#basically british politial parties as i understand them:

[dizzybevvie]

i love seeing u post about american politics. i need to learn about brexit

ah yes the ever topical debate of brexit

[gravitascivics]

VIRGINIA:  A DIFFERENT BASIS, ONE SIMILAR RESULT

As one leaves the New England colonies, where the Puritan influence was so strong, and looks at the other colonies, say Virginia and Pennsylvania, one encounters some highly distinguishing social elements and some common ones as well.  What seems to prevail in all the colonies is a foundational understanding of governance and politics.  

That leads to a set the basic assumptions of how government should be set up and, therefore, reflects agreement about basic related values.  In addition, that similarity led to agreements about what government is and how it should function.  Generally, an overall description of this similarity can be characterized as federal thinking.

         A colony that predated settlement in New England is Virginia.  Thirteen years before the first settlement in Massachusetts was established in 1620, the Jamestown settlement of Virginia was established in 1607. While there were three types of colonial arrangements – property colonies, charter colonies, royal colonies – given the inability to garner immediate profits, and in terms of the Crown, indifference, all the colonies devolved into being free standing entities establishing local governance.

         The initial businesses that set up the colonies, for the most part, were unsuccessful (the Virginia Company went bankrupt in 1622), but the role the colonies were to play in the prevailing mercantilist system was to provide natural resources to the mother country, England.  Given this overall aim, a lot of policy was accepted that might have been at least questioned otherwise.  That would include the introduction and furtherance of slavery.

         The first slaves were introduced in 1619 as they were brought to Jamestown.[1]  These unfortunates were to work on certain agricultural products – rice, sugar, tobacco, and eventually cotton.  These crops lend themselves to large land allotments and, given the geography of the area, the development of the plantation economy quickly came to be.

         Another difference between Virginia and New England was that Virginia was not settled by Puritans. In that more southern area, Anglicans initially populated that colony.  This was offset a bit with a level of popularity for Puritanism among the first natural born generation of Virginians.  

Despite this variance, almost from the beginning, there was a similarity between the constituting documents written and enacted in New England and those that will guide the way in Virginia.  Donald Lutz reports on an initial Virginia document:

 Under its initial charter, Virginia was run by a cumbersome double council. A thirteen-member council in Virginia to carry out its will.  The system did not work, and the Virginia governor had to become a virtual dictator to maintain order.  The [Articles, Laws, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martial for the Colony of Virginia, 1610] was issued under martial law but still reflects the values that were generally accepted by the colonists.  It is equivalent to a code of law and may be fruitfully compared with the other codes of law [found among the colonies].  Religion plays an important role in this Virginia document, as it did in codes elsewhere, and the moral content looks similar to that of New England codes.  … The similarities with the Puritans may have been due to the predominance of “low church” members, who while remaining securely in the fold, shared many of the Puritan inclinations against pomp, status, and other vestiges of what was termed covert popery.[2]

 This gave way to representative governance, defined by compact, shortly afterward.

         The general attitude of the English Crown to the developments in Virginia was to mostly ignore any problems.  This led to the company’s employees to organize themselves that led naturally to a federating model.  Naturally, one can attribute their already existing biases for representative governance due to England’s parliamentary tradition, but with the Crown being so far off and mostly indifferent, one can see federated bonding as a normal mode of advancing a structured polity.

         And this indifference would last for the greater part of the 1600s.  That is not to say certain actions by the Crown would have inconsequential effects.  It, for example, issued highly generous grants to its favored parties such as when it granted William Penn Pennsylvania in 1682, the Carolinas to the Carolina Properties in 1632, New York to the Duke of York in 1666, and so on.[3]  But as the colonies became viable and then lucrative – along with some uppity biases – the interest among British policy makers would change.

         And then there is the effect that growing Enlightened attitudes would have.  Here, there is a mixed bag.  On the one hand, the Enlightenment will undercut the authority of religious thinking (as previously explained in this blog), but on the other, it would also undermine aristocratic assumptions about people.  The whole notion that well off people are so advantaged due to some godly plan was seriously questioned.  

