Originally Posted by
SicEmBaylor
My thoughts on why we can't all get along. I'd appreciate the click, but I won't force you to. Here's the text:
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Fifteen years into the new century and America finds itself in a precarious state of political angst and strife. Spend even a moment talking to the average person, those willing to share their political opinions, and their discontent with the direction of our nation becomes apparent in short order. Every campaign operative and candidate has heard the complaints from any given voter ad-nauseam. The specific complaints across the political spectrum differ; the general sense of morose is universal. From economics and the environment to foreign affairs and social issues, the left/middle/right yearn to shift the direction of the country toward a new heading. Changing course is a common campaign promise ranging from a younger Barack Obama’s lofty progressive promise of change to your local city councilman promising the same, real change is as elusive as Sasquatch. Existing political fault lines are not fundamentally different from those that existed at the earliest formation of our Republic, and our brilliant Founding Fathers and Constitutional Framers understood this fact quite well. To truly understand why our discord has become so contentious, we need to get back to our political roots and fundamentals.
Let’s first consider the origin of the nation and origin of the individual states (the importance of which will be better understood later in this piece.) The original thirteen colonies did not magically spring forth into existence; they were deliberately planned and created. They were created by European, in this case English, colonists with charters authorizing the creation of a colony on claimed North American territory in the name of the king/queen. These groups of colonists who banded together to create new colonies were relatively diverse, mostly in the religious sense. The colonial charters reflected this diversity – our original thirteen colonies were founded by diverse men and women for diverse purposes. For example, the Massachusetts Bay Colonial Charter was ostensibly intended to be a trading center. Puritans saw an opportunity to create a Puritanical, in the truest sense of the world, society. You had Quakers in Pennsylvania and Baptists in Rhode Island each with differing beliefs on how society ought to be ordered. It’s important to point out that these English colonists retained their English citizenship and all the rights and privileges which that citizenship afforded. However, the distance between the New World and the government in London was expansive enough that it made every-day governing of the colonies impossible; thus, the colonists created agreements/compacts for the every-day governance of their affairs. The best and most famous example of these compacts is the Mayflower Compact. Colonies were created and grew from these charters while the first seeds of self-rule were planted not out of (small ‘r’)epublican beliefs but necessity. Subsequent generations of colonists considered self-rule via their colonial legislatures to be an integral part of their society and the means by which they exercised their rights as Englishmen.
The abuse of these rights and the violation of the terms of the colonial charter by the crown eventually led to the Revolution. You may ask yourself, “Why on Earth is this important or relevant to modern America?” We see that the colonies were diverse rather than monolithic. By the time of the Revolution, the colonies were full of Dutch, German, English, and even Spanish (to a lesser degree) influences not to mention the plethora of religious views and sects. The Constitution had to both improve upon the Articles of Confederation and respect the diversity of the colonies/states. When independence was declared, the colonial charters became null and void; thus, legal rights retained by the crown were entirely assumed by each individual colony. Those colonies/states, via their appointed delegates in convention, ceded only a portion of that sovereignty to the newly created Federal government while reserving all other rights to themselves. These ‘enumerated powers’ are found within Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. Madison and the other Framers understood the importance and ramifications of such a diverse country. They understood that a centralized authority could not justly govern both a state like Massachusetts with its puritan tradition and a laisse-faire state such as Virginia. The domestic affairs of the United States had to be left, largely, to each state to determine for itself. Each state retained the right to make law consistent with the ideas, wishes, and beliefs of their people as expressed through the various state legislatures. The Congress was a split between the will of the people (House of Representatives) and the will of the states as whole political entities (Senate); the President executed the will of Congress by order of the legislation passed as a result of compromise between the people and the states. The Framers understood that the Republic would not endure if one region of the country could impose its will on other regions; likewise, there was a fear that large states would govern at the expense of small states. Allowing everyone to govern their own affairs was the underlying principle of the Constitution as originally written and envisioned.
