A Short Diagnosis
At the present moment, the long and short of the diagnosis of the American Body Politic appears to be that at a certain point, the off-center guardians of the mainstream poltical order envied the popularity and the chic of the radical guardians of our societal pressure valves and attempted to mimick them in the hope of "drawing in" new crowds, either from the radicals of their own base or from the ranks of the dissatisfied among those of the other party. The result is that the leadership does not even attempt to hide its contempt to not only its opponent, but also for the moderates who stayed the ideological course of yesteryear. Even as certain leaders promise a return to normalcy, they are bound to engage in policies which cannot but enrage everyone apart from a handful of heretofore irrlevant extremists. The destruction of the composite engine of the ship of state is inevitable.
That being said, a question arises: Can we find an alternantive to that engine?
The Alternative
As we all know, ships were not always powered by steam engines just and they are not powered by them anymore. Before the steam engine, with all its power, complexity and danger, there was the sail-and-mast sytem. Reliant on the winds and the waves, it posed no particular danger and was eas to sustain: There is no engine to fuel, no pressures to be released or retain, no fire burning below deck to control and no opposing forces to be kept in balance. Of all the perils faced by a sail-ship, explosion was not one. The only supplies that the ship's crew would have to worry about is food, which is available in every port they are likely to set sail to, while a steamship must know in advance that coal, a much rarer commodity, would be available at the other side of the journey.
Why, then, was the sail abandoned in favor of the steam-engine? the answer lies in the purpose of sea-going: Commerce. As Alfred T. Mahan, the great theorist of naval policy at the point of transition had demonstrated, even military navies exist mainly to protect sea-going commerce. Commerce favors two things above all else: Capacity and Reliability. He who can bring a greater volume of goods to market or withstand his obligations regularly has an advantage in the marketplace over his competitors. He who can do both conquers all. The sail-ship cannot overgrow a certain volume and, dependent as it is upon the vagaries of elements beyond human control, its reliability in bringing goods to market is questionable as well. A sail-ship must study the winds as they are and charts its course accordingly and sticking to the pre-planned course is not always possible. a steamship hvae a greater freedom in charting its course andtime of voyage, as long as it is charted ahead of time.
The function of the State is, at the end, to facilitate the movement of goods and services - civilian and military alike- across space and between groups and individuals. For this, reliability and capacity are keys. The main problem of any regime is that at its primitive stage it lacks the ability to not be dominated by one force at any given time - the ability for an opposition to retain its shape, opinions and enough spoiling power to force the government to consider its point of view. When the ship of state is carried each time with complete abandon in the direction the political wind happened to be blowing, it cannot be relied upon to achieve much. As a result, the State remains unable to control a great teritorry or administer a powerful army or achieve anything of note on the international arena. Such states also have a tendency to breed a thousand petty parties, each with a narrrow, usually local or secterian, goal in mind. Instead of the single great steamship we have a fleet of sailboats.
The Vital Function
It is no coincidence that all the great states of history had two opposing factions at the helm of their affairs at the time of their greatest achievement- Britain had her Whigs and Tories, the Han dynasty her Mandarins and Eunuchs, Rome her Optimates and Populares, This country, administering a vast and varied terrtory since her inception, our Federalists and Republican-Democrats, than our Democrats and Whigs, finally the Republican and Democratic paties - with not much seeeming to change each time the administration of the government had passed from one to the other. Fundamentally, both powers of our engine know that they are vital to its proper function and can only work upon each other. Jupiter Stator is closely related to Double-Faced- Janus, after all, it is in the latter's month that the two consuls of Rome, often from opposing factions, took office each year around the same time (153 BC) that the bipartisan system took its final shape.
Conclusion and Warning:
On Good and Evil in Government
it is tempting to portray the opposing faction, whether One's own is in power or not, or the government as a whole, were One to belong to a faction hopelessly out of power, as evil. It is the mark of a primitive mind who should not be allowed anywhere near the levers of power. Countries that imagine all goodness, wisdom and bravery on one side and cowardice, idiocy and meannes on the other never ammount to much. Wherever a great country convices itself of this fallacy, it shall lose its ability to administer its territory and the latter shall be split into units small enough to be governed by such an attittude.
Then follows the greatest of evils: Intercine, endless war. For, as Hamilton had said:
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
Such a crisis would be infinitly worse than our Civil War, composing of two sides fighting over a single moral question, headed by two governments of almost identical model. If the existing two main parties refuse to act as the responsible twin powers within the same engine, than we must replace them, or the coming conflict shall not spare the smallest town and farmstead, each fighting all the others under a different banner and a seperate government, boasting of being on the side of Good against Evil.
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