[ProgressingAmerica]

Hear TR's Speech "The Liberty of the People"

[ProgressingAmerica]

If anybody wants on/off the revolutionary progressivism ping list, send me a message

Progressives do not want to discuss their own history. I want to discuss their history.

Summary: Class warfare never gets old.

[cynwoody]

TR killed Cecil.

[cynwoody]

Ironically, the guy he is attacking, Woodrow Wilson, was every bit as toxic to liberty as TR.

[Wuli]

TR and none of the progressives have either understood or admitted that the foundations admonishments about the constraints on the power of government was in the framework of the government they were forming, not the governments of kings they were severing themselves from.

There warnings were about government, period, however it is formed.

“Democracy” and “representative government” do not change the equation with the danger to Liberty government can wrongly imposed if government, by designed, is not constrained.

No, Liberty is not preserved by “the people” doing anything they want by majority vote. By majority vote always means not “the people” but some people, “the majority” imposing their will - government - over others. All the more reason, in a democratic government that government be constrained, by design.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

the people have, actually or potentially, the entire governmental power. It is theirs to use and to exercise, if they choose to use and to exercise it. It offers the only adequate instrument with which they can work for the betterment, for the uplifting of the masses of our people.

O’Sullivan’s First Law An eternal truth. By John O’Sullivan



EDITOR’S NOTE: This appeared in the October 27, 1989, issue of National Review.

Robert Michels — as any reader of James Burnham's finest book, The Machiavellians, knows was the author of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This states that

in any organization the permanent officials will gradually obtain such influence that its day-to-day program will increasingly reflect their interests rather than its own stated philosophy.

To take a homely example, congressmen from egalitarian parties somehow end up voting for higher pay and generous expenses for congressmen. We can also catch an ironic echo of Michels's law in Stalin's title of General Secretary, as well as in the fact that powerful mandarins in the British government creep about under such deceptive pseudonyms as "Permanent Under-Secretary.”

All of which is by way of introducing a new law of my own.

O'Sullivan's First Law:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.

I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.