This led to republican leanings among Enlightened thinkers – among them one finds the “social contract” theorists.  It was a historical shift toward equality.  One imported set of ideas was those of John Locke. While subsequent writers have attributed too much influence on this philosopher,[4] his promotion of a natural rights view and its introduction to America should be noted.  

To the extent that natural rights was considered and adopted, it presented a competing sense of what it meant to govern and engage in politics.  So, during the 1600s, Virginia was allowed to organize itself, initiate its basic economic arrangements, and proceed to establish a viable position within the mercantilist system that was one, global, and two, highly entrenched.  But before moving on to examine Pennsylvania’s development more closely, the next posting will give an overall comparison between the natural rights view and federal theory.

[1] Slavery had already been present in America; the first slaves were probably introduced on this side of the Atlantic as far back as the early 1500s with Christopher Columbus transporting them to Hispaniola.  See “America’s History of Slavery Long before Jamestown,” The History Channel (n.d.), accessed May 6, 2021, https://www.history.com/news/american-slavery-before-jamestown-1619#:~:text=The%20arrival%20of%20the%20first,as%20early%20as%20the%201500s.

[2] Donald S. Lutz (ed.), Colonial Origins of the American Constitution:  A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund,1998), 314.

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).

[4] See, for example, Garry Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1978/2018). 

[ravenmorganleigh]

Whenever I go back and forth between Europe and the States, a curious set of facts strikes me.

In London, Paris, Berlin, I hop on the train, head to the cafe — it’s the afternoon, and nobody’s gotten to work until 9am, and even then, maybe not until 10 — order a carefully made coffee and a newly baked croissant, do some writing, pick up some fresh groceries, maybe a meal or two, head home — now it’s 6 or 7, and everyone else has already gone home around 5 — and watch something interesting, maybe a documentary by an academic, the BBC’s Blue Planet, or a Swedish crime-noir. I think back on my day and remember the people smiling and laughing at the pubs and cafes.

In New York, Washington, Philadelphia, I do the same thing, but it is not the same experience at all. I take broken down public transport to the cafe — everybody’s been at work since 6 or 7 or 8, so they already look half-dead — order coffee and a croissant, both of which are fairly tasteless, do some writing, pick up some mass-produced groceries, full of toxins and colourings and GMOs, even if they are labelled “organic” and “fresh”, all forbidden in Europe, head home — people are still at work, though it’s 7 or 8 — and watch something bland and forgettable, reality porn, decline porn, police-state TV. I think back on my day and remember how I didn’t see a single genuine smile — only hard, grim faces, set against despair, like imagine living in Soviet Leningrad.

Everything I consume in the States is of a vastly, abysmally lower quality. Every single thing. The food, the media, little things like fashion, art, public spaces, the emotional context, the work environment, and life in general make me less sane, happy, alive. I feel a little depressed, insecure, precarious, anxious, worried, angry — just like most Americans do these day. So my quality of life — despite all my privileges — is much worse in America than it is anywhere else in the rich world. Do you feel that I exaggerate unfairly?

It’s not just an anecdote, of course. Americans enjoy lower qualities of life on every single indicator that you can possibly think of. Life expectancy in France and Spain is 83 years, but in America it’s only 78 years — that’s half a decade of life, folks. The same is true for things like maternal mortality, stress, work and leisure, press freedom, quality of democracy — every single thing you can think of that impacts how well, happily, meaningfully, and sanely you live is worse in America, by a very long way. These are forms of impoverishment, of deprivation — as is every form of not realizing potential that could be.

But I don’t wish to write a jeremiad, for I am not a pundit. The question is this: why don’t Americans understand how poor their lives have become? Is it even a fair question to ask?

