This country is being pickled, Pelosi-ed and pressure-cooked. Take it from a housewife. She knows a mess when she sees it. We are on the road to bureaucratic tyranny. I highly recommend this editorial from Investor’s Business Daily on the Congressional health bill passed last Saturday. Kerry Jackson writes:

Two hundred twenty U.S. lawmakers voted late Saturday night for a federal takeover of the American health care sector. They had no right.

Passage of the 1,990-page bill is a national disgrace. Agitators say it’s a shame that the government in the world’s wealthiest country doesn’t provide health care for all. But the real blemish on this nation is a political party pushing the U.S. ever closer to being a nation of dependents.

Congress has no constitutional authority, no moral standing to force a federal health care system on a people whose nation-founding forefathers promised them they’d be free of government coercion — not even if a wide majority was demanding it.

Those 220 lawmakers abused the nation’s trust in them. They performed an intellectually and morally corrupt act. They forgot that they are public servants, not masters of the citizenry. They have elevated the soft tyranny of invasive government over the freedom that is the hallmark of this nation, the legacy of the founders who understood the dangers of a state acting with no limits.

Should the House bill ever become law, it would, like all socialist policies, dehumanize and demean. Socialism, statism, collectivism, communism — they’re all varying degrees of cruel regimes that crush the human spirit and drain the soul. In systems in which the individual is forced to yield to the collective, the individual loses his humanity, his hope and his dignity.

Paul writes:

Mr. Jackson’s comment about not voting away our independence even in the face of large majority support for such a vote seems misplaced. His ire should be primarily aimed at the reforms that have steadily made this country more of a democracy and less of a republic.

The attitudes Mr. Jackson decries have always been present in America (remember that even the fire-breathing freedom lover John Adams wanted the president to be a quasi-king and addressed as “His Highness”), though they weren’t anywhere near as common as they are today. But the Founders clearly set up a republic to keep such desires, inflamed by the corrupting pressures of pure democracy, at bay. Over the past century, however, we have come to more and more resemble a democracy instead of a republic. (We, of course, have always incorporated the principles of democracy in the structure of the federal government, but within the constraints of small “r” republicanism.) Direct election of senators, an income tax to enable citizens’ dependence on a newly empowered state, allowing 18-year olds to vote, electing officials through primaries and allowing popular referenda on all kinds of issues — all of these developments have substantially weakened the barriers to (small “d”) democratic tyranny erected through republicanism. In such a society, the will of the majority is law — regardless of how wrong it might be. We still have vestiges of our republican form of government in institutions like the Bill of Rights, but court mangling and Liberal initiatives like hate speech laws and the gay “rights” movement have done considerable violence to them. In time, they too will likely fall victim to the corrupting influences of democracy.

Mr. Jackson decries the result of the process that’s brought us to this point, but I question whether he understands the process itself.

Laura writes:

I agree, but Kerry Jackson would probably be out of a job if he suggested rolling back the franchise. Short of that, it seems a reversion to a more tempered democracy is impossible.

Paul responds:

Probably impossible, yes. But in that case, his particular criticism — that Congress is making us serfs against the Founders’ wishes but in accordance with ours — becomes something of a non sequitur. There are other, more consistent lines of criticism.

Laura writes:

So, in light of this latest possible seizure of federal power, do you have any hope for effectively resisting it or turning it back?

Paul writes:

This is the question that drove me from the public policy profession. The short answer is a qualified “yes”.  The long answer is, well, longer.

I hold out hope for America, but it is the hope of Habakkuk.I see no hope without a collapse, a social apocalypse. The roots of independence and traditionalism run deep in the American South and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Midwest. When the Left (and Right-Liberals) have taxed the state into oblivion and our society is overrun with unassimilable immigrants (think “America at the end of Atlas Shrugged), those roots will be all that sustain us. IF they are strong enough to weather the coming storm, I believe America can rebound. I don’t see any hope for that in my lifetime, though.

I look at myself like someone in north Africa in the early 7th century: a member of a doomed culture under attack. In my lifetime I expect to see American society decline into ever-increasing levels of decadence, narcissism, and anti-white and anti-traditionalist self-loathing. That is not a call to despair, but rather one to be sober-minded about our situation — an attitude somewhat like Galadriel’s in Fellowship of The Ring when she talks about the elves fighting “the long defeat” to protect Middle-Earth. We are called to fight for what is good even in the face of insurmountable odds.

If God has a purpose for America, if His will is that America continue to be a force for good in the world, He will equip us to do so; He will raise up men and women to fight that fight; He will ensure the survival of a faithful remnant who will be the Ferdinands and Isabellas of our own Reconquest. If that is not God’s will, then we will have received in our ultimate end and dissolution the just punishment for our sins. If that is the case, in the words of the greatest speech in American history, “so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

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