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The outcome of the pitched battle now underway in Congress will be of enormous importance to America's future. Though nominally concerned with fiscal and economic matters, it is much, much more than that. At issue is nothing less than the peoples' sovereignty.
In earlier essays (notably here) I have remarked that the behavior of the current president, his leaders in the house and senate and his allies in the Executive branch is stunning for its arrogance -- its contempt for the majority of Americans. Add to that, and in concert, the same arrogance of the legacy media [1], K12 and academe, Hollywood, labor unions, the "permanent government" bureaucracies and many of the nation's courts, and we have to ask ourselves if they know something we don't. What might that be?
I have posited -- and I do so here -- that they appear to believe they have accumulated enough power to engineer a coup -- the seizure of the people's sovereign power. That power, already weakened by decades of big government usurpation, may on the verge of its undoing.
As I said in a recent essay on the same subject (the debt ceiling), what I see is a struggle between what I describe as the "institutional Left" -- well organized and largely under the strong influence of president and party -- and the emerging, but less organized, peoples' sovereignty movement exemplified by the Tea Party and Tenth Amendment movements. As F. A. Hayek pointed out in his seminal Road to Serfdom, political power is not under the control of the majority, but under that of the largest and best-organized minority. If that minority is aligned with the will of the people, we have an agreeable and responsive government; if not -- if it is aligned in the service of its own power -- we have tyranny.
If I am correct in my appraisal, the outcome of the war-as-politics engagement over the debt limit is an existential confrontation; the Founders' vision for America is at stake.
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1. The major liberal newspapers, led by the New York Times, network TV and left-leaning cable broadcasters like MSNBC and CNN have brazenly joined forces with the president and the Democrats. And they have done so at serious cost to revenues. Why would they do that?
2 comments:
Sadly, I suspect you are correct: "The Founders' vision for America is at stake."
And since the majority of the electorate are aware of little more than they glean from TV, the "vision" is in danger of being forever lost.
I'm not so sure, John, that the "majority of the electorate" is as benighted as the legacy media portrays it. The emergence of the TPM would seem to give lie to the notion. Let's hope I'm right on this one.
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