Linda Kimball
Statists and liberals: where they are located on the Founders' political spectrum
By Linda Kimball
Much confusion reigns today because we think in terms of a left-right dichotomy. Communism is on the left we are told to believe and Fascism comes from the right, while people and parties are called either "leftist" or "rightist." Adding to the confusion, Liberals believe absolutely that even though moral absolutes do not exist, evil nevertheless absolutely comes from the Right, for the evil Right is the party of evil white people. Furthermore, Progressive Liberal educrats condition the minds of America's gullible youth with this insanity writes Dennis Prager in his article, "Black Murders Eight Whites; Media Blames Whites,"
"After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society, only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer's alleged experiences of racism." (http://worth-reading-blog.blogspot.com/2010/08/black-murders-eight-whites-media-blames.html)
America is dying, and due in large part to the fallacious left-right dichotomy, the underlying infection and its' carriers cannot be clearly identified. Consequently, we fight against symptoms rather than the cause of infection, which is an exercise in futility. To clear the air, we ought to think in terms of the Founder's rather ingenious political spectrum, a yardstick for measuring political power in any system of government. In other words, the yardstick is not about political parties or grassroots movements such as today's Tea Party but about political power.
Government is a system of ruling or controlling. In the American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, Noah Webster defines government as:
"The exercise of authority; direction and restraint exercised over the actions of men in communities, societies or states; the administration of public affairs, according to established constitution, laws and usages, or by arbitrary edicts."
On the Founder's yardstick, the two extreme forms of governance are Anarchy and Tyranny, or in today's vernacular, Utopian Statism and its' co-dependent, the Liberalized masses. These two extremes are placed at either end of the spectrum. Statists, whether described as oligarchs, totalitarians, or despots for example, are on the far left while the cult of the unrestrained (Liberals) are on the far right. Included within the definition of Liberal are all who demand an end to moral restraints, which means for instance that certain Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, militant atheists, Liberal Christians, and Democrats are anarchists as measured by the Founders yardstick. At the one extreme there is neither moral law nor cultural restraint. At the other extreme there is oppressive control and too much government — Big Brother, in other words. Both extremes are united by moral relativism, unrestrained passions, will to power, and arbitrary edicts, which are merely politicized caprice, whim, envy, vengeance-seeking, lust, resentment, and covetousness.
Occupying the middle area of the spectrum are both yesterday's Founding generation and today's Constitutional Conservatives of every skin color, of both sexes and from every walk of life. Like the Founders, they believe the rights of all people are unalienable (from the supernatural Creator) and cannot be violated without risking the wrath of Divine Justice. And whether believers or not, they hold that Christianity is one of the West's central foundational pillars:
"The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions." (William McGuffey, d. May 4, 1873, professor at the University of Virginia, president of Ohio University, and author of McGuffey's Readers; http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html)
Constitutionalists also believe that individual liberty lives or dies according to whether the people are self-controlled and virtuous or lacking self-control and thereby depraved:
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." (Samuel Adams, Founding Father; http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html)
Why are only virtuous people capable of individual freedom? In simple terms, all men are compound mixtures of strengths and weaknesses and good and evil. In short, all men are both kindly Dr. Jekyll and evil Mr. Hyde. Virtuous people are those who, over time and with great self-sacrifice, personal suffering, and perseverance, have learned — however imperfectly — to restrain their Mr. Hyde appetites. In attainment of self-control, virtuous people are by consequence capable of self-governance. This means that they are able to live and work within an atmosphere of limited government, or just enough government to protect liberty, rights, and property but not too little that anarchy ensues. Without virtue, liberty degenerates into the madness that now characterizes America and the West:
"What is liberty without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils...madness without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." (Edmund Burke, 1791 at the National Assembly, http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html)
Statists and Liberals
"What distinguishes Communism from the fanatical authoritarian religions with which it has so many points in common is... its rigid, dogmatic and uncompromising exclusion of any element in life lying outside the confines of the present material world....Truth and objectivity are of minor importance. The main purpose is to defame and denounce in every way." Communism is "the faith without God." (William Henry Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, p. 311)
On the Founder's spectrum, Communism, Fascism, radical Islamism, and Socialism would be on the left since they are totalitarian faiths and/or belief systems. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Fidel, George Soros, "elite" green environmentalists, Obama's Czars and Obama for example, would likewise be located on the far left as they are adherents of totalitarian systems.
On the right are the Liberalized masses. Among their number today are even some otherwise orthodox Christians who are Liberals by dint of propaganda, demoralization, mind-conditioning, and dumbing-down. However, after fifty years of systematic demoralization, a diabolical agenda stealthily carried out by the Progressive mind-conditioners of cognitive dissonance and moral depravity, today's Liberalized majority are self-centered adolescents in adult size bodies. They are whining, nasty narcissists full of the pride and unrestrained appetites that brazenly define obscenity, pornography, blasphemy, covetousness, hedonism, sodomy, sadomasochism, laziness, and envy as "Constitutional rights." These are the depraved individuals who not only believe that anyone who hurts their feelings should be charged with a hate crime but that money and rights grow on trees.
Liberalism is the default position of self-centered children, notes Reb Bradley, author of "Born Liberal Raised Right." Bradley notes:
Sexually, today's America is "a nation ruled by its passions." "Heinous acts of casual disregard for life, unheard of fifty years ago, have become a familiar item on the evening news; students killing classmates, children murdering their playmates....these gruesome crimes are merely symptomatic of a breakdown of moral fiber..." (ibid, pp. 2-3)
That far right and far left factions are united in a twisted co-dependent relationship makes sense really, for as virtuous people are those who are most capable of self-governance, they represent true adulthood, strength, authority, truth, reality, courage, and order, which things the other two factions deeply resent and are in rebellion against. Peter Hitchens, brother of the infamous militant atheist Christopher, and author of "The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith," says of this sick relationship:
There is an "...alliance between political utopianism (totalitarianism) and the new cult of the unrestrained self, unleashed into the Western world by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, by Alfred Kinsey and Herbert Marcuse, promoted by the self-pitying anthems of rock music, and encouraged by the enormous power of "progressive" education in which so many cultural revolutionaries work." (p. 135)
America's Plague of Madness
Sanity is the ability to recognize right from wrong independently of personal feelings, fears, impulses, desires, and compulsions. Rational thinking then, is reasoning disciplined to resist the corrupting influence of personal feelings, thus allowing for the acceptance of truths that contradict feelings, desires, and fancies. In short, rational thinking is morally-informed reasoning. It is dispassionate, rightly-ordered and logical, and is the fruit of impulse-control and unswerving commitment to enduring truths, moral law, and principle. Irrational reasoning is the opposite. Irrationality is the inability to recognize right from wrong independent of personal feelings, impulses, and compulsions. By the degree to which the moral sense is corrupt, so too is reason. The greater the degree of corruption, the more depraved is reason.
This being the case, the most frightening aspect of Liberal statist depravity is that through the White House, legislatures and courts they have the power to lead our country farther down the path to moral decline and from there into the abyss. Enabling them in all of this are millions of dumbed-down, mind-conditioned, demoralized Americans, of whom some are said to be "leftists" and others "rightists."
An astute commentator to the Prager Zeitung incisively cut through the confusion caused by the left-right dichotomy to reveal the dreadful reality:
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president." "The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince...The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool" "It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president." (Prager Zeitung, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2559666/posts )
Related Essays:
Cultural Marxism
Cultural Marxism 2: The Subversion and Perversion of America's Youth
In the Shadow of Leviathan: America's Arising Fear-Based Society
When Evil has Destroyed the Foundations, What are the Righteous To Do?
Linda writes on culture, politics, and worldview.
