I meant: “I aim to depress, always.” And GD, I seem somehow to have deleted your comment accidentally! Not sure how I did that or how to undo it lol. Sorry!
I keep meaning to *not* comment, but then you suck me in, Sam. Provocative as always, with the usual bold claims that make me wonder (foreign policy entirely by decree, really?).
I'll make perhaps an equally provocative rejoinder, which is that this is a very East Coast way of looking at things. The Electoral College sucks if you basically think that urban attitudes and populations matter most. There are large swaths of the country that presidential candidates would avoid entirely if it weren't for the EC. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, and many more would be regarded as even more flyover than they already are. The result would also be a far less diverse slate of candidates -- you'd get the usual parade of Ivy Leaguers that you see for the Supreme Court.
I actually think that the people are the check on the presidency. If the people don't believe in public K-12, in vaccines, in empirical science (except when it helps engineering), or authoritative bodies like the CDC, AMA, or credentialing institutions like universities, then they cannot fulfill the check on a presidency that our democracy requires. In this case, who needs the Dept of Education if more people are homeschooling and then urging their kids to bypass college altogether? It's a climate ripe for snake oil, and the only remedy for that is hard knocks.
The Pox- the Vox? They did alright in the 1780s when ( incident in American Nations book by Woodard ) the people shafted by the scheme to deflate the revolutionary war payments in bonds, which then were concentrated in the hands of a ve r y few well connected District of Columbia Seventh Sons, in 178x rose up in force to burglarize Philadelphia, if I remember arightly from chapter 2 from Woodard's Am'can Nations book. But were persuaded by being allowed to camp outside Philly that the new nation had might on its side. With then the exact similar thing happening when the alcohol taxes hurt everybody in the appalachias bequests to their grandchildren, in the 1790's George Washington had to threaten to cut their thro a ts as traitors, historically that is correct? Hard knocks beats alcoholic ideaology in those, and maybe our modern instance. I submit that what we are missing is that a unified foreign policy from a nation spanning a continent necssrly expresses opposites, in one way of saying it that Jane Fonda is preternaturally a relief valve of our body politic. She expressed our national Oops, sorry, to Whom it may concern in a way that we are doomed to do without.
To expand on Josh's point, the constraint faced by the writers of the Constitution was exactly what Sam points out: the sovereignty of the states vs. a Federal government. Without a strong executive to enforce what the federal government needed or wanted to do, the states could simply ignore Congress. A messy compromise was always in the cards if we wanted one nation.
That’s true. As I started this essay, I wanted to be incendiary about the Founders and, as I was reading more about the compromises they made, found myself acknowledging that the vast majority of them really were very intelligent. The states/federal parallel system in the US probably is more successful than not. What I don't have any real sense of is how it compares to other systems of government. Lots of countries, of course, have governors and robust systems of local government overlaid across a national administration. My hunch is that the US system is a bit clunkier than many of those in Western Europe, but I might be wrong.
Haha! I'm glad you're having trouble fighting the temptation!
That foreign policy is done by 'decree' is the most defensible point of mine of the ones you've questioned. Congress really has strikingly oversight over foreign relations - policy is done overwhelmingly through the executive branch, and to the extent that modern presidents don't even bother asking Congress for declarations of war whenever they want to fight someone.
Yeah, it's very interesting to debate with you on the electoral college. You're absolutely right that I have an East Coast/large state bias on this. There was a lot of ill will when I was growing up towards the electoral college, and towards fixed-weighted representation in the Senate, and towards various kinds of geographic distribution - and it's easy to understand why. People in places like New York City or LA ended up with, as it were, less input per capita into national government than people from smaller states - and that actually fed a kind of vicious loop where people from larger metropolitan areas or larger states got cynical about the political entity as a whole.
I do understand why the founders hit on the compromise they did, and that there would have been deleterious effects if they had gone the other way and done proportionate representation only. It is more defensible to have disproportionate representation (of senators, electors, etc) of the large 'flyover' states. What's a bit harder to defend are the privileges that states like Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, all have - and this is obviously a result of their being in the right room at the right time. Btw there's a direct line between Delaware having its electors in the Constitutional Convention and our being stuck with Joe Biden as president.
