Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse

E. Vass Thomas

Description

In his recent book, The Liberty Amendments, Mark Levin promotes the enactment of 10 amendments to the U. S. Constitution, using the second method of amendment outlined in Article V of the Constitution of 1788. Levin offers no clues to how or why he thinks on the 1000th effort, this path of amendment would be successful.

Informations

• Publié par: First Edition Design Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781622875559
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse
Thomas E. Vass


First Edition Design Publishing Inc.
Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse
Copyright ©2014 Thomas E. Vass

ISBN 978-1622-875-97-2 EBOOK

February 2014

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com



ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .


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Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse
First edition
Copyright© 2006 by Thomas E. Vass
Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse
Revised 2014 ebook edition©
Publisher: The Great American Business & Economics Press. (GABBY Press) © 2014
All rights reserved under Title 17, U.S. Code, International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording or duplication by any information storage or retrieval system without prior written permission from the author(s) and publisher(s), except for the inclusion of brief quotations with attribution in a review or report. Requests for reproductions or related information should be addressed to the author c/o Thomas Vass, at [e-mail] .
Contents

Foreword to the 2014 ebook edition
Introduction: The American Democratic Impulse
Chapter I. The Origins of American Socialist Anti-Individualism
Chapter II. The Nature of Constitutional Individual Freedom
Chapter III. The Logic of Individual Self-Interest in A Constitutional Democratic Republic
Chapter IV. Defining Individual Freedom As The Public Purpose in a Constitutional Contract
Chapter V. The Relationship Between Free Markets and Individual Freedom In A Constitutional Democratic Republic
Chapter VI. The Threat of Corporate Globalism To Individual Freedom and National Sovereignty
Chapter VII. Madison’s Constitutional Barriers to Constitutional Reform in America
Chapter VIII. Reclaiming The American Democratic Impulse and Re-Asserting The Ideology of Individualism in A Constitutional Democratic Republic
Chapter IX. The Purpose of Government In A Constitutional Democratic Republic
Bibliography
Foreword to the 2014 ebook edition

In his recent book, The Liberty Amendments , Mark Levin promotes the enactment of 10 amendments to the U. S. Constitution, using the second method of amendment outlined in Article V of the Constitution of 1788.

While his suggested amendments could possibly offer relief from the dysfunction in the American political system, his suggestions contain two debilitating flaws that would not remedy the loss of individual freedoms from the tyranny of centralized, socialist government power.

As described in Chapter VII of this book, Levin’s ideas are not viable for enactment, using the second method of amendment. As he notes, “the second method has never been successfully implemented in over 230 years. Levin notes that there have been over 1000 attempts to amend, using both methods of amendment.

Levin offers no clues to how or why he thinks on the 1000 th effort, this path of amendment would be successful. The second method of amendment was deliberately made unviable by the Federalists because they feared the instability of non-elite citizens intervening in the constitutional process.

His second flaw is worse. Even granting Levin the benefit of the doubt that all of his amendments were successfully enacted, Levin’s remedy contains the mistaken assumption that the socialists, or statists, as he calls them, would immediately change their behavior and begin to abide by the rule of law.

Levin goes through the entire historical chronology of how the socialists have undermined the rule of law in the current constitution, but assumes that with the enactment of his amendments, that the socialists would begin to follow the new rules.

Socialists will never follow constitutional rules because socialism is a religious belief, and socialists do not follow rules made by non-socialists. The socialists are driven by the moral imperatives of their religion, and seek to impose their religious views on non-socialists. Non-socialists, from the viewpoint of the socialist religion, are heretics and bad people, not morally worthy to make rules or govern themselves.

In the socialist religion, only the non-socialists are bound by the laws that are made by the socialists. Socialists call this idea “smart growth,” or some other label that conveys that socialists are smarter than the common herd.

A more realistic appraisal of socialists is that they are not bound by constitutional law because the constitution contains provisions which are inconsistent with their religion. A deeper analysis of socialists is that their religion contains an apocalyptic belief that the proletariat will overthrow the capitalist order in a bloody revolution where all the bad people will be killed. Or, to take a more contemporary example, ordered to move out of New York state.

Levin’s amendments also assume that, after the enactment of his amendments, there would be something of social value to restore in the wreckage on the cultural heritage of individual liberty inflicted by the socialists.

There is nothing of value left after the Obama transformation of America into a socialist state that Levin’s amendments would restore, and the damage inflicted by the socialists is irrevocable.

Part of Levin’s myopia originates with his deep reverence for the work of the “Founding Fathers.” His awe and reverence tends to blind him from a realistic appraisal that the founding Federalists created a flawed document that cannot be fixed with amendments.

Their first flaw originated in their deep fear of the democratic impulse of individual citizens, often referred to as “mob rule,” by the Federalists. Their fear of democracy resulted in a system of checks and balances that insulated elite decision making from citizens.

Once the socialists obtained power, Madison’s system of checks and balances did not have a civil, non-violent path for non-elite citizens to alter or abolish the tyrannical power.

As Gordon Wood has pointed out, in Th e Creation of the American Republic, not only did Madison’s scheme provide for a system domi­nated by “…natural leaders who knew better than the people as a whole what was good for society,” but it also succeeded in remov­ing the non-natural leaders from the political process.

Wood noted, “In fact, the people did not actually participate in government any more…The American (Federalists) had taken the people out of the government altogether. The true distinction of the American government wrote Madison in the Federalist ‘lies in the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share in the government.’”

The more severe flaw of the Federalists was their deliberate omission that the ultimate goal of the constitution was protecting individual freedoms.

This flaw of omitting the end goal results in a dysfunctional government that is commonly described as the “Arrow Paradox.” The Paradox means that, in the absence of a constitutional goal, the political system cycles over and over again, in a do-loop, that results in mistakes continually being repeated because there is no bright line definition of the constitutional public purpose.

A more ‘perfect union” could mean the loss of individual freedom, and the imposition of socialists tyranny, if the socialists ever managed to win control of the government. For them, a more perfect union means imposing their socialist religion upon non-socialists.

The socialists can fundamentally transform America into a socialist state because the Federalists did not proclaim that individual liberty was the end goal of their work.

Levin’s amendments do not add the required philosophical remedy to the Federalist’s second flaw.

This book examines how a new constitution, that includes both Levin’s suggested amendments, and the telos of liberty as the end goal, would be a better path than his idea of amending a hopelessly broken representative republic.

That pathway to freedom means reclaiming the American Democratic Impulse.
Introduction: The American Democratic Impulse

The accepted political wisdom in American political history is that the founding fathers set up a representative republic to avoid the excesses of a populist citizen’s democracy.

The basic premise of the accepted wisdom is that individuals, in their capacity as citizens, are too volatile and unreliable in judgments about civic affairs, and any type of citizen’s democracy would likely end up in “mob-rule.”

There is another American political tradition that embraces the ability of individual citizens to make good decisions in a constitutional democratic republic.

Sean Wilentz, in his monumental work, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln , has called this other tradition the “democratic impulse.”

Wilenz asks “…how had the Jacksonian ascendancy shaped, for better and for worse, the democratic impulses that had arisen out of the American Revolution and had evolved so furiously after 1815?”

This other tradition has a legitimate claim as the correct interpretation of the American history of exceptionalism, meaning that the American experiment in promoting individual liberty, is an exceptional event in human history.

The American democratic impulse derives its status of