THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS

In I Samuel 8, God’s people came and demanded a King. Israel’s government at that time was the Judges. A Judge would govern, along with some other junior judges, after God would speak to them. The nation was free. But many Israelites wanted to be like other countries. They wanted a monarch, to be more like them. The last Judge of Israel, Samuel, was told by God to warn the people what their new King would be like. “He will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle and donkeys and put them to his work. He will take one tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; And the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (I Samuel 8:11-18)

Saul was then made king of Israel. He was supplanted by David, who passed the crown on to his son Solomon. David had fought many wars and Solomon undertook a massive building program, which included the Temple of God. As the Lord had predicted, the people of Israel were put to heavy burdens. When Solomon died he was succeeded by his son Rehoboam (II Chronicles 9:29-31). The people cried out to Rehoboam and asked him to lighten the burdens Solomon and his two predecessors had placed on them. (II Chronicles 10:4-5) Rehoboam responded thus: “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to it; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.” (II Chronicles 14-15). At that point the Kingdom of Israel split apart. (II Chronicles 10:16-19)

I can’t help but find parallels between Israel 3000 years ago and America today. America was founded on the principle that God makes men free and other men make each other slaves. This was in the philosophies of John Locke, whose writings were the Inspiration of the Declaration of Independence. We have been given great freedom by God here in America. And Europe has wallowed in a mire of Socialism, Dictatorship and strife for the last century. Political Correctness stifles free thought in Socialist Europe, you can be fined a lot of money for speaking your mind if some bloodless Socialist bureaucrat finds what you say offensive. Soon prison terms will be handed out for those who rock the boat. And there are many Americans, our Liberal brothers mainly, who, instead of reveling in the freedom God has given us, long to have a Socialist Dictatorship or Oligarchy, so we can be like the rest of the world.

This is the eternal struggle of American Politics- the desire of Northeastern elites for an Old World Tyrant versus Heartland Americans desire for freedom and independence. I came to realize this as I read about an account of the Revolutionary War from 1775 and it detailed how the Patriots besieging Boston in the Spring of that year were scornfully called “the Country People.” Most of the Loyalist Population in America were the urban elites, mainly in the Northeast. The Revolutionary War was the first struggle between “Flyover Country” (though, of course, no flying over was going on) and the Bi-coastal Elites (though they were on a single coast at that time). The Patriots of Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord were the forefathers of the brave people who would settle in places like Idaho, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska and Montana. The Loyalists who didn’t flee to Canada after the war were the forbearers(not necessarily the physical ancestors, but political “ancestors”) of the Left Wing Urban elites who think that Kofi Annan and Jaques Chirac need to run this country rather than its elected American president. They are the same people who preferred George III to George Washington. And there is a relatively unbroken chain of events from the time of the Two Georges down to our own where they have displayed their desire for European and later Eurasian governance.

First we have the Hartford Conference of 1814 and 1815. The upshot of this is the New England States threaten to secede from the Union if peace is not made between the US and Britain. The delegation from this conference arrived in Washington DC early in 1815 to find the people of that city celebrating the end of hostilities. We can be certain that these states would have drifted back into British orbit, their independence being only a formality, a fig leaf, as it were.

But as the 19th century drew to a close and the 20th was around the corner, the Northeastern Elites (who rode comfortable boxcars out to California and Seattle and Portland after the “Country People” had civilized the American West, making them now the Bi-Coastal Elites we know so well) their quest for their European Master took a different turn. Marxism and Socialism had caught on in the coffeehouses of Paris and Berlin and Moscow. Waves of European immigrants brought the Red Ideas to America in the late 19th and early 20th century. These people often barely escaped the Secret Police of the Tsar or the Kaiser. But were they grateful to their new homeland for safety and freedom of conscience? Not for a minute, they immediately began building Sleeper Cells with a mind to overthrowing the United States government in favor of a Red one. An Anarchist even killed our President, McKinley, in 1901. The Left of then, as today, never embraced the idea of freedom, merely they sought to use our own freedoms against us as best they can. The “Red Diaper Baby” children and grandchildren of these Red Immigrants would make the nucleus of the Leftist upheavals caused by stinky hippies in the 1960s.

But soon the fashionable coffeehouses of New York, Boston and Philadelphia had many socialists and Communists in them as well as many other Left Wing factions. The Intelligentsia of the Bi-Coastal Elites came to see the new USSR as the great hope of humanity after 1917. Yes, when Liberals tell you that everything good that ever happened came from Liberalism, they don’t talk about how they loved Joseph Stalin, supported him, adored him, even glossed over his crimes until they were no longer deniable.

