American Political Musical Chairs Part 1

Good day reader, did you know that the framers of America’s constitution were Anarchists? Well good deals of them were; you see America was divided amongst two schools of thought. One was the statist who believed that a strong central government was a strong country; these guys were called Federalists or Whig since they were for a Federal government that stood above the States. The other side was the agrarians and individual liberty guys, these guys believed that in order to ensure individual liberties the individual must be represented to the utmost and this means all laws would be handled by the States, these guys were called either Jeffersonians, and to a degree Madisonians and belonged to the Democratic-Republican Party.

In politics there was always a lot of musical chairs, and reader you must understand that in most cases people who we understand today as bad guys may not have viewed themselves or their acts as evil. For example, the KKK is understood to be one of the most evil entities to exist in US history had members that believed their calling to murder people who did nothing to them was noble.

Eventually the party of Jefferson won and then again with the Madisonians, this pattern continued up until John Quincy Adams who was the first President to severely depart from typical free market strategy and pushed for a banking policy in line with Hamiltonian principles. Right after though Andrew Jackson was elected under the Democratic Party and at this point you were either Andrews’s boy or Adams’s boy and this is where it gets complicated. While both Andrew Jackson and John Q. Adams were from the same overarching school of thought in the Democratic-Republican party, they disagreed on banks, business and government involvement in both. The information of the economic situation during Jacksons time seems to carry the propaganda set by the pro Adams left wing. During this time there was a flip, Federalists were considered conservatives since they followed the old ways of having a monarchy or something close to it. However after being underrepresented in politics for 5 presidents and almost 40 years their tone changed and they pushed instead of for bigger monarchical government for bigger democratic government. 

Okay so let’s take a small breather, I’ll take this moment to clear my throat also: Reader I am not establishing who had the superior ideals here, nor who was good or who was evil. I am explaining to the best of my ability how political ideologies shifted around over the years and in my last paragraph I’ll explain where we stand today because of these shifts and how while the people of those times have died, the ideologies continue with very similar messages.

The term “Nanny State” accurately identifies the Progressive ideology of how government should operate.    But Progressivism had a different name before Teddy Roosevelt, it was also married to another idea called mistakenly referred to as White Supremacy.  Most hear “white” and think Anglo but in reality the ideology of racial superiority the Southerners practiced came from their French background. By this point in history England had decided to end the Transatlantic Slave Trade and positioned Navy and Privateers to harass and arrest those who conducted slave trading to the Americas and Caribbean.  Americans were also weary of a growing Black Slave population and feared a repeat of the Haitian slave revolts but in America. It could be said that fear may have fueled the sense of superiority slave owners felt; it could have been their version of denial. In the end after little over 60 years of slavery there was a war that would ultimately end the institution.

Now reader pay close attention here because this part becomes very confusing, even though I do not recognize the civil war as a war to end slavery many people do and so I’ll take a moment to explain how ideologies got entangled in this pre-civil war game of congressional musical chairs.

Jeffersonians held on to the idea of small but effective government, Hamiltonians held on to the idea of central banking, Madisonians held on to the idea of individual liberties like Jefferson but there was a little more to the ideology, it would be the one that wins the argument after the civil war and would forever change how we look at government, it would reach its apex during rein of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  This was the idea of bicameralism, it was a notion that aristocracy not only does exist but that it should exist in government.  In modern tongue Bicameralism is the belief that the old money or basically the wealthy should be represented separately from everyone else and as with every idea good or bad, there is reasoning behind it. The founders were afraid that the House would become to “fickle” and “impassioned” and so devised the Senate to keep a check on them, the Senate would be the wealthy folks deemed sensible as a verdict of their possession.

Now it’s very important to understand that these identifiers worked before the civil war, after the civil war the political paradigm shifted a lot and it was mainly due to the contagious government structure that England used called bicameralism. In the propaganda spin on things; Monarchy unwilling to give way to the silent ideological revolution called bicameralism established a  ideology called Cameralism. Today we understand Cameralism to mean Nationalism or economically Socialism but there is a difference. Cameralism is the belief that one’s government is one. In turn the government acts on behalf of the people because it is the people.  The Prussian people believed this wholeheartedly and what comes from that is ultimately the rise of nationalism and then when you add the Catholic Church’s far right wing as part of the national identity you have fascism.   

In the US though Cameralism took a different tone as it spread through Europe, Jefferson always had a fondness for Europe but only so far as Empire was concerned and beyond that he had no envy for European political structure or society but Nationalism in a post Jefferson Pre-Civil war era only seemed natural as Social Darwinism made its impact on the norms of society.

Okay, reader now that you have all of that back ground we can continue with how the different ideologies got entangled before the civil war. Before that it’s important to note that from this point on the left wing of America is the Right wing of the rest of the world and the right wing of America is an unrepresented party for the most part and there is a reason for this. There are only a few exceptions to that rule for example in England the Torri party are essentially right wingers and would find a lot more in common with Republicans in America than Democrats.

The founders that were Jeffersonians believed that slavery was a negative of their time, but most like Jefferson except a notable few like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine didn’t want to make a federal mandate abolishing the practice since it went against their idea of small government and also could cause a civil war. Jefferson personally up until his later years did not care for blacks in general and wanted them out of the US so that if they were to be slaves they would be slaves to their own kind, it would be later on in his life that he showed and understanding that blacks are as much men as a Europeans. Even so many early Jeffersonians like James Monroe took steps to get each state to abolish slavery. Part of the reason the North became so industrialized by the civil war was as a result of all the inventions Benjamin Franklin had came up with and the innovations there after.

Industrialization however came with its positives and negatives but for the purpose of the civil war the positive was the need for more consumers. Slaves cannot be consumers and so slavery was abolished thanks to that basic principle of Capitalism that says wealth can be created from nothing more than the imagination.  The downside was that industrialization shifted values from soft to hard land as people found more wealth working in factories than on farms. This caused an increase in the size of cities and thus demands for sound money and a central bank. I won’t go into banking in detail here or the green back movement; I just don’t have the space.

The south had adopted some of the innovations themselves but slavery was about another twenty years from ending in southern states as well without war. Economically the states that had abolished slavery were progressing at rapid rates socially and technologically as they became veritable metropolises. In the South though, inventions like the Cotton gin which was meant to ease demand for slaves like it did in the North only increased demand for slaves.  Aside from the economic reasons for the coming war the moral argument of the south was that Blacks did not want to be free anyway because they couldn’t handle freedom, black slaves were indeed the white man’s burden.

A divide was made and the Democrats who controlled the Senate because of how the Senate was elected (Those who possessed the most wealth in land) were segregationists and the Republicans were for desegregation.  Typically in the Senate was always packed with segregationists and only the Republicans  pushed for desegregation or did nothing at all on that issue. The militant component started with the abolitionists which consisted mainly of religious northerners who thought of slavery as a mortal sin and one of them was John Brown.

I feel that it is mainly because of the sensationalism around the John Brown affair why people give more credit to the abolition aspect of the civil war over the economic one.

I apologize reader but this has carried on for very long and so I’ll have to do a part two at another time, but this was a fun exercise in American History.