Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
And still dithpicable.
Walt
Someone has pointed somewhere in these threads to a study or book that suggests that self-government, whether democratic or representative, constitutionally-constrained democracy or what have you, works better in smaller polities like the Greeks believed.
That's why I think some people have always advanced the concept of subsidiarity, to keep the politics local -- and never mind NOW's sloganeering about "think locally, act globally".
Madison wasn't arguing for size per se, but for a federal system that diffuses intense local conflicts over a larger and more heterogenous area. The separation of powers would make it harder for local disputes to bulk so large on the national scene or for national conflicts to disrupt local politics.
I would disagree with him. One of the side effects of Liberals' learning to strap around uncongenial state governments (a lesson Wm. F. Buckley dated, in IIRC The Governor Listeth, to a 1950's New York City teachers' strike: the City and State said No; but the Liberal congressional delegation said Yes, and delivered) has been to clog Congressional committees and bureaucratic inbaskets in D.C. with the minutiae of local issues. Perfect example: the provision in ISTEA (the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency [?] Act), which mandates that federal highway maintenance and construction monies shall be cut off for any State whose cities accept ISTEA monies and then fail to institute networks of bicycle lanes! I'm not kidding! This is a federal law!
The theory is supplied by a 1972 book on urban politics, from the age of Liberalism's post-Nixonian apogee, The New Urban Politics, ed. E. M. Fox. In an included essay, "The Mayors versus The Cities", by James Q. Wilson, we read, after a discussion documenting the reliable tendency of big-city mayors, even under strong political challenge, or even (in the case of Sam Yorty of L.A.) victorious support, from the Right, to behave very consistently as Liberals:
I would suggest that there is a general, structural reason for the behavior of many big-city mayors, a reason that, if correct, implies the arrival of a new era in city politics, one unlike either the era of the political machine or that of......reform. For many mayors today...., their audience is increasingly different from their constituency. By "audience" I mean those persons whose favorable attitudes and responses the mayor is most interested in, those persons from whom he receives his most welcome applause and his most needed resources and opportunities. By "constituency" I mean those people who can vote.......
At one time, audience and constituency were very nearly the same thing......With the decline of the urban political party and with the decline in the vitality and money resources of the central city.......the separation between audience and constituency began......he campaigned through the help of -- and in part with the intention of influencing -- businessmen, planners, and federal agencies.
In the 1960's....The model cities program, the war on poverty, most civil rights bills, the aid of education programs, and the various pilot projects of both the government and private foundations were largely devised, promoted, and staffed by groups who were becoming the mayor's audience, though they were not among his constituents.
In other words, the cities fell, in the 1960's, under the influence of a Faction committed to promoting Liberalism with Other People's Money in cities whose politicians they captured because the cities needed the money -- and so the "owner" of the marginal dollar, the Liberal apparatchik, became the preferred customer for city government, and the constituents got to take a number. To continue,
This audience consists principally of various federal agencies, especially those that give grants directly to cities; the large foundations, and in particular the Ford Foundation, that can favor the mayor with grants, advice, and future prospects; the mass media, or at least that part of the media -- national news magazines and network television -- that can give the mayor access to the suburbs, the state, and the nation as a whole; and the affluent (and often liberal) suburban voters who will pass on the mayor's fitness for higher office.
The last statement is a clunker, since suburbanites have voted fairly conservatively since at least the riots of 1965-66, and it would be fairer to say that the liberal voting component comes more from block-voting urban blacks and (now) Hispanics, plus other urban Gorebot liberals -- lifestyle liberals, academics and academic wannabes, "urban animals" ("Yuffies"/"young urban failures"), and so on.
Yes, Kansas-Nebraska, and then Dred Scott IIRC, took down the Missouri Compromise -- but the contentiousness of the debates, and most of all the deep divisions in long-term interests between the industrializing North and the agrarian South and West that they illuminated, are what did the damage and convinced a lot of Southerners that North and South were, in fact, two countries united by historical happenstance, but not by interest and inclination.
As for the tariff, it might have come down under the political influence of the National Democracy, but it didn't take a rocket scientist to see that the rates would go back up whenever the Northern States, because of their immigration rates (helped differentially by all the cholera and yellowjack down south), finally got the legislative advantage over the Southerners and introduced them to 200 Years of Hell.
There was no shortage of bad feeling around the country by then -- as witness the affair of Senator Sumner's speech, followed shortly by Rep. Preston Brooks's pointed objection.
