BEING TAKEN UP with going over some of Hannah Arendt's observations in her essay Lying in Politics, I don't have the time to cite and look up all of the necessary citations that Charles Beard and other have made in their debunkery of the common received lies about the nature of the United States Constitution which Republican-fascists, in state governments, in the federal government, especially on the Roberts-Alito Supreme Court use to destroy even the limited democracy which Americans have, through enormous expenditures of blood, work and tears, forced onto that document, especially People of Color and Women who were excluded from the start.
The resort of those who want equality and justice of coming up with citations of the document and logical convolutions to make that document provide what the Declaration of Independence promised, equal rights, equal justice, government of, by and FOR The People has not worked, the great episodes in our history that led lots of us to believe it would work, the abolition movement even the Civil War ended up with things going back to much as they had been, albeit without de jure slavery, the struggle to expand the vote to, first, propertyless white men, then Women, then People of Color and others, the great Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century which achieved the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the anti-poverty programs enacted in the same period have successfully been pushed back by the oligarchs and their lackeys in government and, especially, on the Supreme Court to the point where even those relatively in on the con job are afraid for what of democracy they once depended on. The Roberts Court, put into place with Republican-fascist corruption and the wealth of millionaires and billionaires playing the Constitutional system should be the end of that illusion that the document as it was and even as we have managed to amend it is reliable or even safe.
I'm done with pretending I believe that lie when history as it's passing before my eyes proves it is a lie and, whether told by Parson Weems or Lin-Manuel Miranda, it is an anti-democratic, anti equality mythology that props up what we are again finding to be a millstone around the neck of exactly those it was originally written to keep down.
I do have the time to type out the Conclusions Charles Beard drew from his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States which, in the Dover republication I'm typing from, are on pages 324 and 325. I will leave it to you to do what I know you won't, read the book and look up his citations to see that he quotes and refers to them honestly in coming to his conclusions. If I had time I would quote from some of the more exigent of more recent historians to support my belief in what he said, but that will have to wait. I will note that Beard uses a few words according to old meanings that those of us today are unfamiliar with. He was especially prone to using the word "personality" to mean "personal" or "private" as in private property or private interests. Since this is a response to hate mail, I've inserted a few explanatory terms into Beard's text, for the dope who objected, not as an insult to literate readers.
CONCLUSIONS
At the close of this long and arid survey - partaking of the nature of catalogue - it seems worth while to bring together the important conclusions for political science which the data presented appear to warrant.
The movement for the Constitution of the United States was originated and carried through principally by four groups of personality [personal] interests which had been adversely affected under the Articles of Confederation: money, public securities, manufactures and trade and shipping.
The first firm steps toward the formation of the Constitution were taken by a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors.
No popular vote was taken directly or indirectly on the proposition to call the Convention which drafted the Constitution.
Here we have the first of the acts reneging on the promises made by, among others, many of the principle participants in both fomenting the revolution for independence from Britain and the formation of the Constitution, the claim that the only legitimate government was had by the consent of those governed by it. If you think that's an unimportant detail, it is the very thing that defines the difference between an egalitarian democracy and some species of illegitimate government by gangsters and thugs, everything from the most genteel and most perfumed and manicured to the most brutally ruthless, which all other forms of government are.
It is not an unimportant detail that the large majority of People, not only Black and other People of Color were excluded from the formation of the government of what was becoming the United States, all Women were so excluded. Even most White Men who were excluded by their relative poverty from voting or participating in the formation of the structure of government but were also excluded from the process of accepting the Constitution.
It is against this which all of those groups and others have had to fight from the start, it is those groups which the Roberts Court and virtually all previous Courts have ruled against in the very terms of the Constitution which the "originalists" divine the "original intent" of "the founders" to favor the very groups which decided all issues of the original Constitution. The minor occasions on which the Court has gone against that characteristic practice are, in fact, minor and as the Roberts Court is proving, what the Court can give on the basis of its reading of the document and their fear of the reaction if they don't grant some measure of justice, subsequent courts will FAR MORE EASILY take away.
That is not any accidental issue or mere unimportant detail, it is the key to understanding most of the history of government under the Constitution and why it is still an extreme danger to equality and democracy today. Much of the destruction of the progress we've made since the government was set up is being undermined and destroyed, today, by gatherings of such rich men who, to an extent, allow their gangster women in on some of it, too. Always be suspicious of the rich, in every age they will, by and large, be the enemies of equality, democracy and equal justice.
A large propertyless mass was, under the prevailing suffrage [voting] qualifications, excluded at the outset from participation (through representatives) in the work of framing the Constitution.
