CLASSIC ESSAYS: “Dictatress of the world”: A prophetic 200-year old warning is ignored to our peril

Draft of the Declaration of Independence presented to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on June 28, 1776. (painting by John Trumbull, 1819)

 

Until the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Western world was a grim place. Power was concentrated in the hands of a small group of megalomaniacs who never had enough wealth and power. They exploited their own people and often waged war against neighbors in order to acquire even more power and wealth.

Indeed, by far the most fundamental problem that the American Founding Fathers faced was how to prevent a group of people from concentrating power in its hands and establishing a dictatorship.

Building a radically new form of government is precisely why we speak of the American Revolution and not merely the War of Independence. The true revolution is found in American political philosophy.

While the first shots in the anti-colonial war against Great Britain were fired in 1775, the U.S. political system today was only established and ratified in summer 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The Founding Fathers devised an ingenious solution to mitigate the inherently dangerous and corrupt nature of state power. At the Constitutional Convention they unveiled the concept of the separation of powers: Vital state responsibilities are divided among competing branches of government. Each checks the power of the others, making a dictatorship very difficult to engineer.

In addition, power was further divided by a federal system, whereby each state had the authority to rule in its jurisdiction according to the will of the local population. This brilliant system suited the young United States, which in 1787 stretched almost 1,500 miles along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, from frigid Maine to subtropical Georgia.

Truly it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of Man, the most dangerous predator on Earth. The Founding Fathers understood this loathsome fact about human nature. So their goal was to build a new Republic that would restrain state power and offer people some protection, even in an imperfect system with severe growing pains (and which exploded into civil war in 1861).

John Quincy Adams at home in Massachusetts; photo 1843, by Philip Haas

The above phrase uttered by Adams before the House of Representatives is well known, but scholars rarely quote what he said next. Here’s more of his speech, which helps us to understand the moral predicament of U.S. foreign policy today.

“[The U.S.] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…
“[The U.S] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence,
she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....”

Those prophetic words were said 200 years ago and are well known today to our foreign policy elite. However, they deliberately ignore and disregard Adams’ warning. Clearly, the temptation of power and wealth are too great. Foreign adventures are very profitable for the American ruling class. Just look at the conflict in Ukraine.

In the 1960s the U.S. went abroad ‘in search of monsters to destroy’ and became ensnared in the quagmire of Vietnam that killed roughly a million Vietnamese. Then in 1990, and in 2001, we invaded the Middle East ‘in search of monsters’ (First Gulf War, the War on Terror) and left many countries in that region in even more chaos, poverty, and despotism, destroying the lives of millions of people.

U.S. crime. My Lai massacre iconic photo (March 1968)