Posted on 08/10/2016 2:23:24 PM PDT by detective
Populism has a long pedigree in America and played a major role in the American Revolution.
The Body of the People, the Sons of Liberty, the Liberty Poles, the Minute Men, these were informal populist groups that could and did rally thousands in the decade leading up to the Revolutionary War. They forced the abandonment of onerous rules imposed by London, they intimidated Royal Governors and hemmed in the Redcoats to the city limits of Boston. And in April of 1775 they rallied and opened fire on the Redcoat columns marching on Lexington and Concord.
They formed the Militia, that most populist of military units, and the Continental Line. Without populism there would have been no Revolution, there would simply have been some writers scribbling noble pamphlets against oppression by the Crown.
The agents of the Crown and their Tory lackeys denounced “the Body” all the other popular uprisings as nothing more than a dangerous mob. Their spiritual heirs are still drawn to such talk.
The war ended in 1783. There was no Constitution to “protect” us. There was no Bill of Rights. There wouldn’t be any until the end of the decade. The Constitution wasn’t the beginning of American popular sovereignty, popular sovereignty being A Very Big Deal to the unwashed rabble that won independence. Somehow, in what must be a Great Mystery to those who act like we are about to start building guillotines, Americans managed to govern themselves, and finding the Articles of Confederation insufficient they replaced it with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Amazing what that mob was able to do. And I suspect that the dangerous mob who have rallied behind Donald Trump are capable of something similar.
Socialists and LIEberals are like locusts, they just move on to devour another source of wealth.
They never review the damage damage they cause, they never examine the true effects of their policies, they never fix anything they break, as they search for and focus on another society to destroy.
They are reporting on it - ONCE. Then, they can say “there’s no news there” whenever the subject comes up again.
How does the GOPe's condescending treatment of Trump and his supporters differ from that of the English toward the American colonists? They see us as subjects.
Britain's true policy was to exact obedience, if necessary, with the rod; for colonists, like children, must obey the mother country in all things. Englishmen habitually thought of the relationship of Great Britain and America in terms of parent and child; George Mason of Virginia complained that Great Britain's bearing toward the colonies was seldom "free from the authoritative style of a master to a schoolboy."
Origins of the American Revolution by John C. Miller.
I think I read that they can.
Airplanes are landing with necessities, but the majority of folks have no money to buy with since the petro dollars have dwindled.
(Think Alaska if the state petro subsidy goes away.)
HMMMmmm...
A FLASH mob that doesn't assemble to sing...
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Ironic that the people of Venezuela are literally starving under socialism, while socialist Bernie Sanders just bought a third home for $600,000. Socialism makes the vast majority of people living under it equally poor, but the socialist elites always enjoy a vastly unequal standard of living.
Nah, that’s just “American Imperialist Running Dog Propaganda”, Impy.
It’s a veritable Worker’s Paradise down there - THE Socialist’s Socialist Utopia to end all Utopias!
I am surprised they don’t blame Bush for Venezuela’s problems. Didn’t Chavez get elected when Bush was POTUS? See Bush’s fault.
Why is it socialism somehow fails everywhere else when so many smart people know it would work so well here if only they had the chance to implement it properly on our shores? Is it because these stupid little brown people haven't the proper degrees from Harvard, Brown, or Columbia? Did they neglect to get their millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share? Are they too racist, xenophobic, and not caring enough about The People? Why are they failing so badly in their proper role as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? Are they just not dedicated enough to the cause?
Aspiring American minds want to know because we have an important election coming up and this is on one side of the ballot...
I quoted you.
Yer awesome and I barely have time to freep lately.
Thank you sir.
The show and the network it’s on (Viceland) actually has a pretty noticeable “progressive” bent.
My Bible says that it is by their fruits that we shall know them so I am inclined to distinguish the Founders and the Framers from Bolsheviks and Nazis but I am not inclined to dispense with definitions.
While the patriots were holding the British at bay for a while in Boston and then for the duration of the war in New York, they would in all intellectual honesty have had to recognize that they were not the popular choice but they represented only one third of the people of whom one third opposed them and one third appeared to be indifferent. So we must define our patriots as something other than mere majoritarians. Indeed all of the militias and the whole of the Continental Army operated either under the auspices of state constitutions or the Constitution of the Confederation. These were not revolutionaries who justified their revolts simply by their majority status.
