Skip to content

Taking Power

  • by

[ed. note: This same pattern that happened in 1850 is happening today, in local, state and federal governments, plus in libraries, school boards, universities, the court systems, and more. Your local public school and universities are at risk from this same tactic.
“Enslavement for Racial Dominance -or- Money & Power.” This is now the fight going on within today’s Republican party. After gaining power and dominance, they are fighting amongst themselves over slavery or money. Whichever side wins, you will lose.]

…In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.

The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.

In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.

Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on….

Read the entire article here:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-12-2025

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *