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Party Politics: Buying Votes, Whatever the Cost

Much fanfare has surrounded the purported origins of the Republican Party over the past several generations. 

While operating from a measure of truth, the history of the Republican Party has been largely repurposed for political palatability. 

Notwithstanding the popular misconception that the party was the pure manifestation of good over evil, the abolitionist party dead set against slavery, the Republican Party was actually born out of far less inspiring motives held by the Whigs, the mercantilistic wing that served to promote the Hamiltonian “American system” of unbridled nationalism. 

In contrast to their glossy abolitionist veneer, the Republicans even proposed the regrettable Corwin Amendment, what would have become the Thirteenth Amendment, to actually preserve the “domestic institution” of slavery in perpetuity. 

Lincoln and the Republican Party’s progenitors, chiefly Henry Clay, actually supported the deportation of blacks from the United States through the American Colonization Society, and they never had any intentions of emancipating the slaves in the United States until they acknowledged the military and political advantages of that strategy, whereby the Union could conscript freed slaves into their ranks and later exploit their votes at the ballot box. 



Ironically, Lincoln and the Republican administration — when both the Senate and the House were dominated by their party — failed to abolish slavery in the border states, which remained with the Union during the war, for the entirety of the Lincoln administration. 

Even in Lincoln’s so-called “Emancipation Proclamation,” the former POTUS exempted all states allied with the Union, where the executive order would have had possible precedent to apply — the order was both unconstitutional and invalid in the Confederate States

Despite the party’s ulterior motives, their strategy benefitted them handsomely: most blacks voted with the GOP for several generations, until Roosevelt’s New Deal, and later the New-Frontier and Great-Society administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, which promised political advantages to minorities in order to compete for votes with a Republican Party that had virtually become a political dynasty. 

Ultimately, the "anti-slavery" platform of the fledgling Republican Party was tantamount to the "equality" and "social justice" messaging of today's Democratic Party. 

These are devices for political bodies competing within an apparatus that lends far too much credibility to brazen conviction and poetic pronouncements, and Lincoln and his Republican cronies were simply masterful in exploiting these weaknesses in the political system. 

At the conception of the Republican Party, the extant Hamiltonian agenda of sweeping nationalism conflicted with the Jeffersonian vision of splintered confederations comprised of sovereigns with more adequate political representation: Jefferson foresaw several confederations across the North-American continent, where unique and local interests would be best represented by still limited central governments with whom the original confederation could negotiate treaties and alliances. 

Boosted by the prospects of special interest groups, namely Northern industry, the Republican Party sought to limit the expansion of Constitutional provisions by limiting the compact's unadulterated application to the western territories. 

While dressed with ornate claims of moral correctness, the Republicans supported this initiative, a modified constitutional republic, for the economic and political advantages offered by limiting the prospects of Southern planters in that region, whose laborers served to undermine wages for unskilled labor and competitive advantage for Northern industry. 

The Republicans were then, as they remain today, the party of protectionism. From the Morrill Tariff to Smoot-Hawley and the Trump tariffs, import taxes have been their weapon of choice to promote their principal agenda: nationalism. 

Where the Republican Party is found deviating from the subject of business interests, one is likely to hear praise for the armed forces. 

While the subject of “national defense” is familiar in modern discourse, the proposal exists antithetical to the very Constitution that the instrument purports to defend. 

The Constitution “provide[s] for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, [to] suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” 

It also specifies that “no Appropriation of Money to that Use [of raising and supporting Armies] shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” 

Oddly enough, the Constitution served to prevent the central government from usurping too much power, from becoming too militarily omnipotent, as the Founders appreciated the perils of one central authority with too much vested power. 

For this particular reason, the Founders and the Constitution expressly appointed Congress as the only body authorized to declare war and provide short-term appropriations for designated defense purposes. 

Beyond those occasional appropriations, the several sovereign states remained responsible for themselves. 

What’s more, the United States constituted a confederation of sovereign and independent states, not a nation. As such, the Constitution provides for a defense appropriation on the basis of Congressional approval for the purposes of “common defence,” not “national defense.” 

Indeed, the Constitution and its preceding Articles of Confederation never formed a nation, and as such never intended to produce a standing apparatus for national defense. 

Unfortunately, the unthinking forces under the ill-gotten control of the central government appear poised to obediently execute the unconstitutional orders of the politically-minded parasites presiding over them, serving ultimately to eliminate every vestige of the ethics which once uniquely characterized and allied the sovereign states and persons of the Union. 

It is, thus, far more likely today that the soldiers of the central government will be deployed to preserve the status quo and their revenue channels than anything else that they have been imagined to defend. 

All the while, the respected members of the armed forces, who have never read the Constitution or the surrounding history, will scarcely acknowledge the violations they’ve committed while following orders, and they will be all too happy to oblige so long as they are compensated to remain rationally ignorant. 

This is the nature of mankind and politics: to make poetry of life is to be dishonest with oneself or, which is worse, to swindle others into false worship.

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