When I go home in the evening I usually catch the last 5 minutes or so of “The Five” on Fox, where Greg Gutfeld often has a tired old cliche he wants to ban. Last week I think it was “spot on”.
I collect words, too, only I don’t want them banned, but rather used more correctly. You know what I mean.. I forget who the theater mogul was who said that the use of the word “gay” by homosexuals was a heinous theft of a fine word by “a morose group of people”. “Making love” ain’t, well, making love anymore. And “hooking up” has nothing to do with fishing, bungee jumping, or parachutes. “Middle class” no longer means the private sector, only the state class, except of course, no one will tell us. Doublespeak. As my son once called these, when he was in college, “double nintendoes”.
But for flagrant, serial word corruption, the media stands alone. This we also know, of course.. They are dogs behaving as dogs, acting in accordance with their natures, so we shouldn’t get so exercised. But about those who, by the sometimes sanctimonious, and other times over-casual use of key words that can inflict real harm on our cause, I have to pause and say a few words…always with a moral in mind.
For instance, Limbaugh uses the word “liberal” synonymously with leftist, not knowing or caring that there are liberals out there “not of the left”, as I have often lamented here. Glenn Beck is the same with “progressive”, righteously unaware that there were always progressives “not of the Left” in my day. Much older then Beck, I’ve known many progressives who would have cut your heart out if you’d ever compared them favorably to anything that was remotely un-American.
In both instances, there is a significant Darwinian reason as to why this distinction is important right now, and it all comes down to that one term “politics” Glenn Beck hates. This is the word I want rescue today.
Mr Beck seems to be using his antipathy toward progressivism to bolster an argument that Americans should avoid”politics” altogether, as if it were a dirty word. What we should be spending our time with instead reminds me of the Chautauqua Movement of the late 1800’s, which dried up in part beacause it was so damned boring. He spits “politics” out as if it were “shaddafraddaraddafratz” or some other obscenity, when in truth, that may be the word that can save us all, short of a shooting war. I’d far rather see the “real politics” of America resurrected and used not less, but more, for once upon a time “politics” defined our power as a people, and can be made to again.
Consider: Before the Constitution was ratified there were the Federalist Papers, and the less-read Anti-Federalist papers, which resulted in a model bipartisan document, the first part representing one side, a set of rules for establishing a government and enumerating its powers, and in the second part the other side, with a set of drawn lines in the sand stating where the government cannot step to exercise its authority (the Bill of Rights).
That was politics.
But it didn’t stop there, for as soon as the Constitution was ratified those men who signed it chose up sides into two parties along those same lines, setting themselves on one another (including slander and name-calling) about the importance of the particular issues they each championed, and the insignificance of the other side’s positions. Many of them, if you don’t already know, didn’t like one another very much, e.g., Hamilton calling Jefferson names we still have yet to call Obama (publicly). And I don’t think anyone other than Abigail liked John Adams, even as he was also the most respected member of the Founders.
Again, that was politics, so what was the big diff between then and today?
Two things, actually. First, all those men who signed the Declaration and forged the Constitution shared a common bond, the Revolution and the practical and philosophical reasons behind it…which is why we still consider the Declaration to be woven into the fabric of the Constitution (what I like to call Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s only, albeit unintentional, handshake). All these men shared something in common despite their disparate backgrounds, ambitions, and world views, and as long as they lived, that shared history would always keep them joined.
James Monroe was the last “revolutionary war” president, 1817-1825, almost forty years after the War, thus ending that first generation. And indeed politics in America seemed to go to hell right after that, for the history of American politics, beginning with Andrew Jackson, and every president thereafter, was marked by the national government trying to get bigger and bigger, and more self-involved. The business of government was government. Still, a Frenchman visited America during Jackson’s reign, Alexis De Tocqueville, and he spoke highly of American politics and the people’s passion for it…only he scarcely mentioned the national politics of Washington at all. It was all about local politics. People had never been allowed to do this in Europe, you see, so that was the true rarity De Tocqueville noticed.
