Recently your Texas correspondent delivered a talk at the Abbeville Institute, which is “dedicated to what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition.” You may hear this 37-minute talk here…

https://youtu.be/mrJskoJxtD8

…or skim the transcript here…

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/a-constitution-for-the-future-south/

Still more economically, I provide below the contextual gist of that presentation.

Widely recognized is the fact that Western governments are becoming progressively more dysfunctional. Why is this so? How is it that the centuries-long struggle to institutionalize the “ancient rights of Englishmen” – the gift of a small and “green and pleasant land” of a few million people to elevate the entire world to human dignity – has now forged an instrument of human bondage?

The reason is that this gift of the English nation has been institutionalized in the state form of government. This must be repeated: The “state” is not government; it is a form of government, only 377 years old. This English gift of liberty was never institutionalized in a particular form of government, and even now Britain does not have a formal constitution; it exists in the ancient customs and traditions of the English nation. And even had those customs and traditions been formally expounded in a constitution, such a document would not merely have failed to preserve them, but would have actually imperiled them by calcifying their meaning in terms subject to juristic transmutation. This is exactly what happened in the American experiment, when its Constitutional exposition of these ancient customs and traditions allowed their complete perversion by means of a single brief appendage: Its Fourteenth Amendment.

With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment on July 9, 1868, James Madison’s ingenious tool to apply the principles of human right over a large domain, federalism, was abandoned to form a unitary government with power consolidated in Washington, DC. Note carefully: Under this same Constitution, a humane form of government that had existed for 81 years was exchanged for another form of government hostile to the first. The government of 1787 to 1868 was the era of federalism, or Jeffersonian, Southern government, extolled by Lord Acton in his postwar correspondence with defeated general Robert E. Lee.

The uncodified, unwritten, aspects of Jeffersonian government consisted in a hierarchy of intermediating institutions that not only defended the sacred individual, but also defined his very identity. See the video or transcript for details.

The form of government encrusted over this Jeffersonian hierarchy is the state, created on October 24, 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia. This creation was astonishing and bizarre. Here a convocation of proto-intellectuals, in isolation from the presence of both church and king, met and turned aside a menace to the very existence of Western Europe. The menace was an outbreak of a mass psychogenic illness that threatened to plunge the entire world west of Vienna into a religious civil war. It was a mass psychogenic illness re-ignited with Martin Luther’s famous posting of the 95 Theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg on Halloween day, 1517. Note too, that by the middle of the 16th century the Muslim horde was just a hundred miles outside the gates of Vienna, not to be removed until King Jan Sobieski’s 18,000 Polish winged hussars stormed down from the Kahlenberg heights on the late afternoon of September 12, 1683. These proto-intellectuals who concluded the Treaty of Westphalia reached for the only tool available to turn aside this menace: The hypertrophy of government power, institutionalized in the state form of government.

But why was this form of government that was so dangerous to individual rights and liberty instituted? This made no sense, since there were viable, safer, and long-tested forms of government available at that time. For example, the Hanseatic League, which lasted over half a millennium – starting about 1159; for example, the Swiss Federation, which has lasted 734 years, from 1291 to the present; for example, the Venetian Republic, which lasted exactly 1100 years, from 697 to 1797.

But even had one of these better alternatives been adopted, individual rights and liberty would not have been assured without one more institutional element: Non-stratified sortition. See the video or transcript for details.

The combination of Jeffersonian intermediating hierarchies with non-stratified sortition I call kleristocracy, which I offer as the only workable alternative to the failed state form of government.

Related posts:

Censorship’s Quiet Collapse: Why the British Regime May Soon Liberalise

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