The
past presidential election emphasized the dichotomy of rural and urban voters. If
you look at an electoral map, you’ll notice the United States is awash
in a sea of red dotted with blue bobbers.
Those bobbers are districts with big cities.
City dwellers demand a strong,
centralized government, while country folk believe in self-government and less
intrusion in their lives. In geographic
terms, we have enclaves of teat squawkers in a land of people yearning to be
free.
This rural/urban conflict goes back to
America’s founding. When the
Constitution was debated in the public sphere, newspapers would dismiss Anti-Federalist
writings warning of the flaws of this new government. Urban dwellers wouldn’t tolerate diverse opinions. They would cancel their subscriptions if a
publication dared to print any criticisms of a strong central government. Samuel Bryan (author of the Centinel essays)
made a keen observation:
The Printers were certainly most of them
more willing to publish for, then against the new Constitution. They depended more upon the People in the
Towns than in the Country. The towns
people withdrew their Subscriptions from those who printed Papers against, and
violent Threats were thrown out against the Antis and Attempts were made to
injure them in their Business.
Some things never change. That kind of mentality exists to this
day. Newspapers around the country are infested
with liberals advocating centralized government. Dissent is considered anarchy or anti-government. That was how the Anti-Federalist was portrayed,
that is how the Tea Party is marginalized today.
Why are inhabitants of big cities
advocates for big government? Are urban
dwellers incapable of self-government?
Are they morally inferior to their rural cousins? Here is an excerpt from Alasdair Roberts,
America’s First Great Depression:
The president of Boston city council,
Peleg Whitman Chandler, made the uprisings in Rhode Island and Philadelphia the
subject of his oration for the celebration of July 4, 1844.
The monarchies of Europe, Chandler said,
maintained order with a strong “internal police.” The United States had chosen instead to rely
on the self-governing instincts of its people.
But something had gone awry, Chandler said; the sense of “personal
responsibility [and] manly self-denial” among Americans was manifestly in
decline. The effusion of riots and
rebellions was symptomatic of a moral decay.
Chandler warned that the enemies of
self-government were not foreign adversaries, but inhabitants of large
cities. He suggested that the northeast
needed “civic armies” to discipline the populace. They needed a government
strong enough to overawe those, who cannot
govern themselves…. [T]he tendency of events in our big cities has been such as
must result in the creation of such a strong coercive power, as is not yet
known among us, and which has heretofore been looked upon as foreign to the
spirit of our institutions. It is to be hoped,
that the indications and the necessity of such a change will be confined to our
largest cities, but it is through them, if ever, that the American people are
to learn, what a strong government is.
The Supreme Court wasn’t willing to
confine this need for big government thuggery to our largest cities. They wanted to infect the States as
well. Here is an excerpt from one of my
previous blog post:
A series of Supreme
Court rulings dating back to the 1960’s subverted the political process by
retarding the rights of a State’s self governance. These judges –
this priestly class – molested federalism by dictating the manner with
which States’ shall choose their senators and representatives. This was
by no means a federal consideration. This was purely local.
The rulings in question
are Baker v. Carr, Reynolds v. Sims, and Wesberry v. Sanders. The Supreme
Court fundamentally changed the legislature of States by dictating their
districts and how they were to be represented. Basically, rural citizens
were to be dominated by urbanites. Degenerate values that breed on city
streets would emanate from state capitols and spread throughout the
countryside.
More importantly, this
reconfiguration would benefit a political party that advocates centralized
government. Having Democrats dominate state legislatures, they would draw
districts that marginalize hard working, liberty loving citizens while packing
federal congressional districts with teat squawkers, who are looking for an
agent that would steal from his neighbors.
And the battle over big government
continues.
Source:
