The millions of us who will vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have been told now for five generations since Abraham Lincoln that the government in Washington is a national government and that the President is the leader of a nation. President Lincoln decided that his government was national and he used his absolute power over the military to wage war against Americans living in 11 states. At least 600,000 Americans died in 384 major battles. After his extraordinary political machinations and his victory in the war, there was no going back to a union of sovereign states as it existed before the war.Too much blood had been shed. There had to be a reason for it. President Lincoln had to have been right morally and politically. No nation existed before the war nor one afterwards but there had to be one. Most historians writing American history threw objectivity out the window and searched for evidence of an American nation all the way back to 1620 when a small group of English colonists arrived at Plymouth in Massachusetts. The concept of a nation helped politicians stuff a lot of money in their pockets and they cared nothing about this or that word describing America or this or that use of history as long as they had power. A nation was born. It had to exist to keep more and more power heading to Washington and away from the states.
So whom should we vote for to lead the nation? We have to vote for the candidate who can best pretend for four years to be a leader of a nation and meanwhile diligently do the real job of an American president by leading the world. Foreigners all believe the United States is both a nation and a de facto world government. They do not see any conflict between the two roles which are logically obverse. They have a world government in Washington that guarantees their existence as nations. We Americans have no government in Washington leading us as a nation and we do not generally in our work-a-day lives accept that it is also a world government that goes on lickety-split all over the world eagerly trying to manage as benevolently as possible everyone but us. We will listen as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hurl invectives at each other and argue not a bit about real national issues as though there were none. Our votes in November will decide who leads the world. The nation will go on just as Abraham Lincoln bequeathed it to us. We will go on each of us living in one of our fifty sovereign states believing because of our unshakable loyalty to Washington and because of our love for a glorious and profoundly revolutionary political system that our America with citizens of every racial and national origin speaking countless worldwide languages is our nation.
Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at
Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.
Also available as a book for $5.99.
A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between
a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother
46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five
In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right
from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it
can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected
and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards
one liberating ending to all its beginnings.
Daniel McNeill
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