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                                     Whether Black Nationalists have acquired the experience,                                                        autonomous theory, and moral ballast to furnish a table of                                                      laws, code of civic conduct, and the instruments of                                                                  statecraft to sustain a self-governing nation is the question                                                    republican governance theory asks.  


                                       W. Bernell Brooks lll


Introduction: 

Republics appeared on humanity's stage in the 6th century BC, heralding a radically new political concept: self-government by citizens for their own collective interests. Except for a few fleeting periods, kings, oligarchs, dictators, and the lords of capital--not the Commons--have dominated the planet, ruling by brute force, divine right, and deception.  

The rise of radical republics has been meteoric and brief: their fall was sudden and spectacular. Rome's behemoth first republic was vanquished by one man, Gaius Julius Ceasar. The regicide Oliver Cromwell's new model republic beheaded England's King Charles l, only to crown his son a decade later. France's 1789 Jacobin revolutionary republic self-immolated in the flames of Maximilien Robespierre's Reign of Terror that abolished monarchy, nobility, the Catholic Church, and Christendom itself.      

History suggests authoritarians, aristocrats, and capitalist ruling classes have a distinct advantage over radical republics for one simple reason. Republic's strength is also their greatest vulnerability--which is to say, the people are the government. When the citizens of a republic pursue personal, factional, utopian, or partisan self-interests over the nation's collective interests, the republic will perish. Ignorance and selfish appetites are to republics what cancer is to the body: certain death. 

The Vesey Republic's Theory of Elasticity is a governance theory that argues the Black Commons' intellectual frame, sophistication in the arts of advanced citizenship, epic struggles against racial domination, and ennobling ethical standards are uniquely suited to engage the republican egalitarian ideal.  

The Theory of Elasticity not only contemplates the dismantling of the old orders' system of economic, racial, and gender exploitation but also the creation of the first consciously designed post-modern non-heteropatriarchal state. 

The Vesey Republic is envisioned as a polity of fevered minds. One that engages its citizens' heady curiosities, explores the mysteries of science, medicine, and the environment, tilling the soil to ensure our food security, and aiding the oppressed of the Black Diaspora and Global Commons. Our theaters, parks, sports venues, festivals, and social gatherings will vibrate to the cosmos that elevated the Black Commons as a global juggernaut in cultural production. The Vesey Republic will be a magnet attracting the best Black talent and minds in the Western Hemisphere and from remote corners of the planet.

​Speaking of Marxism in his book The Wretched of the Earth, revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon observed that "A Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue."  Similarly, the Theory of Elasticity stretches republican governance theory to align its constituent elements with the unique portfolio of disparate West African ethnic slaves who grew to nationhood in the blast furnace of the American Empire's plantation system.    

Toward a Black Nationalist Theory of Republican Government

American Empire is now on a trajectory to collapse in the 2020s with no discernible means to effectuate a course correction. Buckling under the weight of hyper-partisanship, ecological apocalypses, and financial volatility rent by global decline, its disintegrating institutions are rendering the government unsustainable. Despite the January 6, 2021, Capitol Coup's failure to install Donald Trump as president-for-life, MAGA-Verse white power seditionists continue to probe the government's defenses to foment regime change.   
Should succession movements and civil war erupt, the Black Commons may find itself suspended in the chasm of existential crisis. Occupied by federal troops with divided loyalties between the government and white nationalists on one side and outgunned by privately financed white power militias who've prepared for The Day of the Rope on the other, the Black Commons could be forced to call for mass armed self-defense.  

Despite the odds, history suggests crises and civil wars have uncertain outcomes. Mass Black mobilizations could escalate from self-defense to self-rule. Revolts in majority Black cities might morph into fortress-independent city-states. The Calexit movement could secede from the union and negotiate an autonomous region for its three million Black residents. Ironically, California's Assembly Bill No. 3121, establishing a Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals produced a multi-billion-dollar reparations plan capable of seeding the infrastructure Black-led regional government.   

The accelerating confluence of events foreshadows a future in which the Black Commons cannot wait for crises to arrive on its doorstep before mapping a path to nationhood. Battles, if not wars, are often won before the first shots are fired. The greatest danger to the Black Commons is not who has the most guns or militias, but a failure of imagination--a strategic blind spot that squanders extraordinary opportunities that exist today to shape the future battlespace.  

