The Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

Make no mistake.

In this document,  the 13 colonies declared themselves each individuality separate from and independent of their common Mother Country,  their metropole, Great Britain.

Each a sovereign and independent state with all the rights and powers customary for such.

Though they here affirm an ancient and traditional consent theory of legitimacy, in a somewhat pointedly republican and Lockean variant with justification for popular revolution against a despotic regime, they promptly pivot to the business at hand and a detailed list of abuses of the colonies and their rights by the government of the British King, justifying separation.

This war of secession did not and was not meant to create a new nation, but 13 independent and sovereign states with a habit of cooperation for their common good and a desire to continue the same.

The war effected a revolution of republicanism effortlessly and by the way, since the colonial governments and societies were already, in their local structures and outlook if not in those, now gone, that had tied them to Britain,  republican.

But it was not a national revolution and it did not create "a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

It created 13 states in which slavery was legal, gathered in a loose, ad hoc association of questionable longevity, in each of which nearly everyone took such ideas not with a grain but a lump of salt.

Say again?

Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people

Sam Tanenhaus says the Republicans are the party of white people and his magazine, the New Republic, calls that “original sin.”

Me?

I wonder if Sam – or the people who write his headlines, anyway – is telling us that white people who know what’s good for them should be voting Republican.

I wonder if the New Republic is saying it’s a sin for white people, though not others, to be concerned about what’s good for them.

Having voted for Obama twice and being pretty sure no un-rich American of any race with an ounce of sense and a glimmer what’s good for him will ever vote Republican for any office during the rest of my lifetime, I find all this confusing.

Being white myself, I mean.

Am I perhaps the one making a terrible mistake?

Sam, like liberals generally, by far prefers to cast the central contemporary opposition between the Republicans and the Democrats as a clash of races, or rather as a clash of one race against all the others and a clash between whites who deny and others who comprise and celebrate American diversity.

Like liberals generally, he has abandoned the other vision of that opposition that cast the Democrats as the party of the people, of the common man, of the vast American majority and the Republicans as the party of the rich.

He prefers to narrate American history as a racial conflict and even thus to exacerbate it for political gain, though that narrative slanders and maligns and even alienates the tens of millions of whites who voted for Obama and without whom the Democrats still cannot win, and will not be able to win for many decades to come, if ever.

And it slanders as well the millions of whites who vote Republican because they are rich and want to keep what they have laid hands on by hook or by crook, because they accept the moral and political vision of the libertarian bumper-sticker that says “socialism is fine until you run out of other people’s money,” or because they are devout Christians who reject the contemptuous and grossly immoral secularism they see as dominant among Democrats.

And he does all that just as a majority of the professional white left has done since the race riots of the sixties and 70’s when they virtually guaranteed the success of the “southern strategy” by repeatedly siding, at least rhetorically, with the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and the Panthers against the whites who feared them and the police who fought them.

Not to mention the black rioters who, in those days and in city after city, slaughtered whites whenever they could as the professional left told America whites had it coming and the rioters were exacting moral and racial justice.

Oh.

Many conservatives over the last 60 or 70 years have lionized Edmund Burke, a champion of monarchy and aristocracy against the brilliant revolutionary republicanism of the French on the continent.

Considerably fewer over all that time have ever had a clue who Calhoun was, and he nearly disappeared from conservative propaganda altogether between the civil rights era and the recent emergence of neo-confederate thought that has lionized pre-Civil War nullificationists and secessionists of the South like Jefferson and Madison and of the North like Webster, Stevens, and most of the abolitionists.

All the same, a history lesson is a good thing, once in a while.

Even if the liberal bias of the thing is so pronounced.

And what thinks he of rights, then? George Will, atheist.

God, the Founders, and George Will

So Conrad Black says Will is “a professed atheist”?

I have read of his irreligion before, but I wonder where and when he has professed it.

Anyway, he is one of those atheists who think it good that the plebs believe.

What then does he personally think of alleged natural rights?

It looks like he believes in the rights in the Declaration of Independence, but not the God.

Or is it just that he thinks it good that others believe in those rights, as he thinks about God?

According to author Conrad Black,

Will agrees with Irving Kristol that “it is crucial to the lives of all our citizens, as it is to all human beings at all times, that they encounter a world that possesses a transcendental meaning, a world in which the human experience makes sense.

