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The State of Obama |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5965"><span class="small">Robert Kuttner, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 21 January 2013 09:24 |
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Kuttner writes: "American history shows that a leader does better being 'president of all the people' by isolating a destructive opposition rather than splitting the difference with it."
President Barack Obama during his 2012 victory speech. (photo: Guardian UK)
The State of Obama
By Robert Kuttner, Reader Supported News
21 January 13
 resident Obama has heartened progressives with many actions since his re-election. He seems to grasp that he has a lot more power to move public opinion than he used in his first term. He also understands that most of the Republican positions on the issues are unpopular with broad public, divisive within the Republican Party, and just plain bad policy.
So will he maximize his advantage? Or will the State of the Union be the occasion for more olive branches, more searching for common ground that doesn't really exist.
American history shows that a leader does better being "president of all the people" by isolating a destructive opposition rather than splitting the difference with it. In his second inaugural, Lincoln famously and magnanimously declared, "With malice toward none and charity for all, let us bind up the nation's wounds." But first it was necessarily to defeat the South on the battlefield. The film, Lincoln, accurately underscored the reality that no compromise with the Confederacy was possible.
Despite the aspiration that launched Obama's national career, to look beyond a red state America and a blue state America to a United States of America, our country is more deeply divided over fundamentals than at any time since the Civil War, with the possible exceptions of the Vietnam war and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
These great struggles were not won by splitting the difference. The entire machinery of the federal government had to be wielded, over the diehard objections of the segregationist South, to bring citizenship to African Americans. A rearguard fight to undo voting rights through ballot suppression still goes on, half a century later.
And on Vietnam, there was no splitting of the difference. The military industrial complex won the policy battle, only to lose on the battlefield.
Look back through American history, and most of the great achievements were not compromises. FDR rammed through Social Security and reform of Wall Street, and the Wagner Act, and public power and the WPA, over the strenuous objections of most Republicans.
Lyndon Johnson had Republican support for the great civil rights acts, but in those days the opponents of civil rights were primarily Dixiecrats.
When women won the right to vote, they did not win any 3/5th compromise.
One key law that was a compromise -- the Federal Reserve Act -- split the difference by putting bankers in charge of the central bank. And we've all been paying the price ever since.
But the great presidents have been leaders, not trimmers.
Today, Barack Obama's approval ratings are creeping upward, both because the public likes a jaunty, resolute leader, and because Republican policies are out of sync with public sentiment.
Obama pushed Republicans' backs to the wall when they tried to hold hostage tax increases for everybody to a tax cut for the top 1 percent. Obama reminded the public just what a bad idea that was. The Republicans caved.
He made it clear that he was not going to allow pay a ransom in exchange for the Republicans relenting on the debt ceiling extension. The Republicans caved again.
He came out of the box strong on immigration, insisting on a comprehensive reform package with a path to earned citizenship, and on gun control. On both issues, Republicans are losing the battle for public opinion, and the president has immense powers to move public opinion -- if he will use them.
He will lose some battles, of course, because many of these reforms require legislation and Republicans do control the House. But a leader fights and fights again.
As the early tests on the tax increase and on the debt ceiling showed, even a Tea Party caucus with safe seats doesn't totally control the Republican Party. House Speaker John Boehner and something like half the members of his caucus really do worry about getting re-elected. They do worry about getting too crazy for the business elite, which doesn't want another financial collapse.
So Obama begins his second term with more self-confidence and more fight than he began his first term. It isn't that the Republicans are weaker today -- if anything, they were weaker right after the financial collapse, when Democrats had majorities in both houses and the disgrace of George W. Bush was fresh in everyone's memory. But Obama is stronger because he has acquired a taste for leading and fighting, not just for conciliating.
Now for the hard part. Even if he succeeds in winning some early victories that change policy for the better, move public opinion, animate his own base, and isolate the Republican Party, the things that most need reforming will take leadership of a whole other order of magnitude.
