2nd Republic Failed...

5fish

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Here a Historian pushing a notion... Reconstruction was a chance at a 2nd Republic a just Republic...

 

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We rose and fell....


Like many historians, Sinha bemoans the fact that Lincoln’s party, which once cheered abolition and equality, mutated into a coldhearted pro-corporate entity indifferent to rights denied to large segments of its citizenry, and unfriendly to a labor force comprised principally of foreign nationals. Tragic indeed, but how surprising was that? The origin of the Republican Party, after all, was a coalition of former pro-business Whigs, disaffected Democrats, nativist “Know Nothings,” and racist, antislavery free-soilers—most whom despised the tiny minority of abolitionists who clung to the fringes. Antislavery and abolition rarely overlapped in those days. And in 1860, abolitionists were split over whether to endorse Lincoln. Even later, emancipation and civil rights were ideologically dominant in the party for only a very brief period. With the Union restored and slavery outlawed, Republicans cynically returned to their roots.
 

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Here is another thought on our 2nd Republic...today 3rd Republic is coming...


But strikingly, the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is also fought over in a very different way. This is the concept of “corporate personhood”, which has been used by the Courts to give corporations the same rights under the 14th Amendment that people have. As Mitt Romney once said “corporations are people too, my friend”. Hillary Clinton now supports a new Amendment to upend that idea.
 

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What America could have looked at.... in 1878... Watershed Democracy... @diane

"Watershed democracy" refers to a concept where political and administrative boundaries align with natural watershed boundaries, rather than the traditional, often arbitrary, lines of states, counties, and cities. This approach aims to improve natural resource management, particularly water resources, and foster more effective and localized governance.


Watersheds know no political boundaries. Except for the borders of a few of the United States, this adage is true. Most watersheds include many state, county, and local governments and this “balkanization” is what makes watershed management so complex.

 

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Within this grand frame, Sinha narrates the rise and fall of what she calls the "Second American Republic." The Reconstruction of the South, a process driven by the alliance between the formerly enslaved at the grassroots and Radical Republicans in Congress, is central to her story, but only part of it. As she demonstrates, the US Army’s conquest of Indigenous nations in the West, labor conflict in the North, Chinese exclusion, women’s suffrage, and the establishment of an overseas American empire were all part of the same struggle between the forces of democracy and those of reaction. The main concern of Reconstruction was the plight of the formerly enslaved, but its fall affected other groups as well: women, workers, immigrants, and Native Americans. From the election of black legislators across the South in the late 1860s to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the colonial war in the Philippines in the 1890s, Sinha narrates the major episodes of the era and introduces us to key individuals, famous and otherwise, who helped remake American democracy, or whose actions spelled its doom.
 
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