Polarization – Libera Voce

To Each Their Own

As Justin Amash put it “Centralization multiplies the costs of human errors.”

To Each Their Own

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” Tacitus

It is estimated that the Federal Government has created so many laws against crimes without victims that the average American can’t avoid at least three felonies or misdemeanors each day. There is a method to this madness and it is not to preserve and protect the liberties we cherish. It is in fact the means to subjugate the people and a cause of the polarization that infests us.

Back in April of last year I wrote a post titled “The Balkanization of America”. Since that time I have come to realize that the polarization I spoke of then, and feared would cause the fragmentation of this country, has reached a critical point. The issue now is not only how that process can be reversed, but what to do if it can’t with the inevitable choice between a violent or non-violent resolution.

What did the Founders intended regarding the issue of secession? As noted in the prior post referenced above, the constitution is silent on secession; this was not an oversight, but intentional. Madison et al made clear that the union was intended as a voluntary institution; as the principal author Madison records that there were proposals during the constitutional convention for a prohibition against secession that were rejected as contrary to the principles for which the Revolution was fought. The colonies had chosen to secede from the British common wealth, a treasonous crime against the king punishable by death; therefore they could not then compel a state to remain in the union against the wishes of its people. They also noted that the 1783 Treaty of Paris declared the thirteen colonies to be free, sovereign and independent states, each of whom signed the treaty.

While secession is often cited as the cause of the bloodiest war in American history, that is not so. The Civil War was ultimately about slavery. However, it is a fact that Lincoln was determined to preserve the union at all costs, and often stated that he would tolerate slavery in order to do so. Most of the North, even the abolitionist, did not support going to war over secession. So was there an alternative resolution to the death of 620,000 Americans? We may never know the answer to that as that option became moot. The Confederacy was formed February 4, 1861 among states that actually declared independence the prior year. During the time from the secessions until war started efforts were made to avoid it. However, if you declare being a sovereign state, and attack another sovereign state, then you have committed an act of war as the attack by the Confederacy on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 made war inevitable.

There are those that argue that the omission of such a constitutional prohibition does not necessarily constitute an accommodation for secession; that fails logically given the simple fact that compulsion to remain in the union is not an enumerated power. This fact was not lost on those in Congress who proposed constitutional amendments to prohibit secession; apparently Congress was aware that there was nothing unconstitutional about secession, otherwise they would not have proposed such amendments to begin with.

How does this history relate to our current dilemma? The late Walter Williams wrote “Now is not the time to pine for the days of agreeable politics. In recent decades, the US has gone through radical political and cultural transformations that are making the country progressively ungovernable. Any kind of national election from here on out will be viewed as illegitimate by the losing side due to the perceived high stakes of these affairs. No longer do America’s partisan coalitions treat each other as respectable competitors, but rather as existential threats that must be vanquished at the ballot box. As America’s social fabric continues withering and polarization intensifies, it’s only a matter of time before this kind of tension turns violent.”

Williams’ statement was proved prescient given the riots in the spring and summer of 2020, the 2020 presidential election and the January 6^th riot at the Capital. While looting and arson are not part of a peaceful protest, neither is murder a part of making an arrest. Those events were not the underlying causes for polarization as is so often the case in history, just the matches that lite the fuse.

To reverse this dangerous process of polarization we need to decentralize power, the disease behind the symptom of polarization. No matter how those in power try to spin their various ideologies, when power is concentrated at one source, you create the means to alienate more people. As Justin Amash put it “Centralization multiplies the costs of human errors.” He went on to say, at the time he was forced to leave the Republican Party because he believed Trump committed impeachable offenses, that “No matter your circumstance, I’m asking you to join me in rejecting the partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.”

The constitution addresses this very concern of centralized power by specifically stating that the Federal government is limited to those powers as enumerated, all other powers being delegated to the people, i.e. the states. Unfortunately, that is not the way things have gone; as the French delegate to the US, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day came in 1913 when the 16^th Amendment was ratified; since then, Congress has had the means to do just that.

Politicians have always made outlandish promises to the electorate, but having the money to deliver on those promises became a powerful and dangerous tool; who can resist the promise of free healthcare, free education, free internet, free rent…essentially a welfare state. Those who understand that “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” see through such obvious shams as ultimately someone pays, and in this case, it’s the American tax payer, the “public” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation.

This creates resentment among those who pay of those who promote such ideas, and those who benefit from them. Politicians realize this, and so need to provide cover for such larcenous behavior; the most effective ways are to promote their ideas culturally, and enforce them legislatively. As Thomas Sowell observed, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” However, when such methods are seen for what they are, that incites more resentment to the imposition of culture, laws and attitudes dictated from above; the “above” is the Federal Government, and the imposition comes from the politically elite.

The resulting social and political dynamic is polarization. There have been about a dozen movements for secession, ranging geographically from Vermont to Hawaii; the impetus for such movements is cultural, social, political and economic, and the advent of social media creates a chimeric growth with an even more alienating result. Add to this the efforts by politicians to censor those that object to the imposition of their cultural and social agenda and you have a threat to the very foundations of liberty so essential to a free society. Clearly in politics today hypocrisy has become a bona fide occupational qualification.

The reason to understand where the constitution stands on secession is not to promote the idea, but to consider it as the ultimate recourse to avoid violence. Following the 2016 presidential election, the people of California proposed secession and with the 2020 election, the people of Texas and some other states did the same. At some point such threats will become reality; we can then resort to violence to preserve a union no longer viable, or we take advantage of our own constitution to avoid that and provide for a non-violent resolution.

Trust

After all, when you get down to the essential human experience, like Billy Joel said, it’s simply a matter of trust.

“In God we trust, all others pay cash.” Jean Shepherd

I first read this line, not from Jean Sheperd’s famous book, but from a fortune cookie. I thought it was a very humorous and timely coincidence as it was shortly after I came back from Europe during the turmoil created by Richard Nixon when he took the dollar off the gold standard. I was caught with dollar denominated travelers checks in countries whose trust in the dollar was sorely shaken. It seemed that overnight what they perceived as the last great money was divorced from the very source of its being, even though the reality was that it had happened decades before. I paid dearly for that perception as the exchange rates and fees soared. It was not a pleasant experience but a great lesson in the meaning of trust.

My friends told me to read Sheperd’s book, which I did; it wasn’t really all that great, a collection of fictional stories the author had previously told on radio. I subsequently learned that the title was in fact not original as it was a borrowed phrase commonly used in early 20C America about the lack of trust in credit and checks. It was a play on the words “In God We Trust” found on US currency starting soon after the Civil War, both on coin and paper; it’s still used today, just take out any money on you and there it is.

But what does this word trust actually mean? What is the concept behind a word we use so often in our lives and in so many contexts? What is it about this word that carries such a sacred respect in human relationships, whether personal, commercial or political?

Basically it comes down to faith in someone else to do what they say they will do based purely on what you know from prior experience. This means that trust has to be earned, not taken for granted, but built on actions, not just words. That kind of experience forms a bond, and we call that trust.

This applies in the context of all human relationships, and is the essence of how trust is built. A cop trusts his partner because they’ve been through experiences where they each had each other’s backs, with business partners who have weathered the unknowns of enterprise, of husbands and wives getting through the good and bad times together, and of citizens united in the history of their nation’s trials to survive whatever the world throws at them. The common thread here is that you can rely on each other to remain loyal to one another because you have created a bond of trust.

That is not some vague or esoteric concept, it is an existential reality based on actions, not words. You know it and rely on it not because someone says so but because someone does so. Nothing is more sacred in human relationships, no matter your race, color, creed, politics or economic class, simply no matter what.

So why is it now that there is so much distrust in our culture and society today? Well think of the opposite of trust, and the logical conclusion is because our faith in each other has been betrayed; the essence of human experience is now fear and hate, hardly conducive in creating good faith in each other, in building that bond of trust. However, it works just fine in polarizing Americans in to opposing camps; the result is the inability to look beyond differences in order to find common cause. This has happened before in our history, and it ultimately led to the Civil War.

Up until recently, this was a “culture war”, facilitated my failed politics and news bias, exponentially accelerated by the technology of social media. We drowned out the opposition, even going so far as to violate our own heritage of free speech, casting the “opposition” with toxic labels, drowning out all those who we found tainted with an irredeemable sin of being different.

Then the inevitable happened. First we saw the destruction of our cities with riots, burning, looting, armed conflict and death. We thought things couldn’t get worse, but then yesterday happened with an assault our own government, the Capital of our country, a violent riot over the outcome of an election. We are stunned, sickened, confused as to how such a state of affairs in the world’s oldest Republic could come to pass.

I don’t say this callously, but really, what did we expect? If we come to a state of distrust in each other, then we come to a point where hate and fear break the bonds that tie, and that break as we have seen throughout history turns violent. Today we hear all about the search for those to blame. Trump is an easy target, and despite his empty words today, deserves no respect from any American, as he was the match that lite the fuse. However, Trump, while the immediate cause with his rants about voting fraud, is not the real cause, but a result of a trust long gone.

