POLITICS: Liberty OR Empire: You Can’t Have Both – USSA News

“Empires, by Pride & Folly & Extravagance, ruin themselves like Individuals.”

Benjamin Franklin wasn’t merely reciting history; he was warning us.

Because every empire follows the same script. And while the common themes are overextension, debt, or even running the printing press, those are merely symptoms of the deadly disease.

The root cause is always the same: Consolidate power. The eventual destruction of liberty and final collapse are guaranteed.

And now, it’s our turn.

This is the story of how empire destroys liberty, because liberty must die for empires to live.

THE STRUCTURE OF RUIN

First, the pattern. The architecture of empire is designed to centralize power, and as Jean Louis De Lolme explained, this is poison to liberty.

“Thus, for instance, the total ruin of the Roman Republic was principally brought about by the exorbitant power to which several of its Citizens were successively enabled to rise”

Machiavelli showed the inevitable next steps. As power consolidates, the ruling class abandons the hard work of defense for the comforts of the palace, buying off potential enemies and disarming the people.

“The Romans continued their high-minded course so long as they enjoyed liberty, but when they submitted to the rule of Emperors, and these Emperors began to be corrupted, preferring the shade of the palace to the sun of the camp, then they also began to buy off the Parthians, the Germans, and other neighboring peoples, which was the beginning of the ruin of this great empire. These are some of the unhappy consequences of disarming the people.”

That palace corruption is no accident. It’s baked into the system. As Thomas Gordan made clear, it’s not just about bad people with power, it’s structural and virtually inevitable.

“But in wide and over-grown empires, especially where all depends upon the will and care of one, let his heart be ever so upright, a thousand evils and injuries will be done, which he can never hear of, nor they who suffer them have the means of representing to him; and which probably are done or connived at by his own deputies, whom he employs to prevent or punish them.”

With this as a foundation, Montesquieu warned that it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when.”

“Empires, like men, must encrease, decay, and be extinguished.”

THE ANTIDOTE

Montesquieu argued that size is the primary enemy of self-government: a republic must stay small to stay free.

“IT is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own”

The larger and more powerful the republic gets, the more likely it will have self-interested  rulers who destroy the country from within.

“he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious by oppressing his fellow-citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country.”

The Founders knew these warnings well. During the ratification debates, the Anti-Federalist Cato warned of that same scenario playing out under the new system.

“Whoever seriously considers the immense extent of territory comprehended within the limits of the United States, together with the variety of its climates, productions, and commerce, the difference of extent, and number of inhabitants in all”

He warned that the union would be too large, with too diverse a people in the different states, to deliver on the core promises in the preamble to the Constitution.

“the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and politics, in almost every one, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidated republican form of government therein, can never form a perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to you and your posterity.”

Even those who supported the new Constitution admitted that a lust for glory and imperial power is a terminal disease. John Dickinson identified this “thirst of empire” as the primary killer of republics.

“This is a vice, that ever has been, and from the nature of things, ever must be, fatal to republican forms of government.”

THE ENGINE 

Empire requires a specific mechanism to strangle liberty: consolidation. Thomas Jefferson identified this as the single greatest destroyer of rights in human history.

“What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? the generalising & concentrating all cares and powers into one body, no matter whether of the Autocrats of Russia or France, or of the Aristocrats of a Venetian Senate.”

And Thomas Gordon warned that destruction of liberty is part of a death spiral that results in the collapse of the empire itself.

“To increase power is, no doubt, the maxim of these princes; but their practice generally contradicts it, while they lessen their people and their wealth to enlarge their territory; every addition of this kind being an addition to their weakness: And therefore great empires, from the moment they are at their height, are in a continual decay;”

Empire is a zero-sum game. The state grows rich and powerful specifically by making the people poor and weak.

“the decay and discouragement of the people being the unnatural means of their first growth; and indeed their increase contained in it, and carried along with it, certain seeds of decrease and desolation.”

Patrick Henry recognized that this history has no exceptions. He warned that consolidation was the most destructive threat the new republic could face.

“Dangers are to be apprehended in whatever manner we proceed; but those of a consolidation are the most destructive.”

STRATEGY AND FORCE

The descent into tyranny doesn’t happen overnight. Emmerich De Vattel explained that sheer size can allow an empire to stand on its own for a while, but that doesn’t last forever.

“A powerful state may support itself for some time by its own weight; but at length it falls into decay; and this is perhaps one of the principal causes of those revolutions observable in great empires.”

James Otis Jr also explained that tyranny is a long process, and not a single, explosive event..

“A free government never degenerated into tyranny all at once, it is the work of years.”

As power grows and consolidates over time, abuses of power grow and expand with them. That’s exactly what the Anti-Federalist Brutus warned about, as this leads to people in power who believe they’re above the law.

“In so extensive a republic, the great officers of government would soon become above the control of the people, and abuse their power to the purpose of aggrandizing themselves, and oppressing them.”

To maintain this control, the empire requires a permanent military force. Thomas Gordon, in his Discourses on the Roman historian Tacitus, traced Rome’s demise to its standing army.

“Rome itself perished by her conquests, which being made by great Armies, occasioned such power and insolence in their Commanders, and set some Citizens so high above the rest, an inequality pernicious to free States, that she was enslaved by ingrates whom she had employed to defend her.”

John Trenchard stated this as a rule: You can have a standing army or you can have liberty, but you can’t have both.

“Great empires cannot subsist without great armies, and liberty cannot subsist with them. As armies long kept up, and grown part of the government, will soon engross the whole government, and can never be disbanded; so liberty long lost, can never be recovered.”

THE CHOICE

For Patrick Henry, the choice was clear: liberty OR empire.

You can’t have both.

“If we admit this consolidated government, it will be because we like a great, splendid one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy, and a number of things.”

Henry ended by reminding us what was at the core of America’s founding: the antidote to empire, liberty.

“When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different; liberty, sir, was then the primary object.”

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