History has not been kind in its review of past experiments by Homo sapiens in self-governing. Whatever the heights reached, all past experiments have collapsed.
- Those that were based on the personal power of an individual failed when that person died.
- Those based on an ideal of any sort, failed when those ideals were abandoned in practice if not in words.
Who is right?
I don't know... absolutely. I strongly suspect that the most accurate answer is likely to be an amalgam of all of those raised, plus some not yet discussed (at least to our knowledge).
But I have a suggestion for a prime "trigger" that guaranteed the collapse of our Republic. And I place the blame on a historical hero of the United States of America:
Abraham Lincoln!
Surprised? Yeah... me too. But hear me out. There are two absolute truths that contribute to the inevitability of the collapse of the United States of America:
- The inherent limitations of a Republic to remain responsive to the citizenry, and
- the inherent nature of man to never relinquish control once acquired.
I had been taught that our government was not a pure democracy but a Republic. But the differences between a pure democracy and a republic were never a matter of intense or critical study. Nor was there ever a study of the advantages and/or limitations of a republican form of government.
Had this been, and does it continue to be, a missing element is our Social and Governmental studies? To answer that question completely requires a reading and study of commentaries on the subject by David Hume and Thomas Jefferson. Or...for the equivalent of a Cliff Notes summary you might want to watch Prof. Livingston's speech on C-SPAN ( http://www.c-span.org/video/?316075-1/ThomasJeffers ) which would reduce what otherwise would take months of study to about an hour of video. The substance of what stuck with me from watching and listening to Professor Livingston I present below...and I am confident that substance will get your attention and initiate thought and debate.
The
general view of republican governance was one where size mattered, if you were
going to have representative rule. If you get too big, you lose
representative responsiveness. Jefferson's vision was one of additional
republics being formed as both population and area grew, maintaining the
people's control of government. The republics would then band together in
a Commonwealth for cooperative defense and trade. Up until the Civil War,
succession was often discussed and seen as a legitimate evolving action for
growth. It wasn't until Abraham Lincoln reflecting the governmental
philosophy of Thomas Hobbs, determined, by force, that the southern states
could not secede, and the "indivisible" term became the norm when
speaking about the republic. Jefferson's view of the various republics being
the political unit, to one where people became the political unit and
control was to be centralized. The French Revolution resulted in the formation
of the French Republic, the first modern large modern state republic, looking
to the individual as the political unit.
No one comments on the mutually exclusive concepts of republican government as
laid out by Jefferson and then by Lincoln (following the Hobbs model), and yet
the significance and effects of this clash on our lives is long standing and
enormous. The two approaches are incompatible, as Livingstone states.
At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the House of Representatives
elected one Representative for every 30,000 people. But in 1911 the
number of Representatives was capped at 435. The result is that today
there is one Representative for every 720,000 people.
If the 720,000 to 1 ratio were applied to the original 13 states, the House would be composed of 5 members, and 8 states would have no representatives at all.
On the other hand, to keep the same 30,000 to 1 ratio today, the House would have 10,500 members.