A Perfect Union

The preamble to our Constitution begins with, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..."

We have been unified many times in our history. During our revolutionary war, and wars such as WWI and II. We came together in the 60s to fight for rights and freedom. We united after 9/11. And, workers have formed unions over our history to stand up to the robber barons of industry. I'm not convinced the founders understood the importance the word union would play in our history, but it has been the glue that has kept our nation together. Which begs the question:

Why are the conservatives, the far-right wing of the GOP, so anti-everything that is intended to help people? Some examples follow:

• Anti-women’s right to decide how their bodies are used
• Anti-immigration
• Anti-LGBTQ+
• Anti-Gender identification 
• Anti-climate rescue
• Anti-DEI
• Anti-vaccination
• Anti-history
• Anti-free speech/protests
• Anti-open voting
• Anti-academia

In every one of these areas, their planned policy changes attack one group of people or another—women, immigrants, LGBTQ+, Transgender, scientists, educators, protestors, and minority voters. None of their programs is designed to help anyone other than corporations or the wealthy. You can sum the GOP agenda up in a few words: anti-human rights and pro-wealth.

Our nation was founded on the dream of breaking the chains of English tyranny and promoting the rights of the people. Not all of the founders indeed agreed with these principles back then. John Adams thought democracy would lead to anarchy.

Benjamin Rush and Elbridge Gerry thought democracy was evil. Fisher Ames compared democracy to a fiery volcano. George Washington believed democracy led people to make bad and emotional decisions. James Madison wrote that democracies are short-lived and violent and didn’t trust the majority to make the right decisions. Alexander Hamilton wanted a more moderate government without extremes and that democracy could lead to another monarchy. John Jay thought religion would make democracy better.

Many of our founders were at least successful if not wealthy, and many were wealthy. While having a rough beginning, Alexander Hamilton rose through the ranks of the military and government to emerge quite well off. He revealed the common sentiment of class hostility and prejudice against the poor when he wrote:

“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government… Can a democratic assembly who annually revolve in the mass of the people be supposed steadily to pursue the common good? Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy…”

For decades in this country, only the landowners and the gentry were permitted to pursue a higher education. Every effort was made by the upper class to exclude the working class from participating in government based on the belief that the workers were somehow less intelligent than the gentry.

The ruling class has always depended on promoting the ideas that they are superior to the working class. Those seeds of discrimination toward the common people, the working classes, have existed since the beginning of civilization, and they continue today in our version of the aristocracy in people like Trump, Musk, and the billionaires surrounding Trump. Human history is full of examples of the rich and powerful looking down on the masses.

It would be naive to believe that anyone in the upper class will give the working class anything more than the bare minimum to keep us satiated and quiet. The slave mentality that common people are a necessary evil to do the work the aristocracy needs done has never gone away. Obviously, almost 80 million under-informed voters believed Trump's lies that he would help them, and that mistake is already coming home to roost as they see their meager savings gobbled up by tariffs and inflation and their medical and social benefits being stripped away, all so that the ruling class can give themselves tax breaks.

Though there is doubt that Benjamin Franklin really said, “We must all hang together, or we will all hang separately,” it is still as accurate today as it was during our revolution, no matter who might have said it. That is the heartbeat of democracies, unions, and any organization that people form to do battle with the ruling class.