The New Revolutionary War

The Revolution is once again upon us. It is not being fought with guns and knives, but we are in a fight for our survival as a free, independent, and self-reliant people. If we allow the government’s refusal to listen to our demand for a redress of grievances discourage us, if we allow ACORN to subvert the integrity of the voting booth and SEIU thugs to intimidate us, if we let the full force of the government’s power to persecute and prosecute deter us from standing up for individual liberty and property, we will lose.

We can afford to lose some battles, but we cannot afford to lose this war. And as General George Washington showed us, it is possible to lose battle after battle and still win. Victory goes to those who refuse to give up or give in.

Today, we stand with the revolutionary founders of our country, or we stand with old King George and all the modern oligarchs and despots who think they know how we should live better than we do for ourselves. We either stand against those old-fashioned rulers – however they dress themselves in contemporary garb – who want us to believe that individual freedom and the unregulated society that individual freedom spawns “has failed,” or we participate in our own extinction as radically free people – torchbearers for the full human dignity God has intended for all of His people.

Our barricades are the Tea Party demonstrations and the Town Hall meetings with our legislators. Our weapons are the telephone, the television, the internet, our voices, and our votes. It is no longer sufficient to choose the party that says it will trade away fewer of our rights and responsibilities; it is now time to choose the candidate who stands in the breach, determined to reduce the scope of government and expand the reach of private initiative and liberty – regardless of party affiliation.

It is time to stand up for our country, to become a new generation of radicals: radical traditionalists who seek a restoration of the values and perspectives of our founders – including the recognition that it is from God that we receive our inalienable rights.

That means that the Judeo-Christian God is essential and integral to our government and society. No other god, and no absence of God, will ensure our freedom and form of government because it is only the God of our founders who guarantees that our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are secured above and apart from the machinations of any government and all would-be rulers.

I am not sanguine. The road in front of us is hard, and it is uphill. However, we have our founders to thank for the inspiration and the witness that if we do nothing more and nothing less than champion our Godly and constitutional freedoms, just as they did, we will not fail.

History is Prelude

The battle we are now fighting for the survival of our God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness not only had its roots in the founding of our country, but it was prefigured in the arguments for and against the Constitution.

Remember that the Constitution was proposed a decade after the United States won its freedom from English rule. For the first decade, we were highly independent states united by a set of loose ties called the Articles of Confederation.

Real patriots – men and women who championed the power of the people over the authority of government – disagreed on whether the proposed new Constitution would help or thwart the goals of the Revolution. Their argument is important for us; the strengths of the Constitution, and its perceived weaknesses, are instructive for our struggle to stop our current federal government’s effort to take over our lives and liberty.

The Argument in Favor of the New Constitution

In Federalist 46, James Madison argued in favor of ratification of the Federal Constitution on the grounds that both the State and Federal governments are subject to the will of the people, and the people, he believed, would naturally tend to prefer that power and authority be located at the State level rather than at the Federal:

Many considerations…seem to place it beyond doubt that the first and most natural attachment of the people will be to the governments of their respective States….By the superintending care of these, all the more domestic and personal interests of the people will be regulated and provided for…. [O]n the side of these, therefore, the popular bias may well be expected most strongly to incline” (Federalist, 290, emph. added).

Furthermore, he said, the experience with the government spawned by the Articles of Confederation proves the notion: it was seen that after an early

enthusiasm for the early Congresses was over, that the attention and attachment of the people were turned anew to their own particular governments; that the federal council was at no time the idol of popular favor; and that opposition to proposed enlargements of its powers and importance was the side usually taken by the men who wished to build their political consequence (291).

However, Madison argued, if at some future point the people

become more partial to the federal than to the State governments, the change can only result from such manifest and irresistible proofs of a better administration as will overcome all their antecedent propensities. And in that case, the people ought not surely to be precluded from giving most of their confidence where they may discover it to be most due… (291).

In other words, if the people decide some of their interests are better served by the federal government, they should not be precluded from giving more authority to the federal level. But even in that case State governments would have little to fear, Madison said, because “it is only within a certain sphere that the federal power can, in the nature of things, be advantageously administered” (291).

This is just one of several places in The Federalist Papers where the authors argue that the people have nothing to fear from a federal government. The arguments are, in sum: that the people will prefer to keep power in their local community and state governments, where they have more immediate recourse to their governors; that the powers of the federal government are by statute constrained; and that those constrained powers are divided between three branches of government, each of which will serve as a check and balance against the other two. Additionally, the legislative branch is divided in two: as originally designed, Senators were appointed by State governments to represent their interests at the federal level, and Congressional representatives were elected by the populace to represent the interests of the residents of each state. That also served to put a check on both State power and potential collusion between State and Federal governments.