Attention to the grainy video on youtube of congress in the House on Septemper 28, 2008. By small virtue of being a 'peer' under Robert's Rules of Order, Marcy Kaptur calls the house to a vote: Shall we approve a 3 page document giving 5 banks 800 million dollars to float their bad debts to ourselves with no str8ng attached? To which the House voted nay. Nu, now I dont lionize Kaptur, 5 days later, the exact same bill was brought to the floor and the newly incoming Obama had phonecalled the 30 plus of these naysayers to the effect that they would receive zero dollars to campaign t next cycle if they did not change their votes. So that neverminding the Senate for the moment, are their 20 or 26 integral changes to the Robert's Rules of Order- organ of the English Par, that we should have changedvto allow a performance by Bo Jangles to postpone any movement? I mean the horse, maybe, or else Insert another animal endowed with the powers of a senator to own the so called floor , would an ad hoc extra senator and congresspersons wld they in good conscience have allowed the exact same bill/"measure" to be reintroduced 5 days later for another vote, or would you. listen to us now: if you had vetoed on the 800 billion cash infusion to those banks, AND had then for the next 4 days had attended to your immediate family giving no head to politics, having committed a serious deed, would you accept the exact same Bill giving 800 billion with no strings attached days later? Our congress acted asif by instinct in that first( Sept. 28, 2008) instance, refusing to double down on bad debits, and then as Sam says here abt the electoral college, over- thought their What? Their yea or their Nay? Another way to say it is household economy, George Washington owned how many 335 thousand acres of tidewater Virginia and lower Ohio and West Virginia and in south Carolina? And patronimocaly raised his sword against the freebooters who threatened to hide their whiskey from taxation in that resistance army to the first taxation regime by the empowered 1790's Congress? 2 questions: Does our House conducted by Robert's Rules allow for the occasional free ( Liberated, O hate that latinate word it should be manumitted in Latin) expression of our Representatives' immediate ( one generation to the next) self interest ? Or 2. Are we just the servants of our autocars, our Silvercloud Buick6's , 12 valves, 10's. IDK because donot drive, but yourb F150 parked outside my f. Door does seem to be the enforcer of the new way. I submit that minomaximalist strategist, Mc Namara ( wait, what whas his title under Nicon, because the Secrtry of Defeanse is listed as James Shlesinger) ( Who is James Shlesinger?!) Is the author of our next 4 years publlic facing foreign policy, but we will have to declare war to influence the events in Myanamar where the Crank currently comes from. We lost, Man, as be it said Bucky Hopper said to Captain Fonda_ before the both of them were gunned down in rural industrial district Georgia. Ascend to what, is another question, since we have accepted that if only our movies are shown world wide we will supply the snacks? What slaveries we have not said are we proposing to liberate them from in indonesia. We failed there, or we taught them to expand into one half of Timor. Sudharta seems to be our ethically recolored message of a George Wash workable liberal rate of exchange, if I am
seeing arightly, violent Big Man, =patient shopkeepers big titty kind of patent porn video world deference to the Producer kind of treaty organization. Except that our behavior more resembles the cock'scomb soldiers at the Kashmir border strutting "left h'arm!" Ab-out face!, with hydrogen armaments represented by their single action carbines, I can accept George Wash as one way to focus on our organizing processes, except that contrary to Josh Dolezal here, the western states are the picture of dependency on the farm subsidies and subsidies to counties including uranium mines, and which should be given fewer seconds to speak in congress according to their populations.
Fascinating take. The past few decades have basically made me question everything I was taught about US history. Certainly the omission of genocide and the oh-by-the-way of founding fathers enriching themselves on the free labor of enslaved persons. Of course any human enterprise is going to be fraught and contentious and flawed. That phrase, A more perfect union, has bugged me forever. Obama, admirable though he was in many ways, would trot that out once in a while. Four words that mean nothing in the face of Trump’s active contempt for our (oh so flawed) Constitution. I wonder what they might have done differently had they admitted that any human enterprise is inherently flawed, never perfect.
It’s funny. I’d never thought before about how the phrase ‘a more perfect Union’ makes no sense.
I omitted this from the piece, but the democratic system also really failed to prevent the genocide of the Indians. It was far from a foregone conclusion what happened - usually our textbooks paint it as a kind of tragic situation rather than as a series of questionable policies. Washington and the early Congresses really were very insistent on preventing expansion and honoring treaties. Starting, really, with Jackson, the democratic system proved completely incapable of honoring its own existing agreements.
I truly enjoyed reading this beautifully written and thoughtful essay. I would like to add some observations on slavery and the difficulty America had in eradicating it. The belief “let’s not forget that the much-celebrated constitutional system utterly failed to solve the problem of slavery — which every other Western nation was in the process of outlawing” is widely held. This makes sense from a modern perspective and is a testament to the success of America. At its founding, the new nation could hardly be compared to England or France. It was, after all, a European colony, not an ancient society with established institutions.
England’s slaves did not live among the population to any extent. Instead, they lived in far away places such as East Florida and the Caribbean. Granting independence to Jamaica had no impact on the local economy or demographics of England. James Grant could enjoy his slave wealth from the comfort of his castle. The kingdom existed before slavery and after it.
Slavery posed a nearly insurmountable problem for Americans. A nation that did not exist could abolish nothing. Perhaps, the North could have walked away from the South just as England moved on from the Caribbean. Either way, slavery would not be abolished since Southerners had no mother country to return to.
Lincoln described it for eternity in his Second Inaugural Address “on the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it~all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war~seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would rather make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
Slavery and the sugar trade became unprofitable for England. They could turn to the East and Africa to extract wealth from colonies. No such choice existed in America. “And the war came.”
Been feeling the inevitability maybe that Southrons would self identify as nobles from the basic hierarchies of Europe lately. Every where they looked was a staging of history with the addition of the fresh audacity in printed matter additively stacking pulpy printed praise of race plus racializing religion. A fast compressed 15 years where John Brown gathered motives where Olmstead wrote really good observer level appreciations of how brutalized with sticks also you could see how obviously more productive the unheated sweat shops.
Very thoughtful note Guy. I appreciate it. As some of the other commentators have noted, I can get a glib sometimes - and certainly in this essay. You're right that comparing the abolition of slavery in the US to European nations is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison, and it's not clear that any other form of government that might possibly have been adopted in 1787 would have expedited the abolition of slavery. My point is just that slavery really was a time-bomb for the US, and all the purported virtues of the democratic system proved insufficient to rectify an obvious and horrific injustice. Cheers, Sam
Interesting. If studying the history of US governance, its, in my opinion, to end the founding period with Jackson presidency and his successor Jacksonians, because the in some ways were strong centralizers (the nullification crises, etc.) but in other ways asserted and installed an ideological and accompanying governance framework that valued BOTH political AND economic federalism (the decentralization of banking and finance, etc.). This framework actually held until the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, most of the biggest economic changes done in the 1970s and 1980s were not the undoing of the New Deal stuff but rather the undoing of the then ~140 year old Jacksonian stuff
Interesting. If studying the history of US governance, its, in my opinion, to end the founding period with Jackson presidency and his successor Jacksonians, because the in some ways were strong centralizers (the nullification crises, etc.) but in other ways asserted and installed an ideological and accompanying governance framework that valued BOTH political AND economic federalism (the decentralization of banking and finance, etc.). This framework actually held until the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, most of the biggest economic changes done in the 1970s and 1980s were not the undoing of the New Deal stuff but rather the undoing of the then ~140 year old Jacksonian stuff
I am to depress, always! Thanks GD!
I meant: “I aim to depress, always.” And GD, I seem somehow to have deleted your comment accidentally! Not sure how I did that or how to undo it lol. Sorry!