Obviously, that common bond no longer exists, nor, as I’ll argue below, can it. So don’t lament its passing. There’s a reason for it, as I dissect below.
Which leads us to that second thing, for those of you who’ve studied American History, what you really studied was the history of the American government, not the history of the American people. In many respects they were never the same. Nor were supposed to be. That was the whole idea of that “We The People” document. America’s real history is found elsewhere, in “the history of Iowa”, or the history of Hardin County, or the history of Amboy Township, or even the history of Five Points, New York.
No one seems to be interested in those histories. Still, they are the mother’s milk of liberty. I’ll bet few of you have ever studied the history of your own town, but there history and politics were inextricably linked. Every paved road, lamp post, school or public building had a history, and all were usually linked to a tax, so a healthy public debate, where some were always fer it, and some agin’ it. Today, those histories are locked up in some dusty archive of the courthouse, or the local historical society or newspaper office, yet reveals American democracy as no history book tells it. Just forget the content of the debates. Instead note how many people participated, usually close to 100% of the taxpayers. I’m quite certain that until the Great Depression (1930), few people in most American towns or cities ever cared what or who was in the state capital, much less Washington…except on Election Day, when the sheriff’s race was still much bigger then the president’s. In fact, except for the fact that it’s now the government standing outside the polling places, passing out half-pints of Old Rub of the Brush, and crisp new five dollar bills, (or maybe birth control pills), voting patterns really haven’t changed that much either.
Simply stated, the people called all the shots in those days, because it was their own money and property, and their unwillingness to part with it. They demanded to know who was going to spend it, for what, and could personally oversee it being spent, that politics dominated their lives. Politics was the main ingredient in private ownership of this country, his personal stake, a jewel in private property’s, and democracy’s crown, and every American tithed a portion of his time each week to be apart of it. Politics. It was no different than fixing a leak in the roof. It was something that had to be done in order to keep their House fit and proper.
So, if the national government needed money, it had to fend for itself. The men who ratified the Constitution, plus the first Congress, and theirs staffs (Did you know up until the time of Grover Cleveland, the president had a staff of three, and Congress no staff at all, and the post office was the biggest employer in America?) couldn’t fill a decent-sized church in Richmond, Virginia? Even by the time of the Civil War, when the federal government’s administrative offices exploded by the thousands, you still couldn’t fill the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut, built for just one football game a year, the Harvard-Yale game (just to give you some sense of proportion to both government and football at the time.)
In short, 99% of America went on its merry way, while paying almost no attention to what was going on in Washington, yet their lives were filled with the most vigorous types of politics.
Still, Americans liked their federal government, mainly because it kept faith with its principal mission, protecting their pursuit of “life, liberty and property”, did a passable job of delivering the mail after 1841, and didn’t get too pushy.
Dinesh D’Souza, in his recent film America, reminded me of what DeToquevuile wrote in Democracy in America when he visited here, namely that Americans were eaten up by politics. It consumed their lives, but only the politics that affected their House (the family corporation). And he wrote at length about our private associations (these days called “lobbies”) who represented the peoples’ various interests to government, mostly state government in those days. Almost everyone had a spokesman in government.
So yes, “politics” is important. In fact, it is liberty’s only lifeline, again, short of shooting those folks.
So, let me try to connect some dots for you by way of changing your thinking about how we as citizens should look at our politics today.
Enter the Devil, Stage Left
I mentioned, above, the change in American politics after the passing of the first generation, which evaporated the mutual bond that glued together the original Founders. It was for a reason, and yes, the Law of Generations had much to do with it. I can’t tell you how many people I meet, including professionals, who still don’t fully understand that human virtues such as patriotism, honor, sense of duty, gratitude. (make your own list), have to be retaught with each generation. They aren’t passed by casual contact or DNA.
It’s a natural phenomenon, so is also easy pickings for a malevolent philosophy that wants to undo the new relationship between government and citizen, to a more compliant, top-heavy arrangement that had served mankind for 5000 years. In short, after 5000 years, our Constitutional blueprint was built around a totally new concept, based on the idea that blueprint would be passed down through the generations with the same (more or less) system of values that first built it. That is how American exceptionalism is defined,, and what local “politics” as I’ve just described is all about.
