The View From 1776

Senator Obama employed both in his recent address to graduating students at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. 

Ironically, his speech was an exhortation for students to convert to the collectivist religion of socialism at a college founded in 1831 by the Methodist Church and named for the church’s great Christian founder John Wesley.  The fact that Senator Obama mispronounced the school’s name as “Wellesleyan” suggests that his gasp of Christianity, apart from the apostate black liberation theology, is a bit tenuous.

Urging inexperienced young students, brain-washed by liberal-progressive instructors, to change the world is like turning a kindergarten class loose in the control room of a nuclear reactor and urging them to experiment with dials and buttons.  Young people know how to destroy, as did the Baby Boomer student activists, but preserving the good and building for posterity is beyond them. 

The proper admonition is to work productively in useful businesses and professions while gaining wisdom and understanding of the real world, before tinkering with complexities that they do not yet comprehend.

Urging students to go into public service is to promote the least productive and most counterproductive element of society.  There already is a surplus of public service people working aggressively to create more welfare-state entitlements and to enroll more welfare dependents in new programs. 

Somebody has to do honest and productive work that will generate savings and tax receipts to pay for the welfare-state load we already carry.

As socialist economist, and liberal icon, Robert Heilbroner wrote (An Inquiry Into The Human Prospect):

For the middle-aged, educated, as I was, in the 1930s, this Victorian heritage was already regarded as a period piece, battered first by World War I, then dealt its death blow by the Great Depression.  But its comforting assurance had been replaced by an equally fortifying belief.  This was the view that history, working like a vast organic machine, would produce a good socialist society out of a bad capitalist one.

Thomas Segel adds another brushstroke to the picture of the radical, left-wing, atheistic, and generally bad policy aims of the Democrat/Socialist Party.  (I say atheistic, because socialism is a philosophically materialist religion that denies God and worships intellectual political planners as the only source of well-being for members of society, well-being defined exclusively in terms of money and physical handouts).

The Turning Over of the Falsehood Rock
By Thomas D. Segel
Tom@thomasdsegel.com
http://www.thomasdsegel.com

Harlingen, Texas, May 24, 2008:  Oliver Wendell Homes said it best…”You never need think you can turn over any old falsehoods without a terrible squirming of the horrid little population that dwells under it.” Well, that is just what happened this past week when Democrat Representative Maxine Waters experienced a Freudian slip and uttered the secret fraternity password that identifies her Party.  She spoke the word all members of her party know must be hidden from every rational thinking citizen.

While addressing oil executives during a House hearing on May 22, 2008 Waters threatened to nationalize the oil industry if it failed to do something to stop the ever-escalating price of gasoline at the pumps.

In a harsh exchange with Shell Oil President John Hofmeister, the California congresswoman demanded that oil companies guarantee consumer prices will fall if drilling is allowed off U.S. shores.

The reply from Hofmeister was equally sharp.  He said, “I can guarantee to the American people, because of the inaction of the United States Congress, ever increasing prices unless the demand comes down.”

The brought about the before mentioned Freudian slip as Waters responded, “And guess what this liberal would be about.  This liberal will be about socializing …uh, um…”

It took the congresswoman a moment to recover.  She then continued, “Would be about, basically taking over, and the government running all of your companies.
It was reported that the oil company executives answered that statement saying they had seen such action before…in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela.

The huge thing about this seemingly small stutter-speak is that Maxine Waters had used the big “S” word in public debate.  She had turned over the always hidden falsehood rock of socialism and exposed the dirty underbelly of the far left political party.

Those who promote the Democratic Party use every word possible to hide its underpinning of socialism.  They say they are the “party of the working man.” They call themselves “liberals”…and when the meaning of that word becomes too tainted, they become “progressives.” They call themselves everything but what they are…. “Socialists”!

