Wauk "On the Uniparty"

I notice that with several of these essays lately, I've been inclined to write two posts: one about the asides that are often more interesting than the main thesis, and one about the main thesis. So too with this one, Mark Wauk's "On the Uniparty."

There are several interesting and challenging ideas here. One of them is that the American Constitution was a kind of coup by a fading power against the rest of the country:

The last time we saw the Federalist Party was in 1816. Still, they occupy an important place in American history—after all, they led the first coup, and a wildly successful one to boot. What, you ask? Recall—the US Constitution. The proto-Federalists seized the opportunity of their leading opponents being out of the country to declare a “Constitutional Convention”, despite the US already having a Constitution—the Articles of Confederation. Conveniently, the population of the country didn’t get to actually vote on this new Constitution.

There's something to this idea. You may recall that the Federalists favored, inter alia, the Bank of the United States. They managed to enact this central bank, and it survived until the first genuinely democratic counterrevolution led by Andrew Jackson destroyed it. No central bank existed in the United States until another anti-democratic coup established the Fed in 1913 (a non-government organization that was ceeded the power to control the American dollar). Revoking the Fed's authority is often discussed by Americans interested in politics, but it is almost anathema among those who actually get elected to office. You might ask if we are on the verge of a similar counterrevolutionary effort now, and if that isn't what Wauk calls the Uniparty really fears.

If you are inclined to accept that the enactment of the Constitution represents a kind of coup, because it represented a real realignment of power that was only covered by a veneer of procedure, there have been several others in American history. Some of these are more-or-less popular, but they all represent points at which the legitimate forms of power transfer were set aside and the result was papered over with legitimacy after the fact. A brief list off the top of my head:

1) The Reconstruction Amendments (13, 14, 15). These were ratified by main force: states were placed under military occupation until they agreed to ratify them as a partial condition of resuming self-government. Notably Congress allowed these states to change their ratification votes from 'no' to 'yes,' but refused to allow free states in the North to change their votes from 'yes' to 'no' when some of them attempted to do so as a protest against the anti-democratic force being used. These amendments are popular today, and probably now enjoy wide democratic approval (especially the 13th). Nevertheless, especially the 14th Amendment centralized power in the Federal government. That power has been used for purposes both good and bad: it was the core of the Civil Rights crusade against Jim Crow, which was good, but it is also behind the current effort to remove a certain candidate from the ballot even though he appears the odds-on favorite to be elected by the people. Love or hate that guy, the move threatens to delegitimize the election and really the entire system in the eyes of much of the citizenry. 

2) The Fed, as mentioned already. There was a law passed, but this was really an Article V-level transfer of power from the government to a nongovernmental organization led by the banks and the rich. It definitely would not have survived the amendment process, so they stole it. 

3) The New Deal. FDR had a significant amount of democratic legitimacy, but his efforts were unconstitutional -- as the Supreme Court determined several times. So, he ran the court packing scheme in order to (successfully) intimidate the Supreme Court into letting him do exactly what they'd said several times was unconstitutional. The biggest part of this power transfer was allowing Congress to delegate its lawmaking authority to the bureaucracy. That's how we got into the mess with ossification that we have today: it allowed for a vast administrative state of the kind that Max Weber was warning against at about the same time (see the Weber commentary on the sidebar). 

*4) The JFK Assassination. I am giving this one an asterisk and not counting it because the facts still aren't fully clear; however, it is widely believed to have been a coup by agents within the government. Was it? I don't know. 

4) The Coup against Nixon: The election of 1972 was a landslide in favor of President Nixon, who used it to finalize his end to the JFK/LBJ Vietnam conflict. The administrative state turned against him and worked with his opponents outside the government to set up a popular campaign to impeach him. His resignation was legal, but it resulted in a power transfer to agents of Wauk's "Uniparty" that allowed them to undo much of what they feared he was doing. 

5) The Obama-era "Iran Deal." Obama's government set up a series of fake NGOs that they then credentialed by having the White House recognize them and treat them as legitimate experts. The media was thereby taught to listen to them and re-report their 'findings' as if they were real experts. (This is not in dispute: Ben Rhodes, Obama's message guy for this 'echo chamber,' explained it all in an interview with the New Yorker after the fact.) With the appearance of strong NGO support and the media almost universally echoing it, Obama got away with inverting the treaty approval process required by the Constitution. Instead of a 2/3rds majority of the Senate voting to ratify the process, he managed to set things up so that a 2/3rds majority was required to reject his approach. As a consequence, he got his agreement and Iran got a lot of money as well as technical help on nuclear power.

6) The 2020 Election. Setting aside the parts of the controversy that are in dispute, the "fortification" efforts described to the press by participants already suffice to make the election unconstitutional because they weren't carried out by state or Federal legislatures as the Constitution requires. I would also add the courts' refusal to grant standing (most egregious when Texas sued, as the Constitution clearly grants the Supreme Court the authority to resolve disputes between states), so that no one could challenge the results; and the widespread and successful efforts to prevent audits in the affected states, and to disable similar inquiries where they could not be prevented.

There are some other candidates we might mention, but this list already suggests that this kind of coup is an ordinary feature of American politics. When power finds its heart's desire to be out of order with the Constitution, a way is found around the legitimate order and then is papered over. We live with the illusion that the Constitutional order has been maintained since the late 18th century, but in fact it has been fundamentally altered several times without lawful process.