A STEEL-cameralist Manifesto Part 4B3: American Fascism (How the Founders Fought and Lost Against the Minotaur).

 

1: Introduction: An Experiment in Liberty.

2: The Structural Origins of American Fascism.

3: Imperium in Imperio.

4: The Hypothesis Falsified.

5: The Last Word.

 

 

1: Introduction: An Experiment in Liberty.

America is a fascist country – or so we argue.

To help understand what we mean, the last two parts attempted to induce a historical and philosophical gestalt switch to perceive the fact that every major modern state can be described as fascist. We have not yet described what fascism is, but we will in the next part.

The part B1 signposted the political history of West’s  trajectory from feudalism to fascism.

Part B2 laid out the prophetic fears of thinkers, both left and right, who saw the totalitarian implications in democracy; implications that came to fruition with the three fascisms of the 20^th Century.

In this part, we finish our framing by turning our attention to the American founding fathers and their disagreements over the structure of the state and the nature of sovereignty.

Or how they fought the Minotaur.

The American founding fathers understood the danger of democracy and state power all too well. Their design was an explicit attempt to prevent the state assuming dangerous, destructive power and using it to crush liberty.

As we will soon see, it was clear to the founders that they were embarked upon a political project that has no precedent in history. They also understood that not only was their situation a novelty, but what they finally did – the regime they founded – was a political novelty.

In other words, it was an experiment.

The rest of this part may appear unduly harsh and critical, so we will say a few words by way of balance out of respect of the great difficulties that these men faced for there has perhaps never in human history been a more valiant attempt to defeat the Minotaur.

The founders were serious, sober, smart men. Their smarts were not the smarts of the academic or political glad-handler. The founders were aristocrats. They were capable of intellectual thought and abstract reasoning and running a farm. They attended both plays and battlefields. There were men of principle, but they also intensely practical and political.

As such, these men – men like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton – had a breadth and depth of practical and theoretical funds to draw upon when they embarked upon their experiment to defeat, capture and imprison the Minotaur for good.

If a 17^th century scientist were to be brought back to life today and was then confronted with all the progress in knowledge since his time, how much would his understanding have to change? How difficult a shift in thought would he need to make?

If Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton could see the results of their political experiment, what would be their judgement?

If they could study the evolution of their bold design, what lessons would they draw?

What would they do differently?

Could they honestly admit that their system of “checks and balances” restrained the power of the state – that the prison they designed for the Minotaur failed to keep the beast chained up?

Our claim here, as the title suggests, is that the American experiment in republican liberty has failed.

That liberty, the thing the founder’s supposedly valued the most, has been crushed by the state.

Our central claim is that their hypothesis that the Constitution and the Federalist architecture of the state did not violate the principle of not creating Imperium in Imperio has been comprehensively falsified by the facts.

We can compare the founder’s actions to that of a doctor who believes he is giving his patient a drug that will prevent them from getting sick; the founders, like the doctor, do not know that their actions are the very cause of the thing they tried to prevent.

 

2: The Structural Origins of American Fascism.

Our final source, before we address the question of fascism directly, is from Bernard Bailyn’s 1968 book Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

The following extracts display some of the arguments that the founders and others had over the nature of state and most importantly here: Imperium in Imperio.

To simplify matters for our purposes, there were two factions that developed over the structure of the American state and its relationship with Imperium in Imperio.

The first, despite fearing the potential power of the centralized state with a strong executive, argued for separating the branches of government but still having an “energetic” executive. This faction, which ultimately won out, rejected – or slurred over – the principle of avoiding Imperium in Imperio. This faction was the Federalists. Their chief advocate was “Publius.”

The second group, who were the Anti-Federalists, while still accepting divided government, argued that the proposed Federalist state was too strong and too threatening to liberty. Their chief advocate was Brutus.

Both parties saw the separation of powers (Imperium in Imperio) as an error, a “political solecism” and that the result of dividing power would bring about “anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war and bloodshed.”