The economy is far from a robust recovery. The gap between the elite and ordinary working Americans is more extreme than ever. We are not generating nearly enough good jobs. Right now, in its understanding of how serious is the employment gap, Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve is slightly to the left of the White House.
Making progress on these longer-term challenges will require more than tactical wins. It will require a fundamental change of direction.
President Obama is holding the line against further tax breaks for the rich, but he accepts the premise that the recovery requires deficit reduction. What it requires is significant public investment. It would be good to hear that in his second Inaugural, and in his upcoming state of the Union and revised budget.
Despite enactment of the Affordable Care Act, virtually all of the long-term stresses on the federal budget are the result of health care costs being out of control.
Obamacare has to be a first step towards universal public health insurance, or it will merely enlist a bloated, inefficient system to cover more people at greater expense, and will keep giving Republicans excuses to demand offsetting cuts in Medicare and elsewhere.
Despite the opening of Superstorm Sandy, we have yet to see this administration get serious enough about either global climate change or about remediation and protection against future storm surges that will be even worse.
So while the tougher, more resolute Barack Obama is to be welcomed, as a fighter, a leader, and a partisan, the deeper challenges that will define his legacy are still to come.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS | Dear Whole Foods CEO, This Is What a Fascist Looks Like |
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Sunday, 20 January 2013 11:23 |
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Hartmann and Sacks write: "It's about time someone injected the word fascism back into our political debate. Especially now that corporations wield more power today than they have in America since the Robber Baron Era."
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. (photo: Whole Foods Markets)
Dear Whole Foods CEO, This Is What a Fascist Looks Like
By Thom Hartmann, Sam Sacks, Thom Hartmann Program
20 January 13
 hole Foods CEO, John Mackey, doesn't know what a fascist is.
Speaking with NPR this week, multimillionaire Mackey tried to express how much he hates Obamacare. Back in 2009, he hated Obamacare so much that he called it "socialism." But now, in 2013, Mackey thinks Obamacare is "fascism."
"Technically speaking, [Obamacare] is more like fascism," he said. "Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production, but they do control it, and that's what's happening with our healthcare programs and these reforms."
Mackey has since walked back this description saying he "regrets using that word now" because there's "so much baggage attached to it."
But, whether Mackey meant to or not, it's about time someone injected the word fascism back into our political debate. Especially now that corporations wield more power today than they have in America since the Robber Baron Era.
First, let's take on Mackey's definitions of socialism and fascism, which he likely procured from the Google machine after typing in, "What are the differences between socialism and fascism?"
Yes, socialism encourages more democratic control of the economy. Or, if Mackey insists, more government ownership of the economy – in particular, ownership of the commons and natural resources.
Fascism, on the other hand, is something completely different. Reporter Sy Mukherjee, who blogged about this story over at ThinkProgress.org notes, "Although fascist nations do often control their 'means of production,' Mackey seems to have forgotten that they usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically-motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends."
The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary defined fascism as: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." Fascism originated in Italy, and Mussolini claims to have invented the word itself. It was actually his ghostwriter, Giovanni Gentile, who invented it and defined it in the Encyclopedia Italiana in this way: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
In other words, fascism is corporate government – a Libertarian's wet dream. It's a government in which the Atlas's of industry are given free rein to control the economy, just how they're regulated, how much they pay in taxes, how much they pay their workers. It should be noted here that, ironically, John Mackey describes himself as a Libertarian.
In 1938, Mussolini finally got his chance to bring fascism to fruition. He dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Members of the Chamber were not selected to represent particular regional constituencies, but instead to represent various aspects of Italian industry and trade. They were the corporate leaders of Italy.
Imagine if the House of Representatives was dissolved and replaced by a Council of America's most powerful CEOs – the Kochs, the Waltons, the Blankfeins, the Dimons, the Mackeys, you get the picture.
Actually, that's not too difficult to imagine, huh? But, that'd be similar to what Mussolini defined as fascism.
