I am not one of those disciples of the state, nor that student of politics, that offers that the United States Constitution is "the greatest document ever written." My choice would be instead, the Declaration of Independence. It was the Declaration that cleverly transferred the power of Divine Right from a nation's monarch to each and every single, solitary citizen of a nation. It was that document that established and reaffirmed John Locke's "life, liberty and property" as the human means by which we can all enjoy the Creator's gifts. It was the Declaration that established government as an artificial entity, one whose only purpose was to guarantee individual human freedom, and that when government fails in this regard, citizens had a right to abolish it and to create a better one to replace it.

The astonishing luck the Continental Army enjoyed under General George Washington was just that. In spite of their ragtag nature, lack of uniforms, lack of boots, constant shortage of gunpowder, cannonball and shot, and in spite of their horrific lack of discipline, this ragtag collection of farmers, drunks, vagrants and street rabble succeeded against a precision and disciplined professional army and the then-most powerful navy of the then-most powerful nation on Earth. Its victory was nothing short of a miracle.

In addition to the totally undersupplied and undisciplined nature of our "army" of farmers, other problems in our nation's struggle for liberty abounded. Among these were the lack of a coordinated and effective means to obtain money to pay the volunteer army, and the failure on the part of the Continental Congress to provide ammunition, uniforms and even the manpower needed in the form of volunteers from the joint and several colonies ["states"]. The state legislatures dragged their collective feet in supporting the cause for freedom that was the American Revolution. There was continual infighting and bickering relative to this needed national support among both the state legislatures and the Continental Congress.

And no one was more frustrated than Washington himself. It was he that wrote a long string of letters and appeals to Congress for help; for the most part, they went unheeded. But as Randolph Bourne has observed, "war is the health of the state." And Federalists Washington, John Adams ["walls of wood"] and Benjamin Franklin, vividly remembered the military struggles as well as the legislative conflicts that eventually gave us our freedom from the British monarchy when they considered "rewriting" the Articles of Confederation. Bourne contrasts the difference between "government" and the "state."

Bourne offers: "Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State." 

He goes on in his 1918 essay, "With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world."

And even back then, Bourne had virtually all our presidents figured out, including today's Bush administration: "The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves."

Randolph Bourne was right on the money! All the checks and balances, the carefully-planned delineated authority of a separation of governmental power, are trumped when the government advances to the universal patriotic action of a state of war, a war of, by and for the state. And the Internet has made a difference in terms of overriding the American state and president's propaganda as delivered by the mass media to camouflage the "need" for war. But, the media's hope is to provide mass impetus, as Bourne points out: "The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part. The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government."

Clearly, the unification of patriotic purpose of a people whose citizens opt for a war between their government and that of another, calls into play great sacrifices that are required for the collective objective of military victory. Nothing can be more effective in assuring the health of the state. Yet, our Founding Fathers, opting for individual freedom as opposed to the unlimited authority of a monarch or an "Executive," progressed in their thinking to where they in effect accomplished just the opposite of their intended purposes. Individual freedom and civil rights, as offered in the greatest document for human freedom, made it clear that individual freedom and the unbridled power of the state are incompatible.

Political expediency and the almost devastating effect of Congressional quibbling over funding for the military support needed to protect the fledgling American state began to gnaw away at the concept of citizens' rights and replace it with the awesome power needed to sanctify and elevate the state. Those Founders believing this favored a strong Constitution establishing "a more perfect union" of centralized, national power. These "Federalists" of course included those frustrated patriots that experienced a "do-nothing" Congress. Yet anti-Federalists, led by Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, George Mason and the like, stayed the course and wanted to ensure civil liberties and protection from an all powerful state. The anti-Federalists compromised when the Bill of Rights was added to amend the Constitution.

But the Constitution failed in one important regard: it failed to take into account the evil that men do. Understandably at the time, there was a heavy dependency upon religion and the worship of the Creator. Our agrarian-based economy depended upon the farmer, and the farmer depended upon the weather and the avoidance of blights and crop failures. Religion was a high priority in those days. Entire Sundays were blocked out for worship and church-led community dinners and religious celebration. And this emphasis involved each citizen and promoted among them all the concepts of humility, morality and unselfish acts of service to the community. 

And it is precisely this level of early collective citizen morality that the Founders relied upon in crafting their Constitution. As the Founders were somewhat aware of the possibility of immoral, criminal collusion, and built "checks and balances" into their design for a great unified collection of states, as well as the concept of a "separation of powers," they overly relied upon these elements alone when restricting the purpose and operation of government hoping to avoid creating a freedom-crushing errant state. But as previously offered, they were too optimistic in this regard. The Federalists' primary concern was in overcoming a citizenry and its elected representatives' from being apathetic and unmotivated, as Bourne points out, in rallying to their state to unite and oppose a future enemy.

And as the unification and collective "patriotism" of a nation's people is required to secure military victory, it contributes to the health of the state, and as Bourne also points out, reverts back to a monarchial, totalitarian dimension of statist power! As the Founders failed to recognize that a powerful central government can be commandeered by an evil totalitarian individual, even as they made this possible, they did recognize the inherent evil in political parties. In fact, to bolster the Federalist cause for a more perfect union, The Federalist Papers were published to convince states, especially New York, to embrace a more centralized and powerful national government.  The Federalist Papers were authored by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Hamilton was the primary proponent of a national central bank, the wealthy cabal of money counterfeiters we now identify as the "Federal Reserve." A strong central bank, along with its complimentary individual income tax, are the cornerstones of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.

In Joseph Ellis' biography of anti-Federalist, Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, The Character of Thomas Jefferson [© 1997 Alfred A. Knopf ­ New York], the following reference is made to political parties: "The most novel and wholly unforeseen development of the era was the emergence of political parties. Not that modern-day political parties, with their mechanisms for raising money, selecting candidates and waging election campaigns, were fully formed in the 1790s. (Full-scale political parties with all the institutional accoutrements we associate with the term date from the 1830s and 1840s.) Nevertheless, what we might call the 'makings' of political parties originated during Jefferson's time as secretary of state, and he had a critical role in their creation. The trouble was that the term 'party,' and the very idea for which it stood, had yet to achieve any measure of respectability." Respectability? 

Deferring to Ellis' naivety at the time, and considering it was then 1997, it is difficult to imagine political parties as having any modicum of respectability. Consider the current mudslinging now transpiring and involving top runners for the office of "Executive" this coming November! Consider the objectives of the Nazi Party, the Communists, Mussolini's fascists, and our own Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Respectability?

Here's David McCullough's take citing the mindset of Federalist John Adams in his book, John Adams [© 2001 Simon & Schuster ­ New York]: "Like Washington and many others, Adams had become increasingly distraught over the rise of political divisiveness, the forming of parties or factions. That political parties were an evil that could bring the ruination of republican government was doctrine he, with others, had long accepted and espoused. 'There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other,' Adams had observed to a correspondent while at Amsterdam, before the Revolution ended. Yet this was exactly what had happened. The 'turbulent maneuvers' of factions, he now wrote privately, could 'tie the hands and destroy the influence' of every honest man with a desire to serve the public good."

Reflect upon that latter observation from John Adams, and then consider the candidacy of Congressman Ron Paul!

In his Federalist Paper No. 10, which concerned itself with precisely the "factions" feared by both Federalists and anti-Federalists, Madison offered the soothing nepenthe of a "diversity" of interests, which would nullify the harmful effects of political polarization and selfishness that could sap national purpose. Elaborating on the term "faction," here's more from Ellis: "A 'party,' as the term was commonly understood, was nothing more than a "faction," meaning an organized minority whose very purpose was to undercut the public will, usually by devious and corrupt means. To call someone a member of a political party was to accuse him of systematic selfishness and perhaps even outright treason." But, how does this concept of factionalism differ from Bourne's observation regarding the systematic selfishness of the Executive in privatizing and keeping secret for personal reasons designs for war?

Here again are Bourne's words on this political phenomenon: "In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves."

Wouldn't it therefore greatly profit the "Executive" to arrange a war in his honor? If war is the health of the state, then what can be said as regards the health of the political state of the Executive? Wouldn't war and the unbridled power of the state translate to the unbridled power of the monarchial presidency as well?

In this upcoming presidential election, consider the candidates' stance on war. Consider their stance on the powers of the state versus our civil liberties. Consider our national purpose in creating a government of, by and for the people. Consider our Constitution, in spite of its flaws in failing to consider the foible of human character and its naivety in failing to address political factions. And consider as well how "the people voted as a mass themselves" in November, 2006, and gave Democrats a clear mandate. Consider Congressman Ron Paul!

© THEODORE E. LANG 2/18/08 All rights reserved  

Ted Lang is a political analyst and freelance writer.