Posted on 06/25/2013 4:12:11 PM PDT by Chris Shugart Uncommon Sense
In one sense, Republicans and Democrats are nearly the same. While they may have different philosophies that motivate their actions, the results are usually identical: An impenetrable bureaucracy that’s expensive to run and difficult to control. Sadly, it’s a trend that neither side seems interested in changing. Maybe they think we won’t notice. And maybe they’re right.
I think it might be time to revise the traditional left/right political spectrum we use to describe American politics. We may need a new way to define the current political landscape, perhaps focusing less on ideology and more on the existing scene we’re now facing. It might even be time to view the nature of government with the same perspective as the American Founders.
The framers of the U.S Constitution were well aware of the historic trend of government. They knew that ruling entities that endured over time evolved towards greater power, gradually increasing control over their nation’s citizens. The Constitution was designed in part to remedy this.
The Founder’s vision of a limited government was a remarkable innovation for its time that was meant to maintain the rights of the individual citizen, and preserve the power of the individual states. Their concept had little to do with left versus right, or liberal versus conservative. Rather, they were largely motivated by the creation of a republic that would not descend into a state of tyranny—a fate that history seemed to show was in the end, inevitable.
I’m proposing a new method of evaluating politics that will measure our government according to the power they have over their citizens. I’m hoping that it will be an effective way to get a simple representation of our politicians and the policies they support. I think it can also serve as a gauge to judge legislative proposals in a way that frames every argument into its basic essentials: size and complexity—the two things that make our government expensive to run and difficult to control.
The left end of the spectrum represents 100 percent government—the domain of dictators, despots, and totalitarian regimes. The right end represents a 100 percent stateless society where you find anarchists*, sovereign citizens, and anti-government groups. The midpoint represents a theoretical equilibrium where the state and the citizen are equally balanced. You’ll find that Americans lean towards one end or the other, depending on their views on the role of government in society.
* A brief sidebar on “anarchism:” The term is often misused, misapplied and misunderstood by politicians and the media. Nowhere is this more evident than in the labeling of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, WTO protesters and various anti-globalization groups. Far from being anarchists, these types of activists are simply anti-capitalists who support government intervention to oppose the private sector.
Keep in mind that this political gauge is a gradient scale. There’s no exact point on this number line that represents any singular ideology or philosophy. The end points and the zero midpoint are absolute, and in the real world unobtainable. Between those points are a range of generic political tendencies that might indicate how much government one would be willing to support or tolerate.
The totalitarian-stateless scale of government is meant to be a measuring device that can be applied without regard to political ideologies, parties or factions. While such factors shouldn’t be necessarily ignored, this spectrum is meant to establish a more basic political inclination: Should government be weighted in favor of the state or towards the citizen? And to what degree? Is there an ideal balance between the two?
From here on out, and until further notice, I have only one simple question. And it’s multiple choice, so any politician should be able to handle it: Is the size of the Federal Government: (a) too large; (b) not large enough; (c) pretty much the right size. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most important discussion we should be having right now. And it’s a question to which we should demand an answer from every politician.
When government is allowed to grow unchecked, (sort of like now) it eventually becomes too expensive to support and too complex to run (sort of like now). Never mind the abuse and injustice it brings to its citizens (sort of like now), it’s patently unsustainable. This should be beyond dispute.
Our choices are simple: We either rein in the power of Washington, or we go broke and careen out of control. The American Founders would certainly have understood this. On the other hand, our elected officials tend to be slow learners. But I hope they can manage to get up to speed, sooner rather than later.
Another thing to make it go away.
It is too large; so much so that if we were to go to strict constitutionalism tomorrow in excess of 95% of FedGov employees would be without a job.
Where does the traditional conservative American Christian fit on your graph?
The kind of people that believed in small government but highly moral law and who would lynch someone calling for abortion and homosexuality, especially in marriage and George Washington’s Army?
At the Virginia ratification convention, Madison responded to Patrick Henry’s charge that the Constitution’s enumerated powers would be usurped and our freedoms destroyed by a national government that would quickly seize all power.
