The Founders' Fear for America
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — The Soapbox
Samael — 1 year ago(January 28, 2025 10:46 PM)
The Founders Anticipated the Threat of Trump
Date: August 14, 2023
Author: Bhanu Dhamija
“America’s Founders designed a constitutional system to prevent demagogues from sowing confusion and mob violence,” writes Jeffrey Rosen, President of the National Constitution Center, in the following article.
The allegations in the indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the election of 2020 represent the American Founders’ nightmare. A key concern of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton was that demagogues would incite mobs and factions to defy the rule of law, overturn free and fair elections and undermine American democracy. “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1790. “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity,” Hamilton warned, “he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
The Founders designed a constitutional system to prevent demagogues from sowing confusion and mob violence in precisely this way. The vast extent of the country, Madison said, would make it hard for local factions to coordinate any kind of mass mobilization. The horizontal separation of powers among the three branches of government would ensure that the House impeached and the Senate convicted corrupt presidents. The vertical division of powers between the states and the federal government would ensure that local officials ensured election integrity.
And norms about the peaceful transfer of power, strengthened by George Washington’s towering example of voluntarily stepping down from office after two terms, would ensure that no elected president could convert himself, like Caesar, into an unelected dictator. “The idea of introducing a monarchy or aristocracy into this Country,” Hamilton wrote, “is one of those visionary things, that none but madmen could meditate,” as long as the American people resisted “convulsions and disorders in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.” …
An instructive historical analogy to the Trump case is the controversy involving free speech and election integrity surrounding the election of 1800, which culminated in the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Two years before the election, Federalists in Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States.” In practice, this muzzled the Republican opposition by making it a crime to criticize the Federalist president, John Adams.
The Republican vice president, Thomas Jefferson, responded by arguing that states had the power to nullify federal laws with which they disagreed. In the election that followed, Adams came in third, and Jefferson and his vice president, Aaron Burr, tied with an equal number of electoral votes. Alexander Hamilton, who believed that Jefferson posed less of a threat to the republic than Burr, helped persuade Federalists in Congress, who had to break the tie, to elect Jefferson. Both Adams and Burr accepted the election results and supported the peaceful transfer of power.
Once in office, however, Jefferson retaliated against his political enemies. He encouraged state prosecutions of his Federalist critics and lashed out against his archrival, Chief Justice John Marshall. He also supported the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase, a partisan Federalist who had presided over one of the sedition trials, but the Senate acquitted Chase, establishing a precedent that Congress shouldn’t remove judges from office because of disagreement with their rulings.
Jefferson then indicted Burr, his former vice president, for treason. After killing Hamilton in the famous duel in 1804, Burr had fled west to improve his fortunes and raised an expedition of men to seize lands in Texas belonging to Spain and lands in Louisiana claimed by Spain and by the U.S., which purchased them from France a year earlier. In 1806, Jefferson received reports that Burr was conspiring to incite the western states to secede from the Union and to conquer new territory. Jefferson alerted Congress and ordered Burr’s arrest. …
Unlike Aaron Burr, Donald Trump has not been indicted for treason. But the trial of Burr, and the legal controversies surrounding the election of 1800, provide lessons about the challenges that will face American institutions before and after the election of 2024. Then, as now, there were grave warning signs of democratic decay, with allegations that both parties were criminalizing their opposition through partisan prosecutions and attacks on free speech, judicial independence and the rule of law. …
At the end of their lives, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who had reconciled in the decade after the explosive ele