I have long maintained that one of the big obstacles libertarians face in the achievement of a genuinely free society is the fact that most Americans honestly believe they are free. When people are convinced they are free, they have no reason to want to join up with us libertarians in our effort to establish a genuinely free society. Instead, they simply view libertarianism as a “weird” philosophy that purports to achieve what we already have — a free society.

In time for the autumn blues last year, Andrew Ross Sorkin delivered a riveting doorstopper-sized account of the fateful year 1929. What most people know about the 1920s revolves around endless optimism, dancing, underground bars, and speculative financial fevers.

“These are men who fight so that the product of their industry should not be the spoils of those who enslaved them; it is an ignoble war. The war waged by Pompey against Caesar charms us; its object is to discover who will be the party who will tyrannize the world; it takes place between men equally incapable of subsisting by their own efforts; it is a noble war. If we trace our opinions to their source, we will find that the majority have been produced by our enemies.”—Charles Comte, De l’organisation sociale, pp.

In his second term, Trump is clearly focused on building his legacy.

The idea of political unity has long been a popular trope and slogan in politics. “He’s a uniter, not a divider” is a sentiment that many American politicians like to cultivate about themselves. Over many centuries and across many jurisdictions we encounter the claim that unity is a political virtue, and that anything that “divides us” must therefore be condemned. Some even label opposition to unity as a type of treason. 

The Constitution had been ratified and was going into effect, and the next great question before the country was the spate of amendments which the Federalists had reluctantly agreed to recommend at the state conventions. Would they, as Madison and the other Federalists wanted, be quietly forgotten? The Antifederalists, particularly in Virginia and New York, would not permit that to happen and the second convention movement, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason in Virginia and proposed by the New York convention circular letter, was the Antifederal goal.