Yet, they contradicted themselves time and again over this principle.

The Federalists argued that their system either did not fall foul of Imperium in Imperio or that the principle did not apply. The Anti-Federalists, meanwhile, saw the Federalists as not only committing the mistake of Imperium in Imperio but compounding the problem by creating a strong, central state in the first place.

The purpose of the following extracts should be seen as in invitation to revisit and re-think the founding of the Republic because the facts of history contradict the claims of theory.

The experiment has been falsified historically, politically, economically, legally and militarily.

Given the corporate origins of the U.S, we can agree with the master that USG has voided its charter due to numerous instances of it operating ultra vires.

(Naturally, this should be both an argument and a talking point.)

Our charge here is that separating political power into three branches does not prevent fascism.

In fact, it is one of two central causes of it.

 

3: Imperium in Imperio.

One of the central issues that divided the Federalists and Anti-Federalists was the principle of Imperium in Imperio.

The origins of this term appears to trace back to Bolingbroke, who first used it in 1731 in an essay that appeared in the Craftsman attacking English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole’s “Robinocracy.”

Bailyn notes that it was an axiom of 18^th Century thought that Imperium in Imperium was the “greatest of all political solecisms.”

The term was later taken up by the colonists and then the American Revolutionaries. (You can search for the references here.)

Imperium in Imperio was understood then as a mistake in much the same way Master Moldbug and Master Future understand the term.

However, there was also a specifically Protestant understanding of the term.

This charming screed makes the claim that it was the Catholics who were introduced the “solecism” of Imperium in Imperio. Decades later, Catholics were still getting blamed for Imperium in Imperio in this wonderfully titled work:

Imperium in Imperio, Or, Substantial Motives for Resisting the Claims of the Roman Catholics to Admissibility Into Any Situations which Could Afford Them Opportunities of Legislating for Protestants

We, by contrast, introduce a third conception of the mistake which is that the very nature of Christianity itself set’s up Imperium in Imperio which is grasped in Christ’s famous render unto Caesar command.

Whatever the merits of the charge, the problem is one that is not exclusive to Christianity. One of the points we have previously made is that the recurring caste division of soldier, sage and merchant provides the impetus to the mistake that results in tension and conflict in Indian, Islamic and Chinese politics.

The crux of the matter is the consequences of the mistake for sound political engineering; a fact that the early Americans were well aware of.

For example:

In footnote 42 on page 206 Bailyn provides sources for the Imperium in Imperio debate:

The: Votes and Procudings of the Free holders … of … Boston . .. (Boston, [1772]: JHL Pamphlet 36), p. 4, Catholics are condemned as introducing “that solecism in politics, imperium in imperio, leading directly to the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war and bloodshed“; “imperium in imperio,” Daniel Leonard wrote, is “the heighth of political absurdity.” The Origin of the American Constitution with Great-Britain … (New York, 1775: JHL Pamphlet 56), p. 56. For the explicit repudiation of the formula, see Iredell’s remarks, quoted below, pp. 224-225 .”

A clearer example is provided by Bailyn in the following passage that features “Brutus”, the leading Anti-Federalist:

The federal government, like the British government before 1776, “Brutus” wrote in two of his finest papers, empowered by the “necessary and proper” and the “supreme law of the land” clauses, “would totally destroy all the powers of the individual states,” for no “two men, or bodies of men, can have unlimited power respecting the same object.” It contradicts logic, scripture, even the principles of mechanics. “The legislature of the United States will have a right to exhaust every source of revenue in every state, and to annul all laws of the states which may stand in the way of effecting it.”

(A recent article, by Judge Andrew Napolitano shows that the problem of divided authority plagues USG to this very day on one of the central issues of our time.)

Master Future:

The first point for the theory is that any society which is systematically turned against itself, is one in which chaos will take hold. To place segments of society in the situation in which engaging in conflict with others in society is of benefit to them is recipe for suicide. The thinking of republicans and the avocation of Imperium in imperio is utterly disastrous and based on basic stupidity which has played out over, and over, and over again. Away with it. If you can’t not deal with this, then I don’t care, you are not reactionary in any way shape or form. You have renounced a state.

The American founders would have understood Future’s warnings completely, but while they said one thing, they did something completely different in practice.

The following long extract from Bailyn set’s out the background to the debate, from the colonial era to the Revolution and beyond. Bailyn notes that the question of Imperium in Imperio would “haunt” all those who would try to create a “stable” political system.

The following passage, furthermore, is really a showcase of order giving way to anarchist disorder due to both the need to make the Revolution justified (“Sovereignty of the people”) and the fact that then, like today, the Americans were politically and religiously (though all Christian) diverse and divided.

From order to anarchy to confusion:

James Iredell condemned the “beautiful theory” of sovereignty as “narrow and pedantic,” “calculated to sacrifice to a point of speculation the happiness of millions,” and developed the argument from the inapplicability of the idea of sovereignty—”the great solecism of an imperium in imperio”—”to the case of several distinct and independent legislatures each engaged within a separate scale and employed about different objects. The imperium in imperio argument is, therefore, not at all applicable to our case, though it has been so vainly and confidently relied on.” The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin’s Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.

Today, we would call the following a case of motivated reasoning:

One of the most notable pamphlets that developed the details of this claim, James Wilson’s Considerations on the Nature and the Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament(1774), opened with a revealing confession. The maturing of this thought, Wilson wrote in his Preface, had been an unwilling progression. He had begun, only a few years earlier, with the “expectation of being able to trace some constitutional line between those cases in which we ought, and those in which we ought not, to acknowledge the power of Parliament over us. In the prosecution of [my] enquiries, [1] became fully convinced that such a line does not exist, and that there can be no medium between acknowledging and denying that power in all cases.” Under the pressure of insistent declarations that sovereignty was indivisible he had followed out the “principles of reason, of liberty, and of law,” to their natural conclusion, which was that “the only dependency which [the colonies] ought to acknowledge is a dependency on the crown.”

Notice that the idea moved from being “radical” to “conservative” in fifteen years:

 But the position that Wilson and others had given up—that Parliament’s sovereignty did extend to America but was constitutionally limited by the powers reserved to the colonial legislatures—had not been forgotten. The movement of thought had been so rapid, however, that this argument, radical for the mid-1760’s, had by 1775 become a conservative bastion; it was defended not only in point of theory by authentic leaders of the American cause who, like John Dickinson, hesitated to proceed to the more extreme position, but also by outspoken Tories who, continuing to ridicule the theory of divided sovereignty, accepted it in practice as they sought to establish some measure of rapport with the new forces of American life. To “disavow the authority of Parliament” and still claim allegiance to the King, the New York Tory leader Samuel Seabury wrote in 1774, “is another piece of Whiggish nonsense”; and he cited Pitt’s speeches in Parliament and Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letters to defend the argument, now comfortably old-fashioned, that the line to be drawn —in fact if not in theory—between “the supremacy of Great Britain and the dependency of the colonies” should leave “all internal taxation . . . in our own legislatures, and the right of trade… [and] enacting all general laws for the good of the colonies” in Parliament.

The break-up:

