Will the new President of the United States be sentimentally American?
What will it take for him to succeed? Exactly what it took to be elected: prefer the United States of America over other countries, other interests and other people. But what once sounded easy is today problematic, as we see a new impediment about: Americans who disfavor their own country and promote others against it.
“You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.” ∼ Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 107 (Harper & Brothers Publishers 1917) (1889).
The formula for success is simple: primary allegiance to the United States. A sentimentally American President who governs as such would be deemed a success, because although that bar is pathetically low, it has not been cleared recently.
Our predicament gives a further call…
The state of the Union is deplorable, as the States and their people have come under the boot of the nation. As we nationalize here at home, our common-law liberties are lost. The national state (devoid of common-law rights) was never meant to predominate locally. Its power resides abroad.
There is a solution: constructive amendments to re-localize that predominance, to put domestic authority back where it belongs.
In the meantime ambiguous governance prevails, further socializing our “free economy” and simultaneously bringing all activity (whether economic or not) under the rule of money, defiling the history-bending advance of ordinary American law and the freedom associated with it.