Historic health care bill divides opinion, but not the nation.
By Seth Richardson
The measure of our Republic is that the vote on the health care bill was not punctuated by the sound of gunfire, explosions and the screams of the dying. The National Guard was not called out. Tanks and barbed wire did not occupy the streets surrounding the Capitol. Soldiers with fixed bayonets did not take aim at protesters armed with brickbats and Molotov cocktails. Blood did not run in the gutters of Washington Sunday night.
This is a demonstration of our determination as a people to resolve our differences peacefully, if perhaps loudly.
This is not the model for most nations, where the kind of arrogance and disdain for the will of the people shown by Progressives and Democrats Sunday night is often met with bloody violence and death. All over the world people frustrated with the Machiavellian machinations of politics vent their fury on each other and their communities, and sometimes upon their elected representatives. In Great Britain, the threat of violence is so real that their laws prohibit protests within a kilometer of their seat of government, the House of Commons, and police and barricades ring Parliament whenever contention is in the air.
But no car bombs went off anywhere in America, and Boulder Democrat Jared Polis was able to joke about being nervous about stepping out on a Capitol balcony overlooking crowds of protesters.
Things did not go nearly so well in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday. While we were peacefully debating a contentious piece of legislation, 13 people died in suicide explosions as their government struggled to find peace among warring factions and terrorists.
A few epithets were hurled in Washington by the lunatic fringe, which were soundly and immediately condemned by every side of the debate, but no rocks or hand grenades flew. No shots were fired. Not a single tear-gas canister was launched. No heads were bloodied by nightsticks.
This is our legacy to the world, and it’s a good one. Born of our determination not to be enslaved and our willingness to fight for what we believe, America has always asked for peace even when we were forced to fight. We fight when we must, but when we’re offered peace, we always accept it, always thinking the best of our opponents and having confidence in the chance for peaceful relations.
We have learned this lesson by brutal experience. Our own Civil War, in which more than 600,000 Americans were killed to preserve the Union, seared into our national soul the determination that we would remain one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, no matter how divisive our opinions.
We can hear the foundations of our Republic groaning and creaking as the Progressives assault the bastions of liberty, and the fight is not nearly over, but we, the People, will withstand the assault and prevail in the end, and we will do so with the power of the pen, not the power of the sword.
In the end, liberty and justice will prevail because they must. It is in our hearts and minds and the sinews of our Republic to be fair and honest, and to be governed only in accordance with our consent, freely granted and revocable at our will. We, the People will determine for ourselves what is right and proper and we will express that will at the ballot box. And those who serve us in the halls of government will obey us and bend to our will, because we are all the same, we are all citizens of this great nation and we understand the need for the peaceful transfer of power and the restraints of representative government.
Tyranny can never prevail in a nation determined to preserve liberty and justice. We have the right to keep and bear arms precisely to secure our ability to overthrow a tyrant and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. But we, the People understand that arms are the last resort, to be held in abeyance until the day when our elected representatives refuse to surrender their power peaceably when their authority to act is lawfully revoked by us.
This is what makes us unique in all the world. We trust ourselves to keep the arms that might facilitate rebellion and insurrection because we trust that our fellow citizens will never use them except in a noble purpose, for the defense of liberty and the overthrow of tyranny, and only then at the narrow passage, when all diplomacy and pleas for redress of grievances have been refused and our public servants attempt to become our masters.
This is the measure of our Republic. This is the beacon of hope and liberty, of peace and amity, of disagreement without disunion, of vigilance and determination, of a mighty nation that keeps its vast stores of arms to secure the peace, not to destroy it, this is the light that guides the world towards peaceable resolution of conflict and dissent by example.
It is our duty as citizens to uphold that ideal and continue to allow the checks and balances of our system to work as they were designed. November will come soon enough, and then, once again, the People will manifest their will and their consent, the transfer of power will proceed with dignity and in peace, and the Republic will endure.
© 2010 Altnews
Learning to recognize Progressives is our first defense against tyranny
By Seth Richardson
In a September column, “Libertarianism and Collectivism”, I discussed the general principles of the two political ideologies and pointed out that collectivists, at least the honest ones, are forthright in their belief that the individuals of a society owe a duty to the collective, and that prosperity for the collective requires sacrifice of individual interests in the name of the public good.
Moderate collectivists, known today as “Liberals” and sometimes “Moderate Democrats,” are willing to acknowledge that individual rights do exist, at least to one extent or another, and have the grace to at least moderate their ideological quest for equality of outcome with a grudging obedience to due process and some modicum of conciliation towards the liberty interests of the People and the Constitution. Moderate Democrats are at least willing to engage the process our Republic uses to make law.
Progressives, however, have no compunctions whatever about imposing their vision of Progressive utopia over the strident objection of everyone, if they can manage it by hook or by crook. And that Progressive arrogance and disrespect for both due process and public opinion is precisely what we’re seeing in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and all their ilk, both within the Democrat and Republican parties, as they attempt to ram government-run health care through the Congress.
It has become essential to the preservation of the Republic and our individual liberty to learn how to identify Progressives wherever they may metastasize. With that in mind, I’m going to discuss what the Progressive ideology is, and what it has planned for you and I.