New Black Nationalists foresee the possibility of multiple independent, Black-led polities emerging in a crisis moment in the 2020s. To resource these nascent movements with a framework to manage the transition from resistance to nation-state formation, New Black Nationalists drafted the Vesey Republic's Theory of Elasticity [ToE]. 

NBN's Theory of Elasticity articulates a theory of governance for newly independent Black majority states putting on the organizational structure of a radical republic. ​It expands originalist notions of the republic as a governing system committed to serving the citizen's collective interests rather than individual, ethnic, economic, or class interests. 

The end of government determines its best form or as one philosopher said, "From this principle, it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in a word happiness to the greatest number of persons, and the greatest degree is the best."

 The Theory of Elasticity posits the foundation of governments are embedded in the principles and passion in the minds of its people. To that end, Elasticity's alternative governing theory and model is a composite of the following elements informing the Vesey Republic's molecular structure, nature, and historical destiny.  

The Core Elements of the Theory of Elasticity

-- The Vesey Republic polities will be majority, Black-led multi-racial micro-states striving to build a new set of human relations across its social register. The architecture of those relations will be rooted in a new set of assumptions ordered by dismantling the old system of economic, racial, and patriarchal exploitation flowing from capitalism's matrix of domination. 

-- The Vesey Republic's project to reconfigure social relations as the fundament of a new national identity contemplates a new design of government and institutions. In essence, the Black Commons will be engaged in state-building and nation-building simultaneously. 

--  To undertake the social transformation needed to aggressively re-order society the Black Commons' government must be an instrument that unleashes rather than inhibits its people's genius for democratic change. Therefore, New Black Nationalists propose the Vesey Republic's governing design embodies a mixed Estates Parliament system combining a multi-party parliament with robust direct democracy referenda and initiatives as components empowering the Black Commons base. 

-- Consistent with the breathtaking scope of the Black Commons' unfinished agenda, the Estates Parliament system furnishes the instruments to facilitate mass participation of Vesey's middle and lower-income strata as the main force directing the affairs of the state. The power shift to women and the middle and moderate-income strata ruptures with the invisible hand of W.E.B. DuBois's Talented Tenth formulation as the dominant default Black leadership model during the past century.  

-- At the top of the Black Commons agenda is pursuing its national destiny of becoming the first post-modern nation designed to eradicate the heteropatriarchal state. At the same time as it works to reconfigure heteropatriarchy's vertical social hierarchy, the Black Commons will engage a transcendent nationalism (New Humanism) that endeavors to move the Black Commons beyond race as the enduring expression of its human destiny.  

-- The character of the Vesey Republic emancipatory project proceeds as the continuum of the Black Common's historic struggle for freedom, social equality, dignity, and humanity. The thrust of those endeavors worked to restrict and ultimately eliminate all manifestations of gender, economic, racial, ethnic, and national exploitation.   

-- The Vesey Estates Parliament's design anticipates the likelihood that an existential crisis in the 2020s could produce multiple forms of new Black-led polities in the form of micro-nation states, independent city-states, or autonomous regions. Therefore, the Estates' architecture is highly adaptable and politically supple enough to accommodate divergent administrative systems for provisional and perpetual government environments. 

-- Vesey Republic polities are conceived as unitary states with a federal system comprised of a national government structure, a women-led autonomous regional structure, and local government structures for entities that are not independent city-states.  

-- In the Vesey Republic schema, the size principle matters. From Plato's Republic's 5th century writings to U.S. President John Adams's Works on Government, the consensus view holds that republican self-government works best in smaller nations and city-states. NBN anticipates newly created, Black-led polities will be small in territory and population, thereby allowing the Black Commons to put its finger on the scale of statecraft. It's no coincidence that Denmark (pop. 5.8 million) is regarded as the most effectively governed country on the planet. Likewise, Switzerland (pop. 8.5 million) has more direct democratic input from its citizens than any other nation. 

