The attributes that best describe how America is governed are executive over-reach, legislative complicity, judicial partisanship and journalistic decadence.
The ruling elites of a now hopelessly corrupt political system are just one major blunder away from revolution. When blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail liberty and oppress the people in order to sustain itself.
Written By Lawrence Sellin
Barack Obama, a coffeehouse communist like his clownish mentors, is doomed to replay the tragic political and economic mistakes of the past because he lacks any sense of history beyond the clichés of fashionable and comfortable college Marxism.
Enforced taxation driven by authoritarian instincts led to civil war and the execution of an English king in 1649. One hundred and twenty-seven years later the same mistakes drove English colonists to rebellion and independence from a mother country with whom, as John Adams noted, they shared the same language, religion and kindred blood.
Obama appears less like a champion of democracy and leader of the free world, than a reincarnation of the petulant, self-admiring King Richard II of England (1367-1400) who, trapped in an adolescent fantasy of indestructability, also mistook himself for a messiah. By issuing royal decrees Richard II bypassed parliament and went out of his way to lavish favors on his closest friends and advisors.
What real kings like Richard II and presumptive kings like Obama often forget is that, in the end, power depends not just on coercion, but on the consent of the governed. Without regard to its consequences, Richard II, in November 1380, initiated his version of wealth redistribution in the form of a tax, which the medieval middle class suspected was meant, not to benefit the realm, but for the nobility to lavish on their private estates. It was an early form of crony capitalism. The outrage that it generated among ordinary English subjects led to the Peasants’ Revolt, perhaps the first example of Marxist class warfare.
But all such upheavals do not happen in a political vacuum. The English Parliament facilitated Richard II by approving the 1380 tax in the same way the US Congress and America’s politicized courts facilitate Obama’s own worst instincts.
In addition, the American establishment media have a political agenda and a script that they follow to support Obama’s radical policies. Rather than restraining the power of the federal government, they have become an extension of it and serve the interests of the status quo, which primarily benefits the current crop of greedy and ambitious ruling elites. The media enable tyranny by misinforming and misleading citizens. They insert emotional slogans in the heads of the naïve or low-information voters to replace the reasoned debate of issues that would otherwise stymie their efforts toward one-party rule. It is not a democracy that they wish to foster, but what Edmund Burke described as a liberal “mobocracy,” dedicated to the absolute authority of King Obama and his government of one-world progressives.
In contrast to what Thomas Paine wrote in the “Rights of Man” (1791), the Obama model sees individual rights as privileges, not endowed by God, but granted via political charter, and, thereby, legally revocable to ensure the “good order” of society. It is a collectivist philosophy that directly conflicts with the principles outlined in the Constitution, where government is a construct of and accountable to its citizens, as Paine noted:
“The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”
If America is faced with no less a battle than between tyrannical obedience to the state and liberty, then why is liberty losing, why are we so willing to part with our hard-won unalienable rights and why are we choosing a path so inherently destructive to each other?
Perhaps it is the direct result of the growing power of the state as psychologist Stanley Milgram (1974) implied:
“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”
Or possibly it is simply because liberty has become too difficult, that Americans have a wish for kings, a desire for a benevolent monarch who can quiet our fears, answer our prayers and provide us with Obamaphones – a desire that may provide temporary sustenance to the body, but may permanently corrupt the soul.
Author Bio
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of “Afghanistan and the Culture of Military Leadership“. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.