The Triumph of the Sham (cont’d)

[This article follows upon the observations made in my WND article last Friday. ]

In 2008 and again in 2012 some people chided me for refusing to voter for the unprincipled deceivers the GOP contrived to nominate for President, (John McCain and Mitt Romney, respectively).  I did so because they did not represent my allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and the God-acknowledging principles of justice that make sense of its provisions. Since I began doing this blog, I have done everything I can to help my readers see political events in terms of their implications for the survival of the constitutional self-government (liberty) of the American people.

America’s prevalent Founders regarded representation as the key to sustaining the republican form of government. In light of this, I have analyzed the deeply corrupted character of the present sham two party system. I have also done my best to help people see, in the consistent pattern of ongoing events and issues, that the sham is being consciously choreographed by a powerful elitist few, first to subvert that form of government, and presently to discard it. This elitist faction is now firmly in control of both the so-called “major” political Parties.

In the preface to the 10th edition of his famous exposition of the character of democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville says that he wrote it “under the constant preoccupation of a single thought: the coming, irresistible, universal accession of Democracy in the world.” He reminded his readers of the words he had used to describe it.

The gradual development of equality is a providential fact. It has the principal characteristics of such a fact: it is universal, durable, and every day it escapes human power. All events and all people alike have served its development. Would it be wise to believe that a social movement so deeply rooted is to be thwarted in a generation? Does someone think that after having destroying feudalism and vanquished kings, Democracy will fall back before the bourgeois and the rich? Will it stop now that it has become so strong, and its adversaries so weak.

Tocqueville grasped the inevitable ascendancy of the democratic principle in his generation. The history of Europe throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries attests to his prescience. But now, in the full dawn of the 21st century, the generation formed during what may prove to have been the triumphant apogee of democracy’s ascent in the last century, must grapple with the opposite possibility.  The permanent counterrevolution Tocqueville rightly thought impossible for his generation, has now stemmed, and is poised powerfully to reverse, the egalitarian tide. Democracy, like the primal god known to the ancient Greeks as Chronos, having overthrown its own progenitor, now finds emerging from within itself, offspring strangely aggrieved despite the flourishing existence they enjoy.  They are, like Zeus and his siblings, ruthlessly inclined to overthrow their progenitor, ripping apart the womb in which they were conceived and nurtured.

For the time being it looks as if this ruthless inclination is having its way. If such turns out to be the case, it will surely be what Hegel called a “world historical event”, drawing a line of demarcation between one course of history and the next. However, contrary to the materialistic degeneration of Hegelian thought Karl Marx concocted (to provoke and satisfy man’s natural appetite for power), it is no end of history. It seems, rather to affirm the recycling of regimes the ancients saw as the common fate of human nature, forever oscillating between one form of tyranny and another; permitting societies to flourish only briefly in the lull between their excesses of power.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.” as the French say. (The more it changes, the more it’s just the same old thing.”) This is not an expression of boredom and ennui. It’s a recognition that an underlying principle informs events, a principle that, properly understood, allows one, at the very least, to understand events and sometimes even to predict them. (This possibility of prediction in light of principle, must not be confused with the humanly inferior predictability modern science achieves, under certain strictly controlled conditions, when it comes to things not human.)

This principled approach to human affairs is what I try to follow in the works I produce for this blog. The individual work and writings of America’s Founders support the conclusion that it is the course they also followed. So does the Declaration of Independence. It sets the events that led up to the break with Great Britain in the context of truths ultimately rooted in the assumptions without which the ideas of right, justice and good government make no durable sense. The first assumption pertains to human nature, as a consequence of the being which substantially informs it with an order that, because it presupposes and determines human existence, also defines how actions and activities (including the activities of other material things) contribute to its good.

This is the premise of natural right; the principle of all rights; and the transcendent ground for justice in human affairs. As conceived by the prevalent Founders of the United States, it is the aim and end of the constitution of government they devised, and which they hoped would be the basis for an experiment proving that a form of government was possible that relied on the goodwill and character of the people as a whole, rather than on the will, imposed by force or deceitful manipulation, of whomever happened to get the better of them.

On account of this conception of self-government, America’s founders rejected the view that justice could properly be regarded as a matter of happenstance. In whatever guise it appears, this view ends up validating the notion that might makes right; that superior force is the source of law and order; that power is the essential aim and end of political activity. This literally dissolves the tidal wave of egalitarian passion Tocqueville observed to be acting so powerfully upon the nominally Christian societies in Europe.

Tragically for America, but in common with all the most oppressive “isms” that ravaged the 20th century, the two so-called major political parties embrace the lawless understanding of law and justice America’s founders rejected. On behalf of the founding generation, James Madison proclaimed that “Justice is the end of government.” In the practices, and what passes for the thought, of the elitist faction twin party sham, the motive force and aim of all government is the “perpetual and restless desire of power after power…” even if and when it encompasses the death of their nation’s general welfare and common liberty.

I write on the assumption that many faithful people of goodwill are presently caught up in the political sham that is destroying the Republic. Nevertheless, they nevertheless do not agree with the elitist faction leaders who have abandoned the prevalent Founders’ vision of just government. By and large, the GOP’s elitist faction quislings proclaim their support for liberty, limited government, fiscal responsibility and wholesome “values”. But the whole tenor of their actions during these early years of the 21st century confirms their disdain for all but what sustains and increases their power, and that of the elitist forces to whom they are surrendering the soul of their nation as well as their own..

In my next few posts I intend to take a look at the many ominous portents of continued betrayal clear in the intentions now being openly avowed by the GOP’s quisling leadership. I hope to make it clear that these prospective betrayals are not discrete instances of incompetence, and political cowardice, nor even of bad faith and institutional corruption. They are elements of a premeditated pattern that exactly corresponds to the design for despotism America’s founder’s foresaw and fought against during the American Revolution. In their actions as well as in the words of the Declaration of Independence, our founders’ proclaimed that it is the right and duty of those who would be free to thwart that design, even when doing so involves material risk to everything that they hold dear.

In one way or another, Americans have been called upon to repeat anew that first generation’s resolve to pass liberty’s hope to new generations. We must do so now, or else go down in the remembrance of our posterity as the first generation to fail that hope and, on that account the last to experience the blessings that prevailed as long as Americans were resolved to be what we must be in order to understand, represent, and preserve it.