In the struggle for the
soul of the Republican Party, the divide is between those who believe in
a return to conservative principle, and those think such an approach is
too rigid. What truly separates here isn't tactics, but how each group
reads the intentions of the liberal left.
Conservatives see the
left as dedicated Marxists who at heart wish to forcibly remake America
in their image, and trying to get along with them is a pointless
exercise.
Moderates view the left
as well-meaning but misguided, and have an equal (if not stronger)
disdain for the right. Getting along is what matters most to them; they
wax rhapsodic about “bipartisanship,” and the “art of compromise.”
With all due respect to
self-styled moderates, governing has never been an art. At best, it's
like watching sausage being made, and about as appealing as the raw
contents thereof.
Why did anybody think that government would be anything other than a
fetid cesspool? Vast amounts of power, money and control are naturally
going to attract the worst scoundrels among us. The idea that
politicians wouldn't fight and be driven by pure selfish ambition and
greed was laughable to the Founders. Which is precisely why they created
a small federal government that was tripartite divided against itself –
the idea was that they'd spend all their time and money fighting each
other and thus leave the citizenry alone.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were
to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government
would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you
must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the
next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people
is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has
taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." –– James
Madison, Federalist No. 51
However, we've reached the point where all three branches (plus an
unelected, self-appointed fourth branch in the mainstream media) are
together out of control, having steamrolled any and all written limits
on their power, to where real consideration must be given to Madison's
"auxiliary precautions," which range anywhere from peaceful civil
disobedience to force of arms, from a modern-day Boston Tea Party to a
second Revolution itself.
Clearly, no constitutional limit is given any regard anymore. Nor does
any politician suffer any consequences for their abuses of power and
their crushing of both personal liberty and personal responsibility.
(Have we ever directly rewarded irresponsibility more than Obama
proposes to? And then some actually wonder why we get so much more of
it!)
That's the real bottom line in this ongoing – and, it would seem,
rapidly failing – experiment in self-government: the Constitution, the
rule of law, liberty and freedom, the whole ball of wax depends upon the
willingness of those in control to control themselves, and if they
won't, the willingness of the people to control them by whatever measure
of force is necessary.
At this moment, the former is completely gone and the latter hangs by a
thread, as many out-of-control spend-a-holic politicians are doing
exactly the bidding of their equally greedy constituents. I fear that we
are reaching the point described by John Adams:
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with
human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition,
revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution
as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a
moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other. –
John Adams
That sound you hear is Moby Dick bursting the nylon cords. We refuse to
control ourselves, and so elect scumbags to do our dirty work for us –
seizing our neighbor's money in taxes and punishing them for their
success over which we're too jealous; subsidizing the consequences of
irresponsible behavior, thus rewarding and motivating more of it;
forcing our personal choices, lifestyles, and beliefs upon as many
others as we can because we think being "right" inherently justifies
might; and so on.
And then we're shocked,
shocked, when our hired thug henchmen, sitting on amounts of
money and power so monstrously enormous that most can scarcely fathom
it, turn out to be dirty in their own right.
We may be halfway to communism, but you have to admit it's still
representative government – and as a more recent saying goes, "Garbage
in, garbage out."
We've lost our moral
center, we refuse to grow up and take responsibility for our lives, and
then some expect the government chosen by such corrupted individuals –
which, by definition, has to be worse still – to magically fix it all
and clean it up? God help us . . .
We're behaving like spoiled brats and looking to government-as-mommy.
And like children, who are not free and must follow their parents' rules
or suffer the consequences, we shall not remain free as a people either.
Instead of mom or dad paddling the petulant child and establishing the
authority of their benevolent “dictatorship,” we'll have government
clamping shackles on us in a real dictatorship that will be anything but
benevolent.
'Tis a sad and pathetic way to end the American Experiment – throwing it
all away and embracing totalitarian tyranny because we just don't want
the responsibility and the duty that comes with freedom and liberty. At
least the Roman Empire was defeated from without (to some extent) by the
Huns. Our civilization is just plain committing suicide from within.
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