Frans Verhagen, de Eénogige Koning.

De journalist Frans Verhagen beweert in de NRC  van 24 maart 2021 dat:

Nu hij eindelijk president is, na drie pogingen en op 78-jarige leeftijd, wil Biden een erfenis achterlaten. Hij is net zestig dagen bezig maar toont zich nu al een president die Amerika fundamenteel gaat veranderen.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/03/24/ervaren-biden-maakt-handig-gebruik-van-coronacrisis-a4037028 

Dus niet een klein beetje, maar 'fundamenteel.' Wat zou deze Nederlandse 'outsider' met die propaganda precies bedoelen? Dat maakt Verhagen niet duidelijk, maar dat hoeft ook niet in een zelfbenoemde Nederlandse 'kwaliteitskrant.' 

De Verenigde Staten is nooit opgezet als een 'democratie,' zoals elke serieuze Amerikaanse intellectueel u zal vertellen,  maar als een republiek die allereerst de rijke elite dient. Als gevolg daarvan is sinds 1776 de VS uitgelopen op ‘an oligarchy’ met ‘unlimited political bribery,’ zoals een insider als oud-president Jimmy Carter in 2015 kort samenvatte. Nogmaals: het imperium is nooit een volksheerschappij geweest, zoals ondermeer de vooraanstaande Amerikaanse historicus Richard Hofstadter in zijn nog steeds geprezen werk The American Political Tradition, And the Men Who Made It aantoont. Hoewel het boek voor het eerst in 1948 verscheen, wordt zijn scherpzinnige studie nog steeds veelvuldig besproken en geraadpleegd. Uit het eerste hoofdstuk, The Founding Fathers. An Age of Realism citeer ik vandaag het volgende fragment :  

If the masses were turbulent and unregenerate, and yet if government must be founded upon their suffrage and consent, what could a Constitution-maker do? One thing that the Fathers did not propose to do, because they thought it impossible, was to change the nature of man to conform with a more ideal system. They were inordinately confident that they knew what man always had been and what he always would be. The eighteenth-century mind had great faith in universals. Its method, as Carl Becker has said, was ‘to go up and down the field of history looking for man in general, the universal man, stripped of the accidents of time and place.’ Madison declared that the causes of political differences and of the formation of factions were ‘sown in the nature of man’ and could never be eradicated. ‘It is universally acknowledged,’ David Hume had written, ‘that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions. The same events always follow from the same causes.’

Since man was an unchangeable creature of self-interest, it would not do to leave anything to his capacity for restraint. It was too much to expect that vice could be checked by virtue; the Fathers relied instead upon checking vice with vice. Madison once objected during the Convention that Gouverneur Morris was 'forever inculcating the utter political depravity of men and the necessity of opposing one vice and interest to another vice and interest.’ And yet Madison himself in the Federalist number 51 later set forth an excellent statement of the same thesis:

‘Ambition must be made to counteract ambition […] It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary […] In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.’

Political economists of the laissez-faire school were saying that private vices could be public benefits, that an economically beneficent result would be providentially or ‘naturally' achieved if self-interest were left free from state interference and allowed to pursue its ends. But the Fathers were not so optimistic about politics. If, in a state that lacked constitutional balance, one class or one interest gained control, they believed, it would surely plunder all other interests. The Fathers, of course, were especially fearful that the poor would plunder the rich, but most of them would probably have admitted that the rich, unrestrained, would also plunder the poor. Even Gouverneur Morris, who stood as close to the extreme aristocratic position as candor and intelligence would allow, told the Convention: ‘Wealth tends to corrupt the mind and to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression. History proves this to be the spirit of the opulent.’

What the Fathers wanted was known as ‘balanced government,’ an idea at least as old as Aristotle and Polybius. This ancient conception had won new sanction in the eighteenth century, which was dominated intellectually by the scientific work of Newton, and in which mechanical metaphors sprang as naturally to men’s minds as did biological metaphors in the Darwinian atmosphere of the late nineteenth century. Men had found a rational order in the universe and they hoped that it could be transferred to politics, or, as John Adams put it, that governments could be ‘erected on the simple principles of nature.’ Madison spoke in the most precise Newtonian language when he said that such a ‘natural’ government must be so constructed 'that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.’ A properly designed state, the Fathers believed, would check interest with interest, class with class, faction with faction, and one branch of government with another in a harmonious system of mutual frustration.

In practical form, therefore, the quest of the Fathers reduced primarily to a search for constitutional devices that would force various interests to check and control one another. Among those who favored the federal Constitution three such devices were distinguished.

The first of these was the advantage of a federated government in maintaining order against popular uprisings or majority rule. In a single state a faction might arise and take complete control by force; but if the states were bound in a federation, the central government could step in and prevent it. Hamilton quoted Montesquieu: ‘Should a popular insurrection happen in one of the confederate states, the others are able to quell it.’ Further, as Madison argued in the Federalist number 10, a majority would be the most dangerous of all factions that might arise, for the majority would be the most capable of gaining complete ascendancy. If the political society were very extensive, however, and embraced a large number and variety of local interests, the citizens who shared a common majority interest ‘must be rendered by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect their schemes of oppression.’ The chief propertied interests would then be safer from ‘a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.’

The second advantage of good constitutional government resided in the mechanism of representation itself. In a small direct democracy the unstable passions of the people would dominate lawmaking; but a representative government, as Madison said, would ‘refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.’ Representatives chosen by the people were wiser and more deliberate than the people themselves in mass assemblage. Hamilton frankly anticipated a kind of syndical paternalism in which the wealthy and dominant members of every trade or industry would represent the others in politics. Merchants, for example, were ‘the natural representatives’ of their employees and of the mechanics and artisans they dealt with. Hamilton expected that Congress, ‘with too few exceptions to have any influence on the spirit of the government, will be composed of landholders, merchants, and men of the learned professions.’

The third advantage of the government the Fathers were designing was pointed out most elaborately by John Adams in the first volume of his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which reached Philadelphia while the Convention was in session and was cited with approval by several delegates. Adams believed that the aristocracy and the democracy must be made to neutralize each other. Each element should be given its own house of the legislature, and over both houses there should be set a capable, strong, and impartial executive armed with the veto power. This split assembly would contain within itself an organic check and would be capable of self-control under the governance of the executive. The whole system was to be capped by an independent judiciary. The inevitable tendency of the rich and the poor to plunder each other would be kept in hand.

http://cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_science/clarkd/upload/The%20Founding%20Fathers---Hofstadter.pdf 

Deze analyse van een groot historicus staat lijnrecht tegenover de propaganda van Frans Verhagen. Maar omdat de polder-intelligentsia volkomen naar binnen is gericht, zal het NRC-publiek genoegen moeten nemen met Frans en zal de krant nooit uitgebreid en diepgaand aandacht besteden aan het werk van Hofstadter. In het kikkerlandje van de blinden is éénoog koning.