I keep meaning to *not* comment, but then you suck me in, Sam. Provocative as always, with the usual bold claims that make me wonder (foreign policy entirely by decree, really?).
I'll make perhaps an equally provocative rejoinder, which is that this is a very East Coast way of looking at things. The Electoral College sucks if you basically think that urban attitudes and populations matter most. There are large swaths of the country that presidential candidates would avoid entirely if it weren't for the EC. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, and many more would be regarded as even more flyover than they already are. The result would also be a far less diverse slate of candidates -- you'd get the usual parade of Ivy Leaguers that you see for the Supreme Court.
I actually think that the people are the check on the presidency. If the people don't believe in public K-12, in vaccines, in empirical science (except when it helps engineering), or authoritative bodies like the CDC, AMA, or credentialing institutions like universities, then they cannot fulfill the check on a presidency that our democracy requires. In this case, who needs the Dept of Education if more people are homeschooling and then urging their kids to bypass college altogether? It's a climate ripe for snake oil, and the only remedy for that is hard knocks.
Joshua Dolezal,
The Pox- the Vox? They did alright in the 1780s when ( incident in American Nations book by Woodard ) the people shafted by the scheme to deflate the revolutionary war payments in bonds, which then were concentrated in the hands of a ve r y few well connected District of Columbia Seventh Sons, in 178x rose up in force to burglarize Philadelphia, if I remember arightly from chapter 2 from Woodard's Am'can Nations book. But were persuaded by being allowed to camp outside Philly that the new nation had might on its side. With then the exact similar thing happening when the alcohol taxes hurt everybody in the appalachias bequests to their grandchildren, in the 1790's George Washington had to threaten to cut their thro a ts as traitors, historically that is correct? Hard knocks beats alcoholic ideaology in those, and maybe our modern instance. I submit that what we are missing is that a unified foreign policy from a nation spanning a continent necssrly expresses opposites, in one way of saying it that Jane Fonda is preternaturally a relief valve of our body politic. She expressed our national Oops, sorry, to Whom it may concern in a way that we are doomed to do without.
To expand on Josh's point, the constraint faced by the writers of the Constitution was exactly what Sam points out: the sovereignty of the states vs. a Federal government. Without a strong executive to enforce what the federal government needed or wanted to do, the states could simply ignore Congress. A messy compromise was always in the cards if we wanted one nation.
That’s true. As I started this essay, I wanted to be incendiary about the Founders and, as I was reading more about the compromises they made, found myself acknowledging that the vast majority of them really were very intelligent. The states/federal parallel system in the US probably is more successful than not. What I don't have any real sense of is how it compares to other systems of government. Lots of countries, of course, have governors and robust systems of local government overlaid across a national administration. My hunch is that the US system is a bit clunkier than many of those in Western Europe, but I might be wrong.
Haha! I'm glad you're having trouble fighting the temptation!
That foreign policy is done by 'decree' is the most defensible point of mine of the ones you've questioned. Congress really has strikingly oversight over foreign relations - policy is done overwhelmingly through the executive branch, and to the extent that modern presidents don't even bother asking Congress for declarations of war whenever they want to fight someone.
Yeah, it's very interesting to debate with you on the electoral college. You're absolutely right that I have an East Coast/large state bias on this. There was a lot of ill will when I was growing up towards the electoral college, and towards fixed-weighted representation in the Senate, and towards various kinds of geographic distribution - and it's easy to understand why. People in places like New York City or LA ended up with, as it were, less input per capita into national government than people from smaller states - and that actually fed a kind of vicious loop where people from larger metropolitan areas or larger states got cynical about the political entity as a whole.
I do understand why the founders hit on the compromise they did, and that there would have been deleterious effects if they had gone the other way and done proportionate representation only. It is more defensible to have disproportionate representation (of senators, electors, etc) of the large 'flyover' states. What's a bit harder to defend are the privileges that states like Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, all have - and this is obviously a result of their being in the right room at the right time. Btw there's a direct line between Delaware having its electors in the Constitutional Convention and our being stuck with Joe Biden as president.
