August 30, 2005
How does this sound any different from today?
As we of the Life, Liberty, and Property Community are quick to point out, our enemies are not stumbling along the path to the death of individual rights. I believe that there is a concerted effort among elected and appointed officials to grow their own power, and the power of the state. It is very rarely admitted to, but easy to spot. The Left politicians believe that individuals should be subservient to the “common good”, and Right politicians believe that individuals should be subservient to the “moral good”. While they squabble amongst themselves for the reins of power, individuals know that their goals are increasing their power, not our rights.
Reading The Idealogical Origins of the American Revolution, I came across the following passage (p. 94-95, beginning of Ch. 4). Were I not sitting in my big comfy chair, with tall armrests, I probably would have fallen out of my chair.
It is the meaning imparted to the events after 1763 by this integrated group of attitudes and ideas that lies behind the colonists’ rebellion. In the context of these ideas, the controversial issues centering on the question of Parliament’s jurisdiction in America acquired as a group new and overwhelming significance. The colonists believed they saw emerging from the welter of events during the decade after the Stamp Act a pattern whose meaning was unmistakable. They saw in the measures taken by the British government and in the actions of officials in the colonies something for which their peculiar inheritance of thought had prepared them only too well, something they had long conceived to be a possibility in view of the known tendencies of history and of the present state of affairs in England. They saw about them, with increasing clarity, not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in Eingland and in America. The danger to America, it was believed, was in fact only the small, immediately visible part of the greater whole whose ultimiate manifestation would be the destruction of the English constitution, with all the rights and privileges embedded in it.
This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists’ struggle, and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition. For, once assumed, it could not be easily dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign.
It was this — the overwhelming evidence, as they saw it, that they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at all costs to gain ends which their words dissembled — that was signaled to the colonists after 1763, and it was this above all else that in the end propelled them into Revolution.
Look at Kelo. Look at McCain-Feingold. Look at certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act. And the underpinnings of all of these, look at the living constitution.
Is it not obvious that the actions of our current government are far more oppressive than anything the British Crown was able to do to the colonists? Is it not obvious that the rule of law is under deliberate attack, and the powers that be want to be relieved of having constraints placed upon their power? Is it not obvious that we are increasingly coming under the ruling of arbitrary reasoning by our Supreme Court, subject to regulations created by government agencies instead of elected officials? The powers trying to destroy our rights have been working in concert for the last 100 years. If we do not act soon to oppose them, we may find our backs against the wall.
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That is one of the passages that I remember very clearly from the book also. And a significant impact to some of my thinking, even today, after many years of being opposed to government action, regulation and intervention.
I’d say our backs are already up against the wall. Kelo cemented that for me. Anything other than a resounding “NO!” in that decision meant a clear violation of the Constitution.
The question is, (as always), what do we do about it?
An armed rebellion is obviously out of the question. But at the same time, I know Eric has taken, and I soon will take, oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution, from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
It’s a connundrum, without any easy answer.
I thought I saw Alice the other day! Or maybe it was Justice Souter –skipping in Wonderland, immune to and above the laws he passes.
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