The Eternal Revolution

I almost hate using the word “enemies” to describe fellow citizens, especially considering many of which would be willing to lay their lives on the line for our country.  Many of them are patriots, but I am not saying they are the enemies of the United States.  What I'm about to lay out rather suggests they are enemies of the cause that gave birth to it. Many of them love this country as much as I do but they also believe her founders and their ideas are losing relevance to today.  In other words they have abandoned the revolution and now work against it.

Now we must ask if those ideas are in fact still relevant to today?  Are they still worth our efforts, our passion, our commitment even unto death?  Or have realities of the present day forced us into a context where this nation's purpose can no longer be the same as it was at its founding?

This is an important logical point. Before I demonstrate that the modern liberal is a counter-revolutionary, I must first establish that the revolution hasn't lost relevance to our current times.  Being a counter-revolutionary to a past and irrelevant revolution wouldn't matter much, but if that revolution is still relevant and even ongoing, then it matters a great deal.

That first point is easily enough satisfied subjectively.  It can be safely said that millions of people here in the United States and around the world believe the cause of individual liberty still needs fought for and continues to be fought for to this day.  The American Revolution did not end with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, it did not culminate with the establishment of the United States government in 1789, and it has not yet achieved total victory even within the sovereign borders of the United States.  As many of the founders acknowledged, they only started the struggle, the struggle to maximize individual liberty within the minimum confines of government necessary to protect us from major threats both within and without.

I could just simply have said that as in the case with any cause the fact that we believe it is relevant makes it so, but instead I thought it important to more fully express that sentiment.  Suffice it to say that whether modern liberalism is a counter-revolutionary movement really does matter.

Now to the business of making the case that it is.  In order for me to demonstrate this I must first show what the founders sought to achieve, and then show that modern liberalism is set against it.

 

The founders intent.

It is argued that the founders were not of one mind and thus there is no such thing as any deep common cause or original intent to be drawn from what they wrote.  This argument is clever but depends on getting a logical fallacy past us.  Just because a group of people by necessity of the legacy of the Tower of Babel, can never have exactly the same understanding of even the things they came together to agree on, doesn't mean the meaning of their agreement is nebulous or elusive.  If that attempted logical fallacy were valid then we could freely disregard all laws and contracts or at the very least be able to “reinterpret” them to mean whatever was convenient to us and our causes.

Since past written agreements and other similar collaborations cannot be rendered so easily meaningless we can safely conclude that there is some degree of common cause and original intent to be credibly drawn from what the founders wrote.  Unless they were a bunch of irrational blitherers there would have to be.  So lets see what some of that was.

Now even most of those who buy into the "not so meaningful intent" argument will at least accept this much about what the founders were after.  They highly valued what they considered to be three fundamental rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  They'd even be likely to grant that, “the pursuit of happiness” largely involves the right to own and control property.  Further still these three fundamental rights are all inseparable from each other.  Not that the modern liberal believes that, but that their scholars would likely grant the framers of the constitution believed this for the most part.  To do otherwise would be to take a departure from the facts of history even too radical for those loving to pound square pegs of historical fact into ideological round holes.

Now to take these pieces of my case they'll grant me and put them together with some stuff I definitely need to source.  The right to property and the inseparable nature of this with individual liberty caused James Madison, often called the father of the constitution, to worry.  He pondered a point we seem to be approaching today where all possible private land will become owned and most citizens will be unable to buy any in their lifetime (emphasis added by me).

"These (people without property) will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands: or which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence & ambition, in which case there will be equal danger on the other side,"

Have-nots being banded together to threaten rights of property or otherwise being used by the very rich to serve their greedy ambitions?  Does this not sound like the world described by modern liberals today? But what seems to be their solution to the crisis?  They propose a powerful central government mandated by a majority to redistribute the wealth of a few to the many.  In Madison's words seem to describe this as a consequence of the problem, “ the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands”, not as a solution to it.  Modern liberalism seems to see it as a choice between two evils, tyranny by government or tyranny by wealthy private interests.  When if they were still friends of the revolution they would seek a choice absent of tyranny.

They don't see another way because they don't want to.  At best some of them think that with the right sort of indoctrination a collective could actually rule with respect for individual dignity.  Here they ignore some of the most sound advice of the founders.  That being that a government ruled by a majority or any collective's interests will by its very nature inevitably attack life, liberty, and property.

Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1788,

"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.  In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents."

Madison takes it a step further in this quote, describing a completely unrestrained democracy in Federalist No. 10 (emphasis again added by me), "A pure democracy ... can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction.  A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party... Hence it is that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

Thus from the point of view of at least the founder described as the father of the constitution, the one who by his own telling, never missed a meeting in the process of the constitution being worked out, the solution offered by modern liberalism is not a solution at all but a surrender to collective rule, the sure enemy of individual liberty.

I underlined and bolded that because it is such a key point.

Now modern liberalism's water carriers in the towers of academia insist that the reduction of individual liberty, greater and greater government intervention in property ownership and wealth distribution is the inevitable direction of things in a world ever more crowded and still possessed of finite resources.  The founders definition of individual liberty can't be relevant in a world where only a few can own land and thus ones liberty must only exist to the extent that governments can manage to allow it while still assuring subsistence for all.  

One could say, using their reasoning, Europe is the way it is because it had to face the reality of finite resources centuries before the United States did, and the United States really doesn't have a choice but to become more like Europe.  In essence, via the demographics of population growth it already has.

Thus I can understand their feeling justified in doing what they're doing to this nation, but then I never thought modern liberal collectivists realized that much of what they do is evil.  Like almost all other collectives that have practiced evil in history they believe they're actions to be both good and rational.  

I dare not list actual examples since all of the collectives ever proven to be evil have since come to be seen as wittingly so, their members all the willing participants in evil.  It seems an unfortunate sociological defense mechanism that we look at any large group of evil-doers and refuse to consider that given the right context of despair, peer pressure, and/or bad information we ourselves could become involved in such things*.

This grows lengthy so I will conclude with this.  The revolution for individual liberty and dignity is ongoing and modern liberals have set themselves against it.  They are enemies of the American revolution.

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*Counter-lynching:  A great example of my point about us all being vulnerable to falling into a bad collective is the crowds of protesters calling for what would in essence be a counter-lynching of George Zimmerman.  The facts of the case didn't in any significant way point anywhere else but at justifiable self-defense but due to a combination of past collective grievances, current despair, and bad information they want an innocent man punished just like so many innocent black men had been lynched in the past.  The members of these crowds of protesters are no different than any of us.  They have been pulled into a bad crowd seeking a huge injustice, and no doubt for many of them they think they act in the name of justice.  This is a clear example of the bad side of collectivism that motivates us to accept perversion and evil as good.