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Political Theory
Saturday, December 22, 2012
The Dismaying Futility of Gun Control Regulation
Laws respecting criminal behavior historically have aimed to establish some basic rules of conduct. To preserve social order, breaking those laws required that the guilty party pay the appropriate penalty, both to society and to the victim. Except to the extent that fear of execution or imprisonment may have deterred would-be killers, criminal behavior laws were not expected to identify and restrain potential perpetrators.
Some who now demand more stringent gun control laws are expecting that tightening such laws by requiring psychological profiling will lead to identifying and restraining potential mass murderers. Making it nigh impossible to purchase a semi-automatic gun is expected to do the rest of the job.
Paradoxically, many who demand the Congress “do something” have for decades urged elimination of the death penalty. Among other reasons, they say that laws providing the death penalty are not deterrents to murder and that too often innocent people are executed.
Read Theodore Dalrymple’s observations regarding Newtown’s Unanswerable Questions.
It is not likely that psychiatrists could have prevented the massacre.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Human Nature vs. Gun Control Laws
The bumper sticker is right: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Recent slaughter at the Newtown, CT, elementary school is horrifying, but it’s just a reaffirmation of the potential for evil in human nature. Tighter gun control laws won’t prevent such human depravity. To the contrary, worldwide evidence shows that tighter gun controls both correlate with higher murder rates, and waste public time and money.
Liberal-progressives’ voices are usually the loudest clamoring for tighter procedural regulations over purchase and possession of guns. Liberal-progressives’ approach is always top-down. Regimentation by collectivized government is presumed to be the only source of betterment for people’s lives, as well as the only way to channel human behavior in desired directions.
Welfare-state programs were supposed to eliminate poverty thereby diminishing the incentive for crime. Government’s thousands of regulatory agencies, in liberal-progressive presumption, were to restructure society and alter human nature, as Karl Mark predicted. The grandest example of this misguided and savagely destructive theory was Lenin’s expectation that socialistic revolution and police-state brutality would alter human nature to create New Soviet Man, who would submerge his individuality in the goals of the political state, taking only what he needed, and giving to his maximum ability.
Today’s faith in the efficacy of sociologists and bureaucratic regulation also leads liberal-progressives to advocate ever increasing leniency toward criminal behavior. Social justice theory, emanating from Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1750s, postulates that humans are naturally good unless corrupted by a society that supports private property rights. Hence criminals are the victims of society. Criminals deserve rehabilitation, not punishment.
The corollary presumption seems to be that availability of guns corrupts human nature and leads irresistibly to an urge to kill.
The older theory of justice, before the advent of liberal-progressive social justice, viewed crimes as actions harming both the victims, and society as a whole. The perpetrator had to pay his dues to both. In Judeo-Christian morality, which in the past constituted the substance of Western civilization, spiritual religion appealed to every individual to do the right thing, to assess actions against moral precepts inculcated by religion. As John Adams said, our Constitution was made for a people self-restrained by religion and morality.
Today secular government, permeated by liberal-progressive multiculturalism, tells us that the only sin is intolerance, which means applying any standard to measure acceptability of conduct. Hedonism is welcomed by legislators and glorified in the media. This, it seems to me, is the spirit that erupts in nihilistic barbarity in schools, shopping malls, and theaters. Such mass killing was unknown before violent student activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Harvard Study: Gun Control Is Counterproductive
The study, which just appeared in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694), set out to answer the question in its title: “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence.” Contrary to conventional wisdom, and the sniffs of our more sophisticated and generally anti-gun counterparts across the pond, the answer is “no.” And not just no, as in there is no correlation between gun ownership and violent crime, but an emphatic no, showing a negative correlation: as gun ownership increases, murder and suicide decreases.
The findings of two criminologists - Prof. Don Kates and Prof. Gary Mauser - in their exhaustive study of American and European gun laws and violence rates, are telling:
Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).
