The Grand Alliance, a.k.a. The Deep State

 

 

 The two sides of the national character that I have described are dominant. The rest of us don’t count and haven’t for a very long time. The two are really one, the same Puritan penchant for money-grubbing and moral imperialism that was implanted in Massachusetts in the earliest days, amplified by European socialism and minority demands. It is said that character is fate, and this national character will  in the long run, decide our fate.

The pattern for modern American politics was set by Lincoln and his cronies in the 1850s—1870s, although it took an immense war against other Americans to make it stick.  The pattern involved making the federal government (not the “Union” or the Constitution) the center of power and the fount of good (and goods).  This meant, in everyday terms, that the victory of Lincoln’s Republicans established control by those who regard the government as a machine to make money for themselves, covered by  a blasphemous religion of Americans as the chosen people who are to lead all mankind into what a later Republican would  call “global democracy.”

Until Lincoln there had been a strong Jeffersonian/Jacksonian counter-current: preference for low tariff, avoidance of public debt, limited government expenditure, dispersed power, distrust of moralistic movements, and patriotic but non-entanglement sentiment in regard to affairs beyond the continent. There was some sense, not always dominant but understood and sometimes prevailing, of a “public good.”

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