Creating A Moralless Society.

The American economic and political model,as opposed to the British Imperial one, wasn't built upon enslaving more and more people as part of its forward projection. Just the opposite. No where have we ever built machines of mass slaughter as the British did in India or the Nazi and communist did across their empires.

Yes we had slavery, and it's immediate dissolution was an insurmountable obstacle to national unity at the Constitutional Convention. However that very Constitution put in place structures and indeed obstacles to its long term growth and the power of the states where the practice still held sway.

The genius of Hamilton's vision was that a developing domestic industry would build the physical machinery that once applied to agriculture would make slave labor economicly inefficient and obsolete. His failure was that he could not foresee the intransigence of the Southern plantation class's stuborn rejection of industrialization and social modernization or the England's willingness to exploit it for their own gain and to undermine the republic tself.  


Our founders for the most part envisioned steadily improving social and economic conditions, not impossible dreams of government enforced perfection. Perhaps their greatest vision was their realization that social conditions and technology will always drive what is perceived as best for current and future generations and the key to that was keeping government out of the way of individual inventiveness as much as possible. The struggle between Hamiltonian individualism and natural progression and Jeffersonian egalitarianism goes on.


Rather than grasping that the American Revolution and its Constitutional government were natural out growths of the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment and the traditions or parliamentary representative government they doubled down on their opposition to everything it stood for. The result was not only the War of 1812 but was also a contributing factor in  Southern intransigent opposition to industrialization and clinging to a cotton/slavery based economy that remained largely dependent on English textile production as a source of income.


Had they instead entered in an economicly and politically cooperative relationship a hundred and fifty years earlier, not just with the US but with the rest of their colonial empire, human social and economic progress for all involved would have advanced far quicker and perhaps would have averted a lot of unnecessary wars and death.  Indeed socialism itself may have never set root beer as deeply as it has.


So now here we are, approaching two and a half centuries into our history and we have all but fully regressed into the moralless, might makes right perspective of British Imperialism. We have all but forgotten that our Revolution was based in a desire to bring morality into the structures of government and international relations.