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I agree, they started with a confederation and ended up with a republic realizing while a confederation was ideal, it would not survive. Now in saying that, we

by kls 6y ago

I agree, they started with a confederation and ended up with a republic realizing while a confederation was ideal, it would not survive. Now in saying that, we do have to take into account the times. For example the separation of church and state, they really could not event envision in their time, that the government should have never been involved in the marriage issue in the first place as it is a religious institution. The government has a legal process for a group working as an entity and that is either a corporation or a trust. From the onset families and their legal rights should have been an inherent trust. This would have kept the religious dogma out of the gay marriage argument and left it to the denominations as to whether they want to sanction the ceremony of marriage or not. Obviously slavery would be another issue, but again I see that as the times, as the people believed that a particular race was less than human. This was corrected via amendments but I don't think a different form of government, at the time, would have reached a more humanitarian conclusion. So we don't really get to ding the republic for it. The problem I have is that the republic works very well, history is littered with the successes of the republic in offering prosperity to its people. The issue is that the republic by its very nature tends to generally gives way to empires. What we have now is an empire, it, in no way shape or form, resembles the original republic, with the exception of vestiges. so it is irksome to hear people lament the foundation as bad or not sufficient and utilize present day examples to do so. The American republic has been gone for a long time. The railroad barons chipped away at it, citizens united chipped away at it, the move to push more and more to the federal level chipped away at it and much, much more, to the extent that we no longer remotely resemble the foundational republic. The prescription is not to fundamentally change what we where, rather it is to take lessons learned and apply them to getting back to a true republic, with fixes to that original model. That is what the founders did, the studied Rome, they studied Greece and tried to account for the failings that they suffered and what allowed them to slide towards the empire and tyranny.

arminiusreturns 6y ago
For what it's worth, I trace the main initiation of the change into the empire to who I consider the worst president in history, Woodrow Wilson. I think the real fight for America will be in pushing back against Wilsonianism enough to drastically shift the overton window in domestic and foreign policy, lest we suffer the consequences of not doing so. That said, to fix a lock that is broken, you have to understand how it works... so I find a lot of value in understanding exactly "how" Wilsonianism took hold so deeply, so quickly. The added complication is the major changes in the banking and monetary system since then also, I mean from that era we go from the creation of the fed, to the bretton woods system, to ww2 and later Nixons move towards the petrodollar. These are all major shifts in the backbone of any nation, empire or not, so a lot of my effort is trying to understand those things as well. I recently came across a particularly insightful talk by Yanis Varoufakis that really condensed a lot of these things well, you might check it out if thats the sort of thing that interests you.[1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ
- kls 6y ago
  My personal opinion is it started with Polk (He is my personal vote for worst president ever, Wilson is second for me), Manifest Destiny and the idea of expansionism, it ebbed and flowed from there until Wilson but the seeds where set when Polk saw that he could use the federal government to expand the influence of the United States. But even with that there where the inclinations from the beginning. I mean the current state of America would have been a dream of Hamilton's, while it would have been Franklin's and Jefferson's worst nightmare of the dystopia, they were trying to prevent. The reality is we got it wrong, the federalist voices were too strong, while I will give that the articles of confederation were too weak, the compromise towards the federalist was too strong. We need to get back to something closer to a confederated republic and away from a federal empire.

by kls 6y ago

arminiusreturns 6y ago

For what it's worth, I trace the main initiation of the change into the empire to who I consider the worst president in history, Woodrow Wilson. I think the real fight for America will be in pushing back against Wilsonianism enough to drastically shift the overton window in domestic and foreign policy, lest we suffer the consequences of not doing so. That said, to fix a lock that is broken, you have to understand how it works... so I find a lot of value in understanding exactly "how" Wilsonianism took hold so deeply, so quickly. The added complication is the major changes in the banking and monetary system since then also, I mean from that era we go from the creation of the fed, to the bretton woods system, to ww2 and later Nixons move towards the petrodollar. These are all major shifts in the backbone of any nation, empire or not, so a lot of my effort is trying to understand those things as well. I recently came across a particularly insightful talk by Yanis Varoufakis that really condensed a lot of these things well, you might check it out if thats the sort of thing that interests you.[1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGeevtdp1WQ

kls 6y ago
My personal opinion is it started with Polk (He is my personal vote for worst president ever, Wilson is second for me), Manifest Destiny and the idea of expansionism, it ebbed and flowed from there until Wilson but the seeds where set when Polk saw that he could use the federal government to expand the influence of the United States. But even with that there where the inclinations from the beginning. I mean the current state of America would have been a dream of Hamilton's, while it would have been Franklin's and Jefferson's worst nightmare of the dystopia, they were trying to prevent. The reality is we got it wrong, the federalist voices were too strong, while I will give that the articles of confederation were too weak, the compromise towards the federalist was too strong. We need to get back to something closer to a confederated republic and away from a federal empire.