Certainly we see that this is exactly the scheme of Republican-fascism and the Roberts Court in their destruction of the Voting Rights Act, to make sure that People of Color, others who they don't believe will vote for those who will support their interests as opposed to the rich and Republican. Again, it is no accident that the Alitos, the Roberts, the other Republican-fascists on the Court and in state governments are recreating the very conditions that the original founders depended on to exclude the majority of even white men from the business of government.
The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately, directly and personally interested in, and derived economic advantages from, the establishment of the new system.
The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.
The major portion of the members of the Convention are on record as recognizing the claim of property to a special and defensive position in the Constitution.
In the ratification of the Constitution, about three-fourths of the adult males failed to vote on the question, having abstained from the elections at which delegates to the state conventions were chosen, either on account of their indifference or their disfranchisement by property qualifications.
No doubt those who make excuses for the sleaziness of the operation will make hay out of the speculation that a lot of that non-participating 3/4ths were slackers who couldn't be bothered to vote. I would point out that a lot of them may not have had the luxury of finding out what the rich men in Philadelphia and their lackeys in the several states were up to until it was a done deal. The state of journalism and the dissemination of news, especially among the rural underclass is hard enough to imagine today, but it was the condition that most of those who the founders proposed to govern were in. Consider how long it took slaves in many parts of the rural South to find out that they weren't supposed to be enslaved anymore, and that was in a period when communication and the news was not only far more developed but the actual governments of the defeated Confederate states was in the hands of those who favored the abolition of slavery. The founders and their allies in the states knew that they were working against the interests of most of those who the process excluded, starting with those who could not meet the property requirements to vote which, in many of the states, including those we, today, like to think of as the most democratic, were quite high, restricting the vote to the affluent.
And, as I never will stop pointing out, never underestimate the role that widely dispersed lies plays in such "votes" as in those Republican-fascist robo-calls that are aimed at driving down voter participation among People of Color, etc. And those such as the idiot principled non-voters who discourage the participation of those who could vote. I wish I could personally punch out every preening, posing asshole on the play-left who has discouraged voting among idiot lefties who listened to them and the asshole magazine publishers who published their bullshit.
The Constitution was ratified by a vote of probably not more than one-sixth of the adult males.
It is questionable whether a majority of the voters participating in the elections for the state conventions in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Virginia and South Carolina, actually approved the ratification of the Constitution.
Beard makes a very good case that in many states the process was intentionally corrupt, either by obvious intent or by how it actually happened.
The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention; and in a large number of instances they were also directly and personally interested in the outcome of their efforts.
In the ratification, it became manifest that the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personality [personal] interest on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interest on the other.
I would love to go farther into studying the extent to which the 1800 Jeffersonian revolution was the assertion of the interests of the losers in the original Constitutional battle and, to some partial extent, the modification of the original scheme of the framers on behalf of those white men who must still have had the power to force an expansion of the franchise at the state level and to have otherwise been able to wrest something like an imperfect democracy out of the fat cats. The eclipse of the Federalist Party and, eventually, the Federalist majority on the Supreme Court under the Jacksonian revolution on behalf of, especially, the interest of small holders in the Western states is, I think, accurately considered a repudiation of "originalism" though the affluent, the slave holders and their current progeny in Republican-fascism have proven to be quite adaptive in regaining and maintaining control, especially through the most anti-democratic branch of the government, the Supreme Court. I will point out that neither the Jeffersonians nor the Jacksonians or those who believe or claim they are inheritors of those traditions can honestly claim that what they hold is "originalist" or "textualist" because what they did was certainly not part of the intent of those who gathered in Philadelphia to illegally construct a new government nor the state ratification conventions which were, by and large, rigged by men who would have disdained either of those two innovations to slightly expand the base of those who got to vote and those who they voted for to represent their own "personality interests."
And perhaps the most important point in understanding how the Republican-fascists are destroying democracy, using the popular delusions about that document and American history.
The Constitution was not created by "the whole people" as the jurists have said; neither was it created by "the states" as Southern nullifiers long contended; but it was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope.
If you want to see how this truth as opposed the those two myths of national origin is important, watch what the Roberts-Alito Court using arguments derived from that of the "Southern nullifiers" on behalf of Republican-fascists who don't want Black People voting or having representation in the state or federal government, and, really, pretty much all of those who they can't count on voting for Republican-fascists. The rest of us who tolerate this because of the myths of "the founders" are suckers for it based on falsified history and hagiographic biography of even some of the shadiest of them.
American history as most of us get it from hagiographic biography, false history, and mostly from some show-biz or fiction source, is about as accurate as the idea that Rome's similarly deified founding fathers were nourished on wolf-milk.
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