As we know, fascism was eventually defeated in World War 2. But just before the end of the war, with the fascists on the ropes, the Vice President of the United States at the time, Henry Wallace, penned an op-ed for the New York Times warning Americans about the creeping dangers of fascism – or corporate government.
He defined a fascist as, "those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion."
Under that definition we can throw those CEOs who've decided to evade Obamacare's mandate to provide health insurance to their employees, like New York City Applebee's franchise owner Zane Terkel, Papa John's CEO John Schnatter, and executives at Darden Restaurants.
Or, perhaps, Wallace is referring to the banksters at Goldman Sachs who knowingly evaded laws and sold investors "shitty deals" or scammed entire cities into bankruptcy or illegally foreclosed on thousands of Americans through fraudulently robo-signing all in the name of short term profits and all in the name of preserving their monopolistic, too-big-to-fail status.
Either way, evading laws meant to protect the public in order to pad your own pockets has become the name of the game in Corporate America today.
Wallace goes on to write, "The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism."
Can anyone say Fox News, or the rest of the Conservative media complex? Or, those on the Right who divide working people and turn them against each other: makers versus takes, public sector workers versus private sector workers, and white people versus brown people.
"They use every opportunity to impugn democracy," wrote Wallace. Does that sound familiar after months of Republican efforts to disenfranchise large swaths of the electorate with voter suppression ID laws, as well as restrictions on early voting and voter registration in largely Democratic areas?
Or what about what Republicans in Pennsylvania are doing right now to rig the next Presidential election by changing how Electoral votes are counted in the state?
Wallace continues, "They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
We often hear of free enterprise from the likes of Wall Street, Big Oil, and the defense industry. Yet these are the same corporations that also lobby to keep generous taxpayer subsidies, bailouts, and no-bid contracts in place that allow them to reign supreme over the markets and crush their smaller, more independent competition.
And the common man suffers as a result. Wages as a percentage of GDP are lower than they've ever been. Unionization rates are lower than they've ever been in more than a half-century. And yet, corporate profits as a percent of GDP are higher than they've ever been in American history.
At the time Wallace was writing this op-ed, he was confident that the fascists had been adequately held in check in America by the Roosevelt Administration. As he wrote, "Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion."
But, he went on to warn that in the future, "[Fascism] may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac."
Sure enough, the bastions of fascism can be found on Wall Street. Main Street, which used to be lined with local independent businesses, is now lined with predatory, transnational giants. And along the Potomac, we find politicians who are more than happy to do the bidding of their corporate overlords.
Today in America, we are dangerously close to seeing Wallace's fascistic, dystopic America come into fruition. We see the traces of it everywhere.
Unfortunately, too many Americans just didn't have a word to define what's happening. But, thanks to John Mackey, and thanks to the foresight of Vice President Henry Wallace, we do have the right word now: Fascism.
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FOCUS | Obama Must Declare War on the Republican Party |
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Sunday, 20 January 2013 10:32 |
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Dickerson writes: "After the last four years, how do you call the nation and its elected representatives to common action while standing on the steps of a building where collective action goes to die?"
President Obama and Vice President Biden announce the administration's new gun law proposals on Wednesday. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Obama Must Declare War on the Republican Party
By John Dickerson, Slate Magazine
20 January 13
 n Monday, President Obama will preside over the grand reopening of his administration. It would be altogether fitting if he stepped to the microphone, looked down the mall, and let out a sigh: so many people expecting so much from a government that appears capable of so little. A second inaugural suggests new beginnings, but this one is being bookended by dead-end debates. Gridlock over the fiscal cliff preceded it and gridlock over the debt limit, sequester, and budget will follow. After the election, the same people are in power in all the branches of government and they don't get along. There's no indication that the president's clashes with House Republicans will end soon.
