Category Archives: Founding Fathers

UPDATE (11/3/018): NEW COLUMN: If The Disunited States Of America Is To Survive …

America, Constitution, Culture, Democrats, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION

NEW COLUMN is “If The Disunited States Of America Is To Survive …” It’s currently on Townhall.com, WND.COM and the Unz Review. And, it’s on American Greatness, too.

And excerpt:

“We are one American nation. We must unite. We have to unify. We have to come together.”

Every faction in our irreparably fractious and fragmented country calls for unity, following events that demonstrate just how disunited the United States of America is.

They all do it.

Calls for unity come loudest from the party of submissives—the GOP. The domineering party is less guilt-ridden about this elusive thing called “unity.”

Democrats just blame Republicans for its absence in our polity and throughout our increasingly uncivil society.

These days, appeals to unity are made by opportunistic politicians, who drape themselves in the noble toga of patriotism on tragic occasions. The latest in many was the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre of Oct. 27.

In the name of honesty—and comity—let us quit the unity charade.

The U.S. is not united. Neither is America a nation in any meaningful way. It hasn’t been one for a long time.

Consider: In the late 1780s, Americans debated whether to nationalize government or keep it a decentralized affair. The discussion was one in which all early Americans partook, nationwide.

Think about the degree of unity that feat required!

The eternal verities of republicanism and limited government were understood and accepted by all Americans. The young nation’s concerns centered on the fate of freedom after Philadelphia. (The Anti-Federalists, the unsung heroes who gave us the Bill of Rights, turned out to be right.)

Around the time The Federalist Papers were published in American newspapers—Americans were a nation in earnest.

For it takes a nation to pull that off—to debate a set of philosophical and theoretical principles like those instantiated in these Papers, Federalist and Anti-Federalist.

The glue that allowed so lofty a debate throughout early America is gone (not to mention the necessary gray matter).

The Tower of Babel that is 21st century America is home not to 4 million but 327 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, diverse to the point of distrust.

Each year, elites pile atop this mass of seething antagonists another million newcomers.

Democrats, who control the intellectual means of production—schools, social media, TV, the print press, the publishing houses, think tanks, the Permanent Bureaucracy—they insist mass immigration comports with “who we are as a people.”

The last is yet another hollow slogan—much like the unity riff. …

… READ THE REST. THE NEW COLUMN, “If The Disunited States Of America Is To Survive, …” is on Townhall.com, WND.COM and the Unz Review. And, on American Greatness, too.

UPDATE (11/3/018): Love my American Greatness readers. Smart and knowledgeable (not least about the “S” word):

1G25 • 26 minutes ago

One of the most thoughtful and intelligent writings I’ve seen on the internet.

” A peaceful society is one founded on voluntary associations, not forced integration.”

Why Liberals Hate The Original Constitutional Scheme

Constitution, Egalitarianism, Europe, Federalism, Founding Fathers

Liberals disapprove of the brilliant men “who wrote America’s constitution,” you know, the geniuses of the pale patriarchy.

Yes, concedes the Economist, the Senate was devised “to represent places, not people, and there is a case for that; other constitutions, such as Germany’s, look to ensure regional representation in their upper house.”

So far, so good.

But liberals want heavily populated cities and city slickers—they vote Democrat—to drown out rural people, who vote Republicans. So, for ensuring that “the largest states do not dominate the rest,” the Senate is considered bad by liberals. “[T]he constitution provides equal representation for all the states, large and small alike. This builds in an over-representation for people in small or sparsely populated places.”

That liberals can’t abide.

But for the electoral college liberals, who’re ignorant of any political theory other than egalitarianism, reserve the ugliest terms.

The “electoral college,” writes the Economist, is as system “that America’s founders jury-rigged in part to square the needs of democracy with the demography of slavery.”

Come again?

See: “The minority majority: America’s electoral system gives the Republicans advantages over Democrats,” July 12th 2018.

NEW: John Quincy Adams is Turning in His Grave

Ancient History, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, John McCain, Political Philosophy, War

THIS WEEK’S COLUMN IS “John Quincy Adams is Turning in His Grave.” Read it unabridged on WorldNetDaily.com, The Unz Review, and the Mises Institute’s Power and Market Blog, where it’s titled “Trump’s Call to Putin.” This week’s column appears on Townhall.com, too, where it’s slightly abridged.

And excerpt:

“This is just a truly astonishing moment coming from the White House podium,” tweeted MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt. Like the rest of the media pack-animals she hunts with, Ms. Hunt had been fuming over President Trump’s telephone call to Vladimir Putin, congratulating him on winning another term as president.

Reliably opposed to a truce were party heavies on both sides. Sen. John McCain joined the chorus: “An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” he intoned.

Another Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley, told a reporter testily that he “wouldn’t have a conversation with a criminal. I think Putin’s a criminal. What he did in” Iraq, what he did in Libya … Wait a sec? Remind me; was it Putin or our guys who wrecked those countries? So many evil-doers on the world-stage, it’s hard for me to keep track.

“When I look at a Russian election, what I see is a lack of credibility in tallying the results,” sermonized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “I’m always reminded of the elections they have in almost every communist country.”

Actually, what the International Election Observation Mission found in Russia’s presidential election of March 18 was far more nuanced. Why, in some ways the Russian elections were very American: In the difficulty dissident candidates have in getting on the ballot, for example.

Ask Ron Paul or all those anonymous, aspiring, independent, third-party candidates about the US’s “restrictive ballot access laws and the other barriers erected” by the duopoly to protect their “de facto monopoly in America,” to paraphrase Forbes.com.

As for jailing journalists, frequently for life: Not Russia, but an American ally, Turkey, is the world’s biggest offender. But hold on. Isn’t Trump turning on the Kurds to pacify the Turks? Maybe it’s something the Saudi’s said. Go figure.

What doesn’t change is the interchangeability—with respect to any peaceful overtures made by President Trump toward Russia—of the Stupid Party (Republicans) and the Evil Party (Democrats). And yet, the same self-interested individuals protest, periodically, that Trump’s recklessness risks plunging the country into war.

The president wants to cooperate with the Russians. International confrontation being their stock-in-trade, the UniParty won’t countenance it. Politicians in both parties have not stopped egging Mr. Trump on, rejecting the détente he seeks with Russia, and urging American aggression against a potential partner. Yet, incongruously, in October of 2017, a Republican Senator, Bob Corker, saw fit to complain that the president was “reckless enough to stumble [sic] the country into a nuclear war.” …

… READ THE REST:  “John Quincy Adams is Turning in His Grave” (Townhall.com) is also on WorldNetDaily.com, The Unz Review, and the Mises Institute’s Power and Market Blog, unabridged.

John Quincy Adams’ Memorable Speech on Independence Day

Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers

As mentioned in this week’s column, “John Quincy Adams Is Turning in his Grave,” the sixth president of the United States (1825-1829), son of John Adams, spoke truths eternal on July 4, 1821. Short excerpt:

… And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the older world, the first observers of mutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to inquire, what has America done for the benefit of mankind? let our answer be this–America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, equal justice, and equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the inde-pendence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama, the European World, will be contests between inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. …

… THE REST.