If one looks at the Declaration of Independence, it is quite conspicuous in its open declaration of the need to justify the separation from Britain. If one looks at the bill of particulars drawn by Thomas Jefferson against King George one notes that they are all appeals to law and further, virtually all of them are to be found elsewhere in writings extent at the time. So our patriots not only were not majoritarians, but they were also not outlaws because, at least in their own minds, they were fulfilling the true and natural state of law which the British had distorted. Even less "populist" was their understanding that they were vindicating their positions which accrued to them as "Englishmen . "
It's quite true that the Constitution was not drafted and ratified until after the war was over but that does not mean that it is a "populist" document. Far from it. First, his intention was to put more power into the federal government than existed under the articles of Confederation-hardly a populist impulse. But it did not intend that that power should be controlled by majority rule and set out to make quite sure that the majority could not rule: The Senate was not to be elected by popular vote and it's members' terms were to be staggered; the Senate itself was not a popularly oriented body but favored small minority states; the president was not to be elected by the people but the electoral college was set up as a check, if necessary, of the popular will; the federal government itself was divided and powers were apportioned and, more importantly, its powers were limited by enumeration; the ratification of the Constitution was explicitly done only on a promise of passage of the Bill of Rights which is a series of guarantees that the wishes of the majority will not prevail; the federal system itself retained powers in the states and there was no huge populist overturning of those constitutions.
The list could go on but the conclusion is unavoidable, the Constitution was not a populist document if populism is defined as majoritarian rule or even ruled by those who are not elite. Clearly, the Senate, the college of electors, the court system, the powers of the various states all were elitist or potentially elitist institutions. One might say that much of the federal Constitution which was the product of the revolutionary experience was an exercise in frustrating the will of the mob.
Nor was the Constitution or the revolution significant for advancing individual liberty of slaves, indentured servants, women, youth, or landless citizens. Indeed much of the revolution in the South was fought by our patriots, those people you label "populist" in opposition to the British efforts to free slaves. That is not to diminish the signal achievement of our patriots who established a whole new concept of government and put it in place-a really remarkable patriotic achievement-but not a "populist" achievement.
That which distinguishes the American Revolution from the French Revolution is our Constitution. That which distinguishes the American Revolution from the Bolshevik revolution is our Constitution and a determination to adhere to it. It is the Constitution which defines us but without those definitions anybody is a patriot and anybody is a populist.
They can drive to a neighboring country to get food, IF they have dollars or other non-worthless currency to pay for it.
“If one doesn’t bother with definitions it becomes quite easy to call a patriot a populist but then one can hardly distinguish between a Bolshevik, a populist, a patriot or a Brown Shirt.”
The good old Fallacy of the Beard. Nice try.
“These were not revolutionaries who justified their revolts simply by their majority status.”
The Sons of Liberty were rallying thousands around Liberty Poles a decade before war erupted. They intimidated Royal Governors, trashed their houses, organized and enforced boycotts. The Royal Governors routinely condemned the patriots as mobs. And even John Adams said the same thing about the victims of the Boston Massacre.
“Indeed all of the militias and the whole of the Continental Army operated either under the auspices of state constitutions or the Constitution of the Confederation. “
That’s nice make-believe, but it doesn’t happen to be true. Militias such as the Minute Men organized locally well before there were any state constitutions or much patriot attempt at organization beyond Committees of Correspondence. The Committees of Correspondence preceded and eventually evolved into the Continental Congress and they formed without such niceties as constitutions to guide them. That all came later. They were simply colonists fed up with oppressive rule from London.
“If one looks at the Declaration of Independence, it is quite conspicuous in its open declaration of the need to justify the separation from Britain.”
The war began a full year before the Declaration. April 1775 vs July 1776. King George had declared the colonies to be in rebellion as of August 1775. The Declaration was an appeal to foreign powers for material support of American independence from Britain. The patriots already knew that they were in a war with the King well before the Declaration.
“It’s quite true that the Constitution was not drafted and ratified until after the war was over but that does not mean that it is a “populist” document. “
No one ever said it was a populist document. The Constitution was entirely irrelevant to the Revolution and wasn’t even dreamed of when the Revolution began. Years later when it was finally proposed as a replacement for the Articles of Confederation founders like Patrick Henry and George Mason even opposed the Constitution as giving far too much power to the national government. They would have been happier with a revision of the Articles.
Your attempt to focus on the then non-existent Constitution illustrates how you’re attempting to sidestep the role of populist revolt and popular sovereignty driving the patriots. It wasn’t a top-down affair waiting on documents.
