The American States Dump Trump

 Donald Trump brought 55 appeals to courts in 7 American states to overthrow the election of Joe Biden. Just as Stalin in Russia put his own loyalists in key posts in the communist government and made himself a dictator, Trump did the same in Washington. He fired anyone he liked in any key position in the Federal Government and put in his own loyalists in their place. He said and did anything he wished for 4 years as he steadily gained total power over the government. Now it is a simple fact that the government he took over is a world government. Citizens of sovereign states all over the world can boast to themselves that they are totally independent of Washington but this is blatantly untrue. The monetary and military power of Washington is active globally, Washington pays 378 billion dollars in interest this year to lenders (mostly foreign banks) all over the globe, it places economic sanctions on individuals globally, it has military bases in 400 countries, it has 11 aircraft carriers in all the oceans of the world, etc., etc.. But let’s not argue the point. The point is Trump grabbed all the power in Washington and it affected everyone globally to some degree. The most important question globally then is how did an American dictator lose his enormous power just like that, not with a bang (to borrow from T.S. Eliot) but with a whimper? Trump made scandalous, viciously undemocratic statements exclaiming to the world that the election of Biden was a fraud and he will continue his totally undemocratic tirades right up until Joe Biden becomes President of the United States on January 20. Trump lost the election even though he had total power over the government.The truth is that democracy triumphed in the United States because the 50 states, each with a democratic government and a highly-developed constitution and legal system, elect the President of the United States. It is shameful that not one media commentator, even intelligent men and women who despise Trump and are deeply proud that our democracy prevailed over him, has spoken out clearly about the mechanism of Trump’s downfall. The mechanism that held up so firmly was the independent legal right and duty of our states under Article 2  Section 1 of the Constitution to decide and certify whom the majority of the citizens of their state voted for for President. A corollary to this truth is that there can not be ever any securely established democracy in any nation state. Dictators and elected leaders in sovereign states falsify elections. Trump would have falsified his if he were president of a sovereign state. He has sovereign  powers but they are limited by the US Constitution and the foundation of American sovereignty is the limited sovereignty of American states. Trump grabbed all the power he could but it was not enough. The 50 states had power too. They dumped him. They turned his undemocratic shouts to whimpers.

Daniel McNeill

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L5IXSGO

A New Supranational Government

 The union of the thirteen original states of north america was constituted uniquely. The Constitution is generally understood to have been a masterful creation using doctrines of revolutionary European political theorists of the age of enlightenment. This is only partly true. Rationalistic philosophers in Europe railed against all the stupidities they encountered among nation-states including their endless wars but none of them theorized about setting up some kind of new supranational government whose purpose and being was designed to unite states rather than to be only just another national state among other national states. The government of the United States of America was just such a supranational creation. The government in Washington set up by the Constitution was “The Government of the United States”. It had a purpose and a being for the united states not over the united states. Most likely few Americans in 1787 understood the new government. The best way to describe it to them would have been to assert that  Washington, located in no state and without the full sovereignty of a nation-state, was the seat of a government of an international union of nations and that if the thirteen states acted as nations with limited sovereignty and if Washington acted as a government with its sovereign authority restricted even more than state authority, the unique new political apparatus would work well and profit all Americans because t would prevent wars among states and allow the free movement of goods and people among them.

Daniel McNeill

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L5IXSGO
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A Coup d'État Without an État

 Donald Trump is now trying to accomplish a coup d'État. But he is not the president of a state  so he is trying to make a coup d'État without an État. You need a fully sovereign state to make a coup d'État and no such thing as that exists in the American political system. The coup he has accomplished however is serious and in danger of becoming permanent leading to political disaster. The Federal Government since the Civil War has taken power away from states and gained more power for itself. The 14th amendment, which directly limits state sovereignty, asserts that Americans are subject to the “jurisdiction”  of the United States. “Jurisdiction” is synonymous with “power” and it comes close to being synonymous with “sovereignty”. Washington’s “jurisdiction” has been used wisely and has served as a means to unite the union solidly relying mainly on the state and federal legal systems. Washington’s “jurisdiction” has been strengthened by its leadership in two World Wars and the Cold War which made it a world leader in globalization. Its firm support for business corporations both domestic and foreign is another factor in its strength. But there is a big but. Washington has never directly governed the American people. It has set up for itself a supremely complicated network of federal agencies working in Washington, in the states and in the world. But this complicated, intelligent and subtle system has never seemed connected to the American heart. It seems to us abstract, isolated and even fictitious. Here is where Trump has made his coup. He has acted directly and even savagely against the normal acceptance by Presidents of the Washington political establishment. He has been on his own. He has turned government agencies into his own property by putting his own people in charge of them. His ignorant and fanatical supporters believe both that the country’s government in Washington is a fictional and fake power and at the same time they want it to be the head of their nation. Trump has tried to wipe the Washington government off the face of the earth and this has touched something in the American heart that is producing dangerous disorders in average people. Loyalty to the Constitution and to the powers it grants to the Federal Government are the very foundation of our social, economic and political lives. Can the political system in Washington that Trump’s coup knocked down get up from the floor led by a new president and fight to make America great again?

Daniel McNeill

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A Simplistic Rationalization For the Civil War

  When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated President in 1861, 7 states had previously seceded from the union because he had declared that in the future new states admitted to the union from territories west of the Mississippi river would no longer have the right to decide as sovereign states to be either free states or slave states. Loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to the powers granted to Washington by the Constitution is the real foundation of American national feeling. 7 states by seceding had disloyally violated their binding connection with the Washington government. Lincoln once in power plotted behind the scenes to start a war against seceded states, but his deliberate actions step by step to produce the Civil War have never been examined honestly and realistically by historians. Instead, after Lincoln won the war and a new “national” government was born in Washington, historians sought simplistic rationalizations to shelter Lincoln’s  machinations from view. One rationalization was by far their favorite: it was a war to end slavery. Thousands and thousands of white men had maimed and killed one another in battles for four bloody years in order to free from their chains five million black African slaves. Nothing could be so false and yet so ready at hand for a simplistic explanation. It was red meat thrown into crowds of hungry historians eager to cheer for Lincoln’s actions which had made Washington supreme. Lincoln had warned in his “House Divided” speech that the “slavery agitation” in his opinion “ will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and past”. He warned that “either the opponents of slavery will arrest its further development…or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become itself lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south.” He made a clear and truthful judgment of the situation that “the nation” faced. He was right that a crisis was coming. However he did not mention that the 34 states contending with one another over the issue of whether they should be “free states” or “slave states” were sovereign states. The sovereignty of the states was itself the cause of the “slavery agitation.” Lincoln did not mention that to stop the agitation and end the crisis something big had to be done against state sovereignty. State sovereignty had to go in order for slavery north and south to go with it. When a bullet entered Lincoln’s skull in Ford’s theater on April 14th 1865, state sovereignty as it had once existed was gone, gone suddenly as though gone with the wind. 

Daniel McNeill

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L5IXSGO
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Lincoln Unites the Divided House

 On June 16th 1858 in Springfield Illinois, Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “House Divided” speech. The “house” was “the nation” but the word “house” better suited Lincoln’s purpose. He wanted to put an end to “slavery agitation” but he complained that the Federal Government’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had not ended but increased the agitation. “I believe,” he said, “that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.” Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the election of 1858 for US Senator from Illinois, warned that Lincoln was calling for “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states”. Seven years later more than 600,000 Americans from the north and the south had died fighting one another in 8000 fights including 384 major battles all over “America” but “the nation” survived whole and now free of slavery, although the man who had first proclaimed that a division existed in the union had been assassinated. There had certainly been political division over slavery but there had been no division at all in the “house” over the question of whether the 34 states of the union were sovereign or not. In 1861 all the states were sovereign but by 1865 state sovereignty as it existed before the war was gone, wiped off the American share of the North American continent by the Civil War along with slavery. 

Daniel McNeill

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Historians Rewrite American History

 No historical writer has ever stated the bare fact that a President of the United States had used in the Civil War an American army against Americans. Instead they busied themselves rewriting American history to make it fit harmoniously with the new direction Abraham Lincoln's revolution was taking the United States. Historians used two concepts to help fashion their postwar version of our history, “America” and “the nation”. “America” already existed before the first appearance on the east coast of  European immigrants. “America” transformed Europeans soon after their arrival on her shores into Americans. The English colonists from England who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were some of the first Americans and the political compact they agreed to on their ship, the Mayflower, before settling on the land was an embryo of democratic concepts that would one day be embodied in the US Constitution that established Washington as the head of “the nation”. American colonists in Massachusetts rebelled in 1695 for independent rule and, assembling an armed force of 1500 men, drove the British governor Andros out of Boston. This was the most important rebellion in “America” in early colonial times against British rule and was clearly, according to historians, the first rumblings of volcanic forces that would one day roar forth in a fiery blast and form “the nation”. Massachusetts’ colonists fired their rifles at the British army at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and killed or wounded nearly 200 British soldiers as they drove the enemy regiments back to the safety of Boston. This allowed historians to again jump on the “America” bandwagon and announce that the Massachusetts men had revolted in “America” to set up an independent government for “the nation”.  The Massachusetts men were American patriots and even before George Washington, a Virginian, came to Cambridge Massachusetts in 1775 to take command of their army, they had begun the American Revolution, the  bold event that showed the world the deep strength seething within the American heart and soul to found “the nation”. Samuel Adams, the firebrand organizer of the New England rebellion, instigated the Boston Tea Party, attended the first and second continental congresses in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Articles of Federation and supported the ratification of the Constitution by Massachusetts. Samuel Adams might have been elevated by historians to the level of a national hero like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson if he had not constantly and outspokenly made it clear to his fellow colonists that Massachusetts was his “country” and that he had led the rebellion against Britain in her name. We have records of him referring to Massachusetts as  his “country” as far back as an essay he wrote on liberty and sedition in 1748 at a time when he could not possibly be referring to “the nation”. In another essay in the Boston Gazette in 1771, he writes about “the liberties of our country”. His country, Massachusetts, had put an army in its fields, had issued its own currency, the Pine Tree Shilling, and had fought alone for three months with an army of over 20,000 men against a powerful European nation. Adams left behind too much written evidence that proved that he was not rebelling in the name of “the nation” so historians ignored him as best they could and some even wrote books deriding him as a crank.

Daniel McNeill

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L5IXSGO

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A Revolutionary Purpose

 The limited powers assigned to Washington by the Constitution, basically full power over the military and diplomacy and some limited legislative and juridical powers, could not possibly be sufficient for what Lincoln declared was a "national" government. American states had gambled that they could give up some of their sovereignty and yet remain sovereign. They attached 10 amendments to the Constitution before ratifying it. The tenth amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Clearly the Constitution is about delegating certain powers to a central government and this would certainly have been an odd way to set up a “national” government since the powers delegated are limited. Lincoln used the word “national” to describe the government he became president of in 1861 because his revolutionary purpose was to make the Federal Government a national government.

Daniel McNeill

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