Frogs we’re not! Let’s jump out of the pot.

This morning as I was browsing through WorldNetDaily a letter to the editor got my attention.  A reader reported finding a Seattle Times newspaper from November 10, 1950.  “I was stunned,” he wrote “when I read what the syndicated editorial columnists wrote about the 1950 off year election results.  As I read the following quotes, I felt like I was reading current articles on WND. Your readers need to know that the country was in dire socialist straits back in 1950.  The dedicated efforts of patriotic American voters upset the socialist Truman administration agenda.”  The reader then goes on to give some quotes from the article beginning with one reporting that “large segments of the voting population came to feel that the survival of the free democratic system was at stake.”  And another that noted that “the protest vote was aimed at the Democratic Party, which has had full responsibility for domestic and foreign policy for the past two years.”

The WND reader concludes by professing his belief “that patriotic Americans will change the course of American history this November.  As in 1950, the American public has simply been pushed too far by another socialist Democratic administration.”  The historical parallels are certainly striking.  But the reader’s belief that the midterm vote this November 2 will change the course of American history sadly seems to miss the real point.  The 1950 election didn’t change the course of American history.  Neither did other historic voter reactions against socialism in 1980 and 1994.  The alternation of power between the Democrat and Republican parties since 1950 has done nothing to stop the nation’s consistent march toward socialism.  Just as, when we walk, one foot moves in its turn before or behind the other, so in any given election one party has moved ahead of or behind the other, but always in the same direction.

However, in 1950 both major parties professed to be adamantly opposed to communist style socialism, and neither dared to advocate explicitly socialist policies.  Now a faction that professes its open admiration for communism controls the White House in the name of the Democrat party, as the GOP’s leadership labors under the influence of people who have supported Republicans such as the two Bushes, Mitt Romney, or Arnold Schwarzenegger who have used their tenure as officeholders to implement socialist policies across a broad spectrum of issues.  Obviously since 1950 America’s situation has grown steadily worse.  Both parties have moved emphatically to the left.  No election outcome fundamentally altered their course.

Time and again the American people have reacted against the erosion of their rights; and the steady expansion of government control over their resources, that are necessarily involved in the establishment of a socialist regime.  Time and again they have turned to the GOP in the belief that once in power Republicans would reverse the socialist trend.  Time and again events have proved them wrong.

Obviously the course toward socialism is not a function of party control.  It is the result of the fundamental inclination, ever more and more characteristic of America’s elites in every walk of life.  Both parties have become the instruments of elite ambition and control.  Both parties have supported measures that steadily erode the capacity of the people at large to control themselves, to control their resources and to control their government.

Such measures have been especially aimed at making sure that public disaffection never again produces a fundamental realignment of the political system.  Whatever party is in control, the elite party has become uncontrollable.  So-called campaign finance reform has created structures aimed at keeping movements of the people at large from amassing sufficient political resources to challenge elite control.  Ironically this mainly involves making sure that mavericks among the wealthy elite cannot give their resources in large amounts to support grassroots campaigns that contradict the elite agenda.  So-called reforms in education have been used to promote moral and political ideologies that directly challenge and contradict the moral and political ideas on which democratic self-government in America was based.  People educated in the “reformed” educational institutions have moved into control of major media outlets, turning them into boldly propagandistic instruments of psychological intimidation and control.

The nation’s current economic crisis was provoked, and is being exploited to serve the purposes of this elitist domination.  The Obama faction’s crude push for open consolidation of elite control of health care is not simply the product of the aberrant radicalism of Obama’s inner circle.  Their supposed extremism is intended to make the consolidated critical mass of government power needed for unchallengeable elite control seem moderate by comparison.  Once in power the crypto-socialists of the GOP will take the broth of socialism off the boil to keep the political pot from boiling over.  Then they will adjust the political temperature in order to simmer away the last vestiges of American constitutional liberty.

If we ponder for a moment the old political metaphor about the frog and the cooking pot, the American people are the frog, and socialism is the stew.  But too many Americans still miss the point that the sham two-party system is the cooking pot.  People hoping to preserve America’s liberty have time and again hoped that a change of party would end the steady deterioration of republican self-government.  I have listened to the siren song of the GOP partisans who promise that they can change the party from within.  What they are really doing is chanting the mesmerizing mantra intoned to help guarantee socialist elite success – “Stay in the pot!  It’s all that you’ve got!  Stay in the pot!”

I think it’s long past time that Americans awaken from this deadly political metaphor and remember that we are people not helpless amphibians.  We are heirs to a political heritage intended to make sure that America’s political establishment serves up policies that suit the palates of the people who patronize it.  Do we still have a taste for liberty?  If so we need to find a better recipe for the preparation of political results than an elitist system that consistently mistakes the resources and liberties of the people for fodder meant to serve their ambitious appetites.