Weimar America?

Weak people make for weak civilizations. Weak civilizations always fall.

There is no doubt these are perilous times. History has proven time and again that times like ours expose the rot and weakness in great civilizations and that most of them fall from the internal rot, not external conquerors. Rome is postulated to have fallen this way by Edward Gibbon in his classic, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Hitler rose to power in situations eerily like the institutional rot we see in the US today.

Perilous times…

For all their protestations of being the political party protecting democracy, the Democrats sure seem to be doing a lot of things that aren’t really that democratic.

Perhaps the greatest danger during times of uncertainty like these is weakness. Weaknesses in leadership, in fiscal and financial matters and in social fiber lead to a loss of faith in our guiding institutions – in this weakness, we all can see the symptoms of a decaying civilization. The people of our country are grasping for something solid in the wake of the failures of promises as thin and wispy as the morning mist, given by a weak, craven and dishonest political class.

So, what are we to expect from our government?

Our Constitution specifies a government that does a very limited number of things:

• to form a more perfect Union [more effective than the Articles of Confederation],

• establish Justice [via assuring that each person is treated equally by government],

• ensure domestic Tranquility [provide a platform for a stable society],

• provide for the common defense [protect the sovereignty of the nation],

• promote the general Welfare [PROMOTE, not provide], and

• secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity [assure the longevity of our nation] …

It is not designed to be the arbiter of success or to redistribute income and wealth in the Marxist ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

People, when faced with ineffective governance, will turn to alternatives no matter the current system. The Russians turned to democracy (except they got an oligarchy due to the old Soviet party structure) and the Germans of the late 1930’s turned to the National Socialists of Adolph Hitler. Democracies seem to give way to alternatives that are not always the best for the people in the long run. Often in times of political and social stress, societies, desperate to the point of panic after being stoked by the alarmist and accusatory rhetoric of a political class bent on achieving or retaining power, will turn to the source of the most promises. Again, the words of the 18^th century history professor at the University of Edinburgh, Alexander Fraser Tytler do ring true:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

The sad truth is that people, in choosing a path forward, continue to base that choice on promises from people seeking to govern. They seek any relief from the stresses placed on them, and since societies do not have a strong sense of irony, seek them from the very people and institutions that caused the stress in the first place. They too soon forget that promises easily given are worthless and the attempts to fulfill those promises often leads to Marxist or totalitarian governments.

The temptation in these trying times is to throw out the system of government and go to something “better”.

But America doesn’t need a new governmental system. What we absolutely don’t need is the socialism of the Obama or Biden administrations, the Marxism of the BLM/ANTIFA “movement” or the communism of the columnists of the Atlantic or New York Times.

We need to recognize why our government is functioning the way that it is before deciding to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Our Constitution (and the governance that flows from it) was never designed to operate under such circumstances. What we are doing today is just as ineffective as trying to change a flat tire with a frying pan or to fry an egg with a lug wrench.

Our government isn’t working, not because it isn’t the right system, it is because the things that it is being driven to do were never part of its scope. It didn’t leave us, we left it.

If we can herd the cats back to what the Constitution is designed to do (and that is a BIG “if”), return the power to the states that has been usurped by the federal government and have the states governed by the will of their people, we can save America.

If not, we may start looking more like the Weimar Republic in its dying days.