Federalist Part 2: How to destroy a republic in 6 easy steps

As mentioned in my last post, I am still reading the Federalist Papers, and between the arguments regarding the Federal Government’s power to raise an army to maintain national defense, and its power to levy taxes, concurrent to the state powers, the constant danger of the usurpation of the Republic by internal or external influences continues to be a major theme.

I can't believe they wrote this is just six months.  It's taking me longer than that just to read it.

And at every turn, they pronounce Unity as the best defense of liberty in the face of dictatorship. But along the way, they point out that the structure of our government provides a helping hand. “A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." (Federalist 51) 

On one level, the Federalist Papers can be read as a historical view of an important moment in American history, perhaps THE most important in American history, in that all other moments of history have followed this one.  And if not for this one moment, no other moments of American history would be possible, or even conceivable, including the moment in history we are living right now, one of the most incredible presidential elections that most of us have ever seen.

In fact, one could make an argument that we should be celebrating September 17^th  (the date of the signing of the Constitution) instead of July 4^th as the birthday of this country.

But, on the other hand, the Federalist Papers could (though probably shouldn’t) be read at least in part as a how-to manual for dismantling a republic.  It was certainly never meant to be such a thing, but it makes an interesting exercise to see if the dangers that Madison and Hamilton and the other original framers foresaw have indeed stuck their ugly heads up out of the sand.

Now, I’m not saying outright that anyone currently running for president of the United States is definitely trying to force himself into an elected position with the aim of seizing the power of the Federal government for his own purposes, but if someone was trying to do that, this is what it might look like, according to history, which knows a few things about megalomaniacs seizing power.

1)  Choose your moment:  

You’ll need to pick the right time to seize power.  Typically, military coupes have come at times of civil unrest and violence, demanding military intervention.  More “democratic” coupes, where the future dictator is elected by the voters often follow periods of economic strife, like the Great Depression.  Exploiting some kind of internal strife requires that a) you wait for something terrible to happen, or b) convince people that a previous crisis is still going on and you can blame it on your current opponent, creating in the process "those violent and oppressive factions which embitter the blessings of liberty." (Federalist 45)  For the framers, it was the poisonous, anti-Union political atmosphere following the successful revolution that posed the greatest danger. 

But I suppose that the recovery period following a great financial crisis, coupled with racial tensions and on-going threats from terrorists groups would work just as well.


2)  Find a scapegoat:  

You’ll need to focus the anger of people who are upset about the direction of the country, now that you and your surrogates have succeeded in convincing them that the country is heading in the wrong direction (despite all evidence to the contrary).  Historically, the best scapegoats are broadly defined minority groups that are perceived as somehow “different” from the majority of the country.  Foreigners and religious minorities work well for this.  Use every opportunity to use one or two examples as proof that everyone in these subcategories are threats either to our economy (the “They’re stealing our jobs” approach) or our security (the “They’re going to kill us all” approach).   If you have trouble coming up with examples, truth is a fluid concept.  Just lie.  Say your lies loud enough and long enough, and everyone who wants to believe them will believe them.

3)  Use propaganda effectively:  

Of course, you standing there by yourself lying your butt off will only get you so far.  You need an effectively propaganda machine.  Since we conveniently have a free and open press, it shouldn’t be too hard to pull one or two of those media outlets into your camp and get them working for you.  

Careful:  This way madness lies.

This, too, goes right back to the founding of our country, with newspapers openly taking sides between the Democratic Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and the Federalists of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, to the point that Adams passed the Alien and Sedition Acts with the intent to lock up members of the press.  In more recent times, the conservative press likewise played an important role in spreading administration misinformation in the lead up to the Iraq war.  

The really great part about how we use the media today is that your propaganda machine doesn’t really have to lie very hard.  According to studies about our online reading habits, we almost never go further than sensationalistic headlines.  We see a headline that matches with our predetermined way of thinking about the world (see above re: exploiting a sometimes-imaginative crisis and blaming it on foreigners) and quickly share it.  All you need to do is recycle

However you manage it, your public image is essential.  You have to make your image work for you, to appeal to the broadest base of your supporters.  And further, you need to make sure your opponent's image appears untrustworthy, or corrupt, or criminal, or incompetent, even in the face of facts that clearly demonstrate to the contrary.  "For it is a truth which the experience of all ages had attested, that the people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion." (Federalist 25)

4)  Get elected:  

Up to now, we’ve really only looked at practices that most politicians use in one form or another- appealing to special interests, blaming someone other than their supporters, distributing misinformation- but swaying a fickle public opinion and actually winning a majority of votes are two different animals.  And even then, the majority of votes isn’t what counts in this country, thanks to the electoral college, specifically designed (for better or worse) as a further safeguard from popular opinion interjecting itself above the public interest.  "This process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of the president, will seldom fall to the lot of any man, who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications." (Federalist 68)

Clearly, their not talking about you.  