Not so, and already shown to be Not So by 4CJ. You have been confuted, and yet you continue to post defective arguments. Sore loser. We are constantly bombarded with this nit-picky unreasonable/belittle the framers neo-reb rant.
Argument ad hominem and ad populum. Both fallacies. Thank you for the demonstration. Although I'm sure you didn't realize it.
Where is similar verbiage from the actual participants?
Try Davis's inaugural speech. It's a good one.
By the way, YOU can pass soevereign acts too. If you can back them up with force -- which the so-called CSA could not.
Ah -- appeal to force. The trifecta! I'm almost as chuffed as N-S about his 1000th post -- thanks, Walt, you've given a real clinic this morning on being a sore loser and stupid and malevolent to boot.
Not so, and already shown to be Not So by 4CJ.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly said otherwise.
If the secesh had been honorable, they would acted honorably -- through the courts.
Walt
Nope.
I am a union man. I am a winner.
It's the neo-rebs who are the losers, just like their heroes.
Of course as I like to say; if you are alive, you won the Civil War.
Walt
Try Davis's inaugural speech. It's a good one.
Apparently it's not worth quoting.
Walt
Did you learn that trick on eBay?
Marshall's 1819 opinion you can parse very carefully, and square it with 4CJ's quote that appears to, but doesn't, contradict it. But there is no way to square Justice Story's 1816 quote with Marshall's, as 4CJ pointed out above, or with Justice Thomas's recent construction of the same question. I would have to say, then, that Justice Story just got it wrong, and that, the Preamble aside, the construction of the Sovereignty question should be as it is illustrated by 4CJ's Marshall and Thomas quotes.
I thought I should go back and address that point myself, although 4CJ has already done so.
"LG"
Don't forget to bring the children, they can have a grand ol' time swimming in the creek. We'll fire up the grill as well - bring your appetite!
All I've seen from you and 4CJ is a lot of verbiage trying to prove that a duck is not a duck.
Next, you'll be telling us that "E Pluribus Unum" means something else besides what it clearly states. This is one country, and the sovereignty is based on all the people.
The states are not totally sovereign, and certainly not completely sovereign. The Articles of Confed showed that to be unworkable.
I mention Jefferson Davis a lot in this context. He clearly held that the federal government had the power to coerce the states in the matter of conscription. I know that as a slave holder, Davis gets a free ride. But was he wrong?
I will readily grant you that the feds are out of control today, but the intent of the framers is clear. While the states should have as muh power over their citizens as posible, as T. Jefferson said, the federal government has ultimate power. This is what Marshall said in Cohens. It's what Jay said in Chisholm and what Story said in Martin.A nd it is what Jefferson Davis wrote to Governor Brown of Georgia.
You can say it doesn't quack like a duck or walk like a duck all you want, but it's still a duck.
Walt
Who cares what he said; he was a politician. His words have all the sincerity of a typical politician - i.e. ZERO.
Bwahaha... Y'all, the Northern Unpleasantry is OVER...
Sounds to me like you Northerners have had too much fun over the years, changing the rules to suit yourselves whenever you please, and assigning all criticism to anyone who objects. You've become complacent and arrogant -- bad combination. How's your Spanish, fellas? Ready for a few other changes that you didn't think of?
But the idea of audience and constituency is intriguing. It spells doom for Southern nationalists, who think they will be the chief constituents of their elected officials. But their audience will be elsewhere. This is what happened in Ireland and other countries, and what is bound to happen in Eastern Europe. The religious, salt of the earth peasantry is an important constitency, but the audience of the politicians is among national and global elites. So it is here and now, and so it would be after independence. The New South, the country club elites hold the power now, and barring a catastrophe will rule after independence. Only they would be liberated from the Northeast-South polarity, which strengthens conservative ideas, to pursue the liberal capitalism that's been their chief motivation for some time.
But another idea that has made itself known is that such elites will precisely be the the ones to break away, with Seattle, San Francisco, Portland and other metropoli severing their ties with lesser mortals to form an ecotopia. Robert Kaplan's Atlantic articles and books outline such a thesis, though as with everything he writes there's plenty of room for scepticism.
Will city states or smaller regional states be freer than nation states? Perhaps in some ways, but I don't know about across the board. Ecotopia would grant you wide lifestyle privileges but come down hard on smokers and non-recyclers. Confederatopia -- if it does free itself from the country club elites -- might provide great freedom from government social programs, but be quite unpleasant for dissenters to live in.
