The citizens of this country still have the ability to "save the republic" without resorting to revolution -- the question is do sufficient numbers of us have the will to do it? It will take organizing a mass political movement to reassert our willingness to fight for our right to govern ourselves. What we lack and desperately need is leadership.
We have been trained by our political elites for the past 50 years to be customers not citizens and have generally restricted our personal political activity to voting for one of the two candidates thrown up by the two parties. The mass of welfare and entitlement programs as well as the huge government bureaucracy that employs an increasing number of Americans have served to turn self-governing citizens into supplicants at the public trough and has caused Americans to waste their political energy fighting each other for more handouts rather than as citizens deciding together on what in the common interest. What we see now on the political scene -- an unresponsive ruling elite that arrogantly imposes its will on us in defiance of our democratically enacted laws -- is the consequence of this dynamic of our abdicating our roles as self-governing citizens.
The mission is nothing less than restoring republican self-governance and we cannot wait for leadership to arise from one of the two existing parties. That simply will not do anymore. The two parties are themselves the problem. They have combined with business and media elites to impose their own elite policies on us against our will and despite our democratically enacted laws. We will have to generate our own political leaders who will both educate the citizenry about what is at stake -- the loss of our freedom to govern ourselves -- while building a political movement that will challenge the elites’ project of arbitrary rule. Given the bipartisan dissatisfaction with how this immigration policy is being forced upon us against our will, Americans are particularly receptive to this message now.
So the answer to the question is “we the people” have to generate a political movement that first understands what is at stake (republican self-governance) , is able and willing to explain this to the American citizenry, and which mounts a political challenge at the ballot box to the existing two parties. This can happen either as a third party movement or as an effort to take over one of the existing parties and change its priorities and goals to restoring republican self-governance.
In the longer term, we will have to scale back the massive welfare state because it is incompatible with a free people governing themselves. In today’s parlance we cannot outsource the provision of all our needs to an overweening and dictatorial government and expect to maintain the independence of mind and character traits that are recognized as necessary for a people to remain free and self-governing. Are we up to this? I really don’t know but I do believe we have a better prospect for resurrecting the ideals of our founding -- the sovereignty of the people -- than perhaps any other nation on earth. This ancient faith of free and self-governing citizens is in our institutional memory as a people, ready to be awakened. We have the constitutional tools and there is nothing to prevent us from creating a political movement that could turn over the membership of the entire House of Representatives in less than two years.
The first task, correctly identifying the problem and what is at stake as the loss of republican self-governance has been made abundantly clear by the behavior of our President and other ruling elites in this immigration debate. The ball is now in our corner as a people. The next task is to generate the national leadership -- a modern day Jefferson or Madison -- who will lead a movement to sound the alarm and provide an alternative, a real challenge, to the death grip the existing two parties and their friends in the business and media aristocracy have on our political and everyday life. We have to quit focusing our power of the vote merely on who will be the lesser of two evils in the next election but on preserving the very ability to have any say at all in what is happening to us as people.
You mae a boat-load of salient points, not the least of which was this one:
“We have the constitutional tools and there is nothing to prevent us from creating a political movement...”
So true. In fact, the Declaration of Independence spells this out:
“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.”
The PURSUIT, not the outcome.
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”
Something that has been obviously forgotten, as the Amnesty Bill slugfest just showed us.
“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,”
Revolution does not always include abolition...altering it, righting the ship, is sometimes all that’s needed.
“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...”
Isn’t THAT what is at stake here?
“when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Is there not a “design” to reduce us to the point where we ae no longer “U.S.” ?