The true fault line

Our political differences as a nation are not defined by a simple Republican-Democrat binary choice.  The real issue is whether the Constitution means what it says regardless what year it is, or whether is can be folded, spindled and mutilated by every generation’s interpretation of the day.  It should not come down to the viewpoints of nine unelected people to determine how our future unfolds.  But since that’s the reality of how our system now works, selecting the right people for that job is paramount:

If you think things are bad now, just wait a bit. It’s about to get worse, much worse.
A war is coming over the Constitution between those who would defend it and those who find it a nuisance. …

To Brett Kavanaugh’s foes, the Constitution stands in the way of grand designs they have for the federal government and your lives.

They want to control things in your lives — your healthcare, your lightbulbs, your land, your neighborhood, your dishwasher, your electric bill, your employer. That’s why a wartime coalition of Leftist interest groups have mobilized to battle over the future of the Constitution.

Kavanaugh’s foes want the Constitution to mean whatever suits their transformative agenda. Kavanaugh believes the Constitution means what it said when it was written. That it was written in 1787 doesn’t trouble him at all. …

The coming fight over Brett Kavanaugh will feature two sides with almost nothing left in common. Sure, we live in proximity to each other. But one side defends the Constitution and the other side will stop at nothing to replace it.

One side believes words have specific, objective meanings that transcend fads.  They are consistent, predictable and stand the test of time.  The other subverts words to suit their agenda and will even quibble over the definition of “is.”  Who would you rather have governing you?

Are we smarter than a medieval baron?

I fear we are losing the rule of law in the United States and in the West — the idea that all are equally accountable to external standards and that even the State must respect certain boundaries.  Eight centuries ago today, one of the great expressions of these concepts was signed: Magna Carta.  The nobles who forced King John to concede these principles knew something of human nature.  For all our pretenses at modern superiority, we seem to have forgotten many of the things they knew, and upon which succeeding generations built.

Those barons who pressured a king to give his seal to a document in an English field 800 years ago could not have imagined the extraordinary impact it would have on human affairs, reshaping not just England but also America and France and even inspiring activists as far afield as Africa and China. This shows that once it had been expressed, the fundamental idea contained with Magna Carta — that restraints are required to limit officialdom’s power — could not be suppressed; the genie could not be forced back in the bottle. More importantly, it shows that freedom must be fought for over and over again. Magna Carta on its own guarantees nothing. How could it? It is merely a piece of paper. Rather, it was the human urge for more liberty, the desire to enjoy choice and freedom and a private life away from the prying eyes and barging elbows of authority, that encouraged future generations to act on Magna Carta, to demand that it be respected and expanded and made into a living, breathing, constitutional reality.

The problem we face today is profound. Firstly, respect for legal rights is in short supply, as evidenced in everything from British governments’ assaults on the right to silence and the ‘double jeopardy’ rule to America’s undermining of the Fourth Amendment through its spying on citizens. And secondly, even worse, the spirit of freedom, the urge within citizens for greater liberty and autonomy, seems weak, too. In short, the two things that guaranteed Magna Carta’s historic, humanity-changing impact — first, the rights it articulated on paper, and second, successive generations’ determination to make those rights real— are waning. And so we are seeing the gains of the Magna Carta era, of the past 800 years of pretty much non-stop struggling for greater liberty, being slowly undermined.

We need a new and serious debate on freedom, on why it’s important and why we need more of it.

To survive, freedom must be valued more than many other things, such as government largesse (which always comes with strings), baldly seeking partisan advantage or an obsession with safety (which brings fearfulness that is exploited by those who would control). Freedom is not obtained merely by the risk of soldiers’ blood. It is secured by the willingness of citizens to assume responsibility for themselves, to adhere to a set of rules that transcend our momentary whims, and to challenge anyone who would dare direct their lives for them.

Quote of the Day

From Glenn Reynolds’ USA Today column:

Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they’ve begun.

And let’s all pray we can continue to push back successfully via vocal public opinion and non-violent non-compliance, rather than being forced to resort to scenes like this in the Ukraine.  Americans have not had to fight physically for their freedoms at home in a very long time.  May it stay that way, even as there is a renewed realization that ‘the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.’  That’s been the failure of “we the people” that brought us to this point.  Finally, if our would-be betters decide not to fold in the face of this renewed vigilance and vocal opposition, may we have the courage to do what it takes to prevent them from cementing an alien form of governance in this land.

Reform, not revolution

One of my main concerns over the state of modern America is that conditions are historically ripe for ‘revolution.’  Despite the U.S. veneration of the American War for Independence, revolutions seldom work out well for anyone involved:

As my dictionary so perfectly defines, “revolution” has two meanings.
First, it can denote an overthrow of a sitting government, whether violent or ‘bloodless’.

But in celestial terms, ‘revolution’ denotes a complete orbit around a fixed axis. In other words, after one revolution, you end up right back where you started.
So whether violent or non-violent, or whether in a voting booth or on the streets, revolutions put a country right back where it started.

In the French revolution, people traded an absolute monarch in Louis the XVI for a genocidal dictator in Robespierre for a military dictator in Napoleon.
In 1917, the Russians traded Tsarist autocracy for Communist autocracy.  ((and thence for ‘strongman rule’ under Vladimir Putin — Jemsion))
In 2011, Egyptians traded Hosni Mubarak for Mohamad Hussein Tantawi (who subsequently suspended the Constitution), for Mohamed Morsi (who as President awarded himself unlimited powers), for yet another coup d’etat.

All of this is because of a knee-jerk reaction– ‘if our country is having major problems, we should throw the bums out and let the man on the white horse take over.’  This creates a never-ending cycle in which the fundamental problems perpetuate.  It’s not about any single person or group of people.  It is the system itself that needs changing.

In our system we award a tiny elite with the power to kill, steal, wage war, educate our children, and conjure unlimited quantities of paper money out of thin air.  This is just plain silly. And antiquated. We’re not living in the Middle Ages anymore where we need kings to tell us what to do, knights to keep the peace, and serfs to do all the work (and enrich the nobles).

Yet this is not too far from the system we have today.

This is because people have become dependent — on Big Agriculture for their (processed) food, on Big Media to tell them what to think about, and Big Government for sustenance they are either unable or unwilling to provide for themselves.  So long as that dependency remains in place, there is no point in confronting the monstrous Leviathan that now controls our lives–even if the current form is removed, the people would simply need a new supplier for their “fixes.”  History shows that such efforts often result in bloodshed and noise… and a situation that merely goes from bad to worse.  Only one ‘man on a white horse‘ will ever set things right — and He cannot be voted into office or raised to power by any human effort.

The solution meanwhile is to abjure the realm — to become self-sufficient on a small scale outside the ‘matrix’ of powers that collude to constrain one’s actions to a narrowly defined, preselected menu of acceptable options.  Only then can government be put back in its proper box of limited responsibilities–and limited power.  That’s what freedom looks like — and from where it must originate: individual strength and self-reliance.  (Dependence upon God provides the best foundation for this, but I leave that to my non-Christian readers to discover for themselves.)