(This article was originally published as "The Decline of the American Republic" in The Freeman, February 25, 1952.)
We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night. The precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say, "You now are entering Imperium." Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: "Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible." And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: "No U Turns."
If you say there were no frightening omens, that is true. The political foundations did not quake; the graves of the Fathers did not fly open; the Constitution did not tear itself up. If you say people did not will it, that also is true. But if you say therefore it has not happened, then you have been so long bemused by words that your mind will not believe what the eye can see, even as in the jungle the terrified primitive, on meeting the lion, importunes magic by saying to himself, "He is not there." That a republic may vanish is an elementary schoolbook fact.
The Roman Republic passed into the Roman Empire, and yet never could a Roman citizen have said, "That was yesterday." Nor is the historian, with all the advantages of perspective, able to place that momentous event at any exact point on the dial of time. The Republic had a long unhappy twilight. It is agreed that the Empire began with Augustus Caesar. Several before him had played emperor and were destroyed.
The first who might have been called emperor in fact was Julius Caesar, who pretended not to want the crown and once publicly declined it. Whether he feared more the displeasure of the Roman populace or the daggers of the republicans is unknown. In his dreams he may have been seeing a bloodstained toga. His murder soon afterward was a desperate act of the dying republican tradition, and perfectly futile. His heir was Octavian, and it was a very bloody business, yet neither did Octavian call himself emperor.
On the contrary, he was most careful to observe the old legal forms. He restored the Senate. Later he made believe to restore the Republic, and caused coins to be struck in commemoration of that event. Having acquired by universal consent, as he afterward wrote, "complete dominion over everything, both by land and sea," he made a long and artful speech to the Senate, and ended it by saying: "And now I give back the Republic into your keeping. The laws, the troops, the treasury, the provinces, are all restored to you. May you guard them worthily."
The response of the Senate was to crown him with oak leaves, plant laurel trees at his gate and name him Augustus. After that he reigned for more than forty years and when he died the bones of the Republic were buried with him. "The personality of a monarch," says Stobart,
"had been thrust almost surreptitiously into the frame of a republican constitution.... The establishment of the Empire was such a delicate and equivocal act that it has been open to various interpretations ever since. Probably in the clever mind of Augustus it was intended to be equivocal from the first."
What Augustus Caesar did was to demonstrate a proposition found in Aristotle's "Politics," one that he must have known by heart, namely this:
"People do not easily change, but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes the place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state."
Revolution within the form.
There is no comfort in history for those who put their faith in forms; who think there is safeguard in words inscribed on parchment, preserved in a glass case, reproduced in facsimile and hauled to and fro on a Freedom Train.
Let it be current history. How much does the younger half of this generation reflect upon the fact that in its own time a complete revolution has taken place in the relations between government and people? It may be doubted that one college student in a thousand could even state it clearly. The first article of our inherited tradition, implicit in American thought from the beginning until a few years ago, was this: Government is the responsibility of a self-governing people. That doctrine has been swept away; only the elders remember it.
Now, in the name of democracy, it is accepted as a political fact that people are the responsibility of government. The forms of republican government survive; the character of the state has changed. Formerly the people supported government and set limits to it and minded their own lives.
Now they pay for unlimited government, whether they want it or not, and the government minds their lives - looking to how they are fed and clothed and housed; how they provide for their old age; how the national income, which is the product of their own labor, shall be divided among them; how they shall buy and sell; how long and how hard and under what conditions they shall work, and how equity shall be maintained between the buyers of food who dwell in the cities and the producers of food who live on the soil. For the last named purpose it resorts to a system of subsidies, penalties and compulsions, and assumes with medieval wisdom to fix the just price.
This is the Welfare State. It rose suddenly within the form. It is legal because the Supreme Court says it is. The Supreme Court once said no and then changed its mind and said yes, because meanwhile the President who was the architect of the Welfare State had appointed to the Supreme Court bench men who believed in it.
