Sunday, October 14, 2018

Lack of civility? It's not a new phenomenon! ..."Their endgame is clear: the effective abolition of the states for all national political purposes."

Michael Walsh writes in American Greatness,
Hillary Clinton, the most vengeful, spiteful loser in the history of American electoral politics, has abandoned the Left’s always deceptive, now evanescent call for “civility.” She insists there can be no civility between the parties until the Democrats are restored to power—and, by extension, the Republicans are vanquished.

...Battling between the parties is almost as old as the republic itself, but the vast majority of the actual violence has always come from the Democrats. Aaron Burr, the proto-Democrat and founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. In 1856, on the eve of the Civil War, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was nearly beaten to death by Democrat Preston Brooks of South Carolina, presaging the bloody events to come. John Wilkes Booth, an ardent Southern Democrat, assassinated Abraham Lincoln just days after Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. Even after the war ended, the Democrats waged a long rearguard action against the Union, including creating the Ku Klux Klan to beat and murder newly freed black Americans.

...Short of civil war, there’s a clear solution to this two-state problem, and it’s been available from the beginning: federalism. The Left’s drive to diminish the power of the states and to consolidate power at the federal level is the reason why it hates the Senate and the Electoral College. The bulk of Hillary’s popular-vote margin came in California, where every vote for her beyond a one-vote majority in a winner-take-all state was wasted. The irony is that as long as Democrats flock together along the coasts, they’ll continue losing.

So their endgame is clear: the effective abolition of the states for all national political purposes. Talk about “fundamental change.” Because when you cut away all the boilerplate and the verbiage, the mock-piety and pretend horror, and strip the battle down to its essentials, what’s left is this: will the United States remain, as its founders intended, a federal republic, or will it become something more akin to a plebiscitary democracy, in which all important questions are decided in the heat and passion of the moment?

If the Democrats really want to see a breakdown in “civility,” this is precisely the way to go: to threaten the essential nature of the republic with an eye to transforming it into something completely different. They tried that once before, and it didn’t end well.

No comments: