October 20, 2016 at 7:50 am, by Carl

With the 2016 just a few weeks away, we come yet again to the place where citizens of the US get to vote for a single leader.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way; the Founders were almost universally opposed to allowing the Presidency to become a popularity contest.  John Adams wrote “If the executive power…is left in the hands of an aristocratical or democratical assembly, it will corrupt the legislature….and when the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.”  The Founders wanted to avoid snob rule (monarchy, aristocracy) and mob rule (democracy).

 

I have made it no secret that I am opposed to either candidate from the two major parties.  I thought it worthwhile to try and express why without getting into the specifics of either person.  While there is much to dislike in the two main candidates, what is more critical (and thus where my major opposition lies) is that they both represent the worst of what is wrong with our government now.  So many Americans can sense that our government is not operating as it should, though sadly many of those same citizens cannot really explain why.

 

The Founders were so very clear about their intentions for their new country.  They understood what they were doing was rare;  it was to be a clear break with nations as understood at that point.  Mostly, they wanted to establish a country that enshrined a free life for the “children of peasants”, who almost all of the citizens were.  To that end, their views about government and the life of the country were unique for that time.

 

So, my opposition to the two candidates centers on this point.  They are a part of the very system that most of us average Americans can tell is broken.  They are “one of them”…a governing elite who no longer are from “we the people.”  They are not the average, yet virtuous volunteer citizen willing to give time in service of the country.  I know that not all of us in the country will agree with what would fix the problems, with some of us wanting a far more involved government while others of us want a far less involved government.  Still, in either case, the answer does not lie in once again electing “one of them, the governing elite who seeks to domineer and dictate” to us.

 

Here is a short list of some of the views that the founding generation held:

 

Government was to be considered untrustworthy, thus must be kept on a tight lease and closely watched.  The entire system of their journey from Rebellion to Constitution is, at the very least, an indictment that one should never openly trust the government.  And they meant it against each other…and against their selves.  If you read comments by Washington, Adams and even Jefferson (and, yes, Madison too), they admit that even they don’t trust themselves in the office and are eager to simply get back home.

 

Government should not be empowered with money or power.  At best, the government was meant to be a necessary evil, with it scarcely doing much more than guarding the national borders, running the post office and making internal improvements to roads and such.  The revolution was not only about taxes, and the Americans weren’t really overly taxed at all from the mother country, but nonetheless, a central point of their complaint (real or imagined) was that there should be very limited taxation.  This became central to how they wanted to protect themselves from an untrustworthy government….simply give it no money.  Don’t let it keep a standing army.  Keep it weak so that no leader or legislature could decide to use either the money or the power against the people.

 

Our foreign policy should be one of limited depth. They were never isolationist; we couldn’t fully be in the late 1700s as the French Revolution embroiled us as early in Washington’s terms as 1791.  His proclamation of neutrality and then the Jay Treaty only kept peace for a bit; ultimately the crisis in Europe led to The Quasi War with France in 1798. A few years later, Jefferson was the first President to send US troops into conflict without permission from Congress over in north Africa, on the “shores of Tripoli.”  Even in Washington’s Farewell Address, he admits that we must be in economic relationships with other nations.  However, he also stresses that we should “have with [foreign nations] as little political connection as possible.”  In other words, the idea of city on a hill did not mean going all around the world trying to tell other nations how to live, and it certainly did not give license for nation-building.

 

Our government should be watched for corruption, knowing that our success as a nation will come only as long as we keep virtue and morality central.  Benjamin Franklin said on the last day of the Constitutional Convention that he thought the government under this constitution would be good, governed well for a time, but warned “can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”   John Adams wrote in 1772 “The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved.”   For Adams and Franklin, they were able to reflect on their experience in Europe where they confronted governments that operated on bribes, corruption, insider information, lies and betrayals.   About 100 years later, Lincoln shared the same fear as Franklin when he wrote “This nation can never be conquered from without. If it is ever to fall it will be from within.”

 

There’s more, but as you head into the election booth, it behooves you to consider candidates who reflect these views.  These are the views that led to our success.  We were, and still are, the country that everyone wanted to come to.  We were the place of opportunity…meaning, an opportunity as the “children of peasants” to just have an opportunity.  That was largely accomplished because the Founders had successfully bound and curtailed government.

 

I do understand that in 2016, and really since the 20th century, we live in a different world with industrialism, technology and urbanism.  There is a place for good involvement of government….or like Alexander Hamilton said, a government that is “active.”  But the government we have seen in our lives is not active but manic.  The two candidates of the main parties are one of them.

 

Make a different choice.