Obama the Reactionary

By James Lewis | June 18, 2012 | American Thinker

In a perverse way this is the most utopian administration in American history. That’s after all what Marxism comes down to, a stubborn fantasy that the world will flip into utopian perfection as soon as all the evil capitalists are in Siberian labor camps. The Soviet Union spent seven decades trying to eradicate capitalism at home and abroad, along with religion, family values and individualism. As a natural consequence, they ended up destroying hard work and agriculture, and every five years the Kremlin kept wondering what could have gone wrong with their “scientific” policies this time around.

Today Vladimir Putin kneels down with the Patriarch of Moscow in the Kremlin Chapel, surrounded by magnificent bling going back to the Byzantine Empire.

So much for eradicating human nature.

A New Declaration of Independence

By Eileen F. Toplansky | April 28, 2012 | American Thinker

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary to ensure that a President, who has led the country to near ruin and who is working to discard the basic principles upon which this Great Country rests, be peaceably removed it is incumbent upon us that we submit the reasons to the people.

Without any in-depth research or vetting about his background, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44^th president of the United States.  There were voices of caution who early on exposed Obama’s connections to former terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-American vilifier Reverend Wright, crook Tony Rezko, and anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi, but they were laughed at as the people allowed themselves to be demagogued on hope and change.  Evidence continues to suggest that Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate is, indeed, a forgery.  This would make his presidential eligibility suspect.

Thus, the American people are at a critical watershed moment in our history.  The facts are in; Obama’s ideology and core principles are now public and exist for all to see.  We can no longer claim ignorance; we can no longer be naïve; we can no longer deny what is patently before us.  The record of this current president is a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these United States.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Mr. Obama has “given himself the powers to declare martial law[.]  It is a sweeping power grab that should worry every American.”  Thus, “Barack Obama is very dangerous, the apotheosis of an insidious strain of authoritarianism that destroys from within.”  In a statement published on December 31, 2011, Mr. Obama states that “[t]oday I have signed into law H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012.”  Though he claims that he has “signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists,” it was Mr. Obama who “demanded the removal of any and all protections for US citizens and legal residents.”

And like King George III, Obama has now established the distinct possibility of placing “[s]tanding armies without the Consent of our legislatures” — although sadly, in this case, the Senate passed this unwholesome disgrace.  King George III would be pleased.

In fact, Mr. Obama sees fit to bypass the “pesky” Constitution whenever it suits him, thus ignoring limited-government tenets which were at the core of the Founding Fathers’ belief system.  Thus, the NDAA detention mandate allows indefinite military detention not just to foreigners; now “U.S. citizens are included in the grant of detention authority.”

In fact, should Mr. Obama be re-elected to a second term, “our rights to speech, religion and property, and to privacy in our persons and homes, will be transformed.”  Mr. Obama has already “hectored Christianity on matters of conscience.”  Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, Mr. Obama is forcing Catholic institutions to pay for insurance covering contraceptives.  Why, when “religious liberty was weighed against access to birth control, did freedom lose?” — a clear intrusion into the first of the five protections of the First Amendment.  Bishop Daniel Jenky has likened President Obama’s health care policies to the attacks on the Catholic church by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of yesteryear.  Dare we go down that totalitarian road again?

The onslaught against free speech has been heightened because of the “cooperation between [Mr. Obama] and the OIC or Organization of Islamic Cooperation.”  The “Obama administration stands ‘united’ with the OIC on speech issues,” thus silencing Arab reformers and anyone who makes any allegedly negative remarks about Islam.  The “repressive practices” of the OIC member-nations speak volumes about their restrictions on free speech.  Hence, “the encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas.”  That an American president would threaten this most fundamental right is yet another resounding reason why he needs to be removed from office.

In December of 2009, Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, asserted that “[i]f congressional Democrats succeed in passing their health-care ‘reform’ measure to send to the White House for President Obama’s signature, then they and he are determining your health decisions[.]” Thus, “these functionaries making decisions about your treatment and, in some cases, about the extent of your life span, have never met you[.]  Is this America?”  Hentoff concludes his piece with the revelation “I’m scared and I do mean to scare you.  We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be.”

Thus, we still hold “these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] 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.”  And “whenever any Form of Government becomes  destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles … as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  We do not declare violent revolution but do demand the secure right to change the government through the ballot box.

