In his new book Nullification: Reclaiming Consent of the Governed, Clyde Wilson pinpoints the folly and futility of “presidential
politics” – of hoping against hope that some Great Savior will somehow
restore American liberty. Only those who are almost completely ignorant
of American history could be fooled by such a farce. Unfortunately,
that seems to include most Americans.
Early Americans were never so naïve as to believe that
national politicians could preserve their freedom; that was their job.
They are the ones who, acting through their state-level political
societies, created and gave authority to the Constitution. The
government was to act as their agent and was delegated by them only
a few specific powers. Moreover, the government itself could never be
the judge of its own powers, for that would lead to “nothing less than a
government of unlimited power, a tyranny,” writes Wilson. Of course,
that is what Americans have now lived under for generations with the
“black-robed deities” of the “supreme” court announcing for all of us what
freedoms we shall have.
A monopoly or “national” government was always understood to
be the greatest threat to liberty by such American statesmen as Thomas
Jefferson, author of the Kentucky Resolution of 1798 that enunciated the
concept of nullification. (He was invited to author the Resolution by
friends in the Kentucky legislature). It was a response to the
first totalitarian power grab by the New England, leftist establishment led
by John Adams who enforced the Sedition Act, an abominable law that outlawed
free political speech in America. “Resolved, That the several States
composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of
unlimited submission to their General Government,” Jefferson wrote in the
Resolve. “[A]nd that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated
powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Kentucky
would not allow the enforcement of the unconstitutional Sedition Act within
its borders. James Madison authored the Virginia Resolution of 1798
that said the same thing. If “consent of the governed” were to have any
real meaning, that consent would have to be enforced through such political
vehicles as nullification and secession.
The leftist New England establishment first invented the lie that
Jefferson was not the author of the Kentucky Resolve – until the great man’s
grandson produced a copy of it in his grandfather’s own handwriting.
They then invented a second lie that Jefferson was only defending free speech
and not states’ rights. Jefferson himself denied this all throughout his
life, Wilson points out, by insisting that in the American system of
government, states’ rights and liberty could not be separated. If
Americans were to have a constitution that protected their freedoms, they
would have to enforce it through political communities organized at the state
and local level.
The central government itself could never be trusted – especially through
its “supreme” court — to do so. Jefferson understood that if the
day ever came that five government lawyers with lifetime tenure would decide
what everyone’s liberties were to be, then the American Revolution would have
failed and Americans would live under a tyranny. That day arrived in
1865, when the U.S. government finally destroyed federalism and states’
rights and consolidated political power – including the power of
constitutional interpretation – in Washington, D.C.
Once empowered by a monopolistic, consolidated, centralized government
used to enrich its operators, there would be no logic that could overturn it,
said Jefferson, for “you might as well reason and argue with the marble
columns” in the Capitol, he said in a letter. He was well aware during
his lifetime that the New England “consolidators” wanted a highly centralized
government that would subsidize their business enterprises with cheap credit
through a bank run by politicians; protect them from international completion
with protectionist tariffs, and lavish canal- and road-building corporations
with tax dollars. Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton, the
intellectual leader (of sorts) of the New England/New York/Philadelphia
leftist establishment, gave this British-style mercantilistic
corruption scheme the Orwellian label of “The American System.”
As Wilson points out, Hamilton praised the American ideals of federalism
and states’ rights in The Federalist Papers, and then spent the rest
of his life doing everything he could to undermine and destroy those
ideals. This included inventing a false history of the founding in
which he claimed that the citizens of the states, who ratified the
Constitution in state political conventions, were never sovereign, and that
Americans’ real “original intent” was to create a highly centralized,
monopolistic government like the one in England. Hamilton’s theory,
Wilson correctly points out, “always rested upon coercion, chutzpah, and
lies.” It was also the theory of the American founding that was
embraced by Abraham Lincoln who used it to “justify” waging war on his own
fellow citizens, killing them off by the hundreds of thousands with the
self-proclaimed objective of “saving the union.”
One of the sillier arguments fabricated against true federalism, which
includes the rights of nullification and secession, is the slogan that
“states don’t have rights, people do!” Duh. As Wilson points out,
it was John Taylor of Caroline who actually first said this in the context of
explaining the Jeffersonian dictum that “States are instruments by
which the people may assert their rights against usurpers and oppressors”
(emphasis added). At least they were in Taylor’s day. Today they
are appendages of Washington, D.C.
In a chapter on “The Real Constitution” Wilson states the obvious fact that
the fabled “system of checks and balances” has been a complete failure in
limiting governmental powers to those delegated to it by the
Constitution. In reality, all three branches of the federal government
work in tandem to limit our freedoms. It is “we the
people” who are limited and controlled, thanks to the state’s judicial
monopoly of constitutional interpretation. “The real Constitution did
not belong to lawyers, who obfuscate for a living,” writes Wilson, who points
out that most of the participants at the constitutional convention were not
lawyers, unlike today’s political class. The people do not need lawyers
to tell them what “THEIR” constitution says, Wilson proclaims.
The fatal mistake of conservatives and libertarians who call themselves
“constitutionalists” is their belief that the federal government can somehow
be persuaded to begin enforcing the Constitution and thereby limiting its own
power, prestige, remuneration, and perks. “The peoples of the states
have not delegated to federal judges the power to decide what their rights
are. This is a power they have reserved to themselves.”
By “the people” Wilson, like Jefferson, does not mean a majority of the
electorate. “By people, do we mean that if a million Chinese wade
ashore in California and outvote everybody else, then they are
sovereign? I think not.” If “consent of the governed” has any
meaning at all, writes Wilson, then it means what it was always intended to
mean: the people of the free, independent, and sovereign states.
“The right to self-government rests on the right to withdraw consent from an
oppressive government,” says Wilson, and in the real American system that has
historically been achieved by the people acting through their state-level
political communities. It is how they decided to fight the Revolution;
it is how the Revolution ended, with King George III signing a peace treaty
with each individual state; it is how the Constitution was ratified; and it
is how the Constitution can be amended. This is why, in all the founding
documents, “United States” is always in the plural, signifying that the free
and independent states are united. It never meant some Leviathan called
“the United States government.” That was the lying fabrication of
Lincoln in his Gettysburg address in which he invented the strange notion
that the founders created a “new nation” instead of a confederacy of free and
independent states, as is clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence,
among other places.
Real federalism or states’ rights is all but nonexistent today, says Wilson,
because “it presented the most powerful obstacle to the consolidation of
irresponsible power – that consolidation which our forefathers decried as the
greatest single threat to liberty. For that reason, states’ rights had
to be covered under a blanket of lies and usurpations by those who thought
they could rule us better than we can rule ourselves.” After the “Civil
War,” writes Wilson, “the American idea of consent of the governed was
replaced by the European idea of obedience.”
The destruction of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights tradition, with the
elimination of nullification and secession as the essential ingredients of
the consent of the governed, allowed the rotten Hamiltonian system of
government by crony capitalists, for crony capitalists, and of crony
capitalists to become cemented into place. This is what Lincoln and the
Republican Party of his day meant when they said they were “saving the
union,” Wilson observes. It was NOT the voluntary union of the
states they wanted to preserve; they utterly destroyed that and
replaced it with a Soviet-style, compulsory union held together by
violence, mass murder, mayhem, and plunder. Their “union” was a large,
centralized government that would dispense corporate welfare and protect the
party’s corporate political supporters from international competition while
showering them with cheap credit through a government-controlled banking
system. As Wilson himself explains: “With the Lincoln revolution
the Hamiltonian program triumphed. Indeed, that was the purpose of the
Lincoln revolution. Thus today, all the politicians of both parties
rally around so that the taxpayers and posterity can reward the Banksters, Too
Big to Jail, for their evil deeds” (emphasis added).