© Linda Kimball
August 12, 2010
Much confusion reigns today because we think in terms of a left-right dichotomy. Communism is on the left we are told to believe and Fascism comes from the right, while people and parties are called either "leftist" or "rightist." Adding to the confusion, Liberals believe absolutely that even though moral absolutes do not exist, evil nevertheless absolutely comes from the Right, for the evil Right is the party of evil white people. Furthermore, Progressive Liberal educrats condition the minds of America's gullible youth with this insanity writes Dennis Prager in his article, "Black Murders Eight Whites; Media Blames Whites,"
"After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society, only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer's alleged experiences of racism." (http://worth-reading-blog.blogspot.com/2010/08/black-murders-eight-whites-media-blames.html)
America is dying, and due in large part to the fallacious left-right dichotomy, the underlying infection and its' carriers cannot be clearly identified. Consequently, we fight against symptoms rather than the cause of infection, which is an exercise in futility. To clear the air, we ought to think in terms of the Founder's rather ingenious political spectrum, a yardstick for measuring political power in any system of government. In other words, the yardstick is not about political parties or grassroots movements such as today's Tea Party but about political power.
Government is a system of ruling or controlling. In the American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, Noah Webster defines government as:
"The exercise of authority; direction and restraint exercised over the actions of men in communities, societies or states; the administration of public affairs, according to established constitution, laws and usages, or by arbitrary edicts."
On the Founder's yardstick, the two extreme forms of governance are Anarchy and Tyranny, or in today's vernacular, Utopian Statism and its' co-dependent, the Liberalized masses. These two extremes are placed at either end of the spectrum. Statists, whether described as oligarchs, totalitarians, or despots for example, are on the far left while the cult of the unrestrained (Liberals) are on the far right. Included within the definition of Liberal are all who demand an end to moral restraints, which means for instance that certain Republicans, Independents, Libertarians, militant atheists, Liberal Christians, and Democrats are anarchists as measured by the Founders yardstick. At the one extreme there is neither moral law nor cultural restraint. At the other extreme there is oppressive control and too much government — Big Brother, in other words. Both extremes are united by moral relativism, unrestrained passions, will to power, and arbitrary edicts, which are merely politicized caprice, whim, envy, vengeance-seeking, lust, resentment, and covetousness.
Occupying the middle area of the spectrum are both yesterday's Founding generation and today's Constitutional Conservatives of every skin color, of both sexes and from every walk of life. Like the Founders, they believe the rights of all people are unalienable (from the supernatural Creator) and cannot be violated without risking the wrath of Divine Justice. And whether believers or not, they hold that Christianity is one of the West's central foundational pillars:
"The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions." (William McGuffey, d. May 4, 1873, professor at the University of Virginia, president of Ohio University, and author of McGuffey's Readers; http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html)
Constitutionalists also believe that individual liberty lives or dies according to whether the people are self-controlled and virtuous or lacking self-control and thereby depraved:
"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." (Samuel Adams, Founding Father; http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html)
Why are only virtuous people capable of individual freedom? In simple terms, all men are compound mixtures of strengths and weaknesses and good and evil. In short, all men are both kindly Dr. Jekyll and evil Mr. Hyde. Virtuous people are those who, over time and with great self-sacrifice, personal suffering, and perseverance, have learned — however imperfectly — to restrain their Mr. Hyde appetites. In attainment of self-control, virtuous people are by consequence capable of self-governance. This means that they are able to live and work within an atmosphere of limited government, or just enough government to protect liberty, rights, and property but not too little that anarchy ensues. Without virtue, liberty degenerates into the madness that now characterizes America and the West:
"What is liberty without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils...madness without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." (Edmund Burke, 1791 at the National Assembly, http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html)
Statists and Liberals
"What distinguishes Communism from the fanatical authoritarian religions with which it has so many points in common is... its rigid, dogmatic and uncompromising exclusion of any element in life lying outside the confines of the present material world....Truth and objectivity are of minor importance. The main purpose is to defame and denounce in every way." Communism is "the faith without God." (William Henry Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age, p. 311)
On the Founder's spectrum, Communism, Fascism, radical Islamism, and Socialism would be on the left since they are totalitarian faiths and/or belief systems. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Fidel, George Soros, "elite" green environmentalists, Obama's Czars and Obama for example, would likewise be located on the far left as they are adherents of totalitarian systems.
