court’s justices might need to be impeached.

“They also know that Senate rules essentially mean they can act with impunity despite their wholesale corruption and the fact that several of them should, in all likelihood, be seriously considered for impeachment.”

READ MORE: Sotomayor Slams ‘Embarrassing’ SCOTUS Anti-LGBTQ Decision That Marks ‘Gays and Lesbians for Second-Class Status’

Pointing to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, he adds: “This is, as [she] has said a constitutional crisis. This is an illegitimate, rogue institution that is seeking to reverse decades of progress and impose the will of a white, wealthy, Christian, male, straight minority on the majority of Americans.”

“This is a moment that calls for action on the part of Democrats in power to use their ability to call Senate hearings and to challenge this extremist cluster of judicial terrorists wherever possible. But more than that, it demands absolutely clarity from the voting public,” he says.

Rothkopf warns conservatives in the Court are poised to do even more damage to democracy and the American people.

“Unless Democrats win the presidency, hold and increase their majority in the Senate and retake the House, this tiny band of malevolent and dangerous actors will gut many of the most important provisions of the past century and a half of American law.”

“They will destroy lives and put millions of others at risk. Next year’s election must be in part, about this threat to democracy even as it is also about the threat posed by GOP presidential candidates. Stop. Consider the consequences.”

He warns minority Americans will continue to see their civil rights “stripped” away.

“Consider the basic rights that will be stripped away from women, people of color, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, voters, and all who believe in the ideals that have guided American leaders as we have struggled to perfect our nation,” he says. “The only people who can save us are you and your fellow voters. The only way to do so is to mobilize, be active, donate to candidates and remain committed to defending our country against the threat posed by the MAGA GOP in our legislature and our judiciary. Starting right now.”

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garudabluffs · 9 months ago

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GOP represents 'most significant threat to basic constitutionalism since Civil War': historian

March 10, 2024

Wehmer also notes:

To get a better sense of this moment, I reached out to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham. 'Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil War,' Mr. Meacham, who has helped devise some of President Biden’s speeches, told me. “That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.'

Since 2015, I have repeatedly warned Republicans about Mr. Trump, describing him as the kind of demagogue the founders feared, malignant and malicious, a man with a disordered personality. At this point eight years ago, I said that while the struggle for the Republican nomination was over, the struggle for the soul of the party was not.

READ MORE GOP represents 'most significant threat to basic constitutionalism since Civil War': historian - Alternet.org

‘Tyranny of the Minority’ warns Constitution is dangerously outdated

September 12, 2023

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt urge institutional reforms, rejection of candidates who violate norms in ‘How Democracies Die’ follow-up

The U.S. Constitution desperately needs updating, say Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

"In their new book “Tyranny of the Minority,” the comparative political scientists argue that these antiquated institutions, including the Electoral College, have protected and enabled an increasingly extremist GOP, which keeps moving farther to the right despite losing the popular vote in all but one of the last eight presidential elections. The scholars also survey governments worldwide for examples of democratizing reforms. And they draw from history in underscoring the dangers of our constitutional stasis."

READ MORE Scholars warn of danger in an outdated Constitution — Harvard Gazette

#Trump #book review author interview #Tyranny of the Minority

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oberlincollegelibraries · 4 years ago

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Weekend Edition: Constitution Day, Part 1

Constitution Day celebrates the the adoption of the United States Constitution and the people who have become U.S. citizens. It is observed on September 17th, the day the document was signed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Constitution Day is coming up this Thursday and to get ready for it, we are highlighting newly added books about the U.S. government and American history.

They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

"In the vein of On Tyranny and How Democracies Die, the bestselling author of Republic, Lost argues that our democracy no longer represents us and shows that reform is both necessary and possible"-- Provided by publisher

“Lessig believes that along many dimensions, a single flaw-- unrepresentativeness-- has detached our government from the people. Our fractured partisanship and ignorance on critical issues drive our leaders to stake out ever more extreme positions. Here he charts the way in which the fundamental institutions of our democracy, including our media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the needs and wishes of the nation's citizenry. Lessig shows that ‘We the people’ are increasingly uninformed about the issues, while political polling reflects and normalizes our ignorance, feeding it back into the system as representative of our will.” -- adapted from jacket

The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America by Ganesh Sitaraman

A leading progressive intellectual offers an agenda for how real democracy can triumph in America and beyond. Since the New Deal in the 1930s, there have been two eras in our political history: the liberal era, stretching up to the 1970s, followed by the neoliberal era of privatization and austerity ever since. In each period, the dominant ideology was so strong that it united even partisan opponents. But the neoliberal era is collapsing, and the central question of our time is what comes next. As acclaimed legal scholar and policy expert Ganesh Sitaraman argues, two political visions now contend for the future. One is nationalist oligarchy, which rigs the system for the rich and powerful while using nationalism to mobilize support. The other is the great democracy, which fights corruption and extends both political and economic power to all people. At this decisive moment in history, The Great Democracy offers a bold, transformative agenda for achieving real democracy

Choosing the Leader: Leadership Elections in the U.S. House of Representatives by Matthew N. Green and Douglas B. Harris

How are congressional party leaders chosen? In the first comprehensive study since Robert Peabody's classic Leadership in Congress, political scientists Matthew Green and Douglas Harris draw on newly collected data about U.S. House members who have sought leadership positions from the 1960s to the present - data including whip tallies, public and private vote commitments, interviews, and media accounts - to provide new insights into how the selection process truly works. Elections for congressional party leaders are conventionally seen as a function of either legislators' ideological preferences or factors too idiosyncratic to permit systematic analysis. Analyzing six decades' worth of information, Green and Harris find evidence for a new comprehensive model of vote choice in House leadership elections that incorporates both legislators' goals and their connections with leadership candidates. This study will stand for years to come as the definitive treatment of a crucial aspects of American politics.

Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833 edited by Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog

"On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution urging each of the British colonies in North America "to adopt such government as shall . . . best conduce" in response to the impending crisis with Great Britain. A suitable preamble was passed on the May 15 following, and Congress then directed that the document be released to the public. The Resolution of May 15 set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were forced to address the issue of church-state relations. Each colony had unique and differing traditions of church-state relations rooted in the colony's peoples, their country of origin, and religion, and the state constitutional framers had to confront the issue of religion, which many would have preferred to put off. This unique volume, comprising twenty-one original essays by eminent historians and political scientists, is a state-by-state account of disestablishment in the original thirteen states, as well as a look at similar events in the soon-to-be-admitted states of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Also considered are disestablishment in Ohio (the first state admitted from the Northwest Territory), Louisiana and Missouri (the first states admitted from the Louisiana Purchase), and Florida (wrestled from Spain under U.S. pressure)"-- Provided by publisher

#oberlin college #oberlin college libraries #weekend edition #constitution day #us constitution #us government #american history

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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What Is Republicanism In The Constitution

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-is-republicanism-in-the-constitution/

What Is Republicanism In The Constitution

An Introduction To The Political Philosophy Of The Constitution

Democracy vs Constitutional Republic – What is America’s Real Form of Government

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

This philosophy, sometimes implicit and sometimes made explicit,guided their deliberations and informed the choices they madeamong competing solutions to pressing problems. This philosophyof government incorporated three major political doctrines:natural rights, republicanism, and constitutionalism. These ideaswere part of the common intellectual currency of eighteenthcentury America.

It is important, if we are to understand the events surroundingthe adoption and ratification of the Constitution, to rememberthat the discussion of these issues was not limited to a smallintellectual elite. A knowledge of these philosophies waswidespread. This is not, of course, to say that most Americanshad read the works of philosophers such as Locke or Montesquieu.Many, however, had become acquainted with their ideas by readingthe pamphlets that were published by the hundreds during theRevolution as well as during the debates over the adoption andratification of the Constitution. In addition, the doctrines ofthese and other philosophers had also been preached from numerouspulpits and promulgated in the pages of many of the thirtyeightnewspapers that existed in the colonies in 1775.

NATURAL RIGHTS

“The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting intocommonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is thepreservation of their property: to which in the state of Naturethere are many things wanting.”

CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISMCONSTITUTIONALISM

Reviewing And Using The Lesson

What is republican government?

Define “common welfare.” Give examples of how your school helps the common welfare.

Define “civic virtue.” Give examples of people with civic virtue in your school and community.

Where was civic virtue taught in early America?

Describe a situation in which your interests might conflict with the common welfare.

Explain these terms: republican government, representative, interests, common welfare, civic virtue.

ISBN 0-89818-169-0

Constitutional Monarchs And Upper Chambers

Some countries turned powerful monarchs into constitutional ones with limited, or eventually merely symbolic, powers. Often the monarchy was abolished along with the aristocratic system, whether or not they were replaced with democratic institutions . In Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Papua New Guinea, and some other countries the monarch, or its representative, is given supreme executive power, but by convention acts only on the advice of his or her ministers. Many nations had elite upper houses of legislatures, the members of which often had lifetime tenure, but eventually these houses lost much power , or else became elective and remained powerful.

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Republican Freedom And The Human Good

So far we have assumed that, however ultimately defined, republicanfreedom is always a good thing. Some have wondered whether this is thecase, however. This objection is most often expressed via the exampleof benevolent care-giving relationships. On the republican view thatone enjoys freedom only to the extent that one is independent fromarbitrary power, it would seem that children do not enjoy republicanfreedom with respect to their parents. But surely, one might suppose,the parent-child relationship is an extremely valuableone, and so we would not want greater republican freedom in such acontext. Republican freedom is, perhaps, not always a good thing.

What Is A Constitutional

The United States is not a pure democracy. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, you might find that statement shocking but that doesnt make it any less true. While our government may hold democratic features, its essentially defined as a Constitutional Republic. Heres what that means, and why the difference matters.

The goal of a constitutional republic is to ensure all people are equally represented, and that the government works for the people while preventing tyranny and corruption.

At its heart, a constitutional republic is a government in which the people have the right to vote in elected officials to lead the country on their behalf. Its typically broken up into multiple branches. This is the case in the United States, which splits powers between the executive, judicial, and legislative bodies. This limits potential overreach and abuse of power.

The main defining feature of a constitutional republic, however, is not any of these features. Instead, its the fact that the government, and any elected officials within it, must follow the rule of a constitution at all times. Neither the government nor its elected officials can take any action that violates it.

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Is The United States A Republic Or A Democracy

The following statement is often used to define the United States’ system of government: “The United States is a republic, not a democracy. This statement suggests that the concepts and characteristics of republics and democracies can never coexist in a single form of government. However, this is rarely the case. As in the United States, most republics function as blended representational democracies featuring a democracys political powers of the majority tempered by a republics system of checks and balances enforced by a constitution that protects the minority from the majority.

To say that the United States is strictly a democracy suggests that the minority is completely unprotected from the will of the majority, which is not correct.

Republicanism In The Thirteen British Colonies In North America

In recent years a debate has developed over the role of republicanism in the American Revolution and in the British radicalism of the 18th century. For many decades the consensus was that liberalism, especially that of John Locke, was paramount and that republicanism had a distinctly secondary role.

The new interpretations were pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock, who argued in The Machiavellian Moment that, at least in the early 18th century, republican ideas were just as important as liberal ones. Pocock’s view is now widely accepted.Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood pioneered the argument that the American founding fathers were more influenced by republicanism than they were by liberalism. Cornell University professor Isaac Kramnick, on the other hand, argues that Americans have always been highly individualistic and therefore Lockean.Joyce Appleby has argued similarly for the Lockean influence on America.

In the decades before the American Revolution , the intellectual and political leaders of the colonies studied history intently, looking for models of good government. They especially followed the development of republican ideas in England. Pocock explained the intellectual sources in America:

The commitment of most Americans to these republican values made the American Revolution inevitable. Britain was increasingly seen as corrupt and hostile to republicanism, and as a threat to the established liberties the Americans enjoyed.

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The Concept Of A Republic

Derived from the Latin phrase res publica, meaning the public thing, a republic is a form of government in which the social and political affairs of the country are considered a public matter, with representatives of the citizen body holding the power to rule. Because citizens govern the state through their representatives, republics may be differentiated from direct democracies. However, most modern representative democracies are republics. The term republiccan also be attached to not only democratic countries but also to oligarchies, aristocracies, and monarchies in which the head of state is not determined by heredity.

In a republic, the people elect representatives to make the laws and an executive to enforce those laws. While the majority still rules in the selection of representatives, an official charter lists and protects certain inalienable rights, thus protecting the minority from the arbitrary political whims of the majority. In this sense, republics like the United States function as representative democracies.

In the U.S., senators and representatives are the elected lawmakers, the president is the elected executive, and the Constitution is the official charter.

Democracy’s Discontent: America In Search Of A Public Philosophy

The Constitution of India – An Introduction

In this book, Sandel contrasts the tradition of civic republicanism with that of procedural liberalism in the US political history. The presentation is organized as the intertwining of philosophical and mostly historical analyses. Philosophically, based on LLJ, Sandel continuous his criticism of liberalism and argues for the idea of civic republicanism with the sense of multiply situated selves. Historically, Sandel shows, while both procedural liberalism and civic republicanism used to be present throughout American politics, American political discourse, in the recent decades, has become dominated by procedural liberalism, and has steadily crowded out the republican understandings of citizenship, which is important for self-government.

Sandel reminds us that the American Revolution was originally aspiring to generate a new community of common good. By separating from England, Americans attempt to stave off corruption and to realize republican ideals, to renew the moral spirit that suited Americans to republican government . Unfortunately, in the years following independence, leading politicians and writers started to worry the corruption of the public spirit by the rampant pursuit of luxury and self-interest. Nowadays, most of American practices and institutions have thoroughly embodied the philosophy of procedural liberalism. Despite its philosophical problem, it has offered the public philosophy by which Americans live.

T. O’Hagan, in, 2001

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Republican Liberty: Problems And Debates

The appeal of the republican conception of political liberty asindependence from the arbitrary power of a master is perhapsunderstandable. This is not to say, however, that this conception isuncontroversial. Before discussing its role in developing contemporarycivic republican arguments, we should consider various problems anddebates surrounding the republican idea of freedom.

The Founders Studied History

The Founders studied the history of governments. They were very interested in what they read about the government of the Roman Republic. It was located in what is now the country of Italy. The Roman Republic existed more than 2,000 years before our nation began.

The Founders liked what they read about the Roman Republic. They learned some important ideas from their study of the government of ancient Rome. They used some of these ideas when they created our government.

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The Constitutive Notion Of Civic Republicanism: Pettit

Insofar as republican freedom is tied to power, it is essentially egalitarian. It is held to protect each individual against arbitrary power, and also to be a communitarian good, allowing people to identify with a state that protects their freedom. This version of republican freedom is heavily influenced by Rousseau, purged of totalitarian accretions, and updated to the advanced capitalist societies of the late twentieth century. They are now explicitly inclusive, bestowing their benefits on all members of society, and also multicultural, displaying liberal neutrality toward different substantive conceptions of the good. How far such societies can provide a stable balance between the participatory core of republican freedom and the centrifugal drives of modern pluralism remains to be seen.