The founders who wrote the Constitution could no more have imagined a Welfare State rising by sanction of its words than they could have imagined a monarchy; and yet the Constitution did not have to be changed. It had only to be reinterpreted in one clause - the clause that reads: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, imposts and excises to pay its debts and provide for common defense and welfare of the United States."
"We are under a Constitution," said Chief Justice Hughes, "but the Constitution is what the judges say it is."
The president names the members of the Supreme Court, with the advice and consent of the Senate. It follows that if the president and a majority of the Senate happen to want a Welfare State, or any other innovation, and if, happily for their design, death and old age create several vacancies on the bench so that they may pack the Court with like-minded men, the Constitution becomes, indeed, a rubberoid instrument.
The extent to which the original precepts and intentions of constitutional, representative, limited government, in the republican form, have been eroded away by argument and dialectic is a separate subject, long and ominous, and belongs to a treatise on political science.
The one fact now to be emphasized is that when the process of erosion has gone on until there is no saying what the supreme law of the land is at a given time, then the Constitution begins to be flouted by Executive will, with something like impunity. The instances may not be crucial at first and all the more dangerous for that reason. As one is condoned, another follows, and they become progressive.
To outsmart the Constitution and to circumvent its restraints became a popular exercise of the art of government in the Roosevelt regime. In defense of his attempt to pack the Supreme Court with social-minded judges after several of his New Deal laws had been declared unconstitutional, President Roosevelt wrote: "The reactionary members of the Court had apparently determined to remain on the bench for as long as life continued-for the sole purpose of blocking any program of reform."
Among the millions who at the time applauded that statement of contempt there were very few, if there was indeed one, who would not have been frightened by a revelation of the logical sequel. They believed, as everyone else did, that there was one thing a President could never do. There was one sentence of the Constitution that could not fall, so long as the Republic lived.
The Constitution says: "The Congress shall have power to declare war." That, therefore, was the one thing no president could do. By his own will he could not declare war. Only Congress could declare war, and Congress could be trusted never to do it but by will of the people - or so they believed. No man could make it for them. Even if you think that President Roosevelt got the country into World War II, that was not the same thing. For a declaration of war he went to Congress - after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. He may have wanted it, he may have planned it; and yet the Constitution forbade him to declare war and he dared not do it. Nine years later a much weaker president did.
President Truman, alone and without either the consent or knowledge of Congress, had declared war on the Korean aggressor, 7000 miles away, Congress condoned his usurpation of its exclusive constitutional power. More than that, his political supporters in Congress argued that in the modern case that sentence in the Constitution conferring upon Congress the sole power to declare war was obsolete.
Mark you, the words had not been erased; they still existed in form. Only they had become obsolete. And why obsolete? Because now war may begin suddenly, with bombs falling out of the sky, and we might perish while waiting for Congress to declare war.
The reasoning is puerile. The Korean war, which made the precedent, did not begin that way; secondly, Congress was in session at the time, so that the delay could not have been more than a few hours, provided Congress had been willing to declare war; and, thirdly, the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Republic may in a legal manner act defensively before a declaration of war has been made. It is bound to be made if the nation has been attacked.
Mr. Truman's supporters argued that in the Korean instance his act was defensive and therefore within his powers as commander-in-chief. In that case, to make it constitutional, he was legally obliged to ask Congress for a declaration of war afterward. This he never did. For a week Congress relied upon the papers for news of the country's entry into war; then the president called a few of its leaders to the White House and told them what he had done.
A year later Congress was still debating whether or not the country was at war, in a legal, constitutional sense. A few months later Mr. Truman sent American troops to Europe to join an international army, and did it not only without a law, without even consulting Congress, but challenged the power of Congress to stop him. Congress made all of the necessary sounds of anger and then poulticed its dignity with a resolution saying the president's action was all right for that one time, since anyhow it had been taken, but that hereafter Congress would expect to be consulted.
At that time the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate asked the State Department to set forth in writing what might be called the position of executive government. The State Department obligingly responded with a document entitled, "Powers of the President to Send Troops Outside of the United States - Prepared for the use of the joint committee made up of the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on the Armed Forces of the Senate, February 28, 1951."
This document, in the year circa 2950, will be a precious find for any historian who may be trying then to trace the departing footprints of the vanished American Republic. For the information of the United States Senate it said (Congressional Record, March 20, 1951, p. 2745):
"As this discussion of the respective powers of the President and Congress has made clear, constitutional doctrine has been largely moulded by practical necessities. Use of the Congressional power to declare war, for example, has fallen into abeyance because wars are no longer declared in advance."
Caesar might have said it to the Roman Senate. If constitutional doctrine is moulded by necessity, what is a written Constitution for?
Thus an argument that seemed at first to rest upon puerile reasoning turned out to be deep and cunning. The immediate use of it was to defend the unconstitutional Korean precedent, namely, the resort to war as an act of the president's own will. Yet it was not invented for that purpose alone. It stands as a forecast of executive intentions, a manifestation of the executive mind, mortal challenge to the parliamentary principle. The simple question is: Whose hand shall control the instrument of war? It is late to ask. It may be too late, for when the hand of the Republic begins to relax another hand is already putting itself forth.
It was common on the Left to intimate that George W. Bush was like Hitler, a remark that would drive the National Review crowd through the roof but which I didn't find entirely outrageous. Bush's main method of governance was to stir up fear of foreign enemies and instigate a kind of nationalist hysteria about the need for waging war and giving up liberty through security.
Hitler is the most famous parallel here, but he is hardly the only one. Many statesmen in world history have used the same tactics, dating back to ancient times. Machiavelli wrote in his Art of War advice to the ruler:
To know how to recognize an opportunity in war, and take it, benefits you more than anything else.
But what's the point of studying Hitler's rise to power unless it is to learn from that history and apply the lessons? One lesson is to beware of leaders who come to power in troubled times, and then use foreign threats and economic crises to bolster their own power. Unless we can draw out lessons for our own times, history becomes nothing but a series of dry data points with no broader relevance.
Certainly Bush used 9-11 to consolidate his power and the neoconservative intellectuals who surrounded him adopted a deep cynicism concerning the manipulation of public opinion. Their governing style concerned the utility of public myth, which they found essential to wise rule. The main myth they promoted was that Bush was the Christian philosopher-king heading a new crusade against Islamic extremism. The very stupid among us believed it, and this served as a kind of ideological infrastructure of his tenure as president.
Then it collapsed when the economy went south and he was unable to sustain the absurd idea that he was protecting us from anyone. The result was disgrace, and the empowering of the political left and its socialistic ethos.
The talk of Hitler in the White House ended forthwith, as if the analogy extended only when nationalist ideology is ruling the day. What people don't remember is that Hitlerism was about more than just militarism, nationalism, and consolidation of identity politics. It also involved a substantial shift in German domestic politics away from free enterprise, or what remained of it under Weimar, toward collectivist economic planning.
Nazism was not only nationalism run amok. It was also socialism of a particular variety.
Let's turn to The Vampire Economy by Guenter Reimann (1939). He begins the story with the 1933 decree that all property must be subject to the collective will. It began with random audits and massive new bookkeeping regulations:
Manufacturers in Germany were panic-stricken when they heard of the experiences of some industrialists who were more or less expropriated by the State. These industrialists were visited by State auditors who had strict orders to "examine" the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company (or individual businessman) for the preceding two, three, or more years until some error or false entry was found. The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error. Obviously, the examination of the books was simply a pretext for partial expropriation of the private capitalist with a view to complete expropriation and seizure of the desired property later. The owner of the property was helpless, since under fascism there is no longer an independent judiciary that protects the property rights of private citizens against the State. The authoritarian State has made it a principle that private property is no longer sacred.
The rules begin to change slowly so that enterprise could no longer make decisions in the interest of profitability. The banks were nationalized. The heads of major companies were changed. Hiring and firing became heavily politicized. The courts ruled not on justice but on political priorities. It was no longer enough merely to obey the laws. The national will must trump economic concerns:
The capitalist under fascism has to be not merely a law-abiding citizen, he must be servile to the representatives of the State. He must not insist on "rights" and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred. He should be grateful to the Fuehrer that he still has private property. This state of affairs must lead to the final collapse of business morale, and sound the death knell of the self-respect and self-reliance which marked the independent businessman under liberal capitalism.
