Future History, page 15
As do the rankings generally. By the late 20th century academia and the media were so infected by the Liberal Statist mentality that the rankings reflected little more than their own distorted view of what the presidency, and the nation itself, were supposed to be.
At the risk of appearing arrogant, this writer proposes a different ranking of presidential greatness, using the following criteria for evaluation:
1. Understanding the true meaning of the Constitution;
2. Understanding, respecting, and defending the division of powers;
3. Understanding, respecting, and defending the separation of powers;104
4. Understanding, respecting, and defending the check and balance system:
5. Willingness to defend the nation and its interests;
6. Skill in dealing with Congress;
7. Judgment in judicial and cabinet appointments.
On the basis of these criteria, the presidents can be ranked as follows:
Just one observer's opinion.
VII – LEVIATHAN
Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned, yet they wily believe there not be many so wise as themselves.
-Thomas Hobbes
Every national crisis engenders an intensification of Liberal Statism.105 As we have seen, the First Civil War, the First World War, the First Great Depression, the Second World War, all occasioned dramatic increases of the power of the State over the people, and a commensurate diminishing of personal liberty. The Second Civil War, the Second Great Depression, and the Third World War not only offered the Liberal Statists another opportunity to expand their authority, it allowed them to establish a form of government masquerading as a democracy, but which was in fact a form of totalitarianism. The American political system and the Constitution itself effectively ended in 2078. All the patriotic slogans and republican jargon remained, of course, and all the phrases of democratic rhetoric continued to be proclaimed with sententious solemnity. It was all irrelevant. By 2080, the United States of America was a one-party totalitarian State.
The secession of ten and a half states was quite obviously a crisis of great proportion, and the Liberal Statists did not waste it; but the Second Civil War differed from the First in a number of significant ways, despite some surface similarities.
The old Confederacy was, as noted previously, right for the wrong reasons. The southern states were right in opposing the federal assault upon self-government in the states of the Union, but wrong in doing so in an attempt to defend and preserve the detestable institution of human slavery. Conversely, the federal government was wrong for the right reasons, wrong to pervert the constitutional system established by the Framers, but right to pursue compliance with was certainly a "higher law," to use an old abolitionist phrase.106 No such disconnect between morality and constitutional scruple existed in 2080. The weapons possession issue provided the federal government with an opportunity, an excuse, to abolish federalism outright by placing in its own hands the absolute power to remake the Constitution in any way it wished. Morality had nothing to do with it.
As was the case in 1861, secessionism did not find much support in the Northeast or Midwest. (The secession of counties in New York and Illinois were brief aberrations, very quickly suppressed.) But unlike 1861, the seceding states were not limited to the South, nor were they contiguous. Texas and Oklahoma formed one unit of the new country (which adopted the name The Constitutional Federal Union, or C.F.U.) Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, and Utah formed a second. Mississippi and Alabama formed a third. Alaska, of course, had always been geographically separate from the "lower forty-eight," but nonetheless now constituted a fourth. And North California constituted a fifth.
This fact of geographic discontiguity should have made this secessionist attempt relatively easy to deal with. After all, it is not necessary to divide and conquer that which is already divided. But two other factors complicated the problem, one with similarities to 1861 and the other so dissimilar that Americans of the 19th century would have found it incomprehensible.
The first is that, as in 1861, both the officer corps and the enlisted personnel of all branches of the service were made up disproportionately of southerners. True, the only states of the old Confederacy to secede in 2078 were Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, but these three states provided nearly 10% of the officers and 15% of the enlisted personnel. Even though the concept of the state as one's "country" had died at Appomattox,107 the emotional pull of locality, family, tradition, sectionalism, etc., led to a disruption of the armed forces; not a fatal one, not an insurmountable one, not one anywhere near as serious as it had been in 1861, but one which severely delayed the ability of the federal government to react to secession.
But fatal and insurmountable indeed was the second factor: the general disinclination of the American population to fight to preserve the Union. In 1861, after the South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, men volunteered to serve in the Union forces (and, not unimportantly, in the Confederate forces) by the tens of thousands. It is true that military conscription108 later swelled the northern ranks, but most of the 2,213,000 Union soldiers, and all of the 600,000 Confederate soldiers, were volunteers.109
But by 2080 the general decay in moral standards, previously examined, had created generation after generation of self-focused, self-indulgent, lazy, irresponsible people, one major result of which was the virtual disappearance of anything approaching patriotism or responsible citizenship (not to mention an understanding of the philosophy underlying federalism, separation of powers, constitutional government, and so forth.) Citizenship itself had, indeed, become an anachronism, as had any rational approach to national defense. In order to trace the evolution (or perhaps the devolution) of the United States from the destruction of the Constitution in 2080 to the rise of Leviathan, we must compartmentalize our examination into distinct and manageable topics.
