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WB: The Wave
Billmon:
[I]t seems worth remembering that the size of the Democratic wave was hugely influenced at the margin (which is where it counts) by that tenth of the electorate who couldn’t make up their minds until literally the last minute — despite everything that’s been done, said, reported and revealed over the two years since they were last asked to take the fate of the world’s only superpower into their hands.
The Wave
Hell of a way to run an empire.
Wow, just wow. Sorry to ignore everyone else’s comments but let me just say “wow”. I’ve been reading this blog for a while and never had the courage to comment because I never really felt I had anything to add that hadn’t already been said. But sometimes maybe you’ve just gotta say “Wow”.
Because, I read this blog becaues although I could never really put my finger on it but I always felt the proprieter of this particular establishment got it. Not just got it but… Got. It.
Because that little line there tossed in at the end of that post was a crystalizing moment. It really just hit me for some reason that I can’t quite express.
Because, I’ve just got to say, yes, that is a hell of a way to run an empire.
Certainly better than any alternative of which I’ve ever heard. And it’s exactly because that if things had tumbled a different way out of the hopper, that narrow margin might very well have swung the other way. And the world would still have kept turning but would it have turned the same way? Could it have stopped and flung all of us off into outer space? Which it very well might have as long as we’re talking about might have beens.
You can’t really know what might have been. You can tell what is. But you can only make a good guess at what might have been because there’s just no way to take into account all the different variables of what happens if pull a string and unravel the whole ball of yarn trying to get it to pile up in a different shape. At least I couldn’t. Maybe someone else could but the point I’m trying to make is that worrying about what might have been is kinda pointless. What I damn well worry about is what should be.
And that’s why it’s a hell of a way to run an empire because back when things were set up people did worry about what should be. Those people, our founding fathers, were revolutionaries, of course. People who stood up for what they believed and fought a war and paved the way for all the things we have and enjoy with bucket after bucket of their own blood. And their brother’s blood. And their children’s blood. And when they actually won they sat down and decided what they were going to do with their brand spanking new country. And, I’d like to think the first thing they thought was that the absolute last thing they wanted was another war. Because war is a terrible, awful, horrible thing and only people who’ve been through one can really understand that it’s a method of last resort. It’s what you do when there’s no other way left to stand up and fight for what you believe. And only people who’ve been through a war can really understand that when there’s nothing else left to do war is necessary and you fight as hard as you can.
So, the second thing I’d like to think they all thought of was the next war. Because the sad fact of history is that there’s never a last war. There’s never a war to end all wars. There’s always another figh looming on the horizon. Because people will fight to the death for what they believe in if they’re pushed hard enough. And power corrupts and the new boss becomes the old boss and I’d like to imagine that having fought a war of revolution that the Founding Fathers the last thing they wanted to see was another one. So, they introduced a system of checks and balances to make sure that no one ever got too powerful, and when that one didn’t work they got another, and then they went around and told everyone that real power lays not with in office but with the people. And if enough people agree then those in office are thrown out and new officials get put into place. All done in an orderly, rational, civilized fashion which is about the exact opposite of what I’d consider a war but, then, I’ve never really fought one. All they were trying to do was to institutionalize the revolution, to make it a process of law and of routine so that there would never have to be a second war of revolution in these United States. There would alwayss be a next election. And there would always be another way to fight for what you believe so that, inside of our “empire” at the very least, we’d never have to get to that last resort.
See, my thing is if the founders of this great nation were our fathers then that makes us their children. And they’ve passed down to us a system where we can make big changes if we need to. And they’ve passed down to us a system where we can make small, minor changes on the margin that might bounce one way or might bounce the other because no one really knows until you count up the votes. All those polls, all those reporters, all those words written and shared and traded back and forth about the possible outcome and no one really knew. We all waited, we all held our breath, because the result was one of any number of possibilities. Because back then that was “what might be”. But our fathers took care of what should be way back when. They tried to give us a civil revolution. And what they came up with was a system where a lot of small changes – this official here, that official there, this appointee, that vote, this proposal – add up to one great big country and it can all change the next election when people get to make up their minds again in a single, crystalizing moment. That’s not revolution. That’s evolution. And that is a hell of a way to run an empire because in an evolving system mistakes can be corrected the next go around.
The Democratic party isn’t going to come in and shake things up just for the sake of shaking things up. They’re not going to use this revolution to put people up against the wall. No way, they’ve evolved. They just got a little bit better and a little bit smart and a little bit stronger and a lot bit tougher. Because that’s what they needed to capture that tiny little sliver of the election. The probabilities don’t tumble randomly in an evolution. They’re affected by pervious results. Now, because they fought the Republican party at its own game and won they’ve got a chance to thrive. And they will in the new poli-eco climate that’s arisen thanks to the last election. If the traits and customs and traditions that make them, well, Democrats and not Republicans have bred true. Because while they might not agree we’ve had an evolution I’m sure they’ll agree that now it’s their solemn duty to shepard our nation to the next catalyst. The next election. The next era. And they’re not going to mess around and waste time while the clock’s ticking on that, not our new model Democrats, will they?
