Augustus and King Donald of Orange

Observation: Supporters of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 (ratified 1788) were a group of economic elites (bourgeoisie / merchant-bankers, 1%, choose your term), offered no guarantee of rights in the proposed governing document. It was only when they realized they would have to accede to demands for a list of guaranteed rights to get adequate votes for ratification that they agreed to a "Bill of Rights." So, the "Bill of Rights" was a concession that allowed fairly narrow approval of the document.

By contrast, the "radical" Constitution of Pennsylvania of 1776 was drawn up by working class delegates to replace the proprietary rule of the Penn family. A "Declaration of Rights" was the first thing after the Preamble. This document served until it was overthrown by a merchant-banker coup in 1790,

Historians refer to this era as "the Critical Period" and usually sing the praises of the bourgeoisie who pulled us through. This bourgeois document also contains the seeds of its own destruction, perceived and predicted by some observers at the time (Herman Husband, for instance). What we are witnessing now, with the rise of King Donald of Orange, is the natural fruits of putting the levers of power in the hands of an economic elite. This is analogous to the rise of Caesar Augustus in the 1st century CE. The consequences are much more dire now, however.

History under the History

There is a train of thought here that's plausible: The right-wing obsession with taking power from the liberals (i.e., FDR and the "New Dealers") and consolidating it beginning with the post-war period (much more can be said about all this, obviously): 1) Murder liberals with power and popularity to intimidate the others (note the slave-owner methodology here); 2) Murder civil rights reformers with power and popularity (even more apt analogy with slavery enforcement); 3) Escalate the "war" on left-leaning governments globally (beginning especially with the Dulles-led CIA in the early 1950s) ; 4) Escalating the war in Vietnam (bad move -- a set back with the public, although good for war profiteers); 4) Overcoming the "Vietnam Syndrome" (i.e., the anti-war movement), beginning with the invasion of Granada by Cowboy Raygun -- a fictional character cynically designed to pacify the American public); 5) Criminalization / financialization of the economy (didn't have far to go on that one); 6) Deploy a "new Pearl Harbor" to institute draconian responses and raise national fear levels ("we'll protect you"); 5) A global pandemic to further muddy the waters, consolidate wealth, property, and power, which plays into #3 where right-wing governments have been installed and supported militarily through the "power of the purse" of the US population and in the EU.

Just a very rough sketch -- and can actually be traced back much further -- A HuffPo piece on Fauci predicting the pandemic in 2017 inspired this (all-too-brief) commentary --

In researching my biography of Herman Husband, an 18th-century agrarian "liberation theology" kind of radical -- I've found that he would not be surprised by this kind of chain of events coming out of the consolidation of power represented by the merchant-banker coup of 1787 (we've been trained to call it the "Constitutional Convention") -- indeed, he predicted it.