(Above: The 35 words by which the legitimacy of the great American experiment of liberty through self-government were derived. Sadly, we have been guilty throughout our history of deviating from these principles, including the author of these fabled words which have served as the doctrine throughout the international community for 237 years upon which it has based its beliefs in human rights: Thomas Jefferson.)
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To Whom This May Concern:
I have noticed perhaps a half dozen posts just today regarding varied opinions on why one should or should not shop or work on major holidays such as Thanksgiving or other holidays where the Judeo-Christian principles are in some manner applied into its meaning and customs of families bonding and celebrating the particular spirit behind these sacred occasions, and if this is to be the case, why or why not certain service-sector industries -- grocery stores, gas stations, hospitals, and even professional and collegiate sporting events -- either open or take place on these days as well. Here are my thoughts on the matter using historical precedents in economics and the culture from our economy's evolution over more than 400 years of American history on this continent which one may trace the roots for our present situation:
America operates in a mixed capitalist system of economics, in theory, but as time has progressed, we have seen in more than one manner how government and outside popular culture influences have fed into the moral fabric of how the American people perceive the holidays in comparison to the past. A high school history teacher will tell you that Anglo-America was founded upon three principles, all starting with the letter "G": God, Gold, and Glory. With regards to holidays like Christmas and Easter, they are no longer considered sacred covenants with a still-healthy majority of the public. Our culture and a plurality of our elected officials have manifested the thought process that rather than being a nation founded upon the foundations of Christianity and British and American liberty, we are a nation of secular, perhaps even atheist, individuals who answer to no higher power other than those entities who will pledge to provide for them material comforts in exchange for the abdication of their legal rights and furthermore, the people's willingness to forfeit their liberties to propagate a culture predicated upon the general will of the majority. Unfortunately, no recent American elections have been held with the party who wins gaining a simple majority of the entire legally-eligible American electorate since nearly half of the American people who are allowed to voted legally choose not to. While any true and just nation whose government is a democratically-elected republican apparatus of oligarchs should in theory adhere to the rule of law favoring the majority as opposed to those with less of a voice numerically, that alone makes it impossible to quantify the majority of the population's mandate due to their failure to pay attention to the affairs of state, and as as result, it cannot possibly always take care in recognizing the liberties and legal rights of the majority when a majority of those who do not have the numerical cloud of the majority are, in fact, the majority of the people who choose to vote. That is the rule of law, however cruel in its irony, and to the people within the majority who vote as they will and in absentia the ones who fail to act upon their civic duty to vote, the will of those who do vote will always be the direction in which the spirit of the laws must be adhered according to any true master of democratic politics and the Machiavellian wielding of power as a result of this legitimacy.
The American Dream was founded in part upon a principle of the ingenuity and talents of individuals allowing a people to achieve and to attain any goal he or she so desires in life. I will not go into semantics upon what the legal definition of a property owner was in 1782 when Hector St. John de Crevecouer authored his famous series of commentaries titled Letters from an American Farmer, but today, this definition is much different in terms of who and how one is defined as such. While in 1782 the definition of a property owner differed greatly from what we know it to be according to our laws today, the point remains both evident and clear: every specimen of mankind has the God-given rights to the acquisition of wealth and prosperity from the fruits borne of his or her own labors. This is most evident when one references the founding father of Classical Liberalism in the 17th Century English philosopher John Locke, when he wrote in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1689) anonymously about the state of nature, which he defines as the following:
"To properly understand political power and trace its origins, we must consider the state that all people are in naturally. That is a state of perfect freedom of acting and disposing of their own possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature. People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another. It is evident that all human beings – as creatures belonging to the same species and rank and born indiscriminately with all the same natural advantages and faculties – are equal amongst themselves. They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty."
Furthermore, if the law of nature is misapplied by the state of nature, Locke states this as being true:
"IF man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others: for all being kings as much as he, every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: and it is not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property." (2nd Tr., §123)
(For further reading, please reference the actual primary source document of Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government here.)
