| The following text is a segment of the adaptation of a speech delivered on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens by the author, President of Hillsdale College, and originally published in the College's newsletter "Imprimis". The full text published in "Imprimis" can be read HERE |
Centralization
America’s Founders set out to build a government entirely upon the will of the great body of the people. This had never been done before. And they set out to accomplish this across a great continent —George Washington’s army was strikingly called the Continental Army— despite the prevailing idea at the time that popular governments could only work in small areas. They succeeded in doing both these things, and the way they succeeded is contained in the American Constitution, the longest-living and the greatest constitution ever written.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution contains 18 paragraphs that enumerate the powers of Congress. Seven of these have to do with national defense, and one with piracy. The rest, save one, mostly have to do with commerce—weights and measures, currency, unimpeded trade between the states, post offices, and post roads. The last power has to do with the federal government’s authority over the District of Columbia. Other powers were reserved for the states and localities.
In Federalist 63, James Madison writes proudly of the fact that ours will be the first purely representative government. This doesn’t just mean that instead of a king being sovereign, as in England, we would elect our rulers. It means that no one inside the government—none of the people carrying on the activities of the government—would be sovereign. The sovereign would be located outside the government. As Abraham Lincoln would later put it, the constitutional majority is the only true sovereign of a free people. All powers are to be delegated from the society to the government.
A diagram of this system would consist of a large circle representing American society. Inside that large circle, government at all levels would be represented by a much smaller circle, about one-tenth the size in terms of gross domestic product. This smaller circle would be divided then into parts. It would be divided vertically with the federal government on one side and states on the other—that’s federalism—and the federal side would be divided horizontally into the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. It was a brilliant and novel system for gathering authority to a national center for limited national purposes and distributing all other authority outwards. And it worked for a very long time.
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Resulta totalmente incomprensible para cualquier análisis racional que se esté divulgando la idea de que los países democráticos que apoyan a Ucrania en la defensa de su territorio invadido, puedan abandonarla o, en el mejor de los casos, reducir considerablemente los suministros para el esfuerzo bélico de su defensa.
The world is experiencing its “First Global War.” A global war is a conflict that impacts and involves everyone, albeit the armed confrontation is limited to confrontations in specific areas and between specific warring factions, in which the globalized world participates. It is a generalized conflict in which there is no neutrality, it is a conflagration from which none of the States is excluded. It started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now it has two active fronts; Ukraine and the Gaza Strip.