ONE: The steady diminishing of respect for the armed forces. Americans had always had an ambivalent attitude toward the military. Suspicion borne of a reasonable mistrust of men with power was coupled with admiration for the martial virtues and the self-sacrifice and service rendered by our warriors in time of need. Our national tradition from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century assumed that a small standing armed force was the normal state of affairs. (Americans were usually oblivious to their good fortune, having Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, neither of whom presented a military threat. One may contrast this with 18th century Poland, which had the Germans and the Russians as neighbors, or 20th century Germany, between the Russians and the French, or, of course, Israel, surrounded on all sides by vicious, hateful, fanatical, bigoted enemies.) When in American history crisis loomed (civil war, world war,) a large armed force was raised, and then disbanded when the crisis passed. This occurred after the Revolution, after the First Civil War, and after the First World War. But the Second World War left us in a different situation, for the crisis that had necessitated the expansion of the armed forces did not really pass. When the Confederacy was crushed, the First Civil War was over. When the German Empire surrendered, the First World War was over. But when the danger posed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ended, it was replaced by an even more sinister danger posed by the Soviet Union. Even though the foundations for our own Liberal Statist system had already been unwittingly laid by Wilson and the Roosevelts, real differences still existed between capitalist democracy and totalitarian socialism, and the U.S. government under President Truman110 determined to use America's industrial predominance, unparalleled wealth, and military might to stop the further expansion of Soviet power. This policy, referred to as "containment," became the fundamental foreign policy of the U.S. for the next forty-five years, and the era of Soviet-American competition came to be referred to as the "Cold War."111
Americans reluctantly but with determination shouldered the burdens thus imposed, and honored and respected their sons (and daughters) who donned the uniform and went off to foreign lands. By 1960, American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen were stationed in Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans, Central America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and, of course, North America itself. Never since the days of the Roman Empire under the Antonines or the Mongol Empire under Kublai Khan had an imperial power (for that is what the United States had become) extended its power so far beyond its borderers.
And then came the War in Vietnam. This was a forty years' war, as the Vietnamese in pursuit of national independence fought first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and then each other. To the American mentality of the era, which saw all international situations within the context of the Cold War, it was a very simple example of Communism versus anti-Communism (if not quite democracy.) It seemed on the surface to be replay of the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. In both cases, an Asian country was split in two, and the non-Communist regime in the south was defending itself against aggression by the Communist regime in the north. Four successive presidents, Eisenhower, the first Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, all seemed to be convinced that the defense of South Vietnam was crucial to American national interests, and both the Democrat and Republican parties supported the commitment o the southern regime.
The problem was that our leadership had misconstrued the situation by its confusion of Vietnam with Korea, a confusion that any simple objective reading of history could have avoided.112 In Korea, the northern Communist regime had been established by the military might of a foreign imperialist power (the Soviet Union, who received the right to occupy northern Korea as part of the World War Two allied agreements,) while the southern regime, with all of its faults (and they were legion) had been established by the Koreans themselves, albeit with American assistance. In Vietnam, the exact opposite situation existed. The Communist regime in the north had been created by Vietnamese, while the non-Communist regime in the south had been created by the French and was subsequently sustained by the Americans.
We were thus attempting to bolster a regime with limited support among its own people, a futile effort which should have cautionary but was not. Our goal, halting the spread of totalitarian socialism, was laudable, and our fighting men were brave and noble; but the task placed upon them was an impossible one. Again we have an example of being wrong for the right reasons.
And the impact was deleterious. Opponents to the war turned upon our soldiers with a viciousness that was venomous and virulent. It was an odd and convoluted combination of socialist propaganda, populist radicalism, misplaced idealism, and the self-absorption of the Generation of Vipers. To the socialists (among whom must be counted Soviet functionaries who managed to influence the American media), anything that impeded the advance of totalitarianism (i.e., "the power of the people", as in the "National Liberation Front" in Vietnam) was on the wrong side of historical inevitability; to the populists (among whom must be counted emotionally overheated and naïve entertainers, whose influence far exceeded both their numbers and their intellectual capacities), America as traditionally understood was essentially evil, and any action taken by the government that did not steal people's property (i.e., take money away from people who had earned it and give to people had had not) was an expression of America's selfishness and greed; to the idealists (exemplars of Lenin's old reference to useful fools), their catch phrases included "war is harmful to children and other living things," "make love, not war," "war is over if you want it," "flower power," "Beatle power is love for life," and, most bizarrely, "power to the people"! (Had "the people" been able to, they would probably have killed these idiots.) And as for the Generation of Vipers, what was generally perceived as an anti-war movement was in reality an anti-draft movement, a general disinclination on their parts to provide military service to the nation that had produced, protected, enriched, and nurtured them. It was not a coincidence that when President Nixon effectively ended the draft, three years before the war ended, the antiwar movement disappeared. Subsequent military actions, in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, Indonesia, etc., while not regarded with the same disgust and personal distain that had afflicted the servicemen in the Vietnam period, were nonetheless the objects of leftist anger. Anything which diverted attention from the Liberal Statist desire to expand domestic power was anathema.113
Thus by the outbreak of the Second Civil War, so much animosity against the military had developed that when the State called for volunteers to serve against the rebellion, very few people responded; and when the draft was reinstates, draft evasion was so widespread that it effectively vitiated the law. The "Union" found itself struggling to have a military force adequate to the suppression of the rebellion.