In other words: you need to do something to guarantee that you win.  And that means you need to guarantee votes.  How?  Voter fraud is possible, but tricky.  Voter intimidation is way easier.  Just ask your own supporters to stay at the polling stations, ostensibly to prevent cheating.  But make sure they know that “cheating” means anyone who is not voting for you.  After all, everyone must be voting for you, since you’re so great, so anyone expressing a different opinion is obviously a liar and cheater working for the other side.  Poor logic?  Perhaps, but I assume you’ve been using poor logic all along, so it won’t be any more noticeable now.  This will help prevent anyone voting against you.  Violence should be (subtly) encouraged, as violence is a strong deterrent to voting.

5) Suppress the opposition:  

The beauty of our Constitutional system is how it provides a framework for bringing together different, often opposing ideas and allows for the possibility of compromise.  Our system of government recognizes that there is a plurality of opinions within the electorate of our country and we owe that plurality a decent hearing as we consider what course to chart.  As a result of this structure, the government will be full of people who disagree with you.  These voices must be silenced.  You like firing people, don't you?  Fire them.  Failing that, intimidate them until they are forced to resign.  Fill every opening with people who agree with everything you say.  

Your next challenge will be the fourth estate, the press, whose freedoms are designed to act as a counterbalance to any consolidation of power within the three branches of government.  Fortunately for you, the press, as we’ve already seen, is lazy and malleable.  But you can’t take the chance of some Woodward or Bernstein exposing your true intentions to the country and turning that ever-shifting public opinion against you.  Instead, you need a press that will be loyal to you at all times and always say positive things to reinforce your image.  So, if some journalist questions you too harshly, you must attack them back, criticize them and their work, punish whatever media outlet they work for by refusing to cooperate or allow them access, and whenever possible, try to solicit some surrogate to respond violently.  Soon, you’ll find journalists as easy to control as any other group of people.

6) Consolidate your power:
  
And here is the final, perhaps most difficult step.  The Constitution of the United States calls for specifically three separate but co-equal branches of government that are interrelated without the kind of crossover of power that allows easily for any one branch to become more powerful than the other two, or for any one person to gain too much influence over all three.  This was designed by founders who well understood the desire of men to seek power.  "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." (Federalist 51)  Being no angel yourself, this is the challenge you’ll need to overcome.  

As the Chief Executive, and as someone who has already purged his political enemies from the executive branch (see previous), you’ll enjoy all the power of the executive branch.  But legislative powers will continue to fall to Congress, as well as budgetary powers, and the judicial branch still has the authority to declare anything you do unconstitutional and therefore void.  These are serious threats to your newly acquired power.  

In the first place, as being President in our modern sense is fundamentally different than it was originally envisioned, at a time before political parties, you will have a solid voting block in the legislature to work for you there.  You’ll need to guard against those who choose not to follow your lead, but those can be handled with a combination of intimidation and monetary incentives.  And when the legislature fails to do as you wish, you yourself will be able to legislate from your office using executive orders.  While there are limits to the use of executive orders, just have a really good lawyer (I’ll assume you already have one) draft a memo explaining that whatever executive order you wish to make is legal under some vague language of the Constitution, and your order should go unchallenged.  If it is challenged in the courts, you’ll need to ensure that courts declare in your favor.  

For this, you’ll need to have influence over the Supreme Court, and that means appointing at least one justice (that lawyer I mentioned earlier would be a good first pick).  It is therefore advisable to time your election/rise to power such that it coincides with vacancy on the court. 

Once you have suitable influence over the courts, you will finally enjoy exactly the consolidation of power that the framers of the constitution feared and loathed.  You'll have taken their principles of republicanism and turned our nation into something far removed, and far worse, than it was ever intended to be.  And you managed to do it right under the nose of "the People." Well done!

And in the end, it won't be you that we have to blame for our predicament, but ourselves.  Because what the Federalist Papers should teach us, and what all the original founders have tried to tell us, is that there is no secret weakness in our government, some Achilles Heel hidden in the Constitution like a Dan Brown novel.