Price controls were next, enforced intermittently and with them grew up a large gray economy, with businesspeople spending more time getting around the rules than producing wealth.
To increase his prices a dealer must have a special permit from the Price Commissar. A request for a price increase must first be certified to by the group leader; it must be accompanied by a detailed statement of necessity and other pertinent data, such as production and distribution costs.
State production mandates were next. Goods were to be produced according to political goals.
Backed by the General Staff of the army, Nazi bureaucrats have been able to embark upon schemes which compel the most powerful leaders of business and finance to undertake projects which they consider both risky and unprofitable.
Bankers were required to act as state actors.
Under fascism, big bankers, formerly independent - except, of course, 'non-Aryans' - have become State officials in everything but name. They are often in high and influential positions, but they are all members of the compact, centralized State machine. Their independence, their individual initiative, their free competitive position, all the principles for which they once fought fervently, are gone.
If you think that the parallels stopped after Bush left power, consider this passage from Reimann:
The totalitarian State reverses the former relationship between the State and the banks. Previously, their political influence increased when the State needed financial help. Now the opposite holds true. The more urgent the financial demands of the State become, the stricter measures are taken by the State in order to compel these institutions to invest their funds as the State may wish.
Once the banks were forced wholly under the control of the government, they became the means by which all property became subject to the state:
The totalitarian State will not have an empty treasury so long as private companies or individuals still have ample cash or liquid assets. For the State has the power to solve its financial difficulties at their expense. The private banks themselves, the financial institutions which previously dictated the terms on which they were willing to lend money, have built up the system of siphoning off liquid funds. This financial system is now utilized by the totalitarian State for its own purposes.
So it was for the stock market, which was regarded as a national asset. Speculation was forbidden. Public companies were entirely subject to bureaucratic rule. Order replaced the old spontaneity, while speculation of the old sort became an entirely underground activity. The largest companies didn't entirely mind the course of events.
The disappearance of small corporations gives rise to a tendency among small investors not to risk their capital in new competitive enterprises. The larger the big corporations grow and the closer they become connected with the State bureaucracy, the fewer chances there are for the rise of new competitors.
So too for insurance companies, which were compelled to buy government paper.
The tendency toward ever more economic regulation resulted not in socialism as such but fascist planning.
The fascist State does not merely grant the private entrepreneur the right to produce for the market, but insists on production as a duty which must be fulfilled even though there be no profit. The businessman cannot close down his factory or shop because he finds it unprofitable. To do this requires a special permit issued by the authorities.
The national demand for "stimulus" replaced private decision making entirely, as businessmen were required to produce and avoid any economic downturns that might embarrass the state.
The Nazi government has expressly threatened the private entrepreneur with increased State coercion and reduction of personal rights and liberties unless he fulfills adequately the 'duty to produce' according to the State's demands.
But stimulus could not and would not work, no matter how hard the party officials tried, because the very institutions of private property and competition and all market forces had been overwritten.
The totalitarian regime has annihilated the most important conservative force of capitalism, the belief that private property ought to be a sacred right of every citizen and that the private property of every citizen ought to be protected. Respect for private property has penetrated the spirit of the people in all capitalist countries. It is the strongest bulwark of capitalism. Fascism has succeeded in destroying this conservative force ... People still have to work for money and have to live on money incomes. Possession of capital still provides income. But this income is largely at the mercy of State bureaucrats and Party officials.
Reimann sums up:
In Nazi Germany there is no field of business activity in which the State does not interfere. In more or less detailed form it prescribes how the businessman may use capital which is still presumably his private property. And because of this, the German businessman has become a fatalist; he does not believe that the new rules will work out well, yet he knows that he cannot alter the course of events. He has been made the tool of a gigantic machine which he cannot direct.