For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns. As the study’s authors write in the report:
If the mantra “more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death” were true, broad cross-national comparisons should show that nations with higher gun ownership per capita consistently have more death. Nations with higher gun ownership rates, however, do not have higher murder or suicide rates than those with lower gun ownership. Indeed many high gun ownership nations have much lower murder rates. (p. 661)
Crime rates in Chicago and DC drop after gun control laws are struck down
Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C. …In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year – back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.
Gun Laws and Crime: A Complex Relationship
By ADAM LIPTAK New York Times
Gun Control: Myths and Realities
by David Lampo - Cato Institute
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Playing Politics With The Economy
When political leaders care more about gaining power than about promoting the general welfare, the Constitution is under attack.
The Constitution’s preamble cites among its purposes to “establish justice” and “promote the general welfare.” Which contributes more toward those aims? so-called social justice, i.e., forcibly redistributing wealth? or reviving the economy so that more people can find jobs and resume supporting themselves, while raising the overall standard of living for everyone?
Apparently, for the president, restructuring our economy and our political society in accordance with socialistic egalitarianism trumps all other considerations. He believes either that the negative incentives introduced by higher taxes are nugatory and that socialism can harmlessly proceed apace, or that working to complete Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal socialism should be his major goal, regardless of the negative effects on economic recovery.
Some Keynesian economists have argued that, though economic conditions are not at all the same as during President Clinton’s terms in office, reverting to tax rates prevailing at that time will cause no economic harm. More economists fear that raising tax rates now, when economic recovery is so slow and unemployment so high, will push us toward a renewed recession. No economist, so far as I’m aware, has asserted that raising taxes now will aid economic recovery or do more than slightly reduce the extent of deficit spending.
See Why Obama’s Tax the Rich Plan Will Slow the Recovery.
Many commentators, including Obama himself, have characterized imposition of higher tax rates on “the rich” as a moral issue. It is indeed a matter of morals, but not in the way the president has in mind. One thing is certain: the majority of people polled want to see higher taxes on “the rich,” viewing it as punishment deserved by people whose acquisition of greater wealth presumably was, in some undefined fashion, the cause of our prolonged Great Recession.
Obama continually since his first days in office has fostered that view in his speeches and press conferences. His is the typical politician’s scape-goating a minority, typified by Adolph Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s, seeking political power through fomenting class warfare.
Appealing to the baser instincts of the economically illiterate masses, while ignoring rational judgment, is demagoguery. Obama’s appeal is in the mode first appearing in a democratic society during the fifth century BC. Athenian demagogues appealed to the emotions of the masses by misstating facts and promising to take from the rich and give to the poor in exchange for granting establishment of tyranny.
Demagogues unfailingly corrupted Athenian public morals and undermined the political order introduced by Solon’s constitution, which had created a balance of power among landed aristocrats, merchants, and laborers. Under the demagogues, constitutional government degenerated into rash mob action that ultimately destroyed Athenian economic and political power in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta.
Our founding generation who wrote the Constitution were very mindful of that danger. The Bill of Rights is intended to protect minority rights against what Alexis de Tocqueville (in Democracy in America) called tyranny of the majority. “The rich” are among the minority groups who are supposed to be protected against rash action by the Bill of Rights.
As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution:
...in Federalist No. 10, Madison compares the proposed federal form of government to the weakness of pure democracies, in which all questions are decided by majority vote, without regard to existing law or tradition:
Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
In the next to last paragraph of Federalist No. 10, speaking of the problem of special interests, Madison says:
A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.
Unfortunately, since the 20th century’s rise of liberal-progressivism, first under President Woodrow Wilson, then under President Franklin Roosevelt, the checks and balances of the Constitution have been steadily weakened and more power concentrated at the Federal level, especially in the executive branch.
President Obama’s four years of non-stop campaign speeches are quintessential demagoguery, intended to bring mobs of labor union thugs and unsophisticated young students into the streets threatening “blood” if their demands are not met for punishment of “the rich” and expansion of the socialist welfare state.
