The Name or the Thing?
by Clyde N. Wilson
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
“Political words of all others are the most indefinite, on account of the constant struggle of power to enlarge itself by tortured construction of terms.”
—John Taylor of Caroline
To have spent the better part of a working life as a historian studying Americans of earlier times has been a privilege. It is also a sorrowful experience from the constant reminder that the trajectory of our political life has been ineluctably downward from the great promise of the Founding. Of course, in the current historical fashion this is no problem because one is not concerned with understanding our forebears, only with illustrating how much more wise and righteous we are than those benighted people.
One of the things that the Fathers understood that has been lost is that in government one should look at the thing itself, not at the name. The Chinese People’s Republic is hardly that. Britain is in form a constitutional monarchy, but it is in fact a republic, in which elected representatives hold the sovereign power. (Sovereignty, the final unappealable authority in a system, is something of a fiction but a useful one.)
The United States started as a republican confederation. Today’s politicians, pundits, and judges will doubtless be astounded to learn that until the great consolidation war of 1861-1865, “United States” was always followed by a plural verb—in every law, treaty, proclamation, public speech, and private writing, i.e., we were the States United. That “United States” is now an artificial and awkward singular tells us quite a bit about our history.
We now think of ourselves as a democracy—presumably a form of government in which “the people” are sovereign. But what if we look at the thing itself rather than the name? How can the people be sovereign when the federal government is at this very moment displacing them, against their will, with a population of Third World coolie labour? Ah yes, you say, but the Congress elected by the people makes the laws. Really? When the people’s elected representatives are afraid to cross the President about anything important and always leave controversial matters to be decided by the Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court is the final authority over every act of state and local government and essentially over every aspect of the life of the people. That sounds like sovereignty to me. About the only thing they don’t have final decision over besides the President’s warmaking, is money. The New York bankers, i.e., the Federal Reserve, have the power to increase or decrease the value of money, which is a form of control over every aspect of private property. Sounds like a sovereign power to me.
To stretch a point, perhaps, there is the mass media. The unknown, unelected owners decide what matters may and may not be discussed, and on the matters on which discussion is allowed, they decide what range of opinions may be heard.
None of these institutions is in the slightest degree responsible to “We, the people.”
I recently noticed something about the U.S. Constitution that surprised even an antiquated Jeffersonian like me. The actual true name which that instrument carries on its face is “Constitution FOR the United States of America.” Constitution FOR, it seems to me to suggest something more of States’ Rights than Constitution OF, which is all we hear now. It suggests to me that the proper term should not be “United States Constitution” but “United States’ Constitution.”
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
1 Comment by Mark on 25 May 2007:
Good article. I’ve read your articles here and always like them. I’ve noticed that you always say Deep North as opposed to Deep South, that always seems wrong. It would be better if you said Far North which makes it sound like you are going up, to the North Pole.
2 Comment by Dan Smith on 26 May 2007:
Speaking of our money supply, something of a moral issue for sure, have you looked at Shadow Government Statistics at http://www.shadowstats.com? Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own data, but using the methodology of the pre-Clinton years, gives us an inflation rate of something over 10%, and not the 2.7% or so currently reported. That 10% itself is also unhinged from reality.
In the late 90s, Greenspan allowed a growth in credit to support the shennanigans on Wall Street, where trillions in wealth were transferred into the bank accounts of speculators from wage earners and retirees following the collapse of the market in March 2000. You’re too young to have to worry about social security, but you might be interested to know that M3, which gives a slightly more accurate picture of inflation, is no longer being reported by the government, and that based on (relatively) accurate inflation figures, social security checks today should be about twice their current amounts.
It’s ironic that so few people who truly care about the extinction of our most basic rights have any understanding of the crime occurring every day as the Fed floods credit into the hands of non-productive speculators on Wall Street who in turn fund, a la Soros, the most corrosive activist groups in this country. I’m no economist, although I majored in economics, but even I can see that the signs are too ominous to ignore.
When the party’s over, you really don’t want to be holding play money or banking on traditional investments to protect your capital against hyperinflation. The collapse of the dollar standard is now set in stone, thanks to all that compassionate deficit spending and the average person’s willingness to sell his grandchildren down the toilet for plastic and electonic trinkets from China.
