Guest Post by Lawrence Sellin
To paraphrase the sage of Oklahoma, Will Rogers, liberals used to be people who did good with their own money.
To paraphrase former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, liberals learned that, by doing so, they would quickly run out of their own money. Whereas, through government, they could satisfy either their altruism or their guilt and do good on a much larger scale using other people’s money.
Unfortunately for them, implementing “social justice” by legal mandate, that is, transforming a liberal philosophy into liberal politics, forced them to swim in the same dogmatic waters as communists, where liberals had difficulty drawing a distinction between their policies and those endorsed by the communists.
That dilemma was temporarily resolved by the Great Depression, an economic calamity arguably caused by government through the inappropriate action of the Federal Reserve, which resulted in the “throw out the bums” election of liberal Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ironically promoted government as the solution. Knowing they could not be elected to high office by truthfully articulating their aims, American communists joined the Roosevelt Administration in droves.
As the Depression dragged on, the size and scope of government increased in a manner not unlike the humorous anecdote about business consultants “if you’re not part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”
Although liberal policies invariably failed and its theoretical basis collapsed, the rhetoric managed to survive, but becoming steadily more extreme in order to nourish a constituency of evolving grievances, from “Income Inequality” to the “War on Women” to the newly-minted “White Privilege.”
One subsidiary of the liberal grievance industry is the Congressional Black Caucus, a group seemingly driven by resentment and the desire for revenge, who exploit black “victimhood” to promote policies that, in the end, maintain the victim population and themselves in Congress. Often fervent to the point of hysteria, they are habitually wrong at the top of their lungs.
It is not injustice that troubles them so much about Ferguson, for example, but justice, and facts that do not validate their “Pre-Rage” or conform to their narrow, race-centric views.
Liberalism fosters a form of political solipsism, which is a philosophical theory where only the self exists, generating an extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings and desires.
It drives liberals to commit, as H.L. Mencken noted, the greatest and most costly of all human follies, to believe passionately in what is palpably not true.
The Obama Administration represents the final stage of liberal descent into totalitarianism with the adoption of 1960s radicalism as the core strategy, an approach that both then and now advocates a rapid fundamental transformation of the United States through confrontation with little respect for the Constitution or the democratic process.
That would not, however, be an issue if there were some resistance to such an ominous trend.
The Republican establishment, confining itself to token, emotionally satisfying gestures of opposition, does not contest that trend because they do not want to challenge the status quo; they want to remain part of it. They do not oppose Democrats, but seek to be more like them. The Republican leadership long ago jettisoned any semblance of principle in favor of election prospects as junior partners in a ruling class.
The federal government has become an entity unto itself operating outside of Constitutional constraints and unaccountable to the American people.
Power rests, not with the citizens, but with a relatively small group of politicians and financiers, who enhance their personal wealth and privilege by looting the country through a self-serving legislative process. They retain their authority by adjusting the levers of government and using the media to manipulate public perception and opinion to preserve the illusion of representative government.
It is what Israeli historian J. L. Talmon described as totalitarian democracy, a political system in which lawfully elected representatives rule a nation state whose citizens, although granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of government.
Well on their way to despotism, our political and media elite have discarded truth and persuasion for the more expedient lies and coercion.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of “Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution “. He receives email at [email protected].
