Can It Happen Here?

WASHINGTON -- Can it happen here? It is happening in Europe where French polls show that the National Front's Marine Le Pen would win the election for president if elections were held tomorrow. Something like it has happened in Italy where an anarchist comedian, the happily named Beppe Grillo, garnered 25 percent of the vote last year. Most spectacularly, it almost happened in the United Kingdom last month. What am I talking about? An election in which the lowly voters overcome the professional pols and vote their minds. Now there is evidence that it can happen here.

In the United Kingdom last month 45 percent of Scottish voters voted "yes" to break up their union with England, a union that has endured more than 300 years. Eight-five percent turned out to vote. Only a last minute rescue mission by the leadership of all London's political parties saved the United Kingdom, but at a high price. Owing to London's promises, the Scots have come very close to home rule. Can Northern Ireland and Wales be far behind? Moreover, the United Kingdom's professional pols face another challenge in next year's elections when its Euroskeptics again challenge them. The Conservative Party, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats, then will have to contend with their dynamic fourth party, UKIP, which already has 24 of Britain's 73 seats in the European Parliament. UKIP is the broadly conservative and libertarian party to the right of the Conservative Party. It has a rough equivalent on this side of the Atlantic, the tea party!

So the United Kingdom is already listening to its roots, the divisive "yes" vote in Scotland and UKIP with its 23 voices in the European Parliament. London's professional pols have reason to fear for their livelihoods.

The Spectator of London argues that, "The Westminster system is broken, because it has been taken over by professional politicians who focus on their opposite numbers rather than on the people they're supposed to represent." And The Spectator counsels that the professional pols follow their roots.

Here in the United States there is grumbling at the base of both parties. Both Democrats and Republicans of a certain staunch rigorism complain that the professional politicians ignore their respective political bases, save perhaps at election time when they only inflame it with talk of the "war on women" by the Democrats and several different war cries by Republicans: immigration, a balanced budget, the war on terror. At the end of every election the professional politicians of both parties return to cutting their deals, securing their sinecures, and making money.

Right now the pacifist wing of President Barack Obama's party has been thrust out in the cold as he adopts the plumage of the War Hawk and bombs the hell out of Syria and Iraq. Who doubts there will soon be boots on the ground? This despite all the protests he hurled at President George W. Bush. Obama's war whoops even surprised me. What is more, his supporters on the tax-and-spend left are grumbling that he has caved on taxing and neglected to spend. They have a point. If he followed their policies national bankruptcy would be upon us sooner, but he promised them a socialist paradise and now he is scurrying to the political center.

As for the Republican leadership it has given the back of its hand to the libertarian right, so much so that even Senator Rand Paul is hunkering down. On social issues, immigration, even spending and balancing the budget, the Republicans have blended into the middle. As I say, the grumbling can be heard from both ends of the spectrum.

Is there something being missed here by the professional pols? London's Spectator thinks so. "It is crucial to recognize," the magazine editorializes, "that the current 'anti-politics' mood is not an anomaly or a cry of pain. It is the start of a new political order, one in which people want bold ideas to get out of what they see as a political and societal morass." In the United Kingdom the 45 percent "yes" vote and UKIP are seen by some as "the start of a new political order." Can it happen here? In both parties, we have the ingredients for that new order. Might the socialist left in the Democratic Party and the tea party in the Republican Party compose the voices of the future? The forthcoming elections should be followed with a jeweler's eye.

Readers of this thread might appreciate a July 24, 1992, entitled "Civilization without Religion?" Russell Kirk essay, citing numerous thinkers and writers. Please read his insightful thoughts in their entirety here.

A sample of Kirk's wisdom which might help to guide citizens today can be found in the following excerpted paragraphs from his closing section, "Restoring Religious Insights:

Restoring Religious Insights

In conclusion, it is my argument that the elaborate civilization we have known stands in peril; that it may expire of lethargy, or be destroyed by violence, or perish, from a combination of both evils. We who think that life remains worth living ought to address ourselves to means by which a restoration of our culture may be achieved. A prime necessity for us is to restore an apprehension of religious insights in our clumsy apparatus of public instruction, which--bullied by militant secular humanists and presumptuous federal courts--has been left with only ruinous answers to the ultimate questions.
What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society's affliction is the decay of religious belief. If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose. The high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine.
"Redeem the time; redeem the dream," T. S. Eliot wrote. It remains possible, given right reason and moral imagination, to confront boldly the age's disorders. The restoration of true learning, humane and scientific; the reform of many public policies; the renewal of our awareness of a transcendent order, and of the presence of an Other, the brightening of the comers where we find ourselves such approaches are open to those among the rising generation who look for a purpose in life. It is just conceivable that we may be given a Sign before the end of the twentieth century; yet Sign or no Sign, Remnant must strive against the follies of the time. - Russell Kirk

Rediscovering the ideas of liberty, as understood and articulated in America's 1776 Declaration of Independence, the nation's philosophical founding document, might prepare new generations of voters for choosing liberty as their guiding passion. Jefferson outlined those principles and ideas in his First Inaugural Address and called them, "the only road that leads to peace, liberty and safety."

Thanks for the bump, Kaslin.

It was John Adams who said: "The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people." Clearly, the Founders' passion was liberty, and in order to secure that liberty, they sought out and incorporated into the United States Constitution those ideas and principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

The French historian, Guizot, once asked James Russell Lowell, "How long will the American republic endure?" Lowell replied: "As long as the IDEAS of the men who founded it continue dominant"

Herein lies the answer to the question, "Will the Experiment Succeed?"

It can and will succeed IF the motivating "principle or passion in the minds of the people" is LIBERTY, and if that passion causes them to exert the determination and will to complete the needed restoration of the IDEAS upon which the great American experiment was based.
From another Kirk essay entitled, "Will the Great American Experiment Succeed?" contributed to the following volume:

Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part VII: ISBN 0-937047-01-5

Even in our decadent age the people of many states added amendments to their constitutions that merely stated the obvious, that marriage = man + woman.

Various federal courts flicked them away as easily as one does with lint on a sweater. Soon, the Supreme Court of the United States will enshrine fag marriage as a right.

I don’t know if return to our religious foundation is possible. I know it is impossible as long as we endure under our current government.

Until power is divided once again between the states and the government they created, elections will be as important as they are now, as sporting events, as entertainment and nothing more.

Article V.

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