Decline And Fall: Twilight In America

The historical similarities of Rome’s Decline and Fall with current America are astounding.  You are witness to a collapse of an entire society into ruin.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

So we are repeating the fall of Rome, Greece, Pre-Revolutionary France while giving rise to Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Soviet and Hitler’s Reich, all rolled together into one massive beast.

The following essay by Dr. Clyde Wilson who notes the historical parallels we are living at an exponential level, is truly sobering given the implications.

Decline and Fall

Clyde Wilson

I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires.  The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter.  A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars.  Such analogies are interesting and suggestive but should not be put forward too dogmatically.  History does repeat itself because human nature remains the same and because civilized people build institutions that then perpetuate themselves for their own sake rather than for the purpose for which they were established.  Power-seeking, luxury, debauchery, irresponsibility, and sloth are ever present and are held in check only for brief and extraordinary periods by Christianity or patriotism.  Still, the recurrences of past patterns are never exactly the same.  The more intimately one knows a past time, the more cautious one becomes in sweeping generalizations.  All large events, like the fall of Rome or the American war of 1861-65, have multiple “causes”—some deep, and some circumstantial.  Indeed, sweeping generalizations about history by people who don’t know what they are talking about are a major blight on American discourse.

The decline and fall of Rome has been blamed on enervating luxury, moral debauchery, imperial overreach, dilution of the founding stock, multiculturalism, bad economic policy, replacement of citizen soldiers by foreign mercenaries, lead poisoning, and, if you believe Gibbon, Christianity.  Such weaknesses left the empire prey to our “barbaric” ancestors.  Dr. Thomas Fleming is my infallible authority on all things classical, and I defer to and welcome his correction.  But as I read it, one of the observable phenomena in the decline of Rome is that republican institutions were maintained in name when they had been entirely transformed in substance.  The senate continued long after it had lost all power.  It no longer represented the interests of a real society but, like the American Congress today, was an appendage of the emperor.  The fiction was maintained that the emperor was only the first among equals.  And yet, like the American president, he was ranked by many among the gods.

Doesn’t that describe the state that the American government has reached today?  The U.S. Constitution continues to receive lip service, when it has all but ceased to exist.  The Framers and ratifiers of the Constitution would not recognize today’s federal government as having any relation to the instrument they created.  All three branches of the federal government have committed violations of fundamental law that are as bad as Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon.  Obama and his predecessor have ruled essentially as elected emperors who may do anything without any effective opposition.  The Congress has become a rubber stamp of the executive, and the Supreme Court the maker of far-reaching laws.

All that remains is for the emperor to rule for life.  Third World dictators do so, and the widespread adulation of Obama definitely has aspects of Third World leader-worship.  Why can’t Obama be elected again and again?  All it would take is for the Supreme Court to suspend or overrule the constitutional amendment limiting presidents to two terms.  Such a ruling would be no more extreme in reasoning and usurpation than many rulings already made and enforced.  A large majority of Congress would fall down and worship rather than put up an opposition that might make them unpopular or threaten their power and perks.

America today bears many of the characteristics that have been checked off as causes of the decline and fall of Rome.  Bread and circuses (multiple forms of welfare, television, sports), imperial overreach, replacement of the founding population with foreigners, concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  Surely, one of the observable clues to Roman decline was the proletarianization of the population.  Indeed, the term prole originates with Rome as a description of the propertyless.  The sturdy yeoman class—attached to land and hearth, household gods, and republican virtue—departed or disappeared into the impoverished, multicultural, and dependent urban mob or imperial wars.  At the same time the wealthy and well placed became ever more wealthy and more lacking in civic character.  You can certainly see here analog to present American reality.  The proletarianization of the upper-middle, middle, and working classes is the most important major trend of our time.  For the first time in American history the promise of the “land of opportunity” has become a bad joke.

One thing about this has puzzled and troubled me.  How could the traditionally wealthy and powerful ruling class of Rome so readily exploit and discard the general mass of their fellow citizens, not in the least regretting their disappearance or understanding the social costs?  Wouldn’t the wealthy and powerful naturally have some fellow feeling, some allegiance to their countrymen of the middle classes with whom they long shared a civic, religious, and military tradition?

I was, as usual, too idealistic and too attached to a dead tradition of a responsible Southern aristocracy of Washington, Jefferson, and Lee.  Observing America today has cured me of such foolishness.  I understand how it happened because I see it happening now.  Our wealthy and powerful class is no less ruthless, selfish, and shortsighted than the Roman.  Wealth is becoming more and more concentrated into fewer hands, and the wealthy are becoming ever less responsible and patriotic and attached to their fellow citizens.  This is decline and fall without a doubt, and nobody even notices or gives a damn.