The Franklin Roosevelt Administration was filled with Soviet Agents- Alger Hiss, a Harvard elitist from one of the finest New England families, was an Assistant Secretary of State. Harry Dexter White, another lovely blueblood, was at Treasury. Even the Vice President from 1941 to 1945, Henry Wallace was what is known as a “Fellow Traveler,” someone who sympathizes with and has all the same aims as a Communist, but is not officially a card-carrying member. For four years, such a man was one heartbeat away from the presidency, which was held by a man who died three weeks after Truman was inaugurated to replace Wallace as Vice President. Not that FDR deserves any great praise. The man was very nearly a fellow traveler himself and certainly one of Stalin‘s great admirers. None of this is subject to debate, as Liberals might claim, we found their pay stubs in the Old KGB Headquarters during the 1990s.

So the anti-American Independence elites then turned to Stalin as the European that Americans needed to bow down to, rather than the English King. Stalin’s USSR was the great wave of the future that they had been dreaming of, and they began to make their best efforts to turn America into another Soviet Union. Sadly, they have been at least partially successful. Soviet legal concepts that have no basis in American law whatsoever, such as Separation of Church and State, are regularly imposed on Americans by the Left. Left Wing propagandists like I.F. Stone and Walter Duranty wrote charming fairy tales about Stalin’s “Workers’ Paradise.” And Liberals believed in and delighted in them.

Many Conservatives posit “what if?” questions about if we had the Liberal Media we have today, how would world War II have gone? We DID have much the same Liberal Media that exists today during the War years. However, Hitler had invaded the “Workers’ Paradise” of their beloved Stalin five months before Pearl Harbor. So the Left was not going to do anything to sabotage any effort we might make to defeat Stalin’s enemy, Hitler. But Ronald Radosh in his book “Commies” (describing his youth as a Red Diaper Baby) relates how the Left had helped Hitler in the pre-Barbarossa days. On August 23, 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact had been signed, making the USSR and Nazi Germany benevolent neutrals towards one another. In the critical days of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, English Leftists used to spy out damage done by German planes to England, report to the Soviet embassy, where the information was promptly passed on to Berlin. At that same time and a little later, the US was sending aid to Britain under the “Lend-Lease” Program. Obeying Moscow’s instructions, American Leftists used to foment phony strikes at plants making Lend-Lease materiel, often slowing down progress. This is another thing the Left never tells us about when they are talking about how wonderful they are- their guilt of abetting the Nazis between August, 1939 and June, 1941. I think any discerning person can easily reach the conclusion that the American Leftist activists and the Liberal Media would have lied and sabotaged our efforts in WWII had Molotov-Ribbentropp still been in effect at the time of US entry into the war. Exactly the same crap they pulled in Vietnam and are pulling in Iraq right now.

When Stalin was denounced in 1956, Liberals couldn’t deny his atrocities any more. After all, the sitting Soviet Premier had just admitted the truth. Still, it didn’t stop the American Left from supporting the USSR and its proxies against their own country. Ho Chi Minh posters were popular among Leftists in the ‘60s, along with ones of Che Guevarra. Again, the Bi-Coastal Elites took the side of a foreing leader over their own country. America was not fit to be strong an independent in the view of ‘60s Leftists. America needed the benevolent guidance of World Socialism. In the 1980s how the Liberals loved Gorbachev! And how they hated Reagan! Not to mention their love of Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro.

As a young teen in the 1980s living in Liberal Elitist Massachusetts one of my favorite movies was “Red Dawn.” I remember how Liberals resented the way the Soviets were portrayed in that movie. Some crackhead Liberal Media “journalist” could write some yellow-journalism guerilla-theater BS about Marines in Vietnam biting the heads off of babies that the Hanoi Politburo told them to say and the Liberals would believe it. They’d eat it up with a spoon. But don’t ever insinuate that their Soviet brothers would ever be less than perfect gentlemen! They’d really get mad then!

Whittaker Chambers wrote in his book “Witness” that when American Leftist met an actual Soviet Russian, they just gushed and fawned all over him or her. I know exactly what he was talking about. In my time in the ‘80s in Dukakis’ Massachusetts we never met any actual Soviets, but the way my Liberal brothers up there talked about Gorby and the others, it is obvious that they would have tripped over each other to fawn over any Soviet citizen they ran into.