The regime also dramatically increased social and medical legislation, providing lifetime pensions to friends and conscripting doctors in the service of its dietary and medical goals.
Now, if any of this sounds familiar, it is because the principles of intervention are universal.
The Nazi regime represented not a unique evil in history but rather a now-conventional combination of two dangerous ideological trends: nationalism and socialism.
When I raise the idea of abandoning the "authority" myth entirely, and understanding that each of us owns himself, I invariably get responses asking how this or that would be handled without "government," how disputes might be resolved peacefully, and how we would deal with all the "gray areas" in life, where people have fundamental disagreements about certain things.
And those are perfectly rational questions ... sometimes. But I immediately wonder WHY the person would ask such questions, and I see two very different possibilities: 1) They are reserving the right to regress back to the belief in "authority," if I can't assure them that everything will be okay without it, or 2) They have given up the "authority" superstition for good, and are just genuinely curious about how society is likely to function without it. The latter is reasonable. The former is looney.
I compare it to the belief in Santa Claus. Someone who had just given up such a belief could rationally ask, "But how will Christmas work without Santa?" However, whatever the answer was, it would NOT be rational to then respond with, "Well, I don't think that will work, so we'd better stick with the Santa plan." Santa Claus isn't real. He's not an option. Either Christmas will work without him, or Christmas won't work. "But what if some good kids don't get presents? What if some bad kids get lots of presents? What if poor folks can't afford to get their kids presents? What if, what if, what if?" Bad things might happen. Deal with it. Santa isn't going to magically appear because the world might be unfair without him.
Likewise, it is completely irrational to revert back to the self- contradictory delusion of "government," once someone understands the truth, even if a stateless society sounds scary or unpredictable. The right of one person to rule another (a.k.a. "authority") does not and cannot exist, whether society "works" without it or not. Whatever scary scenario you can image, whatever problems you think might occur, that doesn't change reality. Choosing to be delusional because facing reality scares you is insane.
Rational people can and will disagree on all sorts of things, including treatment of animals, pollution, owning land, parental rights, environmental issues, abortion, and so on. The trouble is, people are accustomed to viewed things from an authoritarian mindset, with the question always being about how "the law" and "government" should deal with such issues globally and forcibly. As a result, admitting the obvious truth-that no one knows how every dispute will be settled-sounds like no solution at all to most people. And that's because there IS no magic solution, with or without "government," that will always make the good guys win and justice be served.
And so, when people ask me things like, "Under your system, how will ... ," I respond with, "I'm not proposing a system, but what would YOU do about it?" This usually baffles people, because they're not at all accustomed to thinking of THEMSELVES as the ones who would have to decide what to do, and the ones who would have to do it. They're used to imagining a giant, all-powerful state making things right (or rather, saying it will make things right, and then making things horribly wrong).
As I've said before, anarchism is not a complete philosophy, nor does it pretend to offer answers to everything. In fact, it is the opposite. It is the assertion that there is one particular solution ("authority") that should NOT be in the equation. And that's all it is. If you want to understand what it means to be an anarchist, picture this: A certain doctor has an odd habit of using a baseball bat to bash the knees of everyone who walks into his office. The anarchist is the guy who says, "You shouldn't do that." The anarchist doesn't claim to be able to cure all health problems. He doesn't want to be the new doctor. He doesn't claim to know everything, and can't tell the future. All he does is point out that bashing everyone in the knee is a bad idea.
The concept of "government" is self-contradictory, delusional, and horrendously destructive. It goes directly against both free will and individual rights. In addition, the cult-like belief in "government" has been the catalyst for the vast majority of injustice, suffering, oppression and murder in the world. The anarchist recognizes this, and says, "Stop believing in government."
Does that then oblige the anarchist to solve all the problems of the world? No. Does it imply he has to know everything, and be able to explain everything and solve every problem and dispute? No. Does it mean he must dictate anything to anyone, or propose some grand "solution" to replace the "authority" myth? No. Does it obligate him to describe a world where nothing ever goes wrong and injustice never occurs? No.