So also, with minor variations, wrote the English traveler John Lind; so too wrote Daniel Leonard in Massachusetts; so too Joseph Galloway in Pennsylvania; so too Thomas Bradbury Chandler in New York; and so too, in the end— though still ambiguously and much too late —did the government of George III. Through all these years of crisis, when American thought had moved steadily from Otis’ archaisms and confusions to Wilson’s advanced speculations on imperial federalism, the British ministry, fortified by fresh, militant assertions such as Dr. Johnson’s that “in sovereignty there are no gradations,” had remained adamant in its refusal even to consider infringing the Declaratory Act. Its final, pre-Independence proposals for reconciliation did not compromise the point. Only in 1778—after Independence had invoked the ultimate sovereignty of the people; after most of the states had organized their own governments, and the Articles of Confederation of the new nation had been drawn up and submitted to the states for ratification; and only 209 under the pressure of the catastrophe at Saratoga and of France’s entrance into the war—only then, in the instructions to the ill-fated Carlisle Commission, did the North administration relent sufficiently to endorse, though still not in theory, the position that Dickinson had advanced so long ago in the Farmer’s Letters. Such a grudging concession was by then grotesquely irrelevant to the realities of the situation. The idea that Americans would at that late date be willing, as the instructions to the Carlisle Commission put it, “to return to their condition of 1763” and to do so in such a way that “the sovereignty of the mother country should not be infringed” was unthinkable.

Thus, to save face (and neck), the principle of Imperium in Imperio had to go by the board:

The course of intellectual, as well as of political and military, events had brought into question the entire concept of a unitary, concentrated, and absolute governmental sovereignty.

What got broke could not be put back together again:

It had been challenged, implicitly or explicitly, by all those who had sought constitutional grounds for limiting Parliament’s power in America. In its place had come the sense, premised on the assumption that the ultimate sovereignty— ultimate yet still real and effective—rested with the people, that it was not only conceivable but in certain circumstances salutary to divide and distribute the attributes of governmental sovereignty among different levels of institutions.

Was the Revolution even necessary?

Hypocrisy:

The notion had proved unacceptable as a solution of the problem of Anglo-American relations, but it was acted upon immediately and instinctively in forming the new union of sovereign states. The problems, intellectual and political, inherent in such an arrangement would persist; some were scarcely glimpsed when the nation was formed.

The compromise over Imperium in Imperio was inherently contradictory from the beginning.

Haunted by illogical assumptions from the start:

The belief that “imperium in imperio” was a solecism and the assumption that the “sovereignty of the people” and the sovereignty of an organ of government were of the same order of things would remain to haunt the efforts of those who would struggle to build a stable system of federal government. But the initial challenges to the traditional eighteenth- century notion of sovereignty had been made. Later analysts, starting where the colonists had left off before Independence and habituated to think in terms of “qualified sovereignty,” “lesser sovereignties,” “the divisibility of sovereignty,” would continue the effort to make federalism a logical as well as a practical system of government.

They did not succeed:

They would not entirely succeed; the task would be a continuing one, never fully completed.

From a reactionary perspective, what this means is that the “task” of centralizing power, leveling and using proxies will continue, forever presumably.

Still, reactionary voices would still persist:

Generations later there would still be those, states rightists and nationalists, who would repudiate this legacy of the Revolution and reinvoke in different contexts the theories of Hobbes and Blackstone, of Hutchinson and Knox.

The Federalist’s political perpetual motion machine:

But the federalist tradition, born in the colonists’ efforts to state in constitutional language the qualification of Parliament’s authority they had known – to comprehend, systematize, and generalize the unplanned circumstance of colonial life nevertheless survived, and remains, to justify the distribution of absolute power among governments no one of which can claim to be total, and so to keep the central government from amassing “a degree of energy, in order to sustain itself, dangerous to the liberties of the people.”

Again, power can be delegated, never divided.

Alexander Hamilton expended considerable effort, as did many others, in the attempt to square the circle. The following long extract is from the end of Bailyn’s book and it summarizes the obstacles that Hamilton tried to overcome:

The key doctrine of federalism could survive criticism only to the extent that it could somehow be distinguished from the ancient belief that imperium in imperio was an illogical and unresolvable solecism. So they reexamined that old formula, took it apart, and showed, not its falsity, but its irrelevance in the American situation. The anti federalists, Hamilton wrote, obsessed with “artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties,” reiterated the ancient maxim that imperium in imperio is a “political monster.” But in operation, he wrote, the states and the national governments would not clash. The “supreme law of the land” clause would have the effect of linking the states’ officers, no less than the nation’s officers, to the enforcement of federal law and hence lead to a functional merger of-not conflict between – the two levels of authority. There would be no fatal clash, as “Brutus” feared, between the taxing powers of states and nation. The nation’s taxing power is specified, and under Article I, Section 10, the states retained all other taxing powers. The two governments would intersect only where they exercised concurrent powers, and concurrence is not the repugnancy that lay at the heart of the ancient precept. Simple prudence and “reciprocal forbearances” would permit a harmonious relationship, and if the national government invaded areas of taxation reserved to the states, such action would be void, and the people would make this clear.