- Sam
Attention to the grainy video on youtube of congress in the House on Septemper 28, 2008. By small virtue of being a 'peer' under Robert's Rules of Order, Marcy Kaptur calls the house to a vote: Shall we approve a 3 page document giving 5 banks 800 million dollars to float their bad debts to ourselves with no str8ng attached? To which the House voted nay. Nu, now I dont lionize Kaptur, 5 days later, the exact same bill was brought to the floor and the newly incoming Obama had phonecalled the 30 plus of these naysayers to the effect that they would receive zero dollars to campaign t next cycle if they did not change their votes. So that neverminding the Senate for the moment, are their 20 or 26 integral changes to the Robert's Rules of Order- organ of the English Par, that we should have changedvto allow a performance by Bo Jangles to postpone any movement? I mean the horse, maybe, or else Insert another animal endowed with the powers of a senator to own the so called floor , would an ad hoc extra senator and congresspersons wld they in good conscience have allowed the exact same bill/"measure" to be reintroduced 5 days later for another vote, or would you. listen to us now: if you had vetoed on the 800 billion cash infusion to those banks, AND had then for the next 4 days had attended to your immediate family giving no head to politics, having committed a serious deed, would you accept the exact same Bill giving 800 billion with no strings attached days later? Our congress acted asif by instinct in that first( Sept. 28, 2008) instance, refusing to double down on bad debits, and then as Sam says here abt the electoral college, over- thought their What? Their yea or their Nay? Another way to say it is household economy, George Washington owned how many 335 thousand acres of tidewater Virginia and lower Ohio and West Virginia and in south Carolina? And patronimocaly raised his sword against the freebooters who threatened to hide their whiskey from taxation in that resistance army to the first taxation regime by the empowered 1790's Congress? 2 questions: Does our House conducted by Robert's Rules allow for the occasional free ( Liberated, O hate that latinate word it should be manumitted in Latin) expression of our Representatives' immediate ( one generation to the next) self interest ? Or 2. Are we just the servants of our autocars, our Silvercloud Buick6's , 12 valves, 10's. IDK because donot drive, but yourb F150 parked outside my f. Door does seem to be the enforcer of the new way. I submit that minomaximalist strategist, Mc Namara ( wait, what whas his title under Nicon, because the Secrtry of Defeanse is listed as James Shlesinger) ( Who is James Shlesinger?!) Is the author of our next 4 years publlic facing foreign policy, but we will have to declare war to influence the events in Myanamar where the Crank currently comes from. We lost, Man, as be it said Bucky Hopper said to Captain Fonda_ before the both of them were gunned down in rural industrial district Georgia. Ascend to what, is another question, since we have accepted that if only our movies are shown world wide we will supply the snacks? What slaveries we have not said are we proposing to liberate them from in indonesia. We failed there, or we taught them to expand into one half of Timor. Sudharta seems to be our ethically recolored message of a George Wash workable liberal rate of exchange, if I am
seeing arightly, violent Big Man, =patient shopkeepers big titty kind of patent porn video world deference to the Producer kind of treaty organization. Except that our behavior more resembles the cock'scomb soldiers at the Kashmir border strutting "left h'arm!" Ab-out face!, with hydrogen armaments represented by their single action carbines, I can accept George Wash as one way to focus on our organizing processes, except that contrary to Josh Dolezal here, the western states are the picture of dependency on the farm subsidies and subsidies to counties including uranium mines, and which should be given fewer seconds to speak in congress according to their populations.
I've missed that YouTube video lol!
Fascinating take. The past few decades have basically made me question everything I was taught about US history. Certainly the omission of genocide and the oh-by-the-way of founding fathers enriching themselves on the free labor of enslaved persons. Of course any human enterprise is going to be fraught and contentious and flawed. That phrase, A more perfect union, has bugged me forever. Obama, admirable though he was in many ways, would trot that out once in a while. Four words that mean nothing in the face of Trump’s active contempt for our (oh so flawed) Constitution. I wonder what they might have done differently had they admitted that any human enterprise is inherently flawed, never perfect.
