Posted on 07/25/2015 11:17:43 AM PDT by Baynative
In 5,000 years of recorded human history, there has been no nation even resembling the United States. The American model has offered, and continues to offer, a greater chance for dignity, hope and happiness for more people than any other system.
As Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, put it: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” Lady Thatcher was right. The philosophy is one of individual liberty, free-market opportunity and belief that it's all a gift from God. America is the best idea the world has ever had, the greatest value system ever devised.
What are these values that make America exceptional? Individualism, not collectivism. Patriotism, not relativism. Optimism, not pessimism. Limited government, not the nanny state.
God, not Caesar. Faith, not secularism. E pluribus Unum, not multiculturalism. Life, not death. Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Goodness, not moral equivalence.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
see post 20
If only people understood what was wrong from the start, we could get on with figuring out how to correct it all....sadly most will not even look.
BTTT
Indeed.
True, but I understand why they won't look: it's painful. It triggers that response in our collective amygdalae that drives us the "fight or flight."
It hurts to realize that the document your country was founded on, as great as it was and is, does not do the very thing that so many thousands and millions expected it to do, namely, restrain government. In essence, the social contract cannot work, because the next generation does not sign it, and government doesn't care anyway if it breaches the contract, if it means they can arrogate more power to themselves.
For a long time, I refused to read Boston T. Party's (Kenneth W. Royce) "Hologram of Liberty", because I knew that it contained that basic truth, which I wanted to avoid because it was so incredibly painful.
But after I read Royce's book, Spooner's works, the Anti-Federalist papers, the writings of Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and many others, I finally, grudgingly at first, accepted the truth that only an armed, educated, engaged and vigilant population can restrain government, and sometimes that requires bloody violence and death, sad as it is to say. You know the Jefferson quote about "the tree of liberty".
That truth, painful as it is, is liberating (as all truth is; my Lord Jesus told us that): since we know that is wrong, we can rebuild. We can tear down that which is evil and repugnant to liberty, and we can rebuild again.
It will require much blood, sweat, and tears, but our granchildren and their progeny will benefit, and much good will result from a (hopefully) limited self-sacrifice of some of our generation.
Your whole post was good, but that right there just warmed the cockles of my heart, FRiend.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't believe that the Founding was totally secular. As a Christian, I resonate with the Founders' connection to the Bible.
Bump.
Have you watched Paul Ramsey’s YouTube speech on The Dark Enlightenment and if so what do you think of the neoreactionary movement? I am not necessarily on board but it is eye-opening and intriguing as hell. Particularly where he points out that despite our ragings against Marxism and the Soviets, etc., we conservatives share the same essential Enlightenment philosophy as them.
The bit about Luther being the first all Christians are a priesthood of believers-- in fact, the Apostle Peter first wrote that (1 Peter 2:9).
He's right that Protestant Progressivism became evil once it was divorced from God, and that is what led to the French Revolution, the guillotines, Reign of Terror, the Goddess of Reason, and all that. And it led to a dictator (Napoleon). And he's right that Progs have perverted the doctrines of Christianity into such idiocy as global warming and "white privilege."
He's right about Communism coming to America after WWII. And after the fall of the SovUnion, Progressivism kicked into high gear in the US and Europe.
I think he's right about Progs supporting democracy, and democracy being evil, but I know a lot of people in the Tea Party movement, that despite his claims, think that pure democracy necessarily leads to despotism and the tyranny of the majority, and think (as the Founders did) that democracy has to be restrained (which is what the Constitution was supposed to do, but didn't).
He's right about not everyone being equal, but this is not what Jefferson meant when he wrote, "all men are created equal." However, the Progs mean equality in the same way that the French Revolutionaries mean it.
More when I watch the rest.
RamZPaul seems to be a monarchist. Umm, no. My only king is Jesus, who really is divine, unlike human kings. There has to be a better way. Monarchism is just another path to tyranny. Anarchism doesn't work, either. The government that governs best governs closest to the people. Local and regional councils, like the Indians had, for example.
He's really got a thing against Jefferson. The Declaration was "poorly written? Don't think so. He forgets that King George did not want the colonists armed.
He's right that hierarchies were instituted by God, in the Garden of Eden: man is to be subject to God, and the wife to the husband. Those two things are despised by the Progs.