In the popular vernacular, historical and political scholars traditionally refer to this concept by Locke as all mankind having the inalienable rights guaranteed by the law of nature to "life, liberty, and property.'' The above excerpt from Second Treatise is written in his words verbatim. If all mankind are guaranteed these liberties by dent of the very nature of their births, what finite being has the authority to govern what one may possess as to what an individual acquires by way of the fruits of his or her labors? The answer, according to Locke, would be no one, no singular entity. It therefore should be noted that to avoid the state of war which often occurs in the state of nature, and to protect private property, that mankind is to enter into a civil or political society, or in using a better adjective phrase, a state of society. It is also the state to which mankind will ultimately return upon the dissolution of government as a result of a tyrant's rule. While no finite being or beings has or have the right to dictate the terms of the acquisition upon which one's fruits of his or her labors are borne from mankind's means for survival, the nature of humanity is to be selfish, and therefore the lone premise by the existence of any government institution is to protect life, liberty, and property, and nothing more, which is to be accomplished by a social contract with those within their community.
The greatest adherent and yet its most deviant implementer to and of the Lockean principles of the law of nature in America resided at his mountaintop plantation home in Charlottesville, Virginia, when he did not serve in an official governing capacity in the form of one Thomas Jefferson. One of Jefferson's innovations within the American stream of consciousness was his co-founding of the political party system upon his establishing of the Democratic-Republican Party, which was created in opposition to his arch nemesis in the political arena in Alexander Hamilton, who founded the Federalist Party, as what to historians would become forever known as the First Party System which is stated to have launched in 1793 and would be won in the end by the Jeffersonians who advocated a republic as form of government, and equality of political opportunity, with a priority for the "yeoman farmer," "planters," and the "plain folk." They were antagonistic to the aristocratic elitism of merchants and manufacturers, distrusted factory workers, and were on the watch for supporters of the dreaded British system of government. Above all, the Jeffersonians were devoted to the principles of Republicanism, especially civic duty and opposition to privilege, aristocracy, and corruption. The concepts of a society founded upon a system akin to those in Europe of entail and primogeniture, to Jefferson, were most pernicious to a society of free peoples, and he sought to end such practices in America once and for all through his cultural influences in his writings or through his implementation of polity using the people and the natural rights he believed each individual had to determine their governors as his source of legitimacy in his wielding power.
Along with the ultimate victory of the Jeffersonians over the Hamiltonian political faction was ushered in a period where for the first time in the New World, the phenomena behind the First Industrial Revolution commenced, an irony and a new economic culture which is in diametrical opposition to absolute Jeffersonianism. The new era in the economies of scale domestically perhaps can be traced to Jefferson's signing into law in 1807 his Embargo Act against the British Empire, which was his answer to Parliament's passing another Order of Council authorizing British naval vessels to impress ships suspected to be trading with Napoleonic France post Napoleon's issuing the Berlin Decree in November 1806 as the centerpiece behind the Continental System, which declared that no ally or territories acquired by conquest were permitted to trade with Britain. While Jefferson's plan did eventually affect the British economy after the law was repealed in 1808 just prior to his exiting the presidency, its failure to show an immediate impact proved to be equally as detrimental to the economic stability of traditional American free enterprise as it essentially crippled the marine merchant industry in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, thus resulting in a dearth of tax revenues and the loss of scores of jobs. As if the notion that nature always finds its way amid the circumstances which may at once impede its progression through time is assumed to be true, so too did the American economic infrastructure when around this time, the first factories began to open and manufacture goods on domestic soil. While Jefferson's intent behind his Embargo Act's premise to greatly stunt British economic stability by cutting off all trade with the United States was an attempt to play political coercive "hardball" with the world's most powerful empire in Britain in order to avoid war, the fact that the empire practiced mercantilism amid its worldly colonial holdings, with the jewel of the empire by this point being located upon the Indian Subcontinent where much of the cotton that once was purchased from the American Southern plantations was now harvested and was therefore an inter-economic good produced by British subjects, the initiative failed ultimately due to its inability to have an immediate effect upon Britain, and within three years of Jefferson's departure from the presidency, his successor and political protege James Madison would summon Congress to declare war against the nation's former mother country at the misgivings of his mentor, who remained quiet despite his disapproval out of respect for his pupil and ideological coauthor.