The political stability and social order established by the Constitution is mortally threatened by this liberal-progressive onslaught.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Response To A Critique Of Education Reform
A thoughtful reader, with whom I usually disagree, commented in response to Reform Education If The Constitution Is To Survive:
Thomas,
I find it interesting that you hold up pre-Christian Greek theories of education as a model for inculcating religious teaching into the schools to save us from the clutches of the evil liberals. The Greeks did not espouse Christian ideals, because, of course, they predated the Christian era.
One could turn your argument around and ask why the Greeks did OK without Christianity if religious teaching in the schools is so necessary to hold on to our culture.
My response:
Yes, the age of Plato and Aristotle pre-dated Christianity. But it was contemporaneous with the age of the Old Testament prophets. Both Plato, et al, and the prophets envisioned the same new ordering principle for society: the individual human soul opened to God and individually responsible for his actions.
It was this ordering principle, universally taken for granted in our nation’s founding era, the ordering principle that underlay our unwritten constitution, of which John Adams said, “We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.
Liberal-progressivism is a severely retrograde movement, reverting to the pre-Greek, pre-prophetic era of the Pharaohs of Egypt and the oriental despots of the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian empires. In those societies the individual counted for nothing. All flowed from the ruler, usually worshipped as divine, and, in all cases, the only conduit between the gods and the masses. While all of them had legal codes and rules of societal conduct, those rules were whatever the sovereign political state saw fit to impose.
This is an accurate description of the essential nature of a liberal-progressive-socialistic political state in which the relentless thrust is to reduce all citizens to dependence upon the collectivized welfare state. The liberal-progressive-socialistic state tends inherently toward tyranny, as in Lenin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
The Interaction Of Religion And Politics
Gary Kelly ponders the dilemma of Christians assessing political candidates.
The first Amendment forbids Congress’s establishment of any single church as a national religion.
Nonetheless, the Judeo-Christian ethic, the foundation of all of Western civilization, played, and should yet play, an essential role influencing political decisions.
As I wrote in Tocqueville Revisited - Part One:
Two things struck Tocqueville forcibly as he traveled across the United States. Everywhere there was a strong attachment to the equality conferred by political liberty, and everywhere there was an unwavering devotion to Christianity. The two, he concluded, were inseparably connected.
“On my arrival in the United States,” he wrote, “the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this new state of things. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”
Tocqueville would have said that present-day American liberals’ advocacy of libertine license represents all the worst elements of French political life, the very sources of France’s social and political instability. French revolutionaries had destroyed the monarchy and the Catholic Church, making the nation a secular and socialist republic. It was the absence of religious moral restraint that had permitted the slaughter of more than 70,000 people in the name of perfecting humanity. This same secular irreligion was to murder more than twenty million people in Soviet Russia, National Socialist Germany, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Cambodia, and other socialistic countries.
Americans strongly opposed establishment of an official national church, like the Church of England. But, Tocqueville says, “[Christianity] contributed powerfully to the establishment of a republic and a democracy in public affairs; and from the beginning, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never [as of 1831] been dissolved.”
“The sects that exist in the United States are innumerable. They all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man; all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.”
“In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the customs of the community, and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash and unjust. Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.”
“When [people in France] attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions and not of their interests. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”
Imperfect Candidates and the Christian Vote
Gary Kelly
October 31, 2012
Would you have fought against tyranny in 1776? Was not declaring independence from tyranny, “Biblically-based?” Read the grievances in the Declaration and see how many are again prevalent today. I am disturbed by how a Christian could consider allowing the Obamanation to continue! Will we be better off with Romney or Obama? Until someone is on the ballot that meets all Biblically-based requirements are not Christians committed to working and voting against the most evil choice? Are not Christians to continue to spiritually and politically confront unrighteousness and challenge Christian complacency? This is not the same America when candidates were Christians and most voters were Christians.
As I’m visiting grandchildren, does it not give credence and appreciation for vehemently opposing the reelection of a Marxist? We have been given a choice between Obama and Romney as a result of the complacency of Christians. As a citizen of both the Kingdom of God and the United States can a Christian justify encouraging me to not vote for Romney, which I contend is the same as a vote for Obama? Was King David perfect? Under which President will more babies be aborted? Under which President will progressive politically correct Marxism gain more momentum? Can I count on Christians to explain to my children and grandchildren that Election 2012 is a “test” and not a step in reversing the damage Obama and his Democrat/Marxists/RINOs have perpetrated on this REPUBLIC the last 4 years. Until “Christians” elect men of Biblical moral virtue then as Christians we will always fail the “test.”
