America as a Proposition Nation: Facing Our Superstition.
Eksurpted from an article by Clyde Wilson in the Jan. 2008 issur of Chronicles. Dedicated to all no-account neocons of good will ever'where:
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a "Proposition Nation", created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about "all men" in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration. . . .
The history of the United States makes clear, it seems to me that America, while not a Propostition Nation, has long been governed as a Proposition Regime.
Lincoln defined America as a Proposition and defended his war of conquest as the means of preserving the government that was allegedly upholding that Proposition. He was not speaking for traditional American constitutionalism and republicanism or for the America that had been known up to that point. He appealed most strongly to the revolutionary agendas of three particular groups among Americans: profiteers who stood to benefit from a protected market and a highly centralized capital-friendly government; New Englanders, who, from their very beginning as a self-proclaimed Shining City Upon a Hill, had endowed America with a unique and sacred missionary role in history, under their direction; and German immigrants and other national unification state-worshipers, bastard offspring of the French Revolution, who had achieved a considerable ideological transformation of the North during the 1850's.
Together, they created the Proposition Regime - resting upon appealing inventions about an America of endless prosperity and progress, and uniquely virtuous violence in stamping out the grapes of wrath. These types are still in power today. Clearly, the Proposition provided a cover for some interests at the expense of others. As Lincoln spoke, his party was fashioning a system by which the natural resources, enterprise, and labor of the country would be largely inthe custody of the Eastern financiers.
Devotees of the Proposition Regime always define it in terms of Lincoln's pretty words about equality and government of, by, and for the people. But its real spokesman is General Sherman, whose ruminations I highly recommend to anyone who really wants to understand how we got here. General Sherman made it clear that all who disobeyed the government of the Proposition Regime were rebels against the sacred who quite literally deserved nothing except extermination.
S. Jones
Snaggle-Tooth Jones
in The Federals
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