The 1700’s were the seed plot of a paradigm shift that turned the government of nations and cultures upside down. The winds of change were sweeping over Europe and America as the cry of freedom was heard in  France, The American Colonies, and other parts of Western Civilization.  In short order, this change of thinking, would find the political philosophy revolutionized as the assumption of the Divine Right of Kings was being challenged and rethought .

The general assumption that power flowed downward from the top of the political structure was being rethought and in its place was a new perception: That power flows from the bottom up. Few nations in history captured that thought and provided a structure for it like the United States of America. The end result is a history rich in the rewards of that principle.

The United States did not become great and prosperous because of luck, some mysterious endowment or because we were smarter than the rest of the people’s on the planet. The exceptional nature of America grew out of the discovery of a principle:

Power flows upward, not downward.

Our Founding Fathers did not all agree as to the form and substance of our founding document or of the principles on which the nation would stand. They did agree that we should be a nation, independent and sovereign. Some argued for another monarchy and others for various forms of government. In the end, it was left primarily to Thomas Jefferson to write the constitution and to present it back to the other leaders. Whether by wisdom or by chance, this move provided the opportunity for Jefferson to articulate his mastery of political philosophy and his grasp of the principles of power into our foundations. While our founding was a joint effort of many minds, it was Jefferson who captured the principle that government should be of the people, by the people and for the people.

This shift of governmental concept changed everything. From all power being held by the king or dictator, power was held at the lowest levels of society. From all property and possessions being owned by the king or leader, the masses were given the right and responsibility to own land and personal property and to benefit from working their land. From a central form of economic management, free enterprise allowed for anyone and everyone to succeed. The experiment in freedom was born and the fruit of it verified the wisdom of the basic premise.

Other concepts of government and economics were to find root in the human family and were tested in the crucible of human experience. Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels espoused a system by which a strong central government would assure equality of rewards and make the results of everyone’s labor the same. But Communism was tested and found wanting. The end result of penalizing the industrious and rewarding everyone the same, exposed the problems of a top down management of human effort and economics. Communism, as high sounding as its objectives might have been, required the loss of personal freedom, personal property and the rewards available to those who create and compete in the marketplace of products and ideas. History is brutal in its testing of what we call a principle. History will allow for immeasurable suffering and pain in the proof texting of human ideas. They either work or they don’t. That should be the lessons of history.

But here we are, early on in the 21st century, having not necessarily learned how our world or how leadership works. We are once again toying with the possibility that we can reengineer the failed conjectures of Marx and Engels and make communism work. Nowhere is that general sense of a will to try to reengineer our nation more clear than in Barak Obama’s desire to fundamentally change America. We heard the phrase, but it was ill defined and we could not identify the core objectives until we could see the actions that identify what fundamentals were the target of this change. Now we know.

→ The massive shifting of our economic base, from private ownership of wealth to a national debt, greater than anyone ever imagined, signals a change that is diametrically opposed to Jeffersonian distrust of big government.

The use of public funds, borrowed from future generations of Americans, to bail out failed economic policies must have old Thomas spinning in his grave. The demonizing of those who have been successful and the demonstrations against the core marketplace of private economic support (Wall Street), clearly signals a departure from our nation’s founding principles.  The increased use of Presidential Executive Orders, to attain social and economic objectives, without congressional approval, clearly defined the will to fundamentally centralize power and revert to a power base where the top controls and the bottom has no power. The reaction of the grass roots, in the organizing of the Tea Party, signals that contrasting definitions of where power should be placed, are taking shape. We are now more able to clearly define what ‘fundamental change’ means and how this contrasts with our founding principles of government. A principle is a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth. It is true because it works. It works because it is true. It is a principle whether we follow it or ignore it. A principle cannot be altered or fundamentally changed. Its cause and effect relationship is not determined by what we want it to be, it just is!

So, as we define the future of the American Experiment on November 6th, 2012, it may well not be a contest between two competing personalities, but between Barak Obama, who clearly wants to abandon the principles of our bottom up system of government, and Thomas Jefferson, whose proposals of governmental principles have given us the exceptionalism, that we as a nation, have enjoyed.