The Soviet Bloc collapsed from 1989 to 1991 and suddenly Liberals acted as if we always knew this was going to happen and as if they never rendered any assistance whatsoever to their Russian brothers (not their Russian brothers any more now that Socialism is gone). All the Liberal “geniuses” who said in the mid-’80s that we’d be living in Nuclear Winter if we didn’t appease the USSR suddenly forgot all their brilliant pronouncements!

Today the Liberals want to bow down to the UN and Socialist leaders like Jaques Chriac. We still can’t have the United States being strong, independent and thinking for itself or looking out for its own good. We still need a benevolent European or Asian (the Left is “multicultural” now!) dictator to hold our hand. And I realize that we are still fighting the Battles of Lexington and Concord when we stand up to the Left. Our independence, our freedom, our culture- the Left wants all these submerged in the morass of the new UN world. And now, these people run our Congress. Happy New Year America!

Theology was kept pretty much out of it

And yet, the Great Awakening, a religious movement several decades before the Revolution, had a great deal to do with
1) uniting the colonies and
2) contributing to the colonists' vision that they could have an individual relationship with God.

Rather than turning away from faith in God, the colonists became more actively religious and began to get the sense that they should be free to practice their religion the way they wanted.

A great number of them no longer felt they needed to rely on a particular religion to connect them with God.

In summary, a religious movement helped encourage the colonist's awareness of individual liberty.

It makes sense because the centers of opposition to British rule and the centers of agitation against it were in the cities.

The importance of New York's geographic location cannot be overemphasized.

American and British commanders alike had considered New York the strategic key to the continent, particularly if British forces in the city were to march north up the Hudson Valley to meet a British army moving south from Canada, as was planned.
Such a convergence would divide New England from Pennsylvania and the Southern states and vastly complicate Patriot communication, troop deployments and the war for independence itself. However, such a strategic pincer movement failed to materialize.

"Actually it was in the big cities that most of the opposition to the Crown was centered as the names of the first battles indicate. Boston was the center and was the rallying point after the Crown put it under interdiction. The colonies rallied to its defense and that marked one of the first instances of unity among all the colonies against the Crown. For the first several years the movement to independence was centered in NY City and Boston. The hinterlands had nothing to do the rebellion until much later.

Tories were very strong in the western Carolinas not just Charleston. Any attempt to portray the back country as rebels and the cities as Tory is simply false."

I don't say they were 100% ironclad that way, only majority. If the cities were such hotbeds of revolution, then why did the New England countryside have to revolt and lay siege to Boston? Why not vice-versa?

Most of the Patriot Militiamen, like the Minutemen, came from among the "Country People."

Were there patriot urban dwellers? Yes.

Were there Loyalist people in the countryside? Yes.

But both were minorities.

""Alexander Hamilton grew up St Croix, a little island in the Carribean." Alexander Hamilton grew up in a CITY on the Island and left the Caribbean at the age of 17 to come to the Colonies to study. He lived in a CITY in NJ completing his college prep and for the rest of his life lived in the CITY of New York with an interval in Philadelphia when the government moved there. "

Before 1980, and by some standards even today, no such animal existed on St Croix. One of my teachers on St Croix said that in 1960 there was "Christiansted, Fredericksted, a dirt road between them and goats on either side." And to give you an idea, when I lived there in 1993, I was going into Christiansted and I said to this gal I liked, "I'm going into the city, do you want anything?" And her boss laughed at the notion of me referring to Christiansted as 'the city'. Point being, Alexander Hamilton grew up in a rural environment.

"Any city in 1780 except NY, Phil, Charleston, Boston was little more than a "country town" and some of the latter would be considered suburbs today. The isolated rural dwellers had little to do with the Revolution especially the beginning."

that isn't true, the militias that were laying siege to Boston were from the New England countryside. George Washington lived on the farm, as did most of his Virginians, who represented the real soldiery that came up to take charge of the Revolutionary Army.

"Most of the battles were in NY state and NJ as I said not ALL."

Commanded on our side by a Southerner and his Southern troops being the backbone of the Army.

"One of the reasons Cowpens and Yorktown were fought was because Cornwallis wanted to join forces with the Loyalist militia's in the Carolina's.

Your ideological blinders prevent you from seeing a true picture."

No, Cornwallis wanted to pacify the South so he concentrate on delivering a knockout blow to Washington. It wasn't accomplished because the South was in flames for Cornwallis.

