In the next day or so I have to finish reviewing the sample ballot, voters’ guide, and online guidance for progressive voters - as usual, we have a ton of judicial elections along with state & local offices and a few new laws to be decided. Judges often step sideways into government; thus, I care who sits on those benches. So should you.
Perhaps timely: I am still working on the digitize-the-journals project; the other day, I went through one in which I’d logged the following passage from the 6th Federalist Paper (by Alexander Hamilton):
‘A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.’
The nature of a federalist republic is that every state has its own political, governmental, social, and cultural quirks. The function of the central federal government is to smooth over those quirks so that every citizen of the republic can be assured of a consistent minimum set of rights: civil, personal, and judicial. Without that assurance, there’s very little point in having a federal government.
While I don’t talk politics with many people, and I avoid reading too much about it because that way lies a dose of anxiety and depression that I don’t need, it’s impossible not to have noticed that people are beginning to openly discuss the possibility of civil war.
It’s not unlikely. It’s a bad idea for a lot of reasons. That doesn’t make it less likely, because when people are in a state of violent agitation, their reasoning powers are impaired.
What would the most likely conclusion of a civil war be? I’d guess that people think we would suddenly end up with a republic that looks and functions much like the one we have now, except the neo-fascists (most loudly, the white supremacists) would be in charge. They might think they’d be able to immediately pass laws rolling back civil rights for those who are not like them.
A bunch of problems with that, starting with: not all people who want a more restricted, less expensive central government are white, or straight, or coreligionists. It may seem like a politically desirable or even ‘safe’ move to say, e.g., same-sex marriage isn’t legal anymore, or federal tax money can be used to fund religious schools. But you know and I know that the minute a Muslim school applies for a federal grant, suddenly that’s no longer on the table. And then the right to religious liberty is suddenly up for discussion. How many of the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution have to fall before the Constitution no longer functions?
And then there’s reproductive rights (which I mentioned here on June 26). No person can be forced to donate an organ - even after death! - or donate a pint of blood, or even donate sperm - but a certain class of people thinks it’s perfectly okay to force a uterus-equipped person to carry a pregnancy and bear a child.
Pint of blood: no; 9 months of physical danger and servitude to something less than a child followed by 18 years of financial obligation: yes.
‘Oh but you can give it up for adoption,’ they say. That is not at all relevant. The aim of legislation restricting reproductive choice is to take physical autonomy away from only female persons. It’s sex-based discrimination of the most blatant kind.
Returning to my initial point, regarding the undesirability of civil war. The thing I’ll bet proponents of a government overthrow have not really considered is: after a civil war, we will not have this same country. Some states will refuse to participate in a neo-fascist republic. If the original form of government no longer exists, these states can justifiably say: I quit. And since the original form of government no longer exists, it can’t even be called secession.
If the current form of government falls, all of its functions fall with it.
Does the average ranter on the internet have any management experience (to say nothing of government experience)? Maybe so! Maybe there’s a network of highly-qualified neo-fascists with strong and well-conceived proposals for reconfiguring a federal government. Not likely, but possible.
The little of this discussion that’s reached me seems to focus on restriction of civil rights. The argument behind all of it can be boiled down to a quote from George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm:’ “Some … are more equal than others.”
That was true when the Founders cobbled this republic together. Maybe that’s the essential point of the ‘originalist’ doctrine: the rights awarded by the first version of our government are the only ones that should be awarded. If you are not a white male Christian property owner, you don’t get a vote. If you are: congratulations, you get to make laws that benefit only you.
How long would that last? Because in case these folks haven’t noticed, they are a minority in this republic.
Back to what happens next. Who would be in charge of our twelve armed services? How many of those servicemembers would consent to serve whatever’s left of the central government? Is it not much more likely that Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, ATF, FBI, CIA, etc. would simply cease to function? What would remain: a rabble of poorly-trained militia, who would rapidly fall under the command of former professional military members whose motives might not bear scrutiny.
How about the departments of education, transportation, housing, or health? Any point having federal programs for those things if the federal republic no longer exists? Not much. What about the SEC? FAA? FDA? How many environmental or commercial regulations would survive?
How long till the next pandemic, with no government-funded vaccine research?
The people who most hate our current government are exactly the people who shouldn’t be running any kind of government. What they most want is for government to hand them money and land, then turn them loose to do whatever they want with it (and to not be accountable to their fellow citizens for any standard of behavior).
Steve Bannon said it in plain language back in 2016: the goal of the neo-fascists (he didn’t self-identify that way, of course) is the deconstruction of the administrative state. What that means: in their view, the central government has to be dismantled.
The most likely immediate result of a successful overthrow of the current U.S. federal government is the complete collapse of financial markets followed by the Balkanization of North America. Next: mass migrations, takeover of manufacturing and agricultural industries by (probably) Chinese and/or Mexican corporations, and a series of internal and border wars. A couple hundred years on, stability might be restored, most likely in the form of three or four smaller confederations. They would not look or operate like smaller versions of what we have now.
I won’t be around to see it, and I don’t have kids so I have no hostages to the future, but I vote progressive because of family and friends who do have those hostages. Anyone else who truly cares how the U.S.A. looks and operates in 2200 should be voting progressive too, because the other guys don’t actually want what most of us think of as democracy.