Our government's greatest weakness comes in the form of us, the People.  If we walk around blind to how special our government structure is, how great it can be in hands of dedicated public servants, working together, sometimes arguing, sometimes compromising, but always for the Public Interest, instead of their own personal interests, we won't deserve this government anymore.  Our Constitution is still there, with all its flaws and contradictions, trying to create the best nation that it can for us.

And if we give up on that, if we see exactly what you're doing as you subvert every principle of our founders, and we see it and do nothing about it, then you'll win and we will deserve everything we get.

And I think we're better than that.  I hope I'm not wrong.

Back to School: The Federalist Papers (Pt.1)

Summer is over!  Time for our first reading assignment!

This being an election year, and our government being reliant upon the voice of a well-informed electorate, I’ll be assigning the Federalist Papers.

The Federalist Papers, for everyone who fell asleep in history class (seriously you’re yawning right now, aren’t you? Please try to stay awake.  I have a point here, and it’s important), are a series of essays written in 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison (when’s he getting a musical?), and John Jay in order to convince New York to ratify the new Constitution of the United States

"Seriously, no one has any idea who I am."

One of the major themes that is immediately evident running through the 85 essays that comprise the Federalist Papers is the call for Unity among the different states.  It may seem strange to us today that the union of the United States was not always a foregone conclusion.  Or, as Hamilton wrote, "It may perhaps be thought superfluous to offer arguments to prove the utility of the Union...But the fact is, that we already hear it whispered...that the Thirteen States are of too great extent for any general system, and that we must of necessity resort to separate confederacies of distinct portions of the whole."

But, you might be thinking, why?  Why not come together into a full Union?  After all, the states were free, they were already united under the Articles of Confederation, they’d already come together to defeat the world superpower of the time, and this nation was destined to become the new global superpower, to extend its reach all the way past the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean and extend its ideas of freedom from monarchy all over the world.  Why did they have to argue FOR uniting the states?  Weren’t they already the United States?

That's easy for us to say, after nearly 250 years of successful republican government, but no one at the time had any compelling reason to believe that this new government, founded not on principles of monarchy, nor entirely a democracy, but built on republican principles of a representative government several steps removed from the People, yet based on the sovereignty of the People, would succeed.  And they had good reason to be skeptical, in that no other republic since the days of Rome had ever succeeded for any length of time. This crazy new Constitution was doomed to failure.

Because republican democracies don’t last very long.  Absolute monarchies, despotic dictatorships, militaristic empires, those last. 

Now, I already mentioned that there’s an election coming up.  You might have noticed a lot of people on TV, or putting up signs in their front yards, declaring that they want to make America great again.  What they tend to avoid talking about is what made America “great” in the first place, when it was “great,” and what greatness actually means.

Does our greatness stem from our military dominance?  Our responsibility to act as the global police on all international matters in which some form of democracy might be at risk?  Or is American greatness the result of material innovations, technology, manufacturing, research into curing diseases?  Or, as some people seem to think, is it the racism?

I’m going to float here an actual definition for American Greatness, because this is a largely rhetorical essay, and I can do pretty much as I please.  If the greatness of a nation is to be measured by a unique military, social, or cultural yardstick, America’s is based on the simple accomplishment that it managed at its founding, that saved it when the Civil War ripped our country apart, and which we are still living with today:

Our government.

I confess, that’s not a totally original definition.

“Is not the glory of the people of America, that whilst they have paid a decent respect to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” (Federalist 14, by James Madison)

"I'm a lot less boring when you realize my nickname was Jemmy."

Our country wasn’t founded out of any shared history or common culture.  The people of the different states didn’t actually much like each other, even then.  It was founded instead on ideas.  Ideas of self-government, ideas that the power to govern isn’t bestowed by God on pre-ordained rulers, but rather is derived by the consent of the governed themselves.  Ideas like equality and liberty, which are contradictory ideas, but are unified in our founding documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence.  These ideas, as much as tea and taxes, were at the heart of the revolution.

And that revolution should have failed. Realistically, we never should have won our independence, but we did. And ever after, our new government should have failed.  And it did, leading to the Constitutional Convention.  But somehow, THAT convention, with its republican ideals, intrinsic contradictions, and far-reaching compromises, that convention came up with something that managed to beat the odds, something no other violent overthrow of repressive government has managed before or since.

What did the French Revolution lead to?  Napoleon.  And what about the Roman Republic our founders wanted to emulate?  That ended with Caesar crossing the Rubicon.  Or the Florentine Republic of the sixteenth century, which ended with the infamous Medici family and with Machiavelli in exile writing “The Prince.”  Forward in history, the Russian Revolution led to Lenin and Stalin, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union promised a democratic Russia and gave us Putin.

