‘Serpent in Eden’: Whats really behind all the foreign meddling and partisan politics

I read a great book while on my recent trip to Washington D.C.  It wasn’t a book specific to Washington politics and history, and it is generally available by Tyson Reeder called Serpent in Eden.  I found it at Mt. Vernon, Washington’s home, and it seemed like something I’d be interested in since it dealt with foreign meddling and partisan politics in James Madison’s America, a kind of not much talked-about period between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.  A lot of political activity during this period got lost in the various wars that essentially shaped America as a new nation that is worth discussing.  I think people assume that they know American history if they know the basics of the Revolutionary War, that the Constitution was signed soon thereafter, and that George Washington was the first president.  But that really doesn’t begin to cover it all.  The Serpent in Eden is a really remarkable, tightly packed book with a lot of detail and would take a general understanding of history before really absorbing it.  It views the world through the eyes of James Madison, the tiny man but brilliant mind who shaped the Constitution and served as the fourth president of the United States.  But he was writing the Constitution as America was trying to figure itself out, and Washington was trying to preside over everything as a country was trying to start from scratch on an idea of individual liberty, which was a completely foreign concept at that time.  In many ways, it is because of one straightforward term: “We the People.”  The world didn’t understand what that meant, so they didn’t have much respect for the new country.  They did respect George Washington, but they didn’t understand the idea of willfully giving up power and returning to the farm after service to the people was completed. 

To understand the problem we have today with foreign meddling, which George Soros would be a good example, and just one of many, this particular period at the start of the country is an interesting story.  Because America had its original 13 colonies that it was trying to make a country out of, but there were still French holdings along the Mississippi River, Spanish in Florida, and England smarting from their Revolutionary loss and plotting to retake its colonies once a few years wore down the rebels hanging out in Canada, where the French were still hostile and had alliances with the many Indian tribes.  All those forces were plotting and scheming to use America to leverage their enemies, specifically the French against the English, and all early politics centered around these factions of Anti-Federalists, who became Republicans against Federalists, the early version of the big government advocates.  The trick was how to have a big enough government to deal with all these hostile countries that weren’t too big to suppress the will of the people it was supposed to serve.  The English and French thought such a concept was hilarious, so they posed a constant threat by looming in the background attempting to tamper with elections to swing policy in a direction of their liking.  There are a lot of lessons in the truly remarkable story of how America survived all this tampering to win the War of 1812 with Madison in the White House and having to escape before the British burnt it from the inside out.  It was a tight walk on a razor’s edge to build the kind of government we see today, and given the ambitions of globalism and not wanting America to exist at all, you can understand the real problems of our day by seeing how people saw things from the very beginning.

I was in the right mood to read Tyson’s new book, as it had just recently come out.  It was available at all the leading book outlets, but Mt. Vernon has a wonderful gift shop, as you would expect, and it was the kind of book you could get as a souvenir that captured the area and circumstances of America’s birth.  I was at Mt. Vernon trying to see the start of the country the way that George Washington would have seen it.  Not the way that historians with a very shallow grasp of history would have.  These were real problems that reside in the hands of our current Supreme Court as they try to keep our country as close to that razor’s edge as possible.  But it’s hard on a good day because America was never respected, and it still isn’t today.  What is respected is our version of capitalism, which produced a lot of wealth, and people around the world wanted a piece of that wealth.  But our system of government for the people was never understood.  Because nations were built around the concept of sovereignty, such as Napoleon Bonapart, who was Emperor of France, he could speak as a representative of the whole French people.  Or King George in England.  If George Washington was going to give power back after two terms in office, then who represented the government?  These fighting politicians in Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and others?  So, of course, in the chaos of all that political contemplation, the nations of the world plotted our demise, as they still do because they don’t understand how a government can serve the people rather than the people serving the government as one people who then dealt with the world.  It was not an easy idea to flush out.