On the right are the Liberalized masses. Among their number today are even some otherwise orthodox Christians who are Liberals by dint of propaganda, demoralization, mind-conditioning, and dumbing-down. However, after fifty years of systematic demoralization, a diabolical agenda stealthily carried out by the Progressive mind-conditioners of cognitive dissonance and moral depravity, today's Liberalized majority are self-centered adolescents in adult size bodies. They are whining, nasty narcissists full of the pride and unrestrained appetites that brazenly define obscenity, pornography, blasphemy, covetousness, hedonism, sodomy, sadomasochism, laziness, and envy as "Constitutional rights." These are the depraved individuals who not only believe that anyone who hurts their feelings should be charged with a hate crime but that money and rights grow on trees.
Liberalism is the default position of self-centered children, notes Reb Bradley, author of "Born Liberal Raised Right." Bradley notes:
Sexually, today's America is "a nation ruled by its passions." "Heinous acts of casual disregard for life, unheard of fifty years ago, have become a familiar item on the evening news; students killing classmates, children murdering their playmates....these gruesome crimes are merely symptomatic of a breakdown of moral fiber..." (ibid, pp. 2-3)
That far right and far left factions are united in a twisted co-dependent relationship makes sense really, for as virtuous people are those who are most capable of self-governance, they represent true adulthood, strength, authority, truth, reality, courage, and order, which things the other two factions deeply resent and are in rebellion against. Peter Hitchens, brother of the infamous militant atheist Christopher, and author of "The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith," says of this sick relationship:
There is an "...alliance between political utopianism (totalitarianism) and the new cult of the unrestrained self, unleashed into the Western world by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, by Alfred Kinsey and Herbert Marcuse, promoted by the self-pitying anthems of rock music, and encouraged by the enormous power of "progressive" education in which so many cultural revolutionaries work." (p. 135)
America's Plague of Madness
Sanity is the ability to recognize right from wrong independently of personal feelings, fears, impulses, desires, and compulsions. Rational thinking then, is reasoning disciplined to resist the corrupting influence of personal feelings, thus allowing for the acceptance of truths that contradict feelings, desires, and fancies. In short, rational thinking is morally-informed reasoning. It is dispassionate, rightly-ordered and logical, and is the fruit of impulse-control and unswerving commitment to enduring truths, moral law, and principle. Irrational reasoning is the opposite. Irrationality is the inability to recognize right from wrong independent of personal feelings, impulses, and compulsions. By the degree to which the moral sense is corrupt, so too is reason. The greater the degree of corruption, the more depraved is reason.
This being the case, the most frightening aspect of Liberal statist depravity is that through the White House, legislatures and courts they have the power to lead our country farther down the path to moral decline and from there into the abyss. Enabling them in all of this are millions of dumbed-down, mind-conditioned, demoralized Americans, of whom some are said to be "leftists" and others "rightists."
An astute commentator to the Prager Zeitung incisively cut through the confusion caused by the left-right dichotomy to reveal the dreadful reality:
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president." "The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince...The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool" "It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president." (Prager Zeitung, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2559666/posts )
Related Essays:
Cultural Marxism
Cultural Marxism 2: The Subversion and Perversion of America's Youth
In the Shadow of Leviathan: America's Arising Fear-Based Society
When Evil has Destroyed the Foundations, What are the Righteous To Do?
Linda writes on culture, politics, and worldview.
© Linda Kimball
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
