City Journal’s Myron Magnet reviews four books that describe the near fatal torture inflicted upon the Constitution by liberal-progressive collectivization of power since the beginning of the 20th century.
Read It’s Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More.
Presidents, Congresses, and courts are creating an elective despotism.
Alexis de Tocqueville, in his famous Democracy in America, warned us against the tyranny of the majority that would, if unchecked, override and obliterate the rights of individuals under the Bill of Rights. He warned us against the stifling effects of an all-pervading bureaucracy like the centralized administration in socialist France.
Religious morality having been replaced in 1789 Revolutionary France by worship of the Goddess of Reason, Tocqueville wrote, the French people were prepared to tolerate any degree of political tyranny, so long as they received their welfare-state benefits. This same pattern was repeated in 1930s Germany, and now is fully formed in the United States.
“Fairness” and “caring” mean expropriating the property and income of people who are out of favor and giving it to people in favored classes. Social justice is nothing more than the tyranny of the majority, a mob looting in slow motion. Liberal-progressive social justice is a reversion to pre-civilization barbarism in which there is no rule of law, and might makes right. Once having embarked on liberal-progressive socialism, what Freiderich Hayek called The Road to Serfdom, the average citizen finds it easier to ignore tomorrow, to eat, drink, be merry, and let the government take care of him. It is this which led to tyranny, in ancient Athens and now in the modern world.
See also Death Of The American Idea,
A Federal Republic, Not A Democracy,
Equality vs Liberty,
Back To 1984,
Crushing Power of Our Collectivist Political State,
and A Federal Republic If We Can Keep It
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