The Founding Fathers' Coup d'État: The US Constitution Led Us To Where We Are Today (USPolitics)
submitted by FalseRealityCheck to USPolitics 3.1 years ago
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Below are excerpts from this article: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/albert-jay-nock/the-founding-fathers-coup-detat/. I edited it in an attempt to make it shorter and easier to read/comprehend. Note: [Brackets] are text I inserted.
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The revolution of 1776–1781 converted thirteen provinces...into thirteen autonomous political units, completely independent...formally held together...by the Articles of Confederation.
...State power was well centralized...it was not centralized in the federation, but in the federated unit.
...many leading citizens...found this distribution of power unsatisfactory...a considerable compact group of economic interests...stood to profit by a redistribution...
...American economic interests had fallen into two grand divisions, the special interests...made common cause with a view to capturing control of the political means.
One division comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor interests, with their natural allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press. [elites] The other comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally.
General conditions under the Articles of Confederation were pretty good.
Some tinkering with the Articles seemed necessary... The chief trouble was with the federation’s weakness in view of the chance of war, and...debts due to foreign creditors.
But the general scheme [decentralization]...was...objectionable to the interests grouped in the first grand division. ...the national scheme was...more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer centralization of control over the political means.
The farmers and the debtor class in general...were not interested in these considerations...were strongly for letting things stay, for the most part, as they stood.
They were agreeable to...modification of the Articles...but not to setting up a national replica of the British merchant-State....
These [elite] classes aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale; and the interests grouped in the second division [non-elite] saw that what this would really come to was a shifting of the incidence of economic exploitation upon themselves.
...[Alexander] Hamilton, in 1780, objected to the Articles...and proposed the calling of a constitutional convention...[But the non-elite] turned the cold shoulder; as they did again to Washington’s letter to the local governors three years later, in which he adverted to the need of a strong coercive central authority.
...[In 1787] a constitutional convention was assembled, on the distinct understanding that it should do no more than revise the Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to make them “adequate to the exigencies of the nation,” and on the further understanding that all the thirteen units should assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in short, that the method of amendment provided by the Articles themselves should be followed.
Neither understanding was fulfilled.
The convention was made up wholly of men representing the economic interests of the first division. The great majority of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were public creditors; one-third were land-speculators; some were money-lenders; one-fifth were industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of them were lawyers.
They planned and executed a coup *d’État*, simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket, and drafting a constitution *de novo*, with the audacious provision that it should go into effect when ratified by nine units instead of by all thirteen.
Moreover, with like audacity, they provided that the document should not be submitted either to the Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go direct to a popular vote! [Democracy!]
...in order to secure ratification by even the nine necessary units, the document had to conform to certain very exacting and difficult requirements.
The task of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the earlier architects who had designed the structure of the British merchant-State...they had to contrive something that could pass muster as showing a good semblance of popular sovereignty, without the reality. [Say on thing; do another.]
Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention’s purpose was “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction [i.e., a democratic faction], and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”
...the constitution emerged...as a compromise-document…
[But] It was not strong and definite...the interests composing the first division, led by Alexander Hamilton, saw that it was not sufficient of itself to fix them in anything like a permanent impregnable position to exploit...the groups composing the second division.
...to establish the degree of centralization requisite to their purposes — certain lines of administrative management must be...established...[and made] permanent. The further task...was to “administration” the constitution into such absolutist modes as would secure economic supremacy...by...political means, to the groups which made up the first division.
For the first ten years of its existence the constitution remained in the hands of its makers for administration in directions most favourable to their interests.
...for these ten critical years “the machinery of economic and political power was mainly directed by the men who had conceived and established it.”
Washington, who had been chairman of the convention, was elected President. Nearly half the Senate was made up of men who had been delegates, and the House of Representatives was largely made up of men who had to do with the drafting or ratifying of the constitution. Hamilton, Randolph and Knox, who were active in promoting the document, filled three of the four positions in the Cabinet; and all the federal judgeships, without a single exception, were filled by men who had a hand in the business of drafting, or of ratification, or both.
Of all the legislative measures enacted...the one best calculated to ensure a rapid and steady progress in the centralization of political power was the judiciary Act of 1789.
This measure created a federal supreme court of six members (subsequently enlarged to nine), and a federal district court in each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal oversight of state legislation by the familiar device of “interpretation,” whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or judicial action which for any reason it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional.
One feature of the Act...made the tenure of all these federal judgeships appointive, not elective, and for life; thus marking almost the farthest conceivable departure from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.
The [fourth] chief justice [of the Supreme Court] was...John Marshall [1801–1835] who...arbitrarily extended judicial control over both the legislative and executive branches of the federal authority; thus effecting as complete and convenient a centralization of power as the various interests concerned in framing the constitution could reasonably have contemplated.
Nowhere in the history of the constitutional period do we find the faintest suggestion of the Declaration’s doctrine of natural rights; and we find its doctrine of popular sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but constitutionally estopped from ever reappearing.
Nowhere do we find a trace of the Declaration’s theory of government; on the contrary, we find it expressly repudiated.
The new political mechanism was a faithful replica of the old disestablished British model...improved and strengthened...more close-working and efficient...presenting incomparably more attractive possibilities of capture and control.
By consequence...we find more firmly implanted than ever the same general idea of the State...the idea of an organization of the political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful agency standing always ready to be put into use for the service of one set of economic interests as against another.
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TL;DR: The US Constitution was designed to subvert the ideals of the revolution and concentrate power into the hand of a ruling oligarchy. Consequently, all the talk about "getting back to the Constitution" will not bring about the freedoms desired in the revolution or the freedoms sought today. We need a new document.
