Monday, May 17, 2010

The Land of the Free or the Home of the Slave?

Sultan Knish:

Any code of laws that has been set down in the past in order to guide the future organization of a nation is vulnerable to being rewritten by the dominant political or cultural forces of a later period. These forces will inevitably attempt to rewrite that document to give themselves absolute and unlimited power to rule as they see fit, while also providing themselves with immunity from any of its laws.

The United States Constitution was assembled with complete awareness of this reality of human affairs, and so it was designed to limit to the power of government, more than to empower it. But enough pressure against any object, physical or legal, will in time cause it to buckle. Water against a dam will find an opening in it. So too with the United States Constitution. It is startling to consider what an upheaval in the rights of individuals and states was snuck in through the Commerce clause. This was one of the weak points in the Constitution that was bored at and expanded into a hole through which the governing of the nation as a whole was transformed, and the dominant political and cultural movement, liberalism, accrued to itself unlimited power.

Not that there was anything the Framers could have done about it. Given time even the most perfect of documents can be perverted, set aside and turned into the instrument of tyrants and monsters. And they could not have hoped to better the Almighty, whose own document had been perverted in the hands of evil men. All they could hope to do was pass down a legacy of intention that would ward freedom for a time, and then hope that it would serve to keep the flame of freedom burning through the generations. That men would remember the sort of government that had been intended for them to have, the gift set aside for them, even when it was no longer present.

This history is of course a matter of some debate. Those who would alter the future, begin with the present begin with the past, and then the future. Revisionist history is required by every ideology that wishes to radically change the world. The revisionist history of liberalism in particularly is quite revealing when it comes to exposing its own motives and agendas.

Those whose revisionist history recasts the past of their own people as a long series of cruel and oppressive acts, expose themselves as revolutionaries who seek to recast their own history as evil, all the better to rule over the future in the name of justice and mercy. This is altogether true of liberal revisionist history, which recreates America as a shameless tyranny ruled over by greed and lies. A typical and influential example of the genre, is A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, in which the gullible college student learns that all of American history is a sham by the wealthy to control commerce and territory. This naturally prepares him to accept liberalism's mandate for destroying America in order to turn it into a land of liberty, equality and justice.

For the left, the United States Constitution has always been a dangerous document, because it limits the power of government. Their power. And for all that the left inveighs against power and authority, it only does so because its leaders are driven to be the ones in power and wielding that envied authority. The left's model is not democracy, but aristocracy. The aristocracy of the revolutionary faithful. Back to the days of the French Revolution, the radicalism of the left sought to replace inherited aristocracy with ideological aristocracy. Instead of an elite that ruled over the masses because their descended from nobility, they wanted an elite that ruled over the masses because it had the passionate idealism to fight for social justice.

The Constitution is dangerous to them because it limits government power. Its Framers viewed government power as inherently dangerous. This is not a view shared by the left which only sees government power as dangerous-- when it's in the wrong hands. The wrong hands being the hands of the reactionary authorities or that of their political rivals who lack the same ideological commitment that they do. Rather the left believes in the transformative effects of government power to remake a society so that it can reach a perfect state of liberty, fraternity and equality. And this they do not believe can be achieved by limiting government power, but by wielding it in the name of the cause.

The rest here.

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