To Organize the Sovereign People

To Organize the Sovereign People PDF Author: David W. Houpt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813950511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book explores the struggle to define self-government in the critical years following the Declaration of Independence, when Americans throughout the country looked to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania for guidance on political mobilization and the best ways to create a stable arrangement that could balance liberty with order. In 1776 radicals mobilized the people to overthrow the Colonial Assembly and adopt a new constitution, one that asserted average citizens’ rights to exercise their sovereignty directly not only through elections but also through town meeting, petitions, speeches, parades, and even political violence. Although highly democratic, this system proved unwieldy and chaotic. David Houpt finds that over the course of the 1780s, a relatively small group of middling and elite Pennsylvanians learned to harness these various forms of "popular" mobilization to establish themselves as the legitimate spokesmen of the entire citizenry. In examining this process, he provides a granular account of how the meaning of democracy changed, solidifying around party politics and elections, and how a small group of white men succeeded in setting the framework for what self-government means in the United States to this day.

To Organize the Sovereign People

To Organize the Sovereign People PDF Author: David W. Houpt
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813950511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book explores the struggle to define self-government in the critical years following the Declaration of Independence, when Americans throughout the country looked to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania for guidance on political mobilization and the best ways to create a stable arrangement that could balance liberty with order. In 1776 radicals mobilized the people to overthrow the Colonial Assembly and adopt a new constitution, one that asserted average citizens’ rights to exercise their sovereignty directly not only through elections but also through town meeting, petitions, speeches, parades, and even political violence. Although highly democratic, this system proved unwieldy and chaotic. David Houpt finds that over the course of the 1780s, a relatively small group of middling and elite Pennsylvanians learned to harness these various forms of "popular" mobilization to establish themselves as the legitimate spokesmen of the entire citizenry. In examining this process, he provides a granular account of how the meaning of democracy changed, solidifying around party politics and elections, and how a small group of white men succeeded in setting the framework for what self-government means in the United States to this day.

Our Republican Constitution

Our Republican Constitution PDF Author: Randy E. Barnett
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062412302
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A concise history of the long struggle between two fundamentally opposing constitutional traditions, from one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars—a manifesto for renewing our constitutional republic. The Constitution of the United States begins with the words: “We the People.” But from the earliest days of the American republic, there have been two competing notions of “the People,” which lead to two very different visions of the Constitution. Those who view “We the People” collectively think popular sovereignty resides in the people as a group, which leads them to favor a “democratic” constitution that allows the “will of the people” to be expressed by majority rule. In contrast, those who think popular sovereignty resides in the people as individuals contend that a “republican” constitution is needed to secure the pre-existing inalienable rights of “We the People,” each and every one, against abuses by the majority. In Our Republican Constitution, renowned legal scholar Randy E. Barnett tells the fascinating story of how this debate arose shortly after the Revolution, leading to the adoption of a new and innovative “republican” constitution; and how the struggle over slavery led to its completion by a newly formed Republican Party. Yet soon thereafter, progressive academics and activists urged the courts to remake our Republican Constitution into a democratic one by ignoring key passes of its text. Eventually, the courts complied. Drawing from his deep knowledge of constitutional law and history, as well as his experience litigating on behalf of medical marijuana and against Obamacare, Barnett explains why “We the People” would greatly benefit from the renewal of our Republican Constitution, and how this can be accomplished in the courts and the political arena.