There’s the (libertarian) argument that our trade deficit is exactly balanced by credits to our capital account, which is about as impressive as the bookkeeping at Enron. We transfer our assets to overseas creditors, but that’s OK since we get to enjoy all that plastic and electonic junk. Try explaining the most simple economic concept, like inflation, to your neighbor. Chances are he’ll be telling everyone you know that you’re some sort of crank. We’re headed for disaster.
3 Comment by Daniel J on 26 May 2007:
Greenspan swore in on the Talmud by the way…
4 Comment by Leon Haller on 28 May 2007:
Am I missing something here? A “bipartisan” group of Congressional traitors in the Senate is seriously pushing an immigration bill whose effect will be the final nail in the coffin of the Founders’ Republic, and yet there is nothing on this website about this gravest of issues other than a ‘pick-up’ syndicated column from Pat Buchanan.
Apparently, the writers at CHRONICLES think that Mary Cheney’s lesbian parenthood, the Iraq quagmire, the Lost Cause, and a few other matters are more important than the impending Latino racial conquest of the US. Unbelievable. And you call yourselves ‘conservatives’?
If Sam Francis were alive, this amnesty is all he would be writing about. But then Sam understood the REAL issues of our time, as the rest of the CHRONICLES stable obviously does not.
5 Comment by TJF on 28 May 2007:
The writers at Chronicles:
1) Do not constitute a cabal that thinks with one mind,
2) Do not offer knee-jerk reactions to every piece of public stupidity concocted by Congress, especially since many of them have time after time been predicting this very sell-out and have little to say except we told you so
3) Have been too busy putting together a new book, Immigration and the American Future, quite simply the best book ever written on immigratin, with important contributions by Chilton Williamson, Peter Brimelow, George Borjas, Wayne Allensworth, Ed Rubenstein, and myself among others.
4) Are spending this long weekend with wives and children who are more important to them than the predictable treason of US congressmen.
By the way, do not trust the so-called opponents of the new bill. Most of them are open-border advocates who are running scared after receiving threats from constituents.
There are lots of websites catering to the unstable minds of the great unwashed. They are not hard to find.
6 Comment by Bill Wilder on 28 May 2007:
Dr. Fleming,
I’d post a comment, but I’m laughing too hard at yours above to do so.
Cheers!
7 Comment by Allen Wilson on 29 May 2007:
There are times when I think that we need a cabal to come along that is of one mind, a cabal somehow able to militarily exert control over some part of this continent, institute an orthodox form of Christianity as a state church to the exclusion of all others and allowing only orthodox christians to serve in public offices or the military, institute classically based Christian education and forbidding all forms of education not so based, put down dissention, build a strategically located capital, persecute and eradicate all non-Christian religions in it’s territory except for Judaism, destroy all secular ideologies, and send missionaries all over the continent. Constantinople II, perhaps? Many may not wish to live in such a society, but I would much rather serve such a state in any capacity than the one we ‘live’ under now.
Seriously, perhaps we need to look at the beliefs of the founders and the later Confederate founders and discern which of their principles were applicable only to their own time and place (such as laws forbidding primal geniture?), and which are universal and timeless, applicable to most any Christian society even if they have to be modified according to time and place (the works of Calhoun?). We must make every effort to ensure that the second group of principles are passed on to later generations so they can be known to those who rebuild civilisation on the ruins of ours. Clearly, the points that Dr Wilson has made here must be passed on to that generation, along with the true story of the American and Southern republics and the destruction of those republics and following 150 year long decline and eventual fall of society.
8 Comment by Ronald Kyser on 29 May 2007:
“Britain is in form a constitutional monarchy, but it is in fact a republic, in which elected representatives hold the sovereign power.”
In what sense can a disarmed people constitute a republic? Unless “republic” is merely a Latin synonym of the Greek “democracy”.
9 Comment by Lee on 30 May 2007:
If the USA is being run by the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve (all of whose members are vetted and proposed by the same invisible elite), and which I don’t doubt, then we have an oligarchy run by a few for the benefit of a few with a congress and 2-4-6 year election cycles for distraction (entertainment). It seems increasingly apparent to me that the most prophetic book of the 20th or late 19th century is Time Machine — guess which group we are being groomed to be.
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