But even this fundamental right is being seriously eroded as the Department of Justice openly and arrogantly dismisses genuine cases of voter intimidation with nary a word of concern by Barack Obama.  Although there is visual proof and  evidence of threats to the voting public as well as exhortations of death threats to a man on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder turns a blind eye.

By his selective indifference, Mr. Obama has created a racially divisive atmosphere in America.  He continues to promote this hateful attitude wherein the civil rights progress made in this country for all its citizens is ignored.  Surely, Mr. Obama has “excited domestic insurrections amongst us” as he engages in racial division, class warfare, and phony gender wars.  If Mr. Obama is, indeed, so interested in the rights of women, then why does he support Islamic sharia law, which demands second-class status for women?  These diversions serve to stir up resentments; unfortunately, they are successful in obfuscating the shameless actions of this 44^th president.

Mr. Obama is not content with taking the country down the path to “European socialism.”  His centralized control of the health care industry, his increases in entitlement programs, his redistribution of capital — in fact, his sweeping regulations that give the government new authority to control the entire financial sector — are reminiscent of Karl Marx’s 10-Point Agenda, and although communism was unknown in 1775, the signatories of the Declaration knew of the absolute power of the monarchy and would see through the oligarchic nature of this “ism.”

Amazingly, Mr. Obama has assured Russian leaders (who have gained their power through rigged elections) that American concessions are coming their way, but they [the Russian leaders] must wait because he is seeking re-election and he dare not tell his own people of his true intentions.  What credible reason would a loyal American president have for weakening American and allies’ defense systems?  During the open microphone conversation between Obama and Medvedev, a puppet of KGB Putin, the world learned whose interests Obama was truly serving.  Surely, this is “enough to chill friends and allies, democrats and dissidents, all over the world.”

Furthermore, Obama has “obstructed the Administration of Justice[,]” instead pitting one group against the other through “waivers.”  If ObamaCare is so laudable, why extend waivers in the first place?  In fact, it is yet another example of how manipulative Mr. Obama is when he tries to make the people “dependent on his will alone.”

Mr. Obama has ignored the laws of our country to impose an arbitrary and capricious rule of law by outside forces.  He finds it more expedient to pit the federal government against an American state which is trying only to enforce federal immigration law.  To this end, Mr. Obama has seen fit to “subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution[,]” which was so clearly enumerated in the Declaration of Independence as reason to reject King George III.   By issuing a Universal Period Review (UPR), the first of its kind, Mr. Obama has given the United Nations the right to dictate to Arizona.  Thus, the “stakes for our national sovereignty have just been raised.”  Despotic countries of the United Nations have now been empowered to dictate how Americans should conduct themselves.  Is this not reminiscent of King George III “waging war against us”?

Moreover, the Obama State Department ordered the “suspension of routine border inspection procedures in order to whisk (Muslim Brotherhood) Islamists into our country.  Thus, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party did not have to go through the normal procedures of inspection.  Recall that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement is “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!”  Negotiating with the Muslim Brotherhood is akin to negotiating with the dictator Hitler.  It is appeasement all the way.  Why does the Obama administration cavort with such people?  Does this not make him unfit to defend the interests of America?

Read the full article here.

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How to Think About the Foundations of American Conservatism

By James Ceaser, Ph.D. | December 10, 2008 | Heritage Foundation

Contemporary American conservatism, which is notorious for its internal factionalism, is held together by a self-evident truth: conservatives’ shared antipathy to modern liberalism. Their main objections are well-known.

Almost to a man or woman, conservatives oppose using government authority to enforce a vision of greater equality labeled by its supporters, with great seduction, as “social justice.” Nearly as many conser­vatives object to the use of government authority–or, alternatively, to the denial of government authority where it is natural, legal, and appropriate–to pro­mote a worldview of individualism, expressivism, and secularism. Finally, most conservatives want nothing to do with an airy internationalism, frequently suspi­cious of the American nation, that has shown itself so inconstant in its support for the instruments of secu­rity that are necessary in the modern world.

No shame attaches, or should, to relying in politics on the adhesive property that comes from the senti­ment of common dislike. That sentiment is the heart that beats within the breast of the conservative move­ment, supplying much of its unity. This heart sustains four heads, known generally as religious conserva­tives, economic or libertarian-minded conservatives, natural-rights or neoconservatives, and traditionalists or paleoconservatives.

The four heads comprise a coalition of the willing that came together during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The remarkable diversity of this coalition has been both a source of strength and a source of weak­ness for the conservative movement. Each part came into existence at a different time and under differ­ent circumstances, and each has been guided by a different principle by which it measures what is good or right.