So, the Serpent in the book is all these foreign whispers trying to steer America in a direction beneficial to them, just as the serpent tempted Eve to eat from the apple.  So, too, is the business of foreign lobbying, which is a big problem today and is at the heart of the tariff war Trump puts forth.  But there’s a secret in the background of all that, which really emerged from this period with Madison and the War of 1812.  And the Louisiana Purchase and Westward expansion in general.  The world does not know what to do with free people, who a regional monarch or emperor can’t control.  It hadn’t ever been done in the world, and it’s still perplexing to all nations.  And their only defense against it isn’t armies, but in political narrative.  They had infiltrated both political parties in America. As a result, essentially leaving “We the People” without any accurate representation, violating the Constitutional merits Madison and others worked so hard to perfect and for our Supreme Court to hold so tightly to the vest, as a matter of principle.  The defense against the various serpents in our political system of foreign meddling and influence was that the American concept was too big to alter.  That’s how Jefferson ended up with the Louisiana Purchase.  Napoleon never thought America would survive long enough to do anything with the land, so he thought it was a safe bet.  But he lost power before America fell.  The English were trying to push everyone into decline and never thought a country without a military could win a war against them, but Andrew Jackson ruined all their days, and the Spanish too.  All the hostile elements, including the conspiring Indians, were betting on America to fail, but it survived anyway.  Because the brilliance of the Constitution made us too big as a country to fall into such minor grabs of power.  The idea was more significant than the military plots of conspiring nations, which makes us more important than other nations.  Our ideas for personal freedom are more lofty than any other government on the face of the earth or in human history.  It is extraordinary and a big step for the human race.  And it was a real work of a miracle coming from human minds during a very tumultuous time.  

Rich Hoffman

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Why America is the Best: Understanding Gideon and George Washington

While visiting George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, I was very interested in why it is OK for us to say that America is the best country on earth and that we should preserve it very boisterously.  And why George Washington?  Well, we named our capital city after him and think of him as the ultimate Founding Father, the pacesetter who started something new in the world, and we have measured everything thereafter with him in mind.  So, what made George Washington so great?  And why do Americans feel like they must always tell the world that they are the best and greatest?  Our form of government is by far the best, and it’s an unquestioned reality.  But if you’ve ever traveled the world and dined with acquaintances from other countries, and you’re watching a news report in which someone from America comes on and says that America is the best country on earth, it can get a little weird. In that case, it can be a little uncomfortable because the people you eat at the table think the same about their country.  What makes it more accurate for us in the United States than for them, whoever they are?  That’s happened to me a lot of times.  Yet, I think Americans should say such a thing because I believe our form of government is superior to that of anywhere in the world and that we should be proud of it.  We should even brag about it like we do.  But why?  You can understand something instinctively, but to actually “know” it requires much more understanding and perspective, which is undoubtedly the case with this topic.  And now that I’ve visited Mt. Vernon with my wife, George Washington’s home, I think I understand it much better.

I think the key to understanding why America is the best country in the world is literally a “key.”  The key that George Washinton used to hang in the entry to his house that his friend and long lost adopted son Marquis de Lafayette gave to him that used to be the key to the Bastille’s main gate, once the French stormed it and destroyed it as a symbol of tyranny during the French Revolution.  George Washington kept it to show how a country can overthrow tyranny, and even though the French Revolution got well out of hand while the American Revolution slightly before it was much more civil and orderly, the reminder that the people ultimately have the power to rule over themselves was represented in the key, which Washington understood as literally the key to setting up a proper government for the people and by the people.  George Washington liked his house so much that he didn’t want to be away from it with commitments to power and was always reluctant to achieve any high office.  But as to that as well, why?  Then, of course, you would have to understand the Bible, the primary literary entertainment at the time of these revolutions, and the forming of our country.  They didn’t have television shows or music to entertain themselves with thought, but they did have the Bible.  And George Washington would have shared the Bible with just about everyone pursuing a life of thoughtful understanding.  One thing that I have always thought about Biblical studies is that they are narratively, really insightful, psychologically.  I’ve read most of the foundation religious texts of the world, and I can say that the Bible is a brilliant enterprise that served as a good guide through the foundation of a new country.  It was the first to figure itself out, as the Bible had spent the previous 1500 years being fleshed out as an idea.  And the ideas formulated in the Bible essentially laid the groundwork for the creation of America.  So George Washington, by way of dinner conversation, would have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the Bible with his dinner guests at Mt. Vernon, which would have happened all the time. 

I spent most of the previous year leading up to Trump’s election reading various books about George Washington because I felt that the world would need to understand what was about to happen, and to understand America, you have to understand George Washington.  And to understand that, you must understand George Washington’s home of Mt. Vernon.  So that’s what my wife and I did to celebrate Trump being back in the White House; we visited Mt. Vernon to unpack why putting Trump back in as President was necessary and why he should be so boisterous about why America was the best country.   It ultimately comes down to how George Washington thought and how much the Bible influenced him, especially the Book of Judges and the character within that book of Gideon, the military hero who saved Israel with only 300 men but was the reluctant hero always trying to downplay his efforts.  I often see our form of government as a republic as a deliberate attempt to fix the problems in the Book of Judges, where God wanted people to rule themselves. Still, the failure of the regional judges drove the Hebrew people to demand a king to rule over them. The wheels fell off the apple cart, leaving the kingdom to become divided by God’s anger after the death of King Solomon.

