Impeachment

By Paul Street for Truth Dig - I am always darkly amused when I hear one of my fellow Americans call for a return from our current “deep state” plutocracy and empire to the supposedly benevolent and democratic rules and values of the nation’s sacred founders and Constitution. Democracy was the last thing the nation’s founders wanted to see break out in the new republic. Drawn from the elite propertied segments in the new republic, most of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” As the celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstader noted in his classic 1948 text, “The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It”: “In their minds, liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” Democracy was a dangerous concept to them, conferring “unchecked rule by the masses,” which was “sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of liberty.” Hofstader’s take on the founders was borne out in historian Jennifer Nedelsky’s comprehensively researched volume, “Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism,” in 1990.