• For religious conservatives, that principle is biblical faith.
• For libertarians, it is the idea of “spontaneous order,” the postulate that a tendency is opera­tive in human affairs for things to work out for themselves, provided no artificial effort is made to impose an overall order.
• For neoconservatives, it is a version of “natural right,” meaning a standard of good in political affairs that is discoverable by human reason.
• Finally, for traditionalists, it is “History” or “Culture,” meaning the heritage that has come down to us and that is our own.

There are refinements and subdivisions that could be added to this schema, but it represents, I think, a fairly standard approach to discussing the different intellectual currents inside the conserva­tive coalition. Recently, however, a number of com­mentators have fallen into the practice–I use this expression advisedly–of replacing this four-part schema by a two-part division based on a distinc­tion between the concepts of “Culture” and “Creed.” The new system of categorization derives from a book published last year by Samuel Hun­tington, entitled Who Are We? in which the author offers these concepts as the two basic modes in any society for establishing national identity.[1] The cate­gories are meant to refer to the whole nation, but conservatives have applied them to discussions of their own movement.

My argument in this essay will be that introduc­ing this new categorization schema represents a huge error, especially as a way of discussing conser­vatism. The Culture-Creed distinction does not sim­plify; it distorts. Built into its categories are premises that attempt by fiat to order and arrange the different parts of the conservative coalition. Not only is this arrangement “partisan,” in the sense of favoring the Cultural category, but it also attempts, with no basis either in principle or in fact, to place faith inside of Culture, thereby suggesting a natural grouping of traditionalists and religious conservatives in opposi­tion to natural-rights or neoconservatives. Whether this attempt was undertaken consciously or not is of little matter; what counts are its effects, and these could have serious and negative implications for the conservative movement.

The Concepts of Culture and Creed

Let me now take a step back and describe the concepts of Culture and Creed. Huntington initial­ly provides a social science definition of Culture that is so broad as to be meaningless. Culture con­sists of “a people’s language, religious beliefs, social and political values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavioral patterns that reflect these subjective elements.”

Huntington is less interested, however, in social science than in recovering a basis today for patrio­tism and for securing unity in America. It is our Culture that concerns him. He labels that culture “Anglo-Protestantism,” which refers to everything that Huntington elects to emphasize among the first New England settlers. His selection boils down to four main elements: our language (English); our religion (dissenting Protestantism); our basic polit­ical beliefs (a commitment to liberty, individualism, and self-government); and our race (white).

Since Huntington wants Culture to work as a source or standard of identity, and identity in a pos­itive sense, he allows it to evolve in order to per­form its function. In its evolved form, the Culture to which we should look refers–still–to the English language and to the same commitment to liberty and self-government; the notion of religion is broadened slightly from dissenting Protestantism to Christianity insofar as it has been Protestantized. Race as a criterion of distinction drops out.

As for Creed, Huntington initially defines it in a social science fashion as the taking of bearings from theoretical claims that are offered in principle as universal or applicable to all. Examples of Creed that he identifies are communism and classical lib­eralism. The use of these broad-based theoretical concepts is what Huntington means by Creedalism as distinguished from Culturalism. As he says at one point:

People are not likely to find in political principles [i.e., a Creed] the deep emotional content and meaning provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality. These attachments may have little or no basis in fact, but they do satisfy a deep human longing for meaningful community.

Once again, however, Huntington’s interest in Who Are We? is more in our own Creed than in Creeds in general. Our Creed consists of an idea of nature, specifically of natural rights, as articulated in documents like the Declaration of Independence.

How does the binary distinction between Cul­ture and Creed replace and subsume the four-part division of conservatism? The implication is the following. The category of Culture consists of tra­ditionalists and religious conservatives–the first for the obvious reason of their emphasis on our his­tory and culture and the second because Hunting­ton identifies dissenting Protestantism as first or original. The category of Creed consists of natural-rights or neoconservatives and libertarians–the former because they regularly reference natural rights and the Declaration of Independence and the latter because they think in terms of general princi­ples of economic reasoning.

