George Rebane
Lately our American ship of state has taken an historical pummeling, and the beating literally goes on as you read this. The remarkable part is that our country was designed and built so well that it can take a decade (generation?) or two of utter mismanagement, and still provide a world class home for its citizens, most of whom don’t know and don’t care what is happening. You see, the pummeling is coming from the inside, we’re doing it to ourselves.
Our leaders in the aggregate are fools who were sent to the capitols by their equally foolish constituents – that’s us. So today we see them monkeying with the machinery of state, pulling levers and turning knobs the effects of which they have not a clue. They do it for the show that we expect to see from our leadership – don’t leaders always pull levers and turn knobs on the ship of state?
In recent days we have seen everything from “leadership from behind”, to the breakdown of the national fisc, to buying votes with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to admission (by the Bernank) that no one within the beltway really knows what is happening. The only real game that is being played by all the electeds is ‘How can I make sure the crap doesn’t hit me so that I can get re-elected?’ We really are putting to the test the question ‘are people in the aggregate capable of governing themselves?’ The historical answer by princes and philosophers has been a resounding NO.
Then along came this concurrent miracle of place, period, people, and men of peerless vision, courage, and intellect. They saw a way to answer YES, albeit within a set of rules that were almost too difficult to cobble together. But they persevered and gave us our Constitution that defined a republic “if you can keep it.”
Over the last two centuries that republic has almost slipped from our grasp on several occasions, and today half of us are actively working to get rid of the whole thing – Republic and Constitution – and replace it with, yes, Democracy.
The unstudied among us, who form the plurality, know neither the fine points of a republic nor of a democracy. However, connecting unqualified majority rule with democracy has always given that form of governance an unbridled advantage with the great unwashed. Our Founders knew better and told us so.
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." — Thomas Jefferson
"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 death." — James Madison, from Federalist #10
"It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity." — Alexander Hamilton, Speech on 21 June 1788 urging ratification of the Constitution in New York
"Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." — John Adams, letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" — Benjamin Franklin
"Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos." — John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1801-1835
"Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." –James Madison, Federalist No. 55, February 15, 1788
"Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." –Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural address, 1801
All democracies start downward with the violation of the so-called Bastiat Triangle as explained by Frederic Bastiat in The Law (1849), and contained in a dedicatory summary in this blog (upper right column). Autocrats of all ages know that the surest path to power is to marshal the mob under the banner of democracy. Have them sign up to the infamous and impossible exhortation of the French Revolution – ‘Liberte, Egalete, Fraternite!’ – and you’re already half way to a dictatorship.
Today in America the federal government under its progressive leadership is doing everything it can to hasten the day when the states, as envisioned by the Founders and codified in the Constitution, will cease to exist except in name. Everything in the land is rushing pell mell into a unified, ubiquitous, and uniform amalgam – one size will fit all. And all things will be as closely as possible of one mandated size, starting with income. No one understands that equality and liberty sit at opposite ends of the see-saw, each ascends only at the other’s descent.
President Obama and his minions will remind us from here until November 2012 that their work is only half done, and the fundamental transformation of America will require four more years. Given the administration’s accomplishments to date, there is no reason for anyone to doubt this.
And it will all come to pass on our road to democracy. For along that way stand the throngs we last saw in a Chicago stadium, tears streaming from their upturned eyes as their anointed one strode from between alabaster columns down a majestic runway that reached into their midst. Albert Speer with his 1937 Cathedral of Ice in Nürnberg had nothing on Barack Obama’s 2008 Chicago spectacle in Grant Park.
Walter Williams could be right, we may have found our Man on a White Horse.
[28jun2011 update] This YouTube video comparing economically free vs unfree countries was sent by a reader. The numbers are there for comparison and refutation. In it we see a 'Christmas Yet to Come' for our country.
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