Below, a section of Andrew Fraser’s “Natural Born Citizen? Obama and the Fourth American Revolution” published today at The Occidental Observer.
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity
The constitutive principle of the First (Federal) Republic was liberty. But the festering contradiction between the progressive ideal of liberty and the reactionary realities of Negro slavery unleashed another wave of revolutionary dynamism, found in its most extreme form in the rise of the abolitionist movement.
Eventually, the First (Federal) Republic was overthrown. When the War for Southern Independence was lost, the federal principle which licensed the secession of the slave states was subordinated to the colour-blind ideal of personal liberty. It was clear that sovereign authority had passed from the citizens of the several states into a consolidated Union-dominated government under the direction of Northern commercial and industrial interests.
But formal legal recognition of the Second (Bourgeois) Republic required another constitutional coup d’état. The revolutionary Fourteenth Amendment was adopted by Radical Republicans to subordinate the states to the federal government and to create a uniform national citizenship.
According to Article V of the federal Constitution, however, amendments require the formal consent of three quarters of the states. The South was still under military occupation by Union troops. Fraud and coercion were employed freely to compel Southern legislatures to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. In effect, white Southerners were made an offer they could not refuse: ratify the Fourteenth Amendment or be denied re-admission to the Union.
The Second Republic was founded on the principle of equality. But it eventually foundered upon the multiplying contradictions between the formal legal ideal of equality and the substantive social realities of race, class, and gender.
Seventy years after the Civil War, the New Deal ushered in the Third (Managerial/Therapeutic) Republic which radically expanded the powers of the federal government. No effort was made to obtain the formal consent of the states to this constitutional revolution.
Indeed, in 1937, the Supreme Court, too, was compelled to abandon its early resistance to repeated and sweeping federal usurpations of state jurisdiction by making the famous “switch in time that saved nine.” Faced with Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court, the judiciary simply turned a blind eye to the Article V amendment procedure, choosing instead to place its imprimatur on the Third American Revolution.
The Third Republic based itself upon the revolutionary ideal of fraternity among American citizens of every class, race, and gender. While allowing Congress a free hand to regulate the economy, the Supreme Court brought every so-called “discrete and insular minority” under its own wing. In the Forties and Fifties, the Court waged its own revolutionary war against discrimination in landmark cases such as Shelley v Kraemer and, most famously, Brown v Board of Education.
By the Sixties, it was obvious that the principle of fraternity stood in stark contradiction not just to individuals’ freedom of association but also to the exclusionary character of allegedly “racist” immigration laws. Accordingly, the progressive leaders of the Republic launched a demographic revolution which extended the blessings of American citizenship to millions of non-Whites drawn from every corner of the Third World.
As a consequence, the principle of fraternity quickly morphed into the celebration of diversity as an end in itself. But demographic diversity stands in clear contradiction to the ancient republican ideal of a body politic in which citizens unite in pursuit of the public interest and the common good.
Homo americanus long ago renounced his historic allegiance to throne and altar. Soon afterward, the blood faith that his colonial ancestors had shared with their kith and kin across the Atlantic was replaced by the civil religion of the Republic. Americans had also become hopelessly addicted to endless economic growth and territorial expansion. Within that future-oriented, novus ordo seclorum, it was impossible to define the constitutional abstraction known as the sovereign people-at-large in backward-looking, traditional terms of shared blood, language, and religion.
A commenter said…
“Inspired by the secular humanist ideology of the European Enlightenment, America’s constitutional faith strove to incarnate the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, one after another, in a series of revolutionary republican moments.”
Wait, no mention of the influence of the Bible and the Ten Commandments? Yet, these leaders were overwhelmingly inspired by the Bible as evidenced by an army of relevant sources. Here’s a cursory list:
• “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for a government of any other.” —John Adams, 1798 in letters to the Massachusetts Militia.
• “It is equally undeniable… that the Ten Commandments have had a significant impact on the development of secular legal codes of the Western World.” —U.S. Supreme Court, Stone v. Graham, (1980) (Justice Rehnquist, dissenting)
• “The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.” —Harry S. Truman, Feb. 15, 1950, Attorney General’s Conference.
Suggested Reading: The Ten Commandments & their Influence on American Law