Jefferson's plan, while more of a failed ploy to cripple the British economy's international viability than a true victory, did indeed have an unintended latent effect on the American economic consciousness for all time, and perhaps set into motion the chain of events which ultimately led to his idealistic society of the agrarian yeoman and a planter class which was so prevalent in the economies of the South within less than 60 years being destroyed amid four years of civil war, in part, too, because of his contribution to the concept of nullification which was the centerpiece to his argument in his Kentucky Resolutions in 1798 against the unconstitutional Federalist policies within the Alien and Sedition Acts. His mistake with this policy was perhaps the single greatest indictment on his major logical shortfall in his intellectual life: the hypocrisy of failing to adhere to Lockean theory regarding life, liberty, and property which he wrote within the body of the Declaration of Independence (1776) as "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" by not ending slavery during his presidency while simultaneously expressing his own disgust with the peculiar institution of slavery even as he himself was a slaveholder with hundreds of slaves. There are many theories over the years which have been posited pertaining to the reasoning for his never abolishing the practice, most prominent among them involving his relationship with his concubine Sally Hemings, with whom it is nearly certain today that he conceived as many as six offspring during their 38 year period of miscegenation. What we do know is that for the time, Jefferson was considered a man of the people, the most democratic of the Founding Fathers. It is again to be reiterated that prior to his signing into law the legislation behind the Embargo Act, his ideal economic infrastructure to him would rely upon mostly agriculture for strategic commodities than on industry.
Jefferson specifically believed:
"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if He ever had a chosen people, whose breast He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."
However, Jeffersonian ideals are not opposed to all manufacturing; rather, they are inclusive as to the belief that all people have the right to work to provide for their own subsistence and that an economic system which undermines that right is unacceptable.
Jeffersonianism, along with Hamiltonian political philosophy, have long been hailed for the political and economic posterity of America, which one sees as evidence today. Some historians have noted, however, a growing trend favoring Hamilton's principles, citing Jeffersonians as being "naïve, dreamy idealists," that they were at best "reactionary utopians who resisted the onrush of capitalist modernity in hopes of turning America into a yeoman farmers' arcadia," while at worst, "proslavery racists who wish[ed] to rid the West of Indians, expand the empire of slavery, and keep political power in local hands -- all the better to expand the institution of slavery and protect slaveholders' rights to own human property." Jefferson, though, refutes such a claim as to this intent in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) when he stated:
"I beleive [sic] the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman."
He believed, therefore, that only their environment needed to be changed to make them fully American. Even though many American Indians lived in villages and engaged in agriculture, hunting was often still necessary for subsistence. It was this semi-nomadic way of life that led Jefferson and others to consider Indians as "savages." Jefferson believed that if American Indians were made to adopt European-style agriculture and live in European-style towns and villages, then they would quickly "progress" from "savagery" to "civilization" and eventually be equal, in his mind, to white men. As President, Jefferson would try to make these changes a reality. As with all individuals, Jefferson was most guilty of hypocrisies in terms of his inconsistencies in his logic pertaining to the liberties of mankind to be free to live to labor for his own bread and not live upon the whip of a master. One should not blame Jefferson by way of historical revisionism in defaming either his character or philosophies since he was a product of his environment, his contemporaries, and, ergo, his era in American Southern history.
(For further reading, please refer to the official webpage of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello here.)
