"A Combination of the Rich and the Ignorant"

"This combination is the embodiment of Hamilton's warning in 'Federalist No. 71' that the people are continually beset by 'the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.' A demagogue with contempt for the Constitution, colluding with many of the wealthiest Americans on the promise that their wealth will be translated into political power and favors is just the sort of alliance that the Founders warned would corrupt popular government: that 'the people,' in Madison’s phrase, 'would be misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.'"

At The Atlantic, George Thomas writes that today "the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant."

And Alexis Coe at Slate revists pertinent sentences cut from the final draft of George Washington's Farewell Address.

April 2023 Acquisitions

Books:
Charles Ardai and Ang Hor Kheng, Gun Honey: Blood for Blood, 2023.
Chris Burnham et al, Creepshow Vol. 1, 2023.
Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street, 2009.
Shaun Hand, Pop Art Poems: The Music of The Jam, 2021.
Bill Issel, Baptized on the Fourth of July, 2021.
Frank Miller et al, Hard Boiled, 2023.
Mattson Tomlin et al, Batman: The Imposter, 2022.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969, 1999.
Steve Wide, A Field Guide to Punk, 2020.
Mary Woolstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792.
Cody Ziglar et al, Spider-Punk: Battle of the Banned, 2023.

Movies:
Blade Runner 2049, 2017.
Creation Stories, 2021.

Music:

Cher, 2614 Jackson Blvd, 1969.
Ornette Coleman, Genesis of Genius: The Contemporary Albums, 2022.
Gaz Coombes, Turn the Car Around, 2023.
Morris Day, Last Call, 2022.
Susanna Hoffs, The Deep End, 2023.
Kinks, Come Dancing with the Kinks: The Best Of The Kinks 1977-1986, 1986.
New Pornographers, Continue as a Guest, 2023.
Pavement, Quarantine the Past, 2010.
Ravonettes, Lust Lust Lust, 2007.
Various, The Time for Peace Is Now: Gospel Music About Us, 2019.

"'Historians Can Never Forget That It Is a Debate They Are Interpreting'"

"Journalist and author E.J. Dionne once observed that we are a nation conceived in argument. None of these were more important than the meaning attached to the Constitution, which played such a central role in creating our sense of nationhood. I would caution my conservative friends from trying to hijack the meaning of the Constitution for their own ends by playing the trump card (no pun intended), that the founders were all in agreement with modern right-wing politics. How could this be true when they didn't even agree among themselves about how to interpret the Constitution? Instead, lets debate the issues of our day so the American people can make an informed choice without resorting to historically dubious claims."

Donald J. Fraser at History News Network asks, "What do historians make of originalism?"

"But the Main Purpose of Militias—North and South—During This Period Was to Suppress Slave Rebellions"

"Throughout the 17th century, almost all the English colonies along the Eastern Seaboard passed legislation prohibiting women and slaves from owning guns and forbidding the sale of guns to native peoples. By the 18th century, gun ownership had become a defining feature of white masculinity in the English colonies and guns played an integral role in Colonial men's public displays of that masculinity.
"The public training exercises Colonial men participated in as part of their militia service were central to such displays and offered opportunities for them to participate in competitions to demonstrate their martial prowess. In many cases, guns were not only central to these demonstrations but were the prize for victory. The commander of the militia in Henrico County, Va., William Byrd, noted in his diary that he made a practice of awarding pistols to the men who won the competitions that took place on militia days. Such guns thus acted as material manifestations of a Colonial man's physical domination of his peers, augmenting his reputation in terms of property ownership and bodily prowess."

Nathan Wuertenberg at The Washington Post explains the origins of American gun culture.

And Thom Hartmann in a 2013 Truthout article explains how slave patrols ended up in the Second Amendment.

"Slave Labor to Maintain His Wealth, His Lifestyle and His Reputation"

"George Washington died on Dec. 14, 1799. At the time of his death, 318 enslaved people lived at Mount Vernon and fewer than half of them belonged to the former president. Washington's will called for the emancipation of his slaves following the death of his wife. He completed in death what he had been unwilling to do while living, an act made easier because he had no biological children expecting an inheritance. Martha Washington lived until 1802 and upon her death all of her human property went to her inheritors. She emancipated no one."