It’s funny. I’d never thought before about how the phrase ‘a more perfect Union’ makes no sense.
I omitted this from the piece, but the democratic system also really failed to prevent the genocide of the Indians. It was far from a foregone conclusion what happened - usually our textbooks paint it as a kind of tragic situation rather than as a series of questionable policies. Washington and the early Congresses really were very insistent on preventing expansion and honoring treaties. Starting, really, with Jackson, the democratic system proved completely incapable of honoring its own existing agreements.
Thanks Julie!
Yeah, Jackson's actions were pre evil.
I truly enjoyed reading this beautifully written and thoughtful essay. I would like to add some observations on slavery and the difficulty America had in eradicating it. The belief “let’s not forget that the much-celebrated constitutional system utterly failed to solve the problem of slavery — which every other Western nation was in the process of outlawing” is widely held. This makes sense from a modern perspective and is a testament to the success of America. At its founding, the new nation could hardly be compared to England or France. It was, after all, a European colony, not an ancient society with established institutions.
England’s slaves did not live among the population to any extent. Instead, they lived in far away places such as East Florida and the Caribbean. Granting independence to Jamaica had no impact on the local economy or demographics of England. James Grant could enjoy his slave wealth from the comfort of his castle. The kingdom existed before slavery and after it.
Slavery posed a nearly insurmountable problem for Americans. A nation that did not exist could abolish nothing. Perhaps, the North could have walked away from the South just as England moved on from the Caribbean. Either way, slavery would not be abolished since Southerners had no mother country to return to.
Lincoln described it for eternity in his Second Inaugural Address “on the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it~all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war~seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war but one of them would rather make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
Slavery and the sugar trade became unprofitable for England. They could turn to the East and Africa to extract wealth from colonies. No such choice existed in America. “And the war came.”
Been feeling the inevitability maybe that Southrons would self identify as nobles from the basic hierarchies of Europe lately. Every where they looked was a staging of history with the addition of the fresh audacity in printed matter additively stacking pulpy printed praise of race plus racializing religion. A fast compressed 15 years where John Brown gathered motives where Olmstead wrote really good observer level appreciations of how brutalized with sticks also you could see how obviously more productive the unheated sweat shops.
It's interesting how far removed the modern South self-conception is from the Old South with its quasi-aristocratic sensibility.
Very thoughtful note Guy. I appreciate it. As some of the other commentators have noted, I can get a glib sometimes - and certainly in this essay. You're right that comparing the abolition of slavery in the US to European nations is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison, and it's not clear that any other form of government that might possibly have been adopted in 1787 would have expedited the abolition of slavery. My point is just that slavery really was a time-bomb for the US, and all the purported virtues of the democratic system proved insufficient to rectify an obvious and horrific injustice. Cheers, Sam
Interesting. If studying the history of US governance, its, in my opinion, to end the founding period with Jackson presidency and his successor Jacksonians, because the in some ways were strong centralizers (the nullification crises, etc.) but in other ways asserted and installed an ideological and accompanying governance framework that valued BOTH political AND economic federalism (the decentralization of banking and finance, etc.). This framework actually held until the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, most of the biggest economic changes done in the 1970s and 1980s were not the undoing of the New Deal stuff but rather the undoing of the then ~140 year old Jacksonian stuff
Interesting. If studying the history of US governance, its, in my opinion, to end the founding period with Jackson presidency and his successor Jacksonians, because the in some ways were strong centralizers (the nullification crises, etc.) but in other ways asserted and installed an ideological and accompanying governance framework that valued BOTH political AND economic federalism (the decentralization of banking and finance, etc.). This framework actually held until the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era, in fact, most of the biggest economic changes done in the 1970s and 1980s were not the undoing of the New Deal stuff but rather the undoing of the then ~140 year old Jacksonian stuff