Remaking America

The great conservative, Russell Kirk, authored The Conservative Mind (published in 1953). His work chronicled conservative thought dating back to Edmund Burke (thought by many to be the father of the modern conservative movement), and he helped bring conservative philosophy to the forefront of the political debate. Very early in his book, Kirk lays out the 4 grounds of attack on society that all of the Left’s policy seems to stem from. These grounds of attack can be found rooted in all of the Leftist philosophies from Marxism and Communism to the modern “progressive” movement and the policies of President Barack Obama and his Democrat party:

“(1) The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity toward violence and sin.”

This belief in the perfectibility of man is necessary to the belief in a possible Marxist, Socialist, or utilitarian utopia on Earth. It has not worked in past only because man has not reached his ultimate potential yet; however, once we have achieved human perfectibility, void of sin, a tyrannical government will not abuse its power. As we can see, however, even Barack Obama abuses his ever gowning power. He has been using the power of the Presidency to intimidate and threaten private citizens, to pay off political debts with taxpayer money, to confiscate wealth and property, and more.

“(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes.”

The Leftists neglect the lessons we have learned from our past. They attribute the failure of their ideologies to anything but the ideologies themselves, and reject tradition because it holds the knowledge and lessons mankind has learned throughout our history. The Leftist constantly believes that he can execute his ideology better than the thousands who have tried before him. Again, we can see this today, as Barack Obama implements a plethora of policies that have been tried and failed throughout world history.

“(3) Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.”

To demagogues who preach vacant platitudes of “hope” and “change” total democracy, which is utter mob rule with no checks and balances, is ideal for playing on the emotions of people. Like lemmings they will march off of a cliff for a gifted demagogue, like President Obama. All the while he is further centralizing government and removing checks and balances at every opportunity.

“(4) Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.”

This has long been a central tenet of the Left. Even today, we have one of the heaviest progressive income taxes in the world, and our President wants to confiscate more wealth from upper income Americans only to “spread it around” to political allies and those who have become utter dependants of the federal government. Above all, it seems unfair to leftists like Obama when one man acquires more wealth than another, even if it is by his own hard work.

President Obama and the Democrats are hardly bringing “change” to Washington. On the contrary, they are carrying out the same ideology that has failed throughout world history, time and time again. All they have done is re-wrap their core ideology in a collection of new words like “hope”, “change”, and “progressive.” They have utter contempt for the American society and our traditions, and their goal is not to preserve our way of life. Their goal is to destroy our society and re-make it as they see fit; indeed, it all stems from their arrogant belief in the perfectibility of mankind on earth.

A true American Conservative

A couple of weeks ago, Arlen Specter officially left the Republican Party and joined the Democrats. I say officially because Arlen Specter had always acted more like a Democrat than a Republican anyway.

The mainstream media quickly picked up the story and spun it as the looming death of the once-great Republican Party - arguing that Republicans must moderate and become a “big tent” party like the Democrats in order to survive. Their argument is based on a couple of faulty premises.

First, it presupposes that the Republican Party has drifted extremely to the right. Ineed, many commentators have been repeating the talking point that the Republican Party is the furthest to the right it has ever been. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In fact, the Republican Party is the furthest to the left it has ever been.

President Ronald Reagan was inarguably further to the right than the modern day Republican Party. President Reagan proudly trumpeted his Conservative principles – principles such as limited government, right-to-life, and low taxes, and his success speaks for itself. Not only was Reagan the most successful modern day President, but his landslide electoral success is the kind of success Barack Obama can only dream of; moreover, it was done without the aid of voter fraud groups like ACORN.

The Republican Party is nowhere near as Conservative as President Reagan was. People like John McCain continue to tell other Republicans to moderate, when the blueprint for success should be telling them to return to their conservative principles and abandon this wave of big-government that has gripped them.

The second faulty premise the media has latched onto is the idea that the Democrat Party is a “big tent.” On the contrary, the Democrat Party has been wholly overrun by extreme Leftists, with the ultimate result being the rise in power of America’s first-ever Marxist President: Barack Obama.

Sure, the party has allowed the likes of an Arlen Specter to join their caucus, but it is only because they feel it weakens their opposition. Now that Arlen Specter has joined the Democrat party, they have stripped him of his seniority on any committees – contrary to promises made by Harry Reid in the event of his defection.

The party will do this with any disagreeable members, as when they threatened to remove Joe Lieberman of his committee positions, and they ran a leftist against him in his primary in order to attempt to remove him from office. The Democrat Party is not acting as a “big tent” party when they simply segregate any members who do not fall in lock step with their extreme Left base.

In actuality, the Republicans are the “big tent” party, but this is their problem. Too many Republicans are pre-occupied with appearing bi-partisan and moderate. Moderates, however, are people who have no core principles, or people who chose the path of political expediency over any principles they do have.

This popular push for moderation perfectly setup Barack Obama’s victory in November. Americans were faced with the choice between a liberal, Barack Obama, and a confusing man who seemed to have no core philosophy because he was always pandering to the Left in an effort to “reach across the aisle.”