You are mistaken, friend.

"True as that may be it does not change the fact that the government eventually established made sure it was religiously neutral on a national basis with no Established religion allowed, no religious tests for federal office etc. Establishing a theocracy was the last thing on the Founders' minds."

Who says a Godly nation is necessarily a theocracy? Only Liberals and Socialists (sorry for the redundancy).

Our Declaration of Independence plainly states that we are endowed by certain inalienable right by our Creator. the Constitution refers to "preserving the Blessings of Liberty" in the Preamble. What were these Blessings of Liberty? They were the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness endowed by Our Creator spoken of in the Declaration of Independence.

American Socialists say that the Constitution has a "Separation of Church and State" in it, and that this was so very important to the Founding Fathers. But this makes absolute zero sense for several reasons.

First, if it was so important to them, then why did they not say "Separation of Church and State" plainly so that it didn't have to be discovered only by a Liberal judge 158 years after the fact?

Second, why did they put this concept in an Amendment? If it was so important to the Founding Fathers, then why not put it in an article of the Constitution?

Third, how does one reconcile the fact that the Bill of Rights was passed to appease Anti-Federalists (Patrick Henry, a devout Christian, was the leader of the authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers and arguably the best example of an Anti-Federalist, if the Federal Government came to his town and told him he had to remove his 10 Commandments monument, they'd get hot lead from him in response) who wanted to limit Federal power with using Federal Power to tyrannize localities into things like removing their monuments or teaching Intelligent Design? The Anti-Federalists of yesteryear were like the Conservative Republicans of today. How can anybody believe that they'd back the ACLU and the Soviet model of Separation of Church and State?

The fact is, the Establishment Clause says "Congress shall make no law RESPECTING the Establishment of Religion." (emphasis mine). What that means is, Congress has no right to get into questions of Establishment of Religion, for or against. And if Congress can make no law, the Federal Court has no jurisdiction in this question unless some Federal Agency is Establishing a religion. Thus, the only violators of the Establishment Clause are the ACLU, the Southern Bolshevik Law Center and the corrupt judges who seem bent on giving them whatever they want, no matter how flagrantly Unconstitutional.

"It makes sense because the centers of opposition to British rule and the centers of agitation against it were in the cities."

they weren't at all. But big cities were often filled with Country people coming to market and such. They were important commerce centers for ALL people.

There were NEVER any mass uprisings in the cities during the Revolution. The Brits never had to fight the Battle of Hue. Once Boston, New York and Philadelphia were occupied by the British Army, things were mostly quiet in these cities. Just as the dwellers of these cities today are content to lick Kofi Annan's boots, they were happy in 1777 to kiss the hem of their redcoat masters' robes.

"So, in answer to your query about the Korean War, the Democratic Party was doing its utmost to prove that it was as Anti-Communist as the Republican Party

What you wrote makes a good deal of sense. I need to learn more about the period immediately after WWII."

Ann Coulter wrote quite a bit about it in "Treason." Get yourself a copy of that, it is most illuminating.

One of the big events was that 1946 was like 1994, the Republicans swept into power and they forced a change in direction on the New Deal Democrats. New Deal Democrats wanted to continue the Alliance with the USSR and together build a socialist world. 1946 forced a changing of the Guard in the Democratic Party to the GI Generation Democrats, like JFK, RFK and George Smathers. That's why Kennedy stood up to the Reds during the Cuban Missile Crisis and RFK helped Joe McCarthy. RFK was the second man of so-called "McCarthyism." It wasn't until the late '60s that the Democratic Party returned like a dog to its own vomit and began loving Communism again. Remember that JFK opposed the Big Left establishment from the New Deal, and we all know what happened to him and his brother, Liberal propaganda notwithstanding.

Back to 1946. The Democrats had had a virtual lock on power since 1932. In that year they took both Houses of Congress, the presidency, most of the Governorships and state legislatures. The same hypocritical Democrats who bellyached about a "one party state" in 2002 and 2004 look back on the New Deal Era as halcyon days, and in those days America really was a one party state. Republicans didn't even have one hundred members in the House, much less two hundred. Suddenly the GOP has a majority again and so they went about major changes in tactics. See the Republic of Utica's previous post "The Great Left Wing Manpower Shortage" for more on that. But the main thing they did was give control, for a time, over to Anti-Communist WWII vets, people who were like Zell Miller (a Korean War vet, same generation, just a couple years too young for WWII).

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.