Divisive Politics
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Posted: 07/08/08
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Divisive Politics
By Thomas E. Brewton
Senator Obama's campaign is based upon a fantasy: his claimed ability
to transcend politics-as-usual and thereby to unite the nation for a
common purpose.
It isn't just that Senator Obama lacks his claimed power. It's that
the secular religion he represents is entirely antithetical to
everything that led to the foundation of the United States. The very
existence of liberal-progressivism is divisive.
We Constitutional traditionalists were here first. It is the liberal-
progressives who are an invading army of conquest, marching under the
banner of an alien, Continental European philosophy of atheistic
socialism.
To be a liberal-progressive is to view people as members of social,
ethnic, and economic classes, most of them, if we are to believe
Democrat/Socialist Party leaders, belonging to Karl Marx's lumpen
proletariat of unemployed, deprived, depressed, and oppressed. It is
to believe that only government can improve people's lives, because
individuals are powerless in confrontation with the monopolistic,
capitalist establishment.
The solution, in liberal-progressive doctrine, is to restructure
society, redistributing income as evenly as possible. With the
original doctrine of private property ownership removed from society,
people will no longer be envious of each other, but will live
harmoniously. Crime will disappear, because everyone will have his
basic needs satisfied by collectivist government. We will become
one, big, happy commune.
This is the essence of Senator Obama's change that will bring us
together by transcending the old politics.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that leaders of the Democrat-
Socialist party, joined by mainstream media editorialists and so-
called news reporters, continually decry objections from
Constitutional traditionalists as divisive. For liberal-
progressives, to oppose the transition to socialism is to stand in
the path of scientific progress, to thwart the inevitable course of
history.
Let's remember on this Fourth of July, 2008, that the colonists in
1776 fought for something diametrically different from the liberal-
progressive vision of salvation through the collectivized political
state.
Most people have seen only the opening lines of the Declaration of
Independence. The following lines are the meat of it.
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute
despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --
Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is
now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems
of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a
history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To
prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
"He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary
for the public good.
"He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and
pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his
assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly
neglected to attend to them.
"He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large
districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right
of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and
formidable to tyrants only.
"He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,
uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public
records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with
his measures.
"He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with
manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
"He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause
others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of
annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their
exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the
dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
"He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for
that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners;
refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and
raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
"He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his
assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
"He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of
their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
"He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of
officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
"He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the
consent of our legislature.
"He has affected to render the military independent of and superior
to civil power.
"He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign
to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his
assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
"For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
"For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders
which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
"For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
"For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
"For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
"For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring
province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging
its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit
instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:
"For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and
altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:
"For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves
invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
"He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his
protection and waging war against us.
"He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.
"He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries
to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun
with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the
most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized
nation.
"He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high
seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners
of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored
to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction
of all ages, sexes and conditions."
All of this boils down to one basic affront: the British government
of George III and Parliament had consistently and repeatedly
exercised arbitrary power to compel the colonies against their own
interests.
Our nation was composed of independent and individualistic colonies
that became the original states, with greatly differing geographical,
agricultural, and commercial interests. They were united by a common
heritage of Protestant Christianity and the rights of Englishmen,
evidenced in the common law and the principle established in 1689
that even the king is subject to the laws of the land and to the
higher power of God-given morality and justice.
Two years of intense public debate, from 1787 to 1789, were needed to
secure ratification of the Constitution. The great fear was that it
might grant too much arbitrary power to the government.
The fears of 1787-89 unfortunately have been realized, as the Federal
government again and again overrides states' powers guaranteed by the
Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and as the Federal judiciary
arbitrarily creates and imposes law in opposition to the expressed
will of citizens within the states.
The liberal-progressive ideal of a rabble-led democracy of the sort
that emerged in the French Revolution the year of Constitutional
ratification was emphatically rejected by the framers of the
Constitution. James Madison, in the Federalist Papers, observed
that, historically, pure democracies had been the worst and shortest-
lived form of government. Pure democracies repeatedly dissolved into
tyrannies when silver-tongued orators appealed to the masses with
promises of welfare-state benefits in return for grants of more power
to the orator.
The Constitution was, instead, intended to form a federal republic
(not a European-style monolithic sovereignty), in which states
retained most of the police powers to regulate the everyday life of
their citizens.
Senator Obama represents the antithetical thrust of liberal-
progressivism to collectivize power at the national level, reducing
states to hat-in-hand sycophancy, and to revoke the Fifth Amendment's
guarantee of private property rights.
Only by conquest through cultural civil war can Senator Obama and his
liberal-progressive minions bring us together. It is they who are
the divisive element in American politics, education, and business.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
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