"Nothing is more dehumanizing, more certain to generate a crisis, than to experience one’s life as a meaningless event in a meaningless world.”

Really?

Is that how he personally experiences his life?

That it is "a meaningless event in a meaningless world"?

If not, why not, since he seems pretty clearly to suppose that only religion, though false, supplies the meaning, and only for those who mistake it for true?

And is that government’s problem, anyway?

Still, he might be right (how very Marxist of him) to think, as he seems to, that with the decline in religious faith come greater demands on this, our one and only life.

So we should lie to people just to stop them making such demands?

Why?

Per Black, Will claims some key founders like Jefferson and Madison thought it good the common folk were actual Christian believers since that helped shore up their belief in the rights of the Declaration.

And Will sees (as does Black) a conflict between honoring those rights - I think he and Black are both assuming Locke's right to property is implicitly on that list - and trying to better the common fate in this life.

So much the worse for the rights, then, I say.

Why doesn't Will?

Black’s piece is interesting in more ways than one.

He is not at all happy with Will's atheism or his valuing Christianity only as a matter of expediency, whether personal or political.

Are conservatives really so obtuse as to take it for granted that of course we should not only believe what the founders believed (or wanted the hoi polloi to believe) two and a half centuries ago but want what they wanted (or what they wanted the hoi polloi to want)?

All of us?

Or are they just smart enough to pretend to be that obtuse?

Living with an 18th Century relic

Why We are So Unequal

I left the below comment.

"The right has always been unnaturally strong in this country."

It was supposed to be strong; there is nothing unnatural about it.

6 year terms in an anti-majoritarian senate selected by state legislatures and whose members never face the electorate all at one time.

Life tenure for Supremes appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate.

Presidential electors selected by the states in whatever manner pleases them; electors free to vote for anyone; congress free to certify their vote or not.

Marbury vs. Madison.

Extra seats in the house for slave states.

Sure, it was the most democratic constitution in the world when adopted since it rejected monarchy, hereditary office, lords spiritual, and even hereditary prestige.

But it went as far as humanly possible within the framework of 18th Century republicanism to exclude the people from power and permanently cement government of the powerful, by the powerful, and for the powerful.

In contrast, the parliamentary regimes that resulted "by accident" as European monarchies and aristocracies were shorn of power within structures of state inherited from feudalism are generally much more democratic than what we Americans endure.

And to this day many Democratic pundits with reputations for solid liberalism would oppose most of the democratizing reforms now and again suggested by political scientists and constitutional scholars of progressive bent.

You, for example.

For readers who don’t realize, Booman has repeatedly urged repeal of the 17^th Amendment and written against majoritarianism in the senate.

Just as libertarians and paleocons whose ideology empowers plutocracy whine endlessly about the self-enriching uses plutes make of their power, Booman revolts against the inequality that he knows is a result of our most undemocratic constitution even as he rejects democratic reforms.

The ability of the Republican Party to ensure it will continue to control the house though their candidates consistently get fewer total votes than the Democrats is just another example of counter-democracy at work empowering the powerful and disempowering the people.

And yet, most pundits of both parties would resist and have written to oppose democratic reforms of our constitution that would move us toward the level of democracy enjoyed in European, parliamentary regimes, despite their apparently deathless concern for the advancement of democracy in foreign lands not yet liberated by our conquering armies.

Just once I would like to hear a so-called liberal Democratic leader, even a president, react to conservative idolization of the Framers and their constitution with the public scorn and ridicule it deserves.

What the Framers gave us, after all, was so wonderful that they had to fix it, right away, with ten amendments they resisted as wholly unnecessary but without which we would not have freedom of speech and religion, the right to representation by an attorney at a public jury trial, and many others of the basic liberties for which the Framers get but do not deserve the credit.

And then after that we had to fix their constitution several times more, using those same incredibly inapt and clumsy tools they provided in Article V, with an amendment (after a war!) abolishing slavery, another providing women with the vote, yet another guaranteeing the vote to anyone at least 18, another providing for popular election of senators, and another allowing disproportionate taxation of the rich.

And the truth is we are far from done having to fix it.

It is still too much like what it originally was, an 18^th Century junk-pile clapped together to guarantee the power of rich white males and nobody else, and most of them slavocrats.

The one besetting sin of the constitution from the first day was being deliberately constructed to prevent democracy and deny power to the people.

The one and only cure is and has always been democracy and then more democracy, again and again added by a succession of reforms put in through an amendment process that itself needs to be drastically reformed.

And we have a long way further to go.

On the other hand, who, seeing how terrified of democracy are even the most radical pundits of the “party of the people,” can be optimistic about the prospects for democracy in America, today?

A loophole big enough for a battleship

Daniel Webster made a speech in the House denouncing Madison and the Democrats both for starting the war of 1812 and for seeking to draft people to fight it, in December of 1814.

He declaimed drafting people to fight an offensive war unnecessary to the defense of their liberties, their country, their homes, or their families was unconstitutional.

He thus left open the possibility that a draft for a war to serve the nation’s vital interests could be constitutional.

And that makes one wonder what he thought of all those Brit troops who had invaded America and burned Washington DC to the ground.

Anyway, who has not heard of Cap Weinberger’s stunning declaration that there is no place so remote or insignificant in all the world that the US does not have vital interests there?

Who is not aware that the supporters of Mr. Wilson's war insisted America had to fight to make the world safe for democracy?

Or that, according to FDR's supporters, Hitler was out to conquer the whole world, America included, just as the Kaiser had been?

Or that, without America's cold war efforts, communism after WW2 (but apparently not after WW1) was a serious threat to overtake the whole world with Stalin-like tyranny, us included?

Madison, by the way, left Webster undisturbed, so far as I know.

Lincoln would not be so mild toward Clement Vallandigham.

Interestingly, Daniel Webster in his speech of 1814 rejecting the constitutionality of the draft directly addressed the claim that the bare necessity of the thing made it constitutional because the congress and the government in general had to be thought of as endowed with the power to do anything necessary to the achievement of its legitimate, constitutionally prescribed or allowed ends.

And he denounced that idea as Tommyrot.

He flat denied the power of the congress to raise armies, in particular and for example, entailed the power to do anything necessary to raise armies adequate to their admittedly constitutionally authorized purposes.

Yes, at the cost of losing.

What do you think of that?

Wouldn't you think that a claim that congress has so awful a power, so terrible in its impact on the people, on  individuals and on families, could and should be backed by some shred of text?

Surely Webster was right this is far too heavy a weight for the necessary and proper clause to carry?

Mr. Lincoln's war, revisited

Suppose Lincoln had forced the country through all that horror and loss and, in the end, let slavery stand.

Could any national leader have been more infamous in US or even world history for doing anything of more costly and unspeakably stupid futility?

The Articles of Confederation established a perpetual union of the subscribing states under itself, that union’s equally perpetual constitution.

The generation that wrote them blew off both the union and the Articles in flat defiance of several of them and wrote a new constitution far more national in nature – members voted as individuals in that new bicameral legislature instead of each state’s members voting together as a block, for example – that they were willing to see disrupt the union fatally and forever in case it was not ratified by them all, with states previously in now staying out.

The leaders of the southern Confederacy were no more cavalier about the constitution or the union than they had been, and anyway the claim to perpetuity had been discreetly, understandably, but not inconsequentially omitted from the Philadelphia document by its lawless creators.

Union forever?

Phooey.

It is clear as day, I think, that Lincoln’s bloody war to save the union would have been an outrage against humanity and the least common sense had he won and let slavery stand.

And if slavery had within a few decades been actually abandoned voluntarily in all the states that would only have made it worse.

But he did not let slavery stand and what the South feared at the time was very possibly true, though the neo-Confederates today deny it, that Lincoln from the moment the first shot was fired aimed both to keep the South in the union and to end slavery everywhere within it, though he could not at that time say so.

That is, and contrary to what had been the expressed views of many abolitionists before him, he meant to prevent the southern states breaking off and forming a powerful slave confederacy right on our borders, taking away a large part of our national strength and perhaps expanding into the Caribbean, inevitably becoming an enemy and perhaps a menace to the northern, free-state, rump union they would leave behind, as some who favored secession intended.

Many today speculate that had he let the southern states secede slavery would have died out among them anyway within a few decades, as at any rate seems more plausible than the nightmare of entrenched, vigorous, and spreading slavery I have hypothesized Lincoln fought to avoid.

