America
The United States is the closest there is to a land of the
free because it was founded in uniquely favourable
circumstances. Chief among these was the vast expanse of
habitable virgin territory coterminous to its borders which
with the benefits of modern agriculture could have been
settled peacefully by great numbers of immigrants with the
ongoing cooperation of the native population. This
circumstance gave young, fit, armed colonists the option to
resettle virtually at will merely as individuals for a
period of over two centuries. At the same time they enjoyed
many of the benefits of self government thanks to the
incorporation of constitutional provisions in colonial law
inspired by the first English revolutions, including the
right to trial by jury. American technology similarly
developed further the achievements of its British forbears,
and quickly assumed the role of world leader in industrial
innovation. The revolutionary movement which established
the first modern republic was sustained by a people which
had acquired technological skills and experienced freedom
of thought and action to an extent without parallel, led by
representatives of the world's most enlightened
intellectual community informed by the most advanced
understanding of scientific method and able to apply such
learning on a practical basis to the realm of political
philosophy. This explains why as stated the American
Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights comprise the
most concise expression of common sense understanding in
modern history.
Nevertheless it is clear that from the outset of the
revolution obstacles to further progress due to
conservative resistance and the attempts of aristocratic
factions to exploit the struggle against monarchy for
selfish reasons were only partially overcome. They have
continued to limit democratic development to the present
day. The origins of Athenian democracy and sortition are
not fully known. However it is generally recognised that
Greek democracy began with the reforms of Solon - that is
to say, with the positive cooperation of the ruling power.
The use of sortition may be explained therefore either by
the fact that this practice was simply more widespread at
the time, or that it was consciously introduced by the
ruling power, or both. Whichever of these possibilities
occurred, the chief distinctions between this form of
democracy and the US representative system remains the
same: the former was introduced with the willing patronage
of the existing ruling power, the latter was not.
As stated, leadership is necessary for any organisation,
and in its early stages of development democracy requires
aristocracy in order to function. Athenian democracy could
rely more easily on the existing hereditary aristocracy to
guide its development. Anglo-American democracy could not,
but had instead to develop a revolutionary movement to
overthrow a more entrenched form of tyranny. Representative
government arose from this circumstance: it combines the
role of a new aristocracy to overthrow and replace the old
hereditary aristocracy with democracy. It is not democracy
as such but a fusion of aristocracy and democracy. As
Rousseau correctly observed, the practice of representation
- first by appointment, then by election - is a derivation
of feudalism, not democracy.
Freemasonry has sought to present itself as such a
necessary, virtuous aristocracy in the American revolution,
a claim which appears to some limited extent reasonable,
when account is taken of its central role in the new
republic's army. It became nevertheless very clear that the
interests of freemasonry and those of democratic
development do not really coincide. The secret factional
methods of freemasonry are clearly at odds with sortition.
That problematic of leadership is the main reason why
representative democracy came into being when 55 American
colonists, many of whom, if not all, were freemasons, met
at a constitutional convention and deliberated, in secret,
with no agreed recorded minutes, on what form of government
should be established. There is both circumstantial and
anecdotal evidence which appears to confirm this. It has,
for example, been suggested that Franklin and Washington
discussed at the convention whether the role and influence
of Jews in the new republic should be contained, since they
have divided loyalties and could not be regarded as true
patriots. Charles Beard, perhaps the most widely read
radical historian of the American revolution, has sought to
refute this claim; his efforts to promote a Marxist view of
events at the expense of Jefferson's allegiance to common
sense realism should perhaps be taken into account in this
regard.
Conflict within the revolutionary movement polarised into a
struggle between those who favoured a greater emphasis on
aristocratic methods, led by Hamilton, and those who
favoured a greater emphasis on democratic methods, led by
Jefferson. Madison occupied a rather too flexible, centrist
position in this struggle. The US constitution is the
agreement reached between these contending forces which
would serve as a continuing basis for a united alliance.
The subtext of this consensus was that slavery could not be
abolished without destabilising the revolutionary alliance,
and that an aristocratic form of government by limited
consent Hamilton would term 'representative democracy'
should be established. Both sides hoped to overcome their
rivals in due course: the Right conspired to establish an
American constitutional monarchy in alliance with its
British cousin; the Left sought to ally with European
radicalism, end slavery and promote democratic development
in a basically Athenian direction. There are various
exceptions and complexities which do not directly match
this interpretation, but it is the most adequately
comprehensive.
Despite the exclusion of Jefferson from the constitutional
convention, Paine's refusal to attend it and Madison's
flagrant misrepresentation during it of the strengths of
Athenian democracy in containing the deleterious influences
of faction (as S.E. Finer notes, his claims that Greek
'pure' democracy can offer 'no cure for the mischiefs of
faction' are not only '… demonstrably false. Not merely
false: they are contre-verities' 1998, Vol 1, p362)
republican democracy subsequently secured rights to bear
arms and trial by jury on a fully comprehensive basis
pertaining to both pre-trial grand jury hearings and
virtually all criminal and civil matters. These were
important concessions from the American right. The
republican democrats went on to eventually rout federal
conservatism at the polls, but this victory did not lead to
repair of the damage done by Madison's spoiling tactics in
regard to sortition. It therefore remains the case that,
irrespective of his motives, he bears great responsibility
for the failure to incorporate sortition more widely in the
federal constitution, most especially when account is taken
of the fact that this had already been accomplished to some
extent in the Articles of Confederation.
The far sighted wisdom of American revolutionary radicalism
lay in its ability to maintain a difficult and problematic
alliance with aristocratic factions which sought to exploit
the struggle against monarchy for selfish purposes while at
the same time laying foundations which might serve to
facilitate the ultimate sovereignty and triumph of common
sense knowing, very possibly, that even following abolition
of slavery much effort and persistence would be needed to
achieve final victory. While democratic concessions had
been won by radicalism in the constitutional settlement,
much ground had been conceded in turn to aristocracy:
slavery remained intact, sortition was limited to juries
and democratic decision making was accordingly restricted
to a narrow elite.
Despite Jefferson's Bill of Rights, Hamilton was able to
ensure the American republic bore a closer constitutional
resemblance to Rome than Athens. Consequently what had long
been acknowledged as the great bane of aristocracy -
secrecy, intrigue and factionalism - while to some extent
necessary in the pre-revolutionary era, now continued to
act as central, determining components of representative
democracy, limiting and distorting political progress.
When Jefferson died the relative tranquillity established
with the terminal defeat of federal conservatism in the new
republic was disturbed by the new, incongruous champion of
the working man, the masonic grandmaster, Andrew Jackson.
His struggle for the Presidency began in 1824 against John
Quincy Adams on various charges of nepotism and corruption,
which then developed into a split within the Republican
Democrats from which the Democrats and National Republicans
emerged the first and second parties in the US.
As regards policy differences, there were none of any
ongoing historical significance. It was in that context
that Jefferson described Jackson as 'a very dangerous man.'
Although Jackson acquired an ostentatious reputation for
being in favour of the working man, such inferences were
essentially demagogic in character. His approach was in the
main to bribe and corrupt white voters by preserving
slavery, evicting Indians and stealing their lands.
The 'spoils system' in which electoral victors could award
lucrative state posts and contracts to their supporters
epitomised the fraudulent nature of Jackson's claim to be
more democratic than his rivals. The idea that politics was
a pursuit which only the leisured aristocracy could follow
in a virtuous manner was a symptom and consequence of the
narrowly elitist basis of the decision making process
agreed on in the constitutional settlement. This could only
genuinely be addressed by correcting Madison's
misrepresentation of Athenian democracy, and with this,
payment of delegates chosen by random selection. Jackson's
spoils system merely substituted one form of aristocratic
privilege for another, more obviously corrupt form shorn of
all pretence at impartiality.
To borrow an appropriately vernacular phrase, the
Democratic Party has, from its foundation to the present
day, spoken with forked tongue. After fraudulently laying
claim to the Jeffersonian heritage the Democratic Party
went on to promote slavery above the Missouri compromise
line by allowing new states to establish slavery - the
infamous Kansas Nebraska act, which led directly to the
civil war. It was in this context that Lincoln subsequently
inquired in regard to a commemorative dinner held by his
new Republican Party in honour of Jefferson why it should
be that 'those supposed to descend politically from the
party opposed to Jefferson should now be celebrating his
birthday, while those claiming political descent from him
have ceased to breathe his name everywhere. I remember once
being amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage
in a fight with their greatcoats on, which fight, after a
long and harmless contest, ended in each having fought
himself out of his own coat, and into that of the other. If
the two leading parties of the day are really identical
with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have
performed the same feat as the two drunken men.'
