We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us
The founding generations were farmers; what had farming to do with anything?
My head is like a bowl of spaghetti. If I am to then have some sort of “serious” conversation on a subject I need to organize my thoughts. It’s kind of like straightening out the wet spaghetti noodles, drying them, separating the broken from the whole, and putting them back in the box. Something like that. Which I’m going to do here in this case, in preparation for a conversation that Geri and I will have with some others on Tuesday next.
The Utility of Farming
Of course the food, a product of farming, is in and of itself perhaps sufficient reason to farm. And “back in the day,” hair-fiber would have been a product of farming; alcohol was a means of “storing” product long term for later sale or barter; animals restoring the soil through fertilization and disturbance; sinew for bow strings and such; milk; and on top of all that, the animals reproduce themselves. There’s a lot to be said for farming, even if we are only discussing the products of farming, done properly. But there is yet more.
I am passionate about farming, not in the agrarian industry sense prevalent today, but in the agrarian culture sense prevalent until the twentieth century opened, more or less. Now I want to tie in a related point, which will appear unrelated, so please be patient with me.
We the People
As most of you know, I’m also passionate about this unique experiment that is the United States. And I am distraught over its fall. What has gone wrong since the opening of the twentieth century?
Some might argue, as I have, that the Constitution was not up to the task. Some might argue, as I also have, that it is the politicians. Our government was designed, and well I think, to stifle the politicians. “Getting things done” was not the objective; I would argue that the reverse is true. Politicians were a known quantity; the founders knew the tendencies of human nature, and by extension, politicians, if left unfettered.
But, the system of government extends beyond the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government. Beyond the federal government, were “the several states,” the federal governments masters, in the original design. It was expected that the states would form an additional check on the federal government. Unfortunately, the States, and the People, made some serious mistakes in the early twentieth century.
Direct Taxation of the People
Did you know, that in the Constitution, as ratified in 1788, the States were the paymasters, in effect, of the federal government?
Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 2
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included in this Union, according to their respective Numbers…
In other words, the taxes to fund the federal government were imposed upon the States, and only indirectly upon the citizenry. We the People, and the States, changed this with Amendment XVI.
Amendment XVI (Ratified 1913 February 13)
The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Before 1913 there was no federal income tax. With this amendment, which took the States out of the paymaster position, and allowed the federal government to directly tax the citizenry, the States were disempowered and the federal government further empowered, which I will argue, was a very, very bad idea.
Direct Election of Senators by the People
Did you know, that in the Constitution, as ratified in 1788, the individual State legislatures chose the Senators to represent the individual State in the Senate? In other words, Senators represented the interests of the States directly, and the citizens of those States only indirectly.
Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 3
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof…
We the People, and the States, changed this with Amendment XVII.
Amendment XVII (Ratified 1913 February 13)
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof…
Again the States were disempowered and the federal government further empowered, this I will argue, was also a very, very bad idea.
In large part as a result of Amendments XVI and XVII, we weakened State authority over the federal government, to our detriment. Thereby transferring the responsibility for corralling the federal government, in large part, to We the People.
We the People I argue, have performed exceedingly poorly with respect to corralling the federal government; we have totally lost control. Which brings me to my next point, and the connection to farming in general, and farmers in particular.
We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us
That’s a quote from Walt Kelly, circa 1970, and I believe it is on point; We the People, are the problem.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Adams
Let’s examine who the People were, the People that the Constitution was made for.
Religiosity
That’s from Pew Research, and obviously shows that now, less than half the People say religion is “very important;” 49% in 2021, down from 58% just since 1992. That is confirmed by Gallup, who say that as of 2015 75% of Americans self-identified as Christian, but that “In Gallup surveys in the 1950s, over 90% of the adult population identified as Christian, with only a small percentage claiming no religious identification at all or identifying with a non-Christian religion.” I wouldn’t say we are an irreligious people, but less religious than we formerly were to be sure.
But, that’s just one dimension; who were these people that fought the War for Independence? I’m not talking about the Founding Fathers, I’m asking who were “We the People” at the founding? And this is where we come back to farming, and farmers.
Husbandmen (and Women)
Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.
Thomas Jefferson
The first census was in 1790, and some put the number of people living rurally at the time at 90%. Of course there would have been rural farm towns supporting the farmers in all manner of ways, so let’s say 90% of those living rurally were actually on farms; that puts the number of farmers at 81% of the population.
1862 May -- President Lincoln signs legislation establishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He called it "the people's department" since 90 percent of Americans at the time were farmers.
Sidebar: Make no mistake, Lincoln made mistakes. And establishing the US-duh was one of them.
It seems like my 81% is in the ballpark, if not a bit low, when compared to the PBS number. Let’s just say farmers were a very large majority of the population. And again to quote Jefferson:
Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.
So we know, or have evidence of, or the insight of a few, that the People were a religious people, a moral people, vigorous, virtuous, and importantly, independent, which is to say not dependent. All of that is subjective, and could be argued quantitatively I suppose, even if not qualitatively.
Class
Almost by definition, farmers were the “middle class,” after all, they were at least 80% of the population by all accounts. And, in large part they owned property. These characteristics are also of importance. Here I will quote from The Dying Citizen, by Victor David Hansen, who is himself quoting Aristotle:
A city ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes. Wherefore the city which is composed of middle-class citizens in necessarily best governed; they are, as we say, the natural elements of a state. And this is the class of citizens which is most secure in a state, for they do not, like the poor, covet their goods…Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that the those states are likely to be well-administered, in which the middle class is large, and larger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant. Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property.
Aristotle
The founders were well read, especially Jefferson, who alone contributed ~6,000 volumes from his personal library to start the Library of Congress. The Roman and Greek republics were key touchpoints, together with the British, in the design of our own Constitution. They almost certainly knew what Aristotle had to say.
