Meditations on

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Is the balance of power in America moving back to the people?

Many of the Republican pundits in the #NeverTrump movement have been very keen to point out that the US is a Republic, not a pure democracy, and that the GOP itself should have ultimate deciding power to choose their own party's nominee. Not the voting public.

Of course all of these pundits were happy to parade and extoll the virtues of democracy as long as the voters were doing what they wanted them to do, but when the party's base revolted and decided to nominate a vulgarian billionaire with a penchant for humiliating the party's actual leaders many of these pundits felt the need to put the voters back in their place.

This was a massive mistake, of course, and simply resulted in Trump wrapping up the race with yet another landslide victory in Indiana. You don't convince voters to do what you want by demeaning their choices and suggesting that perhaps power should be more concentrated in the hands of the elite, particularly when anti-elite sentiment is already driving the choices you don't like.

But few have accused Republican pundits of being the best strategic thinkers in the biz.

Anyways they happen to be right about at least one thing, the Republican system established by the founding fathers was designed in emulation of the Roman Republic before it fell, and like most all forms of government, the Roman Republic was ultimately an oligarchy.

Sure the people would vote and Roman citizens were afforded particular powers and privileges (including the right to go die with the legions while expanding the Republic into an empire) but the major decisions and power was wielded by the ruling class.

The same was true for the US Republic established by the founding fathers, which was ruled by elites. The history of our nation's politics can largely be understood as representing struggles between a few elites for control of the helm and that history is important for contextualizing what is happening in the current US election.

The original American elites

One thing that used to puzzle me about American history was how so many brilliant men ended up in the original colonies. Growing up you always get the impression that the original colonists were simple-minded peasants who were fleeing England in order to have a chance at a better life in a new world. From there the cream rose to the crop and "survival of the fittest" enabled some great men to emerge later on such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and George Washington.

Then I learned about the massive role that genetics play in human abilities and began to wonder how it was that America ended up with so many highly intelligent and gifted people.

The answer can apparently be found in a book called "Albion's seed" by David Fischer, which I've personally only read spark notes about. The four main Anglo-Saxon groups that defined original American settlement and still influence culture today include:

The Puritans
The Quakers
The Cavaliers
The Borderers

The Puritans were evidently not the simple-minded fundamentalists you tend to imagine from your public education but came from the educated, upper-middle class ranks of England. They were obsessed with education and their legacy lives on in the Ivy Leagues of America's northeast. The Quakers were more or less America's source of liberal conscience and they pushed an agenda for society that would still be described as fairly egalitarian today. They settled in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

The Cavaliers settled in Virginia and were made up of British Aristocrats fleeing a Puritan takeover in England that was hostile to nobility. They brought with them a great many indentured servants and became the landed class of the south.

The Borderers are often described as "the Scots-Irish" and were the rough and tumble folk who were hardened and fashioned on the violent border of England and Scotland. These are basically your classic rednecks, the folks that would push out the frontier, and the better part of the country's overall WASP population.

I'm betting that a great deal of my own lineage is "borderer" although there are some other groups mixed in.

American politics up till the Civil War can largely be defined as northeastern elites of Puritan heritage battling southern elites of Cavalier heritage for control of the state with the Cavaliers usually winning, in part thanks to the 3/5 compromise that counted black slaves as extra votes for southerners.

Jefferson's vision for the American Republic

Jefferson's primary concern for the US was that it not be transformed into a centralized empire, which he saw resulting from the creation of "mobs" within big cities that would be easily controlled by increasingly powerful elites. While he was on board with oligarchy he wanted a certain balance of power to prevent either the masses or the elites from wielding too much power. As a general rule, the Democratic-Republican party led by Jefferson and Madison and focused in the South was ironically more libertarian (usually) than the northeastern party despite including so many landed aristocrats.

The Louisiana purchase was Jefferson's big play to ensure that America be a balanced Republic in the future. His hope was that if provided with tons of room to expand, America could be maintained as nation of self-sufficient peasant farmers for decades to come. Of course this didn't work out.