National government did more than just invade “areas of taxation reserved to the states”, but a literal invasion of bullets and bayonets, bombings and burnings a few decades later over the question of Southern succession.

Self-correcting power system:

….They felt the necessity to build a power center in the national government, but their inherited understanding of the dangers to liberty – fragile in its nature and easily destroyed – warned them against such an effort. At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that could dominate the nation. But that blueprint for a self-correcting power system, which they labored to explain in the minutest detail throughout the vast ratifying debate, was not enough. Something more was required. Their ideological inheritance, which so clearly warned them of the dangers of what they were doing and which fuelled the antifederalists’ objections to the Constitution, had to be confronted and assessed. The past would have to be laid to rest; not rejected in favor of some other, different set of beliefs, but refined, renewed, brought up to date – worked out, fulfilled.

(See more about our take on the self-correcting system here and here.)

No one can ever doubt that Americans are “optimistic” and attempt the impossible:

Embarked as they were on a project they believed was without precedent in human history – to construct a potentially powerful state, but one that would preserve the liberties of the people – they clung to the basic ideology of the early Revolution but, where necessary, turned its monitory, negative formulations to affirmative purposes. Anachronisms were weeded out; irrelevancies in the American situation were discarded; distended abstractions were lanced and drained of distortions; and the hard realities of the real, functioning world were everywhere revealed. Change was inevitably involved, but the movement of change was return as well as departure: revision, refinement, and reapplication of an earlier tradition, not repudiation.

We come next to the question that will occupy us in part five  – the military:

So they dissipated the fear of “standing armies,” not by abandoning the fear of military rule but by showing the irrelevance of that peculiar and distinctive concept in the American situation. They recognized the need for a regular, professional army, but they insisted that it remain under strict civilian control: the military must always, Tench Coxe wrote in the course of his defense of a national army, “be regarded with a watchful eye, for it is a profession that is liable to dangerous perversion.” So they showed the irrelevance of the ancient “solecism” imperium in imperio; but despite Hamilton’s assurances and despite the federalist structure of the Constitution, they continued to believe that a concurrence of powers could mean a repugnancy; that in certain situations you could have – to repeat

Madison’s words – “a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments,” and when you did you would find “violence in place of law, or the destructive coertion of the sword in place of the mild and salutary coertion of the magistracy.”

The possibility and fear of a “totalitarian” government was there from the beginning:

For, Madison prophetically insisted, “if a compleat supremacy some where is not necessary in every society, a controuling power at least is so, by which the general authority may be defended against encroachments of the subordinate authorities and by which the latter may be restrained from encroachments on each other.” Federalism was a possible, not a certain, solution; its essence was not automatic harmony but an uncertain tension which statecraft alone could maintain. For the federalists there was no other solution, since they, as much as the eloquent anti federalist “Brutus,” feared any comprehensive government whose power could be exercised without limitation. In their mind’s eye they too could imagine and they too shuddered at the thought of a national government that could creep into every corner of the country…

(We will see the “prophesy” of Brutus in more detail shortly.)

But they never abandoned the belief that only an informed, alert, intelligent, and uncorrupted electorate would preserve the freedoms of a republican state, and that sufficient virtue existed to sustain the American republic. So too they scotched the fear of an effective national executive, showed its necessity and benignity in the American situation. But they continued to believe, as deeply as any of the militants of ’76, that power corrupts; that, in the words of the conservative Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, “the very idea of power included a possibility of doing harm, that any release of the constraints on the executive – any executive – was an invitation to disaster; and that an unfettered collaboration between the executive and the military or the “secret services” was a certain catastrophe.