An example will help to illustrate how this bina­ry mapping of conservatism has entered into con­temporary discussion. Lawrence Auster, an outspoken conservative, publishes an instructive blog entitled “View from the Right.” Never one to mince words, he begins a spirited entry of October 25, 2005, with an attack on President George W. Bush (one of his frequent targets) in an article iron­ically entitled “Under Bush and the American Creed, America Continues Its Bold Progress”:

At President Bush’s annual Ramadan dinner at the White House this week–did you know the President has an annual Ramadan dinner?–he announced for the first time in our nation’s history we have added a Koran to the White House Library. Yippee.[2]

Arguing that this recognition serves unwisely to legitimize Islam in America, Auster finds further evidence of this same error in a passage from a speech given the previous week by Senator John McCain at the Al Smith Dinner:

We have a nation of many races, many religious faiths, many points of origin, but our shared faith is the belief in liberty, and we believe this will prove stronger, more enduring and better than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.[3]

In Auster’s view, the McCain-Bush position rep­resents the perfect expression of creedal thinking:

According to McCain, the meaning of America is that we have no common culture and no coherent set of traditions but give equal freedom to all cultures, traditions and religions. Such a cultureless society is stronger and more enduring than any other.[4]

Auster may have taken some liberties with the strict claims of Bush and McCain, but his general point could not be more clear: The end result of the Creed is at best indifference, at worst hostility, to Culture.

The Problem with the Culture-Creed distinction

This application of the Culture-Creed distinc­tion to the conservative movement contains two assumptions. The first is that Creedalists are not true conservatives, but conservatives on their way to becoming liberals, if they are not there already. The other is that religious conservatives–meaning those concerned with biblical faith–fall inside the category of Culturalists. Here would seem to be the main gambit involved in this analysis: to define those of faith as closer to cultural traditionalists than to proponents of natural rights.

In light of this questionable mapping of the con­servative movement, it is fair to ask whether Creed and Culture make up helpful categories that assist in understanding reality, or whether they force the analyst to describe reality in a way that satisfies these categories.

Thomas Hobbes, that puckish British philoso­pher, has a chapter in Leviathan in which he reminds us that abstract categories are human con­structions, born either of men’s efforts to compre­hend the world or of the aim of some to dictate how others will think. The result very often is that these terms are imprecise, conflating different things under the same label and producing ever-growing confusions. Hobbes was a very timid man, and as is not infrequent with personalities of this kind, he was also a bit of a sadist. The trait served him well in describing how an individual, when employing a poorly circumscribed category, will soon find him­self “entangled in words as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles, the more belimed.”

Have we become “belimed” by adopting the Cul­ture-Creed distinction?

I bear some slight personal responsibility for popularizing this distinction. Last year I wrote a review essay on Huntington’s Who Are We? for The Weekly Standard.[5] In contrast to the avalanche of reviews from the Left attacking the book, mine was in many ways very appreciative. I followed the Golden Rule of discussing the work of a major thinker, which is to treat it initially on its own terms. Hence my lengthy discussion of the Cul­ture-Creed distinction, on which I offered two observations.

First, I pointed out that more than 20 years ago, Huntington wrote a previous book on America–a fact he all but hides in this one–in which he invoked the Culture-Creed dyad.[6] In both books he argues that forging our national identity requires relying on both Culture and Creed. But whereas in the earlier book he contends that America should emphasize the Creed, in the current one he argues that it should identify more with the Culture.

Second, I asked what reason could account for so fundamental a change. A higher ordering idea of some kind, contained either within one of the two principles or coming from a new one, ought to have been supplied to account for how to regulate the appropriate mix of Culture and Creed. I offered a couple of speculative comments of my own on this issue and suggested that it would be a nice question for others to consider.

In the past year, this theme has been taken up by two well-known political scientists. In a recent issue of The Claremont Review of Books, the editor, Charles Kesler, has a fine essay on Huntington’s work. He begins with some cogent criticisms of how Huntington allows the concept of Creed to slide from its specific and original American mean­ing (a support of natural rights) to its more general social scientific meaning (any kind of broad type of theoretical reasoning). The result is a category that encompasses everything offered in the name of rational principles, from the position of limited government and individualism of the Founders to the Big Government position of the Progressives.

Following this clarification of the concept of Creed, Kesler goes on to argue that we need both concepts, but that the standard of regulation must stem from the Creed (properly understood). He concludes his essay:

The American creed is the keystone of American national identity; but it requires a culture to sustain it. The republican task is to recognize the creed’s primacy, the culture’s indispensability and the challenge which political wisdom alone can answer, to shape a people that can live up to its principles.[7]

Another very perceptive article appeared this fall in Society, written by Peter Skerry. Skerry takes Huntington to task for much of his treatment of the status of the Hispanic community in America and for his analysis of the process of immigrant integra­tion into an American identity. On the major theo­retical distinction of Culture and Creed, however, Skerry embraces Huntington’s analysis and shares his Cultural emphasis. America needs both Creed and Culture, but the senior partner today is–and should be–Culture, which Skerry observes is “at the core of Huntington’s understanding of Ameri­can national identity.”[8]

Both of these essays, each critical in its own way of Huntington’s work, make use of the Culture- Creed distinction. In doing so, they, along now with many other writings, lend credibility to the view that these categories are adequate to define the terrain of this inquiry. It is this position that now needs to be challenged.

Before turning directly to this question, it is worthwhile to observe that for many “Culturalists,” there appears to be as much politics as social sci­ence in the Culture-Creed categorization scheme. No sooner is the distinction introduced than Cul­turalists put it to work to argue for their positions on two major issues of the day.

The first is the previously mentioned matter of immigration policy. Culturalists are deeply con­cerned with the current rate and character of immi­gration. Huntington devotes a large portion of his book to warning of the threat to national unity posed by the influx of Hispanics, largely Mexican. We are in danger of establishing two different cultures in the United States: one English-speaking and Anglo-Protestant, the other Spanish-speaking and, I sup­pose, Latin Catholic. Not only is it said that a Cultur­al approach makes us more aware of this problem, but also Creedalists are charged with being incapa­ble of taking this problem seriously. Their reasoning in universal terms about all human beings makes them “a-Cultural” or anti-Cultural, which for practi­cal purposes means, for immigration politics, multi­cultural. The Culture-Creed distinction is put to use as the proverbial stick with which to beat certain (alleged) foes of immigration restriction.

The other issue on which Culturalists insist today is foreign policy, where many of them are highly critical of the Bush Administration’s position on the war on terrorism. The Administration’s pol­icy in launching the Iraq war and in emphasizing democracy is again said to be a consequence of Creedal thinking, which in its universalistic per­spective leads to a naïve belief, often labeled “Wil­sonianism,” in the possibility of exporting Western democracy to the rest of the world. Creedalism blinds one to the factual primacy of Culture. If the Creedalists who have designed the current foreign policy appreciated the strength and soundness of Culture at home, acknowledging that every other nation or civilization has its Culture just as we have ours, the folly of their grandiose project of nation building would quickly become evident to them.

Culturalists here, incidentally, have their closest allies among those on the Left, including the mul­ticulturalists, who on this issue adopt the Cultural­ist and realist position. Again, the Culture-Creed distinction becomes the weapon of choice in attacking a policy even though a good number of natural-rights conservatives have expressed reser­vations about this policy of their own.

A Better Foundation

Huntington’s inquiry is concerned with cohe­sive­ness and justification–with what enables Americans to be a people, in the sense of possessing unity, and with what makes this people good or worthy in its own eyes. Creed and Culture are said to provide the categories that cover this terrain and allow for intelligent investigation of these ques­tions. But these categories, I have argued, are nei­ther adequate nor exhaustive. Even as defined, they are hugely asymmetrical. Creed refers to a doctrine or set of principles; Culture is presented as a com­pilation of existing sociological facts and realities. But as should be obvious by now, Culture is used to do far more than reference pure facts. It is itself a doctrine that selects facts and bids us to judge the world in a certain way.

It seems to me that a more rewarding approach to the study of unity would begin by separating the study of pure sociological facts–the analysis of what is (or has been) our language, our customs, beliefs, and the like–from all doctrines meant to supply an idea of unity and of right. It would then be possible to examine these doctrines without built-in presup­positions to see how they conceive of cohesiveness and deal with certain sociological facts.

Given my time limits here, I will restrict myself to three major doctrines that were put forth in the early period of our history and that remain impor­tant for contemporary politics and the modern conservative movement: natural rights, traditional­ism, and faith.

Read the full article here.

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Doomed from the Start: The Myth of Limited Constitutional Government in America

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo | February 25, 2010 | Lew Rockwell

Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: An Open Letter to Glenn Beck

After spending a lifetime in politics John C. Calhoun (U.S. Senator, Vice President of the United States, Secretary of War) wrote his brilliant treatise, A Disquisition on Government, which was published posthumously shortly after his death in 1850. In it Calhoun warned that it is an error to believe that a written constitution alone is “sufficient, of itself, without the aid of any organism except such as is necessary to separate its several departments, and render them independent of each other to counteract the tendency of the numerical majority to oppression and abuse of power” (p. 26). The separation of powers is fine as far as it goes, in other words, but it would never be a sufficient defense against governmental tyranny, said Calhoun.