The concept of Jefferson bending against his own principles to accommodate political expediency (The Louisiana Purchase was not a constitutionally-mandated initiative, which he pursued anyway) has become part of lore today in the American political arena. Legitimacy, then, is always derived from what he himself referred to in the Declaration of Independence as "the consent of the governed." This perhaps is the lasting logical principle behind his manifestation of American democratic values within the framework of republican government. It also is indicative of how his policies towards American Indians along the Western frontier would be implemented into law and ultimately carried out to gross extremes by Andrew Jackson, a man whom Jefferson found to be dangerous. If a free people such as the American Indian tribes can be manipulated in terms of how they live as Jefferson believed they should in order to socialize them, what would stop a man as Jackson from uprooting tens of thousands to march them across the land to another territory at enormous costs in lives? Such a principle is in existence today in America, which since 1898 has been active in one means or another in imperialistic endeavors and perhaps what some might refer to as the nation's ultimately enslaving the peoples of the world with capitalistic qualities by first the employing of workers in factories at extremely low wages and for long hours amid poor environment conditions, and then by the manifestation of materialistic dependency upon the products which are manufactured and the acquisition of wealth primarily concentrated into the hands of a rich power-elite and very little into those of these owners of the means of mass productions' workers. This, of course, delves one into the concepts of Marxism within Karl Marx's his masterpiece on political and economic Utopian virtues and a world dominated by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in The Communist Manifesto (1848) along with co-author, Fredrick Engels. For better than one and a half centuries, the world would first build towards class warfare, then finally the ideals of the first Communist state emerged with the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917 upon the forced abdication of the Romanov family from the throne at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. A second world war followed by 46 years of cold war and the threat of nuclear holocaust over the jockeying for control of the world's peoples between the Soviets and its democratic-capitalist enemies, the United States. Each side was as guilty of enslavement of mass populations of people as the other, as the lone difference being the core principles behind which each government used to justify their actions. Both killed millions in order to attain that nation's ideological and imperialistic goals, but in the end, capitalism won upon the centralized-economic infrastructure of the Soviet Union collapsing under the weight of its own artificial economies of scale amid the U.S. escalating the arms race in the 1980's during the Reagan presidency.
About 15 years into the Cold War, the dawn of the age of secularism in America emerged, as individuals like Madeline Murray O'Hare filed lawsuits in federal courts which led the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately abolish mandatory prayer and biblical recitations in public schools as they cited that the practice infringed upon the rights of those who adhered to the principles of atheism to not pray as part of the lifestyle. (Read an article marking the 50th anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp in Religion and Politics.) Since then too, the courts have ordered the removal of Judeo-Christian likenesses such as the Ten Commandments from government buildings such as courthouses citing the same applicable principles. This practice, now among the most common in all of the modern socialistic-characterized public and social cultural initiatives, has permeated into the private sector of the economy with many businesses choosing to no longer close on major religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter Sunday. In its wake lies the largest percentage of workers who prefer to not work but instead to remain at home with their families to celebrate both the religious rituals, and in the case of Thanksgiving, the national traditions and customs which is believed by those of the Judeo-Christian faiths to have been blessed and made possible by God. Those within the secular, socialist minority who are repulsed by those in the majority adhering to the belief that America's settlement was preordained by God as the American Dream's realization of "manifest destiny" continue to cry foul while the majority acquiesces to their demands simply to silence their vitriol and to maintain the public peace. If a member of a minority religious faith chooses to observe their religion's holidays during the calendar year by taking off from work, for these individuals' employers to deny them their right to do so would be potentially punishable by the current rule of law as an act of discrimination. On the other hand, no Christian of whom I am aware would typically be granted such a reprieve for a religious holiday observance, and few ever attempt to buck this trend out of necessity to keep their jobs. It is therefore a matter of cultural discrimination by the varied government influences and the social desires of corporations who have been secularized in their approach to a nation founded in part upon Christian liberties to sacrifice their liberties to praise God in order to earn the all mighty extra buck. Sadly, most of the general public will be complicit in perpetuating and the propagation of this practice until one day, there will be no such officially-recognized holidays as either Christmas or Easter, though holidays such as Ramadan may well be unofficially and surreptitiously heralded as a means to cater to a minority mob rule.
In the end, the choice of the American public to work on holidays lies within the controls of those who own the means of production and the federal government, who through acts of judicial activism over the past half century have greatly crippled the ability for the majority adhering to Judeo-Christian religious principles to observe their holidays and furthermore, to be able to see vestiges of their faiths upon government buildings due to our elected officials attempts at historically-revising what John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson as the following:
"The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were ...the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence."
(For future reading, please refer to the primary source document of John Adams' letter to Thomas Jefferson, dated June 18, 1813 here.)