That malevolent philosophy has always been abroad in the world. In fact, it has held dominion over the world for almost all of written history. This is something you all know, yet really haven’t stopped to consider. So it’s time to consider it now, for somewhere in America history, that original bond of shared purpose began to disappear in government, taking government along two incompatible tracks. It was not by accident.
So, American history becomes important to us now, in determining when and how this occurred, and what we the people at the bottom can do about it. How we decide is important is outcome-determinative as to which of those two sides will win. For you see, these two visions of government are as different as night and day, or should I say, Good and Evil. They can never cohabit the same space, or live peaceably with one another. As of this writing, only one side knows this. Still, one side will emerge victorious, while the other will be defeeted, or as they say in Gothic literature, “thrown down”.
Most patriots profess some level of Christian belief, and most agree that Providence played a role in the formation of the United States. This nature of our creation still defines us, for even as the Left calls America a grotesque freak of nature, not one left-wing Darwinist can explain how this freak could possibly have been an “accident” of nature.
For now, let’s start out with that proposition that God created this freak of nature. But if America was of God’s design, what was His purpose? And how does Evil fit into that purpose?
You’d forgotten about Evil, huh? Yeah. While we give God the credit for America, almost no one wants to acknowledge Evil’s opposite role in world affairs, either as the hand behind the curtain today trying to destroy us, or perhaps more importantly, the reason we were created in the first place.
You may not agree with me about Evil, especially His personification, for polling shows that while 75% of Americans still claim a belief in God, only 50% (and declining) believe His counterpart exists and is out there trying to defeat Him. But the Bible mentions Satan often, beginning with that episode in the Garden. And Jesus actually confronts Him in the wilderness. (Luke 4) And what does Satan do? He tries to tempt Christ by offering Him “all the kingdoms of the world”, even saying “for it has been committed to me” (Luke 4:7). Satan says the world is His give.
So when Mark Twain, around 19o0, made a comment about Satan’s power and ability, saying that
“…anyone who is the spiritual head of half the world, and the political head of the whole of it, must have executive ability”,
he wasn’t just being witty. He was speaking truth to power.
This role of Satan in history in general, and America’s national affairs in particular, may come as a game-changer to many of you, for if you are like my mother you’ve never really stopped to think of just how alone we have always been in this world. She thought Christians owned the world. We can no longer afford this sense of strutting entitlement, for we have “challenged” (in the Devil’s eyes) His “divine right” to it, and he aims to have it back. Imagine a world map in this war between Good and Evil, using the obvious colors, red and blue, in 3000 BC, 100 AD, and even 1600 AD. It would be covered almost entirely in blue, with maybe only a splotch of purple in Europe to account for the many souls there who professed Christianity, but held no real territory. There is no red territory.
Man doesn’t get to add red to that map until 1787, so it should be clear that God had something much bigger in mind than “just” creating a nation that my mother could inherit as her own private Christian preserve. You can disagree if you want, but if you do, please point out to me just where God was in charge during the Egyptian, Babylonian and Chinese dynasties, or even for that matter, in the Christian era in Europe under feudalism, where all, ALL, were built on conquest, and maintained by force, and headed by a nobility class of approximately 2%-3%, purveyed to by assorted craftsmen, and backed up by armies and administrators, another 7%, while the remaining 90% lived in abject slavery of some sort or another, totally at the mercy of their masters…and who built those magnificent Pyramids, Hanging Gardens and Coliseums with a whip at their backs?
I can give longer reasons as to why God had to plan and move in the ways He did in those days long ago, having to do with His prime directive, free choice, which He gave man after the fall of Eden. But I’ll spare you.