Please take note, Mr. Lincoln.  Government of the people, by the people, and for the people is indeed perishing from the earth.

To Maintain Liberty, Religion and Politics Are Inseparable

Religion & Politics Don’t Mix?

By Mark Alexander

“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” –Thomas Jefferson

For all of our nation’s history, there have been tactical battles between opposing political ideologies — liberals (leftists) who want to liberate us from constitutional rule of law, and conservatives who strive to conserve rule of law. Great political capital has been, and continues to be, expended by the Left in order to offend our Constitution, and by the Right in order to defend it.

Amid the din and rhetoric of the current lineup of tactical contests, I ask that you venture up to the strategic level and consider a primal issue that transcends all the political noise.

How many times have you heard the rejoinder, “Religion and politics don’t mix”?

Most Americans have, for generations now, been inculcated (read: “dumbed down”) by the spurious “wall of separation” metaphor and believe that it is a legitimate barrier between government and religion. So effective has been this false indoctrination that even some otherwise erudite conservatives fail to recall that religion and politics not only mix, but are inseparable.

Recall that our Founders affirmed in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In other words, our Creator bestowed the rights enumerated in our Declaration and, by extension, as codified in its subordinate guidance, our Constitution. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights; they are not gifts from government.

To that end, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

But the Left has, for many decades, made its primary objective the eradication of God from every public quarter, and routinely relied on judicial activism to undermine constitutional rule of law and, thus, the natural rights of man.

The intended consequence of this artificial barrier between church and state is to remove knowledge of our Creator from all public forums and, thus, over time, to disabuse belief in a sovereign God and the natural rights He has endowed.

This erosion of knowledge about the origin of our rights has dire implications for the future of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”

As the author of our Declaration of Independence makes clear, we should all tremble that man has adulterated the gifts of God.

Ironically, it was Jefferson who penned the words “wall of separation between church and state” in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

Jefferson was responding to a letter the Association wrote to him objecting to Connecticut’s establishment of Congregationalism as its state church. Jefferson responded that the First Amendment prohibited the national (federal) government from establishing a “national church.”

After all, the controlling language (Amendment I) reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Jefferson concluded rightly that the Constitution’s 10th Amendment federalism provision prohibited the national government from interfering with matters of state governments — a “wall of separation,” if you will, between the federal government and state governments.

Among all our Founders, Jefferson was most adamant in his objection to the construct of the Judicial Branch of government in the proposed Constitution, writing, “The Constitution [would become] a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”

Jefferson warned: “The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch. … It has long been my opinion … that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.”

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 81, “[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.”

But Jefferson was correct in his apprehension about our Constitution being treated as “a mere thing of wax” by what he called the “despotic branch,” who would do the bidding of their special-interest constituencies rather than interpret the plain language of the Constitution.

In 1947, Justice Hugo Black perverted Jefferson’s words when Black speciously opined in the majority opinion of Everson v. Board of Education that the First Amendment created a “wall of separation” between religion and government, thus opening the floodgates for subsequent opinions abolishing religious education and expression in all public forums.

John Adams wrote, “If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave.”

It may not be in the power of man to alienate the gift of liberty, but it will certainly take the power of men, guided by our Creator, to defend it. To that end, religion and politics are inseparable.

When A 1950’s Cartoon Contains More Wisdom Than All of Washington…

A sad testament that America has grown stupid, and rejected wisdom for intelligent-sounding liberal Socialist NONSENSE.

 

And now, we’re suffering the very things this cartoon warned about.

Forget the 1930’s; We Are Facing 1917

The Ultimate Socialist Revolution is Being Spun and Run in Reverse and Applauded By Useful Idiots

Forget the 1930’s; We Are Facing 1917

by John Galt

March 9, 2009

“Obama, Brown Call for Global Solution to Economic Crisis”
from the first paragraph of the story:

“US President Barack Obama joined British Prime Minister Gordon Brown today in calling for a global solution to the economic crisis and both leaders vowed to repair their countries’ shattered financial systems.”

And now a little bit more distant piece of history….

“We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness. We are internationalists. “

-28 December, 1919, Lenin, Letter to the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine, Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 291-297

Are we really that far apart?

