No Yeomen

Where are our yeomen? The Supreme Court is ruled by people who call themselves "originalists" and a certain political faction seems to rant on about the Constitution in direct proportion to their disregard for it, but those revolutionary times were super different from our own.

There were yeomen, or the equivalent, lower class people with land and therefore some stake in the society. Lower class, that is, in relation to the founders, who were upper class people. But the country then evolved with the ideals put in place by the upper class guys, enlightened ideas and ideals.

The ideals were inclusive, for that era. I think the Declaration and Constitution exhibit a kind of survey bias. The founding documents embody the Enlightenment idealism of the founders and only partly reflect the reality of their lives and the times, so the documents are aspirational to a degree. 

This is good, but it places a burden on us, the inheritors of those documents and their idealism. We have done okay, by the standards of the sad history of human governance. It didn't hurt that we were loosed on a continent full of unexploited natural resources with the know-how to exploit them.

And a continent largely depopulated by depredation and disease, depredation by us. It was our destiny, evidently manifestly. We got up a hell of a head of steam and then realized that the natural resources weren't in fact limitless. So we thoughtlessly embraced plundering other places.

Notably the Middle East, where God mistakenly left a lot of oil in the hands of heathen. Again the writing is on the wall. Those resources have a limit. And again it appears that thoughtless plundering is option number one. But why? And where are our yeomen or their equivalent?

That would be our disappearing middle class, people at least invested in the society, if not landowners, and engaged in primally productive stuff. That shit went to China, because of a political system corrupted by money and emptied of Enlightenment optimism and idealism. 

And this is to say nothing of the lower classes, which were increasingly enfranchised as the burden of those ideals of the founders played out in real life, but they are now super-screwed. Now all the good stuff goes to people unfamiliar with primally productive activity, hangers-on and inheritors of wealth. 

Everyone else is disempowered. They're internationalists, among other things, our new ruling class, and not rooted to any land, region or productive activity, unlike their predecessors. The whole system assumes this rootedness, enfranchisement and idealism. Without it we are lost.