Dear Dr Dawkins (@RichardDawkins), (and all interested others);
The US was constructed as a REPUBLIC (rule of law) under the NATURAL LAW (inviolable sovereignty, reciprocity, duty) under CONCURRENT democracy (concurrence or regions and classes) and COMMONALITY (concurrence of decisions regardless of regions) in resolution of disputes in court.
This is why we had the house elected by local population (families), Senate elected by the legislature (industry), and Presidents elected by electors (activist elites) of STATES. This exists to defend minority rights and to PROHIBIT majority desires. Meaning that the government must be given permission by the CONCURRENCY (agreement) of the states, and NOT the majority of the population.
This is because the USA is a union of STATES not a country. (which a Brit should understand given the composition of the UK – despite the UK’s lack of documented foundations.)
In other words the People and their States are sovereign and not the federal government. Similarly american citizens are largely sovereign unlike the UK, where parliament is sovereign and not the people, and where the constitution is unwritten.
So just as Europe is failing to produce a federal power equivalent to the united states because of regional differences (states)n – and failing (despite french designs to rule europe), while the US is devolving from the federal power back to the states to empower cultural differences in regions – because federalism failed once the continent was conquered and the world wars ended.
I am affectionately devoted to you and your work. But you are demonstrably but understandably, like many educated elites in the UK, possessed of the odd presumption of moral supremacy under the illusion that we all ‘can obtain and perform our rights as Englishmen’ despite twenty five hundred years of demonstrated failure of that presumption from the Hellenes to the present.
It may be true that the ‘rights of Englishmen’ if adhered to are all but indistinguishable from Natural Law, and that those elites are in fact most virtuous in the world – but that does not mean the rest of the world is, much of it is, or ever can be. There is no wisdom of crowds whenever the crowd can vote itself a discount at the cost of others past present and future.
The secret of the west, aside from individual (familial) sovereignty, resulting in limits on authority, generating demand for consensus, and debate to produce it, in turn requiring truth-before-face, consists in the informal and form institutionalization of the demand for responsibility for self, private and common in exchange for political participation. And in the postwar period, we see the contradictory demand for equality in responsibility of political wisdom against the efforts at redistribution, irresponsibility, unaccountability, because of individual irresponsibility for personal private and common.
So in this rare case I must disagree with you. Even though european criticism of Trump is understandable, americans (and british as well) are no longer demographically and economically capable of preserving anything more than the anglosphere – the world has caught up with us, and in some case is surpassing us, and as such we cannot afford to ‘carry’ world defense of the international system we developed to encourage peace through human rights, democracy, and free trade, finance, and international law.
WIshing it was so is not a reason for moral criticism of reaction to the world as it is, and will likely remain, as it returns to a conflict of civilizations, the attempted return of empires, and the attempted return to imperial demand for autarky by controlling trade, trade routes, and resources.
Affections
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
Reply addressees: @RichardDawkins
