Divide and Conquer

Keep people fighting with each other, and they'll never notice you're screwing them over.

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Divide and Conquer

This essay is maybe for me as much or more as it is for the reader.  So read on, at your own risk.

We had ourselves a constitution as of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.  It was not universally agreed upon. It was not unanimously praised, even by its creators, as the best thing that ever happened. It would not be ratified by all of the states for another three years.

And keep in mind that the constitutional convention was called by the states, not The People. The document that created the federal government was written by men representing their respective states. Each representative was there to represent only the People of his state, not all Americans. There is no elected official whose job it is to represent all of the People.

Factions had existed even before the Revolutionary War, and now they were developing harder edges.  They would eventually gel into what are now the Democratic and Republican parties.  Many are aware that there has been much morphing as the two parties have pushed and shoved to gain control of the states and of the federal government.  And I hope that everyone is aware that the two parties are dedicated to shaping our opinions, not the other way around. They do not support us, we support them.  Our ‘democracy’ consists only of being able to choose which we will support.

There are libraries full of books on how the two parties have morphed, and I have read some of them. Even expert historians can’t sort it all out. But I think I’ve found a common thread that shows some continuity through it all.

Let’s start with those two main factions, which I will greatly oversimplify by saying that they consisted of a state’s rights (weak federal government) faction led by Thomas Jefferson, and the strong central government faction led by James Madison. Those two factions exist still today, but some say the two parties have switched positions.  I’m not so sure.

Still keeping it simple, Thomas Jefferson and his allies created what is now the Democratic party; James Madison and his allies created what is now the Republican party. George Washington, for his part, warned that political parties could destroy our government.  Boy, was HE prescient!

So, Jefferson was for state’s rights (anti federalist), and was a founding democrat. James Madison was a federalist, and a Republican.  Have the parties switched? Is the democratic party now the party of strong central government, and the Republican the Party of state’s rights?  To some extent, yes.  But with a caveat.

The Republican party always favored individual rights and self-determination.  But it doesn’t break down as rich v. poor or black v. white.  It’s just individual rights, for everyone. People fail to realize that it was the Republican party that pushed to eliminate slavery, eliminate the property ownership requirement for voting, and campaigned for woman’s suffrage.  These are historical facts, largely lost in the muddle of revisionist history.

What about Jefferson and his Democratic party’s state’s rights? That gets tricky.  Yes, he insisted on maintaining state’s rights, but his ideal state had top-down oligarchy as its basis.  Jefferson was himself an oligarch.  Generally, plantations were their own government. Plantation owners appointed the judge, the sheriff, the county government, and controlled every aspect of government.  So, Jefferson’s state’s rights were the antithesis of individual rights. Understand that people such as Jefferson considered their oligarchic government to be a responsibility as much as a right. No good oligarch mistreats his subjects.  Yet, they are subjects.  This feudal form of government had been imported directly from England.  If you’ve watched Downton Abbey, you’ve seen what I consider to be a fairly accurate depiction of the feudal lifestyle in the modern day.  It was the same, in essence, in Jefferson’s day.

Today, we have a democratic party that promotes The People, but it is still an oligarchy. The democratic party leaders, as in Jefferson’s time, lead from the top down, for the ‘good of the people’, whether they like it or not. 

Today’s republican party, as in Madison’s time, seeks validation from the citizenry.  It seeks its authority from the citizenry. If you really think about it, and I hope you will, this largely accounts for the disconnect between party loyalists today. In a broad sense, democrats can not comprehend that Republicans don’t embrace top-down government. They assess the Republican support for Trump and the rejection of socialist federal programs as unforgivable transgressions against the sanctity of oligarchal government. On the other hand, Republicans can not fathom democrat fealty to leaders who act as aristocratic authoritarians who tell us what we should accept rather than ask what we want. Republicans see the constitution and rule of law as the ultimate protection from factionalism and mob rule. Democrats see the constitution and rule of law as malleable entities, subject to the whims of the ‘current thing’ as presented to them by the oligarchs.

I would not embarrass myself by insisting that this is always the case, all the time; I am greatly generalizing here. But when you stand back and look at the big picture from a distance (the forest, not just the trees), that is what I see. Our state governments are supposed to be under direct control of their citizens, and the federal government under direct control of the states.  Jefferson and Madison, and all members of the constitutional convention agreed on that.  That is what the states ratified.

Nobody ratified political parties. Nobody appointed them to be proxies in representational government.  They are illegitimate. But they are here. I will fight continually to weaken them.  The contention which we see today is the direct result of the two parties, not of We the People. Divide and conquer has worked against other people in other times.  Don’t let it work here; not now, not ever.

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