Knowing Evil as we all do, you can see why such a political set-up suited the Devil, for the whole world was built on conquest and force. Evil didn’t, still didn’t, have to worry about the people’s spiritual lives, even in Christian Europe, for the feudal political system there totally smothered them, keeping them in bondage to there most basic needs. This was true is 1000 AD, and still is today in many ways. Up to the industrial revolution 90% of peoples’ lives were so survival-based, that was all they could think about; cold and hunger versus warmth and a full belly. There was no leisure time to consider their souls, and although shriven (baptized) from the 10th Century on in Europe, most would have sold their souls for a plate of fresh venison.
When and how God began His plans to replace Evil’s control of the earth is an interesting story, which I’ll only sketch here. We can trace His seedlings from Mesopotamia and Abraham, thence to Egypt, and Israel and onto Europe, where, after a 400-year audition with France, England’s Magna Carta, the rise of the common man, and her enlistment in the Enlightenment, tilted the decision in her favor. So God sent two boatloads of people from England’s shores, one with a religious purpose, the other with a secular one, to a part of the New World that was terra incognita on all of the Devil’s maps. They were totally under the Devil’s radar.
And so they stayed, out of sight and out of mind, for almost 200 years. In Virginia and Massachusetts God was able to create a laboratory, a petrie dish, to develop a society built by free men and women from the bottom up, rather than on the backs of conquest and imperial sovereignty. True, the American colonials had a king, but by the time the kings of England actually saw any profit in the American colonies they had been there for over three generations, and had already developed a kind of condescending attitude toward the Crown, best summed in a prayer over dinner in the film “Shenandoah’, where the family patriarch, Jimmy Stewart, a proud independent Virginia farmer, reminded God about the forty acres they’d just cleared, and the fine harvest the other fields had yielded, and the big house they’d built from wood they’d cut down all on their own. At the end the patriarch said, “But we thank you just the same, Lord.” That was the attitude American colonists felt for their great white father across the sea.
And that has been the attitude free Americans had always felt for big government from the first day.
The Empire Strike back
I won’t turn this article into a long chapter, only to tell you that from the signing of the Declaration, the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution, the Devil has been trying to get His territory back (although He never actually had I), for none of those things were supposed to have happened. I’m not sure when Lucifer realized it was His “Enemy” that had a hand in creating America, but He quickly understood its significance, just as He understood Christ’s there in the Wilderness, and set about to take it all back.
I’ve mentioned this book before, Larry Schweikart’s Patriot’s History of the United States, 2004 (Amazon.com), and I suggest you read it ( a good, easy read) but with this new perspective in mind; that almost all American history has been an attempt by Evil to reclaim what it believed to be its own. America’s social and political history represents the struggle between Good and Evil for the future of mankind. So, it is much bigger than anything the Democrat Party or the Left..
In this light, then, our role in it is a very, very big deal. We are not mere spectators in the bleachers.
Why? Because the Constitution is not God’s masterpiece in America. We are. “We, the People” are the Holy Grail of Liberty, not the Constitution. We are the reason for it having been written. And the Devil’s mission has always been to destroy us and not the damned government. Hell, politicians and bureaucrats sit at Satan’s right and left hands just as Christ and the archangels sit at God’s. This law is eternal: There is no such thing as “good government” in the universe, only government that is of, by and for the People, and government that serves the purposes of the few. We are the former, the rest of the world is the latter.
And, as promised, for those of you who have so religious belief, in this matter Darwin agrees, for science now acknowledges a “morality” exists in nature (they even use this term now) and it is based on territory, mating for life, and reciprocity, and while species are not quite the same as cultures or nations, it’s clear that the American cultural specie, where freedom reigns, is far more survival-enhancing for the many, while the culture based on a top-heavy few is survival-endangering for the many, for they remain in a kind of bondage, while the top turns over regularly through war and conquest.
Satan owns “government” and always has. Even when our national government was a seedling in 1787, like Tolkein’s lost One Ring, it was always reaching out, searching for its Master. But in 5000 years Evil never had to deal with politics from the bottom, only from the top. Why American government has denied the Devil a complete victory in America today is because the national government had always been so inconsequential to Americans. The Devil is trying to make government matter to the people, so that He can use it to conquer (smother) us.
