ABSTRACT
The American system of power began in a simple public covenant, the Mayflower Compact, drawn up by the Pilgrims onboard ship before landfall in America. The role of power is to conserve initiative. This is a paradox, and a very American paradox at that. The paradox of paradox is that the delicate balance it insinuates can be overturned. When this happens, liberty ends in despotism or in nihilism. But this is the exception, not the rule. In traditional political theory and practice, increasing the scale and extent of state power meant conquest. That was the norm of historic kingdoms and empires. Self-government proved exceptionally difficult in the post-bellum South. Republican Party scallywags and carpetbaggers, freedmen and former slave owners, Democratic Party redeemers and recalcitrants alike treated Reconstruction as a rort. The paradox of the American foundation. It incorporates, indeed produces, the antitheses of liberalism and conservatism, beginning and continuing that animate American political life and the opinions of its citizens.
