Sunday, August 16, 2015

An Unique Political System

   America never was able to become a nation because its central government is not a state. President Lincoln declared in his first inaugural address on March 4 1861 that his government was national. That was the start of his political revolution. The war that he began and won using a northern group of states against a southern group transferred more power to the central government. After the war new territories opened up in the west that could have become colonies instead of states if the Washington government had been itself a state. The European colonies were all created by national states. The sovereignty of a nation was transferred directly to each colony by appointing a governor as its sovereign. Washington was neither fully sovereign nor a state and as a result did not possess a sovereign power that could be transferred. Article lV section 3 of the Constitution gives Congress power to admit new states. Washington therefore organized the new territories by admitting them as states which automatically gave them limited sovereignty. That was the beginning of Washington’s destiny as a worldwide unifying power. From then on it either penetrated foreign states and forced them to adopt its political and economic values or else it admitted states to its union of states with limited sovereignty. Along with its reach worldwide for power it constantly sought more power in America over the united states. It gained power by amending the Constitution to further limit the powers of the states but this still was far from the attainment of full sovereignty. Americans in the period just after the Civil War understood the difficulty involved in changing America to a nation. They wanted as little as possible to do with Washington and they considered it a grave moral weakness, almost a sinful condition. if anyone expected anything from it. More than 20 million European and Asian immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1920. They came from nations and believed they had settled in a nation. That helped Washington’s push towards nationhood but it remained nonetheless the powerful government of a union of states without being itself a state. The 14th amendment to the Constitution says that an American is a citizen of the state where he resides and also a citizen of the United States. We have the powerful political freedom of double citizenship but we cannot ever live in a fully sovereign state or ever be citizens of a central government that is a state. It is impossible under such circumstances to believe we live in a nation. Our loyalty to Washington should be unbreakable but however strong our attachment to it nothing can make it a nation like other nations.
Magna Carta in 1215 began the long struggle in the English-speaking world to establish by law the individual rights of citizens but neither England nor any other nation ever struck a powerful blow against sovereignty itself. The American Constitution slices sovereignty into two parts. The  federal government has its part and the states have theirs. Except in military and diplomatic matters, where Washington is supreme, sovereignty is exercised piecemeal. We can challenge and possibly overturn in federal and state courts every law passed by our 51 legislatures. Our 51 partially sovereign governments are all split into three branches, executive, legislative and judicial. Only a political party with a majority in the federal legislature and all state legislatures can act with something close to full sovereignty. Otherwise everything happens politically in thousands of governments, local, county, state, and federal exercising each only pieces of our sovereignty. Americans should be proud of their unique political system that allows them to live free from the merciless dead weight of absolute national sovereignty. If they need a name for their system, they should stop naming it a nation and look at its name printed on our money: The United States.

Daniel McNeill

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