If you are a party that wants to redistribute the income of the entire country… and if you are the party that wants to nationalize all services from welfare to health care…and if you hate all business and feel you can run it better than those who have invested their lives in its advancement…. you are a Socialist.  But, you never want to use that identification label; because you know that socialism has failed in every place it has raised its ugly head across our globe.  Of course, all socialists feel there is nothing wrong with their planned system of governance.  The only reason it failed everywhere is because…those places didn’t have good leaders.  The belief here is… in the United States Congress there are the chosen socialist leaders who will finally make everything work as planned.

So, socialism has been identified aloud in a public debate.  It has been a decades long falsehood that has finally been revealed by a known proponent. The rock of socialism has been turned over and has disclosed the horrid population that dwells beneath it for what it really believes.

No society can survive without a consensus about right and wrong, about what constitutes moral conduct.  That consensus is the unwritten constitution of society, the content that gives meaning to a written constitution, the meat on the bones of the structure of government. 

Without that consensus there can be only a disparate group of people with little or no attachment to their new homes.  That is what we see increasingly, here and in Great Britain, under the impact of a tsunami of immigration from alien cultures and religions. 

Combining this huge flood of immigration with a liberal-progressive ethos of rootless multiculturalism sets the stage for disintegration of American and British societies more effectively than terrorist attacks by Islamic jihadists.  No longer is education viewed as a melting pot to teach our history and the principles of our government.

Without the pre-existing unwritten constitution of 1776, which Jefferson said was the source of his words in the Declaration of Independence, our written Constitution has become vulnerable to distortion by activist judges and liberal-progressive educators.

In Great Britain, the danger is even more acute.  England has no single written constitution, depending instead upon various documents, commencing with Magna Carta in 1215, and long preserved traditions that circumscribe political power and social interaction.

To see what happens when liberal-progressives impose standardless “tolerance” and multiculturalism on a society, read Theodore Dalrymple’s A Confusion of Tongues: Why Britain struggles to assimilate immigrants.

Judeo-Christian traditions of right and wrong underlie the unwritten constitution that prevailed in 1776.  Those traditions taught generations of Americans that every person should always do his best to do the right thing, even if doing so did not benefit him personally.  A flood of judicial decisions since the 1950s reveals, however, that doing away with precepts of right and wrong is one of the primary objectives of liberal-socialism. 

The “me” generation of the Baby Boomer era were taught that the only standard is immediate gratification of their sensual urges.  Hence today’s generally accepted belief that sexual promiscuity, murdering babies via abortion, drug abuse, biological fathers abandoning partners and the children they father, and living off the welfare state are acceptable life styles.

Our liberal-socialistic educational system goes to great lengths to teach students that the only important virtue is what liberal-progressives call “tolerance,’ which amounts to saying that there are no standards of any kind.  Liberals’ version of scientific truth flatly rejects what they call value judgments.  John Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism says do whatever you can get away with.  Cheat in school and cook the books in companies like Enron and Tyco; dump substandard mortgage loans into packages of supposed creditworthy loans.  If it works for you, that is the only test of validity.

It is not essential that a cohesive and successful political society have a written constitution.  But no political society can exist for long without an unwritten constitution.  The idea of a written constitution is, in fact, fairly recent in world history.  England’s constitution is not a single document, but a large collection of acts, declarations, and traditions.  So long as the English people preserved reverence for and clear recollections of traditions, England remained the dominant world power.  Just as in the United States, the unwritten English constitution began to disintegrate under the corrosive effects of its 20th century socialist labor governments.

Without the unwritten constitution, a written constitution is mere form without content, the state of affairs that came to prevail in the United States during the 20th century.  Knowledge of the unwritten constitution is essential to preserving the intent of the written constitution, because words taken out of context can be misinterpreted by liberal enemies of society. 

Today, after seventy years of liberal brain-washing, American students know almost nothing about our history and traditions, which means that our unwritten constitution is falling apart from lack of maintenance.  The United States has become a large collection of competing special interest groups, each heedless of the common good and intent upon getting as much as possible of government handouts.  American society has become the equivalent of road kill being picked clean by buzzards and crows.