Political parties are supposed to be a group of people who form around a set of core principles and create a platform based upon those principles. That does not mean everyone in the party must agree one-hundred percent on everything, but they must agree on the core principles they form around.

Unfortunately, liberal Republicans have injected so much of the Democrat party’s liberal ideas into the platform that the conservative principles have become dim, and the result is a muddled and confusing platform that often seems contradictory. This is why Arlen Specter leaving the Republican Party is actually a good thing. It is one-step closer to weaning out the liberals who have dulled the party’s platform.

Contrary to the current talking points circulating, if the Republican Party wishes to survive, they must continue to wean the Arlen Specter’s, John McCain’s, and Charlie Crist’s. Then, they can rebuild the Republican platform on Conservative principles and give the American people bold, legitimate candidates for office, instead of “the lesser of two evils.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

In 1831, a mere 55 years after America’s founding, the great French philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to America by his country to study American democracy. At one point in his book, Democracy in America, he claims that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into a “soft tyranny,” and he describes a nanny-state (my words, not his) that seems all too familiar to what we see developing today:

“I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear 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 all 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 he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

“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. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. 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 the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. 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.”

I found this to be very interesting and an accurate description of what we are facing today.

The Statue of Liberty

Welcome to America - the land of opportunity. Even today, the American Dream is still alive and well. All Americans have unique opportunities to follow their dreams. With hard work and determination, a person like Bill Gates can drop out of college and create a software empire, or a simple high school graduate like Rush Limbaugh can create the most successful radio show of all time. Anyone who has the privilege of being in America can take advantage of these opportunities granted by our liberty.

Unfortunately, the American Dream has come under attack, and not just in the form of endless class-warfare rhetoric spewing from the Left. Indeed, the Left relentlessly undermines the American Dream with their Socialist agenda. Their primary weapon is a heavy, progressive income tax that punishes success and rewards failure and lack of effort.

The Left frequently demonizes businesses, corporations, and “the rich” as evil or greedy. They imply that the rich are hording all of our nations’ wealth while the rest of us live on government food stamps and welfare. They have created, for themselves, a popular Robin Hood image of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Now, they are promising to take even more by raising taxes higher and giving even more handouts in the form of new entitlements and money to pay of mortgages.

In the first place, raising taxes is in no way beneficial to the poorest Americans, or America as a whole for that matter – even a tax increase strictly for “the rich” is detrimental. Who wants to work harder to make more money, only to have more of it taken away without consent? Such a progressive income tax punishes success and there is simply no denying it. A cornerstone of the American Dream is to reap the rewards for one’s success; moreover, increasing taxes on the producers of the American economy will only lead to one of two outcomes, or both.

One, businesses will pass the new costs incurred from taxes along to the consumer by increasing the cost of products. In effect, it simply becomes a tax increase on all consumer Americans, even “the poor.” Two, businesses will attempt to cut the costs of labor via layoffs of working Americans. Either of the two outcomes is bad for America.

Second, government handouts and entitlement programs are completely ridiculous. Aside from losing the war in Iraq, the 2008 Democratic platform is simply: “We’ll give you a bunch of free stuff if you elect us.” It is purely an attempt to purchase the people’s votes with the people’s own money. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America in 1835, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

Of course, many on the Left will argue that it is not the money of the general population they are going to take but the money of “the rich”; yet, as I have previously stated, that heavy new billion-dollar tax bill will just be passed along to consumer Americans. Nothing is free - not even “free government Healthcare.”

The next argument advanced is, of course, that it is a right for all Americans to have Healthcare; therefore, it is the government’s duty to provide it for the American people. Some even go so far as to claim it as a right implicit in the Constitution itself. Well, if rights are to be funded by the government for all citizens why stop with Healthcare?

The government is then bound by the right to freedom of speech to provide all materials necessary to advance that freedom - including but not limited to: Paper, pencils, pens, computers, internet access, radio and television appearances, flags and draft cards to burn, megaphones, and a printing press. Without such luxuries, one cannot properly exercise his freedom of speech.

Of course, there is no need to stop with the First Amendment. We can move right on to the right to bear arms and other rights as well. We need firearms to protect our family and household. Should the government buy us all guns as well?

All of these things, including Healthcare, are supposed to be earned through hard work. They are part of the incentives of fulfilling that American Dream and making a good living doing what one wants to do. The Left is undermining the American Dream by taking away all of those incentives. Successful Americans are punished for their success; moreover, the government will give other Americans anything they could ever want. They do not even have to get a job to feed their families. The government will provide Americans with all the welfare and food stamps they need.

America still is the land of opportunity, but fewer and fewer Americans are making good use of those opportunities. Instead, they are opting for the easy way out – to be taken care of by an ever-growing leftist nanny state. The Left encourages such a path because those people then become dependents that reliably vote Democrat. Every time the nanny state grows, the American Dream dwindles. As the American Dream dwindles, so goes America itself.