Sovereign Citizens

Sovereign Citizens PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The sovereign citizen movement combines radical anti-government activism with well-placed lies and carefully structured conspiracy theories about the origins of the United States. Inside, the author exposes the strange, the interesting, and the dangerous, and deconstructs, decodes and deflates the global sovereign citizen movement. The most elaborate conspiracy theories often contain a morsel of truth. This is certainly the case when it comes to the sovereign citizen movement. This movement is not structured, and it has no leader. Yet its ideas have spread around the world in the past thirty years. From the United States to the United Kingdom and all the way to Singapore, you can find instances of sovereign citizen activists splashing the headlines and popping up on YouTube. Most often, sovereign citizens defy the police when they are pulled over for breaking traffic laws. A sovereign citizen will tell the police that they have no lawful authority, no rightful jurisdiction and that they work for a "corporation" known as the United States. Usually, this does not end well for the sovereign citizen. Sovereign citizens will also spread their anti-government activism in YouTube videos, in fraudulent court filings and through elaborate moneymaking schemes where they pose as lawyers and judges. These con artists have swindled millions of dollars from the United States government and perhaps much more money from regular citizens. This book explores the origins of the movement, the conspiracies that form the foundation of the movement and the common words and actions that sovereign citizens adopt and use. Joe Pometto is a licensed attorney in Pittsburgh, PA and a United States Air Force veteran. He also has a YouTube channel called "Attorney Audits Agitators" where he analyzes encounters with sovereign citizens and other movements that brush up against the law.

Constituent Moments

Constituent Moments PDF Author: Jason Frank
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391686
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Since the American Revolution, there has been broad cultural consensus that “the people” are the only legitimate ground of public authority in the United States. For just as long, there has been disagreement over who the people are and how they should be represented or institutionally embodied. In Constituent Moments, Jason Frank explores this dilemma of authorization: the grounding of democratic legitimacy in an elusive notion of the people. Frank argues that the people are not a coherent or sanctioned collective. Instead, the people exist as an effect of successful claims to speak on their behalf; the power to speak in their name can be vindicated only retrospectively. The people, and democratic politics more broadly, emerge from the dynamic tension between popular politics and representation. They spring from what Frank calls “constituent moments,” moments when claims to speak in the people’s name are politically felicitous, even though those making such claims break from established rules and procedures for representing popular voice. Elaborating his theory of constituent moments, Frank focuses on specific historical instances when under-authorized individuals or associations seized the mantle of authority, and, by doing so, changed the inherited rules of authorization and produced new spaces and conditions for political representation. He looks at crowd actions such as parades, riots, and protests; the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s; and the writings of Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. Frank demonstrates that the revolutionary establishment of the people is not a solitary event, but rather a series of micropolitical enactments, small dramas of self-authorization that take place in the informal contexts of crowd actions, political oratory, and literature as well as in the more formal settings of constitutional conventions and political associations.

The Terrorist Next Door

The Terrorist Next Door PDF Author: Daniel Levitas
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429941804
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
September 11, 2001, focused America's attention on the terrorist threat from abroad, but as the World Trade Center towers collapsed, domestic right-wing hate groups were celebrating in the United States. "Hallelu-Yahweh! May the WAR be started! DEATH to His enemies, may the World Trade Center BURN TO THE GROUND!" announced August Kreis of the paramilitary group, the Posse Comitatus. "We can blame no others than ourselves for our problems due to the fact that we allow ...Satan's children, called jews (sic) today, to have dominion over our lives." The Terrorist Next Door reveals the men behind far right groups like the Posse Comitatus - Latin for "power of the county" -- and the ideas that inspired their attempts to bring about a racist revolution in the United States. Timothy McVeigh was executed for killing 168 people when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, but The Terrorist Next Door goes well beyond the destruction in Oklahoma City and takes readers deeper and more broadly inside the Posse and other groups that comprise the paramilitary right. From the emergence of white supremacist groups following the Civil War, through the segregationist violence of the civil rights era, the right-wing tax protest movement of the 1970s, the farm crisis of the 1980s and the militia movement of the 1990s, the book details the roots of the radical right. It also tells the story of men like William Potter Gale, a retired Army officer and the founder of the Posse Comitatus whose hate-filled sermons and calls to armed insurrection have fueled generations of tax protesters, militiamen and other anti-government zealots since the 1960s. Written by Daniel Levitas, a national expert on the origins and activities of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, The Terrorist Next Door is painstakingly researched and includes rich detail from official documents (including the FBI), private archives and confidential sources never before disclosed. In detailing these and other developments, The Terrorist Next Door will prove to be the most definitive history of the roots of the American militia movement and the rural radical right ever written.