It’s like looking at a great tree hundreds of years old felled by lightning, and finding that its heartwood is a rotted core, the lifeblood of its existence succumbed to its own destruction. Think carefully before you dismiss this as anything less than true, and then think of your fellow Americans and ask yourself why, from whatever political or social or cultural beliefs you have, you fear or hate those that don’t share them. Consider if you support any form of censorship against whoever expresses contrary beliefs or repression of any protest against your point of view. If you find that you support such things, then understand you are in breach of good faith and lack the trust in liberty that should be our common cause.

Hopefully the nucleus of your own personal lives remains in a state of faith in that essential trust, but unless you’re living under a rock, you can’t avoid the lack of trust there is in our society, including in our government. The word polarization is more a result than a cause; you have to first define the reasons for such a phenomenon before you can point to the cause, and without doing that, we can’t get back to a union of common cause where we can trust each other regardless of our race, color, creed, politics, economic class, simply no matter what, no excuses, just good faith and respect for each other based on what we do, not what we say.

The violent riots in our cities and the recent attacks on the nation’s capital with their destruction of life and property attest to this basic lack of trust. This goes back long before Trump. While he took advantage of this lack of trust, he himself was a result, not the cause. In truth, he is so shallow a narcissistic moron to be the cause of anything, a product of the horrors of distrust developed over time.

Remember Trump’s taunts about the “Deep State” and his pledges to “Drain the Swamp”? Those are not new buzz words coined by his campaign speech writers; they’re terms used going back at least a century ago. Consider all the lies perpetrated on Americans about why we should get involved in foreign conflicts like the Great War, Viet Nam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya….and who knows what’s next. Consider the fallacies about the creation of the Federal Reserve that funds these atrocities through slight-of-hand financial engineering, defrauding Americans of their wealth. Consider the great social enterprises of the “New Deal”, the “Great Society” and other such boondoggles that have wasted our resources. Consider the “Quantitative Easing” that financially engineered our wealth to the already wealthy, the cronyism of the marriage between business and government; what betrayals of trust!

No, Trump was a result, a demon created by betrayal, and that demon then played Americans in to believing that he was a savior form all that, while in reality he was just another charlatan selling the same old trash, an elixir to cure all simply because we should trust him; empty words, with the only action being a reaction of violence, and with bad people of both sides.

So how do we fix this absence of trust? No more words, we need action, but before action, we need the right ideas on which to act. Do we have that, not just in the new administration, but in ourselves to stop doing the same old thing, over and over again, voting in the same kind of politicians who keep selling us ideas that we should know are so ludicrous, so fundamentally flawed and contrary to every tenet of liberty and justice?

It is far harder to build trust after a betrayal than when first starting on any kind of relationship. Take for instance a fiduciary relationship, such as what the US government is supposed to have with its citizens. It is a unique relationship in that the trustor and the beneficiary are one and the same, i.e. the American people. The trustee is the US government. Without going into all the various facets of this relationship with the Federal Reserve, US Treasury, Congress, etc. suffice it to say that by any standard of performance of fiduciary responsibility that trust has been betrayed. We, the people of the US, are in debt that exceeds that of any nation in the history of the world. Our currency over the last century has been devalued to the point that it now takes a dollar for what a nickel used to buy. The financial and monetary manipulations of government have created a huge wealth and income gap favoring the elites of corporatism. If such things happened in the private sector, we would see headlines similar to the Madoff scandal.

Take the trust we place in government to act in the best interest and wellbeing of its citizens and in good faith among nations to respect their sovereignty and explain then the endless wars killing so many of our youth and innocent civilians of the countries we attack. How can such inhumanity not be a betrayal of trust?

Consider our constitution and the oath those in government take to support and defend it, and then look at the brazen violations by our elected officials and you should not wonder at the loss of trust Americans fell about their government.

What we need from our future administrations is not just an assurance that we can rely on them to act in good faith to restore our trust in government, but actions that show the character, ability, strength, and perseverance to restore our confidence that each and every individual American, regardless of race, color, creed, politics and economic class, will be treated the same, with respect for the liberties guaranteed them under the constitution; that is the bond that creates the trust needed for a nation to be at peace with itself. After all, when you get down to the essential human experience, like Billy Joel said, it’s simply a matter of trust.

The Balkanization of America

We must acknowledge and respect our differences, not ridicule them from partisan perspectives.