Party differences, it might appear, were so marginal in
American politics that one party could slip into the role
of another almost by accident. If, however, account is
taken of the possibility that, as Lincoln clearly implied,
all is not as it appears in the transition to government by
consent, a different set of possibilities emerges. A fuller
picture of the real state of affairs in US political
development can be gained when consideration is given to
the problem of freemasonry. John Quincy Adams was the only
openly antimasonic President in US history. During his
administration the American Anti-Masonic Party was formed
following exposure of the vast conspiracy to protect the
murderers of Captain William Morgan, a high ranking
freemason who took steps and openly threatened to expose
masonic secrets in a publicly systematic way. It won 37
Congress seats in the radical, northern states with the
support of the lower classes and quickly became the third
US party. The possibility therefore emerges that Jackson's
Democrats were in some way promoted in response to this
gathering threat to masonic interests.
In the following decades 'American' freemasonry suffered
the most catastrophic decline in its history. Lincoln's
opponents, it has been claimed, were all freemasons. The
official masonic standpoint in the civil war was of an
'agreement to differ.' Unofficially it has been suggested
that high ranking masonic generals on both sides colluded
with the Democrats to increase Union losses in order to
topple Lincoln. His secretary of state, William Seward, had
led the American Anti-Masonic Party. The operation to kill
them (Seward was attacked in a different place but
simultaneously with Lincoln) was, it has been claimed,
planned and executed by means of a confederate masonic
conspiracy that had international backers, including from
within the British ruling class.
These are mere conjectures, not facts. Nevertheless taken
against the background of the central role of freemasonry
in the history of the American republic they should be
taken account of. On this understanding American history
can be viewed as that of a dynamic, much of it
conspiratorial, between genuinely democratic aspirations
and aristocratic duplicity, with the latter seeking to
present its own interests as those of common sense in order
to better impede realisation of such aspirations, but in so
doing risking exposure and defeat through those powers
granted to ordinary reason by the constitution. This can be
seen in the self evidently contradictory relation between
the Declaration of Independence, slavery, and the right to
trial by jury, which duly found expression in the
widespread rejection and nullification of Fugitive Slave
law by juries. Eight decades after the revolution this
contradiction laid bare the arbitrary, treasonous
standpoint of mainly Democrat supreme court justices when,
in order to deprive Dred Scott of freedom they wilfully and
deliberately ignored the fact that black men in five of the
original States had been full voting citizens dating back
to 1776.
The American 'civil war' was in that sense a war against
both treason and slavery: from the standpoint of common
sense secessionist claims to confederate legitimacy were
nonsense from beginning to end, but even so still
supposedly confused 'anarchist' radicals such as Lysander
Spooner. This example of entrenched supreme court
irrationalism shows that though giving accurate expression
to the general democratic interest in the transition to
government by consent the American revolutionary
achievement has been slow to fully realise due to the
intransigence of conservatism, the subversion of democratic
progress by narrow aristocratic interests, and the
consequent confusion these difficulties have generated in
the camp of radicalism. As a result, although democratic
progress has been made since 1776, it has been relatively
slow, and sometimes has been reversed.
Fraudulent arguments have been deployed by aristocratic
forces to prevent exercise of the fundamental rights
guaranteed by the federal constitution, including the
invocation of state sovereignty. As US supreme court
justices said at the time in 1857, what worried them most
about the Dred Scott case was the implication that blacks
as citizens would be entitled to the right to bear arms. By
such means this right was denied to blacks in Dixieland,
both before and after the 14th amendment. The supreme court
has since effectively refused to discuss defence of second
amendment rights when attacked either by racist state
legislation in the 19th century or soft totalitarian gun
control state legislation enacted by the leftist
'interpretivist' school of judicial activism in the late
20th century. Today career radicalism purports to fear the
urban mob and employs arguments used by the American
slaveowners of 1783 and 1865 who sought to restrict the
right to bear arms to forces under state control for fear
of the black mob, while the revolutionary northern colonies
sought to both oppose slavery and emphasise the individual
right to bear arms (which, as with randomly selected jurors
vs state judges, is what alone makes sense - or, more
precisely, common sense - in regard to the relation between
the state and the people). Reason has shown itself the
slave of short-sighted passions for racists and postmodern
radicals alike in this regard.
The right to trial by jury and with this the limited role
of sortition in the constitution has not been advanced
since the revolution, but on the contrary has been
curtailed by means of judicial interference to levels below
those stipulated in the Bill of Rights. The 14th Amendment,
supposed to protect fundamental rights against state
encroachment, has, as shown, been ignored in regard to the
right to bear arms and actually been interpreted as a way
of curtailing the use of grand juries in misdemeanour
crimes. The purpose of trial by jury, as the Supreme Court
itself has noted, is to prevent "oppression by the
government." To perform that role, jurors must act
independently and conscientiously, and they must be
prepared to "just say no" if they believe that a conviction
would be unjust. Non-cooperation with injustice was a
social imperative that had led, in part, to the American
revolution. Juries are not always or immediately the most
wise depositories of the public interest but in the long
view they are the safest. If there is any component part of
the US federal constitution that has demonstrated its
ultimately reliably democratic character it is the right to
trial by jury and the nullification powers of the jury to
refuse to convict law breakers when enforcement of the law
does not measure up to the standards of common sense.
Jurors regularly refused to enforce both the Alien and
Sedition Act and the Fugitive Slave Act.
Jefferson's confidence in the right to trial by jury has
therefore been completely vindicated, but so also has his
distrust of the legal profession. Just as Jefferson
forewarned, judicial aristocracy - in both conservative and
soft totalitarian form - has shown a tendency to deny the
constitutional role of juries when their own prejudices and
the interests of their allies are at stake. In 1872 the
woman's suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony was denied the
right to trial by jury for illegal voting. Toward the end
of the 19th century courts began to restrict the role of
juries. In 1895 the Supreme Court held that trial courts
were not required to inform jurors of their power to refuse
to convict, or to convict on lesser charges, if they
believed a conviction on the facts proven at trial would be
unjust. In the years since, American courts have
misinterpreted that ruling as a blanket prohibition on
informing jurors of their discretionary prerogative to
"check" unjust laws. The result has been that juries have
been restrained from exercising their veto. While it is
true that white racist juries have taken decisions which do
not accord with truth, it is the role of the jury in the
federal constitution as a whole, and with this, world
history, that has vindicated Jefferson's trust in the
people.
The common sense understanding that inherited wealth should
be subject to redistribution for egalitarian purposes and
that inheritance tax is the most socially just form of
taxation was well known to American revolutionary
radicalism. Jefferson and Paine made plain their firm grasp
of its importance in advocating the principle that 'the
earth belongs to the living' as a constitutional provision.
Franklin similarly argued the state had a duty to prevent
large concentrations of wealth as a threat to the welfare
and happiness of the people. As with slavery, however, this
concession was not going to be easily won from aristocracy.
Although Jefferson abolished primogeniture in his own
lifetime and an inheritance tax was established in 1797 no
stable progress in over two centuries has since been made
in regard to this principle.
During the 19th century the campaign of genocide conducted
against the American Indians ensured vast areas of new land
were made available for frontier settlers, a crime which
violated the principle that the earth belongs to the living
and so directly undermined radicalism on this question.
Jefferson had placed the interests of the world's first
modern democratic republic higher than those of the
American Indians - and he was right to do so - but, as
antimasonic writers made clear, the campaign of genocide
subsequently conducted against them was totally at odds
with his approach on this matter, which upheld the
standards of common sense and rested on the assumption that
westward settlement would take many centuries and develop
in a relatively harmonious manner.
This heritage of genocide is consequently now integrally
connected to this limitation in the development of American
democracy, and together with inheritance tax now comprises
one of the most important constitutional issues continuing
to face the oldest modern republic in regard to the
principle that the earth belongs to the living, rivalled in
significance only by the failure to incorporate sortition
more fully in the electoral system.
Of relevance here is that the American Indian Iroquois
federal constitution had incorporated sortition. By the
close of the 19th century therefore the American republic
had abolished slavery but bore little further resemblance
to Jefferson's hopes in regard to democratic progress. His
vision of development towards a flexible, participatory
democracy similar to that of the Athenian polis organised
about the principle that the earth belongs to the living
and able to effect review of the constitution on a regular,
long term cycle had been subverted and frustrated by the
prejudices, interests and intrigues of aristocratic
factionalism. Progress towards a more participatory,
non-partisan political system had long been forestalled in
favour of the unrestricted accumulation of vast fortunes by
a new aristocracy of wealth. Correspondingly segregation
had in any case been institutionalised in the south and the
American Indians had been virtually exterminated.