I was kind of sickened by the first questioner, but RamZPaul handled him well: "religion has a place in hierarchies."
The 2nd questioner had a good point, which RamZPaul spoke to by talking about a "reboot" of America.
He points out that we of the Tea Party THINK we are some sort of firewall against the evils of democracy, but that in spirit and ideology we actually are just a slowed-down version of it, and of the progs’ march.
You’d enjoy Bailyn’s book.
I just bridle at “proposition nation” manure. It’s a concept popularized by liberals and their neocon cousins in order to diminish the role of culture in what keeps America being America.
“Proposition nation” enables them to support mass third world immigration because if culture doesn’t count then it doesn’t matter if you completely change America’s culture into, oh, Mexico’s culture. Or India’s. So just keep the tidal wave from the third world coming, what right do the descendents of colonials have in keeping the society their families created...
He’s got a thing against the entire Enlightenment movement of that time and its leaders like Jefferson, because they gave us individuals with rights and power on par with those he sees as belonging to a much higher plane, who should rule — he sees voting as the source of the mob rule and runaway debt we have today, with black thug rappers as multi-millionaires, etc. Yes he advocates monarchy which is heresy to us of course, however there seems to be no satisfactory third alternative.....
He also opposed the BoR on grounds that there is no need to spell out in writing, rights possessed by the People, when the ground assumption is that they have them. Think for a minute how long that assumption would have stood up to the power-grabs of FDR, LBJ, and William O. Douglas (Mr. "Penumbras and interstices"). Like taking candy from a baby, for someone like any of those people. I also liked the classy way Hamilton defended himself during the XYZ Affair, by offering the honor of a married woman as his alibi. The army officer whose wife it was, should have shot Hamilton right there, and spared Aaron Burr the trouble.
His class especially showed itself during the Whiskey Rebellion, when he dumped a tax on people he calculated would be unable to resist it politically. Friendless bumpkins who lived across the mountains and had no good way to get their harvests to market. (So they distilled them instead, floated them downriver, and good good prices in the river towns .... which brought Hamilton sniffing.)
I wouldn't agree with that at all .... it sounds like the kind of thing e-GOP trolls would tell us, to try to get us to shut up and drop out.
How is constitutionalism evidence of an addiction to majoritarian democracy? American constitutionalists, if they are same, always stipulate to constitutionally-constrained representative democracy. I see no creeping mass-state enthusiasms on the Right.
Who said anything about enthusiasms? Ramsey is referring to unawareness. Have you watched the speech? Of course not. Yet you comment on it....
The point has to do with things backwoods-engineer and I have been discussing, such as Lysander Spooner’s writings, and Kenneth W. Royce’s writings, and the speech in question.
Ramsey makes a compelling argument about how conservative orthodoxy is rather self-defeating in professing restraint of government, while nonetheless espousing Enlightenment ideology which guarantees that government will always grow and encroach ever more, due to unawareness about the full implications of certain fundamentals. It’s a more sophisticated way of looking at political theory than the usual, conventional template, and it is very eye-opening for those who take the time to really pay attention, that is why it is so refreshing and jolting to me in terms of undoing decades of brainwashing about underlying premises and goals and who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, etc.
He is hilarious, but his topics and points are very serious in terms of our society and future, etc. And his way of making complicated history and theory easily understood and thumbnail summaries are very good.
I’m skeptical of his advocacy for monarchism of course, although it’s possible, as he says, that a wise and benevolent monarch who mostly just leaves people alone would be much better than the FUBAR electoral leviathan of despotic bureaucracies and dystopian political correctness we have now. The monarchy thing does seem to me to be a roll of the dice in terms of hoping for wise and benevolent rulers, and planning contingencies for getting rid of bad ones. His take on the American Revolution is interesting in the way that he frames it (he’s not the only one I’ve encountered who does so) as being a somewhat exaggerated laundry list of transgressions by King George as a way of pouncing on an opportunity to launch a new experiment, etc.
http://praxeology.net/LS-NT-6.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-eAKnVGGBI
Such sources are not “trolls;” they are earnestly explaining why everything we have always thought and said and done, thinking we were barking up the right tree, has only instead resulted in more and more and more government, and less and less liberty.
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