In 1785, the citizens of the thirteen states of the confederation of states were hopelessly divided. There was no central authority to manage the economy. More than one currency was being used in commerce. Disputes were intractable on everything from taxation to religion. The situation was so bad that insurrection and violence had accelerated across borders.
Many Americans today feel that history is repeating itself.
A Constitutional Convention was convened in 1787 to discuss and debate a new structure for government to address the situation. This was by no means an easy proposition. The colonial delegates were not of a like mind. There were landowners, professionals, and administrators, each with a different economic stake. There were Quakers, Puritans, Catholics, Episcopalians, and Baptists. Educational standards and universal access were in dispute.
Many of the delegates just wanted to tinker with and amend the Articles of Confederation. Others wanted to adopt rules and procedures of English law. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had in mind a completely different approach for restructuring the American government. Their genius was to design a form of government never seated before in the history of the world. It became the great American Experiment. They argued for a strong central government, a federal banking system, one currency, and capitalism as the foundational economic system.
Authority between the federal government and states was bifurcated to allow the differences on religion, education, and priorities of government services to be decided by each individual state. The federal government was primarily charged with defending the shores and enforcing equal opportunity to participate in free enterprise.
The Convention became so contentious that Benjamin Franklin suggested they pray together. It is interesting that the diversity of denominations found humility in praying to God for His wisdom, not their own.
Madison and Hamilton’s intellect carried the day.
The federal government was designed by definition in power to facilitate and support the states’ decisions on matters that directly affected the family. The concept of states’ authority over all social issues of division emerged. The result was a republic, not a democracy. The Constitution expressly states that any power not directly granted to the federal government defaults to the states, state-by-state, to decide such policy.
The brilliance of the Constitution lies in its ability as the supreme law of the land to simply define what it is that unifies Americans in federal authority. That which produces issues of division is the states’ authority. There are individual constitutional rights in the Constitution. However, to bind the states on any right, said right must be contained in the original Constitution, or introduced by amendment. In so drafting and ratifying the Constitution, the colonial states established the unifying theme of American society, free enterprise without privilege.
It was the Declaration of Independence that so eloquently made the clarion call for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as an extension of inalienable rights. It was the Constitution that codified the elements of government properly structured to implement the revolutionary idea that government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. And it is state authority as rendered through a republic that allows for separate political issues of force to operate within the context of a national unifying theme.
Albert Einstein spent a great amount of his time in his later years attempting to perfect mathematically “the unified theory of the universe”. He was driven by the question, how gravity, electricity, radiation, radio waves, light, dark matter, dark energy, and atoms, etc., could all operate separately in a system, yet in harmony with the greater universe. Some of these forces of physics operate exactly opposite to each other. How can black holes and the space time continuum coexist in the equilibrium of the known universe? He was never successful in completing the equation. He finally came to the conclusion that only God could have created such a grand, complex universe.
It was not until the Great Depression that the United States federal government began to run deficits without consideration for such a policy’s impact on the unifying theme of free enterprise. In 2019, Covid relief funds were necessary to support the average American family. Progressives now call for even more spending without debate or consideration for such policies’ threats to America’s economic system. Elected officials have now merged the issue of social policy with economic policy as if it were one American objective. The federal government is now compromising freedom with social engineering. It violates the concept of state diversity. This is a departure from past Congressional intent to respect and maintain the unifying theme of our society.
This forcing of federal power to overreach state authority jeopardizes the original intent of the Founding Fathers, and therefore, the unified theory of democracy.
Today, Americans struggle to define what it means to be an American. We do not personally define our national character as that of another state. We define ourselves as Americans as the last bastion of freedom defending liberty in the world. Manifested in principle is the righteousness that every American has equal opportunity to participate in the economic system in relationship to their own pursuit of happiness.
I am currently in Washington, DC attending individual conferences, one composed of Central American states and the other composed of Ukrainian nationals. I delayed the Nuttle Report to include their perspectives on the definition of national character that unifies them.
The Central American states largely see themselves as religious in culture and history. The threat is government policy that imposes upon family values.
The Ukrainian delegation largely sees themselves as a nationality, a bloodline if you will, separate from Russia. They are not necessarily religious, but feel unified as a historical culture.
What Central Americans want is government policy sensitive to the national identity. What Ukrainians want is support against a foreign oppressor that would restrict and dominate their national identity.
Both know exactly what unites them as a people. Both know what threatens their sacred unifying characteristics. Both are willing to stand in defiance to any force that seeks to destroy that principle which unifies them.
The average lifespan of a republic has historically been 200 years. The average lifespan of a constitutional republic is much less.
The United States has exceeded expectations. However, nations do not fail on issues outside of their control. They fail because they refuse to honor the simple unifying theme of their existence.
The United States is at the crossroads of losing that which defines us in unity of purpose. Without a commitment to that unifying principle for which we are all willing to commit our lives and our “sacred honor,” the result may be the loss of our own national collective identity.
The miracle of the great American Experiment is the allowing of every individual to realize economic prosperity through their own efforts while at the same time allowing different political forces to function separately, sometimes, like in the universe, in direct opposition to each other.
In answering the question, what is the constitution of both the unified theory of the universe and democracy, perhaps Einstein’s answer is right for both.
My name is Marc Nuttle and this is what I believe.
What do you believeFathe