Certainly it is difficult - though I think not impossible - to believe it could in that case have survived as a legal institution anywhere in the Occident up to our own day, though it survives even now illegally in many areas of the world and even legally in some parts controlled by Muslim religious law.

But even granting – and I think it is not certain – that slavery would anyway have disappeared before now it remains true that the Civil War did at any rate much shorten the life span of slavery in the southern states, themselves, and almost certainly elsewhere.

So, why could Lincoln not say so from the beginning if, as I have suggested, he meant to save the union and kill slavery within it from the start?

Because he thought he just might have a plausible constitutional case that secession was nothing but rebellion and he as president had a duty to put it down.

That was the view of the Republicans at the time whose outlook on the matters of federal power and states’ rights made them old-time Federalists on steroids.

But he had no case whatever and did not believe that the federal government under the then constitution had the least authority to disturb slavery in the South under any pretext whatever, and specifically not even under pretext of rebellion.

Though during the war he claimed and exercised the power of emancipation he applied it only to some of America's slaves and was by no means sure of its permanent effect.

Hence the need, eventually, to force through the 13^th Amendment banning slavery to give the Civil War an indisputable meaning it would otherwise most certainly not have had.

Should Lincoln have done it?

Should he have fought this war?

The Democrats who opposed him were certainly right, I think, that he ought not to have fought merely to save the union, just as we mostly feel today, I think, that Canada ought not to fight to keep Quebec in, nor Italy to keep in an unwilling South Tyrol, nor anyone at all to keep the Flemings and Walloons from splitting Belgium as the Czechs and the Slovaks split Czechoslovakia.

And is not the UN, even today, defending the right of secession in the former territories of Yugoslavia?

Those who protest that admitting a right of secession is an absurdity in normative political theory are quite right, but they are missing that normative political theory is absurd in the first place and has little bearing on actual history.

See the earlier posts labeled “amoralism.”

In the real world not only secession but even the more radical step of partition are sometimes acceptable and even the only defensible course.

But assume that, though he said he was, Lincoln was not fighting, even at the beginning, merely to save a union half slave and half free.

Assume he aimed from the beginning both to save the union and to kill slavery within it, if he could.

Should he have fought this war?

Were those in the North and West who opposed him at the time actually right?

Especially the thousands of draftee immigrants forced to fight either meaninglessly to save a pointless union or wholly altruistically, tens of thousands of them dying to free slaves little worse off than the free men of their own working class in the cities of the North?

Everything I have ever read denouncing the draft as the most horrific and hateful servitude when the draftees are taken to fight for anything at all but the defense of their own lives and liberty, their country, homes, and loved ones - if perhaps not in that case - comes here to mind, inescapably, and I cannot but sympathize with them rather than him.

And a good deal of all that was written by American republicans sure the end of monarchy and placing the war power in the hands of a popularly elected congress had put an end to the normal feature of history, the powers that be dragging hundreds of thousands, again and again, to kill and die in causes not their own.

Or by anti-federalists opposed to ratification of the Philadelphia constitution, sure that a strong, national union would perpetuate in American that same ancien regime in which the common people fight endless wars for the empire and glory of rulers to whom they are but canon-fodder and cattle.

Afterthought.

The neo-Confederates and, to be fair, other historians have pointed out quite truthfully that Lincoln was among the absolute worst of presidents for usurpation of power and trampling of liberty, democracy, and the Constitution to make his war.

Wilson’s suppression of dissent and infamous treatment of Debs was not worse, by any means.

And the Federalists who so infuriated Jefferson’s and Madison’s Democrats were cub scouts, compared to him.

Perhaps only FDR's internment of the Japanese in America was a comparable or even greater violation of constitutional rectitude.

And yet another afterthought.

The bulk of the evidence shows that Lincoln was a frank racist convinced of the inferiority of blacks to whites, intellectual and otherwise, though he rejected unto shedding rivers of blood that this justified slavery.

Where modern liberals claim to see contradictions others might see only nuance.

Majority rule? Nah, better not, says The Nation.

Don't Eliminate the Filibuster, Restore It

[Extensively re-written 12012012.]

John Nichols displays none of the traditional progressive penchant for democracy.

Well, what the heck.

It’s just too scary for some people.

Something might go wrong.