Andrew Tsz Wan Hung, in, 2015

Attributes Of A Republican Government

Power and authority in the government come from the people

Rights of the citizens are protected through a constitution and voting

Power is distributed to representatives based on majority rule

Representatives are responsible for helping everyone in the country and not just a few people

The involvement of people in the government is what guarantees government stability

Rulers are chosen for their skills and do not gain power based on birthright

Civilians participate in the government processes

The country’s economic pursuits benefit the whole nation

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Civic Virtue And Corruption

Among the more salient themes in the classical republican traditionare the importance of civic virtue and the dangers of corruption. Wemay understand the term corruption simply to mean theadvancement of personal or sectional interest at the expense of thepublic good, and civic virtue as its oppositethatis, a willingness to do ones part in supporting the publicgood. Critics of republicanism often fear that this implies extensiveself-sacrifice and frugality, a renunciation of individuality andself-identification with the community . These fears areno doubt encouraged by the civic humanist reading of the classicaltradition along perfectionist lines. Civic republicans accordinglyhave been at pains to show the contrarythat civic virtue shouldbe understood as a strictly instrumental good, useful in establishingand maintaining republican liberty. Far from calling for thesubjection of individual to collective aims, they argue, republicanliberty is desirable in part because it enables citizens to pursuetheir private aims with assurances of security .

Advantages Of A Republican Government

Have you ever given up your own interests to do something that is good for everyone? In a republican government, selfish interests are given up for the common good of the country. Let’s take a look at more advantages of a republican government.

Laws made by elected representatives are meant to be fair. If people find laws unfair, they can elect other leaders who can change those laws.

A republic allows greater freedom and prosperity. Economic pursuit benefits the entire nation and people are able to live well.

When government serves the interests of the entire country, we say it is serving the common welfare.

There is wider participation in the political process. According to the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal; therefore, it did not matter if you were a small farmer or a powerful aristocrat. Ordinary people are welcome to participate in government.

Leaders emerge based on people’s talents, not their birthright.

Civic virtue is promoted. Civic virtue includes demonstrating civic knowledge , self-restraint, self-assertion, and self-reliance.

Change and reform come about by vote, not by force.

Also Check: How Many Registered Republicans Are In The United States

The Concept Of A Democracy

Coming from the Greek words for people and rule , democracy means rule by the people. As such, a democracy requires that the people be allowed to take part in the government and its political processes. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln may have offered the best definition of democracy as being a government of the people, by the people, for the people in his Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.

Typically through a constitution, democracies limit the powers of their top rulers, such as the President of the United States, set up a system of and responsibilities between branches of the government, and protect the natural rights and civil liberties of the people.

In a pure democracy, all citizens who are eligible to vote take an equal part in the process of making laws that govern them. In a pure or direct democracy,” the citizens as a whole have the power to make all laws directly at the ballot box. Today, some U.S. states empower their citizens to make state laws through a form of direct democracy known as the ballot initiative. Put simply, in a pure democracy, the majority truly does rule and the minority has little or no power.

The concept of democracy can be traced back to around 500 BCE in Athens, Greece. Athenian democracy was a true direct democracy, or mobocracy, under which the public voted on every law, with the majority having almost total control over rights and freedoms.

Constitutional Republic Vs Democracy

American Government: Republic Not Democracy

Some believe that the United States is a democracy, but it is actually the perfect example of a constitutional republic. A pure democracy would be a form of government in which the leaders, while elected by the people, are not constrained by a constitution as to its actions. In a republic, however, elected officials cannot take away or violate certain rights of the people. The Pledge of Allegiance, which was written in 1892 and adopted by Congress in 1942 as the official pledge, even makes reference to the fact that the U.S. is a republic:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Anti-Federalists and Federalists, as the new nation was being formed, could not agree on how involved the federal government should be in citizens lives; a decision on a pure democracy could never be reached. Alexander Hamilton, himself a Federalist, stated that the government being created was a republican government, and that true freedom would not be found in a dictatorship nor a true democracy, but in a moderate government.

The following table outlines some of the differences between a constitutional republic and a democracy:

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The Contemporary Republican Program

However interesting the debates discussed in theprevious section, one may still wonder whether republicanism hasanything valuable to contribute to contemporary normative politicaltheory and philosophy. One reason many people remain skeptical has todo with the fact that the classical republican writings often expressviews that are decidedly elitist, patriarchal, and militaristic. Howcould the basis for an appealing contemporary political program befound in such writings ?

The civic republicans, naturally, reject this view. There is nothinginherently elitist about the ideal of freedom when this is understoodnegatively as independence from arbitrary or uncontrolled power. The classicalrepublicans, to be sure, typically confined the extension of this idealto a narrow range of propertied, native-born male citizens. But on thecivic republican reading of the tradition, this merely reflects anunnecessary prejudice we can easily dispense with. The elitism of the tradition long concealed the potentially radical implications of freedom as non-domination; suitably universalized now at last, republicanism is revealed to be a strikingly progressive political doctrine .

Republican Versus Negative Liberty

Notice that the republican view of freedom is, at least in thebroad sense, a negative conception of political liberty. One need notdo or become anything in particular to enjoy political liberty in therepublican sense; one need not exercise self-mastery, on any view ofwhat that entails, nor succeed in acting on ones second-orderdesires . Republican freedom merely requiresthe absence of something, namely, the absence of any structuraldependence on arbitrary power or domination.

Despite these similarities, however, republican freedom is notequivalent to the received view of negative liberty asnon-interference. In contrast to the non-interference view, it easilyaccounts for our intuitions in the two scenarios described above. Theslave lacks freedom because he is vulnerable to the arbitrary power ofhis master; whether his master happens to exercise that power isneither here nor there. Likewise, what matters with respect topolitical freedom on the republican view is not how much theimperial power chooses to govern its colony, but the fact that theformer may choose to govern the latter as much and however itlikes. Thus Joseph Priestley described the lightly-governed Americancolonies as nevertheless in a condition of servitude because bythe same power, by which the people of England can compel them to payone penny, they may compel them to pay the last penny they have.

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The Legacy Of Antiquity

In spite of manifold contacts with the oriental world, the political and cultural achievements of Greece and Rome were products of indigenous development. The notions of citizenship and individual rights, the ideas of republicanism and democracy, as well as universal emperorship, the continuity of Roman law and of the church , Christian preservation of pagan literature and other traditions became formative for European culture through structural continuities and conscious renaissance. In this sense, it is still appropriate to treat Greco-Roman antiquity as a historical epoch of its own.

The Classical Republican Tradition

After long-standing neglect among historians of political thought,there has been a dramatic revival of interest in the classical republican tradition in the past fifty years or so. For the first fewdecades of this revival, a particular interpretation of that traditionprevailed. According to this view, the classical republicans held whatwould now be described as a perfectionist politicalphilosophythat is, a political philosophy centered on the ideaof promoting a specific conception of the good life as consisting inactive citizenship and healthy civic virtue on the one hand, whilecombating any sort of corruption that would undermine these values onthe other. This distinctive vision of the good life is supposed to berooted in the experience of the ancient Greek polis, especially asexpressed in the writings of Aristotle. The goods of active politicalparticipation, civic virtue, and so on, are to be understood asintrinsically valuable components of human flourishing.

It is now standard to refer to this as the civichumanist interpretation of the classical republican tradition, and it is most commonly associated with the writings of Arendt , Pocock , and Rahe . These and other civic humanist writings have left such an impression on the field that even today many fail to distinguish their views from those of the civic republicans. As we shall see, however, the two are importantly distinct.

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Republicanism And Fundamental Rights

The foregoing discussion should not be construed as implying a necessary correlation between, on the one hand, liberalism and democracy, and, on the other, communitarianism and authoritarianism. Some versions of communitarianism approach a pure, popular democracy more closely than do some versions of liberalism, which would expressly renounce pure democracy. If a society is to be governed by a principle of collective welfare, and if notions of collective welfare are to be ascertained by consensus, then majority rule provides sufficient justification for deciding which acts should be penalized. No additional justification, with reference to the specific harm that would be caused by penalized acts, would be required. If the majority wishes to penalize gambling, alcohol consumption, flag burning, contraception, or homosexuality, then it may do so with no greater notion of harm than the sentiment that individuals and society would be better off without such things.

Ordinary right Putative harm caused by exercise of right Exercise of right may be penalized without special justification Exercise of right may not be penalized without special justification

Wilfried Nippel, in, 2015

Republicanism In The United States

Republican Party republic

This article is part of a series on the

Republicanism in the United States is a set of ideas that guides the government and politics. These ideas have shaped the government, and the way people in the United States think about politics, since the American Revolution.

The American Revolution, the , the Constitution , and even the Gettysburg Address were based on ideas from American republicanism.

“Republicanism” comes from the word “republic.” However, they are not the same thing. A republic is a type of government . Republicanism is an ideology set of beliefs that people in a republic have about what is most important to them.

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Political Liberty Positive And Negative

It is notorious that there are several competing conceptions ofpolitical liberty. The now standard account was laid down mostinfluentially by Isaiah Berlin in his famous lecture on TwoConcepts of Liberty . According to the first,negative conception of liberty, people are free simply tothe extent that their choices are not interfered with. There are manyvariations on this conception, depending on how exactly one wants todefine interference, but they all have in common thebasic intuition that to be free is, more or less, to be left alone todo whatever one chooses. This idea of negative liberty Berlinassociates especially with the classic English political philosophersHobbes, Bentham, and J. S. Mill, and it is today probably the dominantconception of liberty, particularly among contemporary Anglo-Americanphilosophers. In Mills well-known words, the only freedomwhich deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our ownway, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs.

The troubling implications of the positive conception of liberty arewell-known, and need not be rehearsed at length here. For the most part, thesestem from the problem that freedom in the positive sense would seem tolicense fairly extensive coercion on behalf of individualsallegedly real interestsfor example, coercivelyforcing the gambler to quit on the presumption that this is, in fact,what he really wants to do . Regardingthis danger, Berlin writes:

What Is A Republican Government

Understanding the Republican Form of Government

The government of Rome was called a republican government. The Founders read that republican government was one in which:

The power of government is held by the people.

The people give power to leaders they elect to represent them and serve their interests.

The representatives are responsible for helping all the people in the country, not just a few people.

Read Also: What Are The Main Differences Between Democrats And Republicans

0 notes

statetalks · 3 years ago

Text

What Is Republicanism In The Constitution

An Introduction To The Political Philosophy Of The Constitution

Democracy vs Constitutional Republic – What is America’s Real Form of Government

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

NATURAL RIGHTS

CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISMCONSTITUTIONALISM

Reviewing And Using The Lesson

What is republican government? Define “common welfare.” Give examples of how your school helps the common welfare. Define “civic virtue.” Give examples of people with civic virtue in your school and community. Where was civic virtue taught in early America? Describe a situation in which your interests might conflict with the common welfare. Explain these terms: republican government, representative, interests, common welfare, civic virtue.

ISBN 0-89818-169-0

Constitutional Monarchs And Upper Chambers

Read Also: Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

Republican Freedom And The Human Good

What Is A Constitutional

The goal of a constitutional republic is to ensure all people are equally represented, and that the government works for the people while preventing tyranny and corruption.

Read Also: How Many Republicans Are In The Us House

Is The United States A Republic Or A Democracy

To say that the United States is strictly a democracy suggests that the minority is completely unprotected from the will of the majority, which is not correct.

Republicanism In The Thirteen British Colonies In North America

Recommended Reading: Did Republicans Lose Any Senate Seats

The Concept Of A Republic

In the U.S., senators and representatives are the elected lawmakers, the president is the elected executive, and the Constitution is the official charter.

Democracy’s Discontent: America In Search Of A Public Philosophy

The Constitution of India – An Introduction

T. O’Hagan, in, 2001

Also Check: Who Lies More Democrats Or Republicans

Republican Liberty: Problems And Debates

The Founders Studied History

Don’t Miss: How Many Republicans Voted Against Budget

The Constitutive Notion Of Civic Republicanism: Pettit

Andrew Tsz Wan Hung, in, 2015

Attributes Of A Republican Government

Power and authority in the government come from the people

Rights of the citizens are protected through a constitution and voting

Power is distributed to representatives based on majority rule

Representatives are responsible for helping everyone in the country and not just a few people

The involvement of people in the government is what guarantees government stability

Rulers are chosen for their skills and do not gain power based on birthright

Civilians participate in the government processes

The country’s economic pursuits benefit the whole nation

Read Also: What Are The Republicans Saying About Impeachment

Civic Virtue And Corruption

Advantages Of A Republican Government

Laws made by elected representatives are meant to be fair. If people find laws unfair, they can elect other leaders who can change those laws.

A republic allows greater freedom and prosperity. Economic pursuit benefits the entire nation and people are able to live well.

When government serves the interests of the entire country, we say it is serving the common welfare.

Leaders emerge based on people’s talents, not their birthright.

Civic virtue is promoted. Civic virtue includes demonstrating civic knowledge , self-restraint, self-assertion, and self-reliance.

Change and reform come about by vote, not by force.

Also Check: How Many Registered Republicans Are In The United States

The Concept Of A Democracy

Constitutional Republic Vs Democracy

American Government: Republic Not Democracy

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The following table outlines some of the differences between a constitutional republic and a democracy:

Also Check: How Many Republicans Are In The Impeachment Inquiry

The Contemporary Republican Program

Republican Versus Negative Liberty

Recommended Reading: Who Controls The Senate Republicans Or Democrats

The Legacy Of Antiquity

The Classical Republican Tradition

You May Like: Why Republicans Do Not Like Obamacare

Republicanism And Fundamental Rights

Ordinary right Putative harm caused by exercise of right Exercise of right may be penalized without special justification Exercise of right may not be penalized without special justification

Wilfried Nippel, in, 2015

Republicanism In The United States

Republican Party republic

This article is part of a series on the

The American Revolution, the , the Constitution , and even the Gettysburg Address were based on ideas from American republicanism.

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Say Republicans Are Stupid

Political Liberty Positive And Negative

What Is A Republican Government

Understanding the Republican Form of Government

The government of Rome was called a republican government. The Founders read that republican government was one in which:

The power of government is held by the people.

The people give power to leaders they elect to represent them and serve their interests.

The representatives are responsible for helping all the people in the country, not just a few people.

Read Also: What Are The Main Differences Between Democrats And Republicans

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-is-republicanism-in-the-constitution/

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

Link

Imagine that you are a resident in a low-population county in 1950. You run afoul of the small group of families who are effectively in charge. Your political and legal rights are unimpaired. You are free to vote and you are free to sue in municipal and county and state courts. The police treat you with unfailing courtesy and respect.