-- The Vesey Republic contemplates underwriting a new economic model that serves the Black Commons' collective interests without state ownership of its core economic sectors. The 60-year New Deal debate with liberals insisting expert rational planning optimizes the economy for low-income and working people and conservative rants that small government, low taxes, market solutions, and austerity measures could better manage American Empire's industrial welfare state ended with Bill Clinton declaring the demise of big government in 1996.  The information age economy signaled the terminus of the industrial economic revolution and antiquated "socialist" models seeking to revolutionize it with state ownership of means of production. Vesey will probe the frontiers of a post-capitalist alternative economic model.

-- The chances of independent, Black-led republics succeeding as authentic self-governing republics will be greater than any in the pantheon of past republics. It was never possible for the world's most dominant republics-turned-empire (United States, United Kingdom, Athens, and the Roman Empire) to become authentic models of citizen-run self-government. They were all built on the abomination of slavery and the profound oppression of women by property-holding white men. As Black-led polities were created with a pedigree and ethos of abolishing oppressive forms of social dominance, the Vesey Republic disrupts that narrative and cycle of history.   

The Theory of Elasticity answers three fundamental questions:

1) ​In a republican governing structure who will establish the direction and administer the affairs of state?

2) What is the character, national identity, and historic destiny of the Black nation?  

3) What form of a republican governing model is best suited to deliver effective government services to its citizens while increasing their governing capacity and participation as actors to fulfill the Black Common's historic destiny?  

After outlining the Theory of Elasticity's responses to these questions, the structure, operation, and advantages of the Vesey Estate Parliament governing model are discussed. The final section concludes with some brief observations on specific aspects of republican governance theory and the path to Black national construction.

Who will establish the direction and administer the Vesey Republic's state of affairs?

Despite America's long-standing history of denying and suppressing Black voting rights, the Black Commons' elite, middle, and moderate-income strata are well-schooled in the sciences of advanced democracy.  NBN abandons Pax Americana's convoluted presidential republic system and dysfunctional bi-cameral legislature. In its place, the adoption of the Vesey Estate Parliament [VEP] as its government model is proposed.

The VEP model expands the Black Commons' access to participate in legislative, executive, and judicial functions as leaders, representatives, and voters in a diverse multi-party environment. The Estates Parliament eliminates state capture of the government by corporate interests and elites managing a corrupt two-party political monopoly system. The VEP places the balance of decision-making power in the hands of the Black Commons' majority middle- and moderate-income strata. In effect, the Estates Parliament initiates a decisive political power shift.  

What is the character, identity, and historical destiny of our Black nation?

For most nations, its character, national identity, and sense of national destiny grow out of the nature of its development as a historically evolved people. The animating feature for some nations is the struggle over land. For others, it may be the suppression of their language or culture. In all cases, specific timeframes, eras, or singularly defining events contextualize how these factors alter the national struggle's state of play. 

Ukraine more so than most countries exemplifies the complexity of how the character of the national struggle is shaped by events, time, and space. In the last one-hundred years different regions of Ukraine were invaded and occupied twice by Germany and Poland, and three times by Russia. Since the early 1700s Ukraine's emerging organic culture was suppressed at the same time as its occupiers denied the existence of 'Ukrainian culture.' Russian strongman Vladimir Putin denies the reality of Ukrainian culture to this day. Not until the last decade has a clear majority of Ukraine's 14.3 million native Russian speakers chosen to self-identify as members of a Ukrainian nation. 

National Character: The Black Commons' historic journey as an oppressed nation within America's Imperial Empire has been characterized by its struggle for freedom from slavery, equality against racial discrimination, and national liberation from the neocolonial and imperialist rule of the British and American Empires.  Thus, our national cosmos is embedded with the spirit of fighting for equality, dignity, humanity, and freedom--not only for ourselves but for the oppressed everywhere. 

The essence of the Black Commons' national character, ethics, and culture points inexorably toward building a society oriented toward an egalitarian ideal. The Black Commons 'egalitarian impulse' will continue to animate and define the liberated Vesey Republic's collective character. 

While winning nationhood will largely eliminate racial and capitalist exploitation, whether a new Black-led majority will aggressively pursue the fight to abolish discrimination against LGBTQI, non-gender conforming persons, the aged, the disabled, and other racial groups residing in the Vesey Republic remains to be seen. Culture is the greatest predictor of what a nation is likely to do in the future because over time its algorithm becomes encoded into any given nation's psychological makeup.  

Further, since arriving on North America's shores over 400 years ago, Black communities' struggle for liberation has consistently displayed the highest ethical and moral character of any national sub-group save for the indigenous first nations. Moral rectitude like moral hazard matters. It should. Maintaining the highest moral and ethical standards will be critical to achieving the egalitarian ideal and overall success of the Vesey Republic.  These challenges inherent in constructing a new egalitarian society will continue to test the character of the Black Commons.   

National Identity: National identity is rooted in any given nation's organic culture. The Black Commons possesses a distinct and creative cultural footprint that permeates and influences global culture like few others. Notwithstanding its cultural legacy, the Black majority view themselves as a cohesive cultural and politically homogeneous racial group rather than a nationalist formation. 

Within the Black identarian racial strain, various levels of fealty to the mythical American multi-racial project persist. The reparations movement Black nationalists played a critical role in building for decades is now a soft American patriotic trend. A visit to Black reparations Twitter sites finds them plastered with American flags and ongoing discussions opposing native Africans and Caribbean Blacks receiving U.S. reparations payments.   

The Black majority doesn't see themselves as part of a distinct nation entitled to self-determination and creating their independent nation not so much because they disagree with the idea--rather they dismiss it as a real possibility. Nevertheless, in the 2020s, Black people in large numbers from all stations of life will support independent Black micro-states. They will do so if they believe the struggle for nationhood is not only winnable but conclude Vesey could survive to see the next day's sunrise. 

Blacks in great numbers will act out of tribal solidarity rather than submit to a MAGA-Verse American Apartheid state or return to the dungeon of American Empire's illusory Great Society multi-cultural experiment. In revolutionary times, racial consciousness, solidarity, and the Black Commons' instincts for survival and freedom will function as a proxy for Black national consciousness. 

Unlike state building involving the creation of government structures, institutions, and law- giving, nation-building is about creating loyalty and identity within an imagined community. In nation building, universal symbols like the Red, Black, and Green Flag, the Black National Anthem, clothing styles, art, religion, and collective memory emerge as potent cultural weapons galvanizing the nationalist ideal. 

These popular cultural markers, symbols, and signs frequently surge from the bottom up. Philosophers, musicians, novelists, and preachers surface to conjure nationalist visions, myths, and lore. ​Václav Havel was a visionary poet, playwright, and jailed dissident whose works defined Czech resistance to its Communist Party. When the USSR collapsed and the Czech CP fell, he was elected President. Germany had its Luther: Martinique its Aimé Cesaire, and in the 1960, the Black Commons had the Black Arts Movement [BAM]. 

Led by what NBN calls the Hand Grenade Poets, BAM's nationalist influence among Black students, artists, and intellectuals penetrated small towns and rural Black communities across the country. There is a reason Plato's aristocratic-led republic of philosopher-kings, banned poets from the city. “The tragic poet," said Plato, "is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.” 

NBN understands that closing the nationalism deficit gap poses a significant ideological challenge for the work of national construction. Building an authentic--not performative-- Black national identity will be achieved from the ground up. It will require a government with an open civic permission structure that gives voice to the broadest ranks of its citizenry.     

National Destiny: The Black Common's egalitarian impulse not only defines in large measure its national character, but NBN argues it is the vector propelling the Commons toward its destiny of becoming the first consciously designed non-heteropatriarchal nation-state. 

Audre Lorde asserted that the nation-state itself is a heteropatriarchal construct. She was correct. The Vesey Republic will be founded on the principle that an authentic nation cannot exist or flourish as a heteropatriarchal project. There is not a more intellectually vigorous, principled, and battle-hardened womanist and feminist movement on the planet that can match the accomplishments of women in the Black Commons. The Vesey Republic must bestow agency on all its citizens and fully vest women and all gender non-conforming persons in the republic's estate as its leaders, authors, and finishers of its project. 