Well, if they do, we can find a different political animal next time around. But we will have a new one in two years. If only because to survive our current animal had to get that last little sliver of concientious and considerate voters who were waiting until the last moment to make their all important choice. What’s it going to be next time around? Just, wow.
Posted by: Sausaletus Rex | Nov 11 2006 5:57 utc | 22
And when they actually won they sat down and decided what they were going to do with their brand spanking new country. And, I’d like to think the first thing they thought was that the absolute last thing they wanted was another war.
the first things they actually did, for it was a primary reason for breaking off from mother’s empire & building/running their own, independent of britain, was to (1) discard king george III’s royal proclamation of 1763 which halted colonial expansion west of the appalachian mountains, directly thwarting the desires of the land speculating classes, and (2) increase the expansion of slave trade in the new colonies, a practice to which britain has started to turn away from, inserting, for instance, a clause in the colonial charter given to Georgia which prohibited slavery in the new colony, and, given abolitionist movements in the northern colonies, as a way to cement institutional slavery in future colonies.
as francis jennings writes, “A student must brush aside the rhetoric of myth to realize that the leaders of the Revolution were not all devoted to ideals cherished today.”[1] “From the earliest beginnings, the colonies were agencies of conquest.”[2] “The first objective of American empire was rule over Indian peopls and their lands.” [3] “The British crown wanted expansion into Indian territory to be gradual and controlled so as to preserve as much good will as possible with tribes whose warriors were needed against the French; but aggressive colonists were confident about managing Indian neighbors and little concerned about the crown’s policies.”[4]
In all the colonies, assemblies [of freemen elected to levy or withold taxes, acting as intermediaries b/t the colonists & the crown] gave form to colonial demands for autonomy within the empire, and in all of them the assemblies represented owners of private property, landed and commercial. These assemblies were the agencies through which capitalists acquired political power that established the foundations of autonomuy that developed into demands for independence – not simply or directly but ultimately unrestrainable. [5]
these capitalists amassed their wealth, of course, thru land specualtion and enslaved labor.
Because the strains created by dynastic war triggered colonial resentments against Great Britain, it is necessary to realize that most colonists accepted war as a fact of life and sometimes as a very useful instrument of policy – their policies. War against Indians made possible the seizure of lands that was the colonist’s reason for being in America. Virginians had conquered the Powhatans; South Carolinians wiped out the Yamasees; Marylanders joined Virginians to attack Susquehannocks; New Englanders massacred Pequots and Narragansetts; New Yorkers negotiated with Iroquois to war against New France. Only Rhode Island and Pennsylvania renounced war against Indians, in Rhode Island’s case partly from prudence; in Pennsylvania’s from principle.
…
By mid-century these colonists had grown rich and strong and cockily confident of winning combat on land against the French and Spanish colonials who numbered not one in twenty as compared to British manpower.
…
A group of the gentry lusted after land beyond the Appalachian Mountains that had hitherto served as a barrier against entry into lands occupied by Indians… [6]
“Yearners after westward expansion were taken aback by the Royal Proclamation’s ban on expansion by colonial initiative in 1763, especially as the ban was maintained by a standing army in western garrisons.” [7]
For modern romanticists who envision revolution as the common people rising in outrage, it is scandalous tht colonial resistance to Britain’s repressions started among merchants and lawyers and the owners of great slave plantations. (And to think that Nikolai Lenin praised the American Revolution extravagantly!)
The bourgeois gentlemen of the colonies adopted a strategy of squeezing commercial partners in Britain on the assumption that British merchants would compel Parliament to rescind the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act. This was sound strategy; the City of London merchants actively opposed their government’s repressive measures. Colonials banded together to boycott British goods by nonimportation agreements, and some of them withheld payments for bills past due, to the anguish of their creditors.
Southern planters were as involved as northern merchants because the planters had the habit of buying British luxuries on a large scale. The planters drove slaves to produce their tobacco staple (the larges single colonial commodity), but they became great merchants when they took tobacco to market.
Sanctioned by the most respectable men in the colonies, less respectable types used violence and intimidation to prevent distribution and use of Parliament’s stamped paper. Mobs guaranteed the effectiveness of the commercial boycott by threatening and attacking merchants who held back from participation. This was in the pattern of London’s contemporary mobs. These popular actions tapped a deep well of anti-British resentment especially among recent Irish and Scotch-Irish immigrants who had been forced out of the their homelands by the rapacity of English absentee landlords..