Today, it appears as if 21st Century Americans identify more so with the principles associated with the left-wing radicals' prosecution of the French Revolution as opposed to those by which their American Founding Fathers fought for all to enjoy in future generations during our gift to the world of the first revolution against a colonial governing parent-nation: the French, according to Adams, predicated their revolution on atheism as those who prosecuted the toppling of the ancien regime also destroyed the First Estate, which was the sovereignty of the Roman Catholic Church in feudalistic France. God advocates His legitimacy to His followers based upon their choosing to follow Him; the French atheists who prosecuted the revolution used fear and mass murder to legitimize their stranglehold on power, which would greatly influence such revolutionaries as Lenin and Mao during the 20th Century revolutions in Russia and China. It is interesting to note, too, how Marx stated that the rise of the proletariat could only occur during the reign of capitalist hegemony by the bourgeoisie; he later admitted in 1873 that capitalism had provided most individuals more prosperity than ever before despite differences in economic statuses and income levels. In contrast, no major world Communist or socialist revolution has ever successfully been conducted in nations in which a capitalist economic infrastructure existed.
All great civilizations which have ever lasted for centuries or more than a millennia laid their legitimacy upon the principles of a higher power and those of their subjects who recognize their sovereignty as being just because in some manner, the ruling apparatus manages to appeal to its citizens by some form of supernatural or the metaphysical entity from which it can unify its people through a commonly held core of beliefs and principles upon which the governed can in general agree upon as being both just and absolute in moral efficacy. Nations such as those within the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, et. al., have derived their version of this practice by a cult of leadership predicated upon fear much as was experienced during Revolutionary France, which we are seeing today in our nation though it appears to be a gradual usurpation of our traditions and core principles for more than 400 years of Anglo-American settlements rather the extreme coercive methods of radical acceptance of their truth and mythological legitimacy through a metaphysical principle. In each of these nations, they either collapsed or are failing to tread water while their citizens starve and die upon disappointing "Dear Leader," or in the case with China, the nation moderated its policies towards the original abolition of all religious worship, though still the state relies upon fear in the maintenance of its power and cracks down on religious separatist sectarians. Regardless of what has become of these nations, one thing is certain as a fundamental truth today as it was just a generation ago while the Cold War was drawing to its conclusion: these nations, Communist that they are, are willing to resort to any means necessary to prevent its subjugated citizens from fleeing its borders as refugees. The subjugated peoples of North Korea see across the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas a nation in the South free to exist largely as they so choose, while in their native North, they are slaves to the whims of the member of the Kim family in power. The implications here are clear: mankind is not free unless government is limited and it is unimpeded in congregating with those of their common cultures, customs, and faiths to celebrate their heritage and the humanity which through the higher power's legitimacy and their faith in that figure links them all typically, though not always, in peace and harmony.
In the end, the only remedy to end the barbaric practices of the coerced forfeiture of a society's faith in their supreme being of choice is for mega states such as ours to break apart and create polis' such as those which existed in Hellenic Greece in Athens, the birthplace of democracy. The only truly legitimate representatives of a person's democratic interests reside within the heart and mind of each individual, for only the power of the individual, the majority of one, truly has a hope at building for all time the closest thing to the most just, legitimate society of man-manifested legitimacy based upon natural law as provided by God, as no large republican body of elected representatives such as the American system of our elected officials can adequately acquiesce to each individual's wants and desires, and there is no one alive who truly considers that every policy enacted by a republican-representative government to be one hundred percent legitimate to his or her wants and desires and how exactly it best accommodates his or her interests. Ultimately, democracy is mob rule derived by a representative voting apparatus of either the individual, as in Ancient Athens, or the elected representatives of a republican government, and is never fully representative to every individual's nor faction's desires except for those within the ruling majority of votes.
As Winston Churchill once so famously echoed in this sentiment, one cannot help but relate to his logic:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Thus Churchill, a man who acquired his mandate for power from the votes of a constituency of electors which comprised of a majority of one political faction in the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, spoke from experience as a man who derived his legitimacy upon the consent of the governed in a nation which recognizes Christianity through the Church of England as its ultimate basis for power.