The beginning of American Progressivism in government was Teddy Roosevelt, our first Progressive president. His major contribution was the National Parks, which were a good idea, but which were also the first move in a long-running chess game of Progressives against fundamental liberty and limited government. By claiming unbridled Executive power without a shred of Constitutional authority, Roosevelt personally reserved huge swaths of public lands and preserved them in perpetuity. The result was noble, but the process was anything but.
Never before, outside of wartime, had any President executed such sweeping and permanent changes to the complexion of our nation entirely without Congressional approval or even advice. That Congress did not balk Roosevelt was not surprising, given the beneficent intent of his exercise of executive power, but its failure to act immediately to constrain this arrogation of executive power has resulted in much mischief and has empowered Progressives beyond all reason or justice in the decades since.
But things didn’t really get rolling with the Progressives until Woodrow Wilson was elected.
Wilson, an unapologetic racist, eugenicist, Ivy-League professor and President of Princeton University, despised the Constitution and the Congress as obstructions to his vision of a “perfected” nation run by professional, unelected bureaucrats and the Executive, lead by a strong, charismatic leader (himself) who would apply science to government and run the country by executive regulation rather than rule of law. He sought to impose this tyranny of the intellectual elite for the benefit of the downtrodden lumpen proletarian masses too fundamentally ignorant and stupid to know what is best for themselves, to be sure. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that is the road he set us upon, and which we tread today.
Wilson, a fan of the British parliamentary system, thought that the Congress should be a political debating club whose only purpose was to provide broad guidance to the President, who might choose to take that advice, but who, with the guidance of his hand-picked intellectually superior Cabinet ministers, would be solely responsible for determining the “unified national will” of the people, and who would be empowered to do whatever was necessary, unconstrained by law or custom, to achieve this vision.
He, like Obama and Bush the Younger (a closet Progressive who deeply admired Wilson), and many other Progressive presidents, believe that the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and that only “science” and the “unified national will” of the people, as discerned and expressed by a strong President smart enough and well-educated enough to know what that unified will is, should rule government and make law, in order to move society “progressively” closer to some undefined state of political and social perfection, through a Darwin-like evolution of political power and social science.
To Wilson, and FDR, and every Progressive since, the fundamental touchstones of our society, the very foundation on which our incredibly successful form of government was founded, our natural, unalienable, individual rights as human beings are impediments to the progress of society, which in their view has an ultimate, utopian form where the intelligentsia run the country for the benefit of the ignorant not through the rule of law and according to constitutional principles, but through the “science” of executive branch regulation handed down by professional, lifetime-tenure bureaucrats. (Side note: Wilson was the inventor of the Civil Service that entrenches bureaucrats in government and makes them harder than ticks to root out even when they are biased, corrupt, or incompetent.)
The structure of our Republic is one of three branches, the Executive, Judicial and Legislative, all equal in power and subject to the overarching will of the People. Each branch is constrained by the others in a complex system of checks and balances, including the Constitution, intended to prevent runaway tyranny.
But Progressives disdain the separation of powers, the checks and balances and the Constitution itself, and seek to impose top-down unitary Executive Branch management. Instead of the broad foundation of three equal branches, they propose an ivory tower of power, with the President residing at the penthouse of a vertical edifice that places the People at the bottom, using their bodies and rights as rubble for the foundation, with the Congress on their backs and the Judiciary treading on Congress’ power in support of the apex predator of Progressivism, the President, who rules over everyone in benign and benevolent intellectual superiority, supported by a coterie of sinister Ministers and the scientific expertise of the intellectually elite Executive Branch bureaucrats.
If the thought of groaning and sweating under the burden of such an oppressive and arrogant government scares you, it should, because Progressives are nearly there. This is evidenced by examples such as the EPA’s blatant and tyrannical disregard of the Separation of Powers Doctrine inherent in it’s threat that if Congress does not pass climate legislation, the EPA will do it through regulation.
This is a shot across the bow of our Republic by Cass Sunstein, Obama’s “Regulatory Czar,” an uber-radical Progressive who is at the moment the most dangerous man in America. Sunstein is so dangerous because he can effectuate the Progressive agenda of controlling everything in America, from the food we eat to the houses we live in, to the clothing we wear, to the cars we (do not) drive through “nudges” applied by “interpreting” existing federal regulations.
He’s able to do this because for nearly a hundred years, Congress has been giving government bureaucrats and agencies broad powers to exercise executive authority on the excuse that they will use them wisely and not abuse their authority and are under the overall supervision of Congress.
But with Sunstein in charge, and Obama in office, Progressives and outright Communists infesting our government agencies and even the White House, and a Congress under the Svengaliesque influence of Progressivism, Sunstein, at Obama’s command, and can cause massive damage to our rights and our economy without any real threat of interference from Congress.
All this happened because we, the People, lost our focus on the Founders and our own fundamental liberties. We have surrendered our essential liberties for the mere promise of safety, a promise that was a lie to begin with and could never be fulfilled anyway.
Our only hope is to learn to recognize the danger that we face, which is the first step in retaking the Constitution and the Republic from those in power who seek to destroy it.
© 2010 Altnews