Whereas if we just go back to the real filibuster we used to see in movies, what could go wrong?

I think it was Matt Yglesias who, a few years back, gave the history lesson showing the old style filibuster was almost always used to protect wealth and privilege and political expressions of racism like segregation.

And about 90% of the uses of the new style filibuster have been made during O's presidency to protect and advance the interests of plutocracy with record-setting, and downright shocking, obstruction of a fairly modest liberal agenda.

All the same, lot's of liberals are far less democratic in their convictions than one might wish.

Booman, for example, more than once has come out in agreement with the proposal of several conservative pundits and office holders that the 17th Amendment be repealed and the choice of senators returned to state governments.

And that despite the fact that, according to those conservatives, the point of repeal would be to disempower progressivism and create a situation in which its past achievements would be undone.

And very few liberals, indeed, would be willing like Dahl and some others to deny the Supreme Court and the federal courts in general the power of constitutional review of actions of the federal executive or legislative branches, confining its role in that regard to regulation of the states.

Generally, liberals and conservatives alike quote Madison on the role of the courts in protecting minority rights, with the former at least citing the era of the civil rights struggles in support of that notion.

Come to that, they talk the same way about the anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian features of the senate.

But Madison was talking about protecting the propertied classes against the rest of us, a fact the conservatives well know and the liberals ignore.

So far as anyone can tell, he could not have cared less for the alleged rights of non-whites, women, or homosexuals.

And I wouldn't take too much for granted regarding his concern for the rights of non-abrahamic religious minorities.

And, anyway, if you consider the achievements of the liberal federal courts during and after the 20th Century nearly everything they did to advance equality and the sexual revolution - and these are the things that liberals value - was a matter of controlling legislation and other actions of the states.

While during that very same period the senate was an absolute bastion of racism, religious bigotry, sexual repression, and every kind of prejudice and discrimination.

By far, the best thing to do with the senate - according to me, of course - would be to abolish it and restore the unicameralism of the Articles of Confederation.

Second best would be to reform representation to make it proportional to population with each state getting a minimum of one member, as in the house, and reform the rules to make the place majoritarian in its actual procedures.

If we go to unicameralism we might stretch terms in the house to 3 years to allow members to get more done between campaigns, but only if we also institute a recall process for house members - which might be a good idea, anyway.

And we should not stagger house elections as senate elections now are staggered.

The whole membership should continue to come up for election at the same time, as now.

Reforms to allow limits on the duration of campaigns and the money spent on related propaganda by private sources would be good things, I think, as well.

Representation in the house is already proportional to population and its voting, rules, and procedures are, and should remain, majoritarian.

And while we are fixing things my way, the power of constitutional review wielded by federal courts should, I say, be expressly confined to legislation and other actions of the states and inferior jurisdictions.

Too, the - ahem - "creativity" in interpreting the constitution, of the liberal courts more recently but also of conservative courts before them, teaches an important lesson.

While judicial independence has its value there can obviously be too much of this good thing; a way to confine the courts to fair interpretation and enforcement of the law really does need to be found.

Sure, during the 20th Century and since then their flights of invention unencumbered by reality were and have been on the side of the angels, mostly.

That is, those inventions generally suit my values pretty well, now and in retrospect, and apart, of course, from such value as I set on democracy and in flat defiance of my disapproval of judicial, or any other, absolutism.

And within the scope of this personal approval I mean to specifically include the invented constitutional right to privacy, the incorporation doctrine, and the courts' vigorous and free construals of the equal protection clause.

All the same, the Supremes in particular and the courts in general most certainly did not, as is sometimes claimed, invent in favor of the values of modern society as a whole, or even of a contemporary majority.

They invented pretty much to suit themselves and their liberal supporters.

The values of others did not concern them, except as needing to be defied and perhaps somehow outlasted or done away with.

In any case, the judicial absolutism embodied in the idea that the Supremes are or ought to be a sort of "constitutional convention in permanent session," as was once said by a happy liberal - perhaps a judge and at least a lawyer - is, to my mind, an offensive and unacceptable defiance not only of democracy but of the rule of law, altogether.

And I leave it to the reader to rehearse within his own mind the many reasons why absolutism is really not a good idea.

Anyway, not on the whole, ordinarily, or in the general run of things.