That was the miracle of God’s sneak attack in 1609. It would take Evil 200 years just to concoct a plan to take back government, and another century to execute it. The Devil was literally flying by the seat of His pants. He had never confronted politics from the bottom up before. So while putatively in charge in Washington for the past century, Satan has still not acquired the power to smother the people back into submission.
I call this Good News, for Evil knows just how fragile His conquest of our government really is so long as the people have the power and moral base to take it all back themselves. All we need is the correct disposition, for while we are waiting and praying for God to do something on our behalf, especially to send someone, (from !*#$%! Washington? of all places) to rescue us, He is waiting for us to do something from the bottom to rescue ourselves.
This is something we can all do at home, in fact, we must do at home. Only not on our couch.
What is to be Done?- Tithe Local
Actually, we can unmake the Devil’s work in our government rather simply. It will take a generation or so, of just hard work, and never losing sight of the prize. You can make government small again, and impotent, in 30 years, easy.
It all begins with a “tithe”; a tithe of your time, and a redirection of habits. We don’t spend enough time on “our politics’ and far too much time on “other peoples” politics, including Washington, i.e, the politics of the media, who seem to be able to lead us around by the nose henpecked husbands.
Never forget that the government who is now eating you out of house and home, we first invited into out homes in the first place…about three generations ago. They didn’t kick down the door, as they now threaten to do. They just marched right in, sat down at the dinner table, and tucked in a napkin, and we passed the stew. Now they are writing regulations as to how we can prepare the stew.
Begin with the notion that all elected officials in Washington answer to three bosses, in this order; 1) the money interests who pay their way, 2) the media, who proclaim their good name and hold their reputations in thrall, and 3) the voters who elect them. Voters are now at the bottom of this list, when once they were at the top. Politicians are nonetheless married to their voters, who can divorce them at anytime. Ask Eric Cantor. But politicians also have a secret love, a tryst with the Devil’s main spawn, the bureaucracy, who glorifies their status. (Think of this in illicit sexual terms, for power and status have the same effect.) The bureaucracy is the politicians’ painted woman in the big city (could be a guy these days., who knows?) who they must keep in furs while sending a dozen roses back home from time to time just to placate the missus. Their spending over the past decade run at least 50:1 in favor of the mistress over the missus. Most new taxed go to creating new bureaucracies and bureaucrats, not new private sector jobs or new roads, or new infrastructure. Yes, ideology and party loyalty can also play a role, but they are moving targets, and shift with the winds when the love, money and status interests are at stake. (Even in the Democrats’ dictionary Mary Landrieu is a whore, only so long as she is their whore.)
Conservatives seem to be absorbed, even addicted to this soap opera going on in Washington, which itself is an indication of our surrender to these bad circumstances, for wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending clothes is the last sign of surrender.
Instead, reacquaint your congressmen with fear by letting them hear the constant and rising drums beats from their home office in the district. Make politics local again. Don’t bemoan “honest and morality” “injustice” or “big government” anymore. Instead, go dowen to the courthouse, or the school board, and protest the taking of your money. Start turning over tables. Trust me, others will join. Be a joiner instead of a general. Lock arms. Be a Marine. Get off the couch and move into a foxhole. Protect the person on your left and your right and know they have you covered as well. And kick up so much dust it can be seen at the state capital. Trust me, your congressman and president will know it when you do.
This requires you to tithe your time, measured in hours per week, to spend most of it face-to-face with fellow citizens, and not in prayerful retreat wit the internet. (This was always the secret fear the tea parties instilled in government, all those secret meetings down at the Krispy Kreme. Some of my best “Dark Alley” seminars have been in front of no more than eight people in the back corner of a Panera store.) Conspire.
Trickle fear up, for government, like Lucifer, of all the Devil’s minions, knows fear.
Also, ColdWarrior has a capital idea: become a precinct committeeman, and turn over tables inside the GOP proper, for that is local and state politics played at its highest. You can actually do this with the Democrats, too. It was local Virginia committees that brought down the entire Eric Cantor organization earlier this year.