As of 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “At just over 50%, the US middle-income class is much smaller than in most OECD countries.”
And, “The middle-income class has grown smaller with each successive generation.”
And, “One in ten current middle-income jobs are at high risk of automation in the United States…”
In summary, there’s no end in sight to the decline of the middle class in the United States.
Worse yet, according to The Hill:
The Tax Policy Center found that 57 percent of U.S. households paid zero federal income tax in 2021, compared to 44 percent before the pandemic, as first reported by CNBC. Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at The Tax Policy Center, told CNBC that the drastic jump could be attributed to COVID-19-related job losses, a decline in income, stimulus checks and tax credits.
What this means to me is that the all-important “middle class” is persistently shrinking, and that more and more of the population, 44% before the plandemic, contribute nothing to We the People writ large. I give it five more years, and fully half or more of the population will be totally dependent for government services paid for by the other half, or less.
Education and Literacy
Even before the Department of Education (1980), imagine that, the United States was an educated and literate population.
“The literacy rates during the colonial period and the early history of the United States indicate that literacy was steadily growing during that time period to rather high levels. Between 1650 and 1795, for example, male literacy rates are estimated to have risen from 60 to 90 percent. By 1840, literacy was estimated to be between 91 and 97 percent. There is no evidence that there was an undersupply of schools or a lack of interest in education in the United States. (Richman 38-9) The 1828 Journal of Education, for example, reports that "our population if 12,000,000, for the education of which, we have 50 colleges, besides several times the number of well endowed academies leaving primary schools out of the account. For meeting the intellectual needs of this 12,000,000, we have about 600 newspapers and periodical journals." Compare that with Poland, who at the time had a population of 20 million, yet only 15 newspapers.
Contrast those numbers with the current literacy rate in the United States, 182 years later, which is 79% according to World Population Review. For the purposes of this analysis, I will leave it there. We are no more literate, and perhaps less, than we were.
Morality
Then of course, slavery was the “peculiar institution” at the time of the founding. And we can argue that there should have been no compromise in the Constitution. But we, as you will read below, like those before us, are creatures of our culture; then, and now. Slavery had been going on for thousands of years, and frankly, was still and is still going on. Was it moral, of course not. But it was, it existed, world-wide, and the founders compromised in the Constitution, while at the same time sentencing the “peculiar institution” to death in the longer term. The South fought to preserve the institution in the no-so-Civil War, and the North, under Lincoln’s leadership, fought to preserve the Union, which Lincoln saw as his mandate. In the wake of that war slavery met its end on our shores, earlier than it otherwise might have, though at the cost of 600,000 lives.
And now? I resist even going down this particular path given our censorious culture. Regardless of censorious culture I will ask, who can say that abortion as birth control is moral? According to the Washington Examiner:
The National Right to Life Center estimates that by the end of 2021, 63.5 million abortions had been performed in the United States since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Nearly 40% of women who seek abortions are African American, which is astounding, considering this demographic made up just 13.6% of the population at the time of the 2020 census. This likely means that over 20 million black babies have been aborted during the past 50 years.
Abortion as birth control is amoral, and it has a disparate negative impact on the black community. ‘Nuf said.
How about this headline, “Vanderbilt suspends gender-affirming surgeries for minors?” This amounts to chemical castration of males, and genital mutilation of both sexes, which as a culture we once abhorred! “Suspending” this evil is fine so far as it goes, but who are the people who decided it was a good idea, and moral, to perform so-called gender-affirming surgeries on minors in the first place?! For God’s sake, literally, the Governor of Tennessee had to sign “legislation banning doctors from providing gender-confirming hormone treatment to prepubescent minors.” Prepubescent! That is a long way from from adulthood.
I could go on to the income tax as theft, and redistribution of the loot to others, but arguing that point has been going on for so long it’s passe. But, here is a quote on the subject from Alexis de Tocqueville:
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Well, Congress discovered that fact in 1913, and they’ve been bribing the public with the public’s money ever since.
So What?
Where am I heading with all of this? I started by trying to develop an avatar, if you will, of the colonists; religious, farmers in large part, middle class, very literate, and a predominantly moral people. And contrast that with our current state; religiosity is on the persistent decline; less than 2% are on the land; a much smaller and shrinking middle class; a citizenry if not less literate, then certainly no more literate, than our forefathers; and with morality, at least from my point of view, having been reframed as anti-everything we want to do as a culture.
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2
Perhaps, optimistically speaking, we can slow, or perhaps even pause for a time, the decline of the United States. I’m not optimistic to be honest. But, let’s say we could. And let’s imagine that we could then turn the clock back to 1788, wipe the slate clean of law except for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and start over. I suggest that We the People, today, are not the People the Constitution was made for, and therefore we would be right back to where we are in no more than two generations.
And here we go again with Tocqueville, the man was prescient:
It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.
― Alexis de Tocqueville
Even were we to turn back the clock as described above, we would not be able to hold on to our freedom. We are indeed a nation of servants, as I described in my post “Whom Shall Ye Serve.” What must change, if we are to restore this nation as the shining light that it was, is us, We the People.
Will we ever again be a nation comprised largely of rural-dwelling farmers? No. Or at least let’s hope not, because if we do become that nation of old it will mean that something really, really terrible has happened. Short of that though, I think there are things we can do to restore to We the People the character of our forefathers, and in doing so shore up and restore the nation. I want to be a part of that restoration, and and I think the farm can in part be a means to that end.
See also the post, “A Regenerative Agrarian Culture,” for a brief look at just a few of the benefits of creating a “parallel agriculture.”
All the best, and may God bless you and yours,
John
Excellent summary John! Thank you.