The Sacred Capitol
What is the legitimacy of the government of the United States based upon, if not from the consent of the governed?
April 7, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:10
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| Time | Text |
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| You may have heard the phrase our sacred capital building uttered by various Democrats in response to the January 6th riots in which one rioter if that's what we can call them was shot. | |
| Her name was Ashley Babbitt and from the remote position in which I viewed the events it looked like an unjustifiable murder but apparently the officer who killed her got off scot-free so what do I know? | |
| Either way I think it was certainly not an insurrection. | |
| An insurrection is an attempt to overthrow a state by force, and as none of the rioters were armed when they entered the building, it seems evident that this was a protest that developed into a riot. | |
| I won't speculate about who may have been behind the escalation of events. | |
| All I'm saying is that most of the rioters didn't get a sympathetic write-up in the New York Times for a reason. | |
| The thing I found most interesting was the characterization of the events by the Democrats, which really helps us to understand their mindset. | |
| To a foreigner like me, it was of the utmost peculiarity with which I watched the Democrats attempt to weave a strange mythology around not just the event, but the Capitol building itself. | |
| This is a special place, a sacred place. | |
| This sacred place was desecrated by a mob today on our watch. | |
| This temple to democracy was defiled by was defiled by thugs who roamed the halls. | |
| Sat in this chair, Mr. Vice President, said Senator Dick Durbin, who echoed the sentiments of dozens of Democrat representatives. | |
| We must ensure that these sacred halls will never be overrun by racist thugs against our democracy, said Representative Adriano Espaliat, a New York Democrat. | |
| If you Google Sacred Capital, you'll find loads of examples of Democrats using this phrase, and not just no-name local Democrats either. | |
| We stand on sacred ground, the chamber of the United States House of Representatives, the heart of American democracy, said Nancy Pelosi herself. | |
| From the perspective of the Democrat Party then, it seems fair to say that they view the United States as some kind of holy entity, and the capital as an actual temple itself. | |
| Indeed, it was Thomas Jefferson who seems to have been the first to have called it that, saying, quote, the first temple dedicated to the sovereignty of the people, embellishing with Athenian taste the course of a nation looking far beyond the range of Athenian destinies. | |
| It's well understood that the founding fathers of the United States, in particular Thomas Jefferson, were heavily influenced by liberal thinker John Locke. | |
| Writing to retrospectively justify the glorious revolution of 1688, Locke set out his foundational view of English liberalism in his famous Second Treatise of Government. | |
| Locke was writing in direct rebuttal to Sir Robert Filmer's traditional view that the king and the state were divinely ordained and instituted by God. | |
| In Locke's view, isolated men in the state of nature subject to natural law had made the rational decision to live together in society to protect themselves and their property, And therefore, the state was created after this event, and its sole duty was to preserve the people themselves and that which they had accumulated. | |
| Locke repeatedly refers to the preservation of life, liberty, and estate to refer to the proper role of government, and if government overreaches its mandate and becomes tyrannical, he identifies a right to revolt within the people on the basis that the kind of government that rules over them was chosen by them due to it being conformable to their sensibilities, | |
| which could at any time be revoked when it is commonly agreed that the state has lost the consent of the governed, which is the only legitimating factor upon which liberal democracy is based. | |
| We find Locke's formulation expressed almost word for word in the Declaration of Independence, which was authored by Thomas Jefferson. | |
| When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. | |
| We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to those ends, | |
| it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. | |
| The only notable difference is that Jefferson exchanges the term estate in life, liberty and estate for the pursuit of happiness, which is of course a broader statement, but does not exclude the accumulation of property. | |
| Otherwise we see Locke's exact formulation of the origin of the state and the rights of the people replicated here. | |
| What this expressly does is to render the Republican government of the United States a non-sacred enterprise. | |
| It is an explicitly rational one, created by men, for men, and for the purposes of men. | |
| It is wholly temporal and built to serve, not divinely ordained to rule. | |
| Jefferson doubtless did not think that the United States Capitol building was literally a temple and used the term metaphorically. | |
| However, that seems to be lost on modern Democrats who appear to wish to actually imbue the building and structure of government itself with some kind of holy status. | |
| The term propositional nation appears to have originated from Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg address, a short statement in which he firmly grounded himself in Lockean principles. | |
| Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. | |
| Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. | |
| We are met on a great battlefield of that war. | |
| We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. | |
| It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, but in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. | |
| The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. | |
| The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. | |
| It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. | |
| It is rather for us here to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth again. | |
| There is a muddling of non-sacred and sacred language, but Lincoln is firmly rooted in the Lockean perspective that America was founded on the liberal proposition of the harmony of liberty and equality and is governed by a state that was created by the people for their own purposes and not some other purpose. | |
| American integration appears to be based on this concept of the United States as a propositional nation that anyone can become an American if they simply believe the right things. | |
| Whether this is true or not is not really my concern, but it does suggest certain corollaries. | |
| One such is that if someone doesn't believe the materialist, Lockeyan proposition of the United States, in which man sacrifices some of his natural rights to institute a society and state with the purpose of protecting his liberty and property, then they aren't an American. | |
| The entire point of the United States is that it is fundamentally a human endeavour. | |
| It is the orthodox American belief that there is in fact nothing sacred, holy or divine about the concept and nature of government. | |
| The people themselves have a right to be armed because of this fact, and the revolution itself is justified upon these premises. | |
| This is the source of the traditional American scepticism of government itself and the modern Republican animus against it. | |
| If the Democrats have come to the Anti-american conclusion that there is in fact something sacred about the government of the United States, then we must assume that they in fact reject the philosophy that underpins the proposition Of The United States itself, and are therefore themselves not actually Americans. | |
| These foreigners, then, need to explain why the revolt against the British Empire was justified, as it seems that the moral legitimacy of the United States is thereby thrown into question. | |
| If the State is sacred, then the people have no right of revolt. | |
| If the people have no right of revolt, then the American Revolution was unjustified and in some way sacrilegious. |
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