The Argument against the New Constitution

The Anti-Federalists, those patriots who were opposed to giving the federal government more power than it had enjoyed under the Articles of Confederation, argued that usurpation of the people’s supremacy could occur in several ways. Pennsylvanian Samuel Bryan, writing as “Centinel,” argued in Centinel I that the idea of three counterbalancing federal powers is “chimerical.” The problems, he said, are several:

1) Adams proposed the new scheme on the theory that every person will pursue self-interest at the expense of the public good, therefore the power of government must be broken apart so that the self-interests of people serving in different branches would oppose one another.

The fallacy, Bryan said, is two-fold. First, people of greater wealth, education and ambition have a natural tendency to think they should govern those of less means, education or ambition. They will look for advantage and opportunity.

Second, it is not humanly possible to construct “three co-equal orders in government,” with an equal weight in the respect of the community that will “enable them respectfully to exercise their several parts.” That is, it’s not possible to create a scheme in which each part will have equal influence in society such that they will continue in co-equal opposition indefinitely. More likely, Bryan said, given the interests and ambitions of people in the government, all seeking advantage, a way will be found to form “a coalition of any two of them for the destruction of the third.”

Since the people will not maintain a constant interest in government – being more concerned to pursue their own personal interests and fulfill their own personal ambitions – lack of accurate information will result in the people being “imposed upon.” It is better, Bryan said, to keep the form of government simple; and the Federalist proposal complicates and confuses the situation:

If you complicate the plan by various orders, the people will be perplexed and divided in their sentiments about the source of abuses or misconduct, some will impute it to the senate, others to the house of representatives, and so on, [with the result] that the impositions of the people may be rendered imperfect or perhaps wholly abortive” (Anti-Federalist, 231).

His argument is that the separation of powers, and the establishment of two houses of the legislature, makes it harder to fix blame for abuses of power. As a consequence the people will have a harder time agreeing how to remedy abuse, and may find their efforts to do so ineffective or wholly irrelevant to the actual problem.

2) Bryan anticipated that the proposed federal power of taxation “for the general welfare,” and requirement to tax across jurisdictions equally, would lead to federal legislation that the states would be obliged to honor (232).

And since the Supreme Court would be given power to supersede state courts in any matter involving more than one state, or any state and the federal government, or a state and a foreign power, or any citizen of one state in a case involving citizens or the government of another state, the federal government, or a foreign power, it is inevitable that the federal Court will take over the arbitration of almost every case, since “the shades of distinction between civil causes are oftentimes so slight, that…the federal court, as the most powerful, would ever prevail.” He notes:

Every person acquainted with the history of the courts in England, knows by what ingenious sophisms they have, at different periods extended the sphere of their jurisdiction over objects out of the line of their institution, and contrary to their very nature; courts of a criminal jurisdiction obtaining cognizance in civil causes (233).

By giving legislative, taxation, and juridical supremacy to the federal government, the Constitution, Bryan said, would establish “the omnipotency of Congress over the state government and judicatories,” and the judges of the states will be bound by the laws and decrees of the federal government regardless of the contrary provisions in their own state constitutions. As a result, over time the federal will “necessarily absorb the state legislatures and judicatories” (233).

3) As the state governments “melt down into one empire,” it has to be asked whether that resulting structure would be consistent with individual freedom. The very size of our country suggests not, Bryan argued: “It is the opinion of the greatest writers, that a very extensive country cannot be governed on democratical principles, [that is] on any other plan, than a confederation of a number of small republics, possessing all the powers of internal government, but united in the management of their foreign and general concerns.”

“It would not be difficult,” Bryan continued, “to prove that any thing short of despotism could not bind so great a country under one government; and that whatever plan you might, at the first setting out, establish, it would issue in a despotism” (234).

A single national government, run on democratic principles, would not be able to attend to the “various local concerns and wants” of the local populations, different as they are in resources, culture, and values. The federal planners could not have enough information to do democratic justice, and would not have the time to engage each locality, Bryan said – anticipating the modern-day argument against socialism and centralized planning (which, by the way, is the same as the argument against monarchy).

The force of Bryan’s argument is that we either have strong and independent state governments with a weak federal government, or we have an eventual despotic federal government that subsumes state and local governments and abolishes the Revolution’s notion of individual rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And as proposed, the new Constitution, Bryan said, will not secure a weak federal government given the self-interest of power-hungry people, and the tendency of one or two arms of the tri-partite federal government to accrete power at the expense of the other(s). Therefore, the proposed Constitution will lead to despotic rule by one branch of government, or two in collusion.

Toward a Realistic Appraisal of the Constitution

It is difficult, looking around, to discount the Anti-Federalists’ concerns. Right now it looks like they were more clear-eyed than the Federalists about the future of our nation under the Constitution.

That is not to say the original Confederacy would have produced better results; it would have produced different problems. The new Constitution was proposed because the Confederation has serious drawbacks: individual States were in conflict with one another – such conflict that could erupt into war. States were also able to enter into foreign entanglements which could have unhealthy consequences for neighboring States; trade between States was difficult, hampered by strong borders, import taxes, and different currencies. There was a very real possibility that the United States would fracture into a number of smaller countries, either because individual States went their own way, or because several States formed regional alliances against other regions.