TWO: Related to this was the effective end of the concept of citizenship. As originally conceived by the ancient Greeks and Romans, citizenship conferred both privileges and responsibilities upon the people who possessed it. Citizens in those civilizations had political rights (the right to participate in the political process, the right to hold office), legal rights (the right to a jury trial in Athens, the right to appeal a criminal conviction in Rome), as well as the obligation to provide military service. None of this should be confused with the concept of citizenship that emerged during the so-called Enlightenment and subsequent American and French Revolutions. Citizenship in the classical period was limited to men (affluent men in Athens) and there were distinctions among citizens of various degrees (patricians, equestrians, and plebeians in Rome.) But the distinction between citizen and non-citizen was stark and clearly delineated. Non-citizens in Athens or Sparta had no legal or political rights at all, and while the Romans created perforce two separate legal systems to govern their huge empire (the ius civilis, or the law of the city of Rome for citizens, and the ius gentium, or the law of the nations for everyone else,) the two systems had notable differences. For example, if sentenced to death in Rome a citizen would be beheaded, a messy but relatively painless way to die, or might even be allowed to open his veins; a non-citizen might be crucified, a horrific and agonizing death. The ancient Christian tradition tells us that in the Neronian persecution of Christians (64-68 A.D.), St. Paul, a Roman citizen, was beheaded, while St. Peter, who was not a citizen, was crucified.
Citizenship in the early United States conformed to much of the classical model. All citizens were originally men with some degree of property (or at least some ability to pay taxes.) One of the Framers, John Jay of New York, explained this old perspective by saying that "The people who own the country should rule it." The rights of the citizen consisted of the right to vote, the right to run for and to hold office, and the right to sit on juries. Unlike the ancients, however, non-citizens had the same legal rights in court and, for men at least, the same property rights. As the American Republic evolved, full citizenship (the basic component of which was suffrage) underwent constant expansion. By the eve of the First Civil War universal white male suffrage had been established in all the states; freed slaves were given citizenship by the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the right to vote by the 15th Amendment in 1870; women were first granted voting rights in the territory of Wyoming in 1869, and nationally by the 19th Amendment in 1920; the poll tax, a device routinely used in the South to obstruct black voting, was abolished by the 24th Amendment in 1964; and the voting age was lowered nationally to 18 in 1971 by the 26th Amendment.
Thus far the expansion of citizenship rights was meet and right, a just and proper evolution of applied freedom and political equality. The whole concept of citizenship began to be eroded, however, when the Democratic Party realized that it was possible to extend citizenship rights to non-citizens, i.e., illegal aliens, in state and local governments.114 The goal of the Democrats was, of course, to establish in as many states as possible the right of non-citizens to vote and hold public office, because they would then, of course, vote for the Democrats. Some state constitutions expressly prohibited non-citizens from hold office, but it occurred to very few of them to prohibit non-citizens from voting. A slight change in state constitutional wording eliminated both impediments. By 2085 non-citizens were voting and being elected to office in most states, with only Texas, the deep South, and the mountain states resisting the urge. By and large the only difference remaining between citizens and non-citizens was the obligation of citizens to serve on juries, which is to say, no real difference at all. (A 21st century quip asked, "What is the definition of a jury? Answer: twelve people too stupid to avoid jury duty." The selfish irresponsibility of the era regarded jury duty as an annoyance, not a privilege.)
The impact of this change was fundamental. Because the border of the United States had become porous on all sides, illegal aliens had been flooding into the country for decades, and by 2085 constituted some 40% of the population (including their offspring, who were constitutionally entitled to citizenship if born in the U.S.) This was a large and powerful group, and politicians either shamelessly courted their support or shamefully feared offending them. And inasmuch as they were not really Americans and had no sense of loyalty or commitment to anything other than self-interest, they had no intention of risking their lives to bring Montana, for example, back into the Union. This, coupled with the distain in which the military was held, made it impossible to crush the rebellion by conventional means. It remained possible to crush the rebellion by unconventional means, which is what happened in 2085.
