While it is relatively safe in concluding that human beings should never be trusted with power, since the dawn of time there has always been power to be had and only human beings to take it. George Washington was an anomaly, and his replication was the standard for a while until his memory was too far away. Inevitably the human nature of wanting to rule came forward. It isn’t weird it is perfectly normal and for whatever reason the framers of the United States Constitution had made the best possible document for the longevity of the republic. It will never be replicated, and it will not live forever no matter what the chest thumping Us vs. Them mentality of America thinks.
In the beginning of America, there were no republicans or democrats. There were federalists and anti-federalists. The constitution was an agreement between the many states in North America to organize as a union under a federal government. This is foreign to most countries outside of this one because most countries outside of this one are “states” and not a collection of states. This is why there is a house of representatives representing “the people” and a senate representing “the states” themselves. Since there is nobody alive who remembers exactly how that worked, people would vote for their representatives at the federal and the state level, to create laws.
The voted representation of each state would vote on the appointment of senators to the federal government to have an equal say on every law created by the federal representatives by the exact same number of senators of each state. It was genius and it was important to those that crave power to eliminate this system. The first stage of doing this is to eliminate the two parties that originally created the laws that formed the nation so that it could be slowly destroyed from within its own system of rules. The evolution of this didn’t take very long as anti-federalists became democratic-republicans. Later, after the democratic-republicans were the only party, the whigs became the opposition party in theory.
The democratic-republicans were the ones that started the anyone can vote as long as they were white and male under the Andrew Jackson presidential victory and then transformed into the democratic party. This fortified the slavery narrative and added the wholesale conquering of America by the general community that supported this new party. The rights of the states managed to stem the tide of forced acceptance of slavery around the entire union. The whigs being no real opposition to the democrat party created a vacuum that was finally filled by the republican party. This is where the wheels really started coming off the cart of this republic and brought us to where we are today.
I’m fortunate that I don’t have much credibility or popularity because I can just state the truth here. The republicans don’t get enough credit for how they created the America that is ending before our very eyes today. The election of Abraham Lincoln was obviously a great move for the abolishment of slavery, but it was also the first nail in the coffin of state’s rights. While we can all laud the abolishment of slavery, the threat of the abolishment of slavery on the southern states created the need for them to secede from the union. I am not saying I support this. I am saying that they had a right to do it. Whether it was economics, morality or selfishness, the northern states willingness to fight a war to keep the southern states in the union, and the outcome of winning that war all but eliminated any functional states rights, where perhaps just allowing them to go their own way would have maintained the state’s rights necessary to avoid the populism that plagues the nation now.
Of course it may not as well, since the problem with human nature, populism, and the innate need for people to democratically elect the worst common denominator, this all was on the way regardless. It took another republican populist election that was probably funded by the robber barons that really start spiraling the nation out of control. William McKinley needed to include the progressive firebrand Theodore Roosevelt to his ticket to keep the base of the republicans that weren’t sold on his candidacy on board, and to keep Roosevelt out of the news. An assassins bullet made Roosevelt the 26th president of the United States and left to his own devices he started building the infrastructure that started making us more European socialist, and American progressive that we had been before that. Federalizing large swaths of property. Unionizing labor throughout the Midwest. The worst of it though was when he decided that he was above the precedent set forth by George Washington after he had a change of heart.
Many people think Roosevelt was a hero, but when he threw his hat into the 1912 presidential race, losing to the current president Warren G Harding, he went full on progressive, and paved the way for the worst president in United States history, Woodrow Wilson. There are many idiots in this country that assume this is a happenstance, but it was more likely an acceptable outcome to Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson’s version of progressivism, while possibly less “American” than Roosevelt’s was far more compatible to it. The next eight years would destroy the state’s rights that most American’s are in denial about losing over 100 years ago ... To be continued.
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