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| Jefferson |
"He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither” – Ben Franklin
The two most important political questions are: “Who
decides,’ and “Who benefits?” The less important political question is: “What
shall be done?” V. I. Lenin answered this last question in his most famous
pamphlet: “What Shall Be Done?”
Lenin’s answer to this question was: The ownership of
property, including wages and benefits, should revert from property owners to
workers. This, pretty much, is the unstated program of our new, reform minded, Marxist
tinged, neo-progressive Democrat Party.
But, of course, business questions must be decided by someone.
If not property owners and the managers of businesses under the direction of
its stockholders, then who? For Lenin especially, the question “Who shall
decide what is to be done?” was paramount. His answer to the question was: All
important matters of state, including the direction of the national economy,
would be decided by a communist vanguard of the people. Marxist/Leninist
progressive change plunged Russia and a good part of the Western world into an
economic, cultural and political maelstrom from which, even today, it has not
recovered.
Here in the United States, the U.S. Constitution provides in
its governing plan an answer to the question “Who decides?” In so doing, the
Constitution breaks the back of autocratic government by dividing the branches
of government into three separate divisions – executive, legislative and
judicial -- each equal in its own sphere of activity. When we say the separate
branches are equal, we mean that each branch – because it is
functionally separate – serves as a breakwater that prevents the accumulation
of power without which tyranny and Caesarism are rendered less likely.
“Remember,” Lord Acton tells us, “where you have a
concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the
mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.”
The authors of the U. S. Constitution were familiar, by
reason of their own immediate circumstances, with Caesarism -- executive, parliamentary
and judicial corruption. And they were having none of it. When Benjamin Franklin, emerging from the
Constitutional Convention, was asked by Mrs. Powel, “Sir, what have you given
us?” he answered, “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.”
We were told in our Civics classes – when there were Civic
classes in public, parochial and private schools – that the division of
separate but equal powers into three branches of government preserves
democratic or republican government.
In addition to the Constitutional separation of powers, an
organic division of powers – that between federal, state and municipal
governments – also serves as a political prophylactic preventing the
centralization of political power in a larger and potentially oppressive unitary government.
To be sure, an autocratic government in which the people
surrender their liberties to secure safety and peace may be more efficient than
our cumbersome model of governance. However, no less an apostle of liberty than
Thomas Jefferson warns us, “When all government ...in little as in great
things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will
render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will
become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
Municipal government, whittled away in our state by a venal
and oppressive, tax hungry state government, is the best corrective for an
oppressive state government, even as strong and independent state governments
serve as guard rails protecting the public against our increasingly ambitious
and overweening federal behemoth.
Connecticut’s current crop of U.S. Senators and U.S.
Representatives, all Democrats, enjoy preening themselves in public as
defenders of “the democracy” but, from the Jeffersonian point of view, they
would be little more than the “gangsters” Lord Acton has warned us about.
The founders of the Republic regarded governance as a brush
fire controlled by eternal vigilance and the distribution of political power
divided into separate branches and separate governments, federal, state and
municipal. These necessary separations, which preserve the hallowed liberties
of the people, cannot be destroyed by Caesars and foreign governments. They can
be destroyed by solicitous politicians unmindful of Alexis de Tocqueville’s
ever timely warning. The author of Democracy
in America, sometimes assigned in High School Civics classes when there
were Civics classes, wrote “The American Republic will endure until the day
Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
Those Americans unimpressed by the blandishments of
politicians in heat during election periods should bring the Tocqueville quote
with them in voting booths when they vote in the upcoming 2024 elections.
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