Of course, one can speak of capitalism and false consciousness and class war, of technology hypnotizing people with outrage. But I think there is a deeper truth here. There is a myth of exceptionalism in America that prevents it from looking outward, and learning from the world. It is made up of littler myths about greed being good, the weak deserving nothing, society being an arena, not a lever, for the survival of the fittest — and America is busy recounting those myths, not learning from the world, in slightly weaker (Democrats) or stronger (Republicans) forms. Still, the myths stay the same — and the debate is only really about whether a lightning bolt or a thunderstorm is the just punishment from the gods for the fallen, and a palace or a kingdom is the just reward for the cunning.

Hence, I have never once sees in America a leader saying, “hey! See that British healthcare system? That German union and pension system? Why don’t we propose that? They work!!” Instead, the whole American debate is self-referential — pundits debating Andrew Jackson (LOL) instead of, say, what the rest of the world does today in 2017. How can a broken society grow only by looking inwards? If you are a desperate, heart-broken addict, what can you learn from yourself? Won’t you only, recounting your pain, reach for the needle quicker? So we must look outwards, always, to learn best and truest — but I will return to that.

Still, though, “why don’t Americans get it!” is an unfair question unless we ask it for both sides. So let us look at the picture from the opposite side, to see if our question is worth asking.

Do Europeans “get it” — how good their lives are, relatively speaking? Well, in Europe, regressive forces are at work, too — not as badly as in America, but rising, to be sure, in every single nation. So Europeans, too, at least enough to seat extremist parties in parliaments, take their quality of life for granted a little. Why would that be? Probably because they have now grown up with the gift their grandfathers and grandmothers gave them — constitutions in which healthcare, education, dignity, and so on, are essential rights — which are what underpin Europe’s stunningly high quality of life. Hence, regressive forces in Europe say “these people must not have rights!”, not understanding that those very rights, enshrined in rewritten constitutions, are exactly how Europe rose in a generation from the ruins of war, to the highest living standards ever, period — and to take them away is to begin erasing history.

So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking — which is to say how good they could be — so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are — and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes.

Now. What does that really mean? We are living in a world unable to learn from itself. What would sane societies do, watching each other, watching each other’s fortunes rise and fall? A sane America would look at Europe, see it’s tremendously higher quality of life in every possible regard, and say, “My God! That is what we should reach for, too!”. And a sane Europe would look at America, see it’s falling life expectancy and imploding middle class, and say, “My God! We must never become that!” But you see, the irony is this: both are doing precisely the opposite. Europe is fighting against becoming more American, and America is not fighting to become more European. (Of course, I don’t mean culturally — I mean in terms of constitutions, institutions, economy, polity, and social contracts).

History teaches us tragedy with irony. And this to me is the greatest irony of now. We are making three great mistakes in this age. The first is that we cannot learn from modern history — which is the story of Trump and America and tyranny. The second is that we cannot learn from deep history — that the whole story of human progress has been written by lifting one another up, not keeping anyone else down, and so the seductive ur-myth of the fascist, that I rise by pulling you down, right down into the abyss, is mesmerizing societies whole.

The third mistake we are making, though, is more invisible, and perhaps the greatest of all — what this essay is about: we cannot learn from one another anymore. How do we learn things? We can learn only in these three ways: from our own mistakes, from the mistakes all people have made, or from the fortunes and misfortunes of our peers. And of those three, the swiftest way to learn is to simply look at what others are doing, that work, and copy it.

Mimicry, of course, is how babies learn the most basic things — yet we cannot seem to even handle that much. So here is the unforgiving truth. We, in this age, this time, have regressed to something past an infantile state: we cannot even manage the mimicry that babies perform happily, the most basic form of learning that exists. We have regressed beyond regression itself.

And so we live in an age that feels paralyzed, stuck, unable to even grow like a baby does. It is failing the most basic test of all: the test of ignorance, of folly, of being unable to see, hold, mature, develop, grow. History is easy to forget — and it’s easiest of all to take it for granted when you are the one who has not learned from it yet. What do you call a world that can’t learn from itself? It is not even a baby. It is something more like an old man, on the edge of darkness.

Umair December 2017

[pscottm]

Whenever I go back and forth between Europe and the States, a curious set of facts strikes me.

In London, Paris, Berlin, I hop on the train, head to the cafe — it’s the afternoon, and nobody’s gotten to work until 9am, and even then, maybe not until 10 — order a carefully made coffee and a newly baked croissant, do some writing, pick up some fresh groceries, maybe a meal or two, head home — now it’s 6 or 7, and everyone else has already gone home around 5 — and watch something interesting, maybe a documentary by an academic, the BBC’s Blue Planet, or a Swedish crime-noir. I think back on my day and remember the people smiling and laughing at the pubs and cafes.

In New York, Washington, Philadelphia, I do the same thing, but it is not the same experience at all. I take broken down public transport to the cafe — everybody’s been at work since 6 or 7 or 8, so they already look half-dead — order coffee and a croissant, both of which are fairly tasteless, do some writing, pick up some mass-produced groceries, full of toxins and colourings and GMOs, even if they are labelled “organic” and “fresh”, all forbidden in Europe, head home — people are still at work, though it’s 7 or 8 — and watch something bland and forgettable, reality porn, decline porn, police-state TV. I think back on my day and remember how I didn’t see a single genuine smile — only hard, grim faces, set against despair, like imagine living in Soviet Leningrad.

Everything I consume in the States is of a vastly, abysmally lower quality. Every single thing. The food, the media, little things like fashion, art, public spaces, the emotional context, the work environment, and life in general make me less sane, happy, alive. I feel a little depressed, insecure, precarious, anxious, worried, angry — just like most Americans do these day. So my quality of life — despite all my privileges — is much worse in America than it is anywhere else in the rich world. Do you feel that I exaggerate unfairly?

It’s not just an anecdote, of course. Americans enjoy lower qualities of life on every single indicator that you can possibly think of. Life expectancy in France and Spain is 83 years, but in America it’s only 78 years — that’s half a decade of life, folks. The same is true for things like maternal mortality, stress, work and leisure, press freedom, quality of democracy — every single thing you can think of that impacts how well, happily, meaningfully, and sanely you live is worse in America, by a very long way. These are forms of impoverishment, of deprivation — as is every form of not realizing potential that could be.

But I don’t wish to write a jeremiad, for I am not a pundit. The question is this: why don’t Americans understand how poor their lives have become? Is it even a fair question to ask?

Of course, one can speak of capitalism and false consciousness and class war, of technology hypnotizing people with outrage. But I think there is a deeper truth here. There is a myth of exceptionalism in America that prevents it from looking outward, and learning from the world. It is made up of littler myths about greed being good, the weak deserving nothing, society being an arena, not a lever, for the survival of the fittest — and America is busy recounting those myths, not learning from the world, in slightly weaker (Democrats) or stronger (Republicans) forms. Still, the myths stay the same — and the debate is only really about whether a lightning bolt or a thunderstorm is the just punishment from the gods for the fallen, and a palace or a kingdom is the just reward for the cunning.

Hence, I have never once sees in America a leader saying, “hey! See that British healthcare system? That German union and pension system? Why don’t we propose that? They work!!” Instead, the whole American debate is self-referential — pundits debating Andrew Jackson (LOL) instead of, say, what the rest of the world does today in 2017. How can a broken society grow only by looking inwards? If you are a desperate, heart-broken addict, what can you learn from yourself? Won’t you only, recounting your pain, reach for the needle quicker? So we must look outwards, always, to learn best and truest — but I will return to that.

Still, though, “why don’t Americans get it!” is an unfair question unless we ask it for both sides. So let us look at the picture from the opposite side, to see if our question is worth asking.

Do Europeans “get it” — how good their lives are, relatively speaking? Well, in Europe, regressive forces are at work, too — not as badly as in America, but rising, to be sure, in every single nation. So Europeans, too, at least enough to seat extremist parties in parliaments, take their quality of life for granted a little. Why would that be? Probably because they have now grown up with the gift their grandfathers and grandmothers gave them — constitutions in which healthcare, education, dignity, and so on, are essential rights — which are what underpin Europe’s stunningly high quality of life. Hence, regressive forces in Europe say “these people must not have rights!”, not understanding that those very rights, enshrined in rewritten constitutions, are exactly how Europe rose in a generation from the ruins of war, to the highest living standards ever, period — and to take them away is to begin erasing history.

