Opus 2015-386: Election 2016: Up country and the Aristocrats

You may have heard that history repeats itself.  That is not the real situation.  What happens is that human nature keeps acting human so we face the same crisis points and pleasure points again and again.

A case in point came to me as I was reading about the life of John Marshall in an old book I picked up somewhere.  The writing is dated.  I don’t know how to take some of its statements about Marshall himself but it gives me real insights into the world he lived in.  The point I am writing about was the time when the Stamp Act had been passed by Parliament and there was a lot of anger and resentment in the American colonies.  In spite of this the House of Burgesses in Virginia was going to go along to get along.  After several reasons why this would be true we come to this paragraph,

“But a far stronger influence with them was their hatred of Henry and their fear of the growing power of the up country.  They were smarting from the defeat of the loan-office bill.  They did not relish the idea of following the audacious Henry and his democratic supporters from the hills.  They resented the leadership which the ‘new men’ were assuming.  To the aristocratic machine it was offensive to have any movement originate outside itself.” p. 62

If you are wondering why Mitch McConnell and John Boehner seem to have lost their man parts it may be because they are more worried about the upstarts in the “up country” than they are about the man trying to destroy the country from the White House.  The lust for power is part of human nature and the Republican leaders are not above putting us in our place for daring to question their leadership and demand accountability.

They count on another quality of human nature:  The sheep in the up country will forget by the time the next election rolls around.  They have a wonderful set of examples:  Bill Clinton and Barak Obama.  Both were elected a second time. 

Elections matter.  One is coming.  Vote the suckers out.  If we get rid of a few good ones it will be more than balanced by all the aristocrats that need to go looking for jobs as consultants and lobbyists.

Beveridge, Albert J.  The Life of John Marshall, Vol. 1.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916.

homo unius libri