What If It Isn't Working

I fear that despite the best efforts of elected people, Washington may be permanently ensconced in its form and can never be undone.

There’s always a moment for a child when they realize that what they think about the world isn’t reality. It could be when they find out Santa Claus is really a parent, or the Easter Bunny doesn’t hide eggs in the middle of the night, but somewhere along the way, an intersection of disappointment and shock collide and shatter the illusions of childhood. I can’t remember when it was for me, but somewhere in my youth, those moments turned the dial from childhood to adulthood one more notch - and eventually, all of the illusions of childhood are gone.

These last few weeks, and especially on the heels of my time in Colonial Williamsburg, I have wondered if America is at that same moment in its lifespan. I have always been a true believer that our Declaration and Constitution are brilliant and timeless documents that changed the course of history forever. They set billions of people free from tyrannical rule by oligarchs and monarchs and helped create a Western world that has lifted humanity out from under despotism and poverty. The robust life that Liberty awards has forever changed the trajectory of mankind. I still believe that, but it has started to feel more like an apologue of childhood than a plausible and functional way to hold a country together.

There is a lot of evidence that what the United States has become is the inevitable degrading of human nature’s impact upon the best-laid plans. I picked up a pamphlet that the printer in Williamsburg had made that was the original constitution for the United States, the Articles of Confederation. I ashamedly had never read all of it. I had been told by the expert class that it was dysfunctional and had to be changed for its lack of ability to create a strong enough federal government for the United States to function. I took them at their word and moved on to my veneration of the existing Constitution. The divine had looked down upon Philadelphia and created a government so perfect as to almost be scriptural. But as I read the Articles, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of disappointment that the founders hadn’t had a little more patience with their original version. Their skepticism of government is much greater in the Articles. You can see it. They wanted to assure the states that they were autonomous and free to govern themselves. The intent of the Union was not a monolithic leviathan but a chord of friendship for trade, standardized monies and measurements, defense, and the goodwill of cooperation. Nowhere in the document is an insistence that the government they are joining in with is to be the be-all and end-all of governance. It restrains the powers of the federal government in much greater ways than the current Constitution. Admittedly, I was not alive to deal with the ills or frustrations that the Articles were causing that drove Madison and Hamilton back to the drawing board to scrap the whole thing and start over, so perhaps my views are jaded by what we live under today, but I think they made a terrible miscalculation in tossing out the sovereignty of the states for the temptation of a more centralized government.

Historically, the problems with the Constitution and the new federal powers began immediately. The Whiskey Rebellion happened just five years into the existence of the new Constitution. My old buddy, Alexander Hamilton, decided to levy a tax on whiskey and convinced Congress to pass it. Whiskey, for the people of the backwoods, was how they could store their grain in bumper crop years. They could convert it to a distilled spirit and preserve the fruits of their fields. For most, it became an informal currency that enabled trade and preservation of value on crops that would have otherwise been wasted. Mr. Hamilton convinced President Washington that their disobedience to pay the tax was an insurrection and needed to be put down. So, President Washington, in the only moment like it in our history, rode out with an army of men as commander-in-chief to quell the rebellion. It asserted the government’s dominance over the states and the people for their disobedience to federal laws. While I am certain the Articles had their issues, the use of force upon the country’s own people was not one that ever showed up. Somewhere in this mix, we have been convinced as people that the brute force enabled by the Constitution was preferable to a perceived weakness of the Confederation.

In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson ushered in an era of Republicanism and diminished the role of the Federal Government, the next 24 years established a more Federalist style of governance. The states had autonomy and were given deference in most instances of confrontation between themselves and the Federal Government. It lasted that way until the Civil War. While I am certain that bad ideas and terrible treatment of people happened under this decentralized concept, it was likely the purest form of our Federal Government as conceptualized by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The states had autonomy, and the only real battles of frustration during that time came as a result of punitive tariffs placed upon the South for their crops. The southern states spent most of their existence in the Federal Government, advocating for their trade positions and lack of say in the taxation between the states.

In 1860, after the election of Abraham Lincoln, many of the southern states decided that they had had enough and that they were no longer willing to participate in the Union that had been created by the States in the Constitution. The South’s perspective was that the states had made the compact that created the Federal Government, not the other way around. Contrary to popular belief today, this was not just a discussion over slavery. This was a boiling point over taxes, trade, and their own sovereignty as a state. We have to unwind our present-day thinking to truly understand what their secession was about. Most people at that time thought of themselves as Virginians or New Yorkers. They rarely ever said that they were from the United States. They saw their individual states as a country unto itself - just as France might see themselves as a part of Europe, but that they were distinctly different than someone from Germany. The people of this country saw their membership of a state as their nationality. We must remember that most people never traveled more than twenty miles from their home in their lives. The world was smaller, and their affiliation with their state was their identity as a people group. Even though there was a common language that most of the people in each state spoke, a Virginian saw themselves as completely different than a South Carolinian. Prior to the Civil War, the proper use of the plural was used when referring to the United States. They would say, “The United States are” whereas today, we don’t hesitate to say, “The United States is,” which is technically grammatically incorrect.

