Joseph Sobran on how tyranny came to America:
“According to the Declaration of Independence, the rights of the people come from God, and the powers of the government come from the people….”
“The Constitution was the instrument by which the American people granted, or delegated, certain specific powers to the federal government. Any power not delegated was withheld, or “reserved.” As we’ll see later, these principles are expressed particularly in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, two crucial but neglected provisions of the Constitution…”
“Let me say it yet again: The rights of the people come from God. The powers of government come from the people. …..”
“You can think of the Constitution as a sort of antitrust act for government, with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments at its core. It’s remarkable that the same liberals who think business monopolies are sinister think monopolies of political power are progressive. When they can’t pass their programs because of the constitutional safeguards, they complain about “gridlock” — a cliché that shows they miss the whole point of the enumeration and separation of powers. …”
And here’s Sobran on the only way tyranny might yet be overthrown in America:
“Can we restore the Constitution and recover our freedom? I have no doubt that we can. Like all great reforms, it will take an intelligent, determined effort by many people. I don’t want to sow false optimism….
But the time is ripe for a constitutional counterrevolution. Discontent with the ruling system, as the 1992 Perot vote showed, is deep and widespread among several classes of people: Christians, conservatives, gun owners, taxpayers, and simple believers in honest government all have their reasons. The rulers lack legitimacy and don’t believe in their own power strongly enough to defend it.
The beauty of it is that the people don’t have to invent a new system of government in order to get rid of this one. They only have to restore the one described in the Constitution — the system our government already professes to be upholding. Taken seriously, the Constitution would pose a serious threat to our form of government.
And for just that reason, the ruling parties will be finished as soon as the American people rediscover and awaken their dormant Constitution…”
Comment:
[NB: “God” in this context need not automatically raise any secularist/humanist hackles — more on this below]
If you want US Govt. Inc. to win, vote blindfolded – for any of the leading candidates, Dem or Repub. It won’t matter which.
If you want America to win, vote Ron Paul.
It’s that simple.
There’s no one else who’s defended the constitution in season and out, when it was unpopular, when he was unknown, no matter who was in power, or who asked for the money, or what they wanted it for.
No matter what the issue, Ron Paul’s question was always the same: Is it constitutional?
The American Constitution has not had a more loyal champion in government in the last thirty years.
We’ve tried capitalist cronyism and socialist cronyism.
Let’s try a crony of the constitution.
Update:
From Jonathan Rowe at Cato Unbound.
“The inescapable conclusion is that America does have a political theology; it is just not Christianity. (For more on America’s founding creed, see this article.) Nature’s God was theologically unitarian, universalist (did not eternally damn anyone) syncretist (most or all world religions worshipped Him), partially inspired the Christian Scriptures, and man’s reason was ultimate device for understanding Him. He was not quite the strict Deist God that some secular scholars have made Him out to be. But neither was He the Biblical God. Rather, somewhere in between….” (In other words, the founders subscribed to something not so far from the syncretist “wisdom” tradition, and like this blogger, saw no essential divergence between that and the enlightenment. That’s something both militant evangelicals and dogmatic atheists can’t seem to bend their minds around).
Update 2:
In her excellent book “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” Frances Yates stated the case for hermetic/occult influence on the Age of Reason too enthusiastically (as one of the greatest historians of the period, John Pocock, cautioned those of us who embraced Dame Frances uncritically)– but at least, she put it out there….
I have not read Yates’s book, which I should probably do. E. Michael Jones’s book Libido Dominando: Sexual Liberation and Political Control,
looks at the”occult” movements (e.g. Illuminism, Freemasonry, etc.) from the point of view of the manipulation of vice in order to serve rulers.
My review here:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495hz/id74.html
I am not at all comfortable with that idea of “culture war,” Caryl.
It seems very tendentious..
I think reasonable people are bound to differ on important issues.
and I do think if Jones is arguing that “modernity” (that’s kind of sweeping just there) is simply a rationalization of sexual misbehavior (one man’s misbehavior is another man’s health), then he is on very flimsy grounds indeed…and if he does go beyond that, as some descriptions of his work say he does, and ascribes “intent” to debase culture to Jewish intellectuals (does he actually say that?) – then he also seems to me to be anti-semitic, in the same way as Kevin McDonald is, but also confused.
You might as well say that religious orthodoxy is rationalized repression (which some do) – that would be equally convincing and beg the question equally.
Caryl,
I had a moment to read your review and am excerpting a part of it here, since its presumably central to what Jones’ writing is about; certainly his claims are very large….and very problematic.
QUOTE
The twentieth century brings us to America – John B. Watson and behaviorism, Greenwich Village and socialist-beatniks, Margaret Sanger and the birth-control-eugenics movement. The left may have repudiated the eugenics embraced by Hitler & Co., but it has never severed the link forged by Margaret Sanger, in which the agenda of the sexual revolution converged with the interests of the propertied classes. Far from helping to work for better working conditions and wages for working people, liberals and liberationists put their energy into the cause of contraception and later abortion. Jones thinks this was a covert war against high-reproducing groups – particularly Catholics and blacks, which, Jones says, was “waged in the ethnic interests of the WASP establishment … which had succumbed to hedonism and was in the process of putting itself out of business politically by the widespread practice of contraception.” Enormous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation went into the sexual liberation agenda, Kinsey’s sex research institute, Planned Parenthood, and other eugenics crusades. These chapters on Rockefeller money and Kinsey’s sinister influence on American sexual mores, and how these dovetail into the agenda of the New World Order comprise the most fascinating – and appalling – chapters of this book. Jones writes: “…in controlling the agency responsible for the transmission of life, the controllers control human life at its source and therefore, at its most crucial point…. Liberal politics becomes then first the incitation to sexual vice, then the colonization of the procreative powers that are indissoluably associated with sexuality, and finally the political mobilization of the guilt which flows from the misuse of the procreative power in an all-encompassing system that gives new meaning to the term totalitarian.”
END QUOTE
I’ll return to this another time. For now, let me say Jones connects so many things in such a broad way, it’s not convincing to me, apart from anything else..
(at least, from your summary of his position). Maybe you can clarify.