Moreover, it is a “great mistake,” Calhoun wrote, to suppose that “the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the powers of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted, with the means of enforcing their observance, will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers” (emphasis added). The party “in possession of the government” will always be opposed to any and all restrictions on its powers. They “will have no need of these restrictions” and “would come, in time, to regard these limitations as unnecessary and improper restraints and endeavor to elude them . . .”

The “part in favor of the restrictions” (i.e., strict constructionists) would inevitably be overpowered. It is sheer folly, Calhoun argued, to suppose that “the party in possession of the ballot box and the physical force of the country, could be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the constitution” (emphasis added). He predicted that “the restrictions [of government power in the Constitution] would ultimately be annulled, and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.” He was right, of course.

This is a classic statement of the Jeffersonian states’ rights position. The people of the free, independent and sovereign states must be empowered with the rights of nullification and secession, and a concurrent majority with veto power over unconstitutional federal laws, if their constitutional liberties are to have any chance of protection, Calhoun believed. The federal government itself can never, ever be trusted to limit its own powers.

How did Calhoun come to such conclusions? One answer to this question is that he was a serious student of politics, history, and political philosophy for his entire life, and understood the nature of government as much as anyone else alive during his time. He also witnessed first hand or quickly learned about the machinations of the sworn enemies of limited constitutional government in America: men such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, John Marshall, Joseph Story and Daniel Webster.

America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, did a much better job of limiting the tyrannical proclivities of government than the U.S. Constitution ever did, and it did so while permitting enough governmental power to field an army that defeated the British Empire. The limits on government that the Articles contained outraged the advocates of unlimited governmental powers, such as Alexander Hamilton, which is why the “Perpetual Union” that was created by the Articles was abolished as all the states peacefully seceded from that union

The Founding Fathers of Constitutional Subversion

The constitutional convention was Hamilton’s idea as much as anyone’s. Upon arriving at the convention Hamilton laid out the plan of his fellow nationalists: a permanent president or king, who would appoint all governors, who would have veto power over all state legislation. This monopoly government would then impose on the entire nation a British-style mercantilist empire without Great Britain, complete with massive corporate welfare subsidies, a large public debt, protectionist tariffs, and a central bank modeled after the Bank of England that would inflate the currency to finance the empire.

Hamilton did not get his way, of course, thanks to the Jeffersonians. When the Constitution was finally ratified, creating a federal instead of a national or monopolistic, monarchical government, Hamilton denounced the document as “a frail and worthless fabric.” He and his Federalist/nationalist colleagues immediately went to work destroying the limits on government contained in the Constitution. He invented the notion of “implied powers” of the Constitution, which allowed him and his political heirs to argue that the Constitution is not a set of limitations on governmental powers, as Jefferson believed it was, but rather a potential stamp of approval on anything the government ever wanted to do as long as it is “properly” interpreted by clever, statist lawyers like Alexander Hamilton or John Marshall. Hamilton “set out to remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy,” wrote Clinton Rossiter in Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution.

One of the first subversive things Hamilton did was to rewrite the history of the American founding by saying in a public speech on June 29 1787, that the states were merely “artificial beings” and were never sovereign. The “nation,” not the states, was sovereign, he said. And he said this while the constitutional convention was busy crafting Article 7 of the Constitution, which holds that the Constitution would become the law of the land only when nine of the thirteen free and independent states ratified it. The states were to ratify the Constitution because, as everyone knew, they were sovereign and were delegating a few express powers to the central government for their mutual benefit.

It was Hamilton who first invented the expansive interpretations of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution, which have been used for generations to grant totalitarian powers to the central state. He literally set the template for the destruction of constitutional liberty in America the moment it became apparent at the constitutional convention that he and his fellow nationalists would not get their way and create a “monarchy bottomed on corruption,” as Thomas Jefferson described the Hamiltonian system.

Hamilton’s devoted disciple, John Marshall, was appointed chief justice of the United States in 1801 and served in that post for more than three decades. His career was a crusade to rewrite the Constitution so that it would become a nationalist document that destroyed states’ rights and most other limitations on the powers of the centralized state. He essentially declared in Marbury vs. Madison that he, John Marshall, would be the arbiter of constitutionality via “judicial review.” The Jeffersonians, meanwhile, had always warned that if the day ever came when the federal government became the sole arbiter of the limits of its own powers, it would soon declare that there were, in fact, no limits on its powers. This of course is what the anti-Jeffersonians wanted — and what has happened.

