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Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Offsite Post: ‘The False Promise of Unity’


We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.


One of the first blessings promised to the States in the Preamble of the Constitution of 1787 is a more perfect union.  But the events surrounding Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh prove once again the inability of the Constitution to deliver on its opening promise.  Protestors in favor of various causes of the so-called ‘Left’ were at the hearings in full force to disrupt the proceedings, lest one of their adversaries on the ‘Right’ should be appointed to the Supreme Court and rule in ways they find unjust.  And lately claims and counter-claims as to the moral uprightness of the Judge and his accusers have become very heated as well.

The Constitution’s impotence to unite could not be otherwise, however.  Whether one views it as a compact between sovereign States or a contract between sovereign individuals, the end product of such a document, which has as the overarching goal for the people living under its authority only an ill-defined liberty, will never be unity, but chaos.

The peoples of the States have a hard question in front of them, then:  Do they really want unity?  And if they answer Yes, this leads to a second question:  How do they propose to achieve it?

Unity comes ultimately from shared religious beliefs and the shared way of life that flows from them.  But the American boast has always been in the freedom of religion of its various peoples.  With religious pluralism, however, comes different conceptions of God, of right worship, right living, and so on.  Again, this does not lead to unity but to conflict. 

The solution in the States to this impasse has been to downplay the need for dogmatic religious unity and replace it with dogmatic unity of another kind, whether political and/or economic.  But this did not lead to the desired result, either, for there was a split right at the start of the new constitutional era between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians:

The Federalist Party, or Hamiltonians, believed in a strong central government, a national banking system, fiat currency, a national debt, protective tariffs and internal taxes, direct aid to corporations, loose construction of the Constitution, the suppression of civil liberties, and an internationalist foreign policy.

The Republican Party, or Jeffersonians (not to be confused with the modern-day Party of Lincoln), by contrast, believed in limited government, federalism, sound money, low taxes and tariffs, no national debt, government separation from banks, no subsidies for business, a strict construction of the Constitution, including the protection of civil liberties held by the people, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Simply put, the Hamiltonians believed in the merits of an energetic national government; Jeffersonians believed in de-centralization and trusted in the people to govern themselves.

 
So great in fact was the divide between these factions that the great disaster of the War between the States had to sweep through the land before a measure of harmony was restored.  But the War only made the divisions dormant for a time; it didn’t resolve the problem.

This leads one to the disturbing crux of the whole matter of unity in the States:  The only thing that has ever brought a measure of oneness has been war, whether with external enemies (the War for Independence with Great Britain, War of 1812, WWII, the Cold War, etc.) or with internal enemies (the War of Northern Aggression against the South). 

This brings forward an inescapable question:  Are those who want the States to remain united willing to go to war to achieve that end?  . . .


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The Abbeville Institute has also been kind enough to host some of what we’ve written.  Here are a few of those pieces:

‘An Appeal to Southern Graduates’

‘The Southern Saga’

‘What’s in a (Generational) Name?’

Our thanks to them!

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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