The Mental Ferment for Men (and Women) who Might Foment an American Revolution: Part Four

In the previous three parts of this posting I have, in very brief form, showed that our system of governance is neither so honest about many of its basic principles, so true to its heritage nor  so worthy in its administration that a revolution is out of the question.  In general there is a rule that if one is going to go a distance in political action which is beyond the norm and involves risk then it is actually less risky to undertake greater changes than are absolutely necessary (without going too far) because a society that does so will have to risk fewer constitutional transformations and is more likely to live long and prosper than is one which must go back twice as  often to those borderlands of “the state of nature” where constitutional changes are created. So I propose the elements of this fourth section as reasonable and perhaps in a certain sense necessary but not as minimalist unavoidable necessities. These are changes which cannot be undertaken lightly. The new regime I have laid out for our consideration reasserts a more affirmative social structure which would enable many social problems to be addressed more directly and comprehensively than in our current society. It is a white supremacist constitution obviously but it also redistribute wealth in the form of public lands transfer from States, counties, municipalities and the federal government to non white constitutional jurisdictions. Further, these lands would also be comprised disproportionately of lands seized in tax  and other actions –thus while not all lands in the new Jurisdictions would be owned by the new Juris dictions much of the land in many of them would be. Some would be restricted in use but much would be available for sale into the private sector and lease. In addition while I favor cutting off programs to elevate these racial groups into the middle class within the states, cutting off the cost of integrating schools (without allowing public schools to be de jure 100% segregated either), cutting off the cost of imprisoning the unemployed and hopeless masses caused in part by many of our social polices I would create a single simple rule. Half of one percent of all revenues of any State government would go to aid programs for the needy in all of its neighboring non-State  Constitutional Jurisdictions and one and a half percent of all state revenues will be divided among the capital improvement programs of all neighboring non-State Constitutional Jurisdictions. The Federal Government would also be obliged to fulfill ten percent of all its contracts from non-State Jurisdictions. In addition to this there would be the horse-trading aspects of the legislative and electoral process and the access to the military among other forces to promote greater racial equality. However, There would also be a countervailing system of set-asides to accentuate the social structure. There would be some few named high offices only available to State citizens, a citizen of a Possession could not rise above the rank of Colonel in the US military and no citizen of a Territory could rise above the rank of a two star general. The residents of Colored Districts in States could not stand for election to any statewide elected office and State Citizens of the North East Asian Districts of a State could not succeed another such citizen as governor or chief magistrate nor serve more than two total terms nor could they hold more than one US Senate Seat from any state for more than one year.  These things are controversial, But they are nothing compared to where I am headed in this part of this posting.  I am so far pressed by what I view as extreme circumstance to urge these changes. The writing and declaring of these goals and opinions is more likely to do irrevocable harm to me and to what little reputation and fortune I may still have than they are to result in the achievement of the objectives described.  

So in the first three parts I suggested the creation of Censors and Electors for Life, the expansion and transformation of the Congress of the United States and the redrawing of the map to include Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands as well as creating fourteen new Territories and seventeen new Possessions. Those are radical changes to which I added the Major Compacts and Minor Compacts with their governments and new zones on the map as well. Much more ambitious change than is ever proposed by anyone serious.  A working out of the details of the Governments of the Major Compacts begins to push us into the changes that really go against the flow of events in our Union for a very long time. The Major Compacts should be governed by an Executive and Judical Board (and of which I will only mention here that these Boards will have equally voting seats and only a few members and that the Elector for Life of the Compact will be one of those seated) to which we shall return and a Compact Legislature which we have already begun to discuss. Compact Legislatures would be formed by A Council of Nobles in the Upper Chamber and a Compact Assembly in the Lower Chamber. Half the seats of the Lower Chamber will be filled from the Roll of Kindreds for the Compact but the means of filling those seats shall be diverse including both wide and limited elections, random selection among all Family Associations, ex-officio seats in the Roll’s Administration, rotation among family associations and seats auctioned off to qualified family associations. The other half of the seats in the lower chamber will be appointed by the legislatures of all member Constitutional Jurisdictions in the Compact.  The Upper Chamber should be a Council of Nobles divided more or less into three blocks composing 25% of the seats each and two blocks composing 12.5% of the seats each. The three larger blocks would be the Ordinary Nobility, the Nobility of the Sword and the Nobility of the Robe.  The two smaller blocks would be the Nobility of the Chamber and the Nobility of the Games.  All seats would vote equally and each Major Compact would in its charter state with clarity the manner in which each block seats it members but all those entitled to sit in a block are to be subject to a process of changing ratios — in other words the number of Nobles of a type may change but the number of seats will be constant. No more seats will be added unless added to all blocks according to their proportion and approved by the entire legislature. Leave the Ordinary Nobility aside for now except to say  a portion of these seats will go to Chiefs of the Name certified by the Roll of Kindreds and to other familial leaders of similar rank so certified. The Nobility of the Sword will be all general officers and retired general officers in the militaries of the member Constitutional Jurisdictions in the Compact and all those of the Rank of Colonel or higher in the US military.  Nobility of the Robe will be made up of high-ranking academics, clerics and judiciary officials as described in the Charter of each Compact. The Nobility of the Chamber will be made up of the Governors or other chief political executives and their immediate inferiors as well as leader of the legislative chambers of all Jurisdictions and any and all US Senators, Tribunes and Censors from member Jurisdictions of the Compact. The Nobility of the Games will be made up of the Olympic Medalists from the Compact as well as other who have been elected or selected from among lists of other types of competitive champions. Despite the name this would not only includes athletics and Games but other competitions as well.  Later in this posting I will return to a special function of this chamber alone.     

Now I have gotten to the final part of my four-part posting on the American Revolution.  If the revolutionary changes described up until this point were carried out in the context of an American Revolution that would create a much stronger and more just country than we have today. Such changes are vastly out of sync with what is discussed and proposed in Washington and in most of the United States of America as political options.  However, I think that I general our Founding Fathers  and the responsible leaders among the Revolutionary leaders thought that in time our republic ought to evolve into an Empire but that it should do so in a good and free way (they never equated freedom and democracy). I assert (AND YES I AM ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS ABOUT THE GENERAL THRUST OF THIS ALTHOUGH IN LIFE AND WRITING I AM SOMETIMES KNOWN FOR SARCASM) that the next large constitutional transformation of this society ought to be into an empire. I propose that this reconstitutionalized country should have two official names “The United States of America” and “The Federal American Empire of the United States”.

Eventually my proposal for a transition from Republicanism to Royalism will have to have a separate post on “American Royalism” or “Fulfilling Plans of Empire” that are not part of this blog post in four parts with deals with new revolutionary change in and of itself.  The mere basics can be mentioned here but all of the votes I propose would still exist, the federalism would still exist, the Censors and Electors for Life would exist as described. The Electors for Life would now elect the Emperor as well if we went all the way to royalism. Yes, an elected Emperor could be fully royal. The Holy Roman Emperor was elected, the Pope ( who is a Royal Monarch of an odd kind) is elected, the Kings of England before the Norman Conquest were elected, The King of Poland in recent centuries was elected,  Numerous Royal Chiefs and High Kings of Scotland and Ireland have been elected. There is also this dirty little secret which doubtless the United Kingdom would feel the need to deny if this were an official US document — QUEEN ELIZABETH’S FATHER AND PRINCE PHILIP’S GRANDFATHER WERE BOTH ELECTED KINGS. Thus if Charles become King of England then he will have a grandfather and a great-grandfather who were elected kings of different countries.  However this system would be like the Holy Roman Empire and Poland and the Pope and ancient England in that the elections would be regular and a matter of course not exception.