Not even judicial absolutism, however benevolent in limited respects some despots - judicial or other - may in the past or elsewhere have been.

We are in marked need, here, of adequate checks and balances.

No judge should have life tenure, I think.

And most should be elected by the people or subject to periodic re-appointment, perhaps according to the same process by which they were appointed in the first place.

[Update 12022012.

Well, yes, restoring the old-style filibuster is better than going on as we are, of course.

Sure, it's a weapon in the hands of the plutocrat minority that would be less easy and a lot more costly to use and so, we hope, it would be used much less often than the new filibuster they have in their armory, now.

So, what's that?

Another damned lesser evil we're supposed to pretend we like?]

Get rid of the 2nd Amendment

It was intended in the 18^th Century to defend republican institutions against resurgent monarchy and aristocracy and to prevent the great and rich from trampling the rights of the people.

In our time it has become a public safety disaster, a weapon of the unscrupulous plutocracy, and a threat to republicanism and democracy.

I posted the below in answer to this post of BooMan’s with which I mostly agree. 

Indeed, much of what I write repeats what he writes.

But not all, and we don't agree on quite everything.

Talking the Second Amendment

Considerable research has been done on the intentions behind the Bill of Rights as a whole and the 2nd Amendment in particular, mirrored in the constitutions of several other states at the time and since.

The generally accepted conclusion has been that protection of an individual right was intended and that the reasons it was thought necessary to protect that right were three: the need for self-defense in a frontier society, the need to hunt for food, and a popular – not an upper class – concern to enable resistance to tyranny at a time when the American synonyms for "tyranny" were “monarchy” and “aristocracy” rather than “socialism” or “Marxism.”

Madison and the men of Philadelphia had not included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution and he thought it both unwise and unnecessary to do so.

But, under pressure from many others including Jefferson, Madison drafted a list of amendments the then congress boiled down to the familiar ten.

When he did so he included in what became the second as a reason for its importance an allusion to the republican notion of the time that “a well-regulated militia” – as opposed to such a dangerous tool of tyranny, again meaning monarchy and aristocracy, as a standing army – is the “best security for a free state.”

At the time, a militia was just a somewhat drilled, trained, armed, and disciplined body of ordinary people.

Just the kind of thing the people could, it was felt, spontaneously organize among themselves to resist threatened impositions of monarchy or aristocracy if they owned their own weapons, though such spontaneously self-organized rebellion did not do well against George Washington’s troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.

All the same, that political reason was not the only reason for writing directly into the Constitution a guarantee of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Something like the above understanding first became the conservative theory of the 2nd Amendment some decades ago.

It was accepted as early as 2008 by Barack Obama and has since through decisions of the Supremes been incorporated in the reigning jurisprudence of the land.

It is worth emphasizing, I think, that the tyranny this right was intended to enable the people to resist was embodied in monarchy and aristocracy, the then nearly universal forms of tyranny that America had just thrown off and that Ben Franklin alluded to in his famous statement of what sort of government the Constitution set up, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

And these forms of tyranny, of course, were emphatically defended by that modern conservative hero and vigorous enemy of republicanism and revolution, Edmund Burke, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a book of such infamous and black reaction that had it been written in America during our own revolution it would have been the deepest treason and well worth a hanging.

And it is also worth noting that the threat of a monarchist counterrevolution is past while nowadays having too many weapons in the wrong hands has become a major threat to public safety and itself dangerously subversive of our republican and constitutional government owing to the rise and spread of right wing political violence and intimidation.

And last, it is also worth noting, I suppose, that hunting is no longer one of life’s necessities for the majority of Americans and that any legitimate concerns for self-defense are addressed by small capacity pistols and shotguns.

So it’s time to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

Don’t you think?

Sorry, I should have included that it was felt when the Bill of Rights was adopted that the militia could defend the states and the Union against attack and invasion by another country while an army was organized and that this was preferable to reliance on a standing army because the latter could easily be used against the people and their liberties by the great and the powerful while the former could not and could even enable the people to deter, if not overcome, such attempts.

Of course, Washington's easy success against the Whiskey Rebellion made mincemeat of that idea, too.

Update.

And then there was that war of 1812 in which the Brits used regulars and the Americans mostly used militia on short term enlistments.

The Brits cleaned our clocks.