So just as Americans don’t get how bad their lives really are, comparatively speaking — which is to say how good they could be — so too Europeans don’t fully understand how good their lives are — and how bad, if they continue to follow in America’s footsteps, austerity by austerity, they could be. Both appear to be blind to one another’s mistakes and successes.

Now. What does that really mean? We are living in a world unable to learn from itself. What would sane societies do, watching each other, watching each other’s fortunes rise and fall? A sane America would look at Europe, see it’s tremendously higher quality of life in every possible regard, and say, “My God! That is what we should reach for, too!”. And a sane Europe would look at America, see it’s falling life expectancy and imploding middle class, and say, “My God! We must never become that!” But you see, the irony is this: both are doing precisely the opposite. Europe is fighting against becoming more American, and America is not fighting to become more European. (Of course, I don’t mean culturally — I mean in terms of constitutions, institutions, economy, polity, and social contracts).

History teaches us tragedy with irony. And this to me is the greatest irony of now. We are making three great mistakes in this age. The first is that we cannot learn from modern history — which is the story of Trump and America and tyranny. The second is that we cannot learn from deep history — that the whole story of human progress has been written by lifting one another up, not keeping anyone else down, and so the seductive ur-myth of the fascist, that I rise by pulling you down, right down into the abyss, is mesmerizing societies whole.

The third mistake we are making, though, is more invisible, and perhaps the greatest of all — what this essay is about: we cannot learn from one another anymore. How do we learn things? We can learn only in these three ways: from our own mistakes, from the mistakes all people have made, or from the fortunes and misfortunes of our peers. And of those three, the swiftest way to learn is to simply look at what others are doing, that work, and copy it.

Mimicry, of course, is how babies learn the most basic things — yet we cannot seem to even handle that much. So here is the unforgiving truth. We, in this age, this time, have regressed to something past an infantile state: we cannot even manage the mimicry that babies perform happily, the most basic form of learning that exists. We have regressed beyond regression itself.

And so we live in an age that feels paralyzed, stuck, unable to even grow like a baby does. It is failing the most basic test of all: the test of ignorance, of folly, of being unable to see, hold, mature, develop, grow. History is easy to forget — and it’s easiest of all to take it for granted when you are the one who has not learned from it yet. What do you call a world that can’t learn from itself? It is not even a baby. It is something more like an old man, on the edge of darkness.

Umair December 2017

[gravitascivics]

A GRADING AFFAIR

This posting will be dedicated to conduct some housekeeping. As indicated in the last one, this posting will begin an analysis of the Whig Party’s history.  The main question asked of that history will be how it, as a political entity, supported or undermined federalist values.  Since one cannot look into people’s minds or hearts, one is left predominately to know what the party promoted through its rhetoric and through the policies it proposed and, when in power, instituted.

         But as with most of history, judgements cannot be rendered one way or the other.  They instead fall in degrees, leaning one way or another.  The same here; the various developments of that party’s history can be judged whether the acts of those partisans were very federal, a bit so, or not at all.  Oh, there is one more degree, they could have acted against being federal.  Perhaps, to appreciate this approach of evaluating historical movements or other sets of events, an example of such an analysis would be helpful.

         The historian Allen C. Guelzo provides such an example.  Actually, this example could have been part of this blog’s review of the colonial history it reported in the past.  The aim of that review was to describe how the colonial years steered the American development down a federalist path.  For example, it described how the Puritanical beliefs of those early colonialists set the stage for covenantal/compact-al understanding of how a polity should be established. That, of course, was judged to be federalist development.  But as already alluded to, this was but one nudge toward a federalist result.

         Here’s another.  Guelzo makes a telling distinction among how the Spanish, the French, and the English went about establishing colonies or overseas possessions.[1]  To begin with, all three saw the efforts as money-making enterprises, but the Spanish and the French had a more direct control over what happened in the new lands. In those cases, the respective monarchs took ownership of what was claimed under the king’s name.  The monarch held a good bit of control by directly naming the governors and viceroys who, in turn, governed those areas.

         By and large, the king exerted quite of bit of interest since profits were to be had from those far off areas.  But for the British – and also the Dutch – a different story unfolded.  There, the monarch did not have direct control, but a franchise system was established.  And for a variety of reasons – mismanagement, undercapitalization, etc. – in all of the various colonies, those business arrangements proved to be failures.  And that resulted in the Americans being allowed to manage their own affairs.

         In all, the colonies were mostly on their own, and this independence was in place in a relatively short time, that is, within fifty years from the first settlement in Virginia began.  For the British, that is the Imperial Government in London, this was a mixed bag.  On the one hand, it laid claim to the vast land area in North America along the Atlantic seacoast, without spending any money to defend it.  Colonials were expected to provide for their own defense. But this hands-off policy would have its consequences.

         Before the Virginia Company, the initial chartered entity meant to profit from that colony, came to a formal end, the settlers of that colony already organized themselves to establish the House of Burgesses. This, not-so-legal legislature provided the necessary “rules of the game” for the colony to function.  That was established in 1624, only seventeen years after the colony was first settled.  It levied taxes and set limits on the colonial governor.  And the London authorities, during these years, let its colonies do what they wished – it was cheaper that way.  After all, there was an ocean in the way.

         But this neglect led to a different sort of legislative body in the American colonies than what one found in the British Parliament.  Parliament basically represented few Britons.  Its House of Lords was set up to protect the nobility or the remnants of the feudal system that used to prevail in Britain.  The House of Commons represented the successful business class. Estimates have it that 40 percent of the nation’s wealth was owned by the top 1 percent of the population.  And that wealth rested on the fact that these elites owned 70 percent of the land.  Consequently, the politics of that nation did not involve the bulk of its population.

         Not so in America, there, partly due to cheap land, two-thirds of the population owned 60 percent of the land.  Colonial elites – its gentry – owned 30 percent. So, while the elites were elites, they were tempered by a sufficiently empowered non-elite.  After all, when seeking either positions of power or seeking the passage of some policy proposal, the rich had to cater or convince the lower class of the prudence of what was being proposed.  

And those of the lower class were mostly made up of independent, small farmers with what one can imagine, definite views of good and bad, right or wrong.  And key was this notion of independence from the rich in their own colony or the rich or imperial powers of Britain.  What that meant was those royal governors, though they had significant levels of power (e.g., they appointed judges), they encountered meaningful restraints.  Always conscious of a potential crowd to voice some objection to their officiating, they thought twice before offending them.

How bad could this popularism get?  “In 1736, unhappy Bostonians gathered at midnight and demolished the town marketplace as a protest against the construction of the marketplace by the town selectmen as a means of regulating public food sales.”[2]  That was but one case of such uprisings.  By the time of the Revolutionary War, tar and feathering incidences became common enough.[3]  The common folk were a definite political force in the American scene – sometimes not exemplifying justified reasons for their reactions nor for the modes of reaction they were disposed to employ.

The point was that the British had to deal with a more united people – within the various colonies – in which each population felt it had a stake in what transpired with its “government,” its colony, and its immediate community.  One senses from Guelzo a true sense of “being in it together.” That is, these early Americans, in part due to these developments, felt the compact-al relationship they had created.

So, the reader can guess how this development ranks in this writer’s judgement about how federated it is.  It definitely supported, quite vigorously, a cultural partnership, although it could exhibit profound animosities among the colonialists more from a sense of disappointment or judging others not meeting their responsibilities to uphold the common good.  Were there incidents of selfishness or other self-centered motivations?  Of course there were.  But the general orientation was one in which all were in this struggle together.