Consonant with the Black Common's national destiny is embracing a transcendent nationalism that ultimately seeks to move the Black Commons and all its citizens beyond race as our destiny. This is not a celestial question to be contemplated but a practical matter that will confront the Black Commons the moment political power is captured.    

The Vesey Republic and its related national polities will inherit Black-led multi-racial micro-states as they are. All who wish to remain citizens of the republic will be welcomed. Those wishing to leave will be provided with equitable compensation for any business and private property interests that cannot be transferred or sold. 

Addressing the vestiges of racial discrimination does not disappear with the act of taking political power. Quite the opposite it begins with the Black Commons' policies and practices towards, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Rim communities, and indigenous natives. 

As adherents of Frantz Fanon's New Humanist school, we embrace a transcendent nationalism that ultimately strives to move beyond race as the Black Commons national destiny. Leading a multi-racial republic will continuously test our nationalist and egalitarian ideals in real-time.       

What form of government best serves those leading the republic to achieve its goals?    

In developing the Vesey Estates parliamentary system NBN canvased governance models from 5th Century BC Athenian direct democracy system to Switzerland's present-day consociational democracy. We explored Nigeria's Igbo tribes' consultative assemblies from the 1300s noted for its exceptional women's involvement, and Florence, Italy's 14th-century Civic Humanist Signoria councils. 

Both Grenada's People's Revolutionary Government (1979 -1983) and Burkina Faso's, National Council of Government's (1983 -1987) four-year reigns dramatically improved their citizen's living conditions and civic participation. Why then were their leaders Maurice Bishop and Thomas Sankara both assassinated in office? These nationalist anti-imperialist revolutions contain rich lessons concerning national construction and the pitfalls of one-party states. 

Most critical to developing the Vesey Estates Parliament design was the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika's 1990 presidential-republic constitution. Called the Code of Umoja,​ it was the only modern prototype of a Black republic government structure in the U.S. In August 2020, the NBN critiqued the constitution's logic and governmental architecture. 


The Estates Parliament Organizational Structure

In its early days, the republic will likely encounter existential security challenges, sabotage, and dramatic political realignments on its borders threatening crib death to the newborn polity. Therefore, Vesey's governance structure--even in its provisional stage--must be thoughtfully crafted and responsive to contingency.

The Vesey's Estate's Parliament adopts a dynamic, streamlined, multi-party parliamentary system that combines the legislative and executive functions in a unicameral body. It dispenses with the concept of an upper house and a lower house. To guard against distempers and emotions that from time to time adversely infect well-intentioned legislation, an appointed Council of Sages will be seated to dispassionately evaluate the merits of policy proposals. 

Vesey's High Court of Justice will not function as a separate branch of government. ​While many parliamentary systems have a separation of powers between different branches of government, the Vesey Republic will not. Not will the Vesey Republic have one single comprehensive written constitution--like the United States--that enumerates all the powers and limitations on government and its citizens. Rather, the Vesey Republic will have a what is called an "uncodified" constitution. 

An uncodified constitution is a type of constitution where the fundamental rules often take the form of customs, usage, precedent, and a variety of statutes and legal instruments. An understanding of the Constitution is obtained through reading commentary by the judiciary, government committees, or legal experts. In such a constitutional system, all these elements may be (or may not be) recognized by courts, legislators, and the bureaucracy as binding upon the government and limiting its powers. Such a framework is sometimes imprecisely called an "unwritten constitution"; however, all the elements of an uncodified constitution are typically written down in a variety of official documents, though not codified in a single document.

Vesey's Declaration of Citizens' Rights, its Declaration of Independence, statutory law, written laws, and common law practices, legal instruments from the preceding British colonial period and America's post-colonial eras, and African traditional law and customs 
can be incorporated into the Vesey Republic's unwritten constitution.   

The merging of the legislative and executive branches in a unicameral body will enable the parliament to take quick, more unified, and decisive action embodying a singular national will. 

The First Prime Minister is the executive leader of the Vesey Estates Parliament and head of government. The First Prime Minister is the head of the majority party, the head of state (the republic), and the commander and chief of the nation's armed forces. Unlike the U.S. presidential system, the First Prime Minister is not directly elected by the voters. Rather, the First Prime Minister is elected by a simple majority of the parliament's majority party or by a coalition of parties achieving a simple majority of the aggregate members of parliament's (MPs) votes. 

Vesey's Estates Parliament was conceived as a government of energy, taking timely and decisive action. It foregoes the entanglements of Montesquieu's arcane checks and balances system restraining the legislative, executive, and judicial branches from jousting to be the playground bully shaking down the middling and lessor Commons for their lunch money. ​

The dysfunction of American Empire's bi-cameral legislatures is further exacerbated when elections give control to one party controlling the Senate and the other party controlling the House of Representatives. More often than not, the president's agenda displeases his party as much as the opposition. 

Even when one party controls both legislative houses and the Oval Office, numerous checks allow legislation to be vetoed or held up from being passed by measures like the filibuster.  America's presidential system is a case study of gridlock, corruption, and political malfeasance, that could not survive its first 70 years before lurching into civil war. The Vesey Republic chooses not to walk in the footsteps of a failed system.  

The Vesey's System's Federal Structure

The Vesey Republic's federal structure will consist of the national Estate's Parliament government, an independent judiciary, a women's autonomous regional government, and local elected governments. In the event that more than one Vesey national polity exists in different parts of North America, establishing a confederation or acts of union will be looked upon favorably.   

New Black Nationalists anticipate that newly created, Black-led nation-states, independent city-states, or autonomous regions will be relatively small in territory and population. Vesey Republic polities will in almost every instance begin as unitary states, except a women's-led autonomous regional government. 

The proposed Vesey Estates Parliament model combining legislative and executive functions can be easily scaled to effectively govern city-states, autonomous regions, and micro-nation-state environments.  

Consonant with its goal of creating the first modern non-heteropatriarchal nation, one-fourth of the territory and population will be designated as a women's-majority autonomous region.  The region will consist of 25% of the republic's total landmass and population and a guaranteed minimum of 75% of its region's electorate will be registered women voters. 

Except for a limited number of areas like national defense and international relations, Vesey's women's autonomous region will draft its table of laws provided they don't contravene Vesey's Declaration of Citizens Rights. The region will exercise control over its own judicial systems, schools, hospitals, transportation, local governments, and regional elections systems. The women-led autonomous region will also be entitled to one-fourth of the seats in the national parliament. 

Multi-Party and Direct Democracy

The Estates Parliament will consist of as many political parties as the republic's diverse population and interest groups seek to form. As a majority Black-led multi-racial nation with diverse political interests, multi-party democracy will ensure diverse viewpoints will contend for influence, votes, and support of their parties' views. All Vesey citizens, including those registering as independents, must feel they have a platform and stake in the nation's development.   

The Black Commons' experience in Caribbean and African liberation and independence movements has mostly been single-party-political states. Tragically, after Nelson Mandela retired as South Africa's president in 1999, the African National Congress has been awash in a sea of corruption and delinquent management of the country. Aborted national liberation movements are scattered across the globe, mostly because of the failure of their political programs, but also because they could not design effective government models that served their people.   

Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth scotched one-party rule in newly independent African countries in 1960 as a cancer on the Black Commons body. He has proven to be correct. The Estates Parliament gives smaller parties a voice, votes, and coalition-building power. Having alternative solutions to political challenges is important as is everyone contributing to the national project. 

That said, the tendency of parties to promote faction is a real danger.  Parties promoting a slate of issues as the only way to solve multiple issues tend not to compromise and seriously consider the viewpoints of others. Zero-sum political party politics is a problem that can start to be addressed by ranked-choice voting but the issue will require a larger open ideological struggle. No party has a monopoly on the truth or solutions.     

Further, to ensure that the broadest number of Vesey citizens are shaping the nation's future, the constitution will provide guarantees that national and regional referendums and initiatives will be held. These votes will be called on critical questions and any amendments to the constitution.  

To counter drift or malfeasance in the government's leadership, Vesey's sitting parliament is empowered to call a "vote of no confidence," to initiate a process for the possible removal of the government's majority coalition in snap elections. The republic's citizens won't be forced to endure non-responsive or incompetent government by waiting until the next scheduled national election to make change. Vesey will not function according to expiration dates on milk cartons, but the people's needs.  

