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 election 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.
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
2 comments:
Many claim that the Constitution is outdated, to the contrary, it is a perfect document, as much so as ANY document can be, and is, or should be applicable to any and all situations the USA could face...
It was written for a moral people, a band of true, freedom loving Americans and yes, this *death by Communism* is going to be the death of a nation, a people and the most wonderful document ever written by mortal men..
Can't say much about China's Communism, but Russia's Communism is by far the most interesting. The 'hundreds of millions' death is exaggerated, but we can say that bad climatic conditions in the thirties, along with dry climates in Ukraine, contributed to those disastrous years.
As for China, well. That nation has never had a large care for its people.
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