So, in terms of what is coming up in this blog, this blogger will look at the various developments the Whig Party timeline highlighted and apply the above graded judgements as to how federal the developments were.  Again, an event will be judged as to whether it describes a supportive, assumed, irrelevant, or contradictory turn in establishing or maintaining a federalist cultural bias.  The overall hypothesis is that the events in total supported a federalist bent or at least did not counter that construct’s values.

[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – transcript books – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005). 

[2] Ibid., 75-76.

[3] Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution:  How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York, NY:  Perennial, 2002).  To be clear, Raphael does not present evidence of a federalist cultural bent. If anything, his book is a pro-critical view.

[gravitascivics]

UNLOCKING LOCKE’S VIEW

This blog has often described the national disagreement between those who lean toward republican values and those who lean toward liberalist values.  And here begins a problem with language.  One might think, from these “titles” that republicanism refers to the beliefs of the Republican Party, and liberalism favors the Democratic Party.  

But as the terms are being used in this posting, and in the related literature, the opposite is true.  Here, liberalism does not refer to left-of-center political thought, but actually reflects the natural rights view.  And republicanism, of which federalism is one form, refers to communal biases as expressed by a representative governmental arrangement.  With that, this posting can report on a debate among scholars who study the history of American political thought.

And this debate centers on how at the time of the colonial years and through the beginning of the nation the Enlightenment affected American leaders and the constitutional model they hit upon to establish the nation’s governance. Those who favor liberalism argue that the Enlightenment led the founders toward a polity that put in place the arguments of John Locke.  

Often cited is Thomas Jefferson’s phraseology of the rights of the individual: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

This mirrored, so the claim states, Locke’s natural rights of life, liberty, and property.  And for the bulk of the years this debate has been carried forth, those who favor liberalism cite this bias,[1] but roughly since 1960s, led by such historians as J. G. A. Pocock, that republican ideas were at least just as important as liberal ideas.[2]  

There are other scholars who support the republican bias, and this blogger leans toward the political scientist, Daniel J. Elazar, who this blog often cites for his contributions to explaining this history.[3]  Another historian this blog has cited is Gordon Wood along with his work on the founding generation.[4]  

This is how this blog described Wood’s account of the founders,

Gordon Wood argues that in the years surrounding the writing of the Declaration of Independence there was an especially strong popular commitment to federalist ideals. Particularly, the political group of that time, known as the Commonwealthmen or Whigs (not to be confused with the nineteenth century Whig Party), demonstrated an inordinate level of support for republicanism which can be described as a type of political beliefs that include federalist thought.  

The Whigs are credited with leading popular support for independence from Britain.  They emphasized citizen participation, – especially at the local level – representative government, liberty, equality, and public virtue.  In other words, citizens bound to this cultural view lived their social lives [in the 1830s] as Tocqueville described them [in an earlier posting].[5]  

 So disposed, a lot of the colonists’ thought took on a reactive mode to changes in British rule as the 1700s progressed.  That is, they began to see the British as corrupt since they were instituting policies that flew in the face of colonials’ biases.  That particularly targeted British taxing policies, their interference with American politics, and their on again-off again promotion of Anglican religion seemed contrary to what Americans were judging to be good governance.  

What the colonists began to emphasize – both as result of the Enlightenment but also due to their Puritanical background – was that a person’s value, in intrinsic terms as well as in his/her financial standing, was based on property[6] (and its entailed rights), but that value also included his/her communal sense of citizenship.  

Beyond these sensitivities, they saw governmental corruption by means of faction, patronage, standing armies, an established church, and excessive support of monied interests as growing under their colonial existence and attributed to British influence or policies.  Summarily, one can classify these growing concerns as those of republicanism.  

These feelings were not limited to the elites but made their way across the American colonial population.  And this grew as Britain attempted to exert its presence within the colonies and as the 1700s wore on.  Most Americans can readily remember their school lessons of British taxation and Americans’ call for “no taxation without representation.”

