Federalists, Whigs and Progressives

As our imperious head of state takes his most recent ill-timed vacation and the stock market falls, the ranks of unemployed Americans grows, and crises and commotions remain unresolved the dustbin of history is being prepared.

Anger at failed leftist policies and leadership from the American black left in the guise of Representative Maxine Waters of the Black Congressional Caucus and the growing American black right as represented by Congressman Allen West of Florida appear to show that a flash point has been reached.

The founders used the term “experiment in self-government” to describe the new nation they had created because they had no expectation that it would be permanent, only a hope that it would be. The founders understood that nothing is stable across the ages but for change – therefore, they made our system of government flexible.

Maxine Water’s legitimate abandonment complaints about the president’s recent big-black-bus tour across several mid-western states were that no black communities had been visited. Allen West said on August 18th “I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman to kind of lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility.” Congressman West was referring to the Democratic party and the failed liberal policies that it espouses by his use of the term “plantation”. Both West and Waters, representatives of black America from two opposing political worldviews agree on this point that the Democratic party and its progressive liberal policies have been a great disappointment, if not a complete failure.

The simultaneous disaffection and anger of Waters and West (and those they represent) signals an end to the paradigm of the Democratic party as the sole political defender of the black community and thus the likely demise of the now definitively failed political ideologies of progressivism and fantasist Utopianism.

West’s controversial yet sophisticated and insightful reverse invocation of slavery references could signal a massive shift in the ongoing American political discussion. Public acknowledgment and criticism of intellectual slavery can best be seen as a “fire-bell in the night” signifying the beginning of its end.

Disaffection with progressive leaders and policies among the Left’s longtime black American core supporters and beneficiaries as well as a growing revolt among black Americans (elucidated by Rep. West) who are embracing more fiscally and socially conservative views and thus rejecting progressivism means that progressive liberalism is now in existential crisis.

As our national economic disaster and our impossible-to-defend foreign policy (sending trillions in monetary aid and military support to others while our own people and country fail) continue with no end in sight, the black community suffers more than most through a higher unemployment rate.

While the president absents himself on Martha’s Vineyard there is a growing feeling of abandonment and failure in our country. It is now clear that the black community, long stalwart supporters of Democrats, is not immune to these feelings.

A Utopian approach to policy and governance has three problems:

1. There is no Utopia.
2. Utopian programs (here and abroad) are now definitively shown to be unaffordable, non-pragmatic, and generally neither fiscally sound nor in synch with how humans live with themselves and interact with one another.
3. See #1.

The ongoing crisis in the EU shows that the Utopian approach has failed in Europe; riots in London and Greece are not only founded upon failed immigration policies but upon a culture of Utopian fantasies and entitlement that fails to foster self-reliance, responsibility, or respect for others. The lessons of the EU collapse are clear: A culture that will not work that does not value itself over others will fail.

The American people are suffering. Those currently in power appear little concerned over such matters. Their imperiousness, obtuseness, and obvious lack of compassion for the suffering of the people are the signals that the dustbin of history is being prepared.

In every generation there are those who will not heed the lessons of history or of current events. Our present collapse must be reversed; the only way to do this is to reject the failed Utopian political ideology whose lack of pragmatism and flexibility brought this failure and collapse to both the United States and to the EU.

There will always be people who believe “communism is a good system and was never really implemented correctly”; that we are and ought to be responsible for the general welfare of all, even those who enter the country illegally; that ours is a country of niceness and openness and that any preference for “Americans” is a backward nativism and ignorance; that we are all citizens of the world; that all cultures, religions and ideologies are equivalent. People holding these demonstrably failed beliefs, in future, will have difficulty getting elected to any public office.

A renewal of Jeffersonian-connectedness to government is necessary. Jefferson feared that if the people lost their connection to and direct involvement with self-government the experiment of the United States would fail. Jefferson’s opposition to Federalism was founded upon this idea of decentralization of power, which he believed would secure both the rights and liberties of the people and the States.

While Federalism supported a strong central government and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans favored a decentralized approach the irony is that while there are no longer Federalists (nor Whigs), the party founded by Jefferson now upholds a world view more akin to Federalism than to Jefferson.

The great test of a political view is not only its moral foundation but its pragmatism. We are entering a challenging new phase, again.

There is no Utopia, there are only hard decisions that now must be made based upon our desire to safe guard the American experiment. The founders gave us the perfect tool for the job – the United States Constitution.

If the current administration is rejected in a landslide in the next presidential election that would be, to me, a signal of the end of leftist progressivism in the United States as a legitimate political viewpoint.

When the Federalists led by John Adams were voted out of office and replaced by Jefferson in the hotly contested election of 1800, the horror from the losing side was real, but over-stated, as it almost always is. Edward Ellis, in his “Character Sketch of Thomas Jefferson” puts the reality succinctly.

A favorite warning on the part of those who see their ideas threatened with overthrow is that our country is “trembling on the verge of revolution.” … According to these wild pessimists the revolution is always at hand, but somehow or other it fails to arrive. The probabilities are that it has been permanently side-tracked.

The revolution now occurring is nothing less than the overthrow of long held Utopian fantasies and impracticalities and a return to a more pragmatic and realistic American politics. In 1782 Jefferson wrote this:

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

The imperiousness of our national leadership, its disconnectedness, callousness, obtuseness, myriad failed policies, and rigidity of thought are the signals that its time is approaching.

The dustbin of history is never full, there’s lots of room.