I think not but history has a way of perverting itself in the grand scheme just when the “advanced” nations think they know and see all. Just what if the great American experiment ended as a comedy show instead of a tragedy? We have always elected to view ourselves as a sitcom, a piece of Americana where the hilarious Al Bundyesque ending always seemed to concluded every tragedy no matter what with a laugh track and a miracle, because heck, we’re American by gummit and that’s how it is! Of course no one ever asked:

What if the final joke is on us?

What is the reaction of the American public when they wake up from their American Idol slumber and realize that everything they believed in, the system they have been told was safe, the world they knew, ended.

No subtitles.

No miracles.

No superheroes.

Just pain, agony and “solutions” proposed by those in power but this time instead of a populist from the back of a train en route from Berlin to Moscow, on a television screen and via the internet from Washington, DC with the power that the Bolsheviks could only have fantasized about in their day and age. A geopolitical monster with military and financial reaches that would shake the roots of hell into panic and cause all to tremble in its wake. Is that what we are facing now?

In the 1900’s an oligarch, the Czar of Russia, held complete control over every aspect of the lives of the people of Russia. A wrong word, a bad astrological forecast, inept military advice and poof, you were executed. The sheeple of that time, the peasantry was meant to serve the aristocracy primarily because that “was how it was always done” and new ideas were foreign to the people of that land due to centuries of Imperial enforced ignorance. This would change with the sudden expansion of other ideals and the blind foolishness of the “West” which assumed that the political system of Russian leaders was perfected to prevent outside influences from causing internal disturbances from expanding beyond small regional racially based flare-ups where the leaders could easily be bought off to preserve the status quo.

Just what if the theory worked in reverse; an oligarch, either of the American Democrat or Republican Parties elected to reverse the Soviet revolution and impose a state controlled system by convincing the “people” that it was the only solution to save their way of life?

The idea of a proverbial de facto proletariat takeover of our nation has never crossed the mind of the national psyche. America elected it though and it is quite possible we will sow what we reap because a “good crisis is too good of an opportunity to pass up” or words to that effect. The re-centralization of power and control and expansion of a statist system with integrated and cooperative corporatist technocracies to enhance and insure the expansion of a singular party’s control is the fantasy of many a dictator and we might have reached that zenith in history just now.

Just what would happen if the “workers” thought they took over our Republic? There is a lot of conjecture now in the hinterlands that the average soul is upset about the state of our union, that their voices are not being heard, the politicians are ignoring them, etc. What is different from this period of time and the era from 1913 to 1920? Not much except they arrested and detained the opposition during much of that time period using such powerful terms as “treason” and “sedition” to silence and extinguish legitimate debate, not the fringe, from the hard issues of the day. The call has already been made by some leftists like Stephanie Miller (an obscure talk show host) as highlighted in her declaration that Rush be charged with “treason and executed“. The silence from the mainstream media must indicate a support via the whisper or a blind eye to insure their role as America’s new private partnership with the Department of Information is solidified for the future.

Time will tell.

The problem as I see it is the economists, the historians, political junkies and talk show hosts are all focused on the wrong era. This is not about a 1930’s style Roosevelt takeover of our nation and elimination of the rights of the citizens. Nor is it the Woodrow Wilson reincarnation of “Progressive” freedoms. This is the new world ideal, a concept developed after continuous trial and era, using smaller nations to eradicate and use as test beds for the greater good. Unfortunately it is time for the grand experiment to come home to roost. The damned piece of paper will be willfully sacrificed with a “people’s movement” real or perceived to save the pain of the elderly from losing what they “had” and to preserve the basic standard of living of the American people. In the process of doing so, the 1917 model will be implemented to insure that freedom is defined only by those in power and insured via an international agreement to extract the capital, the production, of the United States citizen in exchange for this new life of liberty as defined by the state.

Once the level of economic deprivation and pain has reached the extremes in our nation this time, the sacrifice of the ideals of Jefferson and Franklin will become a secondary concern in exchange for a box of MRE’s for a hungry family along with several gallons of water. It is the ultimate revolution, spun and run in reverse, with the implied blessings of the religious hierarchy, mainstream business concerns and alleged intellectuals across this land of ours.

And the people will beg, pray for and demand it.

The Prophetic Past That Warned Us Where We Now Find Ourselves

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, ‘equality’. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

I am encouraged when countrymen look into our past history to consider what our Patriarchs, Framers and even brillaint and simple men noted about the gift of liberty that is unique to America in all the world’s existence. There has been a bit of talk about one noted philosopher and author Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to America in 1831 and 1832 to write about his impressions of America from a European perspective after he was quoted in a Powerline Blog, and got mention on talk radio circles today.