Charles Finney wrote: “The time has come for Christians to vote for honest men, and take consistent ground in politics or the Lord will curse them…Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to their country as a part of their duty to God.” ...“God will bless or curse this nation according to the course Christians take in politics.”
Jesus is the King of the Kingdom of God and not running for President (and neither is Allen West). Therefore, since the only One Who is perfect is not running, than someone who is imperfect must be. Plus, how many candidates, even Christian, will satisfy all Christians? Christian voters must decide, in this present day climate of prevalent progressive left-wing culture which candidates are likely to do less harm to the Republic and adhere more to Biblical Righteousness.
Yes it is disturbing we have to choose between a Marxist and a RINO. Christians in Marxachusetts consistently have to choose between Marxists or RINOs, as we did when Romney ran for Governor and Brown for Senator. Yes I am beside myself with Romney after he did NOTHING and to uphold the Massachusetts Constitution and prevent same-sex marriage from being made in court and again when he violated the liberty that comes from God with Romneycare.
However, it took decades to degenerate into this moral decline and America will not be restored overnight as Christians sit on the sidelines refusing to confront “politics and religion,” as the Marxist media continues to deceive complacent American voters. As long as preachers only preach John 3:16 and not what Jesus said in the same breath through verse 21, or 1 Timothy 2 and not 2 Timothy 4 as well America will continue to decline.
“A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” Theodore Roosevelt
Gary Kelly’s web site is EarsToHear.net He is the author of Lessons of The Holy Spirit: A Guide for Entering the Kingdom of God and Discover Why It Pleased God to Hide His Kingdom from the Wise.
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Culture And Survival Of The Constitution
The ethos of a society, its unwritten constitution, is what holds it together and protects its citizens.
Pat Buchanan explains why he endorses Mitt Romney for the presidency.
Quote:
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”
So wrote John Jay in Federalist No. 2, wherein he describes Americans as a “band of brethren united to each other by the strongest ties.”
That “band of brethren united” no longer exists.
As I wrote in The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred-Year War Against The Constitution:
The United States was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic that historically was the substance of Western civilization. Ours was a specifically English conception of individual morality and individual responsibility that, only in England and its North American colonies, had produced a government of laws, not men, a government in which even the king is subject to the statutes of the land and to a higher moral law.
This conception of government necessitates a citizenry self-regulated by moral precepts that are preserved and taught by spiritual religion. The government must similarly be restrained by the limits of natural law, which say that no legitimate government may infringe any individual’s rights to life, liberty, and private property. Both religion and natural law, and their relation to human nature, are part of God’s creation.
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 disparate special-interest groups; such is the multi-cultural jumble into which the United States has blundered since the late 1960s.
Opposing our original conception of government is the liberal jihad, driven by the ideology of socialism, sometimes called The Religion of Humanity or secular humanism. This religion was formalized in the 1789 French Revolution, the same year that our Constitution was ratified.
Socialism is a secular religion. Like Islamic suicide bombers, liberals are so firmly persuaded that their cause is right, good, and just that they are prepared to go to any lengths necessary to destroy the Judeo-Christian ethic of individual morality and replace it with a rigidly regulated National-State collectivism, of which Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were extreme examples.
The religion of socialism is being taught unconstitutionally, at your expense, in public schools and colleges receiving Federal aid. Teaching the religious doctrine of socialism as “scientific fact” amounts to making liberal-progressive-socialism the unconstitutionally established religion of the United States. The way, and it necessarily will be laborious, to stop the liberal jihad is to force schools to present both sides of the story, traditionalist, as well as liberal-progressive. Publicly funded schools now teach only the amoral, secular materialism of the socialist religion. Schools no longer present true versions of American history and of our original ideas of civic virtue and personal morality that are historically the substance of Western civilization. Penetrating the shield of socialist teachers’ unions and the politicians whom they help elect is a very long-term project, but a vital one.
