We Need Secession and Nullification

In his new book Nullification: Reclaiming Consent of the Governed, Clyde Wilson pinpoints the folly and futility of “presidential politics” – of hoping against hope that some Great Savior will somehow restore American liberty.  Only those who are almost completely ignorant of American history could be fooled by such a farce.  Unfortunately, that seems to include most Americans.

Early Americans were never so naïve as to believe that national politicians could preserve their freedom; that was their job.  They are the ones who, acting through their state-level political societies, created and gave authority to the Constitution.  The government was to act as their agent and was delegated by them only a few specific powers.  Moreover, the government itself could never be the judge of its own powers, for that would lead to “nothing less than a government of unlimited power, a tyranny,” writes Wilson.  Of course, that is what Americans have now lived under for generations with the “black-robed deities” of the “supreme” court announcing for all of us what freedoms we shall have.

Real federalism or states’ rights is all but nonexistent today, says Wilson, because “it presented the most powerful obstacle to the consolidation of irresponsible power – that consolidation which our forefathers decried as the greatest single threat to liberty.  For that reason, states’ rights had to be covered under a blanket of lies and usurpations by those who thought they could rule us better than we can rule ourselves.”  After the “Civil War,” writes Wilson, “the American idea of consent of the governed was replaced by the European idea of obedience.”

The destruction of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights tradition, with the elimination of nullification and secession as the essential ingredients of the consent of the governed, allowed the rotten Hamiltonian system of government by crony capitalists, for crony capitalists, and of crony capitalists to become cemented into place.  This is what Lincoln and the Republican Party of his day meant when they said they were “saving the union,” Wilson observes.  It was NOT the voluntary union of the states they wanted to preserve; they utterly destroyed that and replaced it with a Soviet-style, compulsory union held together by violence, mass murder, mayhem, and plunder.  Their “union” was a large, centralized government that would dispense corporate welfare and protect the party’s corporate political supporters from international competition while showering them with cheap credit through a government-controlled banking system.  As Wilson himself explains:  “With the Lincoln revolution the Hamiltonian program triumphed. Indeed, that was the purpose of the Lincoln revolution. Thus today, all the politicians of both parties  rally around so that the taxpayers and posterity can reward the Banksters, Too Big to Jail, for their evil deeds” (emphasis added).

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