Excellent commentary as usual.
As I ponder the issues you’ve raised, I’ve been giving considerable thought to the role government plays in modern life and what forces may be responsible for its increasing power.
The Constitution, designed to limit government and preserve individual liberty, was written for a primarily rural agrarian society in which shared Christian religious beliefs played a critical role in defining social values and acceptable behavior. In that time, a man desiring true independence and freedom could walk into the wilderness, purchase land at little or no cost, and sustain his existence by growing and capturing his own food. Inhabitants of rural areas to this day tend to be more conservative politically and socially, more religious, and more respectful of the Constitution than urban dwellers.
Today self sufficient farmers comprise less than 5% of the population. Most citizens are urban/suburban dwellers and are highly dependent on modern technology as well as other people for survival in densely populated areas. The concept of true independence and self sufficiency, much less the skills required to achieve it, are unknown to the average 21st century urban dwelling American. The interdependence of urban life and the scale achievable in densely populated environments seems to naturally foster the growth of government. Government assumes the role of defining common rules of social behavior formerly the province of religion. Government police power and regulatory control over commerce ensures the safety of citizens and the ongoing flow of life sustaining food and other essentials which urban citizens cannot ensure for themselves acting as individuals.
It may be that for the 21st century urban dweller a government highly involved in managing the interdependencies required to sustain life in densely populated areas reliant on sophisticated modern technology is as important as individual liberty to the rural farmer of the founding era. The choice of living in an urban population center requires the individual to rely on technology and other people for survival. The acceptance of government control, and acceptance of government limitations on freedom naturally follows. Perhaps this is why the urban dweller of today is so accepting of te collectivist mindset in which the desires of the individual are subordinated to the needs or goals of the community. To a man who has no concept of liberty the state’s role in everyday life seems part of the natural order not unlike the weather part of the natural order to the rural farmer.
As I observe the increasingly bitter political division between the densely populated blue counties, and the more rural and less populated red counties, I wonder if the system of government envisioned by the founders is simply incompatible with the requirements of organizing and sustaining a 21st century urban society. If the survival of the urban community requires a collectivist mindset, conservatives will not be successful achieving our goals of limiting the size, influence and power of the a central government dedicated to managing the infrastructure of the urban center. To the urban collectivist, individual liberty equates to chaos which is extremely dangerous in an environment where inhabitants are extremely dependent. If so the only viable alternatives to achieving harmony between the urban dweller and rural dweller are separation or coercive conquest.
It seems at this moment in time the primarily rural red county conservatives are engaged in a hopeless effort at persuasion through an electoral process designed over 200 years ago, and no longer embraced by the blue county dwellers. These “blue” urban collectivists seem determined to conquer and completely subjugate conservatives in order to ensure their own survival and well being. If this is the case we should be determining and executing our own strategy for survival instead of continuing to expend energy and resources trying to win national and regional elections where we simply do not have the numbers to prevail because the urban collectivist a will never be receptive to the message or willing to peacefully coexist. To preserve personal liberty it may be necessary to achieve true independence from the urban centers where a strong government role in daily life is deemed essential for survival.
As our agrarian way of life was exchanged for the city and the suburbs and the frontier was no longer available as an escape valve, the pressure for more government inexorably grew. Today, the Democrats keep the pressure up by flooding us with a flood of immigrants, legal and illegal, digestible and culturally indigestible.
Since they also control the institutions which should digest immigrants such as our educational establishment, they control the temperature of the pressure cooker.