Inaugural speeches are supposed to be huge and stirring. Presidents haul our heroes onstage, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. George W. Bush brought the Liberty Bell. They use history to make greatness and achievements seem like something you can just take down from the shelf. Americans are not stuck in the rut of the day.
But this might be too much for Obama's second inaugural address: After the last four years, how do you call the nation and its elected representatives to common action while standing on the steps of a building where collective action goes to die? That bipartisan bag of tricks has been tried and it didn't work. People don't believe it. Congress' approval rating is 14 percent, the lowest in history. In a December Gallup poll, 77 percent of those asked said the way Washington works is doing "serious harm" to the country.
The challenge for President Obama's speech is the challenge of his second term: how to be great when the environment stinks. Enhancing the president's legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems. Washington's partisan rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat.
President Obama could, of course, resign himself to tending to the achievements of his first term. He'd make sure health care reform is implemented, nurse the economy back to health, and put the military on a new footing after two wars. But he's more ambitious than that. He ran for president as a one-term senator with no executive experience. In his first term, he pushed for the biggest overhaul of health care possible because, as he told his aides, he wanted to make history. He may already have made it. There's no question that he is already a president of consequence. But there's no sign he's content to ride out the second half of the game in the Barcalounger. He is approaching gun control, climate change, and immigration with wide and excited eyes. He's not going for caretaker.
How should the president proceed then, if he wants to be bold? The Barack Obama of the first administration might have approached the task by finding some Republicans to deal with and then start agreeing to some of their demands in hope that he would win some of their votes. It's the traditional approach. Perhaps he could add a good deal more schmoozing with lawmakers, too.
That's the old way. He has abandoned that. He doesn't think it will work and he doesn't have the time. As Obama explained in his last press conference, he thinks the Republicans are dead set on opposing him. They cannot be unchained by schmoozing. Even if Obama were wrong about Republican intransigence, other constraints will limit the chance for cooperation. Republican lawmakers worried about primary challenges in 2014 are not going to be willing partners. He probably has at most 18 months before people start dropping the lame-duck label in close proximity to his name.
Obama's only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition's most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.
This theory of political transformation rests on the weaponization (and slight bastardization) of the work by Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek. Skowronek has written extensively about what distinguishes transformational presidents from caretaker presidents. In order for a president to be transformational, the old order has to fall as the orthodoxies that kept it in power exhaust themselves. Obama's gambit in 2009 was to build a new post-partisan consensus. That didn't work, but by exploiting the weaknesses of today's Republican Party, Obama has an opportunity to hasten the demise of the old order by increasing the political cost of having the GOP coalition defined by Second Amendment absolutists, climate science deniers, supporters of "self-deportation" and the pure no-tax wing.
The president has the ambition and has picked a second-term agenda that can lead to clarifying fights. The next necessary condition for this theory to work rests on the Republican response. Obama needs two things from the GOP: overreaction and charismatic dissenters. They're not going to give this to him willingly, of course, but mounting pressures in the party and the personal ambitions of individual players may offer it to him anyway. Indeed, Republicans are serving him some of this recipe already on gun control, immigration, and the broader issue of fiscal policy.
On gun control, the National Rifle Association has overreached. Its Web video mentioning the president's children crossed a line.* The group's dissembling about the point of the video and its message compounds the error. (The video was also wrong). The NRA is whipping up its members, closing ranks, and lashing out. This solidifies its base, but is not a strategy for wooing those who are not already engaged in the gun rights debate. It only appeals to those who already think the worst of the president. Republicans who want to oppose the president on policy grounds now have to make a decision: Do they want to be associated with a group that opposes, in such impolitic ways, measures like universal background checks that 70 to 80 percent of the public supports? Polling also suggests that women are more open to gun control measures than men. The NRA, by close association, risks further defining the Republican Party as the party of angry, white Southern men.