What is so timely about the following notations from “Democracy In America” is that they put an exclamation point on the dangers this Election Cycle is parading in front of us with the various pushes and calls for bigger government Socialism, oversights, “fairness” and safety (for the children of course). From the scam that is Global Warming to the promises of what Nationalized Health Care will mandate – you can read de Tocqueville and feel as if you just read an indictment of our current culture and political circus that is this year’s elections.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously concludes with a warning of the kind of despotism to which democracies are especially susceptible. Of particular note is the chapter: “OF CERTAIN PECULIAR AND ACCIDENTAL CAUSES WHICH EITHER LEAD A PEOPLE TO COMPLETE THE CENTRALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT OR DIVERT THEM FROM IT”.

Among men who have lived free long before they became equal, the tendencies derived from free institutions combat, to a certain extent, the propensities superinduced by the principle of equality; and although the central power may increase its privileges among such a people, the private members of such a community will never entirely forfeit their independence. But when equality of conditions grows up among a people who have never known or have long ceased to know what freedom is (and such is the case on the continent of Europe), as the former habits of the nation are suddenly combined, by some sort of natural attraction, with the new habits and principles engendered by the state of society, all powers seem spontaneously to rush to the center. These powers accumulate there with astonishing rapidity, and the state instantly attains the utmost limits of its strength, while private persons allow themselves to sink as suddenly to the lowest degree of weakness.

Tocqueville warns that the passion for equality will give rise to a certain kind of degradation in which citizens will surrender their freedom democratically to a tutelary power:

Above these [citizens] an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

If one truly looks at and examines our culture and politics today in light of what Tocqueville is warning about – one could easily see that we have already arrived at that crucial point. Both political parties seem to be in a race over which one gets to be the bigger parent. You might recall the 1992 Presidential debate when an old hippie with pony tail asked Bill Clinton: “”We are your children, we have our needs. What will you do to take care of us-to take care of our needs?”

Government today works almost exclusively towards “providing” happiness, entertainements, bail-outs and free hand-outs to specific groups it decides deserves the largesse of the federal treasury from the pockets of a working class the government uses like slaves. All to the point that politicans and government talk about nothing but facilitating the pleasures of people, regardless how depraved and consequential they may be; dictates how industry works such as the demands Congress just placed on automakers for fuel-efficient cars and the abolishment of incandescent light bulbs for “enviro-freindly/mercury-filled” flourescents. Private property is now the pervue of the state according to the KELO decision of the Supreme Court; in Illinois you cannot smoke outside in any public place, in California not even in your own car. Your wealth is confiscated in taxes for those the government decides should receive it. This culture blames the government for not doing enough after Katrina or demanding they do something about high gas prices in the absolvement of any responsibility they should have for themselves, fulfilling what Tocqueville said about “tak[ing] away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living”

I suppose we could almost declare Tocqueville a prophet in light of where we are today with what he was warning we could become.

Subjection in small affairs manifests itself every day and makes itself felt without distinction by all citizens. It does not make them desperate, but it constantly thwarts them and brings them to renounce the use of their wills. Thus little by little, it extinguishes their spirits and enervates their souls….

In listening to the political candidates, almost every single one of them is a purveyor of this disease. The fight for redefining what Conservatism means into some perverted nanny-state caring for others by use of government simply underscores where de Tocqueville said this Republic would end-up if we were not careful and vigilant.

Well….here we are.

Perhaps if we studied our roots rather than the latest ball game stats or arguing over who will win the next Survivor or America’s Next Top Model, we could have a chance to recpature what is being lost.

I’m not to hopeful, as the populace is become exactly like the ponytail Kid in 1992, that declared that all of us were children of Big Mama Government.

Bill of Rights – A Dying Document That Was Always Threatened

“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” – Alexander Hamilton

Today’s essay is most excellent and captures the true history of the Amendments securing 10 of our most sacred rights, that if not adopted – we would have lost those rights long ago to the tyranny of government and the courts.

Even now, the efforts to redefine them are before the Supreme Court – and by next Summer, the watering down, redefinition or abolishement of some of them may in fact become a reality, that will seal our coffin as a free republic.

To Secure These Rights…

By Mark Alexander

Patriot Post US

Saturday, 15 December, is the 216th anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to our Constitution, as ratified in 1791.

The Bill of Rights was inspired by three remarkable documents: John Locke’s 1689 thesis, Two Treatises of Government, regarding the protection of “property” (in the Latin context, proprius, or one’s own “life, liberty and estate”); in part from the Virginia Declaration of Rights authored by George Mason in 1776 as part of that state’s Constitution; and, of course, in part from our Declaration of Independenceauthored by Thomas Jefferson.

