𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐍 𝐅𝐔𝐍𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐄: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐏𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐓𝐮𝐠-𝐨𝐟-𝐖𝐚𝐫

The Genesis of America's delusions of freedom and democracy were established by the creation and ratification of the Constitution of the United States. Instead objective reality insists it's a back-alley brawl disguised as a founding document: How Hamilton’s industrial elites and Jefferson’s plantation lords ignored Washington's warnings, rigged the political game, and wired the original partisan booby trap we are still stepping into and bleeding over centuries later.

Gather ‘round, my denizens of democracy and digitally-addled Facebook faithful. Today we’re going to take a look at how the Great American Funhouse came about, when the nation’s walls began to warp and the mirrors began to distort the images of freedom and democracy. Today we’re going to take a look back when the U.S. Constitution was written and realize that this document wasn’t handed down by glowing angels on a mountaintop. Instead it was forged in the summer of 1787 in the absolute, pants-wetting terror of an elite class who suddenly realized that the dirty, armed peasants, who fought for the nation’s revolutionary liberty, were coming for their bank ledgers, because they were owed.

Let’s rip the powdered wigs off the Founding Fathers and stare at the raw, pulsating nerves of the American experiment. Let’s understand that we are sold a mythological fever dream that this country was built on unified, high-minded ideals. This is absolute hog-slop. It was built on a brutal, back-alley turf war between two competing flavors of oligarchy, and we are all still bleeding from the 18th-century shrapnel today.

It all started with Daniel Shays. Shays was a wounded Revolutionary War vet who dragged himself home to western Massachusetts only to find the very people he fought a war for, were feverishly foreclosing on his dirt farm. They wanted to take Daniel’s dirt and use it to satisfy the debts incurred by the Revolutionary War. Image the wealthy not only stiffing them for the sacrifices of using their bodies as bullet shields or sponges in their little war to kick out the British; but then to add insult to injury they were taking their land to pay off the debts of said war. So, Shays and his boys did what any self-respecting, heavily armed, stiffed veterans would do: they grabbed their muskets and shut down the debt courts.

The wealthy coastal merchants absolutely panicked. The flimsy Articles of Confederation were completely useless to protect their money from the mob. So, 55 terrified, sweaty men locked themselves in a Philadelphia statehouse to draft the Constitution. It wasn’t a pristine beacon of liberty; it was a heavily fortified and secretive legal panic room designed specifically to keep the mob out of the vault.

Enter the two heavyweights: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

Hamilton and his Federalists wanted a British-style machine. Central banks, federal armies, and a government powerful enough to crush the next Daniel Shays before he could even tie his boots. They wanted industrial order. They wanted Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nation’s, ‘Division of Labor’, They wanted profit. And Britain was the strongest empire in the world.

Jefferson, meanwhile, wasn’t even in the sweltering room. He was safely insulated over in Paris, sipping Bordeaux, soaking up Enlightenment art, and writing romantic, sociopathic poetry about how a little violent rebellion is just good political hygiene. He despised Hamilton’s Northern bankers. He wanted a sprawling agrarian utopia—a French-style aristocracy where wealthy, enlightened plantation lords ruled over the yeoman farmers with paternalistic grace, all conveniently financed by the brutal extraction of enslaved labor. And furthermore, The young United States owed France for their newly found freedom from the English monarchy.

George Washington ever the stoic pragmatist sided with Hamilton, because England had the liquidity, whereas France was embroiled in a little revolution of their own, and he was determined not to be a play-thing between England and France. Feeling betrayed Jefferson resigned from Washington’s cabinet, and taking Madison with him they formed America’s first political party: the Democratic-Republicans or Jefferson’s Republicans. A line from the Democrats of today can be drawn, uninterrupted back to Jefferson. For 4 years this wound festered, with each side taking shots at each other through the media, but because Washington was so respected by all, this beef stayed quelled under Washington’s stern brow. This was a big factor in many wanting George Washington to remain President, for as long as he lived.

However, Washington wanted to set the precedence that the young nation did not have royalty or a permanence of power. Before he departed he left the nation with his, “Farewell to Friends and Fellow Citizens” a prophetic warning of what will happen if we give in to human nature’s ‘Spirit of Party’ and follow factions over the Constitution. Washington apprised that these 3 distinct things will happen—political revenge, geopolitical separatism, and foreign interference and influence into our government affairs—and effectively destroying ourselves from the inside. Does anything sound prescient?

The ink wasn’t even dry on George Washington’s Farewell Address before the Federalists, like eager little children waiting for Christmas morning, fired the first real shots in the eternal, maddening tug-of-war we now call the Conservative-Liberal divide. In 1798, terrified of French radicalism and Jeffersonian populism, they slammed down the Alien and Sedition Acts. The so-called champions of liberty made it a federal crime to call the President a moron. It was a staggering, unconstitutional power grab by an administration desperate to lock up its political critics and silence the press. Is this starting to a ring a bell?

But Jefferson didn’t just get mad; he got even. And in doing so, he went into the basement of the republic and quietly wired a Confederate booby trap straight into the ideological plumbing.

In secret, Jefferson penned the Kentucky Resolutions, arguing that states had the ultimate right to nullify federal laws they didn’t like. He thought he was just outmaneuvering John Adams. In reality, he forged the exact weapon that Southern aristocrats would pick up a half-century later. Men like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis took that high-minded Enlightenment theory of states’ rights and stripped it down to its ugly core to protect their oligarchic, slave-based economy. They sold the poor, dirt-farming descendants of Daniel Shays a total bill of goods, marching them into the meat grinder of the Civil War to protect the wealth of the Richmond elite, all under the hijacked guise of Jeffersonian liberty.

So here we are, centuries later, still screaming at each other in this Great American Funhouse. We are still fighting the ghost of Hamilton’s central bank and strong federal government, while the phantom of Jefferson’s agrarian rebellion and State’s rights of upholding the highest forms of personal liberties and ownership of property still rattle the government walls. Leaving us now with a grotesque version of both combined, that has taken the absolute worst ideals of each and turned them into a governing body that is of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy. And we the people are still trying to decide which billionaires are the benevolent ones.

So my beleaguered citizens keep your eyes open and your heads on a swivel, and never trust a wealthy man in a powdered wig telling you he’s locking down the government and silencing the media for your own good

— Johnny Democraseed

Next Week: The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798