The resistance of the eastern urban merchants was joined by immigrants who had gone west in search of lands. Their resentments festered also because of the Royal Proclamation line barring further western settlement. Joining them, many veterans of the Seven Years War had been promised bonus lands as rewards for service, but colonial governments were forbidden by Proclamation from fulfilling their engagements. Only the crown could now grant lands west of the Proclamation line, and the crown adamantly refused to do so. Cheated soldiers blamed the crown and joined hotly in the antiroyal demonstrations. [8]
actually, the proclamation line didn’t stop george washington from adding to his western investments. in fact, as jennings informs us, “Washingon’s example shows willful pursuit of personal gain in violation of colonial governments as well as the crown, and even by embezzling the property rights of the men he had commanded in the Seven Years War. Some writers have equated such lawless enterprise with ‘frontier democracy.’ Washington’s soldiers, had they known what was going on, might have defined democracy somewhat differently.”[9]
Let it not be said that the favored revolutionaries of the eighteenth century were democratic; there were no such thing as will be apparent when we examine their behavior. They strove to overthrow the power of the crown in order to assume it themselves, not to transmit it to the people in general. … power was the issue. [10]
for instance, sticking to washington for a moment,
The Father of his Country was certainly the father of the Constitution, and the uses he made of it in suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated why opponents had struggled against its ratification. They feared and opposed excise taxes because of the power given to tax collectors to invade privacy while searching for taxable goods. They dreaded the power of a standing army capable of overriding local authorities. George Washington had fought against such powers when they were exerted by the British goverment, but when they came into his own hands he used them without hesitation. [11]
and adams,
President John Adams determined to suppress the radical party sympathizing with the French Revolution. Adam’s Federalists enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts that put powers in his hand greater than those of King George III and plainly violated the Bill of Rights amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
The Alien Act of 1798 empowered President Adams to deport from the United States “all such aliens as he shall judge dangerous” or such as he suspects of treasonable machinations. The Sedition Act punished with fine and imprisonment “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States … with intent to defame the said government.” It was a republican government’s version of lèse majesté, and Adams used it to jail editors opposed to himself. [12]
adam’s brutal use of the military to put down frie’s rebellion is also illuminating, but i’m getting away from my original premise – that the united states was clearly founded as an independent empire, breaking away from king george to continue westward expansion & unfettered slavery. the ruling classes in the colonies seized ultimate power from their british overlords, creating a caste society demarcated along perception of racial categories – with indians & slaves being permanently recognized as subhumans – that filtered all wealth toward propertied white males.
Instead of slavery being ended, the institution was strengthened and protected against attack, with the result that owners of slaves thereafter dominated national policy making for three-quarters of a century. … State immediately increased attacks upon tribal Indians and even against British Canada. Although modern historians call the new United States a triumph of liberty, and it was indeed that for a privileged portion of the people, it did not seem so to slaves or to Indians who tried vainly to keep their lands from being plundered. [13]
so much of the founding myths/documents of this country are blantant propaganda.
Maybe one should not raise questions about great propaganda documents. Despite its power, the Declaration was not perfect even in its bill of complaints. It is hardly necesary to note again the abysmal fault in its “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal” coming from the pen of a slaveholder. But in a kind of justice to Jefferson, he must be credited with noticing the evils of slavery albeit allegedly as the fault of George III. Congress eliminated this section, the self-serving logic of which must be seen in its own phrasing. He, the king:
has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life & libery in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, and that his assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he has also obtruded them, thus paying of former crimes committed against the liberites of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Perhaps someone in Congress was bold enough to suggest that this horror could be turned into a revolutionary asset by simply emancipating all those poor people from captivity. Probably not; more likely the members simply spotted how vulnerable to criticism the passage appeared. Slaveholding members understood very well how they violated the “most sacred rights of life and libery.” They never left off crying that the king would never make slaves of them.
Jefferson had much reason to be grateful to the Congress that saved him from his excess of rhetoric. Its inclusion would have made the Declaration the laughingstock of Europe. [14]
democracy, as inteded, was a herrenvolk democracy, parity among distinguished, propertied white males.
“In a very real sense, even within the arbitrary fictional domain of law, the empire of the United States has derived its authority from power over Indians.”[15]
and the forced labor of enslaved nonwhites.
jennings rightly renames the american empire revolution for what it more correctly was – evolution. meet the new boss…
in addition to westward expansion, the breakaway empire also coveted the land southward.
…Jefferson and other Founders thought the spread of revolution could also open Latin America to more direct North American control. The Virginian’s growing concerns about expanding U.S. power even led him in the 1780s to decide that it would be better if the Spanish held on to their territory “till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by peice [sic]. Part of this dream became real in 1803 when, as president, Jefferson acquired the vast former Spanish colony of Louisiana. His confidence that Manifest Destiny required the booming new nation to swoop down over Mexico and Central America was shared by most of the other Founders, including Jefferson’s great political rival, Alexander Hamilton. [16]
these are no fathers i would claim
I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other Land.
— mark twain, october 15, 1900
notes:
1. francis jennings, the creation of america: through revolution to empire, p179
2. ibid, p12
3. ibid, p17
4. ibid, p18
5. ibid, p38
6. ibid, p63-64
7. ibid, p87
8. ibid, p91-92
9. ibid, p122
10. ibid, p177
11. ibid, p309
12. ibid, p312
13. ibid, p5
14. ibid, p169-170
15. francis jennings, the founders of america: how indians discovered the land, pioneered in it, and created great classical civilizations, how they were plunged into a dark age by invasion and conquest, and how they are reviving, p319
16. walter lafeber, inevitable revolutions: the united states in central america, p19
Posted by: b real | Nov 11 2006 18:53 utc | 25
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