by Stephen Neitzke

Although I've been looking at individuals and events from the people's point of view for that ten-plus years, I've only recently understood "The Silence."
 
Pro-people and pro-democracy "gentlemen" -- Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry, etc -- were a tiny minorty among thousands of predator elitist "gentlemen".  Their persons, fortunes, and families would have depended on their maintaining The Silence.  But Jefferson became a special representative of his faction and the people when he was asked to write the Declaration Of Independence.
 
The majority of predators intended the DOI to be a throw-away piece of propaganda, of course.  It's only real function was to get the contemptible commoners to fight so that the predators could be free of being second-class elites, subjugated to and taxed out of wealth by the British elites.  In the face of their intentions for the DOI, it's clear that Jefferson played a trick on them.
 
The DOI's great founding principles do not square with the pure representative government that the predator elitists had trumpeted for the new nation, beginning in the early 1770s.  And they do not square with the "traditional rights of Englishmen", taken from the 1689 English Bill Of Rights and written into our own Bill Of Rights after the Constitution was ratified.  However, closely examined, Jefferson's extraordinary, DOI-expressed founding principles do square with the 400-year governance of the Roman Republic.
 
Jefferson clearly wanted the US to have a traditional republican governance, with sovereign citizen lawmaking in charge.  We can infer that from many of his writings, even though he never says it directly.  He clearly trusted, however, that US patriots would fight for, live for, and see their nation though the promises of those extraordinary DOI principles -- for a very long time into the future.
 
Jefferson would also have understood that there was no hope for the way-undereducated majority to best the classically educated predators.  But he could plant those founding principles and trust us to make their connections with traditional republican governance when civil society became more educated.
 
Jefferson did what he could.  Other educated members of his faction would have read and understood.  They would have seen that it was a pretty good solution for starting the nation with proper principles, for hanging onto their own personal fortunes, and for delaying a political fight that they felt they could not win but that a later civil society surely would.
 
End of puzzle. 

Beginning of a stunning new argument for traditional republican governance.  We can have a solid continuity between what we fought for in the Revolution and all subsequent wars, and the political dynamic that is possible in the near future.
 
The ways in which the DOI's founding principles square with traditional republican governance are unavoidable, irrefutable facts. 

Hey, predators -- spin this.

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