I believe that the true legal and moral authority to govern the United States is derived from the people, as expressed in a Constitutional Convention. If enough people want to get rid of the current government tomorrow, they are free to organize a new Constitutional Convention, like the one that replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution.
sigh No, the founders wouldn’t advocate overthrowing of the popularly elected government of the US just because they disagreed with the current administrations perchants for foreign adventures. They would advocate going to the polls and electing a new government…you know, democracy and all that.
Its hard to imagine why anyone in their right mind would think that the founding fathers (or anyone else with any intellegence) would advocate revolution when we have the vote. As other posters have pointed out, I’m sure they’d be with you though if Bush desides to set aside the constitution and make himself king or something…I’ll be with you too. But I’m not holding my breath for this to happen…my tinfoil beanie just isn’t that thick.
Two words…horse shit. No president (or any other politician) could survive in office if 80-90% of the population turned against them, and no congressmen/women who desired re-election would fail to impeach a president that unpopular if he went against the congress and took us to another war with no authorization (unlike the last one where he had said authorization from congress). Come on BG…get real here. I know you dislike Bush but you have to keep this thing in the realm of reality.
-XT
It is because we owe All to our descendants that some of us need to learn the Truth that some our Forefathers understood intuitively.
Peace through Liberty
rwjefferson
Our forefathers wouldn’t have wanted most of us to vote. They would have wanted a sizeable percentage of us to get off our asses and get back to picking cotton, right damn quick. As far as their reaction to Bush, our country was founded on the notion that great, noble principles require free men to weasel out of paying taxes for the governmental services they enjoy, so I’d say he’d be okay on their list. Jefferson wouldn’t have liked the militarist bent our country has taken for the century and a half or so, but then Jefferson wasn’t the most well-liked of the founding fathers to begin with. Frankly, I think we should pack in the “What would our forefathers have done?” rhetoric and start thinking for ourselves.
The point our Enlightened Forefathers stated quite eloquently was that the Government of the People has the DUTY to secure the Rights of All; even the Outcasts.
A Tyranny of the Majority is Still a Tyranny. A Tyranny of the Religious is Especially a Tyranny.
Ask any gay, or anyone in jail for a vice offense whether you might be a Tyrant. The exceptions to Right of the Pursuit of Happiness are not the ones you think they are.
Our enlightened founding Fathers clearly understood that the Masses could also be Tyrants. They understood that only a Minority were enlightened. That is why they designed a Republic and not pure democracy. They mistakenly thought that three sets of the Enlightened (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) would be enough to protect the minority from the majority.
Republic (def): A government designed to enable the enlightened minority to secure the rights of all. (ant): Republican
No, we have not succeeded…yet.
Liberty for All
Through Enlightenment
~jefferson
But there is no way, other than a dictatorship, to ensure the rights of the citizens if you don’t do it democratically. The founders knew that democratic action was not infallible, but that it was still the best overall way to secure the rights of the citizens. You are confusing an “enlightened” dictatorship with a democratic republic.
Did you just make that definition up?
Nothing there about an “enlightened minority”.
Dammit, someone beat me to it.
Yeah, let’s get rid of that pesky First Amendment because Georgie boy cannot handle any thought, let alone an opinion, different than his own. Shock horror!
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Thomas Jefferson
This question isn’t worth much. Just about anyone is going to have some very strange ideas about how things ought to be if you put them in some sort of time travelling machine and drop them off 220+ years in the future.
All of the founding fathers would be genuinely shocked at how powerful the federal government was, and how intrusive government in general is. They would be abhorred that we were members of the WTO, NATO, the UN, et cetera. They would be shocked that we had military personnel based all over the globe. They would be dismayed that we had a huge military-industrial complex with an entrenched officer class.
Everything is relative, and even with Bush in power the U.S. Government right now would seem beyond radical to an 18th century American, so far beyond radical they probably would have trouble finding the words to express their feelings on it.
But they were intelligent men, if before passing judgment on our modern society or President Bush they were extensively taught the history and developments of the nation that we founded in many ways they would probably agree with what was ultimately done.
They would find fault with certain specific ways things happened, but they knew just as well as modern politicians do that ideals and beliefs must be sacrificed and compromised on in political situations.
Once they saw that American interests could not be introverted because of the nature of the world they probably would not have much of a problem with us being “world policeman.” Isolationism was much more viable in the 18th century, and much wiser, than it is now.
As for the invasion of Iraq, it’s hard to say what their opinion on that would be. But the founders were pretty ready and willing to wipe out indian tribes, go to war with the barbary pirates, go to war yet again with England. The founders were not pacifists and military action was not something they looked at with as much deliberation as we do today, the world was more brutish then.
How would you successfully impeach or arrest a president who has the overwhelming support of law enforcement and the military? If such an unlikely scenario ever did happen, it would be like impeaching Napolean or Caesar. The only chance any hypothetical impeachment would have against junior is if he went willingly.
Emphasis mine.
That’s a pretty bold claim, given the brutishness of the twentieth century, and the continuing brutishness of the twenty-first.
Eh, war hasn’t gotten less violent, no. War is less violent for very advanced powers in the strict sense that they do not lose as many troops when they fight less advanced powers.
But the world is still brutish. And life is still brutish, nasty, and short for a great many people.
But I was referring more to an intellectual brutishness. I mean, look at the Vietnam protests, all the clamoring about dead U.S. servicemen, dead Vietnamese villagers.
Papers of the day of Washington didn’t lament the death of 50 Cherokee villagers killed in a raid. They also didn’t really act like it was the end of the world if 50 settlers out west died. You didn’t know these people, you didn’t care.
Now at least the media pretends to care, and individual citizens will walk around with a heavy heart for a few minutes over such things.
He doesn’t have that kind of support from anyone. The law enforcement and military overwhelmingly support the US Constitution. Wich makes the current POTUS CinC of the Military unless he is impeached an removed from office. Law enforcement doesn’t have any constitutional duty to support the president. Kent STate notwithstanding, I find it very rediculous to think the US military would ever turn against the people of the US for one man… ever. And to suggest so is just hysterical partisanship that does no good to anyone, much less yourself.
A democratically elected Republic, where enlightened Statesman (not politicians looking to be re-elected) have sworn to protect the rights of all is currently the best mechanism available.
I Am not confused about the two. It was once thought that only educated white males could be enlightened. Now we clearly understand that all have that potential. Unfortunately, most (even of the educated white males) never quite reach it.
And that is why they tried to insert layers of more intelligent people to protect itself and citizens from the tyranny of the masses.
Yes, consider it a updated definition of a Democratic Republic.
Peace through Liberty
rwjefferson
Well, in the hypothetical given, something like 80-90% of the American people opposed the president. I suppose the percentages in the police and military might be somewhat different, but if 90% of the country opposed the president, why would you assume that 90% of the military supported him?
Obviously, if the vast majority of people in America want someone to be dictator, that person will become dictator. Caesar and Napoleon didn’t become dictators simply because they controlled the military, they were also overwhelmingly popular among the plebians. If everyone wants fascism, fascism we shall have. The constitution only exists because everyone agrees that it exists. But that’s not what we’re talking about, we are talking about a desparately unpopular president attempting to seize dictatorial power, not a hugely popular president prosecuting a war that most people support. After all, if most people supported the president’s war then he wouldn’t have to seize dictatorial power anyway.
The cops and the military don’t exist in a vacuum, they are American citizens just like you and me. Are you honestly claiming that if Bush declared himself dictator tomorrow a large percentage of the military would support him? Seriously, do you know anyone who has served in the military? What makes you suspect that most people in the military are just waiting for a dictator to support?
But how do you go about determining exactly what those rights are, if not by democratic action? A constitution handed down from “on high”, no matter how benign, is still a dictatorship if the electorate can’t vote on it.
There really is no point debating a definition that only you use. The rest of us will continue to use the true definition of Republic. You need to invent a new word to describe your proposed system, rather than corrupting a word that already means something quite different.
I believe you meant, “That’d be the bud, Bob.”
It should be noted that the Founding Fathers were in fact revolutionaries who overthrew an existing government they found to be tyrannical. I don’t think they’re made of the same stuff our current conservative “patriots” are made of.
Sure, the founding fathers were revolutionaries who engaged in violent overthrow of the existing government.
But I’m not sure what exactly you mean by the rest. Are you saying that they wouldn’t be driving trucks full of fertillizer into federal buildings like “patriots” like Tim McVeigh? Or that they WOULD be driving trucks into federal buildings, unlike “patriots” in the Bush administration? If the existing government is tyrannical I imagine most people would agree that violent overthrow of that government exists as a step of last resort, and the FF would agree. Do you mean to say that we are currently living under such a tyranny? Or that we aren’t living under tyranny? And if we are living under tyranny, have peaceful methods (ie, convincing 50%+ of voters to vote for another candidate) been tried?