Madison: “If the general government were wholly independent of the governments of the particular states, then, indeed, usurpation might be expected to the fullest extent. But, sir, on whom does this general government depend? It derives its authority from these governments, and from the same sources from which their authority is derived.”
there should be a republic in between democracy and libertarian
Like the founding American generations, who would want to lynch both the democratics and the libertarians.
well, not all libertarians, it depends on their morals.
the democrats however, well, we know whattheir moiralsare, so you’re dead on there. :-)
When a person decides to say that he isn’t a conservative but a libertarian, and is promoting libertarianism, and acceptability of libertarianism, then he is a part of libertarianism, so it is all self described libertarians.
hey i agree.
just saying a libertarian with christian values is going to be a different animal than one with a humanist worldview.
Our current White House occupant told us honestly that he is a naturalized citizen, born a British subject and born to a British subject, whose allegiance was necessarily to the Crown. Both parties kept their silence but our founding documents, even as they are avoided and references to them scrubbed in the digital media, remain. Obama never lied. He told us he believes our Constitution needed a new bill of rights, and was antiquated. He told us he believed in global governance. He told us he is a naturalized citizen, and wrote books about his Muslim father, who was a British subject, and his uncle educated by the KGB in East Germany. was also a Sunni Muslim. Most all of his relatives are Muslim, and actively supporting Jihad for the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama was not born to parents who communicated allegiance in our nation of laws to his son, as required by our Constitution.
Obama, if he has any clear allegiance, is beholden to his patron, Alwaleed bin-Talal’s Wahhabi Sharia legal system. He is supporting Sharia's blasphemy dictum, in direct contradiction with freedom of speech and the press, aided by fellow Wahhabi, converted in the late 1990s, now CIA Director John Brennan, who agreed with ISNA and CAIR, and coordinated, before he had official authority, the purging of our military, State Department, and intelligence agencies of terms like Jihadi, Islamic Terrorism, Muslim Terrorism, and had thousands of pages of military and intelligence manuals scrubbed of inferences to Islamic terrorism.
Both of our major parties are thoroughly penetrated, a glaring example being the support by a director of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, Grover Norquist, of unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trials, exposing support of terrorist organizations by presumed charity groups, Suhail Khan, as a director of CPAC, along with his activities for CAIR and ISNA and dozens of other Muslim Brotherhood groups. Norquist's activities involve almost every presumed conservative in the Republican party, as Norquist was Jack Abramoff’s associate for many years - and Abramoff is an orthodox Jew!.
Until we open our eyes to the remarkable penetration of all branches of government that has condoned that election of a presumably naturalized (some question Obama’s naturalization after having been a British/Kenyan and then an Indonesian citizen) citizen to the office requiring a natural born citizen - the only office (now including the Vice Presidency) in our government requiring a natural born citizen. Our trouble was anticipated by John Jay's concern, foreign influence. Our Constitution intentionally has no definitions (just a restriction on “Treason”), because, as Madison pointed out, wisely, the meanings of words changes over time. As Chief Justice Waite, in Minor v. Happersett explained:
At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens
And this is a bad thing becaauuse...?
Re: “In one sense, Republicans and Democrats are nearly the same......[They create] an impenetrable bureaucracy that’s expensive to run and difficult to control.”
Unfortunately, all government bureaucracies, and most of the people they employ, are instinctively Leftist.
That is the eternal trump card of the Democrat Party.
Even when the Republicans are in power, the bureaucracy relentlessly pulls government to the Left.
I don’t see how, the real purpose behind advancing libertarianism is not to duplicate already existing conservative efforts that the libertarians agree on, but to advance the social liberalism that conservatives and Christians are opposed to.
in modern secular society today, not nearly as much as it was in the founders days.
Your post is enlightening and sums up much of our dire situation. Thank you.
Libertarianism and the left have already created a situation where Christians are finding that survival is the challenge today, that the culture war is probably already lost.
We see the power of those libertarian commandos from the left, as more and more republican leaders, rinos, and young republicans are proclaiming that they still support conservative economic goals, but are “libertarian” or “lean libertarian” on social issues, and that we all need to grow with the times.
rinos are more moderates or closet democrats than they are libertarians. by and large. most tend to be running scared than actually running on libertarian principles.
The easiest way to pick out a rino, or a future rino, is to look at how convincing they are on social issues, it is rare for true social conservatives “grow” to become rinos, that is the role that libertarians play, they give the rinos cover with a new vocabulary for supporting liberalism in the social areas.
That is why a politican can say that he will continue fighting for conservative economic issues but is leaning more libertarian on social issues, we all know what “libertarian on social issues” means.
I think that would be a good thing.
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