James Madison proposed the Bill of Rights as amendments to our Constitution in 1789, but many of our Founders objected to listing the Bill of Rights at all, much less as “amendments.” Their rationale was that such rights might then be construed as malleable rather than unalienable, as amendable rather than “endowed by our Creator” as noted in the Constitution’s supreme guidance, the Declaration of Independence.

Alexander Hamilton argued this point in The Federalist Papers, the most comprehensive explication of our Constitution: “I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous… For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” (Federalist No. 84)

George Mason was one of 55 who authored the U.S. Constitution, but one of 16 who refused to sign it because it did not adequately address limitations on what the central government had “no power to do.” He worked with Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams against the Constitution’s ratification for that reason.

As a result of Mason’s insistence, ten limitations were put on the Federal Government by the first session of Congress, for the reasons outlined by the Bill of Rights Preamble: “The Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institution…”

Read in context, the Bill of Rights is both an affirmation of innate individual rights (as noted by Thomas Jefferson: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time…”), and a clear delineation on constraints upon the central government.

However, as Jefferson warned repeatedly, the greatest threat to such limitations on the central government was an unbridled judiciary: “Over the Judiciary department, the Constitution [has] deprived [the people] of their control… The original error [was in] establishing a judiciary independent of the nation, and which, from the citadel of the law, can turn its guns on those they were meant to defend, and control and fashion their proceedings to its own will… It is a misnomer to call a government republican in which a branch of the supreme power [the judiciary] is independent of the nation… The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”

In Federalist No. 81 Alexander Hamilton wrote, “[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution, or which gives them any greater latitude in this respect than may be claimed by the courts of every State.”

That admonition notwithstanding, the federal judiciary has become “a despotic branch.”

Indeed, since the middle of the last century, judicial despots have grossly devitalized the Bill of Rights, asserting errantly that our Founders created a “Living Constitution” amendable by judicial diktat.

For example, the Leftjudiciary has “interpreted” the First Amendment as placing all manner of constraint upon the exercise of religion by way of the so-called “establishment clause” and based on the phony “Wall of Separation” argument. At the same time, the courts have asserted that all manner of expression constitutes “speech.”

The judiciary and legislatures have undermined the strength of the Second Amendment, a right of which James Madison’s appointee, Justice Joseph Story, referred to as “…the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers…”

Equally derelict is the manner in which the Tenth Amendment has been eroded by judicial interpretation.

In Federalist No. 45, Madison outlines the clear limits on central government power established in the Constitution: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

Alexander Hamilton added in Federalist No. 81 “…the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States.”

There was a very bloody War Between the States fought over offense to the Constitution’s assurance of States’ Rights.

All is not lost, however.

Sunday, 16 December, is the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party (1773). The “radicals” from Marlborough, Massachusetts, who threw 342 chests of tea from a British East India Company ship into the Boston Harbor in protest of tyrannical rule, did so noting, “Death is more eligible than slavery. A free-born people are not required by the religion of Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their… liberties.”

Three years later, this rebellion had grown to such extent that our Founders were willing to give up their fortunes and lives, attaching their signatures to a document that declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Judicial and political despots, take note.

Giving Thanks in An Unthankful World

This week, Americans hopefully will give sincere thanks for this nation and the blessings we have taken for granted over the last 50 plus years of relative peace and plenty on our shores. In fact, when you consider the beastly empires of men for the nearly 6,000 years of recorded human history – America is an anomoly in the course of world empires and cultures.

As the world grows darker, and our own economic, cultural and moral problems threaten the stability of the only way of life we have ever known – it is good to give Almighty God our sincerest thanks for our abundant blessings while He may be found – for the world seriously wishes to return to the normal that America has disrupted by our existence.

It would be good for the world to give thanks for America. I know the current self-loathing of the Democrat Left and Blame America Firsters like Ron Paul, poop on such an idea. They are more comfortable with justifying the world’s hatred of us and trying to convince the rest of America how much of a bane we are to the globe. But before we let the Anti-war/Global Warming preachers fire another salvo to diminish our resolve and national self esteem, take a moment to read this essay from Mark Steyn:

The World should give thanks for America

MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays.

Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: In Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from Dec. 22 to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world.

But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness, which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly from your iPod?

And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.

Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union.

If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced ‘n’ diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish, in effect, the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it.

I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era.

In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations.

But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.
That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:

“We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!”
Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either.

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.
Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.