The Founders established a decentralized Republic that allowed most if not nearly all important political decisions and impositions to be taken at the level of the states. This comes from the experience during the Colonial period. Each colony had a different policy, ethos, religion, economic structure, and set of leaders. The only remaining problem, as they saw it, was the King of England, who was trying to rule all with an iron fist in the interest of collecting as much revenue as possible.

The priority of the American Revolution was all about ending that problem. Once done, the colonies put together Articles of Confederation that preserved local control. In fact, it established no national government at all. That lasted for many years until the Constitution replaced it, but still, with a huge deference to the states.

Crucially, the U.S. Congress in the Constitution was divided into two parts. The House represented the people by vote, but the Senate was to represent the whole state by appointment of the legislatures of the states. In a catastrophic move in 1913, the 17th Amendment was unlawfully ratified in order to allow direct election of the Senate, thereby distorting the entire institution. Now the Senate represents the interests of the big cities and out-of-state interests rather than the states themselves.

In the ensuing 100 years, thanks also to the unconstitutional income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve (see unlawfully ratified 16th Amendment), power became more and more centralized in Washington, D.C.. This tendency is utterly contrary to the whole idea of America. Lord Acton wrote that the decentralized federal structure was the number one contribution that the experiment in the United States presented to world understanding. It was its unique feature of our Republic, and what guaranteed freedom for the American people. With that gone now, we are left with an older form of despotism like Rome and other empires.

The Founders were so deferential to the idea of states' rights that they even permitted the continuation of slavery, which was the disaster that eventually contributed [among other things] to our own Civil War (1861-1865). After that, however, the United States reset and preserved the original structure of the Constitution (minus slavery), which in the post Civil War era led to the greatest boom in human prosperity and technology ever seen up until that point in history.

Do we have the makings of another civil war today? I can imagine this possibility, and the purpose of this article is to warn my fellow Americans against it. But what is the way out? It's definitely not for one faction to win all and then force everyone and everything into compliance. However, that seems to be the path we are on today. It's not going to work, folks. The only real path to peace is to discover the Founders' wisdom and decentralize all things again. Repeal the scores of unconstitutional laws and the unlawfully ratified 14th, 16th, and 17th Amendments that have so obviously damaged our nation over the past 150 years, and reboot the Constitution.

The situation we face today as a nation is a dire one. The sovereignty of the American nation itself is right now being tested with a treaty at the World Health Organization (WHO) that seems to obligate the United States to do another pandemic mitigation exercise of the same catastrophic sort pursued in 2020 and following. That's only the beginning: the centralization of finance, health, energy policy, and other regulations is proceeding ahead right now at a break-neck pace, and without any meaningful public debate.

The whole idea of centralization of power is based on a wicked fantasy of obtaining full population-wide agreement on issues on which we cannot and will not ever agree. The attempt alone will always and everywhere produce dystopia and disaster. Why we even have to point that out at this stage in history is preposterous, but there it is. The desire for power and money is so strong in the human personality that not even the settled wisdom of the ages can overcome it.

Maybe by having a serious and sane national conversation about where we are headed as a nation is one way to stop this trajectory. If we don't, our descendants are going to look back at this generation with utter disdain and condemnation for ever allowing this to happen.

Our nation's first Civil War might have been avoided with moral clarity and some kind of peaceful negotiated settlement, just as happened in the UK in the 19th century. We should do the same. We have the opportunity now to stop the next civil war by rediscovering the original U.S. Constitution and its purposes. But, instead of doing that, we see the mainstream propaganda media and the corrupt D.C. establishment it serves either ignoring it or denouncing it, which I see as a very bad sign.

Read | Post Comments