Last week, I inadvertently hit the dreaded Fox News Channel button on the remote, and there he was, that creepy little Issa fellow, the one who’s been working on the Fast and Furious scandal for what seems like most of my life. I watched just long enough to hear him say that Eric Holder should resign. Wow! What a bold guy Issa is.
No mention of indicting serial liar Holder for lying under oath, of course. Just insist that he resign. And you wonder why progressives laugh at conservatives? Issa’s wimpy remark reminded me yet again why I no longer get my news from television. These days, most of my information comes from the Internet and books, two sources from which I can pick and choose what I want to read.
Since it’s been clear for a long time that no one is serious about getting to the bottom of any of the endless Obama scandals (or even willing to suggest that they are Obama’s scandals), I choose to ignore them and focus on serious stuff – like liberty, tyranny, dictatorship, Natural Law and the guiding force of the human race, philosophy.
As we have seen throughout history, the implementation of a philosophy can change the world. I’ve always found it to be remarkable how Marx and Engels painstakingly thought through an entire philosophy of life – an ideology, if you will – that was actually put into practice in Russia in just a little more than two decades following Engels’ death.
It not only changed Russia, it changed the entire world. Here we are today, nearly a hundred years later, and Russia’s ideological experiment has left a socialist imprint on all Western countries. Put another way, it was the spark that made socialism the new normal of the Western world.
As the philosophy of equality of results spread around the globe, opposition to it arose. Unfortunately, the opposition united a pair of strange bedfellows – classical liberals and conservatives. But it’s a shaky alliance. True classical liberals unequivocally oppose a strong central government, while conservatives just want to slow the growth of government.
That’s why today’s Republicans cheer over the slightest slowdown of the progressive agenda. They’ve thrown in the towel on deficit spending; they just want to slow it down a bit. They’ve thrown in the towel on amnesty for illegals; they just want to slow it down a bit. They’ve thrown in the towel on government’s trashing of the Constitution; they just want to slow it down a bit. They’ve thrown in the towel on government’s spying on its own citizens; they just want to slow it down a bit.
Since today’s conservatives stand for nothing more than slowing down the socialist agenda of progressives, they are avid believers in so-called compromise. Unfortunately, as a result of the misguided belief that compromise is the moral path for enlightened politicians, conservatives have, while kicking and screaming to the contrary, adopted the direction of the socialists’ agenda. Conservatism has always meant favoring the status quo, and, over time, the status quo has become socialism.
The problem with conservatism is that, by its very nature, it does not offer alternatives. It simply opposes the increasingly rapid shift to the left. Thus, it is not surprising that civil libertarians, who do not wish to preserve our socialist system, are both allied and at odds with conservatives at the same time. They are desirous of change. Specifically, they would like to remove all obstacles to growth, and socialism is the greatest obstacle to growth ever conceived by man.
This is why voters see the GOP as the party that is against everything, but has no ideas of its own. Because conservatives abhor change, they resist any attempt to weaken established authority, even though today’s established authority has its roots in the depleted soil of socialism. Their only goal is to try to keep its power somewhat controlled.
Like his socialist counterparts, the conservative believes in arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he perceives to be the right objectives. In other words, he sincerely believes that politicians have a right to force their values on others. He clings to the delusion that it’s just a matter of electing the right people – morally superior people – to wield power over the less enlightened masses.
All this by way of pointing out that the Republican stand-for-nothing-except-slow-down-the-accepted-agenda-of-the-far-left machine is revving up again. Yep, Jeb Bush is already making his rounds of the talk shows and discussing a possible presidential bid in 2016, and he is definitely the choice of the Republican establishment. And right behind him is Mike “the only way anything gets done in government is by compromising” Huckabee. Progressive Republicans are preparing to do battle once again – with members of their own party!
That’s right, they’re already working to destroy the civil libertarians in their midst – especially Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. They see these believers in individual sovereignty as dangerous extremists who are calling for (Gasp!) change – away from socialism and toward individualism.
And you can be sure that Democrats will be giving them all the help they can. At a recent fundraiser, hatchet hack Joe Biden got the ball rolling by saying of Rand and Cruz, “America has moved on, well beyond where these guys are.”
And he’s right. America has moved way beyond where Paul and Cruz are – away from a constitutional government steeped in federalism and toward evermore socialism. The Democratic Socialist Party knows it must stop Paul, Cruz and other misguided souls who stubbornly cling to the belief that the Founding Fathers had it right. Socialists accuse such people of wanting to go backward rather than forward, as though freedom were old-fashioned.
Unfortunately, most of those on the right agree with them, which is why conservatism is a philosophy of paralysis.
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