An Answer to Gary Hart

In his blog, Matters of Principle, former U.S. Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado)questions the increasing loss of civility in government and society.

I answered his blog with the following thoughts.

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I think the answer to your question is found in the work of late historian Will Durant. He wrote, “Every form of government seems to perish by excess of its basic principle.” I think Madison invoked our founding principle in Federalist 10, in his assault on the “violence of faction.”

Our basic principle is that the violence of faction will undo our government as it has so many other democracies. So, we contrived all sorts of government controls to prevent factions from gaining the upper hand, including the constitutionally questionable filibuster.

Even so, the controls, and especially this one, support one faction over all others. It may support that faction over survival of the nation.

This faction is a parasite sucking the life out of our nation, transferring our wealth and placing claims on our future labor to and for itself. This faction does so simply because we cannot move legislation through the Senate to stop it… all because of the filibuster…all because of this founding principle that fears the violence of faction.

Because we fear the violence of faction, because we have a filibuster to prevent faction, we created the most dangerous faction of all: a plutocratic class.

Alexander Hamilton has won it seems. We have an aristocracy calling the shots. Maybe we always have but didn’t know it until the Web 2.0-New Media generation. Maybe we now have the medium Marx predicted would allow the people of the world come to know they share a common interest. Hmm. I wonder.

I think the cracks to civility radiate from a growing volcano of poverty. Remember, poverty creates powerlessness. When people have or perceive they have nothing left to lose, people rebel against whatever they perceive as mollifying forces used to keep them down. Civility may be perceived as one of those mollifying forces. I would be really worried if, quite suddenly, we saw a drop in church attendance over several months, religion being a primary mollifying force.

These cracks to civility should caution us about the potential, devastating eruption that could follow if we sufficiently anger the volcano god called Revolution.

When people perceive they have nothing left to lose, that’s when the monsters come out. And, I think we saw a few at the Tea Party convention this past weekend.

We should be thankful the bullets are not flying yet… yet. And, we must do something to undo the filibuster… lest the filibuster undo what civility and resulting peace we have left in our land.
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What was the original American Aurora? It was the newspaper published by Benjamin Beech, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia. The paper was highly critical of what Beech felt was the tyrannous Federalist administrations of Washington and Adams. Click this link to learn more.