The Two American Nations
In 1845, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations, a literary exposition of the social and economic changes that followed the industrial revolution...
The political polarization graphically on display during the recent presidential election season... calls to mind Disraeli’s influential novel...
Our Constitutional structures are the Framers’ response to that contentious diversity*: the Bill of Rights to protect diverse citizens, federalism to protect the diverse states, and a tripartite national government divided and mutually balanced to protect our freedom from the tyranny of any concentrated power...
By the Seventies, our “two nations” and their identities were easily recognizable... One nation was still churchgoing, traditionalist, patriotic, and conservative...
The other nation comprised those who fancied themselves... “progressives,”... “woke,” and globalist...
This increasing endorsement of technocratic inclinations was a consequence of the rise of Progressivism during the early 20th century. A major goal of that movement was to rewrite the Constitution to eliminate or weaken its guardrails protecting our rights and freedom from the tyranny of a minority of technocrats who want a centralized concentration of powers...
... progressive assaults on the Constitution have steadily proliferated and found its home among Democrats, who don’t believe ordinary Americans are capable of self-government...
We saw how well the technocracy worked during the Covid crisis, when politicized protocols and policies like lockdowns, “social distancing,” and masks did more harm rather than good...
Finally, these two "nations" are not morally equivalent. The core of the radical difference is the Democrats' long embrace of progressive anti-Constitutionalism, and willingness to degrade as well the Bill of Rights and other obstacles to tyranny. One "nation" is the champion of freedom and the Constitution; the other comprises the agents of a "fundamental transformation" of our founding charter that guarantees our Constitutional rights and freedoms. For now, it seems that we the people have chosen the nation of freedom.
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* Actually, our nation when founded was considerably cohesive in values and uniformly moral and religious. As John Adams succinctly stated:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