After the war and the utter destruction of the South, the Republicans, who were led by progressive radicals like Thaddeus Stevens, brought the South to heel and eliminated the autonomy of the states forever. The vision of the United States changed, and instead of a federalized system of autonomous states working towards cooperation, it was forever changed into a monolith of power. The Federal Government would always have the final say, and if disagreements or incongruent laws between the states or the federal government came into question, there was always one winner: the government in Washington.

So why go through all of that old history? Because I think it shapes our mythology. As patriotic Americans, we have high hopes for our country, and we project the great leaders into a story that we all want to believe exists. We speak of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln all as people who helped usher America toward a horizon of greatness. We think that we live under the pretense of the Declaration, and we proudly hail our rights to speech and liberty. But if we are honest with ourselves, the country we think we live in does not exist. With each new paper that comes out from the JFK files or the tangled web of payments that people like Elon Musk or

DataRepublican

find, there is a sad reality casting a shadow over our illusion. We don’t have a functioning government that is created by the will of the people. We have a shadow government that allows us to cling to our myths and yet run itself as antithetically as it can to the one that is supposedly created from the Constitution.

I use the Lysander Spooner quote often,

“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”

We have a system that isn’t what we think it is, and in a sad admittance for me personally, the one I want to believe exists bears no resemblance to the one I realize I live under. I worked as much as I could to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. win the presidency. Of all those running, he spoke about the American mythology I want to believe exists. He spoke on the Constitution and the need to play by those rules as they had been written. Yet, as the Trump team has moved its way into the seat of government, it becomes evident that all of my hopes to restore America to a place more in line with what I want it to be is as foolish as believing in Santa. This system we have is entirely corrupted. No one, not even the wrecking ball of Trump, can undo this. The machine is designed to survive and continue its terrible meddling all over the world. It will not acquiesce to the political class. To them, that is a theater as fake as a superhero movie. They can send out Bernie Sanders and AOC to Greeley, Colorado, and rabble-rouse the people for the optics, but deep in the bowels of the system, the sausage continues to be made.

There needs to be a different solution than looking to Washington to fix itself. It’s like asking a criminal to police itself. The cancer of human nature has corrupted the systems of government so fully and with so much disdain for the citizens that I don’t think it can ever be fixed by the votes or will of the people. We are in a deciding time, and while I had high hopes that this administration could do the fixing, it is becoming clear that they will be given a few victories along the way, but nothing systemic will change. I continue to see the most lasting “success” in the work that Mr. Kennedy is doing, but for most of us, the pace at which it has to proceed is painful. He gets to have victories around food and baby formula (all of which I fully support), but any discussions about mRNA vaccines or a change to the schedule will be thwarted by the mercantile interests that run our country. The system is built on the interests of the corporations and those that run the machine from deep inside the depths of the Washington lair.

I have no illusion that, at this moment, those interests are willing to back down. They will pay off conservative influencers to make sure that Soda is now an essential liberty and that taxpayers should still make sure they do all the dirty work for the corporations. It’s a bad system. The Constitution, liberty language, or the Declaration are all just window dressings. We have an adult moment to wake up to. Santa isn’t real, and neither is the United States of America as we want it to be.

What are the solutions? I’d start with an honest assessment. As we close in on 250 years of celebrating the United States and the Declaration of Independence, we would be wise to understand how much of that is still left. We should be brutally honest about that, too. If we read the grievances, it is very self-evident that the same tendencies of the King in 1776 are right at our doorstep today. They may be worse because of surveillance and technological capabilities. We have to stop believing that the myth exists. We have been the willing accomplices in Washington’s ability to continue its abuse. Every time we wave the Constitution or talk about our rights and freedoms but go right along with their next mandate, tax policy, eye scanner at the airport, or any other host of totalitarian controls, we play right into the theater they hope for. There will have to come a time of civil disobedience in all of this. We may have to band together to not pay taxes or to ignore their edicts. We should insist on a lack of centrality and consolidation. We need to assert those kinds of behaviors if we talk about constitutions or freedoms. Otherwise, we are actors in their play and will live as illusionary a life as can be concocted.

All of the discussions should be on the table. A disbanding of the federal government, a rewrite of the constitution, and a broken-up United States into, say, 50 smaller countries should all be open for discussion. The machine survives on our willful participation and lack of willingness to hold anyone in the bureaucracy accountable. Politicians are powerless to change the machine, so the only way to fix it is to toss sand in the gears, one action at a time, and stop celebrating myths.