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Book Plug and a bit more

My younger son (the Professor) gave me a book for Christmas, This Vast Southern Empire, written by Matthew Karp, a friend of his. I haven’t finished it, but if you’re a history buff I can certainly recommend it.

It shines a light on a portion of our history that I, for one, had never given much thought, specifically, the extent to which the South, and the slave interest, controlled our foreign policy in the years prior to the Civil War. The slaveowners had an interest in the survival of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, and the United States foreign policy was shaped, some might say distorted, by that interest.

Which brings us to another subject that I’ve been thinking about lately. We are raised to revere the Constitution, and to accept that if it is not god-given, it is certainly the result of a Miracle in Philadelphia, bequeathed to us by wise and disinterested patriots, who just happened to also be members of the 1% of the day, and, to a large extent, slaveowners.

Those slaveowners in 1840 could never have dominated American Foreign Policy had not the constitution been shaped, or misshapen, in order to give them a disproportionate influence over that policy. The United States Senate was designed to give disproportionate influence to the smaller states. The House or Representatives was similarly distorted, as each slave counted as two-thirds of a person for purposes of apportioning representatives, but no-thirds of a person so far as those representatives were concerned.

The two thirds issue is now a dead letter, but we are still burdened with a system that gives Wyoming the same influence in the Senate as California, as well as giving that state, and others like it, disproportionate influence over the selection of the President of the United States. The framers of the Constitution may truly have believed that the system they framed would prevent the election of demagogues and incompetents, but twice in this century we’ve seen that the people are a lot smarter than those scholars in the Electoral College. We’ve just gone through an election, which, had it been conducted as it would be in any other advanced nation, would have been considered a landslide victory for the candidate who lost. We have a United States Senate dominated by Republicans, yet:

The 48 members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, in their most recent respective elections dating back to 2012, collectively earned 78.4 million votes on their way to victory. Republicans, by contrast, won just 54.8 million votes—even though there are 52 of them.

via Daily Kos

And then, of course, there’s the gerrymandered House of Representatives, enabled at least in part by the Constitution’s built in bias toward rural states.

The sad fact is that our constitution has doomed us to lose the Republic that Ben Franklin challenged us to keep. We are taught to be proud of the fact that the framers anticipated the need to change the constitution, but the fact is that the two methods provided in the constitution are both held hostage to the minority, which in this country is invariably reactionary. It is no doubt the case that the post Civil War Amendments, of which we can truly be proud, only passed because the Southern states were forced to approve them, though I believe Mississippi was somehow able to avoid voting to outlaw slavery until the fairly recent past.

Is there any doubt that if we were to hold a constitutional convention today, for which the constitution provides, which we desperately need to do since the document is so antiquated, that it would be dominated by the political heirs of the slaveowning aristocracy? We are probably in the final days of the Republic, and our vaunted constitution will likely prevent us from avoiding our fate.

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