What would Publius and Brutus make of today’s “deep state”?

Who, ultimately, was proved correct: Federalists or Anti-Federalists?

Here is a prophecy from Brutus, that Bailyn recounts:

The federal government, like the British government before 1776, “Brutus” wrote in two of his finest papers, empowered by the “necessary and proper” and the “supreme law of the land” clauses, “would totally destroy all the powers of the individual states,” for no “two men, or bodies of men, can have unlimited power respecting the same object.” It contradicts logic, scripture, even the principles of mechanics. “The legislature of the United States will have a right to exhaust every source of revenue in every state, and to annul all laws of the states which may stand in the way of effecting it.”

In the end, the national government, through its taxing power, “Brutus” then wrote in a florid peroration that conjures up the horrors of totalitarian states, exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every corner of the city and country.

It [the national government] will wait upon the ladies at their toilen, and will not leave them in any of their domestic concerns; it will accompany them to the ball, the play, and the assembly; it will go with them when they visit, and will, on all occasions, sit beside them in their carriages, nor will it desert them even at church; it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlour, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks; it will attend him to his bed-chamber, and watch him while he sleeps; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office or his study; it will watch the merchant in the counting-house or in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop and in his work, and will haunt him in his family and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labour, it will be with him in the house and in the field, observe the toil of his hands and the sweat of his brow; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States.

To all these different classes of people and in all these circumstances in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them will be, GIVE! GIVE!

“Ladies” in their toilets?

Check.

Food and drink?

Check.

Mechanic in his shop?

Check.

Merchant in his store?

Check.

Light upon the head of every person?

Check.

Give! Give!! Give!!!

Check. Check. Check.

 

4: The Hypothesis Falsified.

Lawrence Hunter, writing in Forbes, concludes that:

The American experiment in liberty has failed.  It is only a matter of time before people realize it. Official dogma exulting over the U.S. Constitution, which for so long was propagated through public schools, churches and government mouthpieces, will not forever withstand the exposure of the truth about American democracy now readily available on the Internet.

The greatest fear of America’s Founding Fathers has been realized: The U.S. Constitution has been unable to thwart the corrosive dynamics of majority-rule democracy, which in turn has mangled the Constitution beyond recognition. The real conclusion of the American Experiment is that democracy ultimately undermines liberty and leads to tyranny and oppression by elected leaders and judges, their cronies and unelected bureaucrats.  All of this is done in the name of “the people” and the “general welfare,” of course.  But in fact, democracy oppresses the very demos in whose name it operates, benefiting string-pullers within the Establishment and rewarding the political constituencies they manage by paying off special interests with everyone else’s money forcibly extracted through taxation.

So much for Hamilton’s “simple prudence.”

The Founding Fathers (especially Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and James Monroe), as well as outside observers of the American Experiment such as Alexis de Tocqueville all feared democracy and dreaded this outcome.  But, they let hope and faith in their ingenious constitutional engineering overcome their fear of the democratic state, only to discover they had replaced one tyranny with another.

The American Experiment in Liberty Has Failed.

In a review of Stolen Sovereignty, a book by Daniel Horowitz, Mark Pullium writes that Horowitz:

… decries “a runaway judicial oligarchy and an unaccountable bureaucratic state.” He is concerned that the Left “has irrevocably co-opted [the courts and bureaucracy] into serving as conduits for their radical and revolutionary ideas—to the point that even if we win back the presidency and elect only constitutional conservatives to Congress, . . . it won’t matter.”

Radical, revolutionary and fascist ideas.

5: The Last Word.

Imperium in Imperio: “no “two men, or bodies of men, can have unlimited power respecting the same object.”.

A political solecism that will produce nothing but “anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war and bloodshed.“

And fascism.

This is why things like this happens.

Or this: