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To: x
x wrote:

What Woods, a founding member of the Southern nationalist League of the South doesn't say is that Jefferson's and Madison's views changed over time.

Or; -- perhaps their views were corrupted by party politics.

Some of the things that were done in the late 1790s, from Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts to Jefferson's call for nullification make poor precedents for later Americans:

Why is the concept of nullification a "poor precedent"? It could serve well to check & balance our current rush to socialism, no?

in those days the two parties were convinced that their opponents were out to establish a tyranny, so that all manner of countermeasures were permissable. Confronted with serious party divisions for the first time, the founders interpreted them in terms of the violent enmities of the Revolutionary years, and didn't always come up with what later generations considered to be the best solutions for running a two-party system.

I'd say our present day "best solutions" are losing us our Republic, wouldn't you?

50 posted on 01/13/2005 5:22:02 PM PST by jonestown ( Tolerance for intolerance is not tolerance at all.)
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To: jonestown
Maybe, but when you examine other countries where one group has a veto power and continually threatens to break up the country or actually does split off they doesn't look like any improvement over what we have now.

Had the Anti-Federalists, nullifiers, or secessionists gotten their way, after some years we might look more like one of those unfortunate "failed states" in the poorer parts of the earth. That's something Woods and his fellow Rockwellites don't consider.

I'd agree that government can be a great enemy of human freedom. But I'd think more of such critics if they addressed the problems of countries that didn't succeed in establishing or maintaining the basics of government. They're not Utopias.

51 posted on 01/13/2005 5:36:47 PM PST by x
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