The president is also getting help from Republicans who are calling out the most extreme members of the coalition. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called the NRA video "reprehensible." Others who have national ambitions are going to have to follow suit. The president can rail about and call the GOP bad names, but that doesn't mean people are going to listen. He needs members inside the Republican tent to ratify his positions - or at least to stop marching in lockstep with the most controversial members of the GOP club. When Republicans with national ambitions make public splits with their party, this helps the president.
(There is a corollary: The president can't lose the support of Democratic senators facing tough races in 2014. Opposition from within his own ranks undermines his attempt to paint the GOP as beyond the pale.)
If the Republican Party finds itself destabilized right now, it is in part because the president has already implemented a version of this strategy. In the 2012 campaign, the president successfully transformed the most intense conservative positions into liabilities on immigration and the role of government. Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination on a platform of "self-deportation" for illegal immigrants - and the Obama team never let Hispanics forget it. The Obama campaign also branded Republicans with Romney's ill-chosen words about 47 percent of Americans as the party of uncaring millionaires.
Now Republican presidential hopefuls like Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, and Bobby Jindal are trying to fix the party's image. There is a general scramble going on as the GOP looks for a formula to move from a party that relies on older white voters to one that can attract minorities and younger voters.
Out of fear for the long-term prospects of the GOP, some Republicans may be willing to partner with the president. That would actually mean progress on important issues facing the country, which would enhance Obama's legacy. If not, the president will stir up a fracas between those in the Republican Party who believe it must show evolution on issues like immigration, gun control, or climate change and those who accuse those people of betraying party principles.
That fight will be loud and in the open - and in the short term unproductive. The president can stir up these fights by poking the fear among Republicans that the party is becoming defined by its most extreme elements, which will in turn provoke fear among the most faithful conservatives that weak-willed conservatives are bending to the popular mood. That will lead to more tin-eared, dooming declarations of absolutism like those made by conservatives who sought to define the difference between legitimate and illegitimate rape - and handed control of the Senate to Democrats along the way. For the public watching from the sidelines, these intramural fights will look confused and disconnected from their daily lives. (Lip-smacking Democrats don't get too excited: This internal battle is the necessary precondition for a GOP rebirth, and the Democratic Party has its own tensions.)
This approach is not a path of gentle engagement. It requires confrontation and bright lines and tactics that are more aggressive than the president demonstrated in the first term. He can't turn into a snarling hack. The posture is probably one similar to his official second-term photograph: smiling, but with arms crossed.
The president already appears to be headed down this path. He has admitted he's not going to spend much time improving his schmoozing skills; he's going to get outside of Washington to ratchet up public pressure on Republicans. He is transforming his successful political operation into a governing operation. It will have his legacy and agenda in mind - and it won't be affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, so it will be able to accept essentially unlimited donations. The president tried to use his political arm this way after the 2008 election, but he was constrained by re-election and his early promises of bipartisanship. No more. Those days are done.
Presidents don't usually sow discord in their inaugural addresses, though the challenge of writing a speech in which the call for compromise doesn't evaporate faster than the air out of the president's mouth might inspire him to shake things up a bit. If it doesn't, and he tries to conjure our better angels or summon past American heroes, then it will be among the most forgettable speeches, because the next day he's going to return to pitched political battle. He has no time to waste.
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The Right's Dangerously Bad History |
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Sunday, 20 January 2013 09:11 |
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Parry writes: "Reacting to President Obama's modest executive orders on gun safety and his proposed legislation to Congress, the Right is engaging in hysterical rhetoric about 'tyranny' and riling up angry whites to arm themselves."
Sen. Rand Paul addresses the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., 08/29/12. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The Right's Dangerously Bad History
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
20 January 13
ne conceit of America’s right-wingers is that they respect U.S. history and especially the Constitution in ways that other Americans don’t. But not only has the Right absorbed a grossly distorted idea of the Constitution but many prominent conservatives have a shoddy understanding of history, most recently revealed by Sen. Rand Paul.