There would be a change in the title of the Executive elected every four  years and some of his powers and duties would be reduced but mostly the Emperor would fill a different role. Emperor would have a fulsome executive power over a central governance outside the Constitutional Jurisdictions and the Federal government per se. Even this government would have two broad types of land in its sway. First, the District of Columbia and the Federation of Compact Zones  would be  in the Direct Imperial Government category along with a substantial one time grant of lands currently owned by the Federal Government and administered by the federal Land Management bureaucracy.  This would consist of several components all governed under the same and independent body of law and procedure. However, this law and  procedure would acknowledge yet another subdivision of  the lands involved there would be the Fiefdoms made up of lands bought or granted from the Federal governments and State Governments and organized as estates of various kinds.  There would be a seventy-five yard band of Royal Fiat Zone around the land borders of every Territory and ten percent of its coastal boundaries that would be added to the lands taken from the States where these are created from State Lands. The  same basic rule would apply to the Possessions except that these would be one hundred and fifty yards wide. These interior bands would occur along with another set of lands.   In addition to these  buffers between constituencies  there would be a cession  of bands of five hundred yards to Royal Fiat Zones along all land borders between the United States and Mexico as well as between the United States and Canada. There would also be a cession of the same band width for ninety percent of each State’s riverine borders and fifty percent of each state’s Great Lakes borders with these countries and where the States retained coastal lands they would grant a very extensive Continuity Right of Way for infrastructure projects. There would only be a small base granted on Texas’s  southern Gulf Coast some where near the end of its land border  with Mexico.  For those living outside of either the Direct Imperial Government lands or the Royal Fiat Zone the Emperor would not rule or govern very much but rather he would reign and be Head of State while operating a few bureaucracies and a serving as Judiciary of Last Resort for the Federal system.    He would appoint the Special Vice President  for each Major Compact who would preside over the Executive and Judicial Board of each Compact.  Each Executive and Judicial Board would be composed of the Speaker of each chamber of the Compact Legislature, the Elector for Life for the Compact and the Commander of the Compact’s Cavalry Honor Guard. There is a lot which will be left out of this post about a royalist regime but one thing that must be addressed for such a post as this to be in any way genuine as a serious piece of revolutionary literature which is what I intend it to be. To do this  I need to discuss the royalist tradition which is relevant in America and tied to America. 

In the empirically unlikely event that the United States converts to a royalist system within a short time the Monarch if they are to be in any very good sense a Monarch and in any very good sense both royal and royalist will have a lot to do in terms of creating and restoring, both renewing and establishing royal and royalist culture. Hawaii can certainly still be restored to a royalist culture it can both influence a new regime and it can be influenced to conform to the New regime. Using the Councils of Nobles which I have mentioned the ideal Ordinary Nobility would be a mix of new titles and some renewed from worthy preserver of such color of right to those titles  as French, English, Spanish and other powers have left in good families of committed Americans upon our shores.  However, while I am constrained by space and unable to really do a decent job of presenting these ideas I am going to suggest that there is a royal line, tradition and apparatus which has pre-eminent claim to an American Empire for many reasons and that is the Arcadian — Acadian royal line.

This line is almost entirely unknown for a variety of reasons. There is a great deal to take in and almost no chance to weave it in coherently in this post. Yet it is imperative that we try to do so.      

the first really key point is that the real roots of the American Revolution occurred in a larger colonial context.  I am going to recommend a book that does not declare ( as I do here and now) that the Acadian expulsion (loosely described in Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline)  were a principal cause of and stimulus to the American revolution.  But it does show the connections of this event to the revolutionary ferment in a broad contest. In this regard I recommend Leach’s book.  http://www.amazon.com/Roots-Conflict-Colonial-Americans-1677-1763/dp/0807842583#noop 

Secondly, I want to show that the destruction of Acadie was a large and significant act. That it had everything to do with creating a British profile and character the Americans could distrust and that in their early history the Acadians had both elements the Americans were eager to restore to their experience of the British Constitution and also the chivalric and aristocratic values which I argue that we need to restore today. In which regard there is a recent book by John Mack Faragher:  http://www.amazon.com/Great-Noble-Scheme-Expulsion-Acadians/dp/0393051358  to understand the British view of how great and wealthy a land the Acadians had created and how eager they were to have its wealth for themselves.  The Acadian experience is deeply tioed to the American experience as a whole.

Two men whom I know (one much better than the other and neither all that well) have also written books that are relevant to this theme and discussion Carl A. Brasseaux has written The Founding of the New Acadia and Acadian to Cajun.  Meanwhile Warren Perrin has handled the appeal for the Apology from the Queen of England and Scotland and has discussed this journey and its partial success in the book Acadian Redemption. Le Grand Derangement or the Great Upheaval brought Acadians to all parts of the Thirteen Colonies before they were settled in Louisiana successfully in 1765 by the King Joseph Broussard Dit Beausoleil. During their scattering they did not get on well with the general population and there times were sad and bad mostly. But that does not mean that they did not have a powerful influence in turning the minds of their fellow North American Colonists against the English Government.  Even if it had only been the example of their suffering they would be the most likely true proximate cause of the Revolutionary ferment in America. But in fact we know they had vast network of communications and logistics with which they reassembled small groups of survivors from many parts of the world to found the New Acadia in South Louisiana. Res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself and although they have been cheated of that recognition and sought to conceal it just as they have been cheated and concealing of many other things  the American Revolution is profoundly tied to and rooted in the Acadian experience and expulsion. It can also play a role in the new American Revolution if it comes.

 In the Acadian Constitution is the resource for a royalist Empire that is truly American the Kings of the Acadians are not directly mentioned as such in any of these books but the Basileus Arkadion (or Arkadios) is elected from those most eligible in a complex line of succession. Tests of merit, election and heredity are all required. The Arcadian Bouletherion would have to be fully and openly re-established but it has in its ancient history been hybridized. They would supply the majority of electors but the US Electors for Life and other Peer Electors could also vote. Thus Americans as a whole would always have some voice in their Sovereign’s selection without doing violence to his tradition which would be very difficult to achieve anywhere else from existing options. The Keys to the Line of the Basileus Arkadios have always been known to very few as have the remnant of Acadian government in the Ethnos Arkadios (or Arcadian Tribe translated fully into English). These elements of Comites, Ridelles, Courires, Loups Garous, Gran Famille and Prince Chef de Gran Famille are very seldom mentioned by anyone. They are almost ignored in the public works of the Acadian Renaissance in recent decades. Nonetheless the Acadian royalist system might still be saved to come to America’s aid should it desire a royalist system. There is no European descended culture more North American than the Acadian and Cajun culture.  The Acadian system would also have some of the advantages of cost from both systems. In a royalist system the cost is contained if it works properly because a few facilities and people are paid  a lot for their role and this is not done away with so that over time one build up great capital with limited expense in royal hands. Ina republican system costs are contained over time if it works well because standards are lower for all the executive accoutrements. In Acadian lines since 1604 no great fortune has ever been in Kingly hands ( nor for hundreds of years before by the terms of European Royalty) and Arcadian and Spartan royals were often austere in the mists of time’s long past. This has not usually been so much deliberates it has been part  of the historic reality. Nonetheless, compared to other precedents one could bring to a truly Imperial USA this set of traditions has  the most apparent low price tag.

The Titles of the Emperor would include “Emperor, Supreme President and Extraordinary Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America”. Among the perquisites of the Emperor he would have the White House as his Imperial residence. Some duties of the current Presidency would go to him but many would remain in the hands of an official to be titled “First and Executive Vice President, ordinary Commander-in-Chief and High Imperial Political Minister” of the United States of America”. This person would become a Censor on retirement by right, would have a Deputy First Vice President elected on his ticket and doing many of the same things in the same ways as the current Vice President. The First and Executive Vice President  would reside in the Naval Observatory and would have a country residence as well provided by his office.    The Emperor should be part of a royal house and an imperial house but should be elected by a conclave and this conclave would include all of the ninety-four Electors for Life already described as well as an entirely random selection of a standard size Grand Jury of US citizens and Forty Peer Electors not guaranteed to be part of the Elections of the eight-year President. These Peer Electors would be seated in the Electoral College should the eight-year President not be elected on the second ballot.  They would vote for three more ballots before the Presidency would pass to the House of Representatives. The Peer Electors would include the long secret Princely Chiefs of the Acadians — The Prince Boulet, The Prince Theriot, The Prince Broussard, The Prince Mouton and The Prince Leblanc as well as some more tenuous titles new to the Regime in the form they would take but tied to the Acadians. They would include the King or Queen of Hawaii but they would largely include scions of old families with claims who were selected for this special honor partly because given their claims they had agreed to conform to the Acadian three-part succession system of heredity trials of merit and election. They would also include some key leader of religious, academic and at least one Masonic organization who have played a large role in the Republican era and have the qualities to pass things on with a title over generations. 

This essay is open to thousands of instances of many kinds  attack and has little chance of success if not attacked. Yet it is my heartfelt opinion that its four parts provide the best map of a way forward. I also believe doing nothing is always making a very big set of big and small choices that can be costly.