Why is there increasing noise in social media about the topic of secession? In order to discuss secession itself, we need to understand this question and the answer; that can be difficult given all that “noise”, and the fact that civil discourse is absent from any debate, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored.

Let’s not get hung up on the simplistic notion that this is just another crisis of the Age of Trump; this goes back much further than the current administration. The list of significant such movements in the US is about a dozen and range geographically across the country from Vermont to Hawaii. The impetus for such movements range from cultural, social, political and economic issues, and support secessions of counties within states all the way to groups of states seceding from the Union.

A common theme is the reaction to the imposition of culture, laws and attitudes dictated from above, meaning not representative of a particular local area. The “above” is perceived as Washington DC, i.e. the Federal Government. The imposition resented comes from the politically elite in the urban areas of the Northeast and Pacific Coast.

The resulting social and political dynamic reviving and driving these movements is polarization. With the advent of social media, these movements have grown and the synergy created with technology back feeds into even more support; it’s like a chimeric growth with an indeterminate evolution, but decidedly alienating.

So this in turn leads to the issue of secession itself, an issue that we assumed was settled with the Civil War. However, from a constitutional perspective, that may be only an assumption. The Constitution provides a clear path for a territory to become a state of the Union, but is silent on the issue of secession. That curious fact has been explained variously by many scholars, but not conclusively.

Foremost against secession we have the Supreme Court 1869 ruling in Texas v. White; the case was about US bond sales and redemptions by Texas during the Civil War, and not specifically about Texas’ right to secede from the Union. However the case presented the Supreme Court with an opportunity, so it ruled that the sale was illegal because it occurred at the time of secession, which in turn it deemed illegal stating that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States. That is true as the Constitution says nothing about secession, so unilateral or not, permission or prohibition, it is not addressed.

Some scholars have argued that the court should have gone further as it did not address the fact that the Constitution did not speak against secession. Obviously, having just had a bloody civil war about secession and with the South still under Reconstruction governance, the court found itself compelled to take a stand against secession or put the entire outcome in jeopardy. However, by not addressing the issue of the Constitution’s silence on secession, it lost the opportunity to resolve that issue in regards to powers not expressed and therefore reserved to the States.

Regardless of which way you may argue the issue, it remains that the Constitution to this day is silent on secession, does not provide an expressed power, and has not had an amendment to resolve that. On that basis those promoting the right of secession make their case.

Taken all together, we have a Balkanization of America. I chose that phrase based on its definition, i.e. a geopolitical term for the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or uncooperative with one another. The term evolved during the many periods of fragmentation of the Balkans from the time of the Byzantine Empire’s collapse to that of the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Well by definition we certainly have Balkanization going on in America today, and the current economic collapse will only exacerbate the underlying causes even further. It is difficult to separate the growing polarization from this issue as therein lay both the cause and the possible solution.

Let’s start with the simple premise that when developing policies of governance, especially for a country as large and diverse as America, we can’t take an approach that one size fits all; by definition it can’t work in governance any more than in shoe making since no matter what you’re excluding more people than you are serving.

Government works best to serve the people when it operates at the most localized level to the people involved, i.e. state and county, city and town. This is how the US was originally constructed through the constitution and therein lies the way to understand how polarization starts and grows to the extremes we have today.

With the growth of the Federal government, specifically its assumptions of powers despite restrictions within the Constitution, we have conflict through intervention in areas of governance that belong at the state and local levels, an assumption of powers never intended even by the Federalists and certainly feared by Jeffersonians. It is this growth of the Federal Government and its attendant powers that is the underlying cause of the alienation tearing the Republic apart.

Knowing the problem and its cause informs us for a solution. We need to face and collegially embrace the fact that we are a union of various States, each representing its own unique history, culture, social and political characteristics. We must acknowledge and respect our differences, not ridicule them from partisan perspectives. We must embrace our common values, chiefly our respect for individual freedom as guaranteed by the Constitution, the rule of law and the protection of individual lives, liberties and private properties. There should be no more debate about the Bill of Rights; it was the one thing that enabled the ratification of the Constitution, thanks to the insistence of the New England states, the birth place of the Revolution.

This means an existential shift in the direction of our political institutions away from nationalistic agendas to localized prerogatives; for a truly civil society, when it comes to government, less is truly more.

This should not be dismissed as wishful thinking as this is what our Republic is based on, what the Revolution was fought for, and what the Civil War was intended to preserve. If we do not do these things, polarization will only get worse and we will face the inevitable prospect of Balkanization.

#balkanizationamerica