The largest volume of immigration in the nation’s history, both legal and illegal, coupled with liberals’ relentless efforts to destroy America’s original traditions of individual morality, leaves us with no core values and a diminishing will to defend ourselves against foreign enemies.
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Sunday, September 09, 2012
Liberal Self-Contradiction
Liberal-progressivism, the supposedly scientific religion of materialistic determinism, at its foundation level rests upon two contradictory theories of human nature.
Bill Greene, in response to a recent post, commented:
Buchanan makes the excellent point that atheists represent a large segment of the odd Democratic coalition of gays, unions, radical environmentalists, teachers, anti-business, tort lawyers, utopianists, and welfare recipients. The obvious self-interest motives common to most of these groups makes clear that they are more FOR themselves than for the good long-term health of the nation.
The paradox is that those who most believe they are self-sufficient and have no need for religion are the very ones that want Big Government to either take care of them or provide special favors and treatment.
In The Liberal Jihad - The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution I wrote:
Liberal-progressives’ picture of the world requires simultaneously two mutually exclusive theories of human nature: in the one, humans must be naturally good, absent the corruptions of political and social structures, in the other, humans must be characterless and passive receptors of external influences that produce sensual pleasure or pain.
Both of these theories stand in opposition to the traditions of Western civilization that picture humans as created in the image of God, but born with sinful natures. Humans have the potential for both good and evil; the course followed depends upon individual free will and personal responsibility.
When the religion of socialism was taking shape, in the half century before the 1789 French Revolution, the liberal-progressive theory was that humans originally, in the State of Nature, were entirely good, benevolent, cooperative, and generous. The invention of private property and a social and political structure that protected private property corrupted human nature and brought aggression, crime, and wars to human life.
In the decades following the French Revolution, when the religion of socialism attained its final definition, a so-called scientific element was introduced. Liberal-progressives denied that humans have a fixed nature of Divine origin, from which come spiritual religion, moral codes, and traditions of right and wrong in political governance. Instead, they proclaimed that there is no fixed human nature, and that human nature is a variable thing that can be controlled by an intellectual elite employing political power. The implication is that these intellectual rulers have the knowledge, and thereby the power, to perfect humanity.
This is a Darwinian sort of doctrine. Human nature is perceived to evolve over time. Liberal-progressives will just direct and expedite the process. It therefore is a synthesis of sorts between the biology of evolution, which states that evolution is without design or purpose, and Comtean Positivism, a gnostic doctrine, proclaiming that through human reason alone intellectuals can attain a knowledge of history’s secrets. With that knowledge intellectuals uniquely are enabled to direct the affairs of humanity toward earthly perfection.
These two mythical pictures of human nature and political society exist only in the minds of intellectuals and their fellow worshippers of socialism. In present-day liberal-progressive-socialism, the two theories, though mutually contradictory, are mixed in a way that produces dangerous political and social policies.
On the one hand, liberals are unwilling to deal realistically with the real evil displayed by some human beings. On the other hand, liberals are captivated by the intellectualist fallacy that whatever intellectual planners decide to do can easily be accomplished in the real world. To date results have ranged from disappointing to barbaric.
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Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Human Nature Viewed by Liberal-Progressives
Liberal-progressives set great store by the welfare states’ presumed ability to produce economic and social equality and harmony. Unfortunately, human nature is not as they imagine it.
The following is an extract from Chapter Eight, The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution.
Liberal-progressives’ picture of the world requires simultaneously two mutually exclusive theories of human nature: in the one, humans must be naturally good, absent the corruptions of political and social structures, in the other, humans must be characterless and passive receptors of external influences that produce sensual pleasure or pain.
Both of these theories stand in opposition to the traditions of Western civilization that picture humans as created in the image of God, but born with sinful natures. Humans have the potential for both good and evil; the course followed depends upon individual free will and personal responsibility.
