I knew that somehow the “property rights” people who opposed the Perkiomen Trail and the “property rights” Sahas who opposed the revitalization of the City of Coatesville had a history linking them to the “property rights” of southern aristocrat slave owners.
“The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather then liberty.’ The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of radical slavery.”
FROM:
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS - by Nancy MacLean
What I saw in meetings about the construction of the Perkiomen Trail in Schwenksville was nearly identical to what I saw at the City of Coatesville City Council meetings between 2002/2005. What I saw was the intimidation tactics used at both locations. One tactic in particular was singling out people who came to the meetings for the first time and sorting out "for residents" and "against residents". The "property rights" people in both locations would then "gang up" those thought to be against them. They made a very big mistake when they did this to me.
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EXCERPT FROM "DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS"
“Slave owners found themselves to be very much alone in their questioning of the legitimacy of taxation to advance public purposes. Such concerns did not arise where slavery was absent, the historian Robert Einhorn has shown, in the first careful study to examine state and local tax practices in early America. Einhorn found that where they were free to do so, voters regularly called on their governments to perform services they valued and elected candidates who pledged to provide them. They believed, as Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. later put it, that taxes are “the price we pay for civilization.”
What early free-state American voters liked about tax policy in their self-governing republic was that they, the people, decided by majority rule what they wanted their elected officials to do and how to tax for it. For these citizens, liberty meant having a say in questions of governance, being able to enter the public debate about the best way forward. Tracing such debates from the Colonial Era to the Civil War, Einhorn concluded, “American governments were more democratic, stronger, and more competent” where slavery was negligible or nonexistent. They were “more aristocratic, weaker, and less competent” where slavery dominated, as well as more likely to be captured by the wealthy few, who turned them to their own ends. Voters in free states wanted active government: they taxed themselves for public schools, roads to travel from place to place, canals to move their goods, and more. In the southern states, the yeomen of the backcountry, where slaves were fewer, often tried to get their governments to take up their concerns but found that “planters saw threats to their ‘property’ in any political action they did not control, even if the yeomen actually were demanding roads, schools, and other mundane services.” The irony of all this is vast, as Einhorn points out: “The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty.” The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of radical slavery.
More than that, to stop what he imagined to be the exploitation of men like himself, Calhoun set out to alter understanding of the U.S. Constitution. The system that James Madison and other framers had devised for the protection of property rights did not go far enough, according to the South’s most self-seeking capitalist. It did not shackle the people’s power sufficiently - even though one of the main goals of the U.S. Constitution’s famed checks and balances was precisely to keep sudden swings of public opinion form undermining political institutions, particularly those that protected property. But the Constitution no longer seemed enough.
To grasp the scale of Calhoun’s departure from the vision of the founders, it bears remembering that neither Madison nor his colleagues had been fans of pure democracy. As the main architect of the Constitution and a slave master of great wealth himself, Madison thought long and hard about how to protect minority rights in a government based on sovereignty of the people, a people then understood to be white men of property. He and his fellow framers built numerous protection of minority rights and property rights into the document, among them the Electoral College and the Senate, with their systems of representation that favored less populous states. They also safeguarded slavery, the most well known example being the clause of Article I. Section 2, that counted “all other Persons” other than “free Persons” and Indians as “three fifths” of a person in apportioning representation and taxes. Still Madison, Jefferson, and other statesmen of the founding era were sufficiently ashamed of slavery that they never mentioned it by name in the document. They anticipated that their system of human bondage would and should wither away.
Not so Calhoun. Not of the revolutionary generation himself, he had none of the founders’ embarrassment over “the peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. His was the cohort of the cotton gin, the technological innovation that turned plantation slavery into the most profitable capitalist enterprise the world had yet seen. Calhoun made slavery a point of pride, going so far as to announce from the Senate floor that it was “a positive good.” It was good, Calhoun asserted, for the masters of the South, good for the capitalists of the North (because if made the South “the great conservative power” able to protect the interests of property nationwide against any rebellion from free labor, and good even for the enslaved, who, according to Calhoun, could count on food and shelter where the free wage owners of the North could not.
Calhoun, the precocious political scientist, began making his aggressive case for slavery’s superiority just as the free-labor North was outstripping the South in population and its political institutions were becoming more inclusive of working people (rather akin to the changes in demography and voting rights in the early twenty-first century that alarmed some billionaires)."
FROM:
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS
THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA
by Nancy MacLean
"Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority..."
"Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government"
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Democracy in Chains
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