The View From 1776

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It’s back to the degenerate barbarities of the 1960s student-activist Weatherman era.  Democrats’ wetted-fingers-in-the-air are so sensitized to breezes of public opinion that they don’t need a weatherman to tell them which way it’s blowing.  Ted Kennedy and John Kerry assiduously fan the coals still glowing under the ashes of liberal-socialism’s burnt-out ideas.  Once again, we hear echoes of wisdom from unhinged student sit-ins: end the fight and liberate “the people” from capitalist oppression.  For Baby-Boomer liberal Democrats it doesn’t matter if millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and now Iraqis, are slaughtered because of our abandonment.

It’s back to the days of Slick Willie’s foreign policy governed by domestic political aims.  Make nice to third-world dictators-of-color in order to identify the Democrats with multi-cultural political-correctness.  For liberal Democrats it doesn’t matter whether our national security is endangered, so long as they project a proper socialistic “sensitivity” to the opinion of mobs in the streets of Europe and the United States.

As dictated by their worship of atheistic, secular materialism, these Democrats have reduced themselves to soulless, mechanical receptors of mob mania manipulated by the liberal media.  Don’t bother to think about the consequences of speech or actions; just react to the material nudging of public opinion, wherever it pushes.

If the opinion pollsters should report that skydiving has become widely popular with voters, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi will be first in line for skydiving lessons, without stopping to ask if skydiving is a prudent practice for political leaders.

But isn’t heeding public opinion what our American democracy is all about?  Isn’t it elitist to say that expert knowledge, however deficient, is more likely to be a better guide to foreign policy than uninformed public opinion?

Here we come to one of the great internal contradictions and the great danger of liberal-socialism.

Liberal-socialism tends inherently toward collectivist tyranny, what the elite of the Soviet Union called the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Individual political liberties must be curbed in order to impose the socialistic welfare-state, which deals only with classes and masses.  To create a monolithic ruling structure, the Democratic party and its allies work to foreclose appointive public office to anyone who is not an atheistic materialist.

At the same time, liberal-socialists speak reverentially about “every vote must count” public opinion.  The reality, however, is that, to function, liberal-socialism requires that public opinion be manipulated by educators and by the socialist media establishment.

This leaves the Democratic party prisoner to its most left-leaning deviants, housed in the offices of the New York Times editorial board and Ivy League faculty clubs, where “public opinion” is fabricated by falsifying history and by highly selective, and often distorted, news reporting.  Liberals in Congress might as well get their marching orders from Michael Moore and Al Franken.

In contrast, hard-won political liberties undergirding our 1787 Constitution were acquired during many centuries of struggle in England between Parliament and the crown.  In that tradition, there was no dichotomy between an elite and the masses, there was no public opinion that could be manipulated by politicians.  The struggle was between elected members of Parliament, who constituted an elite of the best informed and most prudent local leaders, and an elite of the king and his ministers.  The resolution was a constitutional balance of power between those two elites that was intended to work for the best interests of the nation as a whole.

Edmund Burke, often cited as the founder of modern conservatism, was emphatic that the commission of an elected member of Parliament was to exercise his best judgment in behalf of his constituents.  It was not the role of the legislator merely to follow mercurial public opinion. 

This principle led Burke, in the decade before our Declaration of Independence, to oppose the crown’s determination to levy heavy taxes on the American colonists.  Doing so, Burke said, might achieve a short term domestic political victory at the immeasurable cost of losing Britain’s North American empire.

Democrats’ unprincipled kow-towing to public opinion in matters of foreign policy will mire us in a quagmire of hedonistic, self-indulgent weakness.  It will leave us helpless when terrorists put knives to our throats, demanding submission to sharia.

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