Are the Republicans in California Planning to Subvert both America and Islam?
by Dr. Robert D. Crane
What should genuine revolutionaries, like born-again Reaganite Republicans, as well false revolutionaries, like the utopian followers of Che Guevara, think of the current Republican shenanigans in California? The Republicans want to abolish the “winner takes all” system in the Electoral College for California, because otherwise the Democrats would take the state and win the national election next year. The Republicans, however, would like to keep the present system in Texas, because it would disenfranchise the Democrats.
The Democrats would like to abolish the Electoral College of indirect voting for the presidency everywhere because they believe in a national system of one-man one-vote. This Democrat scheme, however, would be political bida’ or destructive innovation, because our Constitution enshrined the wisdom of states rights, whereby the majority in each state determines the entire vote of the state.
The Democrat system of democracy would be ‘bida because it runs contrary to the sacred nature of the individual person. According to America’s Founders, sovereignty begins with the person (under the higher sovereignty of God), ascends upward through the community (states and perhaps higher regions), and then ultimately to the so-called National State (recognized in international law as the sole sovereign), which derives its authority from the emanation of the individual person’s responsibilities, rights, and powers upwards. The State, which may govern many nations (as in Iraq), therefore should have limited powers and only over very limited issues, restricted to those that the lower levels cannot handle alone. This is the wisdom of what is known in natural law as subsidiarity.
This community-oriented system of democracy is embodied in the universal principle or maqsud of haqq al nasl in the universal code of rights known in Islamic jurisprudence as the maqasid al shari’ah. This duty to respect the nuclear family and its expression in moral community is also the definition of con-federalism or a loose federalism as advocated by Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the American Declaration of Independence. In the Preamble he put “justice” as the highest purpose of the American union of states and listed freedom last as merely its product. The traditionalist American system of democracy is merely a tool to pursue justice. It has meaning only within this context as a means to promote its ultimate purpose which is to secure the dignity and sacred nature of every person and of their chosen communities.
Democracy as an institutional means to pursue justice therefore must include economic democracy, because this is the key to political democracy. Money talks! In economic democracy all the institutions of society should function to broaden capital ownership and reduce the wealth gap, both nationally and globally. This is why oil in Iraq should be demonopolized by issuing to every resident an equal voting and inalienable share of stock in a private oil company, so that Iraq’s major natural resource is not owned defacto by foreign oil companies through a central government in Baghdad. The people in Iraq then would not think that they have to kill each other to control the central government or perhaps simultaneously to kill each other in order to destroy it.
In the governance of an Iraqi hydrocarbon corporation, each nation should have an owners’ union to project the wishes of the regional shareholders’ upwards. This would be the equivalent of the Electoral College in America, so that both economic and political power would ascend upwards through communities rather than downward from the special interests, both domestic and foreign, which often serve to distort individual self-determination.
What has gotten into the Republicans, who at least until recently have seemed willing to discard both in America and in Iraq every value that gave rise to the Great American Experiment in order, justice, and freedom? America was founded as a republic, not a democracy. The Democrats, as a generalization, have never understood genuine democracy, because they are secular collectivists who accordingly like centralized power. The Republicans, however, who de facto are traditionally America’s only religious party and therefore respect the highest dimension of human rights, should know better.
Perhaps the only really good Republican is Barack Obama, because he believes in the natural law of compassionate justice. He respects government, which Ron Paul does not, but Obama recognizes its inherent danger as the sole legitimate owner of a monopoly of coercion. They are both revolutionaries, but Obama is more Islamic.