US policy in the new century could consequently be
described as democratic in only a limited and provisional
manner, in that it could be affected by election of one or
two main parties. This needs to be taken into account in
regard to economic policy, and in particular, the role of
banking and finance. The conservative wing of the American
republic made plain from the outset their desire to emulate
as closely as possible the British example of
constitutional monarchy and with this to establish a
National Bank and a National Debt, aims for which they were
unsurprisingly supported by the banking fraternity.
Alexander Hamilton, a man of Jewish descent experienced in
the realm of finance, led his federalist supporters in this
cause. American radicalism had consistently opposed this
demand throughout most of the 19th century. Despite this
and after having somehow survived most of its first century
without deliberate deficit spending and yet still emerged
as the pioneer of mass production and accordingly the
world's leading industrial power the American republic
nevertheless eventually succumbed to the long advocated
strategies of the banking fraternity. In 1913 The Federal
Reserve Act formally established the central role of
capitalist banking and finance in US economic affairs. The
National Debt was zero in one single year, 1834, when the
Anti-Masonic Party held 37 seats in Congress. It is now
over $9 trillion, much of it due to war. Hence banking,
debt and war are related. Eisenhower's curious warning
about the 'military industrial complex' might actually have
been better directed against banking.
In 1916 the US constitution was amended to establish income
tax on a federal basis, half of which revenue is now spent
paying the interest on the National Debt. Whether this
colossal debt actually serves the real interests of the
people is and has always been an open question, since the
political system has never facilitated processes of
democratic decision making on a systematically popular,
non-partisan foundation, in which self evident truth and
its derivatives can be properly distinguished and subject
to the judgement of common sense. Even so freedom of speech
has been upheld in many parts of America: in 1900 it was
still (and has remained) the most advanced republic in
world history. Given sound leadership and some good fortune
it was possible that the Jeffersonian path could have been
rejoined and genuinely democratic constitutional provisions
based on the self evident truths of common sense could
accordingly have been formulated, promoted and
incorporated.
New difficulties however had in the meantime emerged with
the failure of revolutionary movements throughout Europe
which had operated on strategic assumptions derived chiefly
from the French example. In this process the tenuous
relation between common sense, political philosophy and
social progress, competently grasped by American
revolutionary radicalism, had been weakened and fractured.
Democracy in its non-partisan Athenian meaning was probably
less understood in 1900 than in 1800 by academics, leave
alone voters. Madison and his murky colleagues had well and
truly sown the dragon's teeth of confusion in this regard.
By 1900 Kautsky, following Hegel, had declared Athenian
democracy to be 'immature,' and the party system to be the
'mature' form of 'bourgeois democracy.' This fake
radicalism served to bamboozle the Left and at the same
time strengthen longstanding conservative prejudices
against Athenian democracy and so further remove sortition
from the realm of academic study and public discussion.
Common sense realism, the guiding philosophical tradition
of Anglo-American radicalism, suffered a similar fate and
was likewise overshadowed in the academic world, verbally
and in print, by the idealist and scholastic traditions of
European social theory. In June 2003 an officially
witnessed computer search at the British Library showed
that none of the first fifty books on the subject of
democracy contained reference to sortition in title,
chapter heading, or index. It is only very recently
&endash; in the last decade or so, that Thomas Reid's
work on common sense realism has begun to gain recognition
for its true merit, after a period of over a century in
which this tradition has been virtually excluded from
serious academic consideration. This has been the
background against which the erroneous and unscientific
postulates of European idealism and Marxism ultimately
informed the methodological assumptions of anarchism,
Marxism, socialism, postmodern liberalism and
totalitarianism. No library today consequently contains any
works other than those of this author suggesting the
application of sortition in electoral process (and
including payment of randomly selected delegates) on the
basis of common sense realism to deal with the problems of
masonic and cold war factionalism in the context of James
Madison's misrepresentation of Athenian democracy and the
failure of subsequent US legislators to incorporate the
principle that the 'earth belongs to the living' in
taxation policy.