How to Brainwash a Nation

When government is decentralized, "The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State."

Centralize power and political factions will tear the country apart in their hunger for control. The Senate kept federal power in check before the 17th Amendment was passed, which, in the words of Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter,, "was perhaps the single biggest step away from federalism and the original constitutional design toward mass democracy and a consolidated national government. With the Tenth Amendment well on its way to becoming a dead constitutional letter, with an open-ended Commerce Clause in place to fuel unlimited growth of the national government’s reach, with a revenue-generating and behavior-regulating national income tax in place, and hard currency now able to be replaced by freely printed paper money at the Fed, direct election of Senators completed the necessary and sufficient conditions for a complete consolidation of political power in the hands of a unified national government."

Hat tip: Campaign for Liberty