Is America Breaking Down?
On Tuesday evening, Mark Levin posed a question on his radio show that bears serious consideration by we conservatives, and I think it’s time we discuss it. It’s not a matter of winning any longer, but whether we can stave off disaster. What Levin wondered aloud was whether our nation might be saved at all. He asked if it is too late, because there are too few people remaining who will oppose the advance of statism. Are we too few? Is it too late? Is the America we had known doomed? If so, what will we have instead? Our Republic stands on the brink of collapse, and the question we now face is what we can do about it. The signs are all around us: If we don’t turn things around in 2012, it may be that we never will.
Identifying the problem we face is simple, and it’s really what Alexis de Tocqueville proposed when he wrote Democracy In America. Among all of the other important and prescient things he warned, these may have been the two we should have etched in stone on the steps of Congress, and on every class-room door in the country:
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
That helps to describe our predicament, and this punctuates it:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
Our nation is now just more than 200 years on from the adoption of our current constitution, and it seems that the cause of Tocqueville’s warning is being realized before our eyes. Barack Obama is effectively a dictator, overturning laws by failing to enforce them, and by promulgating regulations that have no legal basis in authority under our Constitution. Our people, a majority of them, live substantially by taking from others, and those who produce their living have been indoctrinated to supine servitude. This isn’t the nation of our founding, and our current president’s enmity to the constitution to which he has sworn an oath demonstrates our dire situation. Many judges no longer see any reason to restrain themselves to the content or context of the laws on the basis of which they’re allegedly ruling, and they reach out to international case law for precedents that conflict with our own constitution. Under these conditions, our Republic cannot survive, much less flourish, and we are headed for darkness.
Part of what my professional life entails is the process of evaluating threats and vulnerabilities, and projecting organization capabilities for confronting them. Applying that technique to our current situation, for individuals who consider themselves conservative, never mind libertarian, I think we’re going to see a revolution of radical statists, and I believe this has been the aim of George Soros and his pack of radical cohorts. Our options are going to be just three, and you had better begin to consider them:
- Submit – Accept the country is going to become a radical socialist state complete with a police-state front
- Flee – Leave the country in search of friendly shores that will accept you
- Fight – Take up arms against it, risking life, limb, and property
These aren’t pleasant options, no matter which we consider, but let’s look at them. To submit would mean to maintain immediate physical safety, but it also means giving up virtually all personal sovereignty. I’m not cut out for this option, because I’m not one who respects claims of arbitrary authority over my life, or the way in which I choose to live it. I’m not one who abides by theft, whether carried out by a hoodlum in a darkened alleyway, or in the open by a federal bureaucrat. I don’t accept the idea that my life, liberty, and property are rightly subject to the aggression of other men, whether alone, or as a mob. This means that for me, I’m not inclined to submit, but every person will be forced to make their own choices. I fear too many will lie down in order to avoid harm, because in point of fact, the last century has been a progression of this sort of incremental surrender.
I don’t wish to surrender my country. I’m not the sort to flee from tyranny, although I must admit that I’ve done so before. I live out in the country precisely because I could not abide the growing tyranny in a municipality that orders its residents to have so many shrubs, so many trees, and what sort of decorations they can place on their own properties. I could not abide it, so I moved a short way out of the city, and in a matter of a decade, that city annexed properties quickly advancing upon me. At that point, I moved my family and my horses to an even more remote locale, and set up the farm where I expect that I will find some peace for the remainder of my days. This won’t be the case, however, if the federal government becomes the sort of coercive police state that leftists desire. There will be no escape to the country, and the only choice will be to flee the country altogether.
As I’ve reported, there have been some people, including filmmaker James Cameron who have fled to New Zealand, but the problem for most of us is that few can afford that move, and countries like New Zealand are smart enough to refuse easy immigration. Where then shall we go? The geographical isolation that has served America as a protection promises to serve now as a prison. Canada? Mexico? These are our choices, and neither looks very promising to most Americans. I can’t imagine that Mexico will offer much promise, and Canada won’t absorb us all. In my view, this sort of flight isn’t feasible for me, or for most Americans, which then brings us along to the option nobody wants to consider.
Fighting a counter-revolution is a deadly affair, particularly when the power of government is in the hands of the revolutionaries. From the outset, they will have command of the entire military, the police, and indeed, the entire array of government institutions, and since the media serves the revolution in most important ways, they’ve already created a willing propaganda arm. They control the horizontal and the vertical, so communications will become an impossibility. How do you wage a war against such a force? How is it possible to win? There is a very good reason that peoples the world over flee from or submit to large scale national social tyrannies: These are easier than fighting. These pose less danger.
What sort of country have ours become that we must even consider the revolutionary tyranny that is now creeping toward us, gathering inertia? I do not wish to seem as though I’m a doomsayer, but the truth is that we’re in very real national distress. Across the vast expanses of this country, there are probably fewer than one in six who I would consider committed patriots who believe we should maintain this republic as framed by our constitution, but still fewer who are willing to fight to preserve it. I doubt we could must five million patriots who would step forward and take up arms in defense of the republic, and make war against the people who have slowly usurped our system of government.
I am not asking or urging anybody to do anything, except think. I’d like you to consider the meaning of all of these things, and what you are willing to do to preserve what we all claim to love so dearly. Is our liberty to be abandoned without a fight? Is our freedom really to be eclipsed in this generation? Why are we going on quietly about our lives? The Tea Party was launched with the intention of creating a push-back, but the Tea Party has been largely silent in the last year. The problem is that without some rallying cry, we’re sliding more quickly toward the national catastrophe that now awaits in the gaping maw of the social welfare police-state. The other problem faced by those who would be inclined to fight if it comes to it is that we don’t have a single bright line for the trigger for a fight. What is that trigger? What is the thing that if the government undertakes, we would immediately respond with war?
This reminds me of the story of Wyatt Earp standing down a mob: “Sure, you’ll get me in a rush, but who wants to be first?” This is a question nobody likes to consider, because nobody wants to be first. Perhaps that will change, and perhaps it’s not yet as bad as that implies, but at some point, we’ll reach that climax at the pace in which we’re now rushing toward tyranny. All I’m suggesting to my fellow Americans is that now is the time to think these things through. What will we do in defense of our constitution when those sworn to uphold it decide instead to set it aside? What will be that condition under which we will no longer abide the transgressions? It’s easy to make brave oaths, today in the shrinking protection our liberties provide, but if our social compact is to be dissolved, it will no longer be a matter of oaths but instead a course of actions that we must consider.