One thing I do notice is that we are in the middle of a great libertarian tide. People naturally assume that changes will promote further libertarianism. But that's not a certainty. City-states in the 30s or 40s, 60s or 70s would have been far more socialistic. What regional states would do about turbocapitalism or Walmart capitalism is not easy to forsee.
FWIW, If America is being Mexicanized, the South won't escape the phenomenon. The new model of ethnicity, for better or worse, is neither Northern nor Southern but Western, and you'll see it in Arkansas and Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, as well as in big cities.
No, I think not -- they're having too much fun spoiling things for everyone else with their prating and eco-hectoring. I would like to find and read Kaplan's articles in the Atlantic Monthly, though. Because of the gross disorder on my rolltop desk where I keep my laptop, I can't right now put my hand on the file folder I keep my "books wanted" list, to check whether I've added Kaplan's title to it, but could you tell me the title to his book, if you have it? I'm sure I could look it up in a library author file if needed.
Will city states or smaller regional states be freer than nation states?
Not necessarily. I think it was Robert Heinlein, in his fiction, who first suggested that California has a bent for totalitarianism. It's obvious to me: democracy and republic require character in the citizenry. Less character in the people means more dirigisme in the regime.
Confederatopia -- if it does free itself from the country club elites -- might provide great freedom from government social programs, but be quite unpleasant for dissenters to live in.
Texas has a lively tradition of populist dissent, so I've no concerns on that score, and Louisiana has always given great scope to the individualist "character" ..... you must be thinking about Snopesian Mississippi and Arkansas. Which latter, by the way, hasn't received any Mexican immigration worth talking about. That state remains very Jacksonian and Old Democrat in its politics. Corrupt, too, like the Spoils System, the Albany Regency, Tammany Hall, and the other legacies of the National Democracy in the Age of Jackson and Van Buren.
Perhaps it's time for an established historian to start distilling out the essences of Jacksonianism, and filtering out the "contributions" of Martin Van Buren and the Albany Regency, which was anything but democratic and populist.
One thing I do notice is that we are in the middle of a great libertarian tide. People naturally assume that changes will promote further libertarianism. But that's not a certainty.
I think that the "libertarianism" you notice is artificial, and wholly incidental to the real process at work, which is the New Elite's vigorous solution and destruction of the sources and structures of competing authority in morality and political influence, principally Judeo-Christian morality and its exponents, and the various memetic resources of the political opposition.
City-states in the 30s or 40s, 60s or 70s would have been far more socialistic. What regional states would do about turbocapitalism or Walmart capitalism is not easy to forsee.
Excellent point. And for purposes of the forces now at play, even the United States is a "regional state", and meat on the table. The migrations you refer to are the superclass calling its underclass resources to join it in the metropolises, there to offset, undermine, submerge, and destroy the middle class in the processes of reproletarization that the superclass has set in motion, commoditizing added-value skillsets seriatim and en bloc and attacking the earning power of all sectors except management. Only entrepreneurs who succeed, are outside this system of proletarization. Even academics are caught in the maw; they just don't realize it yet, as they are being kept happy for the nonce.
What a joke: just as institutionalized Marxism dies, the real "class struggle" begins, as internationalists work to abolish countries, and reintroduce the world of the 18th century, when the main divisions were those of class and money. And I've just put my finger on the best reason for continued Union: some country has to be big enough to fight the global imperialists, and a disunited United States won't be that country.
FWIW, If America is being Mexicanized, the South won't escape the phenomenon.
Yes, it will. It'll arm, ruck up, and blow the Mexican Aztlanistas into the Pacific. Literally. The South wanted to be transcontinental, too, remember; and the Mexicans have worn out their welcome with their reconquista B.S., so Southerners would deal with them pretty frostily, I think. Texas will be the flashpoint in any fight like that -- or developments in New Mexico, where whites are few and the Chicanos might be emboldened to help them "see the advantages" of leaving the state. That would do it.
But this is all speculation now, which is never as interesting, in the end, as the event. But we will have a fight over the demographic upset before too many more years have passed; and whichever side the United States is on, we may rely on it, that the United Nations will be on the other. That is when even larger issues will be joined -- and the sooner the better, before the Bilderbergers (for lack of a better label) are ready for those issues to be joined.
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