Thoughts Aloud

Archive for November 23rd, 2008

A slow-paced discussion has been going on in a comment section that deserves a wider audience. Tom recently said:

Thank you for your comments. My mind is still swimming. I have thoughtfully read your comments twice–at least–at different sittings, as well as Troy’s Secession piece along with the comments that followed. I am very impressed by the clearly written expressions of passion and conviction and the depth and quantity of thought and detail. I have some thoughts to express aloud.

As an American citizen, I share much anger and frustration. On the other hand, I do not believe there can exist a political utopia, whether the embedded economic system is capitalistic or socialistic, or a blend of both. Because human beings are imperfect creatures, all governments, institutions, and professions will have elements of corruption and incompetence: and if these pockets of corruption and incompetence are unattended, they can erode and\or destroy a government, an institution, or a profession. Along with many others, I also think that human beings are animals capable of reason and that human beings are also social animals who thrive best by forming social contracts, that is, systems of agreements with commitments, rights and responsibilities, although the social contracts (including the Constitution) may be imperfect ones. As time moves and flaws in the social contract become apparent and new problems develop, the parties involved in the social contract must make choices to correct present and potential problems. In such a process, I think that intelligent, honest, sincere, and competent men and women will sometimes make mistakes, though they act with good intentions. And I also think that all complex problems are not immediately solvable and that some problems cannot be solved at all. When “corrections or “perceived corrections” are made, there well may be some negative, unintended consequences. Consequently, adjustments will be needed. So the cycle continues and more imperfect representatatives in a constitutional repubic will attempt to solve complex problems. So it goes.

So, for me, given the imperfections of human nature and American strengths balanced against America’s weaknesses (democracy’s flaws, capitalism’s flaws), I think that living in America and accepting my rights and responsibilities (as I understand them in the context of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its Amendments, and The Gettysburg Address (especially a government of, and by, and for the people) is the best choice for me at this time and place, my here and now. And I am thankful that I can freely discuss and write about this free choice to live in America, while at the same time honoring and respecting those who think and choose differently.

A closing note: I believe that Freedom is not an absolute and that Freedom is not free. My freedom–my ability to make important and significant political, economic, and personal choices in a personally secure and comfortable environment–is deeply rooted in the risks and the sacrifices that many Americans have made through the years in order to make and preserve the identity of the United States. I am humbled at the thought.

That was an excellent summation of your reaction to what you are encountering here, Tom. When one first becomes exposed to some of the history of what America once was, and the perversion of it that has taken place, one’s mind and worldview do indeed swim in a sea of confusion and mixed emotions.

For what it is worth, Troy and I experienced this awakening years ago, long before we met online. We spent the last year together elsewhere, almost daily kicking around proactive ideas about how to awaken the American people to what had happened; and what was coming, if we did not return to our founding principles before it was too late. In between, it is probably fair to say that we went through the stage of pragmatic compromise with the modern Robin Hoods, which you find yourself presently in.

We are now, to be sure, inflexible proponents of individual sovereignty, who will never accept the status of serf or the chains of a slave, be they attempted by a tyrant or a committee of the vox populi. We have watched with trepidation the brewing of this perfect storm. Converging forces of corrupted national politics, unsustainable debt, phony environmentalism, expanding corporatism, globalist geopolitics, Islamic jihad, illegal immigration, the monetary malfeasance of the financial world, and the abdication of their adversarial duty by the fourth estate, were there for all to see; but few bothered to connect the dots. Believing in the essential character of the American people, Troy, I, and countless others did all we knew how to warn them.

Alas, as old men from the heartland, we discounted the efficacy of the emoting academics and their sycophant media, feverishly emasculating the minds of metropolitan voters; thereby robbing them of their birthright as free, self-sufficient, and self-reliant Americans. The indomitable character of the typical countryman of our youth, has simply vanished in our lifetimes.  Now, the results of our recent election provide the final ingredient to that perfect cauldron, and with utter dismay we watch helplessly as the maelstrom comes crashing on our shores.

You appear to subscribe to the swinging pendulum theory, which would keep America essentially centered as we tack back and forth in our endeavors to make more perfect our Union. I and others had a brief moment of hope back in early ’94, when a cadre of young libertarian thinking Republicans made a “Contract With America” to win their votes. Sadly, it only took a distressingly short time for them to be utterly corrupted by the environment in DC, and the pendulum has been stuck on the Left ever since.

For all the hateful rhetoric from the Left over the past eight years, the Bush administration has basically been a Progressive one. For all the epithets from Leftists toward “neocons,” people forget that these characters were Wilsonian Progressives who got fed up with the pacifists who had hijacked the Democratic Party; so they deliberately sought to hijack the Republican Party for their New World Order agenda.

With the singular exception of his Jacksonian reaction to 9/11, Bush has allowed these Wilsonian neoconservatives to govern entirely from the Left. “No Child Left Behind,” “Medicare Drugs,” “Amnesty for Illegals,” “Mexamericanada” (SPP) et al, are not conservative ideas. Neither is massive deficit spending or corporate bailouts. He signed all the pork barrel spending bills that allowed Congress to pander to their voters, to maintain the status quo of incumbency. Bush is not a conservative ideologue or even a libertarian, he is a Pragmatist.

Even his personal choice for the Supreme Court was uninspiring, and it took a massive revolt by his own constituency to get him to appoint a couple of strict constructionists. The simple truth is, Kennedy’s administration was well to the Right of Bush’s, and to a lesser extent, so was Clinton’s. Were he a Democrat, all but the twitchy Jeffersonians among them would be singing his praises. As a Republican, almost nobody is, and to call his tenure in office a period of conservatism, is just silly.

You allude to flaws in our original social contract, and I will acknowledge a few; the pragmatic accommodation of the slave trade, chief among them. Our nation eventually paid dearly for that; but the changes enacted in 1913 were not corrections, they were perversions. If I could erase a single year in our history, that would be the year.

From my and countless others’ perspective, the pendulum never even got back to the center, much less to the Right, and it just took another hard swing Leftward. Nothing I see on the horizon is likely to correct that, and this rapidly approaching perfect storm will be unthinkably devastating and not abate anytime soon. The Progressives who are now in total control of the reins, will undoubtedly repeat FDR’s mistakes, which so unnecessarily delayed our recovery from the last depression.

Please forgive us for abandoning all hope of reason alone effecting the necessary political adjustments to weather it comfortably. Reason is in short supply in America these days; feelings, whim, and the crippling “entitlement” mindset are in ascendancy. The powers that be, even if smart enough to know better, are going to have to dance with the the folks who empower them; and to the tune they played as the piper, however discordant to a rational ear.

Thus, we reckon that nothing short of hitting the reset button, and rebooting an uncorrupted copy of our original Constitution, is going to get the system back to operating smoothly and efficiently in an atmosphere of laissez faire capitalism, with honest currency, for the true benefit of all Americans – whether they are too mind-numbed to understand it or not. If that requires abandoning the metro-academics to pillage and plunder each other in their Marxist inspired ghettos, while the producers in Flyover Country cast off their chains and start afresh, C’est la vie. ◄Dave►