The War Against the People

A few days ago I had a conversation about the current political environment with an associate, and I recalled some family history.

My parents were born at the turn of the last century in the Netherlands. They lived through World War 1 (the Netherlands were not involved) and World War 2 (the Netherlands were assaulted, conquered and occupied). In the early 1950s, as Europe was still recovering from the aftermath of the war, they pulled up stakes and immigrated to the United States. My father was in his 50s, an age when most people are ready to settle down.

The act of taking your family across the Atlantic and moving to a country whose language you don’t speak and whose customs you don’t know takes an immense incentive. The older I get the more I wonder at that. The vast majority of men and women don’t move unless driven out by starvation or at the point of a gun. Yet my parents did. They did so to find a freer life with greater opportunity.

Even then the Netherlands was a country of economic rules and regulations that tied people down. You could choose your “lady of the night” from the shop windows of Amsterdam, but you could not pay your employees more that the government mandated wage. The Dutch government has long been one that allowed free rein to bodily pleasures – legalized prostitution and drugs are two examples – but controlled every aspect of economic expression. A faint echo of the Roman policy of bread and circuses for the plebeians while the aristocracy ruled.

So I wondered out loud if I would have the courage to emigrate if the American system ever became oppressive enough. He responded that we live in a democracy, repeating it like a mantra as if the expression itself was proof against ... change.

But political systems can be overthrown. History is riddled with republics and democracies that became kingdoms or dictatorships. And when my parents left the Netherlands, it was a democracy, and still is. It just wasn’t the kind of society that I would want to live in. Many would; just not my parents … and not me.

So what causes this concern? Am I being paranoid? Well, some people in congress are also concerned. Francis Parretto has an essay to this point in which he quotes Senator Jim DeMint

After four months of proposals, decisions, and public statements, it seems the president believes that the 2008 election — or more to the point, his election — represents a fundamental break from the previous 232 years of our history. It’s as if he believes his victory in November was less like the election of previous presidents and more like 1789, when we ratified a new constitution.
In 2001, when Obama called the U.S. Constitution “a charter of negative liberties,” he didn’t mean it as a compliment. “It says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you. But it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”...

What President Obama meant is not that the Constitution fails to mandate government action, but that it fails to mandate enough, to satisfy his gargantuan ambitions. And so he daily goes about his business of rewriting America’s social contract, not by amending the Constitution, but by ignoring it all together.

Aside from his constitutional powers, Obama is now also the operational CEO of General Motors, Chrysler, the American International Group (AIG), Citi Group, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and he wields un-challengeable influence over more than 500 financial institutions that have received federal bailout funds.

But presidents don’t have powers aside from the Constitution.

What this president is doing with the automotive, insurance, banking, and mortgage lending industries is extra-constitutional and dangerous — dangerous specifically because it is extra-constitutional.

But Parretto continues by pointing fingers not just at Obama, but at the entire political establishment.

Our founding era featured men of a somewhat different character. Yes, they made mistakes and they committed infractions. The best of them, Thomas Jefferson, was willing to overlook the Constitution for the sake of the Louisiana Purchase, a violation of the constraints on Washington's powers that was urged upon him by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. But no one from our current crop of federal officeholders is worthy to stand among them.

The two centuries that have passed since then have brought a different kind of man to the political fore: a lover of power who believes himself fit to rule over the less exalted in all things, and whose priorities are entirely selfish. No Constitution could ensure the freedom of private citizens, no political system could possibly be kept honest and open, with such men in charge.

But as Arthur Herzog pointed out in The B.S. Factor, when dishonesty and corruption have afflicted a particular institution, it's not because of "a few bad apples;" it's because of the incentives that apply to that institution, and to human nature. Herein lies one of the great liberal fallacies: that giving "the right people" unlimited power is the path to Earthly paradise. The history of political systems provides overwhelming evidence that power and the lure of power really do corrupt. More, the longer a man is permitted to wield power, the more he comes to think of it as his by right.

Given the nearly complete lack of barriers to political permanency, we must expect that a man elevated to a position of public power will, over time, become ever less the servant of We The People and ever more dedicated to his own aggrandizement. We must expect that he will evolve ways to finesse whatever constraints a Constitution or an oath of office have placed upon him. We must expect that he will come to think of himself and his colleagues in office as a higher order of creature from the groundlings over whom they rule.

The Founders knew the power of Kings and Princes. They not only lived under the rule of Kings and royal governors, they went to Europe to obtain the aid of royalty there in the fight for independence. So they were acutely sensitive to the unconstitutional usurpation of power. Americans living today and born here have never experienced anything but a representative republic that leaves most personal and economic choices up to the private citizen. They take that order of things as immutable and permanent. It is the immigrant, the refugee, who can bring alternative experiences to the imagination. And they are terrified, for they see the beginning of the countries they fled.

What is inexplicable to me is that my associate is a member of a “tribe” (let’s call it) whose history is one long story of slavery, oppression, suffering and near extinction. And in defense of his liberty he invokes a mantra “we live in a democracy.” Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have replied to an inquiry on leaving Independence Hall during the final days of deliberation on the Constitution: from "Fierce Planet" :

“A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.”

When the memories no longer serve and history is not longer taught to the young the mantra of "we live in a democracy" is no longer enough if the rules are no longer observed, there is no one to enforce them, and the oath-breakers are cheered.