The Constitution had a similar purpose to the original colonial charters – it was a compact writ-large. Violation of the terms of the new national compact would be similar in result to violating the terms of the colonial charter, an independence movement and war. Egregious violations of the rights of the individual states and breaking the terms of the national compact rendered it null ending with the secession of the southern states. The forceful reincorporation of the southern states to the existing Union resulted in a total shift in how the Constitution was viewed and how it would be followed for following generations. Regardless of one’s opinion of secession and the war, one thing is clear – the underlying principle of self-rule by the states within the Constitution was dead. The Republic, as it existed prior to 1861, would be replaced by a continental empire with a rapidly expanding centralized government that no longer needed to concern itself with ‘checks’ on its power by the individual states. Combined with like-minded pro-Union Supreme Court appointments, states’ rights were effectively dead. This was more than a philosophical shift in American politics – it was codified with ‘ratification’ of the 14th and 17th amendments. The former of which applied Federal Constitutional restraints on state power via the ‘incorporation doctrine’; the latter of which fundamentally altered the Senate as a chamber representing the states instead making Senators beholden to the people directly.
Today we have a nation even more diverse than it was in 1789 with a Constitution designed to protect political diversity but implemented in such a way that strips and disregards that political diversity. The truth is that we may all be Americans, but we’re not all the same. The United States is unique in that it represents the culmination of enlightenment principles with a diverse citizenry rather than representative of a single or small number of ethnicities. The ‘American’ people, unlike German or Japanese, are not monolithic. We have vastly different cultural backgrounds with vastly different religious beliefs with vastly different political beliefs. Our Founding Fathers understood that the best government is the government closest to home. The first and foremost government authority in our lives should be the state legislator who lives down the street, shops at the same stores, and sends his or her children to the same schools. Our affairs were never meant to be governed by someone 1,200 miles away whose only hope of locating our community comes in the form of a Google search. We are all Americans; we are not all the same people. A rural farmer in central Alabama is going to have considerably different views on how his affairs should be governed than the guy with his own tech start-up in San Francisco. The misnomer is often heard that our Framers/Founders could not possibly have anticipated changes in American society as an argument for why the Constitution no longer works. Of course they couldn’t anticipate changes! They anticipated the fact that they couldn’t anticipate changes; therefore, they created a Constitution flexible enough to deal with that eventuality. The amendment process serves as one method, but the states themselves were supposed to be incubators for social change. The Constitution, if applied correctly, provides the means by which progressive states are free to govern their own affairs while more conservative states are free to do the same. Rhode Island was as incapable of governing Virginia in 1789 as Vermont is Texas in 2015. A single ‘one size fits all’ Federal law across a country as diverse as the United States is the real root of our growing discord. Rather than bring us all together as ‘Americans’, it’s tearing us apart. Progressives chaff under conservative (let’s just pretend legitimate conservatives actually exist in Washington) rule while conservatives do the same under progressives. It is not sustainable.
We face a choice. The Constitution was never designed to work the way in which it’s currently implemented. Our government doesn’t work because our Constitution isn’t followed. The reality of the situation is that we are too diverse a country to ever be governed by a single centralized authority in Washington. It’s still possible for all Americans to live side-by-side with one another in peace and security, but we must do so in such a way that respects political and cultural diversity. No better means than the Constitution has been proposed that would accomplish that goal. Either we end the centralized authority of the Federal government and return power to the states, and thus ourselves, or we continue toward some eventuality that results in a break up of our political and social structure. That’s not to say that end result would necessarily be bad, but it shouldn’t be preferable. The key to preventing that outcome starts with electing state legislators and governors willing to stand against unconstitutional Federal law by nullifying and refusing to comply with such edicts. This country is on the precipice, but we can move forward without falling off the edge. The future and way forward is dependent upon our ability to turn around go back. Go back to the original intent of the Constitution. Go back to the principles and ideals of our Founding Fathers. Go back to when our states and local communities had the power to govern their own affairs. Go back to the days of powdered wigs and morning coats. Well…not so much the powdered wigs.