Marshall also repeated Hamilton’s bogus theory of the American founding, claiming that the “nation” somehow created the states. He amazingly argued that the federal government was somehow created by “the whole people” and not the citizens of the states through state political conventions, as was actually the case. In the name of “the people,” Marshall said, the federal government claimed the right to“legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory” (Edward S. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution, p. 131).In the case of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee Marshall invented out of thin air the notion that the federal government had the “right” to veto state court decisions. Marshall also made up the theory that the so-called Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes the federal government “supreme” in all matters. This is false: The federal government is only “supreme” with regard to those powers that were expressly delegated to it by the free and independent states, in Article 1, Section 8.

All of the Hamilton/Marshall nonsense about the founders having created a monopolistic, monarchical government and having abolished states rights or federalism was repeated for decades by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story and Daniel Webster. Story was“the most Hamiltonian of judges,” wrote Clinton Rossiter. His famous book, Commentaries on the Constitution, published in 1833, could have been entitled“Commentaries on Alexander Hamilton’s Commentaries on the Constitution,” says Rossiter. He “construed the powers of Congress liberally,” i.e., meaning there were virtually no limits to such powers; and “upheld the supremacy of the nation,” i.e., of monopolistic, monarchical, and unconstitutional government. StoriesCommentaries provided a political roadmap for “the legal profession’s elite or at least among the part of it educated in the North during the middle years of the nineteenth century,” wrote Rossiter.

Story’s “famous” Commentaries are filled with phony history and illogic. On the Articles of Confederation, he wrote that “It is heresy to maintain, that a party to a compact has a right to revoke that compact.” But of course the Articles were revoked!

Secession of a single state would mean “dissolution of the government,” Story wrote. Nonsense. After eleven Southern states seceded in 1860—61 the U.S. government proceeded to field the largest and best-equipped army in the history of the world up to that point. It was hardly “dissolved.”

In a classic of doubletalk, Story admitted that “The original compact of society . . . in no instance . . . has ever been formally expressed at the first institution of a state.” That is, there was never any agreement by the citizens of any state to always and forever be obedient to those who would enforce what they proclaim to be “the general will.” Nevertheless, said Story, “every part should pay obedience to the will of the whole.” And who is to define “the will of the whole”? Why, nationalist Supreme Court justices like Joseph Story and John Marshall, of course.

Story admitted that social contract theories of “voluntary” state formation were mere theoretical fantasies. He also held the rather creepy and totalitarian, if not barbarian view that “The majority must have a right to accomplish that object by the means, which they deem adequate for the end . . . . The will of the majority of the people is absolute and sovereign, limited only by its means and power to make its will effectual.”

Contrary to the political truths expressed by Calhoun which have all proven to be true, by the way Story expressed the elementary-schoolish view that the appropriate response to governmental oppression should be only via “the proper tribunals constituted by the government”which would supposedly “appeal to the good sense, and integrity, and justice of the majority of the people.” Trust the politicians and lifetime-appointed federal judges to enforce their view of “justice,” in other words. That hasn’t really worked out during the succeeding 170 years.What Story is saying here is not that there should be a national plebescite on all policy issues that can express the “will of the majority.” No, as with Hamilton he adopted the French Jacobin philosophy that such a “will” was possessed in the minds of the ruling class, and that that class (the Storys, Hamiltons, Marshalls, etc.) somehow possessed “absolute” power as long as it has the military means to “make its will effectual.” Here we have the theoretical basis for Abe Lincoln’s waging of total war on his own citizens.

Story also repeated John Marshall’s fable that the Supremacy Clause created a monopolistic government in Washington, D.C. and effectively abolished states’ rights, along with the equally ridiculous myth that the Constitution was magically ratified by “the whole people”(presumably not counting women, who could not vote, or slaves and free blacks).

Another famous and influential subverter of the Constitution was Daniel Webster, who repeated many of these same nationalist fables during his famous U.S. Senate debate with South Carolina’s Robert Hayne in January of 1830. This is a debate that Hayne clearly won according to their congressional colleagues, and the media of the day, although nationalist historians (a.k.a., distorians) have claimed otherwise.

