By Alan Caruba
It was a Founder and our second President, John Adams, who said "Our
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other."
He was right and I am sure he
would be appalled to know that the Constitution has since been interpreted to
permit the murder of the unborn or that the ancient definition of marriage has
been trashed to permit people of the same sex to "marry." The legalization and
use of marijuana is a further sign of decline.
These and other elements
of the values expressed and expected by the Founders are eating away at the
present and future of the United States of America. The Supreme Court was
created to rule on what the Constitution's actual words say and mean, not
on the passing aspirations of generations who have abandoned the fundamental
principles of the remarkable government it created.
The Constitution
represents a federal government that was granted limited powers. The rest were
retained by the States, but Communism and Socialism are based on a strong
central government, one ruled by an elite class of intellectuals to oversee all
elements of the economy and to set the rules by which everyone must live even if
they conflict with their religious convictions and moral values.
The
degradation of the nation has tracked the rise of Socialism, begun with Karl
Marx's creation of Communism. Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was influenced by
the writings of Hegel, a German philosopher. Marx's socialist writings would get
him expelled from Germany and France. In 1848, with Friedrich Engels, he
published The Communist Manifesto and was exiled to London where he wrote
the first volume of Das Kapital, living there until his death in 1883.
Suffice to say that the Communism he unleashed would cause the death of hundreds
of millions, particularly in Russia and China where it was
embraced.
Americans and, in particular, conservatives who have a high
regard for the Constitution and the values of personal freedom and liberty it
bestows on individuals, have been fighting against the tyranny of Communism and
Socialism, but it has always had an appeal to those who prefer to let others
determine the actions of government and the bigger it is, the better. This is
enhanced by a government that redistributes the wealth from those who worked for
it to those who have not.
Along the way there have been voices that have
spoken out against Communism and Socialism. I came across a speech by one of
them. At the time he said, "We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has
ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been
said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours,
history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most
to lose did the least to prevent its happening."
It is happening today in
an America that has twice elected a Communist as its President, some say out of
guilt over the slavery the nation countenanced and which took a Civil War to
end. That Civil War was fought between moral Americans who hated slavery and
those who profited from it. In the latter part of the last century, Americans
joined with the black community to put an end to the injustices it had
encountered for a century. That was the act of a nation with its moral values
intact.
Barack Obama was "a red diaper baby" raised from birth by a family
devoted to Socialism and educated in universities where it thrives today. His
actions are entirely determined by the Marxist theology to which he has devoted
his life and his failures demonstrate its failures. In the process, millions of
Americans are suffering unemployment in an economy that knows what it takes to
create growth, but which has been thwarted by massive government regulation and
the crony capitalism that corrupts it. It has wasted billions on the global
warming/climate change hoax that is still being advocated by some in
Congress.
In the stump speech
given to support the campaign of a leading conservative, the speaker said that
the issue of that elections was "Whether we believe in our capacity for
self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a
little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us
better than we can plan them ourselves." That question exists today.
A
centralized government was the "very thing the Founding Fathers sought to
minimize. They knew that... a government can't control the economy without
controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must
use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding
Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as
well or as economically as the private sector of the economy."
At the
time he gave his speech, he noted that "For three decades we've sought to solve
the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans
fail, the more the planners plan."
He warned that, "Our natural,
unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and
freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp at this
moment."
He could have delivered that speech today, but the speaker was
Ronald Reagan and the speech was given on October 27, 1964. He was campaigning
for Sen. Barry Goldwater who was running against Lyndon Baines Johnson who was
the incumbent as the result of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Johnson was
overwhelmingly elected and, while expanding the war in Vietnam that would cost
more than American 53,000 lives, he also launched the "Great Society" program
based entirely in Socialism. Like the war, it too would fail.
Goldwater
had rejected the New Deal socialism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and it was
Roosevelt who would preside over the nation's longest economic doldrums from his
first election in 1932 until the Great Depression would end in the wake of the
Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Four years later Americans would
celebrate the defeat of the Japanese Empire and Germany's Nazi
regime.
Reagan would be elected President in 1980 and, through two terms,
would oversee economic growth that would be passed onto George W. Bush. The
nation would turn to Bill Clinton in 1992, electing him twice.
To save
the nation today, Americans must reject a Democratic Party that resembles the
Communist Party USA. The voters must secure control of the Senate and House by a
Republican Party that must tap into the values of men like Reagan and
predecessors that included Coolidge, Hoover, and Eisenhower. Both Bush
presidencies tried as well.
The warnings Reagan voiced in 1964 are no
less true today and, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, an even greater
threat exists than did five decades ago. If we fail, we will be signing a
suicide pact with Communism.
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