When the religion of socialism was taking shape, in the half century before the 1789 French Revolution, the liberal-progressive theory was that humans originally, in the State of Nature, were entirely good, benevolent, cooperative, and generous. The invention of private property and a social and political structure that protected private property corrupted human nature and brought aggression, crime, and wars to human life.
In the decades following the French Revolution, when the religion of socialism attained its final definition, a so-called scientific element was introduced. Liberal-progressives denied that humans have a fixed nature of Divine origin, from which come spiritual religion, moral codes, and traditions of right and wrong in political governance. Instead, they proclaimed that there is no fixed human nature, and that human nature is a variable thing that can be controlled by an intellectual elite employing political power. The implication is that these intellectual rulers have the knowledge, and thereby the power, to perfect humanity.
This is a Darwinian sort of doctrine. Human nature is perceived to evolve over time. Liberal-progressives will just direct and expedite the process. It therefore is a synthesis of sorts between the biology of evolution, which states that evolution is without design or purpose, and Comtean Positivism, a gnostic doctrine, proclaiming that through human reason alone intellectuals can attain a knowledge of history’s secrets. With that knowledge intellectuals uniquely are enabled to direct the affairs of humanity toward earthly perfection.
These two mythical pictures of human nature and political society exist only in the minds of intellectuals and their fellow worshippers of socialism. In present-day liberal-progressive-socialism, the two theories, though mutually contradictory, are mixed in a way that produces dangerous political and social policies.
On the one hand, liberals are unwilling to deal realistically with the real evil displayed by some human beings. On the other hand, liberals are captivated by the intellectualist fallacy that whatever intellectual planners decide to do can easily be accomplished in the real world. To date results have ranged from disappointing to barbaric.
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Thursday, August 09, 2012
The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution
My new book, The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution, is available as a Kindle eBook on amazon.com.
If you don’t have a Kindle, an iPad, or any of the other eBook reading devices, you can read the book on your computer by downloading free Kindle reading software from amazon.com.
Readers of The Liberal Jihad: The Hundred Year War Against The Constitution will learn why today’s bitter political, social, and economic divisions are almost impossible to compromise. They will see how those divisions arise from the clash between two mutually-exclusive religions: the spirituality and individual responsibility of the Judeo-Christian ethos that is the foundation of our Constitution, and the secular, materialistic, and atheistic religion of socialism emanating from the 1789 French Revolution.
The Liberal Jihad will pull all the pieces together to give readers a comprehensive understanding of why socialism implicitly leads to political tyranny, why liberal-progressives want laws and regulations that will compel the rest of us to conform to their secular religious ideology, just as the Islamic jihad seeks to impose sharia law on everyone. The Liberal Jihad explains socialism’s manifestations in phony science, in collectivized government dedicated to continually restricting personal freedoms, in economic theories advocating deficit spending and exploding government deb, in manipulated public opinion and judicial activism, and in education dedicated to converting young students to the religion of socialism.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Following Tocqueville’s 1833 Script
The Democrat/Socialist Party, particularly under President Obama, and RINO Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, are dedicated to reducing us to servile dependence upon the liberal-progressive welfare state.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville discussed the danger, evident then in France, inherent in reliance upon public opinion in democracies. Such reliance fostered envy and class warfare, which inevitably entrained the rise of collectivist tyranny. He wrote:
I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world… The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but does not see them… he exists only in himself and for himself alone…
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate… For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of free agency of man less useful and less frequent… The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting ... Every man allows himself to be put in lead-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain…
... A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large.
... It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life… It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, til they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated… It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves
It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed…
Like the French, Americans are ready to vote (to the extent that they are prepared to go to the polls at all) for anyone who promises welfare handouts at someone else’s expense, as this comports with the goal of economic equality. This has become especially dangerous to survival of the Constitution, because roughly half the population now pay no income taxes at all. New welfare-state handouts appear to them to cost nothing; who cares, when taxes on “the rich” fund benefits. Small wonder that politicians promising pie-in-the-sky attract such voters.
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