This article is largely to lay a two-by-four across your nose about the real game you are involved in, one that began in 1609. We are just the latest edition, but also possibly the last, as the Devil is not a potted plant, and he has plans moving forward as well.
What the Devil does not envision is a rising of the people, not violently, mind you, but not non-violently either, but one which returns fear of the people to our elected leaders.
There are several things that need to be done that will take several years to accomplish, but pressure from the bottom is key. I’ll list only a few here. If you started today it would probably take 10-15 years to gain these objectives, but only 1-2 years (one term) to make your congressman afraid, and begin drifting back in your direction, easing your path forward to the larger objective. This is how politics is played.
1) Remove the august trappings of government and replace it with dignity and humility, the proper cloaks of a public servant. In theory, with a good cell phone, computer, and a halfway decent secretary, a Congressman who is afraid to spend even a nickel of his constituents’ money without their permission, can run his official business on an overturned footlocker, with a paint can as chair. If he wants better, tell to find a yard sale.
No really. Reduce his high esteem for himself, and miracles will occur. He’ll meet you halfway, or be replaced by someone who while, while he goes back to work in his father’s law practice. Or warehouse. America’s history proves we don’t need pretty people or clever people, but people who are beholding to a higher set of standards and calling when the chips are down. We can count them on one hand, yes, but keep those rules in their minds, and forever hold that gold standards out to every person you send to congress.
Take that incentive out of government and you put the citizen back in charge.
2) Cut the financial strings between the states and the federal government, which began in he FDR era, then federal aid to education and then Nixon’s revenue sharing, variations of which continue today, giving the federal government a 10%-20% middle-man fee, plus requiring the states to create “mirror bureaucracies’ to deal with this money. This exists in every cabinet-level bureaucracy, and cutting the ties means 20% reduction in federal and close to the same reduction in state bureaucracies. Moreover it removes that Damocles Sword the feds hold over state sovereignty. It makes it easiert for a state to say no.
3) Repeal the Administrative Procedures Act, an LBJ-era law, and all its little spawn since, that empowers bureaucracies to write laws, and enforce them, without the involvement of Congress. Yes, it should have been declared unconstitutional years ago, but it wasn’t. So get rid of it. Start over.
4) And completely redraft the old Pendleton Acts, which created a so-called “merit-based” Civil Service Commission, to replace patronage politics. Bureaucracies now owe their loyalty entirely to government, instead of a patron, so this was not really such a good thing, especially since they naturally lean Left (i.e., big government). Today we can’t even fire them, as one person lamented about the recommended changes to reform the VA, noting that why is it we actually have to write special legislation just to fire a corrupt, incompetent, or insubordinate federal employee?
Bureaucracies are Satan’s special spawn, a breed He’s sicced on all people on behalf of the king since Egypt. Regulators, tax collectors and busy-bodies, who can come in your house without permission. The Devil’s special twist in America is that these demons are actually paid with your own money. Almost all of them should be removed over the rank of GS-5 and start over. Do this one thing and America will become whole again, for black people on the plantation will become free, congressmen will lose their painted women, and the Left will lose 25% of its voter base.
5) Get rid of all public unions.
6) Take back your local schools.
Do these things (there are others) and in ten-to-fifteen years the people will be in charge again in the same way they were in time of DeTocqueville, when all real politics was local. Your total payout to government at every level will be much less.
Moreover, your children and grandchildren will have a chance to be in charge in the future, and this will be your most valuable bequest to them.
But, as I said, the Devil is not a potted plant. He is moving out smartly to finish His own plan, which by my calculation will take another 25-30 years to smother our culture. He has all sorts of things in his favor, public schools, the academy, Jimmy Fallon, but once you understand his ways and purposes, you can collectively rise against him, and there is nothing He can do about it. Repeat; There is nothing He can do about it, for you alreay have inside you what Satan spent 5000 years keeping out of man. God wins if we do.
Satan’s plan today relies on you (us) continuing to look in all the wrong places for relief and a quick fix. He doesn’t envision you, the ordinary citizen, laying down a long-term, three-generation plan to cut these bonds that he has created.