On Wednesday, the Kentucky Republican appeared on Fox News to liken President Barack Obama’s executive orders on gun safety to the behavior of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who guided the nation through much of the Great Depression and World War II.
According to Paul’s version of that history, "FDR had a little bit of this 'king complex'” like Obama, so "we had to limit FDR finally because he served so many terms that I think he would have ruled in perpetuity, and I'm very concerned about this president [Obama] garnering so much power and arrogance that he thinks he can do whatever he wants."
Regarding the FDR point, Paul is referring to the 22nd Amendment which limits a U.S. president to two four-year terms. Roosevelt was the only president elected more than twice, having won four elections. But the 22nd Amendment did nothing “to limit FDR.”
Roosevelt died shortly into his fourth term in 1945. The 22nd Amendment was passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states in 1951. In other words, Roosevelt was no longer around at the time of the 22nd Amendment.
Paul’s erroneous history puts him in the company of other prominent Republicans who profess to love American history and the Constitution, but don’t seem interested enough to get their facts straight. For instance, several GOP candidates for President in 2012, including one who served as governor of Massachusetts, displayed ignorance of basic facts about the American Revolution.
Mitt Romney, who served four years as governor of the state where the war began, wrote in his book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, that the Revolutionary War began in April 1775 when the British attacked Boston by sea. “In April 1775, British warships laid siege on Boston Harbor and successfully took command of the city,” Romney wrote.
However, in the actual history, the British military controlled Boston long before April 1775, garrisoning Redcoats in the rebellious city since 1768. The British clamped down more tightly after the Boston Tea Party on Dec. 16, 1773, imposing the so-called “Intolerable Acts” in 1774, reinforcing the Boston garrison and stopping commerce into Boston Harbor.
The aggressive British actions forced dissident leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock to flee the city and take refuge in Lexington, as colonial militias built up their stocks of arms and ammunition in nearby Concord.
The Revolutionary War began not with British forces seizing Boston in April 1775 as Romney wrote, but when the Redcoats ventured forth from Boston on April 19, 1775, to seize Adams and Hancock in Lexington and then go farther inland to destroy the colonial arms cache in Concord.
The British failed in both endeavors, but touched off the war by killing eight Massachusetts men at Lexington Green. The Redcoats then encountered a larger force of Minutemen near Concord Bridge and were driven back in a daylong retreat to Boston, suffering heavy losses. Thus, the Revolutionary War began with a stunning American victory, not with the American defeat that Romney described in a book that he claims to have written himself.
Romney’s misrepresentation of the start of the war is particularly stunning because Massachusetts celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord every year in a holiday called Patriots Day, with the Boston Red Sox playing an unusual morning game so fans can exit Fenway Park in time to watch the end of the Boston Marathon.
Wrong Century, Wrong State
Other rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination also got basic facts about the nation’s founding wrong.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry put the American Revolution in the 1500s. “The reason that we fought the revolution in the 16th Century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown if you will,” Perry said, missing the actual date for the war for independence by two centuries and even placing it before the first permanent English settlement in the New World, Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the first decade of the 17th Century.
While pandering to Tea Party voters in New Hampshire, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota declared, “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.” (She may have gotten confused because there is a Concord, New Hampshire, as well as a Concord, Massachusetts.)
More significantly, however, the American Right has inculcated in its followers a bogus idea of what the U.S. Constitution did. Typically, the Right’s founding narrative jumps from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the Constitution, which was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. What is usually left out is the nation’s experience with the Articles of Confederation, which governed the new nation from 1777 to 1787.
By ignoring the Articles, the Right can pretend that the Constitution was written with the goal of establishing a system dominated by the states with the central government kept small and weak. That version of history then is cited to support right-wing claims that federal officials, such as Roosevelt and Obama, violate the Constitution when they seek national solutions to the country’s economic and social problems.
