The Struggle for America's Soul - a Nation of Laws or a People of Pop Culture
When Benjamin Franklin was asked at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, "What have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”, the learned gentleman answered both wisely and cynically, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Can we keep it? That's the question at the heart of the great struggle for America's soul. Are we a nation of laws or a people of pop culture?
The 2008 Presidential election saw a race between an American war hero with decades of political experience and a man with virtually no political experience and no talent besides posing for photographs. The larger struggle that took place was between America as a nation of laws and the mass media and the internet distilling everything into digital entertainment. And America lost.
When Tony Blair ushered in the New Britain, the Cool Britain, the one detached from its many centuries of wars and history, in favor of one defined by screaming pop stars and brazen tabloid covers-- he did to England, what Obama's backers would do to America. It was not America that crowned Obama, but the New America, without standards, without laws and with no values beyond bread and circuses.
A republic if you can keep it. Rome couldn't. In the years ahead, it will become finally clear whether there will be a United States of America that derives from the laws and values of over two centuries of history-- or Obama's New America, a conglomeration of design skills, reality tv shows, iPod commercials, magazine covers and celebrity hysteria. Not a nation of laws, not even an empire, but a decaying bewildered collapsing oligarchy, where gawkers hawk merchandise with the great leader's photo, where bribery and graft control everything-- and where the biggest employer is the government and the only other employers worth mentioning are overseas companies.
Call it Putin's America. Call it Obama's America.
The panic, the chaos, the devaluation, the defeatism, the depression and the dumbing down of America all serves a purpose-- to make certain that we can't keep the Republic. To make certain that there isn't even a Republic left to keep.
America, the original Ownership Society, is swiftly becoming the Owned Society. The Ownership Society meant that Americans were one of the few citizenries that actually government themselves, because they owned their country. The Owned Society by contrast rolls everything together into one massive bureaucratic pyramid that owns everything and controls everyone, from cradle to grave.
The way to turn one into the other is through disempowerment and devaluation. And by causing people to forget that they are owners, by promising them that life as slaves will be so much easier for them. Why bother working hard when your new bureaucratic masters promise to take care of you instead? Universal health care, unlimited immigration, universal laws, universal everything. Come for the free chains, stay for the 16 hour ditch digging in the volunteer community corps.
Finally and most of all, a Republic is based on reason. So reason must be shouted down with crude slogans, with emotionalism, with biased narratives and memes... and through recreating language itself into a Newspeak mockery that no longer has any objective meaning.
Promise the impossible, speak in grand terms and wait for the applause. Propose what can reasonably be done and let your proposal be debated. That is the difference between the monarch and the President of a Republic. It takes men and women of reason in an ownership society to conduct business in a Republic. But any mob with any figurehead can march around, shout, wave banners and thrill to the demagougery of an egomaniac with a microphone. That is how most of the world is run.
America has been dumbed down, through the public miseducation system, through multiculturalism, through second language immigration, through racial grievance mongering, through the lowest common denominator of entertainment-- all leading to a society eager to give up its rights and freedoms in exchange for a chance to gather in a mob and cheer hoarsely while they're promised a new Golden Age just around the corner.
The Constitutional Convention was the product of a citizenry willing to work for a Republic. The 2008 Presidential election was the work of shills and salesmen playing to a public that no longer understands any of the values or agendas of 1787. Instead a poverty of the intellect and the spirit holds sway disguised by splashy design schemes and carefully orchestrated marketing programs.
The American Experiment was not built on catering to the rule of an ignorant and greedy mob. It was built on the rights and responsibilities of American citizens as individuals. Mob rule negates the Republic, the Constitution and America itself. As Lincoln himself said, a nation cannot survive half-slave and half-free.
Today America is half-slave and half-free and the balance is tilting toward slavery. The slavery is not quite as dramatic, but it is every bit as real, in the political, moral, economic, intellectual and spiritual sense. The nation is half enslaved to a state of enforced mindlessness and ignorance.
The Civil War came about because America could not survive as a free nation if it was half-slave. A society where rule is in the hands of the citizenry cannot exist as a free nation if it is half slave, given time it will become a slave empire, ruled by a handful over the groans and whimpers of the many. The Free Power that the Union Armies fought for, was to be the power of Free Men in industry and politics... over the power of slavery.
Today we once again face that struggle, to submit to slavery, to a nation of slaves chained to a vast government bureaucracy, lashed by endless media propaganda and driven to cheer their own enslavement. Or to reject slavery and to choose freedom.
The Constitutional Convention was the work of men who would not be slaves, it was the heritage of Patrick Henry's warning of the chains that had been forged by a monarchy for the binding of free men, it was that same Republic which Franklin understood could only be kept by free men.
And so the New America of Obama must fail to swallow and forever destroy the United States of America, a nation ruled by laws, a Constitutional Republic in which rights and freedoms are vested in the individual.