In an article recently posted to my blog, I discuss the fact that authentic conservatives have every reason to be chagrined with the forces presently in control of the GOP. Their collaboration with Obama serves the agenda of an elitist faction that aims to overthrow America’s constitutional republic. As a result, an oligarchic tyranny is replacing the American republic. As Obama’s executive abuses clearly demonstrate, it will be administered as a national dictatorship, subservient to the powerful individuals, banks, and other corporate institutions that comprise the elitist faction.
Thanks to the undeniable failures of the confederal international system established under U.S. leadership after WWII, the aims of this factional dictatorship may seem justifiable to some. After all, won’t the de facto tyranny of a global elite be better able to manage competing national or regional powers, mitigating the tendency toward violent conflict?
Of course, in the Middle East and elsewhere, this expectation is already proving to be foolishly optimistic. Unregulated by a statesmanship that implements a federalist concept (statesmanship the political class spawned by America’s corrupt political process no longer seems willing or able to provide), the elitist faction’s push toward de facto tyranny seems likely to produce devastating economic and military conflict among the various forces (Russia, China, the Islamic jihad) that aspire to dominance.
Tragically, America’s current elites have largely abetted this dictatorial agenda, despite the fact that
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It rejects, in principle, the American founders’ commitment to representative government, constructed on the assumption that people are, on the whole, capable of fulfilling the responsibilities connected with the exercise of sovereign power; and
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It abandons the founders’ confidence that, when people are properly educated to resist elitist demagoguery, government of, by, and for the people tends to constrain and domesticate inordinate ambition.
This confidence in the general capacity of humankind only makes sense, however, in view of the understanding of natural law (i.e., natural necessity, or, in human terms, natural inclination) which accepts that,
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Human nature is distinguished by the capacity to choose, so that human beings are not simply objects governed by random material causality, (or as Hamilton put it in Federalist #1, “accident and force”);
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In view of their special nature, human beings are authoritatively “endowed by their Creator” with the inclination to do what is right, a natural disposition to take account of what is good, on the whole, even as and when they pursue their own good as individuals; and
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Human nature is susceptible to moral education, which activates this natural disposition in order to supply the character required for the people, in general, to be capable of self-government.
Whatever false rhetoric they deploy, the actions of the elitist faction currently controlling both the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States puts them at odds with the American founders’ sense of humanity’s potential for democratic self-government, as well as the understanding of natural law that makes sense of it. This is shown by,
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Their advocacy of a view of “right” that contradicts God-endowed right as the basis for justice (e.g., so called “abortion rights” and the “right” of homosexuals to marry);
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Their promotion of a view of natural history as random (i.e., ultimately devoid of intention) materialistic evolution, a view that effaces the distinction in principle between human beings and animals, effectively dehumanizing the whole human race;
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Their adoption of an elitist, oligarchic approach to government and indeed all human affairs, predicated on this implicit disregard for the special nature of human beings;
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Their propagation of the demonstrably false assumption that this conceptual abrogation of human nature represents “progress,” when in fact it is the ultimate form of degradation.
As a matter of practical fact, the founders’ respectful view of the people’s capacity for self-government had much to do with the hopeful view of human destiny engendered by the Christian understanding of history. Though these days it is often quite purposely neglected, or maliciously denied, Christ represents a way, formally open to all human beings, to make the sovereign wisdom of God an indwelling principle of their lives, informing their will.
Though some still give lip service to Christ and the Bible, the GOP’s elitist faction leadership has quietly surrendered to a false jurisprudence, and equally false conceptions of tolerance and compassion, that effectively defame and criminalize the way of life Christ represents. Yet millions who profess to follow that way of life connive at this capitulation, effectively prostituting their faith by accepting an agenda that seeks first the kingdom of Mammon.
In every respect the preceding observations give cause to doubt the common sense, and even the sanity, of conservatives still exhausting their resources and hopes by their continued dalliance with the GOP. In this context, I use the word dalliance deliberately. In the era before casual sex usurped the dignity of a sacrament, the word “dalliance” denoted a sexual relationship devoid of the good faith, the permanent commitment of trust, the reverent respect for God’s will for the preservation of humanity, evoked by the name of marriage.
In similar fashion, as the result of the elitist faction’s profound corruption of the political process in the United States today, citizenship is being made into a hollow caricature of the true and honorable obligation to contribute to the deliberative process that sways the use of government power. In the elitist faction’s sham political parties, conservatives are now no better than the despised mistresses of power and ambition, shamefully crying for the favors, or else decrying the treachery of overseers obviously unwilling to espouse their cause.
In the past, when dalliance finally ended in marriage, people used to say it made an honest man or woman of those involved. The conservatives’ inveterate dalliance with the GOP reverses this effect — it makes dishonest men and women of every self-professed adherent of constitutional liberty who persists in it. Worse still, while they dally, the Republic goes down in flames, revealing the disgrace of all who thus willingly leave to their posterity nothing but the ashes of liberty.