THE DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA?
R. A. Schultz
MY TAKE: Here’s something to ruminate: The bedwetting leftists in this country currently bewail the “fact” that President Trump is dividing the country. Those of us who know even a modicum of American history know that this is unadulterated horsepucky.
Long before We the People got together to form A More Perfect Union, Americans were divided. Long before we commenced our insurrection against the mother country, there were those who thought Mommy could do no wrong and there were those who resented the hell out of the way Mommy treated us, the Colonies. This slowly morphed into the three-way division of loyalists, revolutionaries, and those who simply didn’t give a flip!
Ultimately, many of the loyalists fled to Canada and the various Caribbean islands as well as back to their British Isles origins. Those who simply didn’t give a flip continued to vegetate in place. Those resentful SOB’s ultimately kicked the living daylights out of Mommy and threw her down the stairs at Yorktown.
But new divisions arose along wholly new fault lines. The former Colonies, now sovereign States, went about pursuing their own interests separately under a very weak central government of the United States provided by the Articles of Confederation. More morphing occurred into those who thought the central government under the Articles was much too weak to be effective and those who thought things were just fine the way they were. Ultimately, those who favored a stronger central government won out, and the Constitution was born, but the division continued between what ultimately morphed into the statist versus individualist paradigm which, with varied interim convolutions, continues to this day.
The Constitution seemed fine at first to most, but not to early libertarians like Patrick Henry (who, if I had lived in his era, would have been my very close drinking buddy!). But then, early on, indeed, only some thirteen years into the life of the Constitution, the Supreme Court created out of whole cloth (Marbury v. Madison, 1803) the doctrine of “Judicial Review,” drawing unto itself powers which the founders never intended nor foresaw.
Statism continued to grow gradually, the central government increasing its power and scope until, in 1861, several sovereign states had had enough and voted to sever their ties with the other states and with the increasingly dominant central government, ultimately joining together as a separate national entity, the Confederate States of America. The statists, under Abraham Lincoln, realizing full well that the remaining United States of America could not long survive without the revenue provided by the departing Southern States, elected to invade the Confederacy, ultimately conquering a sovereign nation and forcing it back into the so-called Union. To this day, a good many of the wounds inflicted by this invasion and its aftermath, “the Reconstruction,” endure in the South.
Today, a Left-Right dichotomy has arisen from the remains of the country following the War of the Northern Aggression (known to some as the “American Civil War”, interrupted only briefly at intermittent intervals by external attacks from various mutually-abhorrent sources. This dichotomy takes the form of those favoring greater and more highly concentrated central government power versus those who favor greater individual liberty. The division began to manifest itself in the 1960’s and has only recently, during the eight- year reign of the ultra-leftists under Barack Obama, reached critical mass. Today, this division seriously threatens that “union” which, to realists has always been tenuous at best, with total disintegration. Indeed, many serious political scientists have concluded that the current “union” is geopolitically much too diverse to remain in existence as a single republic, suggesting various divisions into smaller units. Individual state secession has evolved from a humorous fantasy into a serious consideration, witness current secessionist movements in such states as California, Texas, and Florida.
During the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, the secessionist movements in Texas and Florida lost a considerable amount of pressure and forward momentum and that in California became virulent, with the election to the presidency of Donald Trump. Whether or not the Trump presidency will succeed in reunifying the country remains to be seen, but it would certainly be of benefit to all concerned if certain influences could be eliminated. Specifically, those who advocate the New World Order need to be somehow silenced, in and of itself a truly Herculean task!
