I speak of course of The Jeffersonian Tradition, the title of Brion McClanahan’s new book. As for the American Taliban, I refer to the national Democrat party and its various political flunkies, including most of the university world (essentially think tanks of the radical cultural Marxist Left), the “mainstream media,” all of their kept state and local government political hacks, and the uneducated Stalinist punks who run Google, Facebook, Twitter, ETC. And, of course, the millions of Americans who either support their Stalinist agenda or simply sit by and acquiesce in it.
After reading these 55 tightly-argued, scholarly essays, one realizes the breath-taking enormity of the lies and falsehoods about American history that have been concocted by generations of court historians in service of the state and statism – of the ruination of America, in other words. Only by re-embracing Jeffersonian ideas will there be any chance of resurrecting American freedom.
McClanahan starts by pointing out that Thomas Jefferson’s main bequest to America was not the proposition that “all men are created equal,” as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence. Equality before the law was widely accepted before the Declaration was published and besides, no one believed the absurd notion that all people where actually created by God as equals, like so many bricks manufactured by man in a brickyard. Certainly not Jefferson. Instead, Jefferson’s “gift to America” is in the last paragraph of the Declaration where he explained that the founders wished to create a federal republic of “Free and Independent States,” an association of sovereign states in a voluntary compact where each state (Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc.” was to be viewed as the equal of England, France, or Spain. As states, Jefferson wrote, they would have the same powers that all states have such as raising taxes and waging war. This last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence has been very well hidden from American school children since 1865. You should search for it online now and read it.
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Jefferson’s declaration of secession from the British Empire “did not create the ‘United States,” McClanahan correctly points out. “United States” is always in the plural in all the founding documents, signifying that the individual states were united in becoming “free and independent” and as such were “equal to the mother country” England. The Constitution, moreover, was “a compact between the states” and not the creation of “the United States government” as nationalist myth and superstition has it.
New York and Rhode Island clearly stated in their constitutional ratification documents that the powers they were delegating to the federal government to act as their agent and for their benefit could be “reassumed” if that government ever interfered with their “happiness.” Virginia’s ratification document said the exact same thing. It was assumed by everyone that ALL the states had such a right – the right of secession – since the constitutional compact and the American union was, after all, a voluntary compact and not a coerced tyranny like the twentieth-century Soviet union. “If a State withdraws from the Union, the Federal Government has no power, under the Constitution, to use the military force against her, for there is no law to enforce the submission of a sovereign state,” said Alabama Governor A.B. Moore at Alabama’s 1860 secession convention. All of the founding fathers – even the imperialistic Hamilton – would have agreed with him. “If Lincoln believed in self government,” McClanahan writes, “then the Southern states would have been allowed to go in peace and the deaths of over 1,000,000 men would have been avoided.”
Northern politicians also understood that the American union was voluntary. “Instead of attempting to blend incompatible things, let us at once take friendly leave of each other,” wrote Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania in 1787.
Several chapters of The Jeffersonian Tradition are devoted to explaining the futility of centralized government that most Americans are mesmerized by. Most conservatives (and libertarians) seem to believe that if only “our guy or gal” could be elected president, or placed on the Supreme Court, or put in charge of some large federal bureaucracy, then we will be on the road from serfdom. Well, we’ve been trying that for over 250 years now, and it just has not worked out that way.
The “real debate” at the constitutional convention, McClanahan writes, was between the nationalists like Hamilton and the true federalists or decentralists like the Jeffersonians. Everyone understood at the time that as James Wilson said in 1787, “To support with vigor, a single government over the whole extent of the United States, would demand a system of the most unqualified and most unremitted despotism.” That was when the country was miniscule in population compared to today. It is also a perfect description of today’s federal government.
One of the most dishonest scams perpetrated on the American public by the court historians of academe, politics, and the legal profession is the false notion that the so-called “supremacy clause” of the Constitution renders the federal government “supreme” in all things in relation to state and local governments and the people in general. Not so, McClanahan explains. It is only “supreme” with regard to the powers delegated to it by the sovereign states – which were always intended to have the right to withdraw those powers for any reason that they believed was necessary, without seeking the permission of any other state or states.
You will also learn from The Jeffersonian Tradition that “Lincoln’s American revolution” was “a comprehensive movement to remake America into a Northern ideologically dominated Puritanical Utopia. A country run by an American Taliban, in other words. Famed Northern Yankees like Horace Greely, Charles Sumner, Samuel Chase, and Benjamin Wade promoted for years such things as prohibition; “Brook Farm socialism;” “the abolition of the privileged classes;” “universal education” enforced by government, just like in The Communist Manifesto; maximum-hour labor laws; a government war on poverty; and an end to capital punishment (“except for treasonous Southerners).
As for the Lincoln Myth, McClanahan skewers the absurdity of the American history profession by explaining how:
- He had “no military experience worth noting,” yet “led the largest military effort in the history of the United States to that point.
- He “had little education or understanding of American government,” yet “is considered . . . to be the greatest statesman and political theorist in American history.”
- He had a profitable career as a highly paid attorney representing big business” yet “is portrayed as a successful ‘man of the people.’”
- He “committed treason against the states” by levying war upon them, as prohibited by Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution, yet “is often viewed as the man who saved the Constitution.”
- He “favored colonization of freed blacks, never believed in racial equality, consistently stated that his goal was to save the Union and not end slavery, and allowed slavery to continue in the ‘border’ states,” yet “is revered as the ‘Great Emancipator.’”
- He “spoke of liberty and free government” yet “had over ten thousand Northerners arrested for dissent during the War.”
- He is “seen as the embodiment of popular will,” yet he received only 39 percent of the total popular vote in 1860” and squeaked by in the 1864 election thanks to “wide-spread voter fraud” that would make the Biden Democrats look like childish amateurs.
- He “is considered to be the best president in American history” yet “the three living presidents at the time (Buchanan, Pierce, and Fillmore) all characterized his actions during the war as unconstitutional.”
These are just a few of the mountains of lies about Lincoln, his war, and the American state that form the ideological cornerstone of American statism, thanks to generations of court historians, and especially the “Straussian” wing of the neoconservative establishment. The Jeffersonian tradition is the only known antidote to these monumental lies, myths, and superstitions, and it is all explained as clear as a bell in Brion McClanahan’s new book.