As for Jefferson’s phrase, such writers as Gary Will credits not John Locke (Will argues that Jefferson did not even own Locke’s work from which the famous phrase was credited), but was much more influenced by common sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid.  Others attribute the actual Declaration quote to William Wollaston.  

In Wollaston’s 1722 book, The Religion of Nature Delineated, he provides “the pursuit of happiness” phrase and attributes its prudence to reason and truth.[7]  Yet others look to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.[8]  So the Locke source – which in his Two Treatises of Government is “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” – does not turn out to be a “slam dunk” source of Jefferson’s phrase.  

As a matter of fact, when one reviews Locke’s position on natural rights, he is reigned in by something called natural law.  Steven Forde makes an important related distinction between Locke and Thomas Hobbes – who should be the philosopher cited by natural rights advocates. Forde writes,

Locke’s claim is that individual have a duty to respect the rights of others, even in the state of nature [that state that exists before a people organize a polity]. The source of this duty, he says, is natural law.

         The difference with Hobbes is clearest in Locke’s argument about property.  Hobbes and Locke agree that individuals have a right to property in the state of nature, but Hobbes denies that individuals have any duty to respect the property of others.  This makes property more or less useless in Hobbes’s state of nature.  Locke says individuals have a duty to respect the property (and lives and liberties) of others even in the state of nature, a duty he traces to natural law.  Natural law and natural rights coexist, but natural law is primary, commanding respect for the rights of others.[9]

Forde goes on to clarify this a bit further.  He claims that an individual’s rights are in the context of this duty, in that that duty is always present with the exception when one’s life is in jeopardy.

         This posting will, of course, not end this debate, but this blogger wishes to take this opportunity to explicitly state an underlying message this blog has tried to communicate.  Most of American history, not only the years surrounding the birth the nation, was guided more so by the republican train of thought. More specifically, that being the form of republicanism Americans followed, federalism.

Everyone knows that that bias determined the structural makeup of the national and state governments.  But beyond that, Americans had held as almost sacred to federalism’s processes.  That included a reliance that the nation saw, at least as a basic espoused value, the worth of its population being federated within themselves.  At least to the degree that a sense of communality, collaboration, and cooperation by those who were accepted as part of the national partnership served to establish what was right in terms of governance and politics.

Its only shortcoming – and it was and has been an immoral and unjust shortcoming – was the exclusion of nonwhites.  That is why federation theory, what this blogger promotes, is not this earlier version, parochial/traditional federalism, but a newer version.  That is liberated federalism, which is inclusive of all Americans.  

As for what today holds in regard to the allegiance of most Americans, that would be the natural rights view.  Some hold onto the ideals of Locke, but too many are holding onto Hobbes’s dystopian vision – a social existence without any sense of duty or obligation.  With that insight, one can begin to understand the sorry state of the polity today.

[1] See Isaac Kramnick, “John Locke and Liberal Constitutionalism,” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, edited by Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 97-114.  Ironically, a value this blogger cites making up what one can call republicanism – or more specifically federalism – is civic humanism.  In making his argument, Kramnick admits that up until the development of the founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights – American elites tended to rely on republican values such as civic humanism.  Civic humanism, as Kramnick describes it, is a political being realizing his/her fulfilment through participation in public life and a concern with public good above selfish ends.  This is a republican value.  

[2] J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975).

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966) and Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa, AL:  The University of Alabama Press, 1987).

[4] Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969/1968).

[5] Robert Gutierrez, “What Was the Original Intent?”, Gravitas:  A Voice for Social Studies – a blog (May 30, 2017).

[6] Life was considered an element of one’s property.

[7] James W. Ely, Main Themes in the Debate over Property Rights (Milton Park, England: Routledge, 1997).

[8] Paul Sayre (ed.), Interpretations of Modern Legal Philosophies:  Essays in Honor of Roscoe Pond (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1947).

[9] Steven Forde, “John Locke and the Natural Law and Natural Rights Tradition,” Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism (n.d.), accessed June 3, 2021, http://www.nlnrac.org/earlymodern/locke .