Succession, the Peaceful Transfer of Power, and a Declaration of Rights

​Above all Vesey's governing structure will have clearly defined laws for the orderly succession of executive, legislative, and judiciary leadership. A framework for political succession is paramount to establish the legitimacy of the Vesey Republic's republican ideal. Vesey will not be a refuge of last resort for scoundrels and despots like the United States.  

The Vesey Republic's Theory of Elasticity restores the republic's historic role as a bulwark against the despotism of monarchy and oligarchy. It also rejects liberalism's primacy of the autonomous individual as the raison d'être of government.   

Creating a Black-led nation and polities in the 2020s will be an experience in firstness for the Black Commons after having been something else for centuries. It is therefore imperative that Vesey's citizens understand their constitutionally guaranteed rights which cannot be revoked by the Estates Parliament nor the First Prime Minister. All Vesey citizens will be afforded the protections enumerated in the Declaration of Citizens Rights. 

Closing Thoughts  

If New Black Nationalists' visions of the dawn of Black-led nation-states and polities emerging in 2020 seem too rosy, unrealistic, or at best revolutionary romanticism, we get that. We've heard it before. That said, our 2019 analysis of American Empire spiraling into an existential crisis and the U.S. government's collapse in the 2020s is tracking with the pace of events. In fact, the January 6, 2021, Capitol Coup suggests our analysis may not have been aggressive enough. 

If history has taught us anything, it is that countless opportunities for revolutionary movements and oppressed people to rise up and take political power have been squandered because they weren't prepared to seize state power when the decisive moment arrived. Worse still, were revolutionary forces that won political power but were unprepared to build a new order with popular support. 

The Theory of Elasticity is grounded in the realities that will likely unfold if an existential crisis matures. For example, NBN's work to influence the growing National Divorce debate.  We link Black reparations to creating an independent Black nation-state as part of a negotiated settlement to partition American Empire into a new concert of independent sovereign nations to avoid a bloody civil war between the Red States and the Blue States.   

​The Theory of Elasticity is unwavering in its commitment to building an inclusive nation that draws on all the talents and resources of its people. It places trust in the hands of the broadest majority of the Black Commons to prudently wield political power and administer justice to its people who have never known what true justice looks like or feels like. 

Similarly, Elasticity's call for a women-led regional government is not a political stunt. It is a necessary component of building a bridge to a non-heteropatriarchal republic. It is based on the strength of Black women's historic contributions as activists, leaders, and theoreticians. Empowering women and the Black Commons to accomplish something that has never been achieved will require bold experiments and risk-taking. In other words, some stretching of the republic.  

In this light, NBN's recommendation to adopt a parliamentary governing structure is a big ask for a Black Commons with little experience in parliamentary governing systems. To learn a new governance system during a crisis is a risky proposition. Nevertheless, our assessment is based on the best fit for the kind of republic and society we want to build. Winning and maintaining power is a critical issue, which will require the Black Commons to stretch its own capabilities and horizons. 

In conclusion, we return to an earlier point we broached concerning New Black Nationalists' optimism about the future. Our project is to create an independent nation-state swim against the tide of history. We are rowing in uncharted waters because we're living in a dark moment of history where the old order from Russia to Europe to the U.S. is disintegrating before our eyes. 

Violent white nationalist movements are on the rise across the Global North. No one is certain where this clash between nations, races, civilizations, and empires will end. Whether one reads Nick Land's Dark Enlightenment, Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe or Jared Yates Sexton's Midnight Kingdom, we are entering a revolutionary period of deep valleys and towering summits.      

What New Black Nationalists see is opportunity. Out of the destruction of the old comes the new. We cannot stop larger forces that are destined for a collision on a grand scale. The Black Commons cannot save American Empire or its corporately managed democracy from self-destructing, nor should we want to. We cannot save 'confused' whites who can't make up their minds to support or oppose reactionary white nationalists attempting to create an American Apartheid regime. 

What we can control is our own destiny. And we can win. This is where New Black Nationalists' confidence and optimism lies: in our people.    






































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