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution

Sovereignty, International Law, and the French Revolution PDF Author: Edward James Kolla
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107179548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This book argues that the introduction of popular sovereignty as the basis for government in France facilitated a dramatic transformation in international law in the eighteenth century.

The Sovereign Individual

The Sovereign Individual PDF Author: James Dale Davidson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439144737
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Now featuring a new preface by Peter Thiel Two renowned investment advisors and authors of the bestseller The Great Reckoning bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century. The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization. Few observers of the late twentieth century have their fingers so presciently on the pulse of the global political and economic realignment ushering in the new millennium as do James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. Their bold prediction of disaster on Wall Street in Blood in the Streets was borne out by Black Tuesday. In their ensuing bestseller, The Great Reckoning, published just weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev, they analyzed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union and foretold the civil war in Yugoslavia and other events that have proved to be among the most searing developments of the past few years. In The Sovereign Individual, Davidson and Rees-Mogg explore the greatest economic and political transition in centuries—the shift from an industrial to an information-based society. This transition, which they have termed "the fourth stage of human society," will liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government. This outstanding book will replace false hopes and fictions with new understanding and clarified values.

Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing

Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing PDF Author: Stuart A. Wright
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139464752
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This book explores social movements by analyzing an escalating spiral of tension between the Patriot movement and the state centered on the mutual framing of conflict as 'warfare'. By examining the social construction of 'warfare' as a principal script or frame defining the movement-state dynamic, Stuart A. Wright explains how this highly charged confluence of a war narrative engendered a kind of symbiosis leading to the escalation of a mutual threat that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. Wright offers a unique perspective on the events leading up to the bombing because he served as a consultant to Timothy McVeigh's defense team for eighteen months and draws on primary data based on face-to-face interviews with McVeigh. The book contends that McVeigh was firmly entrenched in the Patriot movement and was part of a network of 'warrior cells' that planned and implemented the bombing.

Jacobin Republic Under Fire

Jacobin Republic Under Fire PDF Author: Paul R. Hanson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271047928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
It is time for a major work of synthetic interpretation, and this is what The Jacobin Republic Under Fire offers.".

Sovereignty Or Submission

Sovereignty Or Submission PDF Author: John Fonte
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1594035296
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
The International Criminal Court claims authority over Americans for actions that the United States does not define as “crimes.” In short, the Twenty-First Century is witnessing an epic struggle between the forces of global governance and American constitutional democracy. Transnational progressives and transnational pragmatists in the UN, EU, post-modern states of Europe, NGOs, corporations, prominent foundations, and most importantly, in America’s leading elites, seek to establish “global governance.” Further, they understand that in order to achieve global governance, American sovereignty must be subordinated to the “global rule of law.” The U.S. Constitution must incorporate “evolving norms of international law.”Sovereignty or Submissionexamines this process with crystalline clarity and alerts the American public to the danger ahead. Global governance seeks legitimacy not in democracy, but in a partisan interpretation of human rights. It would shift power from democracies (U.S., Israel, India) to post-democratic authorities, such as the judges of the International Criminal Court. Global governance is a new political form (a rival to liberal democracy), that is already a significant actor on the world stage. America faces serious challenges from radical Islam and a rising China. Simultaneously, it faces a third challenge (global governance) that is internal to the democratic world; is non-violent; but nonetheless threatens constitutional self-government. Although it seems unlikely that the utopian goals of the globalists could be fully achieved, if they continue to obtain a wide spread influence over mainstream elite opinion, they could disable and disarm democratic self-government at home and abroad. The result would be the slow suicide of American liberal democracy. Whichever side prevails, the existential conflict'global governance versus American sovereignty (and democratic self-government in general) will be at the heart of world politics as far as the eye can see.