Revolutions nearly always lead to dictators.

Except for us.  (Well, so far.)

But, why?

Put another way, is there something intrinsic in democratic governments that make them more open to the advances of a dictatorship, and is there something within our own form of government that helps to guard against such a takeover of government, and is that fundamental safeguard or safeguards, still useful today?

According to the Federalist Papers, the major internal danger to the republic was the fighting among parties and factions that could lead to disunion.  But almost as dangerous was the rise of irrational majority movements that disenfranchised the minority parties and factions and thus secured their own power, leading to a kind of tyranny of the majority.  To Hamilton and Madison, the greatest thing we had going from us was our large size and diverse population (their definition of diverse being somewhat removed from our own, but I think the basic thinking remains the same) that would check any populist movements from becoming too powerful.  Having competing factions helped guard against any one man who might decry all others who opposed him and declare that he, alone, was the answer to all of the nation’s problems.  But too many factions, fracturing the nation and competing for power at the expense of each other, without a larger unifying identity, could also be dangerous. Public opinion is easily swayed, and a particularly strong, vocal faction took take power away from other factions by claiming any number of prejudiced and misguided notions.  So the power of the people need to be removed from the people by degrees. So that by having three coequal branches of government that checked each other plus a freedom of speech and press that guaranteed a fourth check, the nation could effectively prevent the popular power from being vested too much in any one man.

However, it is an open question if those same protections still exist in our modern political landscape.  When we sure as hell still need them.

Our political culture, which is designed to be deliberative, intentionally slow and bureaucratic, so as to avoid the whims of temporary inflammations of public opinion, but instead to work for the public good, which are often two different, sometimes opposite, objects, is competing with the internet and 24/7 news cycles, where we constantly demand instant satisfaction and put every public act under several microscopes at once, each seeing it from a different angle and reaching a different conclusion which must be THE truth of the moment.  And we all have all the mouthpieces for our own opinions and prejudices that we could want.  So that a minority of opinions can be disguised as a full-blown public movement.

And in this moment, moving toward our next election, we now have a deadlocked Congress, a deadlocked Supreme Court, and most interestingly, a major party candidate courting special interests in order to give the appearance of appealing to some kind of vocal majority, inciting people with rhetoric about how our government is the problem, how immigrants are a threat, and how he alone is the answer.

"Fun Fact:  Today, I'd be considered an illegal immigrant."

Everything about this scenario would have sounded alarming to Hamilton and Madison.

In fact, in a true democracy, tied directly to the voice of the majority, to the whims of public opinion, this would be a truly existential threat to freedom.  It is still a danger, though one our country has been built to withstand.  The real threat is if public opinion is mistaken for public interest, mistrust of others is allowed to be codified as law, and a small faction is allowed to disenfranchise other factions, giving rise to self-perpetuating loops of bigotry and prejudice.  Such is the case with Voter ID laws and voter registration requirements in which specific demographics are targeted and voting made more difficult, all in the name of reducing non-existed voter fraud, but is actually based on prevailing fears of people who are different, somehow, from those currently in power. And if we constantly think of each other as different from ourselves, instead of as part of the same society, the same People, little can stand in the way of such a threat.

Our Founding Fathers were absolutely clear that our fractured groups of Americans needed more than anything else to unite behind a single union of identity.  We had to move from These United States to THE United States.  From plural to singular.  Through Unity, not of party or opinion, but a unity that embraces a diversity of, and respect for, our sometimes contradictory opinions and perspectives.  At a time when all of politics seems to consist of shouting down any contrary opinion, a fuller consideration of ideas is freedom’s most potent defense.  

Or, in the words of George Washington, "The unity of government which constitutes you one people...is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your peace; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize."

If we remember that the people who disagree with us are also citizens of this country, worthy of its freedoms, and dedicated to its founding principles, that makes the whole country stronger.

We have defied our earliest critics.  We have defied even history itself, and have created, however unlikely, an example of representative government that can withstand both blatant incompetence and deceitful corruption to serve as a voice for the sovereign people, from whom our federal government derives its power.  And by holding ourselves to the core principles of Unity and Representative Government (or, in Lincoln’s words, “of the people, by the people, and for the people”), we will continue to endure.

And that, in short, is the starting point of American Exceptionalism.  The authors of the Federalist Papers understood this.  They predicted this; that if our country could survive, to hold itself together for long enough, we could, by our mere continued existence, serve as an example that yes, this kind of government can actually work.

In other words (and somewhat ironically), we can “Make America Great Again” by being “Stronger Together.”