4est_4est_Gump
Run Forrest! RUN!
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Drawing on work by historian Gordon S. Wood, I recently suggested that we see the U.S. Constitution not as a landmark in the struggle for liberty, but rather as a move to introduce elements of monarchy and aristocracy into an American political system that had become too democratic for America's upper crust. As Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789-1815, "Benjamin Rush [a signer of the Declaration of Independence] described the new government in 1790 as one 'which unites with the vigor of monarchy and the stability of aristocracy all the freedom of a simple republic.'" But is that union actually coherent?
Rush's invocation of "the freedom of a simple republic" was no mere lip service to satisfy ordinary Americans. The new country's patricians also valued personal liberty; no one wanted the arbitrary rule of a dictatorship. But it is important to understand that the framers of the second U.S. constitution—the successor to the Articles of Confederation—did not intend for the complex governmental structure devised at the federal convention of 1787 to protect Americans' liberty directly. Rather, the ultimate protector was to be the ruling elite, the gentlemen of leisure who, free of the daily care of laboring in the marketplace, could referee clashing particular interests and thereby effect the general welfare. The purpose of the political process established in 1789 was to assure that the right sort of people would be selected to govern and the wrong sort would be weeded out, as alas they had not been in the various states since the Revolution.
In light of this interpretation of constitutional history, we may now inquire into the nature and purpose of the Bill of Rights, the 10 amendments adopted immediately after the new government was put into operation.
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http://reason.com/archives/2016/01/31/the-bill-of-rights-revisited
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