For Presidents Day, Erica Armstrong Dunbar in The New York Times looks at George Washington and slavery.

"Hamilton’s Work, By Contrast, Reveals the Truth That for Capital, There Is No 'Outside of the State'"

"Even today, Hamilton's ideas about state-led industrialization offer much. Consider the crisis of climate change. Alas, we do not have the luxury of making this an agenda item for our future post-capitalist assembly. Facing up to it demands getting off fossil fuels in a very short time frame. That requires a massive and immediate industrial transformation, which must be undertaken using the actually existing states and economies currently on hand. Such a project can only be led by the state—an institution that Hamilton’s writing and life's work helps us to rethink."


Christian Parenti in Jacobin champions Alexander Hamilton, instead of Thomas Jefferson, as a progressive model.

First Freedom?

"As both Mr. Clinton’s and Mr. Bush’s uses of the phrase suggest, the ostensible reason for ascribing primacy to religion among constitutionally protected freedoms is its place as the first mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Contrary to Mr. Romney’s 'first freedom' claim, the actual Constitution does not say anything about religious liberty except to state in Article 6 that no religious 'test' will be required of officeholders. Nor does the document once use the word 'God,' an omission that some 18th-century Americans decried. ('A Papist, a Mohomotan, a Deist, yea an Atheist' might someday even become president, one critic warned.)
"The First Amendment, adopted four years later in 1791, does protect 'the free exercise' of religion–but only after barring government from 'establishing' religion. Viewed strictly in terms of sequence, the First Amendement’s 'first freedom' might be seen as freedom from rather than freedom of religion."

Peter Manseau at The New York Times questions the emphasis by politicians on religious liberty.

"That's Right, the Father of Our Country Had No Difficulty Imposing a Health Insurance Mandate"

"Six years later, in 1798, Congress addressed the problem that the employer mandate to buy medical insurance for seamen covered drugs and physician services but not hospital stays. And you know what this Congress, with five framers serving in it, did? It enacted a federal law requiring the seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. That’s right, Congress enacted an individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. And this act was signed by another framer, President John Adams."

Einer Elhauge in The New Republic explores health-care policy during the Early Republic.

"The Deep, Founding Roots of Rowdy, American Populist Protest and Insurrection"

"Like it or not, though, it is Occupy Wall Street that has the most in common, ideologically, not with those Boston merchants and their supporters but with the less well-known, less comfortably acknowledged people who, throughout the founding period, cogently proposed and vigorously agitated for an entirely different approach to finance and monetary policy than that carried forward by the famous founders. Amid horrible depressions and foreclosure crises, from the 1750′s through the 1790′s, ordinary people closed debt courts, rescued debt prisoners, waylaid process servers, boycotted foreclosure actions, etc. (More on that here [9] and here [10].) They were legally barred from voting and holding office, since they didn’t have enough property, so they used their power of intimidation to pressure their legislatures for debt relief and popular monetary policies."

William Hogeland in Salon compares Occupy Wall Street with the Shays' and Whiskey Rebellions.

But Lee Fang at Think Progress connects the protests to the Boston Tea Party.

Necessary and Proper

"So whereas Tea Partiers sometimes associate their objections to federal taxes with a desire to 'get back to the Constitution,' federal taxation is one of the Constitution's central purposes. And we can thank the wunderkind Alexander Hamilton for proposing the legislation by which the first U.S. Congress imposed the first federal tax ever on an American product."

William Hogeland in Salon wishes Alexander Hamilton a happy tax day.

"The New Nullifiers"

"After four years of Civil War, in a 'new birth of freedom' that resurrected the Union, Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called 'massive resistance' of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic attacks "the current wave of enthusiasm for 'states’ rights,' 'interposition,' and 'nullification.'"

Hamilton's Vision

"For much of our history, the Jeffersonian hostility to an energetic federal government served us well. But with the end of the frontier and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness' has become utterly essential. All the major problems now befuddling us--the destructive excesses of finance capitalism, a profit-based healthcare system, an increasingly contaminated atmosphere--are only soluble if we regard government as the chosen representative of our collective interests as a people and a nation."

Joseph J. Ellis in the Los Angeles Times argues against the limitations of limited government.