I think Washington modeled himself after Biblical characters with his approach to leadership and, most notably, Gideon himself.  Gideon’s conquests led to 40 years of peace during the rest of his lifetime. Still, before he died, he had made a gold ephod from the spoils of war that some Israelites began to worship. Once Gideon wasn’t around anymore, idolatry started to poison the minds of the people, and one of his 70 sons, Abimelech, led an uprising that killed all the others and drove them to a fallen society.  Thinking about human nature through this story, George Washington was trying not to make the mistakes of Gideon.  Rather than become just another corrupt king with multiple wives, like Gideon, Washington stayed loyal to Martha and kept himself grounded at Mt. Vernon all his life before and after the Revolution and his two terms as President.  George fought off the hungry temptation to be romantic with Sally Fairfax, the wife of his very good friend William, and the couple for which Fairfax County is named today.  But being inspired by Bible stories, Washington wanted to avoid those pitfalls and stayed grounded throughout his life.  However, once he was out of office, like Gideon’s sons, it was hard to pull together a republic without everyone fighting all the time, which was undoubtedly the case with subsequent presidents like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.  And like the story of the Book of Judges, leadership always failed.  And the way that America set up its republic form of government to resist those temptations, for society to call out for a king and to give them unlimited power, our government was built on the Book of Judges from the beginning to correct it.  That was certainly at the core of George Washington’s belief and why he thought the key to the Bastille was so important.  It was more important for people to rule themselves and to throw off the oppressors of social order than to conform to it.  Because once a person has collected such power, as the Bible shows, they all fail.  So Washington and our American form of government set everything up to resist that temptation and to give people just enough power, knowing that the faults of humanity were always very close.  And like his temptations with Sally Fairfax, he would keep those lusts cool and always on the back burner, where they belonged.  If a leader can’t govern their emotions, how can they govern other people?  Because of these concerns, and after several hundred years, they led to President Trump, who found that balance late in life on his own terms.  We can say that America is better than all other forms of government because it was built with these concerns in mind, which had previously destroyed every society people had in it.  And we have now sustained ourselves for many centuries on a premise of restraint, which George Washinton started, based on the Bible story of Gideon, the reluctant military general whom God worked through directly to save his people, even if only for a short time.

Rich Hoffman

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The Rebellion Against the Global Managerial Class: What causes all war

When the British were finally forced to leave New York after the Revolutionary War, as one of the final acts after their defeat at the Battle of Yorktown, they imagined that the Americans would fall apart as soon as they left the city.  But once on their ships, an officer remembered that he had left something behind in a home he had been occupying and returned to get it.  The ship landed, and the officer returned to the house and retrieved what he had left behind, which he had expected to be a dangerous enterprise.  But he was stunned, as was the rest of England, to learn that the Americans were capable of self-government and were better off with them gone.  The world in America was better without the micromanagement of an oppressive centralized force.  And that is still the fight we have to this day; a managerial class of bureaucrats is attached to globalism and wants every corner of the globe to submit to their authority.  People have a raw belief about other people and the role authority plays in their lives.  And the truth is, the kind of freedom demonstrated for the first time in the world, the creation of a new nation and a people who governed themselves was bound to occur at some point in time.  America was able to happen due to a unique period in history where shipping allowed for international trade and communication just enough to make a new country possible.  But it was still too big to have all these jealous managerial people poking their noses in everyone’s business.  For a few hundred years, America was left alone because, for one, it didn’t have much value.  So, most of the other countries in the world didn’t care much about what happened to America.  That is until it became one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and mass communications became possible. At that point, the same jealous people were thrust together into a conflict that is very much the story of our modern day.