On balance, the Constitution was an essential step forward for the country. However, that does not mean we should be unconscious about the potential – and now actual – problems inherent in the structure. The Anti-Federalists need to be taken seriously as true revolutionary patriots who shared the concern of the Federalists for the supremacy of the individual, and the protection of the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. All of our revolutionary founders said that no government and no governmental structure may be allowed to exercise authority over the rights of the individual. They just disagreed on what form of government would be best to secure our God-given rights.

Every modern radical traditionalist – every person who champions the radical tradition of our founders – ought to become familiar with the arguments of both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists.  We need to know what the Federalists said in order to understand what the writers of the Constitution intended to be the range and the limits of our federal government.

We need to know what the Anti-Federalists said in order to understand where sympathetic opponents to the Constitution saw dangers and weaknesses in the proposed structure. That’s particularly important today because the very weaknesses patriots like Samuel Bryan noted are now being exploited by those who want to turn us back into a nation like other nations: governed from the top by a few with ambitions to power who believe they possess better knowledge and wisdom about how the rest of us ought to live than we do for ourselves.

The Saul Alinsky Connection

Samuel Bryan believed that the crisis generated by a decade of living under the Articles of Confederation had created a level of concern, fear, and panic in the public at large that the proponents of a stronger Federal government were exploiting in order to introduce a structure that would inevitably lead to the reduction of the citizenry to a pre-Revolutionary subservience to government.

The fact that people like Bryan imagined the Constitution to be a scheme to trick the populace into giving away their sovereignty is instructive. The accusation is worthy of Saul Alinsky’s dictum, repeated by Obama advisor Rahm Immanuel, that no crisis should be let go to waste.

Bryan says that habit and custom make it difficult to effect radical change on a people. That’s because under normal circumstances “it is the genius of the common law to resist innovation.” However, the “late revolution having effaced in a great measure all former habits,” and the youthfulness of the then-current institutions (under the Articles of Confederation), meant that there was much less “reluctance to innovation.” Under such circumstances, people are more susceptible to big changes, he said, and in conditions of generalized panic big frauds can be perpetrated because even “the most comprehensive mind cannot foresee the full operation of material changes on civil polity.” The situation is ideal for fraud, and

the wealthy and ambitious, who in every community think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures, have availed themselves, very successfully, of this favorable disposition; for the people thus unsettled in their sentiments, have been prepared to accede to any extreme of government; all the distresses and difficulties they experience, proceeding from various causes, have been ascribed to the impotency of the present confederation, and thence they have been led to expect full relief from the adoption of the proposed system of government; and in the other event [that is, if they don’t adopt the new proposal, they have been led to expect] immediately ruin and annihilation as a nation (229).

There, in a nutshell, is a true patriot’s recognition and caution against falling for a ploy that the false patriot Saul Alinsky has more recently advocated as a means to thwart our founders’ intentions. It is telling that it is also a primary tool of the Obama candidacy and presidency. This pattern, older than our country, has long been – and continues to be – used by tyrants and oligarchs to frighten, deceive and subjugate their citizens.

Lessons to Take From Our History

At the very beginning of the United States, patriots warned that even our Constitution could be used against us, because it is not the perfect instrument its proponents made is seem. And today, we are faced with “the wealthy and ambitious” who have exploited citizen concern about economic wellbeing to propose and ramrod dramatic changes in how we are governed. They have even advanced the notion that if we fail to accede to a stronger role for the federal government, our nation and wellbeing will be destroyed.

The schemers are succeeding for several inter-related reasons: we citizens are the victims of the collusion of the three branches of federal government, the close cooperation of state governments (which have become dependent upon the largess of the federal coffers, and have learned obedient to the laws and rulings of the federal legislature and Supreme Court), the  failure of the press to serve as a watchdog against accretions of centralized federal power, and the simple fact that most Americans have been appropriately and predictably more interested in pursuing our own dreams and ambitions than in making sure our elected representatives keep the people’s freedom foremost in their deliberations.

Indeed, those who oppose strong individuals and weak government are succeeding because American citizens have been willing to let the various levels of government buy us off. Until recently, it did not seem to many of us that the price was very high for guarantees of life-style security. Only now do we understand the danger we face.

Today, the fears of the early Anti-Federalists are being realized, and will be fully manifested, unless we, the citizens, refuse to accept subjugation to federal control over our lives, ambitions, daily practices and rights.

Therefore, let us resolve with one another today that we will go to the barricades and we will not rest, we will not tire, and we will not go quietly back to our homes until we have fulfilled Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg vision: that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth!

References:

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, edited by Clinton Rossiter. Signet Classic Series paperback, 1961. Price: $7.95.

The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, edited by Ralph Ketcham. Signet Classic Series paperback, 2003. Price: $7.95.