However, in the real history, the Framers of the Constitution, particularly George Washington and James Madison, were rejecting the structure of “independent” and “sovereign” states (with a weak central government or "league of friendship") as established by the Articles of Confederation. The Framers had witnessed how that system had failed and how it was threatening the future of the newly independent nation.
Thus, Washington and Madison led what amounted to a coup d’etat at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Though their instructions were simply to propose amendments to the Articles and refer those suggestions back to the state legislatures, Washington and Madison instead threw out the Articles entirely and produced a dramatically different structure.
Gone was the language in the Articles about “sovereign” and “independent” states. Instead, national sovereignty was shifted to “We the People of the United States.” The new Constitution made federal law supreme and granted the central government sweeping new powers over currency and commerce as well as broad authority to act on behalf of the “general Welfare.”
Washington and Madison also circumvented the state legislatures, putting the new Constitution before special conventions and requiring only approval of nine of the 13 states for ratification. The proposed changes were so radical that a determined opposition arose, known as the Anti-Federalists.
To save his plan, Madison joined in writing a series of articles called the Federalist Papers, in which he mostly tried to downplay how radical the changes actually were. He also agreed to tack on a Bill of Rights, spelling out specific guarantees for individuals and the states.
Misreading Amendments
Some of the first ten amendments were substantive and others mostly rhetorical, For instance, the Tenth Amendment states that powers not granted by the Constitution to the central government remain with the people and the states. However, the whole point of any constitution is to define the limits of a government’s powers – and the powers granted to the central government by the Constitution were extraordinarily broad.
So, the Tenth Amendment – despite efforts by today’s Right to exaggerate its significance – was mostly a sop to the Anti-Federalists. To recognize how insignificant it is, it should be contrasted with Article Two of the Articles of Confederation, which it essentially replaced. [See Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
Today’s Right also has misrepresented the original intent of the Second Amendment, which reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This concession also was primarily to the states which wanted militias to maintain “security.”
The context for those concerns related to the recent experience of Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts (in 1786-87) as well as the fear of slave revolts in the South and raids by Native Americans on the frontier. The states wanted their own militias to put down such uprisings.
In the early days of the Republic, the Second Amendment also was not seen as a universal right for individuals. For instance, some states passed “Black Codes” that barred all African-Americans from owning guns. When the Second Congress passed the Militia Act of 1792, the law specified arming “white” men of military age.
Yet, despite some of the ugly compromises that went into drafting the Constitution, such as its tolerance of slavery, the chief goal of the Framers was to create a framework for a democratic Republic that would enable the new nation to pass laws necessary for the country’s growth and success.
European monarchies were predicting that this experiment in self-governance would fail, so the likes of Washington and Madison wanted to show that Americans could govern themselves without resort to violence. The Framers stated as one of their top goals, “domestic Tranquility.”
The Framers also recognized the failure of the Articles and the need for a vibrant central government in a country as sprawling as the United States. The last thing they wanted was an armed population violently resisting the constitutionally elected government of the United States. Indeed, they declared such behavior to be "treason." [See Consortiumnews.com’s “More Second Amendment Madness.”]
But today’s neo-Confederates and other right-wingers have spent vast sums of money distorting American history and deluding many Americans into believing that they must do whatever is necessary to “take back” their country from the likes of Barack Obama.
Any modest steps toward rational gun safety – even provisions cleared by the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court – are deemed “tyranny” on par with the British Crown imposing its will on the Thirteen Colonies, which were denied representation in the British Parliament.
What is particularly dangerous about the Right’s hodgepodge of bad history is that – with the nation’s first African-American president – millions of whites are rushing to arm themselves while believing they have some duty to enforce the Constitution, without the foggiest idea of what the Framers were trying to do with it.
Not only is some of the right-wing rhetoric wildly hyperbolic – comparing a twice-elected U.S. president seeking modest gun safety in the wake of a horrendous school massacre to an English monarch – but Rand Paul and many of his fellow Republicans don’t even bother to get their history straight.
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here are four revealing stories to be gleaned from the 
