Amerika

Democracy gets sticky when it comes down to the line because the voters rarely understand more than a general idea of what they are voting for. Bureaucrats take advantage of this by clumping unrelated issues together and loading up on symbolic issues like abortion and religion.

If you want to frame this election in simple terms, however, we have to go back to 1866 when the first Civil Rights Act was passed. It was unconstitutional, so they patched the Constitution four years later with the Fourteenth Amendment. This switched America from natural rights to civil rights.

These concepts require a bit of elucidation:

• Natural rights restrict government from removing your ability to do certain things. These are negative rights of the “thou shalt not” variety, commanding government to not infringe on your right to free speech, assembly/religion, gun ownership, and property without a court verdict.
• Civil rights empower government by granting it a mandate to provide certain things to all citizens. These are positive rights that require government to intervene in all affairs public and private to provide them, and requires that government tax citizens to do so, taking from some to give to others.

Civil rights was an attempt to limit States Rights, which were related to the first government of America, the Articles of Confederation from 1777:

This “first constitution of the United States” established a “league of friendship” for the 13 sovereign and independent states. Each state retained “every Power…which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States. The Articles of Confederation also outlined a Congress with representation not based on population – each state would have one vote in Congress.

Ratification by all 13 states was necessary to set the Confederation into motion. Because of disputes over representation, voting, and the western lands claimed by some states, ratification was delayed. When Maryland ratified it on March 1, 1781, the Congress of the Confederation came into being.

Just a few years after the Revolutionary War, however, James Madison and George Washington were among those who feared their young country was on the brink of collapse. With the states retaining considerable power, the central government had insufficient power to regulate commerce. It could not tax and was generally impotent in setting commercial policy. Nor could it effectively support a war effort. Congress was attempting to function with a depleted treasury; and paper money was flooding the country, creating extraordinary inflation.

The states were on the brink of economic disaster; and the central government had little power to settle quarrels between states. Disputes over territory, war pensions, taxation, and trade threatened to tear the country apart.

The Articles of Confederation provided for something closer to what the European Union is today: a loose alliance of semi-autonomous states, although the EU has a powerful administrative state power that the Articles of Confederation lacked entirely.

This turned out to be a problem because the States were issuing their own currency, using their own standards, and withholding money from the central coffers, as well as free to avoid joining in any war effort. This meant that the country did not function as a country, but more like a loose corporate association, and this made it weak.

States Rights was a doctrine that said that since the goal of the Constitution was for us to act as a nation-state and not a loose confederation, everything outside of that purpose was retained, including the Tenth Amendment rights granted to the states which limited federal power.

Many of us see how civil rights was a workaround to the Tenth Amendment more than anything else because it gave the federal government complete control over state government. If state rules did not fit the civil rights agenda, the feds would step and do things like forcibly integrate schools at gunpoint.

The 14A started slow but each generation forgot that the purpose was originally to stop slavery and Jim Crow (or similar conditions) from arising again, and gradually it became used in the way that Abraham Lincoln used government, more like a European semi-totalitarian state.

Since the 1940s, the civil rights agenda has swallowed up every other part of American law and been used to strengthen the federal government to absurd levels. Following the demise of the 10A, the administrative state — probably never Constitutional — arose and became the largest source of unelected bureaucrats in government.

When you are trying to find a specific place and driving along the many roads of this country, you often take a wrong turn. This will be followed by others as you try to get back on course. At some point, you simply retrace your steps to get to where you were before you made that wrong turn and try again.

The Democrat agenda is to accelerate the civil rights takeover to make a total state; the Republicans want to dial that back, soften civil rights back to its original intention, and rein in the administrative state and the Keynesian stimulus that is akin to socialism.

If we go down the path of civil rights any further, there will be no coming back, especially with the diversity swing vote excluding all politicians but Leftists as was always the intent. This is why this election is so important that refusing to vote is akin to treason.

Tags: 10A, 14A, 1A, 2A, articles of confederation, civil rights, constitution, diversity swing vote, natural rights, states' rights