The Safest Road to Hell is the Gradual One
When someone is telling you a lie, knowing it is a lie and choosing to believe the lie or ignoring evidence to the contrary, does not stop it from being a lie.
I am a big believer in simple observation, natural law and the context it brings to our lives. Something know from observations that when someone is telling you a lie, knowing it is a lie and choosing to believe the lie - or ignoring evidence to the contrary - does not stop it from being a lie.
Correspondingly, if something looks like Karl Marx, walks like Karl Marx and quacks like Karl Marx, it is reasonable to conclude that it is a bearded Marxist (or a third wave feminist, sometimes it is hard to tell the difference).
Progressive Democrats have sure been doing a hell of a lot of looking, walking and quacking the last few decades. For the past several months, we have been subjected to veritable cacophony of collectivist pot banging.
It goes without debate that we are a far more collectivist state than we were just 50 years ago, and with a much stronger central government and Executive. We can debate if the drift toward the “Imperial President” or “Unitary Executive” is “Bush’s fault” for expanding the power of the president – but what is not deniable is the fact that Obama and Biden achieved the impossible – the expanded the dictatorial power of the office. One can’t do that without willing accomplices, those being the Hobbesian progressives in both parties and the the useful idiots in the media, punditry and the public.
I think we may well have reached a tipping point. When people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are called “extremists”, “economic terrorists” and “terrorists with bombs strapped to their chests” for simply following the basic principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, recognizing that a law is not made just simply through passage by our legislative bodies, we are clearly walking a thin line between liberty and tyranny.
The Declaration of Independence tells us that we have an obligation to resist such laws no matter what our “leaders” say, stating:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
That is not fantasy – those are the words upon which the American experiment in liberty is based.
When I measure our drift toward Marxism, this is my starting point.
I have been on a C.S. Lewis kick this week, so no surprise I am reminded of this quote from him:
“The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
When I am chided as an alarmist and told that a little socialism is a good thing, I remind people that the only reason that we have been able to avoid the corporate pain inherent in collectivist systems is that what we have done so far is tolerable to our Republic – it is like an annoying pimple, unsightly and ugly but ultimately inconsequential to the human body. However, since the start of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, we have been slowly and incrementally increasing the infections until they have become systemic and life threatening. They are now threatening the organs of the body. The current regime has brought us to a trauma center with our heart in fibrillation – and only Obamacare for insurance.
Contemporary progressives do not want the best for our country, they just want control of it. If they turn it into a smoldering ash heap in the process, that’s just fine as long as they are kings of the resulting wasteland. They have conclusively proven this by exempting themselves from the very laws they foist on the rest of the populace.
Economically, they want just enough our capitalism to pay for their adventures in socialism…but Obamacare has brought the pain to the ranks of the useful idiots and I do see them start to recognize their inner Any Rand and push back.
While I remain hopeful the useful idiots are going to become slightly less useful and a great deal less idiotic, the chances seem to be diminishing that we are about to turn around on the path C.S. Lewis described and begin the uphill walk to that shining city on the hill that was America.