“The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the person of King George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Thenceforth, American revolutionaries generally agreed and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. This idea—often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed—was not invented by the American revolutionaries. Rather, the consent of the governed and the idea of the people as a sovereign had clear 17th and 18th century intellectual roots in English history “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_sovereignty#Popular_sovereignty_in_the_United_States
Evidently in defense of populism, you cite the American Revolution and take pains to point out that the Constitution came later while acknowledging that it is not a populist document. Its relevance is that it comes as a result of the revolution and was the product of many of the same men who waged the Revolutionary war. Moreover, charters and constitutions had existed in every colony since the 17th century, contrary to your assertions.
Since you cite the American Revolution as evidence that populism is not a danger because it was itself a populist movement, I sought to distinguish that patriotic impulse from populism. Evidently in your mind it is important the Constitution came after the war but it is not important to note that populism is purely a 19th century conception. Put that aside, I have tried to inquire about the real nature of populism, whenever we identify it, and attempt to understand whether it was the impulse which drove the American Revolution and, if it did, what has that got to do with the danger inherent in populism?
So I sought to find some definitional elements of populism. It's nice to define what we are talking about but you claim that is somehow a debating trick. I had identified two elements of populism, majoritarianism and opposition to rule by elites. You equate populism with "popular sovereignty" which I find not to be particularly helpful. If popular sovereignty was the goal of the revolution then all of the checks to democracy which I enumerated in my previous reply tell us that that was a misplaced effort and populism clearly miscarried. If popular sovereignty is the test then mere change of government control meets it and the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were populists.
Clearly that test is not hopeful.
It is difficult to argue that slaveholders Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lee and the rest were not elites, they clearly were. You pointed out that John Adams decried the action of the "mob," a term I used in an earlier post. Franklin was clearly an establishment figure as postmaster and one of the wealthy men in the colonies who controlled a bit of a publishing empire. Where is the attack on elitism? It seems to be confined only to one elitist, George III, and perhaps his agents in the colonies.
Popular sovereignty simply tells us that control the government passes from one group to another it does not tell us that it was a "populist" impulse. That requires something else. I have suggested two criteria which are more helpful. The American revolutionary experience certainly contained some elements of populism but that was countered by the impulse toward the rule of law, the reaction to Shays rebellion, the new constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the continued rule in the colonies by those who had ruled in the colonies while George III was still the titular head of those colonies.
Populism, like the man on horseback, is seductive but treacherous. The truth remains, it is a constitution which saves us from the tyranny of the mob as well is the tyranny of the man on horseback, adherence to it saves us from runaway populism, which spares us becoming Venezuela.
“. It is not inappropriate now to remind the reader that this thread is about Venezuela which is dying as well. “
It’s also about a little game that anti-Trumpers have been playing in which the trick is to label support for Trump as populism and then link that to what goes on in places like Venezuela.
” Evidently in your mind it is important the Constitution came after the war but it is not important to note that populism is purely a 19th century conception. “
That’s the same as saying that capitalism is a 19th century conception and therefore didn’t exist prior to someone calling it by that name. Populism did exist, it was a driving force in the 1760s in the mounting resistance to London’s increasingly despotic rule over the colonies.
I’m interested in pointing out that the Constitution was written years after the Revolution because I’m not going to play games with the timeline of history. The Constitution wasn’t even dreamed of in the events leading up to and during the Revolution.
The Constitution grew out of the Mt Vernon and Annapolis meetings to iron out navigation rights on the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. The delegates involved broadened their mandate and replaced the Articles of Confederation.
“Moreover, charters and constitutions had existed in every colony since the 17th century, contrary to your assertions.”
And they played little to no role in the colonists rebelling against the Crown, other than fueling colonial anger when London suspended those charters. But nice try at introducing yet another extraneous and irrelevant point.
“what has that got to do with the danger inherent in populism?”
You’re assuming your own premise, that populism is inherently dangerous. Why not assume that elitism and cronyism is inherently dangerous? Why not assume that any and all representative government is prone to capture by the rich and powerful and is therefore inherently dangerous?
” If popular sovereignty is the test then mere change of government control meets it and the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were populists.”
You’re very confused if you think that those two top down authoritarian movements have anything in common with popular sovereignty.
“Bill of Rights”
The Bill of Rights was demanded by the opponents of the Constitution, Patrick Henry and George Mason being two of the more prominent. It was anything but a ringing endorsement of the centralizing power that they could see in the Constitution, and the 9th and 10th amendments rather than serving as brakes on that power have turned out to be dead letters.
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