The trouble is, people are so accustomed to hearing the promises of megalomaniacs, who offer centralized "solutions" via top-down, micromanaged authoritarian programs, that it's the only thing a lot of people can even contemplate. By definition, the anarchist doesn't have a global, authoritarian solution to be imposed upon society. (He wouldn't be an anarchist if he did.) Instead, he merely points out that ONE particular type of "solution"-solution via "authority"-is insane, inherently immoral, and destined to fail horribly.
So when people ask how this or that will work "under anarchy," I guess I could make some predictions, or could offer some suggestions, but ultimately the only truthful answer I can give- the only truthful answer anyone can give-is, "How the hell should I know?"
But that's not what people want to hear. They've been spoon-fed centralized "solutions" for so long that, even though such solutions never actually work, they make people feel comfortable. In short, people want to think that someone ELSE is taking care of everything, so they don't have to take on the responsibility of learning the facts, understanding the truth, and taking action on anything themselves. And that's why the concept of "anarchy"-a society without a giant nanny running the world-scares them to death. They'd rather be told lies, and have a security blanket that suffocates them, than face the uncertainties of reality. The fact that their savior and protector, "government," has murdered more people, stolen more property, attacked, harassed, terrorized, tortured and oppressed more people throughout history than any private band of crooks and thieves ever has or ever could, doesn't seem to dissuade them. They still prefer the empty "guarantees" of the slave-masters to the unpredictability of freedom.
Posted by KenAnderson on 04/26/09 Last updated 08/03/09
The MN Joint Analysis Center (MNJAC), founded in 2005 with Federal funds, is Minnesota's 'fusion center,' our version of Missouri's MIAC that was generating reports targeting liberty orgs like our own here, and diseminating that info out to other law enforcement agencies. They are officially "very much a state-based entity acting in compliance with established policy and existing law," according to Director Michael Bosacker, retired Eden Prairie police officer now with the BCA directing MNJAC. I've yet to obtain any crystal clear info regarding whether 100% of their sustenance is derived from Federal sources still today; I do know that the stimulus bill included a good sized chunk of change for these operations. It does appear entirely possible that Minn lawmakers have never approved or funded any of this, but info on that is not forthcoming from the Director himself, who is a high school friend from decades past. Also unanswered are questions posed regarding constitutionally sound filtering of intel gathered in order to insure the Feds get absolutely nothing out of this 'state-based entity' in the way of data unless it is clearly and directly related to constitutionally authorized Federal business. I suspect its possible the Feds can access anything and everything this agency collects and gathers on Minnesotans- since the question got put forward and got soundly ignored.
These fusion centers around the country grew out of the events of 9/11, but have turned heavily towards gathering info on domestic crime and domestic organizations, since. Otherwise they'd have very little to do, so increased and locally coordinated (but Federally funded) gov't snooping is apparently the order of the day. Mr. Bosacker had something pretty chilling to say in our e-mail discussions- "The development of the MNJAC has been purposeful and intentionally incremental."
With regard to that creeping incrementalism, I would strongly recommend reading up on the new bills introduced by MN legislators last month furthering the secret snooping abilities, HF1449 & SF1103. It doesn't sound like these bills are going anywhere this session, but just the fact that they are being authored and presented is certainly reason enough to begin publicly calling for the demise of MNJAC and the taking of sledgehammers to the hard drives containing their data. Three good features I'd recommend:
The MNJAC has a privacy committee that sets policy for protecting privacy as a watchdog of sorts; unfortunately they appear to be limited to the question of how to best protect privacy considering the MNJAC unauthorized mission, rather than whether such a mission is supportable in the first place especially considering the state has never authorized MNJAC's existence to my knowledge. The 11 individuals on that committee are listed below with e-mail where it could be readily had- I would particularly applaud Mr.Samuelson as a reluctantly serving member who has openly and publicly questioned MNJAC's reason for being. Perhaps we should be contacting him about how we can work together to insure that there is no longer any such fusion center in our state.
Mr. Charles Samuelson, Executive Director American Civil Liberties Union MN; csamuelson@aclu-mn.org
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