But strange things start to happen. The only newspaper in the county refuses to take ads for your business. The only bank in the county announces that it is closing your account and calling in your mortgage. Your car breaks down and the only garage and service shop in the county refuses to repair it. The only general store in the county refuses your patronage and the few restaurants in the county turn you away at the door. After you lose your business to the newspaper advertising boycott, you try to get a job, but discover that you have been blacklisted by all of the employers in the county. Nobody will hire you.

Are you free, in this scenario, just because there is no official interference with your voting rights and your civil rights? Private power is power, no less than government power. You can be immobilized, impoverished, humiliated, tormented, and perhaps driven to suicide by hostile businesses and banks in an otherwise functioning liberal democracy, just as surely as by the police or military in a dictatorship.

The United States in 2021 is a continental nation-state with nearly 330 million people. And yet its social system today, in disturbing respects, resembles that of my imaginary county in 1950. Instead of one general store, there is Amazon with its dominant online position. Instead of one local newspaper, there is Google, which serves as the 21st century version of the old Yellow Pages. Instead of one county bank, there are a handful of giant banks and credit card companies. As in the old Texas county, if one essential firm spurns you there may be no alternatives in that industry who want your business, as a practical matter. If one or all of these national monopolies and oligopolies turns against you, for whatever reason, your business or your reputation or your life can be destroyed.

Following the Capitol riot on January 6, the world was doubly shocked by the attack on the seat of American power and by the power of America’s irresponsible corporations, which are accountable to nobody except their shareholders. The president of the United States—who has been impeached for the second time by the House but has yet to be removed by the Senate or officially accused of any specific crimes in a court of law, much less convicted—was banned by numerous media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Spotify (he can’t even share his music lists!)

The purges and proscriptions have not been limited to Trump or to the criminals involved in the Capitol riot, or in planning others. The dragnet has been widened to include Republicans and conservatives in general, as well as figures on the dissident non-corporate left. Parler, a social media app favored by the right as an alternative to Twitter, was destroyed by Apple and Amazon. The baseball legend Curt Schilling claims that AIG Insurance cut off his family health plan because of his pro-Trump tweets.

Many tech tycoons and companies insist that their mass purge even of conservatives and Republicans was necessary to prevent fascists from organizing insurrections against the federal government. But tracking potentially violent criminals and terrorists and foiling their plots is what the folks at the FBI, Homeland Security, NSA, and CIA, along with state and local police, are paid to do. Who needs the FBI when Spotify can save America from a fascist putsch?

The truth is that the corporate proscriptions, purges, and de-platformings were a brutal exercise of raw power by a few very rich people who shares jurisdiction over the citizens and residents of the United States under the corporate constitution.

Today Americans live under two constitutions: The political constitution and the corporate constitution. The political constitution is functioning reasonably well. The corporate constitution, by comparison, is a lawless realm of out-of-control tyranny.

…

Most of the attention has focused on Twitter and Facebook, because so many American journalists, academics, activists and politicians live online. But the importance of social media is exaggerated. According to Pew, only about a fifth of Americans are on Twitter and 10% of the users generate 80% of the tweets. Individuals, parties and movements were able to communicate easily before Twitter was created in 2006. Getting banned from Twitter is a nuisance, not the death of free speech.

Of graver concern in a democratic republic should be arbitrary powers exercised by companies in the real economy against dissident individuals or unpopular businesses or organizations. If businesses are banned from advertising their goods and services on electronic platforms and other forms of media; if authors of controversial books can be banned from online and physical book distributors; if political groups are banned from making electronic transactions, or having bank accounts; if individuals who hold the wrong opinions can be denied health insurance; if lenders deny credit cards to people who voted the wrong way in the last election or said something inflammatory on social media, then the United States is now a tyranny, even if the courts are open and elections are free.

…

More than a century ago, the development of modern infrastructure industries like electricity and telephony and national banking created predatory businesses like Samuel Insull’s Midwestern electrical empire that were as out-of-control as many tech giants are today. The phrase “Robber Baron”—inspired by medieval German barons who exacted tolls from travelers on the Rhine—is most apt when it is applied to tycoons who control essential infrastructure that society cannot do without.

During and after the New Deal, essential industries were tamed and regulated under our political constitution. Today you do not fear that your water or electricity or gas will be turned off because the local providers do not like your political views. Both publicly-owned and privately-owned water, electricity and gas firms are regulated by public utility commissions that set their rates and rules..

In the science fiction of the mid-twentieth century, it was usually assumed that the “central computer banks” of the future would be boring regulated public utilities more like the old highly regulated Ma Bell telephone monopoly than like Samuel Insull’s electrical industry holding company or Jack Dorsey’s Twitter. If they were dangerous, it was because the computers themselves might run amok, or perhaps because they were used by a despotic government, not because the new technology would empower individual plutocrats to lord it over their fellow citizens in an Ayn Rand fantasy come to life.

…

Putting an “e” in front of something for “electronic” (ooh, electronic!) provided a get-out-of-regulation-or-taxation free card in the era of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton and their neoliberal and libertarian successors. Amazon isn’t a retailer that should collect and pay state sales taxes. It is… e-commerce! Uber isn’t a taxi company subject to taxi company regulations… it’s a tech company! If an online payday lender charges 3000% annualized interest, the government shouldn’t do anything about it because… it’s fintech!

For the last three decades, many of America’s elected officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, have rejected the argument that new essential economic infrastructure industries should be regulated like the old ones. They have claimed that the infant internet economy was so fragile that it would be crushed under the regulatory burdens that apply to old-timey electrical utilities or book publishers. Some of the politicians of both parties who made such arguments just happened to receive massive amounts of Silicon Valley cash, or were given shares of companies before their IPOs, or were hired after serving in government as managers or consultants or lobbyists or put on corporate boards by the same companies that they regulated, or rather, refused to regulate.

The result is our present situation, in which some of the indispensable industries in the U.S. economy, social life, the media and politics are allowed to make their own rules, in the form of ever-changing “terms of service” that nobody reads; allowed to subject themselves to oversight by commissions which they themselves appoint; and allowed to deputize themselves as vigilantes protecting us from any enemies of the people whom they happen to designate.

Was there an alternative to allowing a dystopian informal corporate constitution to emerge and engross more and more of the American economy and society like a black hole devouring a galaxy?

…

In practice, extending our imperfect but somewhat accountable political constitution to replace the wholly despotic digital corporate constitution is difficult, given the financial control that tech firms and tycoons exercise over our politicians and our media. In theory, however, it is easy to strip the protective “e” away from tech companies and define them either as common carriers or public accommodations. There is no need to invent any new categories or concepts. The old common law concepts are flexible and will do as the basis for new legislation—with one exception.

The exception consists of social media platforms like Twitter and Parler and YouTube and Facebook, which allow individuals to put up material without prior editorial or curatorial approval. Their business model exists only because they are exempt from the legal regime regarding libel and obscenity that governs regular magazines and book publishers. If Section 230 is repealed, these sites will shut down or become conventional online magazines or media firms, whose lawyers will ensure that all material is carefully vetted before it goes up online.

Good. Traditional publications don’t publish things written under aliases by people whose identities they don’t know. I have no right to publish a libel against someone in the pages of a magazine without editors and possibly lawyers seeing it first. Why should I be able to publish the same libel on Twitter or YouTube, and force the victim to lobby for its deletion only after the damage has been done?

The CEOs and especially the staffs of Twitter and YouTube and Facebook tend to be Democratic partisans, hostile to conservatives and Republicans. Fine. Turn Twitter and YouTube and Facebook into the equivalents of regular online left-of-center magazines like the Nation and Salon and Jacobin, and let them explicitly reject conservative content. Let the right have its own magazines and media outlets.

…

The remedies for arbitrary corporate power in the new infrastructure industries, then, are simple and straightforward. Define online opinion and video platforms as regular publishers, subject to traditional publishing regulations that seek to deter dissemination of libels, profanity, obscenity, intellectual property theft and so on. And define all the other big tech firms either as common carriers or public accommodations that are clothed in a public interest.

Oh, and one more thing. If you thought this essay was worth reading, you might wish to print out a paper copy before it vanishes from the Internet.

#tablet magazine #michael lind

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multipleservicelisting · 4 years ago

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Jason Chaffetz: Democrats have leveraged pandemic, economic pain and civil unrest for political gain

Never let it be said that Democrats let the crises of the past 12 months go to waste. With the coronavirus pandemic, forced closures of large swaths of the economy and civil unrest, the left did what it always does in times of crisis: leverage disaster for political gain. It worked. So we can expect to see a lot more of it.

The left has continued its crusade to suppress conservative views in many forums, including taking the extraordinary step of barring the president of the United States from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram in his final days in office.

Earlier, leftists gutted election security procedures, using the pandemic as their justification.

BIG TECH BACKLASH AGAINST CONSERVATIVES WILL ‘NOT CALM THE WATERS’: CHAFFETZ

Democratic officeholders have managed to amplify false narratives and conceal true ones with the help of partners in the left-wing media, powerful social media platforms, the nonprofit sector and government.

More from Opinion

Whether it was misleading us about the efficacy of drug treatments that could have saved lives in the pandemic, or raising money to bail out looters and vandals who participated in riots around the country, there seemed to be no line the Democrats wouldn’t cross to capitalize on America’s misfortunes.

Welcome to disaster liberalism. And buckle up. Now that the success of these efforts has given Democrats bare majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, along with the presidency as of Wednesday, we can expect them to double down on the tactics that worked so well for them in 2020.

Given the choice between moderating their positions to attract more support and claiming a crisis to strip away checks on their power, the Democrats will choose the latter.

It would take a book to describe the many ways Americans have been betrayed by the Democrats’ quest for power. And so I wrote that book. “They Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: The Truth About Disaster Liberalism,” available in April, provides a deep dive into the hypocrisy, cynicism and destruction of disaster liberalism.

As I write in my book, the unfortunate truth about national disasters is that they provide a convenient pretext for dispensing with slow and deliberative democratic processes. In such times, leftists argue representative government is too slow.

Individual rights are also considered dangerous by the left. Opposing ideas are viewed as too extreme. Checks and balances are tossed aside as too inconvenient. And having dispensed with those bothersome guardrails, Democratic politicians seek to recklessly impose their agenda without the consent of the governed.

The crises of the past 12 months provided the pretext by which leftists achieved their goal. Now that Democrats have the power they sought, we can expect them to continue to leverage real crises, exaggerate small ones, and fabricate new ones to justify exponentially bigger power grabs.

For the left, crises change but the solutions are always the same: more government, less freedom and higher taxes. Unfortunately for Democrats, our recent crises came during a Republican presidency under the stewardship of a man who showed little appetite for leveraging the crises to expand federal power.

I shudder to think what this country would look like today had Hillary Clinton held the reigns of the presidency during the coronavirus pandemic. But even with a Republican president and Senate to check their power, Democrats managed to leverage the crises that have engulfed America in ways that did great damage to our country.

Even as President Trump prepares to leave office, we see the strategy playing out. Democrats spent years justifying violence. They told us when we saw violent far-left Occupy and Black Lives Matter protests that “this is what democracy looks like.” They used Facebook and Twitter to organize large-scale violence.

But now the tables have now turned. Democrats have signaled a 180-degree turn in the rhetoric now that they hold power.

Suddenly, Democrats are no longer claiming that protests are “mostly peaceful” when some participants turn violent. Now they justify the suppression of an entire political party.

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Suddenly, Democrats tell us it’s OK to tar every attendee at protests with a broad brush when some engage in violence.

Suddenly, social media are a dangerous place to organize — but only for those who oppose Democrats. All others can continue to organize their violent protests unimpeded.

We can expect to see much more punitive responses to speech the left labels unpopular. We will see efforts to punish or retaliate against those who would undermine the majority position. No longer will we hear that “this is what democracy looks like.”

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For the good of our country, we need to resist efforts to use disasters as a justification for running roughshod over constitutional protections.

While Democrats control the federal legislative and executive branches, Republicans hold the majority of state legislatures. We must hold the line on defending and enforcing the checks and balances that protect us from a majority that has clearly signaled its preference for tyranny.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM JASON CHAFFETZ

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punkrockpolitix · 4 years ago

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Trumpism and the Tyranny of the Minority

by Mitch Maley — I'm often asked why self-described patriots seem to be okay with fascism or how those who scream in defense of concepts such as liberty and freedom can fail to be troubled by our slide toward totalitarianism, but such questions seem to miss the larger point.

Trumpism isn't a new phenomenon or even unique to the man at its helm. It is simply the logical end point for the so-called Tea Party movement that has completely taken over traditional conservatism in the past decade, a movement that aims to fully impose the will of a minority, even if their views are grossly out of step with most Americans.

In that sense, 2010 was the official end of bipartisan government, the moment the opposition became the enemy. It became more dangerous to reach across the aisle than to sit on your hands and do nothing, unless you could do everything your constituents wanted. It became a zero sum game in which half a loaf of bread was worse than none at all.

Make no mistake, extremism—whether it comes from the right or the left—is always about minority rule. Otherwise, the beliefs would be mainstream. Donald Trump was only the fourth president in U.S. history to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, and he did it with less of a share of the total vote (46.9) than any of the others. Not once during his presidency has his approval rate hit 50 percent, and it's recently been as low as 35.

I point this out because to hear his supporters tell it, they are part of a silent majority, despite what the math tells us. However, minority rule has been at the core of this movement from the beginning—at least for its architects. From restrictive voting laws clearly meant to suppress opposition turnout (including the current misinformation campaign on vote by mail) to packing the courts with judges that hold views grossly out of step with the majority of Americans and seeking to subvert the Supreme Court decision on a woman's right to choose with laws meant to curtail the ability of women to access abortion under bogus pretenses, the right-wing platform has increasingly become about a minority of people imposing their beliefs on a majority who find them objectionable.

Sure, there are memes, slogans and talking points that attempt to rationalize things like voter ID laws, limitations on early voting, requiring OBGYNs to have admitting privileges near their clinics or that the clinics to be expensively retrofitted to meet arbitrary codes, and on and on across a broad spectrum of issues, but when you read the literature of the think tanks and policy groups that craft such legislation, their objective is clear: How do we get what we want, without the power of the majority behind us?

One way is to argue that the rules favor the minority view, which is why there are always so many lay constitutional scholars ready to tell us how things like universal health care, mask mandates during a pandemic, sensible environmental regulation and other policies favored by a majority of Americans run afoul of the founder's intent, even if those same experts fail to find their voice each time this president tramples on the Constitution on behalf of something they agree with.

But gerrymandering districts so that you can keep at least part of Congress under your control despite getting less total Congressional votes cycle after cycle, or packing courts with sympathetic judges who might uphold the unconstitutional laws you are able to get passed is part of the kind of long game most people don't have patience for. In the end, if you want to see your country look exactly the way you want—and most of your fellow Americans do not share your vision—there is only one route: ceding power to a totalitarian dictator who has been able to turn minority support into presidential power and is willing to dance to any song his supporters play, so long as they provide the means for him to remain in power—legitimately or otherwise.

It is in this effort that fascism becomes quite useful, for it allows the minority to actually claim defense of our freedoms against an enemy that can now be identified as the other, an outsider group who they don't need to count among their numbers, as those people are now the enemy, making for a false reality in which they are no longer a minority but rather a majority of real Americans who love their country and are therefore intent on stopping the evil others at all costs.

Fascism is, at its core, not an ideology. Most simply put, it is an attack from the right on the left, on the basis that the central tenets of liberalism represent a constant threat of socialist takeover that is always close to being upon us. Draped in nationalism and an appeal to a brand of inherent righteousness most commonly found in religious movements, it should be no surprise that its adherents often espouse rhetoric that is just as dogmatic and evangelical.

Conversely, socialism is, in many ways, a similar attack on the perceived inherent evils of capitalism. Like fascist revolutions, socialist ones routinely justify violent insurrection, theft and even the execution of those who do not bend their knee, as necessary nearly to the point of being benevolent—regardless of the majority's will. One need not look further than the recent upheaval in Seattle, where a group of left-wing radicals vandalized private property while occupying six city blocks and making ridiculous demands until eventually devolving into the deadly chaos of a miniature failed state. The means to take power already exist through democratic channels, but because a majority is needed to seize it, the malcontent convince themselves that such a system is inherently corrupt to the degree that such criminal reappropriations are not only justified but completely necessary in order to force their minority view on the rest of the community who so desperately needs to live by it, even if they don’t realize it yet.

What the extreme left and extreme right have in common is an unwavering belief that there is but one way to do things—theirs. The big difference, however, is that while the extreme left doesn't even like the Democratic Party, even the progressive left is but a fringe force in a party almost wholly controlled by right of center NeoLiberals who drape themselves in progressive slogans, while remaining contemptuous of progressive politics.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement has, in just 10 years, completely vanquished the NeoConservative forces that preceded it as the power center of the Republican Party. Trump's election in 2016 signaled the passing of the torch, or rather it being pried from the cold, dead hands of the House of Bush. The extreme right, very much unlike the extreme left, is in control, with both the White House and the Senate under its wing. Those who haven't bent their knee in fealty to Trump and his tribe like former NeoCon stalwarts Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley and Mitch McConnell have, have either been marooned in a political no man’s land (Mitt Romney) or have gotten out.

What's left of the NeoConservative Republicans is now part of team Biden, seeing far more commonality with the NeoLiberals than Trump's crowd. That should be no surprise. The majority of Democrats and Republicans of 2000-2010 disagreed on little when it came down to brass tacks. Sure, they dangled identity politics, social issues and class warfare as red meat for the crowd, but when it came to Wall Street, globalization, bad trade deals and forever wars, they had much in common and were happy to divy the loot.

Of course, if you're a Trump supporter, you might be inclined to think something totally different. To hear his campaign frame the 2020 election, he's not running against the guy who wrote the crime bill, voted for every war and military spending bill ever put before him and routinely worked across the aisle to make deals. No, they're running against Antifa, AOC, looters in Portland and the impending socialist revolution that will always be on the verge of taking over, lest Donald J. Trump protects us.

Why? Because there's not a very sound argument for minority rule or trading democracy for autocracy to get it, unless the wolves are at the door and your only choices are giving up your freedoms or being eaten alive. For many Trump supporters, the constant rhetoric and propaganda has led them to a place where they truly believe there's that much at stake in November. It doesn't matter that the streets were peaceful when he took office or that Americans have never been as divided as they have become under his rule, at least since the Civil War. That's not because of his actions. In their minds, it's in spite of them. If Biden were to win, every American city would be overtaken by violent leftists, AOC and the Squad would be pulling his strings, and their country would become unrecognizable. Of course they would hand over any power needed to the one man who could save them from such horrors.

For the rest of us, the country has already become unrecognizable since 2016, and in the worst way possible. We're living their nightmare and the notion that four more years of Trump (or perhaps more, given his regular references to deserving a third term) might indeed see the United States slide into a totalitarian autocracy in which dissenters or even those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about Dear Leader could be sent off to the gulags seems all too possible. The only thing that remains certain is that it won't be over on November 3, no matter who wins. America is at the crossroads of a cultural reckoning, and it will take more than just a presidential election for it to fully play out.

Dennis “Mitch” Maley has been a journalist for more than two decades. A former Army Captain, he has a degree in government from Shippensburg University and is the author of several books, which can be found here.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years ago

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Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy

by Frederick Clarkson

Frederick Clarkson is a widely published journalist, author and lecturer who specializes in the Radical Right.

Book published March 1, 1997 (Bear in mind, since this book was written things have moved swiftly to the right.)

____________________________________________

“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

– Thomas Jefferson, who was attacked by the religious right in the election of 1800. These words are engraved inside the Jefferson Memorial.

____________________________________________

Back cover

What is behind the violence against abortion clinics, attacks on gays and lesbians and the growing power of the religious right?

Frederick Clarkson makes it clear that beyond the bombers and assassins who sometimes make news, is a growing, if not well understood, movement that encompasses Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon and the Promise Keepers—the lead agency of the so-called Christian men’s movement.

Drawing on years of rigorous research, Clarkson exposes the wild card of the “theology of vigilantism” which urges the enforcement of “God’s law” and argues for fundamentalist revolution against constitutional democracy. Contrary to popular belief, these figures are usually neither nuts nor alone.

Eternal Hostility concludes with a challenge to leading neoconservative academics who attempt to blame much of the current culture wars on the legalization of abortion while ignoring the theocratic intentions of leading “conservatives.”

____________________________________________

Review

Frederick Clarkson’s Eternal Hostility provides a chilling road map to a growing movement whose roots go back to the founding days of the country. Clarkson asks the reader to consider what it would be like if having an abortion was punishable by death, if gays and lesbians were thrown into jail, or if our constitutional rights were replaced by biblical law. In a stunning analysis, Clarkson debunks the “objective” bestseller Culture Wars to reveal a tract written by a rightwing church elder.

Chastising liberals and the left for failing to recognize the depth of the threat to liberty, Clarkson argues that we must develop a coherent response to a well-organized effort aimed at overthrowing democracy. When he exposes the aims and strategies of such diverse Christian zealots as the “Promise Keepers” and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, remember that it was Clarkson who first to exposed the Christian Coalition’s plans to take over the Republican Party, plans which have largely succeeded in several states and was actually seen as it was acted out on television in the 1996 Texas Republic Convention. Clarkson was also the first to expose how elements of the Christian Right were encouraging the formation of citizen “militias” almost five years before the Oklahoma City bombing propelled the militia movement into general public awareness. Eternal Hostility is a warning bell in the night and is essential reading for any secular humanist or freethinker needing to be aroused from a complacency that “it can’t happen here” — because it has, it is, and it may well succeed if enough good men do nothing to stop it.

— Midwest Book Review

____________________________________________

Contents

Introduction by Robert Meneilly vi

Acknowledgements viii

1. Eternal Hostility: The Born-Again Struggle 1

2. Neither a Juggernaut nor a Joke: 19 How Overestimating and Underestimating Helps the Christian Right

3. Americans for Theocratic Action: 45 Rev. Sun Myung Moon, “Family Values,” and the Christian Right—One Dangerous Theocrat

4. Laying Down the (Biblical) Law: 77 Christian Reconstructionism by the Book

5. Theocrats in Action: From Theory to Practice 97

6. The Devil in the Details: 125 How the Christian Right’s Vision of Political and Religious Opponents as Satanic May Lead to Religious Warfare

7. Bombings, Assassinations, and Theocratic Revolution: 139 Vigilantes Enforce “God’s Law”

8. The Fight for the Framework: 163 Resetting the Terms of Debate

9. Promise Keepers: The Death of Feminism? 187

10. Defending Democracy: Rethink the Strategy 203

Appendix: Resources 217

Notes 227

Index 264

About the Author 280

____________________________________________

Introduction

Rev. Robert H. Meneilly

As a Presbyterian (USA) clergy with a life-long zeal for both my Christian religion and our democratic country, Eternal Hostility has illuminated my mind and sensitized my heart like nothing I have read in recent times. This is exactly what is needed to help us secure the health of our democracy and preserve true religious liberty. Its honest and intelligent investigative journalism embodies some of the most in-depth research and reporting on the religious right in print. An encounter of my own with the religious right may serve to illustrate the need for this book.

In the spring of 1994, I gave a sermon to our 7,600 member congregation, introducing the personnel, theology, and goals of the radical religious right. The text was subsequently published locally and then in the Sunday New York Times. This drew the wrath of religious right leader James Dobson of Focus on the Family in the form of a full page ad in the Kansas City Star. This was just the tip of a large iceberg of stealth campaigns by the religious right to take over the Republican Party and run for public office in our area. It was then that a local grassroots Mainstream Coalition was formed to challenge the religious right.

I first met Fred Clarkson when we shared the podium at a public forum a few months later in July, 1994, titled “Exposing the Agenda of the Radical Religious Right” and sponsored by Planned Parenthood. The event turned out to be a benchmark in the growing struggle with the religious right in our suburban community outside of Kansas City.

The Planned Parenthood Forum drew extensive coverage from television, radio, and out of town newspapers. Fred spent all day before the evening forum doing interviews. So concerned had the community become that more people had to be turned away than those who packed the large auditorium. On that unforgettable evening, Fred detailed with clarity, and with good humor essential to civil discourse, the imminent threat of the radical religious right to our democratic institutions. This was especially significant in that there were many religious right activists present. It is evident that people are starved for accurate information and analysis about the radical religious right as it affects our communities.

Now Clarkson has drawn on the themes of that address and more, to create a very readable and well-documented book. In bringing out the facts, he is discerning, and not judgmental—a true investigative journalist.

From his critique of authors dealing with the so-called “culture wars,” to his first-hand observation of the founding meetings of the Christian Coalition, much of his writing comes of personal experience, not hearsay. Everything he reports is carefully documented.

Clarkson exposes the distorted use of American colonial history— as some use statistics, interpreting as they will in an attempt to prove whatever they want—and the misreading of the Constitution by the leadership of the religious right. Pat Robertson and his fellow generals in the army do the same with holy Scripture to give their narrow sectarian views the authority of “thus says the Lord.” Clarkson eliminates any confusion; he clearly demonstrates that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were purposefully designed to preserve this democracy and forever save it from being made a theocracy.

Eternal Hostility introduces many important players who receive little media attention, from the anti-democratic “reconstructionist” theologians to James Dobson, long-hailed hero of family values who has been building a prime political empire for a decade. He may well influence more people than the Christian Coalition. His “Focus On The Family” brings in annual revenues of more than $100 million. But while Clarkson issues a warning about these groups and others such as the Unification Church and the Promise Keepers, the author makes clear that apathy on the part of mainline Christians and other centrists is more to be feared. Clarkson insists that “Political participation must not be limited to the voting booth, but active participation in political and electoral life must span the calendar year.”

Too many wonderfully good citizens upon hearing the religious right stand back and say, “They certainly don’t speak for me.” But they do speak for you if you are not doing anything to keep our democracy from being converted to a theocracy!

This book is a masterpiece for God and country!

—Robert H. Meneilly

Robert H. Meneilly founded and then pastored the Village Presbyterian Church (USA) for more than 47 years in Prairie Village, Kansas. It is the second largest mainstream Presbyterian Church in the country. He is one of the founders of the Interfaith Alliance and the Mainstream Coalition, organizations of mainstream religious leaders who oppose the agenda of the religious right.

____________________________________________

“Moon’s Law: God Is Phasing Out Democracy” by Frederick Clarkson

Missing Pieces of the Story of Sun Myung Moon by Frederick Clarkson

Trivializing FFWPU mass weddings and underestimating the Christian Right

The CIG constitution is the paperwork for what Fraser and every Moon org critic has warned was the Moon org’s goal all along

Hak Ja Han’s Cheon Il Guk Constitution is troubling

Church and state: A personal and public tug of war

Sun Myung Moon: “church and the state must become one”

U.S. Presidents Endorse Sun Myung Moon From ‘Spirit World’

United States Congressional investigation of Moon’s organization

Politics and religion interwoven

The Resurrection of Rev Moon

____________________________________________

#Frederick Clarkson #Sun Myung Moon #Unification Church #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #Hak Ja Han

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xtruss · 5 years ago

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PEPE ESCOBAR: MAGA Misses the Eurasia Train!

While China and Russia solidify their economic and political alliance, the U.S. is missing an historic chance to join a multilateral world, clinging instead to military empire, argues Pepe Escobar.

By Pepe Escobar, in Milan, Italy

February 4, 2019

We should know by now that the heart of the 21stCentury Great Game is the myriad layers of the battle between the United States and the partnership of Russia and China.

Even the U.S. National Defense Strategy says so: “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by … revisionist powers.” The recently published assessment on U.S. defense implications of China’s global expansion says so too.

The clash will frame the emergence of a possibly new, post-ideological, strategic world order amidst an extremely volatile unpredictability in which peace is war and an accident may spark a nuclear confrontation.

The U.S. vs. Russia and China will keep challenging the West’s obsession in deriding “illiberalism,” a fearful, rhetorical exercise that equates Russian democracy with China’s one party rule, Iran’s demo-theocracy and Turkey’s neo-Ottoman revival.

It’s immaterial that Russia’s economy is one-tenth of China’s. From boosting trade that bypasses the U.S. dollar, to increasing joint military exercises, the Russia-China symbiosis is poised to advance beyond political and ideological affinities.

China badly needs Russian know-how in its military industry. Beijing will turn this knowledge into plenty of dual use, civilian-military innovations.

The long game indicates Russia and China will break down language and cultural barriers to lead Eurasian integration against American economic hegemony backed by military might.

One could say the Eurasian century is already upon us. The era of the West shaping the world at will (a mere blip of history) is already over. This is despite Western elite denials and fulminations against the so-called “morally reprehensible,” “forces of instability” and “existential threats.”

Standard Chartered, the British financial services company, using a mix of purchasing power exchange rates and GDP growth, has projected that the top five economies in 2030 will be China, the U.S., India, Japan and Russia. These will be followed by Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and the UK. Asia will extend its middle class as they are slowly killed off across the West.

Hop on the Trans-Eurasia Express

A case can be made that Beijing’s elites are fascinated at how Russia, in less than two decades, has returned to semi-superpower status after the devastation of the Yeltsin years.

That happened to a large extent due to science and technology. The most graphic example is the unmatched, state-of-the-art weaponry unveiled by President Vladimir Putin in his March 1, 2018 speech.

In practice, Russia and China will be advancing the alignment of China’s New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with Russia’s Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

There’s ample potential for a Trans-Eurasia Express network of land and maritime transport corridors to be up and running by the middle of next decade, including, for instance, road and railway bridges connecting China with Russia across the Heilongjiang River.

Heilongjiang or Armur river separating China and Russia. (Wikimedia)

Following serious trilateral talks involving Russia, India and Iran last November, closer attention is being paid to the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), a 7,200-km long lane mixing sea and rail routes essentially linking the Indian Ocean with the Persian Gulf through Iran and Russia and further on down the road, to Europe.

Imagine cargo transiting from all over India to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, then overland to Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port on the Caspian Sea, and then on to the Russian southern port of Astrakhan, and after that to Europe by rail. From New Delhi’s point of view, that means shipping costs reduced by up to 40 percent, and Mumbai-to-Moscow in only 20 days.

Down the line, INSTC will merge with BRI – as in Chinese-led corridors linked with the India-Iran-Russia route into a global transport network.

This is happening just as Japan is looking at the Trans-Siberian Railway – which will be upgraded throughout the next decade – to improve its connections with Russia, China and the Koreas. Japan is now a top investor in Russia and at the same time very much interested in a Korea peace deal. That would free Tokyo from massive defense spending conditioned by Washington’s rules. The EAEU free trade agreements with ASEAN can be added to that.

Especially over these past four years, Russia has also learned how to attract Chinese investment and wealth, aware that Beijing’s system mass-produces virtually everything and knows how to market it globally, while Moscow needs to fight every block in the book dreamed up by Washington.

The Huawei-Venezuela “Axis of Evil”

Metal Truss Railroad Bridge (Kama River, near Perm city). Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915. (Wikimedia)

While Washington remains a bipartisan prisoner to the Russophobic Platonic cave – where Cold War shadows on the wall are taken as reality – MAGA is missing the train to Eurasia.

A many-headed hydra, MAGA, stripped to the bone, could be read as a non-ideological antidote to the Empire’s global adventurism. Trump, in his non-strategic, shambolic way, proposed at least in theory the return to a social contract in the U.S. MAGA in theory would translate into jobs, opportunities for small businesses, low taxes and no more foreign wars.

It’s nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s before the Vietnam quagmire and before “Made in the USA” was slowly and deliberately dismantled. What’s left are tens of trillions of national debt; a quadrillion in derivatives; the Deep State running amok; and a lot of pumped up fear of evil Russians, devious Chinese, Persian mullahs, the troika of tyranny, the Belt and Road, Huawei, and illegal aliens.

More than a Hobbesian “war of all against all” or carping about the “Western rules-based system” being under attack, the fear is actually of the strategic challenge posed by Russia and China, which seeks a return to rule by international law.

MAGA would thrive if hitched to a ride on the Eurasia integration train: more jobs and more business opportunities instead of more foreign wars. Yet MAGA won’t happen – to a large extent because what really makes Trump tick is his policy of energy dominance to decisively interfere with Russia and China’s development.

The Pentagon and the “intel community” pushed the Trump administration to go after Huawei, branded as a nest of spies, while pressuring key allies Germany, Japan and Italy to follow. Germany and Japan permit the U.S. to control the key nodes in the extremities of Eurasia. Italy is essentially a large NATO base.

The U.S. Department of Justice requested the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou from Canada last Tuesday, adding a notch to the Trump administration’s geopolitical tactic of “blunt force trauma.”

Add to it that Huawei – based in Shenzhen and owned by its workers as shareholders – is killing Apple across Asia and in most latitudes across the Global South. The real the battle is over 5G, in which China aims to upstage the U.S., while upgrading capacity and production quality.

The digital economy in China is already larger than the GDP of France or the UK. It’s based on the BATX companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi), Didi (the Chinese Uber), e-commerce giant JD.com and Huawei. These Big Seven are a state within a civilization – an ecosystem they’ve constructed themselves, investing fortunes in big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet. American giants – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google – are absent from this enormous market.

Moreover, Huawei’s sophisticated encryption system in telecom equipment prevents interception by the NSA. That helps account for its extreme popularity all across the Global South, in contrast to the Five Eyes (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) electronic espionage network.

The economic war on Huawei is also directly connected to the expansion of BRI across 70 Asian, European and African nations, constituting a Eurasia-wide network of commerce, investment and infrastructure able to turn geopolitical and geo-economic relations, as we know them, upside down.

Greater Eurasia Beckons

Whatever China does won’t alter the Deep State’s obsession about “an aggression against our vital interests,” as stated by the National Defense Strategy. The dominant Pentagon narrative in years to come will be about China “intending to impose, in the short term, its hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region, and catch the United States off-guard in order to achieve future global pre-eminence.” This is mixed with a belief that Russia wants to “crush NATO” and “sabotage the democratic process in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.”

The Karakoram Highway connecting Pakistan and China, sometimes referred to as the English Wonder of the World. (Wikimedia)

During my recent travels along the northern part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), I saw once again how China is upgrading highways, building dams, railways and bridges that are useful not only for its own economic expansion but also for its neighbors’ development. Compare it to U.S. wars – as in Iraq and Libya – where dams, railways and bridges are destroyed.

Russian diplomacy is all but winning the New Cold War — as diagnosed by Prof. Stephen Cohen in his latest book, War with Russia: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.

Moscow mixes serious warnings with diverse strategies, such as resurrecting the South Stream gas pipeline to supply Europe as an extension of Turk Stream after the Trump administration also furiously opposed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow ramps up energy exports to China.

The advance of the Belt and Road Initiative is linked to Russian security and energy exports, including the Northern Sea Route, as an alternative future transportation corridor to Central Asia. Russia emerges then as the top security guarantee for Eurasian trade and economic integration.

Last month in Moscow, I discussed Greater Eurasia– by now established as the overarching concept of Russian foreign policy – with top Russian analysts. They told me Putin is on board. He referred to Eurasia recently as “not a chessboard or a geopolitical playground, but our peaceful and prosperous home.”

Needless to say, U.S. think tanks dismiss the idea as “abortive”. They ignore Prof. Sergey Karaganov, who as early as mid-2017 was arguing that Greater Eurasia could serve as a platform for “a trilateral dialogue on global problems and international strategic stability between Russia, the United States and China.”

As much as the Beltway may refuse it, “The center of gravity of global trade is now shifting from the high seas toward the vast continental interior of Eurasia.”

Beijing Skirts the Dollar

Beijing is realizing it can’t meet its geo-economic goals on energy, security, and trade without bypassing the U.S. dollar.

According to the IMF, 62 percent of global central bank reserves were still held in U.S. dollars by the second quarter of 2018. Around 43 per cent of international transactions on SWIFT are still in U.S. dollars. Even as China, in 2018, was the single largest contributor to global GDP growth, at 27.2 percent, the yuan still only accounts for 1 percent of international payments, and 1.8 per cent of all reserve assets held by central banks.

The author at the Khunjerab pass, China-Pak border, on New Silk Road overdrive.

It takes time, but change is on the way. China’s cross-border payment network for yuan transactions was launched less than four years ago. Integration between the Russian Mir payment system and Chinese Union Pay appears inevitable.

Bye Bye Drs. K and Zbig

Russia and China are developing the ultimate nightmare for those former shamans of U.S. foreign policy, Henry Kissinger and the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski.

Back in 1972 Kissinger was the mastermind – with logistical help from Pakistan – of the Nixon moment in China. That was classic Divide and Rule, separating China from the USSR. Two years ago, before Trump’s inauguration, Dr. K’s advice dispensed at Trump Tower meetings consisted of a modified Divide and Rule: the seduction of Russia to contain China.

The Kissinger doctrine rules that, geopolitically, the U.S. is just “an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia.” Domination “by a single power of either of Eurasia’s two principal spheres – Europe or Asia – remains a good definition of strategic danger for America, Cold War or no Cold War,” as Kissinger said. “For such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip America economically and, in the end, militarily.”

The Zbig doctrine ran along similar lines. The objectives were to prevent collusion and maintain security among the EU-NATO vassals; keep tributaries pliant; keep the barbarians (a.k.a. Russians and allies) from coming together; most of all prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition (as in today’s Russia-China alliance) capable of challenging U.S. hegemony; and submit Germany, Russia, Japan, Iran, and China to permanent Divide and Rule.

Thus the despair of the current National Security Strategy, forecasting China displacing the United States “to achieve global preeminence in the future,” through BRI’s supra-continental reach.

The “policy” to counteract such “threats” is sanctions, sanctions, and more unilateral sanctions, coupled with an inflation of absurd notions peddled across the Beltway – such as that Russia is aiding and abetting the re-conquest of the Arab world by Persia. Also that Beijing will ditch the “paper tiger” “Made in China 2025” plan for its major upgrade in global, high-tech manufacturing just because Trump hates it.

Once in a blue moon a U.S. report actually gets it right, such as in Beijing speeding up an array of BRI projects; as a modified Sun Tzu tactic deployed by President Xi Jinping.

At the June 2016 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Professor Xiang Lanxin, director of the Centre of One Belt and One Road Studies at the China National Institute for SCO International Exchange and Judicial Cooperation, defined BRI as an avenue to a “post-Westphalian world.” The journey is just beginning; a new geopolitical and economic era is at hand. And the U.S. is being left behind at the station.

Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is 2030.

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englishchinesetranslations · 5 years ago

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I am not an admirer of the democratic system as it has has evolved in the United States since the Founding. I am especially opposed to the kind of democratic system that has grown since the start of Lyndon Johnson’s bankrupting and citizenry-enslaving Great Society. As the Founders would have thought, I believe that the current nature of democracy in America is the generator of anarchy, which, in turn, inevitably solidifies the rule of the aspiring tyrants – in this case, the Democratic leaders, the legacy media, and the Media Titans — who are using democracy to produce anarchy and turn the anarchy into a durable and brutal tyranny

The Founders’ likely, and my own absolute opposition to today’s kind of democracy has been verified, for all who care to see and understand, in the denial of civil liberties, due process, and equality before the law to the president of the United States. The importance of the tyrants’ deliberate and destructive rape of the Constitution and the rule of law is a minor annoyance to President Trump, but it is an explicit augury of what the Democratic Party intends to do to any American citizen who objects – or resists – the tyranny they are seeking impose if they achieve national power.

As we slide along into 2020 on the oozing scum relentlessly being spread by the mere existence of the Democrat Party, the Trump Administration is faced with monumental tasks that may well require a declaration of martial law. These include the nation-wide restoration of responsible republican government; the destruction of all state governments that have acted, or threatened to act, unconstitutionally in such areas of immigration; election manipulation; non-citizen voting; blackmailing the federal judiciary and members of Congress; supporting pedophilia and those who practice it; and slowly strangling the 2nd Amendments.

Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution may be the most comprehensively powerful –and strangely neglected – statement of legitimate national government authority. Section 4 simply and clearly states:

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

This comprehensive power was placed in the hands of the national government by the Founders and the Constitution, I believe, as a power of absolute last resort, as the nation’s making of war must always be. Section 4 should have been triggered a decade or more ago as the requirements of both of its clauses have been fulfilled. There is no genuine republican government in a number of states – the governments there, in fact, are actively eradicating republicanism and conducting an insurrection – and so each can accurately be described as having been invaded by lethal enemies of republicanism, and so neither the executive or legislature in those states will request the aid of the national government to restore republicanism. The Constitution’s guarantee of republicanism in every state, therefore, can only be secured by destroying those state governments and their insurrection via the unilateral intervention of the national government. Five steps by the national government suggest themselves.

–1.) The republican form of government guaranteed by the Constitution must be forcibly restored in – at least – California, New York, Virginia, and Minnesota. The governors and their cabinets in those states must be arrested not only for failing to maintain republican government, but for trying to destroy it in their states. The mayors, and department heads of such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Oakland, Minneapolis, Richmond, Portland, and San Francisco also must be arrested for the same reason. They should be replaced by trustworthy military officers and troops with the experience in police-like duties and the task of restoring safe and reliable public order and infrastructure operation, talents they gathered in overseas operations. In America, they will have the support and cooperation of most of the well-armed citizenry, unlike in their operations overseas.

–2.) The illegal aliens living in these states and cities must be identified and deported with dispatch – along with their criminality, violence, disease, and illiteracy — by whatever means of transportation come to hand. These people, and all with them, are self-made criminals simply because they crossed America’s northern and southern borders without being authorized to do so by the national government. These self-made criminals are of no legal or humanitarian concern to the United States once they are identified for deportation and, in one way or another, must be pushed across the northern and southern borders into Canada or Mexico.

–3.) Every local police chief and every chief of state police forces in the country must be assessed. If any of them are found to have a record of helping the Democrats to plan and execute mass shootings or refusing to protect the citizenry from the Democratic Party’s terrorist groups – ANTIFA, BLM, MS-13, and BAM – he or she, and the top lieutenants of each, must be arrested for promoting terrorism and immediately incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. In addition, all members of the named terrorist organizations must be arrested on terrorism charges and incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. The National Guard’s commanders and his/her staff in each state must be likewise assessed. If they have supported – physically or vocally—unconstitutional activity, they should join those police officials and American-citizen terrorists bound for long stays in sunny Cuba.

–4.) All public and private colleges and universities in the United States must be defunded by the national government for a period of at least five years or until a federal court in each college or university’s vicinity evaluates and confirms that all aspects of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment have been fully restored, protected, and promoted on each campus. Thereafter, and for at least ten consecutive years, each college and university must be annually certified by the court as having fully maintained, protected, and promoted all liberties cited and guaranteed in the 1st Amendment.

–5.) All members of the governing elite — including elected officials and federal civil servants — who have sought and received monetary, propaganda, media, or political support from the regimes or citizens of China, Ukraine, Russia, Britain, Italy, Germany, Israel, or other foreign nations to defeat presidential-Trump candidate or the legitimately elected Trump Administration must be arrested, transported to Guantanamo Bay, turned over to military tribunals for trial, and immediately executed if found guilty.

The recommendations above may, and perhaps should, strike readers as extreme. They strike me that way. Still, is there anything more extreme than 38 consecutive months of the Democratic Party, the Media Titans, and the assorted crazed and criminal members of the Democratic congressional contingent deliberately robbing the republic of more than three years of its life. These miscreants have worked to destroy social cohesion and censor free speech; prevented the greater growth of the economy; blocked the complete elimination of the inflow of illegal aliens; stopped additional reductions in the unemployment and poverty rates; obstructed the termination of the Democrats’ and establishment-Republicans’ unnecessary and unconstitutional wars and their sending of many tens of billions of dollars in aid for foreigners, while Americans at home are malnourished and their infrastructure is left unbuilt; and prevented additional tax cuts for all Americans. Worse, they and their foreign allies have, since 2016, worked with great determination to overthrow the entire republican system of government in the United States. Is there a punishment too severe for this anti-American behavior? I think there is not, no matter how bloody.

Several hundred years ago, a distinguished Jesuit priest named Balthasar Grecian – a strong, honest, and learned man, unlike today’s effeminate, pro-depravity, anti-America Jesuits and their Clown-Socialist-Pope – wrote a book of maxims about how life should be lived, one of which is particularly pertinent to the situation that the pro-Constitution American citizenry faces today. “A happy finish makes everything shine,” Fr. Grecian advised, “no matter how unfitting the means may have been. Which explains why at times it should be a rule to offend the rules when it is not possible by other means to attain a happy ending.” (2)

Enough is enough. The U.S. Constitution clearly prescribes the proper rules for ending America’s current insurrection. Given that fact, the Trump administration is obligated by the Constitution to use effective force to end the insurrection and restore republican government nationwide. If the loyal parts of the U.S. military need help in accomplishing these ends, there is an enormous the pool of former and combat-experienced soldiers and Marines to draw from, and an even larger body of private and well-armed male and female citizens who are willing to join militia units.

–Endnotes:

–1.) Artilce Section 4, Section 4, https://constitutionus.com/

–2.) Balthasar Grecian. The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Maxim No. 66

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Why Are The Republicans Protecting Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-the-republicans-protecting-trump/

Why Are The Republicans Protecting Trump

Most Gop Senators Are Cowards But They Have Good Reason To Worry About Their Personal Safety And Their Political Future

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In a 1994 episode of The Simpsons, the bumbling patriarch Homer tries to shirk jury duty that make it look like hes wide awake during the trial while hes in fact enjoying a nap. Homer is meant to be an oaf, albeit a sometimes lovable one. But even in his buffoonery, Homer still took his responsibilities as a juror more seriously than many Republican senators, who are being singularly cavalier about the solemn duty of weighing whether to convict an impeached president.

At least Homer Simpson showed up for his jury dutyeven if he didnt stay conscious. But 15 Republican senators failed to be present in either mind or body for substantial parts of the third day of the impeachment, as members of the House of Representatives painstakingly laid out the case that Trump riled up a mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6. Thom Tillis was visible in the GOP cloakroom reading his phone, Manu Raju of CNN. Another CNN reporter, Jeremy Herb, that Senator Rick Scott had a blank map of Asia on his desk and was writing on it like he was filling in the names of the countries. According to Forbes, Many within the chamber were preoccupied with other activities: Senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Grassley were reading papers

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Jamie Raskin Is Leading The Effort To Impeach Trump While Mourning The Recent Death Of His Son

A day after Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, buried his 25-year-old son, he survived the mob attack on the Capitol. He is now leading the impeachment effort against President Trump for inciting the siege.

Mr. Raskins son, Tommy Raskin, a 25-year-old Harvard University law student, social justice activist, animal lover and poet, died by suicide on New Years Eve. He left his parents an apology, with instructions: Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me.

As he found himself hiding with House colleagues from a violent mob, Mr. Raskin feared for the safety of a surviving daughter who had accompanied him to the Capitol to witness the counting of electoral votes to seal Joseph R. Biden Jr.s victory.

Within hours, Mr. Raskin was at work drafting an article of impeachment with the mob braying in his ear and his sons final plea on his mind.

Ill spend the rest of my life trying to live up to those instructions, the Maryland Democrat said in an interview on Monday, reading aloud the farewell note as he reflected on his familys grief and the confluence of events. But what we are doing this week is looking after our beloved republic.

The slightly rumpled former constitutional law professor has been preparing his entire life for this moment. That it should come just as he is suffering the most unimaginable loss a parent can bear has touched his colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

Stacey Plaskett Addresses Emotional Toll Of Seeing Black Women Used In Trump Defense

“Those 43 who voted to acquit the president did so because they were afraid of him, because they were more interested in party and in power than they were in our country and in duty to their Senate oath,” she added.

Plaskett said Trump “will be forever tarnished” by the impeachment.

“I think it leaves him for all history our children and my grandchildren will see in history that this was the most despicable despot attempting to become a fascist ruler over a country that was founded in democracy,” she said.

President Biden said the attack on the Capitol “has reminded us that democracy is fragile.” Above, Biden speaks during a visit Thursday to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Evan Vucci/APhide caption

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President Biden said the attack on the Capitol “has reminded us that democracy is fragile.” Above, Biden speaks during a visit Thursday to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

President Biden responded to the Senate’s of Donald Trump on Saturday by reminding Americans that truth must be defended, saying the impeachment of the former president was a stark illustration of the danger posed to democracy by lies, misinformation and extremism.

And Biden said that although Trump was acquitted, his actions in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection were not “in dispute.”

It’s Trump’s Party Now So Much For A Fair Impeachment Trial

Donald Trump; Mitch McConnell

I believe all the reports that say Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., loathes former president Donald Trump with every fiber of his being. Apparently, he hasn’t spoken to him since the election and has made it clear to everyone who knows him that he would love to see Trump just retire to Mar-a-Lago never to be heard from again. He’s anything but a Trump true believer.

But Mitch McConnell believes in power. As he cast about trying to get a sense of where Republicans are in the wake of Trump’s disastrous performance since the election and the incitement of a violent insurrection on January 6th, he floated trial balloons about supporting impeachment and made some critical speeches. But he never had any intention of allowing Donald Trump to be convicted in a Senate trial, even if it were possible. How do we know this? As The Atlantic’s James Fallows :

-On January 13, when House voted for impeachment, McConnell said Senate could not consider it *until* Trump had left office. -From Jan 20 onward, McConnell has said Senate should not consider it *because* Trump has left office.

Similarly, McConnell’s lugubrious paean to Senatorial comity as he held the Senate hostage demanding that Democrats agree not to eliminate the filibuster is a monument to shameless hypocrisy, as Fallows also demonstrates:

Take for instance Rand Paul’s speech on Tuesday, a tour de force of brazen bad faith.

Extinguishing The Concept Of Truth

Acquittal in the Senate, when it comes, will be an example not of democratic deliberation, of the careful sifting and weighing of facts to arrive at some approximation of truth, but the exercise of raw political power.

This is not how a developed democracy should function. Rather, it has something important in common with tin-pot tyrannies in which the leader manipulates the factions and interest groups beneath him to build unbridled power.

To be sure, the political actors backing Trump in Congress are not acting lawlessly; quite the contrary. They are playing the role allotted to them by the Constitution: representing their constituents, i.e., Trumps base, which opinion polls show would want to stick with him even if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.

Yet there is nonetheless something deeply sinister about the Republicans’ behavior. They appear intent on extinguishing perhaps the most fundamental ingredient of a self-governing republic, namely, the concept of truth.

Impeachment Is An ‘act Of Political Vengeance’ Trump Lawyer Says

“At no point was the president informed the vice president was in any danger,” Michael van der Veen argued, adding that there is “nothing at all in record on this point.” Van der Veen also accused the House impeachment managers of failing to do their due diligence on this issue.

“What the president did know is that there was a violent riot happening at the Capitol,” van der Veen said. “That’s why he repeatedly called via tweet and via video for the riots to stop, to be peaceful, to respect Capitol police and law enforcement and to commit no violence and go home.”

But van der Veen’s argument left senators with additional questions.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who says he is undecided on whether he’ll vote to convict Trump, asked for more details regarding Tuberville’s account of the call with Trump and his tweet railing against Pence.

“Does this show that President Trump was tolerant of the intimidation of Vice President Pence?” Cassidy asked.

But again, van der Veen disputed the sequence of events, calling discussion of Tuberville’s call “hearsay.”

“I have a problem with the facts in the question because I have no idea,” van der Veen responded.

Cassidy told reporters later that he didn’t think his question got a good answer.

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Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, hailed by many for his heroism during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, participates in a the dress rehearsal for Inauguration Day.

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“History will wait for our decision.”

Republicans Supporting Donald Trump In The 2016 Presidential Election

Elected officials’ positions on Donald Trump Federal:Republicans and their declared positions on Donald Trump Republicans supporting Donald Trump Republicans opposing Donald Trump State and local:

See also: Republicans and their declared positions on Donald Trump

In a typical general election year, elected officials readily line up behind their party’s presidential nominee. In 2012, for example, The Hill reported that only four Republican members of Congress had declined to endorse Mitt Romney by mid-September of that year. “All other House and Senate Republicans” had already endorsed the Republican nominee.

But 2016 was not a typical general election year.

Controversial comments from the GOP’s 2016 nominee, Donald Trump, about women, Muslims, , and caused some Republican lawmakers to distance themselves from the businessman, while others outright denounced him.

This page tracked Republican lawmakers who openly declared their support for Trump during the 2016 presidential election.

Opinionthe Unfortunate Reason Republicans Like Rand Paul Are Already Attacking Biden

The callousness of lawmakers like Hawley is now a distressing image that stands beside the shouts of rioters calling for the lynching of then-Vice President Mike Pence as testaments to how far the GOP has fallen.

Republicans like Hawley may flee to the gallery when our nation needs leadership, but they wont be able to outrun their complicity in supporting the far-right radicals who raided their workplace. If they arent held accountable by voters at the ballot box, the impeachment trial will forever serve as a testament to their dark role in American history.

‘the Footage Is Horrific’: Senators React To Gripping New Video Of Capitol Riot

The video demonstrated how close rioters came to then-Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. And the impeachment managers argued that the video showed clearly that the mob of pro-Trump supporters was there for the president, and many believed they were there at the president’s behest.

The impeachment managers, however, made a broader case than Trump’s comments on Jan. 6. They argued that Trump laid the groundwork for false grievance on the part of his supporters with two months of baseless claims of widespread election fraud that cost him the electionand years, in fact, of tolerating, condoning and encouraging violence.

Why No Gop Senator Will Stand Up To Trump

Barry Goldwater had the power to tell Nixon it was all over. But dont expect a repeat this time.

Sen. Barry Goldwater. | Bill Allen/AP Photo

01/22/2020 05:10 AM EST

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Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller . He is now at work on a history of Watergate. He can be reached at

At the end for Richard Nixon, after all the mounting evidence in the Watergate scandal, after both special prosecutors, after all the White House indictments, after the guilty pleas, after the obstruction efforts fell apart, after all the court fights, after all the damaging revelations in outlets like the Washington Post, Time and the Los Angeles Times, after all the impeachment hearings, it all came down to Barry Goldwater.

Its easy, nearly 50 years after Watergate, to forget that Nixons ignominious departure from the White House was hardly a foregone conclusion. The Republican Party had stuck closely with Nixon even through the darkest days of the Watergate scandal; even as its lawmakers whispered behind closed doors about his guiltand even as public opinion polls showed Nixon dragging down their party, they had toughed it outpast the indictments of his top aides, past the courts batting back one attempt at obstruction after another, even after Nixons attacks on and ultimate firing of the special prosecutor targeting him.

Hours later, he ventured to the White House to tell Nixon to resign.

IMPEACHMENT TODAY

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Republicans Blame Democrats For Trumps Scandals

Second, they believe Trumps refusal to accept the election results is fair play because Democrats did it to him. Lets not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election, proclaimed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

What on earth is McConnell talking about? Hillary Clinton, after all, graciously accepted the results of the election the morning after, once her razor-thin defeat had become clear. McConnell obviously does not have the election result itself in mind. Instead he seems to be referring to the broader pattern of resistance to Trump during his term.

Republicans blame the four-year stream of misconduct and outright criminality not on Trump but on the reporters and investigators who uncovered it. Trump faced a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost, Wall StreetJournal columnist and recent editor Gerard Baker rants in his column today. The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposalbureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news mediato thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.

In His First Public Appearance Since The Capitol Siege Trump Expresses No Contrition For Inciting The Mob

President Trump on Tuesday showed no contrition or regret for instigating the mob that stormed the Capitol and threatened the lives of members of Congress and his vice president, saying that his remarks to a rally beforehand were totally appropriate and that the effort by Congress to impeach and convict him was causing tremendous anger.

Answering questions from reporters for the first time since the violence at the Capitol on Wednesday, Mr. Trump sidestepped questions about his culpability in the deadly riot that shook the nations long tradition of peaceful transfers of power.

People thought what I said was totally appropriate, Mr. Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, en route to Alamo, Texas, where he was set to visit the wall along the Mexican border. Instead, Mr. Trump claimed that protests against racial injustice over the summer were a real problem.

If you look at what other people have said, politicians at a high level about the riots during the summer, the horrible riots in Portland and Seattle and various other places, that was a real problem, he said.

Mr. Trumps defiance came despite near universal condemnation of his role in stoking the assault on the Capitol, including from within his own administration and some of his closest allies on Capitol Hill.

We analyzed the alternating perspectives of President Trump at the podium, the lawmakers inside the Capitol and a growing mobs destruction and violence.

Would Impeachment Prevent Trump From Seeking Office In The Future Its Complicated

With just days remaining in his term, House Democrats have introduced an of impeachment in Congress charging President Trump for a second time with committing high crimes and misdemeanors, this time for his role in inciting a mob that stormed the Capitol last week.

Impeaching a president with less than two weeks left in his term presents an extraordinary challenge. But if Mr. Trump is impeached in the House and subsequently convicted by a two-thirds vote in the Senate and removed from office, the Senate could then vote to bar him from ever holding office again.

The Constitution says that the Senate, after voting to convict an impeached president, can consider disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States. This would be determined by a second vote, requiring only a simple majority of senators to successfully disqualify him from holding office in the future. Such a vote could be appealing not just to Democrats but also possibly to many Republicans who have set their sights on the presidency.

Mr. Trump, who is said to be contemplating another run for president in 2024, has just eight days remaining in office, presenting an impeachment timeline for congressional Democrats that is tight, but not impossible. As soon as the House votes to adopt an article of impeachment, it can immediately transmit it to the Senate, which must promptly begin a trial.

Joint Chiefs Of Staff Remind Members Of Armed Forces To Reject Extremism

The Joint Chiefs of Staff issued an unusual message to the entire American armed forces on Tuesday reminding them that their job is to support and defend the Constitution, and to reject extremism.

As we have done throughout our history, the U.S. military will obey lawful orders from civilian leadership, support civil authorities to protect lives and property, ensure public safety in accordance with the law, and remain fully committed to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, said the one-page internal memo signed by the eight military chiefs.

That the chiefs found it necessary to remind their rank-and-file members of the oath to the United States was extraordinary. But the memo came as federal law enforcement authorities were pursuing more than 150 suspects, including current or former service members, involved in the mob that assaulted the Capitol last week.

As service members, we must embody the values and ideals of the nation, the memo continued. We support and defend the Constitution. Any act to disrupt the constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law.

Cruz Calls For Zero Covid Mandates As His Kids Safely Attend School Requiring Masks

It’s a dispiriting trend, to put it lightly. Sure, Republicans and right-wing media have downplayed the dangers of Covid-19 and bucked policies to contain it since the beginning of the pandemic. But initially one fact made that more explicable: 2020 was an election year, and there was a discernible political incentive for Republicans to ignore the virus to protect then-President Donald Trump’s reputation and win elections. It was morally perverse but at least intelligible as a political agenda.

This time around, as Democrats control the White House and Congress, as the delta variant causes extraordinary surges in hospitalizations and as the end of the pandemic is receding further into the future, Republicans have a perfect opportunity to go moderate on Covid-19. In fact, they have an opportunity to try to hold Democrats’ feet to the fire over containing the virus as the pandemic intensifies and use Democrats’ own Covid concerns against them.

It has become a mark of political ambition to paint basic public health protocols to prevent Covid transmission as a Trojan horse for totalitarianism.

But while some Republicans have sought to heed expert advice about Covid-19, it has become a mark of political ambition to paint basic public health protocols to prevent Covid transmission as a Trojan horse for totalitarianism.

It’s also clear that for Noem, a pointed refusal to do anything to slow the spread of Covid-19 is a way to prove her conservative bona fides.

Trump Lawyer: His Call To Georgia Officials To ‘find’ Votes Was Taken Out Of Context

Trump’s lawyers largely sidestepped Trump’s false claims of election fraud. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked during the question-and-answer session: “Are the prosecutors right when they claim that Trump was telling a big lie, or in your judgment did Trump actually win the election?”

Trump lawyer Michael van der Veen shot back, “My judgment? Who asked that?”

“I did,” Sanders replied.

“My judgment is irrelevant,” van der Veen said.

“You represent the president of the United States!” Sanders yelled back before Sen. Patrick Leahy, the presiding officer, gaveled the chamber back to order.

Trump’s rhetoric about widespread fraud and a stolen election was false, dismissed by many courts stemming from dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and allies across several key states.

Why Is The Gop Still Supporting Trump

The Republicans complicity with Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t just politicsbut something far more “unholy.”

Sharon Albuerne

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When evidence of potential Russian interference began surfacing after last years presidential election and Donald Trump only offered praise of Vladimir Putin in response, I began to notice a trend that struck me as odd. Many people journalists, social-media users, friends were asking what amounted to the same question: Why isnt the GOP standing up to Trump or Putin? After Trump violated countless democratic norms during his first weeks in office, the questions only became more urgent: Why doesnt the GOP do something about _____?, where the blank could be filled by any of the daily onslaught of ethics violations, financial conflicts of interest, security breaches, outright , and unqualified cabinet nominees emanating from the Trump administration.

Why So Many Republicans Cling To Trump

Ben Shapiro got part of it right. A toxic mix of status anxiety, persecution fears, and echoes of the Civil War helps explain why they follow Trump into the abyss.

On September 17, 1862, over 10,000 Confederate soldiers were , wounded, or went missing in a single day at the Battle of Antietam. Very few of them came from slave-owning families, so why did they agree to give their lives in defense of human bondage?

I was reminded of this question when I noticed that Politico Playbook had recruited conservative celebrity and author Ben Shapiro to explain why the vast majority of House Republicans voted not to impeach President Trump on Wednesday for sending a murderous mob after them on January 6. Politico was slammed by liberals for opening its best-known section to a conservative whos been charged with being bigoted and intolerant. But Shapiros explanation of the rallying around Trump during his final days wasnt totally off base. He was on to something about how Republicans see the world.

With Trump leaving office within a week, defending his incitement of an insurrection doesnt seem to be in the long-term self-interest of Republican officeholders. But the Civil War example helps explain why people sometimes do very self-destructive things out of spite or insecurity.

White supremacy was such a consensus view at the time that Lincoln felt compelled to defend it.

Like the rebels at Antietam, no one wants to die for nothing.

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Senate Acquits Trump In Impeachment Trial Again

A majority of senators voted to hold Trump guilty on one charge of inciting an insurrection, but the 57-43 tally fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority required for conviction. In all, seven Republicans voted to convict the former president, making Saturday’s vote the most bipartisan in a presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history.

“While the final vote did not lead to a conviction, the substance of the charge is not in dispute,” Biden said. “Even those opposed to the conviction, like Senate Minority Leader McConnell, believe Donald Trump was guilty of a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ and ‘practically and morally responsible for provoking’ the violence unleashed on the Capitol.”

Until his comments on Saturday, Biden had remained mostly silent about his predecessor’s impeachment, telling reporters last week that he did not even plan to watch the trial. He neither fully supported nor opposed the vote by the House of Representatives last month to impeach Trump, saying he wanted to leave the matter up to Congress. He also declined to say whether the Senate should move to convict.

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yesweweresoldiers · 5 years ago

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Does the Presidency Function as the Founders Intended?

In his new study of the presidency, Stephen F. Knott, Thomas and Mabel Guy Professor in Teaching American History’s Master of Arts in American History and Government program, traces what he views as a long devolution of the executive office, culminating in the surprising election result in 2016. The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal will appear from the University Press of Kansas on October 25. Knott, who teaches National Security Affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, has written five other books on the presidency, including two studies of Ronald Reagan and a book he co-authored with Tony Williams, Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance That Forged America (Sourcebooks, 2015). We asked Professor Knott to explain why he believes the presidency no longer functions as the framers of the Constitution intended.

Since the American founding, how has the presidency changed?

I argue that the president’s role has been unmoored from what the founders envisioned 232 years ago. The founders saw the president as a head of state who stood above the partisan fray, representing the nation as a whole. Today, the president represents the will of an impassioned majority. The president has become a cheerleader for popular feelings, putting at risk those who don’t share them.

As a Hamilton scholar, you know he argued in Federalist 68 that the Electoral College, which delegated presidential selection to electors chosen by state legislators, guaranteed

[caption id="attachment_22848" align="alignright" width="266"] John Trumbull. Alexander Hamilton, 1805. Oil on canvas. Public domain, from the Google Cultural Institute.[/caption]

. . . that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.

What happened?

Thomas Jefferson decided that the “revolution of 1800” must revamp the presidential selection process and re-found the office on a new understanding.

[caption id="attachment_22612" align="alignleft" width="309"] Rembrandt Peale. The Official Presidential Portrait of Jefferson, 1800. Public domain, from the White House Historical Association.[/caption]

He launched the presidency on a populist course that, in the long run, undermined the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. The founders I consider critical—Washington, Hamilton, and Madison—worried that demagoguery could destroy the republic. Hamilton feared demagogic leaders would tap passions to sway public sentiments. Hence he held the energetic executive responsible for checking popular excess. Jefferson argued to the contrary that public opinion served as the “best criterion of what is best,” and that enlisting and engaging that opinion would “give strength to the government.” As the nation’s only nationally elected figure, the president drew support for an energetic executive directly from the people. Jefferson turned Hamilton’s argument on its head, arguing that popular opinion conferred constitutional legitimacy. Jefferson made this abundantly clear in a letter he wrote to James Madison in 1787: “after all, it is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail.”

[caption id="attachment_23218" align="alignleft" width="282"] Thomas Sully. Andrew Jackson - 7th President of the United States (1829–1837), 1824. Public domain, from the US Senate site.[/caption]

This led to the much more partisan candidacy of Andrew Jackson, who accused his opponents of representing an elite and un-American oligarchy. Jackson believed that “the majority is to govern” and that the president was uniquely situated to speak for that majority. To Jackson, checks on majority rule, including the Electoral College, undermined the principle that “as few impediments as possible should exist to the free operation of the public will.” As a consequence, the Jacksonians expanded the right to vote among white males but stripped free blacks of their voting rights. Jackson changed the nature of the American political order, an order created to allow for reason and reflection and the possibility of statesmanship. Under Jackson, the tyranny of the majority replaced the rule of law.

Ironically, Jefferson and Jackson, although opposed to nationalizing or federalizing problems that could be dealt with at the local or state level, paved the way for the progressive presidents of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt saw the office as a stage on which the president could be as big of a man as he wanted to be. Although each saw himself as the voice of the people, their leadership imposed costs on racial and political minorities.

You say partisanship detached the presidency from its Constitutional role. Yet many observers say that the 2016 election shows the weakness of our party system. Parties can no longer keep the nomination process under their control.

[caption id="attachment_35943" align="alignright" width="268"] Jacques Reich, Woodrow Wilson, 1917. National Portrait Gallery.[/caption]

I couldn’t agree more. The presidency has become personalized. Woodrow Wilson considered cigar-chomping party leaders in smoke-filled rooms an impediment to effective governance and did what he could to mitigate their power. Today, the parties no longer screen potential candidates. In 2016, a man who was not a member of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, nearly won the Democratic nomination, while a man who had been a lifelong Democrat, Donald Trump, won the Republican nomination and the presidency. Any personality who can move the majority now sees himself entitled to govern as he sees fit.

So now, instead of speaking for a party, the president speaks for the instincts of a shifting majority? Have fear and reaction—seen in prejudice, identity politics, xenophobia, and isolationism—displaced party goals?

I think so. I’m told the word “passions” appears 66 times in The Federalist. The process of selecting the president was supposed to check those passions, promoting candidates who appealed to reason. But today we prefer candidates who excite the crowds. That reverses the key founders’ vision.

When the parties filtered the nominees for president, the party bosses picked those they thought they could control. Still, they did a fairly decent job of choosing those who would not do harm. For example, they replaced Henry Wallace with Harry Truman. But by then, Progressive presidents had already moved us toward a direct democracy system. Wilson even proposed a national primary for the two parties.

The reforms George McGovern pushed through the Democratic Party in 1972 followed Wilson’s vision, making the possibility of insurgent candidacies more likely. The Republicans moved much more slowly in that direction, yet ironically ended up backing Trump, in my view the most egregious example of this democratized, populist presidential selection process.

Do the greatest presidents show the least ego?

[caption id="attachment_23479" align="alignleft" width="297"] William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States and 10th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. 1908. Public Domain.[/caption]

The best presidents have conducted themselves with moderation and magnanimity, although this may mean voters and historians don’t judge them fairly. William Howard Taft did not project a “vision” that would lead the majority into the promised land, even though he supported progressive legislation. He was overwhelmingly defeated for reelection in 1912 in part because he didn’t practice the “little arts of popularity.”

Certainly Abraham Lincoln had a vision for a new birth of freedom. But he had a prudential sense that people have to be brought along. He didn’t see it as his job to fire up the base and attack the opposition. If there was any president who had a reason to go after the opposition, whether the Confederate states or some of their Democratic party allies in the north—it was Lincoln, but Lincoln’s language was very restrained.

Along with exaggerated attacks on opponents come exaggerated promises. Securing the Democratic Party nomination, Obama declared that this would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans beg[ins] to slow.” John F. Kennedy proclaimed at his inauguration that the US would “pay any price, bear any burden” to promote democracy abroad. Trump promises he’ll build a wall and the Mexicans will pay for it. Inflated rhetoric leads to inflated expectations of what the office can deliver. Deep disappointment follows, when it turns out that we can’t remake the world, remake human nature, or even necessarily avert climate change.

How have modern communications contributed to this?

[caption id="attachment_35937" align="alignright" width="373"] Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, September 6, 1936, Library of Congress.[/caption]

Wilson was the first to use radio, which Franklin D. Roosevelt played to the max. His presidential library in Hyde Park holds letters American citizens wrote him, saying, in effect, “I listened to your fireside chat, and I felt that you were in the room with me. You made me feel loved and cared for.”

John F. Kennedy, during the two years, ten months and two days of his presidency, demonstrated the power of television. His personable performance in the TV debates with Nixon played a role in his election. Even in death, TV elevated him in the national memory. The networks covered his assassination and funeral around the clock, repeatedly showing the image of his young widow and small children. In the aftermath, two thirds of the public claimed to have voted for Kennedy, even though he actually did not get quite 50%.

Obama was the first to use social media, and President Trump relies on it. At last check, he has tweeted over 44,000 times.

Some blame Congress for ceding power to the president in recent years.

That began when Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt assumed responsibility for setting the legislative agenda. Wilson restored the in-person State of the Union speech and in it laid out a laundry list of presidential initiatives.

[caption id="attachment_35947" align="alignright" width="427"] President Dwight D. Eisenhower standing with Lyndon B. Johnson . . . during a bipartisan luncheon at the White House, March 31, 1955. Thomas O’Halloran, Library of Congress, LC-U9- 150A-18.[/caption]

Yet presidents who have acted as head of state, rather than as party leader or policy developer, have done quite well. They are seen as unifying national figures. In modern times, perhaps Dwight Eisenhower comes closest to that model. Eisenhower never personalized his disputes with the Democratic Party opposition. He had a good relationship with Lyndon Johnson. He disdained Joe McCarthy in part because of his personal attacks on others. I think Eisenhower’s example has a lot to offer us in the 21st century.

How can we return to that model?

I try to be optimistic. One thing we could do is to restore the filtering function that the party leaders used to play. I would favor more super delegates for both conventions—members of Congress and governors who are not pledged to support those who win state primaries. That might at least prevent non-members from winning party nominations.

Ultimately, the American people must change. We’ve been sold a bill of goods about the president. We hear of “presidential government,” as if the other branches didn’t matter. We call the president the most powerful person in the world. We celebrate the office excessively.

We need more and better civics education, teaching us not only about the proper balance of powers, but reminding us of the limits of politics.

Presidents themselves can act as educators—Wilson wanted to be the national teacher, but he taught some wrong lessons. More recently, Ronald Reagan played a unifying role at the D-Day beaches and after the Challenger disaster. Even George W. Bush struck the right tone in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Those nonpartisan moments when Americans are called on to take pride in the nation and embrace their common citizenship—I’m fully in favor of that. It’s when presidents become partisan lightening rods that the trouble begins.

The post Does the Presidency Function as the Founders Intended? appeared first on Teaching American History.

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dorcasrempel · 5 years ago

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The permanent struggle for liberty

Where do democratic states with substantial personal liberty come from? Over the years, many grand theories have emphasized one specific factor or another, including culture, climate, geography, technology, or socioeconomic circumstances such as the development of a robust middle class.

Daron Acemoglu has a different view: Political liberty comes from social struggle. We have no universal template for liberty — no conditions that necessarily give rise to it, and no unfolding historical progression that inevitably leads to it. Liberty is not engineered and handed down by elites, and there is no guarantee liberty will remain intact, even when it is enshrined in law.

“True democracy and liberty don’t originate from checks and balances or from clever institutional design,” says Acemoglu, an economist and Institute Professor at MIT. “They originate [and are sustained] in the much more messy process of society mobilizing, people defending their own liberties, and actively setting constraints on how rules and behaviors are imposed on them.”