Victory for the Northern elites

For years and years the Southern aristocracy had the upper hand over America's northeast. Despite the north's economic progression towards manufacturing and establishing a middle class built on urban workers rather than farmers, the south maintained political control due to factors like the 3/5 compromise.

Andrew Jackson built the modern Democratic party around borderer sentiment as he and his people feared that elites would tend to use the government to promote their own interests over the interests of everyday Americans (true) and his response was that government should be limited and curtailed. Ironic given the modern Democratic platform, no?

However, the party was frequently hijacked by southern elites who used the party's popularity and credibility with borderer masses to push their own agenda, such as the protection of the institution of slavery. They kept the commoners on their side by fighting against northern measures like the tariffs, which were designed to benefit northern manufacturing at the expense of southern agrarians.

From the inception of the Democratic party and it's election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 until the year 1861 when the Republican party's first president (Abraham Lincoln) assumed office the Democrats held the presidency every term save for the 1841-45 and 1849-53 terms. The Democrats lost those elections to "Whig" presidents. The Whigs accomplished those victories by nominating war heroes William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor that allowed them to expand into the south on the electoral map and beyond their northeastern cluster.

The establishment of the Republican party and a split ticket in 1860 finally allowed the northeastern elites to break the power of the southern elites. Seeing the writing on the wall and fearing that they would henceforth be ruled by northern interests thanks to that region's superior population, the south then seceded. The north won the war and established control back over those states.

Ebbs and flows in American political power dynamics

From the Civil War on the country has been ruled by a wide variety of different interests but northern elites have usually run the show. Some of the power of American elites was broken and their exploitation stopped by the "progressive" Republicans of the early 20th century, such as Teddy Roosevelt. At this time in American history the papers started to wield a good deal of power helped provide the people some counter-balancing power. Prior to that William Jennings Bryan tried to take up the populist cause but was soundly defeated.

Over the last few decades the country has come to governed by a "ruling class" consisting largely of well educated people in the D.C.-N.Y. axis and the nation's small supply of billionaires. While the Republicans and Democrats have each fought for different values in the culture wars you'll notice that none of the last several presidents did anything too different from one another in terms of expanding American reach abroad and pushing a globalist economic vision.

The major media networks all largely sang that tune and candidates like Ron Paul that cautioned against aggressive foreign interventionism were universally labelled as "nut-jobs." Essentially, America's oligarchy had become a bit too powerful and unchecked.

The 2016 election is probably the first in which the super-democratizing internet has made it possible for the descendants of the borderers who swept Andrew Jackson into power back in 1828 to make another dent in American politics with Donald Trump.

When you see Bobby Knight campaigning with Donald Trump and helping him over the top in Indiana you're seeing classic America fight to reclaim a seat at the table.

The 2016 election is partially about globalism vs nationalism in the same way the Civil War was about slavery vs free labor, but it also represents average Americans using the power of the internet to check the power of the nation's elites.

Take a gander at how much money the various candidates have raised and spent:
A few notes here, I combined the money raised and spent by the campaign and their Super-PACs and the numbers are in millions. Neither Bernie Sanders nor Donald Trump have really used Super-PACs in their campaigns. I didn't include super-delegates in the count for Hillary vs Bernie and their rules for delegate dispersions are different than in the Republican primary so direct comparisons are inexact.

Super-PACs are the means by which billionaires can have unlimited influence on a campaign because there are donation limits to presidential campaigns but none for Super-PACs. Despite raising $76 million for Hillary and about $188 million for Jeb and Marco with Super-PACs, billionaires have had very little impact in the 2016 election, save perhaps for influencing super-delegates to roll with Hillary rather than Sanders (she currently has virtually all of the super delegates on her side).

Trump is a divisive candidate who basically represents all the rough edges of America's non-elites, but perhaps someone like Thomas Jefferson would be pleased to see the pendulum of power swinging back again and limiting the control elites have in the American system.

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