When Barack Obama says that he doesn’t understand how we became so divided, as he did at a recent rally for Harris, as the poll numbers show his Marxist revolution in the American government is coming to an end, I don’t think he does understand his role in the mess.  He was brought into that micromanagement culture of government to be a kind of communist parent.  So, like that English officer returning to New York, this concept of self-government just doesn’t make sense to him.  And, of course, there are people within the United States and worldwide who are just as perplexed.  I would call them broken people who crave government to be a parent in their lives.  They are insecure people who do not sustain themselves properly, so they are attracted to group affiliations.  But what caused the Revolutionary War in the first place is the same desire behind the MAGA movement now.  Everyone is shocked by what they are seeing in global populism, much less government, because most people never dealt with the cause of freedom in the first place.  When we talk about a Deep State and an administrative state, we are talking about people who are personally insecure and who want to rule over people in a managerial class kind of way.  You see it at every level of society, where a superior bosses around an inferior for the joy of being in control over someone else.  And this is the essence behind all forms of globalism.  They want to control value so that they can rule over the people who want a piece of that value.  But they do not understand why people would not want to be governed by them.  Or why more value is created in a culture that rebels against a management class of overseers. 

Another common theme that has not been well understood is that the Revolutionary War was about who controlled currency.  One of the plans the English had for the newly found Americans was to crush their economy by flooding the market with counterfeit money, making all the pay and exchanges made to people worthless, and essentially destroying the effort of freedom because nobody could afford the basics in life, particularly on the frontier of private property.  This was a continued problem with George Washington, who had been very successful before he became involved in the war or the presidency.  For his efforts, he was paid with worthless money, just as everyone else was, and that misfortune lasted the rest of his life.  But Americans didn’t turn away from freedom over a lousy economy that perplexed the world and its managerial class overseas.  They never understood it, and that holds to this day.  The same kind of people who lost America to the Revolution are handling our money supply now, and they have been purposely trying to destroy our economy for the purposeful incursion of ruling over America from the newly created United Nations.  To answer Barack Obama’s question, this rebellion would always occur, even if it meant the destruction of our economy.  When that destruction was most utilized in a global policy with the creation of the Covid bioweapon that shut down the world economy, the opposite of what they thought would happen occurred.  Just as that English officer was surprised to see how Americans behaved once the managerial class of the English military packed up and left New York after that war of independence. 

The monetary policy of imposing control over those who were supposed to be happy as subordinates was never understood psychologically, so the world has made the same mistakes repeatedly.  And Americans were taught by all the wrong people about how the world was supposed to be.  What was ignored was how people wished to live, and those forces never reconciled.  And that is the heart of what we see in this current election.  People do not want to be ruled by a managerial class.  It doesn’t matter if it’s other countries, centralized bankers, aliens from space, the World Economic Forum, or China, no matter who it is. People don’t want to be controlled by a managerial class, and America shows the benefits of what freedom produces in people.  Even when attempts to destroy our economy were utilized, people did not rush back to the arms of global overseers; instead, they became more rebellious.  And are electing Trump to get the globalists out of our back pockets.  And the more managerial overseers try to keep their hands in our pockets, the more anxious we have become.  But none of this is new; it’s just that the world is finally catching up to the nature of all human beings.  They don’t want a micromanaging parental figure ruling their lives.  They want freedom from all that, and the next several years are going to be very surprising to those globalist types.  They never reconciled what that English officer learned that day in New York, which is just as accurate now as it was then.  There is nothing that this management class can do to change human nature.  Things will never be for them as they would like them to be because that is not the nature of human beings anywhere. 

Rich Hoffman

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I’m An Anti-Federalist: I’m never going to sign up for global communism or a life without the American Constitution

Since there is so much talk about revolution, law and order, and proper conduct for people and their government, let’s put a few things in perspective. Most of the people in the world are really dumb. Not because they lack intelligence but because they have not educated themselves and are entirely too dependent on the government education they received as kids and young adults, and their minds are rotten. This was a purposeful excursion into the world of control as the powers of the world have intended. One of the first things I did on this blog site was to establish that a couple of my favorite works of literature are the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. I consider the American Constitution to be one of the most important works of philosophy in the history of the world. And that trajectory will continue despite this current globalist movement toward borderless communism led by a new military power in the world, the aristocratic financiers. The trajectory of human experience naturally drives them toward more personal freedom, whereas the power structures using technology to facilitate it seek more centralized control resulting in the kind of divisiveness we see today. When governments try to take people where they naturally don’t want to go, people would have a moral, ethical, and legal right to stop them. I never signed up for a communist takeover of my government, so if a government tries to move in that direction, people naturally have a moral obligation to fight it for the sake of all future humanity.   Because of the poor quality of their education systems, most people don’t know what they should be thinking or doing. They just know what they feel even if their intellectual aptitude has been robbed from them deliberately by these corrupt forces to acquire power that has always been at the heart of the problem. 