Webster then presented a totally false scenario: “One of two things is true: either the laws of the Union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the States; or else we have no constitution of general government . . .” Huh? All the laws? Are the people to have no say whatsoever about laws they believe are clearly constitutional? Apparently so, said Daniel Webster.The first Big Lie that Webster told was that “the Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself . . . the power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the extent of its own authority.” No, it does not. John Marshall may have wished that it did when he invented judicial review, but the document itself says no such thing. As Senator John Taylor once said, “The Constitution never could have designed to destroy [liberty], by investing five or six men, installed for life, with a power of regulating the constitutional rights of all political departments.”

The a-historical fairy tale about the Constitution being somehow ratified by “the whole people” was repeated over and over by Webster. His strategy was apparently to convince his audience not by historical facts but by repetition and bluster. “The Constitution creates a popular government, erected by the people . . . it is not a creature of the state governments,” he bellowed. Anyone who has ever read Article 7 of the U.S. Constitution knows that this is utterly false.

Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution clearly defines treason under the constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Thus, treason means levying war against“them,” the sovereign states. This is why Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treasonous behavior under the Constitution. Had the North lost the war, he could have been justifiably hanged.In fine French Jacobin fashion, Webster asked, “Who shall interpret their [the peoples’] will? Why “the government itself,” he said. Not through popular votes, mind you, but through the orders, mandates, and dictates of “the government itself.” The people themselves were to have nothing to do with “interpreting” their own “will.”

Webster attempted to re-define treason under the Constitution by claiming that “To resist by force the execution of a [federal] law, generally, is treason.” Thus, if the federal government were to invade a sovereign state to enforce one of its laws, a clearly treasonous act under the plain language of the Constitution, resistance to the invasion is what constitutes treason according to Webster. He defined treason, in other words, to mean exactly the opposite of what it actually means in the Constitution.

Then there is the elementary-schoolish faith in democracy as the only necessary defense against governmental tyranny: “Trust in the efficacy of frequent elections,”“trust in the judicial power.” Well, we tried that for decades and decades, Daniel, and it didn’t work.

All of these false histories and logical fallacies were repeated by other nationalist politicians for decades. This includes Abraham Lincoln, who probably lifted his famous line in The Gettysburg Address from this statement by Webster during his debate with Hayne: “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. The people of the United States have declared that this Constitution shall be the supreme law.” Of course, they did not.

Hamilton, Marshall, Webster, Story, and other nationalists kept up their rhetorical fog-horning for decades, trying to convince Americans that the founding fathers did, after all, adopt Hamilton’s plan of a dictatorial executive that abolished states rights and was devoted to building a mercantilist empire in America that would rival the British empire. But their rhetoric had little or no success during their lifetimes.As Lord Pete Bauer once said in commenting on the rhetoric of communism, whenever one hears of “the people’s republic” the “peoples’government,” etc., it is a sure bet that the people have nothing whatsoever to do with, or control over that government.

New Englanders plotted to secede for a decade after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800; all states, North and South, made use of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights doctrine of nullification to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act, protectionist tariffs, the antics of the Bank of the United States, and other issues up until the 1860s. There was a secession movement in the Mid-Atlantic states in the 1850s, and in 1861 the majority of Northern newspaper editorialists were in support of peaceful secession (see Northern Editorials on Secession by Howard Perkins).

The false, nationalist theory of the American founding was repeated by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address (and praised decades later by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, wherein Hitler mad his case for abolishing states’ rights and centralizing all political power in Germany). In the same speech Lincoln threatened“invasion” and “bloodshed” (his words) in any state that failed to collect the newly-doubled federal tariff tax. He then followed through with his threat.

The only group of Americans to ever seriously challenge this false nationalist theory, Southern secessionists, were mass murdered by the hundreds of thousands, including some 50,000 civilians according to James McPherson; their cities and towns were bombed and burned to the ground, tens of millions of dollars of private property was plundered by the U.S. Army; Southern women, white and black, were raped; and total war was waged on the civilian population. This is what finally cemented into place the false, Hamiltonian/nationalist theory of the American founding, for the victors always get to write the history in war. Government of the people, by the people, for the people, is “limited only” by the state’s “power to make its will effectual,” as Joseph Story proclaimed. The technology of mass murder in the hands of the state finally made this will “effectual” in the first half of the 1860s. Americans have been mis-educated and misinformed about their own political history ever since. It is this mis-education, this false theory of history, that serves to prop up the Hamiltonian empire that Americans now slave under.

[Hat Tip: Gunny G]

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for America Today.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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