Now Acemoglu and his longtime collaborator James A. Robinson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have a new book out propounding this thesis. “The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty,” published this week by Penguin Random House, examines how some states emerged as beacons of liberty.

The crux of the matter, to Acemoglu and Robinson, is that liberal-democratic states exist in between the alternatives of lawlessness and authoritarianism. The state is needed to protect people from domination at the hands of others in society, but the state can also become an instrument of violence and repression. When social groups contest state power and harness it to help ordinary citizens, liberty expands.

“The conflict between state and society, where the state is represented by elite institutions and leaders, creates a narrow corridor in which liberty flourishes,” Acemoglu says. “You need this conflict to be balanced. An imbalance is detrimental to liberty. If society is too weak, that leads to despotism. But on the other side, if society is too strong, that results in weak states that are unable to protect their citizens.”

From the “Gilgamesh problem” to the “narrow corridor”

Following the English political theorist John Locke, Acemoglu and Robinson define liberty by writing that it “must start with people being free from violence, intimidation, and other demeaning acts. People must be able to make free choices about their lives and have the means to carry them out without the menace of unreasonable punishment or draconian social sanctions.”

This has been a nearly eternal concern, the authors note: Gilgamesh, per the ancient epic, was a king who “exceeded all bounds” in society. The need to curb absolute power is something the authors call the “Gilgamesh problem,” one of several coinages in the book. Another is the “cage of norms,” the condition where society, in absence of a state, organizes itself to avoid extensive violence — but only through restrictive social arrangements.

States, by becoming the guarantors of liberty, can break the repressive cage of norms. But social groups must curb state power before it too stifles freedom. When state capacity and society develop in tandem, the authors call this the “Red Queen effect,” alluding to a race in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” This “race,” if balanced enough, occurs in the “narrow corridor” where liberty-supporting states can exist.

Acemoglu and Robinson examine ancient cases of political reform from Athens to the Zapotec state, and they locate liberty’s largest direct wellspring in the early Middle Ages. Germanic tribes had quasidemocratic assemblies; meanwhile some leftover administrative structures of the Roman empire still existed alongside those of the Christian church. When the Frankish king Clovis created a “fusion of Roman state structure with the norms and political institutions of the Franks” in 511, the authors write, some parts of Europe were “at the entryway to the corridor” toward liberty.

To be sure, there was a “gradual, painful historical process” to be played out; it was another 700 years before King John of England signed the Magna Carta in 1215, a watershed for the distribution of lawful power beyond the throne.

Still, state structures being grafted onto a mechanism for representing society, through assemblies, meant both state and society could expand their power. As Acemoglu and Robinson put it, this “fortuitous balance” effectively “put Europe into the corridor, setting in motion the Red Queen effect in a relentless process of state‐society competition.” Eventually, European democracies evolved.

“Liberty is fragile”

That Europe took the lead in creating liberty-granting states was not inevitable, Acemoglu and Robinson emphasize. Almost 3,000 years ago, they note, ancient China was organized into city-states, and one influential political advisor of the time wrote that “the people are masters of the deities.” But by the fourth century B.C.E., spurred on by the politician and theorist Shang Yang, Chinese rulers built a much more powerful state, which became the Qin empire. Despite many potential moments of reform, detailed in “The Narrow Corridor,” China’s state has largely remained much more powerful than its social interests.

Moreover, Acemoglu suggests, the longer a despotic state exists, “the more self-reinforcing it becomes.” He adds: “The more it takes root, the more it sets up a hierarchy which is hard to change, and the more it weakens society. … That’s why I think dreams of China smoothly converting to a democratic system have been misplaced — [it’s had] 2,500 years of state despotism.”

The account of the U.S. in “The Narrow Corridor” also takes a long view, albeit over a much shorter period. The U.S. Constitution and the architecture of government developed in the late 18th century, Acemoglu and Robinson write, was a “Faustian bargain” created by Federalists to limit both absolute power and popular power. This structure, they believe, especially its emphasis on states’ rights, “meant that the federal state remained impaired in some important dimensions. For one, it obviously didn’t protect slaves and later its African American citizens from violence, discrimination, poverty, and dominance.”

Acemoglu and Robinson also believe that focusing too much on “the brilliant design of the Constitution” is problematic because it “ignores the critical role that society’s mobilization and the Red Queen [effect] played at every turn. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights … were the result of the tussle between elites and the people.” The expansion of U.S. rights and liberties has emerged intermittently — following the Civil War, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement, among other things. But these liberties can also recede if political counter-movements become effective enough.

“That is the sense in which liberty is fragile,” Acemoglu says. “If you thought liberty depended on clever designs, you’d have thought we would find the perfect design that protects liberty all the time. But if you think it depends on this messy process, then it’s a much more contingent and troubled existence.”

Facing the “urgent challenges for us today”

“The Narrow Corridor” examines many additional cases of state-building in history, from India and Africa to Scandinavia. It also builds on a body of work Acemoglu and Robinson have produced examining the relationships between society, state institutions, and growth. That includes the books “Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy” (2006) and “Why Nations Fail” (2012). The two scholars have also co-authored 36 published papers on these topics (some with additional co-authors).

Acemoglu has also published widely on labor economics, the impact of technology on work and growth, and macroeconomic dynamics. He was named as one of MIT’s 12 Institute Professors this summer and has been on the faculty of the Department of Economics since 1993.

As the authors view it, their account of liberty stands in contrast to many other models. The close of the Cold War helped generate the idea of a geopolitical “end of history,” in which states would converge on a liberal-democratic model. That notion did not closely forecast subsequent developments. Neither did postwar theories of modernization that posited a standardized path to democratic prosperity for the developing world.

“There are multiple destinations countries can be headed to,” Acemoglu says. “There is nothing ephemeral about a despotic state or a weak state, and there is no ineluctable process that’s going to take every country smoothly toward some sort of liberty at all.”

Moreover, Acemoglu says, “Our argument is not a culturally deterministic one.” He adds: “There are views that are very economistic. … Ours is a view that emphasizes the role of agency by individuals and society, and maintains that different social organizations lead to different outcomes. It’s also not geography-based. I think there are a lot of differences from [other] theories.”

Scholars have praised “The Narrow Corridor.” Joel Mokyr, a historian at Northwestern University, has called it “a magisterial book of immense insight and learning,” which “draws a chilling conclusion every thinking person should be aware of: Liberty is as rare as it is fragile, wedged uneasily between tyranny and anarchy.”

Today’s politics have also generated abundant discussion about the future of governance and democracy. In this vein, Acemoglu says, “The Narrow Corridor” is an engagement with the past meant to illuminate the present.

“We need to think about history,” Acemoglu says. “We are writing this book because we think it’s relevant to the urgent challenges for us today. Creating the right sort of political balance, and mobilizing society while not disempowering laws and institutions, are completely first-order challenges we face today. I hope our perspective will shed some light on those issues.”

The permanent struggle for liberty syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

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gibsongirlselections · 4 years ago

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How Intellectuals Cured ‘Tyrannophobia’

Almost 400 years ago, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote a book scoffing at tyrannophobia—the “fear of being strongly governed.” This was a peculiar term that Hobbes invented in Leviathan, since civilized nations had feared tyrants for almost 2000 years at that point. But over the past 150 years, Hobbes’ totalitarianism has been defined out of existence by apologists who believe that government needs vast, if not unlimited power. Hobbes’ revival is symptomatic of the collapse of intellectuals’ respect in individual freedom.

Writing in 1651, Hobbes labeled the State as Leviathan, “our mortal God.” Leviathan signifies a government whose power is unbounded, with a right to dictate almost anything and everything to the people under its sway. Hobbes declared that it was forever prohibited for subjects in “any way to speak evil of their sovereign” regardless of how badly power was abused. Hobbes proclaimed that “there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Sovereign; and consequently none of his subjects, by any pretense of forfeiture, can be freed from his subjection.”

Hobbes championed absolute impunity for rulers: “No man that hath sovereign power can justly be put to death, or otherwise in any manner by his subjects punished.” Hobbes offered what might be called suicide pact sovereignty: to recognize a government’s existence is to automatically concede the government’s right to destroy everything in its domain. Hobbes sought to terrify readers with a portrayal of life in the “state of nature” as the “war of all against all” that made even perpetual political slavery look preferable. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government published a few decades later, scoffed at Hobbes’ “solution”: “This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats and foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.” As Charles Tarlton, a professor at the State University of New York in Albany, noted in a superb 2001 article in The History of Political Thought, Hobbes “despotical doctrine” rests upon “an absolute and arbitrary political power joined with a moral demand for complete, simple and unquestioning political obedience and, second, the concept that no action of the sovereign can ever be unjust or even criticized.”

Hobbes’ treatise succeeded in making “Leviathan” the F-word of political discourse. In the century after Hobbes wrote, there was rarely any doubt about the political poison he sought to unleash. David Hume, writing in his History of England declared that “Hobbes’s politics were fitted only to promote tyranny.” Voltaire condemned Hobbes for making “no distinction between kingship and tyranny … With him force is everything.” Jean Jacques Rousseau condemned Hobbes for viewing humans as “herds of cattle, each of which has a master, who looks after it in order to devour it.”

Hobbes’ views were derided as long as political thought was tethered to the Earth. Unluckily for humanity, philosophers found ways to sever ties to both history and reality. The most influential political philosopher of the 19th century may have been Germany’s G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel proclaimed, “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth” and is “the shape which the perfect embodiment of Spirit assumes.” Hegel also declared that “the State is … the ultimate end which has the highest right against the individual, whose highest duty is to be a member of the State.” Hegel had a profound influence on both communism (via Marx) and fascism. Political scientist Carl Friedrich observed in 1939, “In a slow process that lasted several generations, the modern concept of the State was … forged by political theorists as a tool of propaganda for absolute monarchs. They wished to give the king’s government a corporate halo roughly equivalent to that of the Church.”

By the twentieth century, as Tarlton noted, “Hobbes’s interpreters and commentators had worked to make Hobbes’s appalling political prescriptions more palatable.” Experts scoffed at “tyrannophobia” because they believed tyrants were necessary to “fix” humanity.

Hobbes’ revival in America was aided by John Dewey, probably the philosopher with the most impact on public policy in the first half of the 20th century. In 1918, Dewey shrugged off Hobbes’ affection for despotism: “Undoubtedly a certain arbitrariness on the part of the sovereign is made possible, [it] is part of the price paid, the cost assumed, in behalf of an infinitely greater return of good.” And why presume “an infinitely greater return of good”? Because the government would be following the prescriptions of Dewey and his intellectual cronies. Two years earlier, Dewey championed government coercion as a social curative: “No ends are accomplished without the use of force. It is consequently no presumption against a measure, political, international, jural, economic, that it involves a use of force.” Dewey declared that “squeamishness about [the use of] force is the mark not of idealistic but of moonstruck morals.”

Two decades later, Dewey discovered utopia during a visit to Moscow and proclaimed that the Soviet people “go about as if some mighty, oppressive load had been removed, as if they were newly awakened to the consciousness of released energies.” Dewey had no qualms about the artificial famine that Stalin caused in the Ukraine that killed more than five million peasants. Perhaps Dewey agreed with Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.”

President Franklin Roosevelt never invoked Hobbes but his Hobbesian approach to power made FDR a darling of the intelligentsia. In his first inaugural address, FDR called for a Hobbesian-like total submission to Washington: “We now realize… that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership can become effective.” The military metaphors and call for everyone to march in lockstep was similar to rhetoric used by European dictators at the time. Roosevelt sometimes practically portrayed the State as a god. In his 1936 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, he declared, “In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.” In 1937, he praised the members of political parties for respecting “as sacred all branches of their government.” In the same speech, Roosevelt assured listeners, in terms Hobbes would approve, “Your government knows your mind, and you know your government’s mind.”

As governments throughout the western world seized vastly more power, British professors took the lead in consecrating Hobbes. In 1938, on the eve of World War Two, British philosopher A.E. Taylor wrote an influential book that bizarrely proclaimed “that, in spite of his absolutist leanings, what Hobbes is trying to express by the aid of his legal fictions is the great democratic idea of self-government.” Eight years later, Michael Oakeshott, one of favorite British philosophers of American conservatives, hailed Leviathan as “the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language.” Oakeshott assured readers that “we need not greatly concern ourselves” about critics who warned of Hobbes’ dark side because Hobbes’ vision “could never amount to despotism.” Signaling the total vanquishing of classical liberal interpretations, a major academic review of recent writings on Hobbes declared in 1982 that “seeing Leviathan as tyranny is now only to be found in new editions of old books.”

In the United States, many liberals display a Hobbesian love of vast government power.

University of Chicago professor Stephen Holmes gushed in his 1995 book, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy: “It now seems obvious that [contemporary Statist] liberalism can occasionally eclipse authoritarianism as a technique for accumulating political power…. For good or ill, liberalism is one of the most effective philosophies of state building ever contrived.” Holmes hailed Hobbes as a “pre-liberal”—which makes as much sense as touting Hitler as a “post-liberal.”

“Leviathan” has long since lost its onus among the academic elite. In 2012, Princeton University professor John Ikenberry’s Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order was published. The publisher, Princeton University Press, summarized the book: “In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States engaged in the most ambitious and far-reaching liberal order building the world had yet seen. This liberal international order has been one of the most successful in history.” Tell that to the Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Somalians, and many other victims of U.S. foreign policy. Writing recently in the Washington Post, DePaul University political science professor David Lay Williams hailed Leviathan as “perhaps the greatest work of political philosophy ever written in English.” DePaul is finishing a book titled, The Greatest of All Plagues: Economic Inequality in Western Political Thought, so perhaps he favors tyranny as the cure for inequality.

Especially since 9/11, America has suffered presidents who acted entitled to Hobbesian-levels of unlimited power. Bush administration lawyers secretly decided that neither federal law nor the Constitution could limit the power of the president, who was even entitled to declare martial law in America at his whim. President Barack Obama promised to restore civil liberties but vastly expanded illegal surveillance, bombed seven nations, boosted drone attacks by 500%, and claimed a prerogative to kill American terror suspects without a trial. President Donald Trump proclaimed earlier this year, “When somebody is President of the United States, his authority is total.” Trump neglected to clear his statement with the ghost of James Madison, the father of the Constitution.

The issue here is not the reputation of one long-dead philosopher but the seachange in verdicts on tyranny. The more powerful government becomes, the more homage Leviathan receives from professors and pundits. Will average citizens recognize the folly of a bunch of intellectual lemmings plunging over a cliff? As Professor Carlton warned, “The theory of Hobbes is a theory of unadulterated despotism, or it is nothing.” Is it too much to ask the champions of despotism to cease pretending to be friends of liberty?

James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard.

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