When I say I love the American Constitution, I love it as a work of philosophy as part of the evolution of human experience that will continue along that many thousands of years of trajectory. That collision of personal freedom and expression is colliding with many millions of years of human beings clambering to be the village chief of their tribe and the centralized authority of their localized clan. People naturally want to be in charge of other people, even if people as a species are constantly growing away from that primal perspective. But I am not happy at all with the tone of the American Constitution.   I see Federalism to be entirely too restrictive and centralized, which is uncomfortably too cozy with big government solutions. During the debate of the original Constitution, I would not have been happy with the eventual Constitution, as I would have been aligned with the Anti-Federalist sentiment, such as Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. I live in the town named after the big-time Federalist Alexander Hamilton. But I would not have liked Hamilton. I think the world was done a great service when he lost the duel with Aaron Burr and that the world would be a lot better off if people still settled their disputes with one another with duels instead of hiring a bunch of pansy lawyers to go to court. Courts have been a poor substitution for the restitution of satisfaction. But, I have agreed to live in such a society under those rules, and its that settled Constitution that I have signed up for, even if I don’t agree with much of the big government approach that was in the final Constitution for which we have built our laws around as a nation. History now shows how wise such a Constitution was and how a country could prosper. So, it’s worth defending as written.

However, I view the Bill of Rights as a concession to the Anti-Federalist arguments, which is precisely what they were. I am personally to the right of the Bill of Rights by quite a lot. Much of my personal beliefs are to the right of Thomas Jefferson and other early Anti-Federalists, so what ended up in our Constitution naturally is too oppressive for me as it is. The Bill of Rights, which was added after the Constitution was ratified, was included to appease the Anti-Federalists. George Washington was a Federalist; I don’t talk much about him. He may have done a great job as a leader of his time, but he’s not the kind of person I’d sit down with and talk all night about philosophy.   George Washington was entirely too liberal for me. And that is even more true today for people who do their homework and read the Constitution and understand history; the conflicts being expressed presently are an attempt to reverse the course of the human race back to a dependent culture that runs contrary to the desires of all human beings. George Washington and his buddy Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were good people with roots still in the old aristocracy of Federalist ideas. While they rebelled against the crown’s control over the colonies, they still liked to play dress up and dance with the ladies as military officers. The Anti-Federalists wouldn’t even want the military because they could be used as an oppressive force against the rights of the people. 

This is why the notion that Trump supporters, or any hard-liner conservatives, are Nazis or fascists, or anything derogatory, is rooted in sheer stupidity. All those terms are along the scale of European socialism and communism as defined by Karl Marx and are not even considerations in American life, which evolved from the philosophy of the Constitution and the economic concepts identified in the great work by Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. Because global academics have ignored Adam Smith and embraced Karl Marx, that doesn’t mean they were right. All it means is that people trusted authority too much to question what was being taught and not ask the basic questions as to whether it should be taught, as most people would be better off without knowing anything about Karl Marx. But Karl Marx facilitated those immature urgencies in the effort for the village chiefs to retake the primal desire for centralized authority. The work of the American Constitution is what everyone should be studying and using to have successful cultures of their own. But as for global definitions, the political spectrum isn’t along the lines of hard Karl Marx and soft Karl Marx, but no Karl Marx all together. Global communism and socialism are not an option; for America, there is only one law: the Constitution. If we are dealing with a government that seeks to get rid of it in favor of something else if that’s the case, I’m to the political right of the Anti-Federalist types, and the fight will be along those lines. Not in digital currency, run by a bunch of dumb Marxists in Switzerland while debating the merits of cuff links over tea. I’m happy to live under the restrictions of the American Constitution because it has a history of working, even if it drives me crazy with too much-centralized government. But for those who want to get rid of that law, I think the world would be a lot better off with Aaron Burrs and the duels of satisfaction than the brain-dead stupidity of the Deep State bureaucrats. And if they want to go there, that’s on them.

Rich Hoffman

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What George Lang has in common with George Washington: Leadership is a thankless job that only the toughest can handle

For anyone who watched the very good Washington three-part series on The History Channel they were treated with a great reminder of several great elements that made that America’s first president so great. I have read several books on Washington and heard the story told many times in various documentaries, but this recent one was a bit different, perhaps because of the reflections of our own modern politics. As I write this the world is literally stunned that Bernie Sanders is the frontrunner in the Democrat primary and President Trump is in India attracting 110,000 people to the largest cricket stadium in the world. For many who only casually pay attention to politics, it would appear to them that the world is on fire and they are baffled as to the fuel that is burning it. But one thing that The History Channel show on Washington really drove home was how much famous figures like Thomas Paine despised George Washington at the end of his term and wished him well to leave politics forever, the guy who was the driving general who had won the war against Great Briton. In a lot of ways it reminded me of a domestic election in my state of Ohio where George Lang has several primary rivals and have targeted him as the established “federalist” and are nurturing the idea of “if only” someone new and fresh were elected, then everything would be great.

While my personal sentiments in politics are very anti-federalist, much more like Thomas Paine’s original writings and those of Thomas Jefferson, I admire the way that George Washington handled his first terms in office, especially how he quelled the tempers of Alexander Hamilton during the Whiskey Rebellion. Of course a country must enforce the laws it comes up with, but it should never lose sight of who they work for and so one of the thinnest lines in the history of the world started in America and was navigated by General George Washington in those early days of forging the country and there were many who hated him for it. George Lang of Butler County Ohio has had a similar experience, although not similar in the moments of war, but there were many political battles that George had to survive to enter into the 52nd House seat with a foot in the world of the old Republican Party and being one of the first Trump supporters to come out of the mainstream to support him. There were many political costs to that effort and George Lang managed to work through them with great effort, and a lot of hurt feelings.

But that’s the way it goes, and George Washington understood that contention came with the territory even if in the end he just wanted to be a farmer. To free mankind from the burdens of servitude in government with self-rule, was to unleash all their tempers and freedoms to express it. And that would of course lead to many contentious battles in American politics that has not eased up at all in the following centuries. Most people around the world feel the need for freedom, but few can express it as they can in America so by nature, there will always be discontent. Thomas Paine obviously sung the praises of Washington when Yorktown was won, or at Trenton. But once Washington had management power, like all members of management, the knives come out and everyone in the world thinks they can do a better job. The question is, do they have the guts and the skill, and I would argue that few other than Washington did. And regarding modern politicians like George Lang, they were forged in the furnace, and most people would melt away under such pressure. Their ambitions are always positive while they are on a yard sign, but once they get into office and those knives come out, they are easily overtaken, and the regrets happen fast.

And that was true on the national stage just as it is on the local level, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson had their own ideas about how the presidency should have been and were very critical of George Washington while the old general was president, but when they had their own turn, they of course had their own critics and in the hindsight of history, many could agree that George Washington did a great job, even fending off the militaristic efforts of his young friend Alexander Hamilton. We should all be so lucky that it was never Hamilton who became president but was in fact Washington. I see this as applicable to our Butler County region where George Lang is running for the senate because all these towns and cities in the county are named after those founding fathers, specifically Hamilton, Ohio which was so named as a direct consequence to Washington’s relationship to the Southwest Ohio area. History does repeat and the conditions of merit don’t change. And neither do the pressures. They are the same as they were in Washington’s time as they are now in the Ohio Statehouse. But the circumstances are modern as opposed to siloed into the past concerns where it took a lot longer to communicate from town to town, or country to country.

Anybody in any management position, whether its in government or in private enterprise will find it a lonely place to function from, and people by their very nature find control over their lives reprehensible, and will work to limit your management of them at every turn. The answer to the Bernie Sanders types who want to solve the problem with communism and just take away everyone’s freedoms so that everyone is equally miserable and hopeless is just another extreme way of dealing with the fundamental problem that anybody in management of any kind will be hated. They are loved during elections, but once the pressure is on to perform, the factions of hatred will increase essentially because people don’t like to be controlled, so anybody in that role will be heavily scrutinized. However, the trick is for the manager, or in this case, politician is to see how well they can function under scrutiny and do right when opposition is strongest.

That is what George Lang has that others simply do not and would take several decades of experience to develop. And yes, it’s a thankless job that only has benefit in knowing deep down inside that the world was made better by their work. Because the benefits do not come from the immediate gains of everyday life where literally everyone has a different vision for how things should be done and as a representative of many people, which any position as senator does, somebody is always going to hate you. What George Washington always had in mind was the big picture as it was evolved by Thomas Paine and other revolutionaries, even if those people couldn’t see it in practice themselves. Washington the leader could and held true to give our nation the jump start it needed where most everyone else would have failed. And that is how I see the efforts of George Lang of Ohio, it’s a thankless battle in the day to day world of politics, but he makes everything so much better with the big view of solutions that last into the coming decades. And that is ultimately how greatness is defined by history.

Rich Hoffman