DeeGeesLifeBlog ~ Life as Art ~ Or is it Heart?

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. ~ Hebrews 11: 1-2

Vincent McCaffrey, American Greatness: The Republic is Dead. Two hundred and thirty-four years after Ben Franklin issued his warning on the occasion of its beginning, we couldn’t keep it.  The Republic is dead. To pretend otherwise after the government usurpations of authority during the COVID “emergency” is delusional and self-destructive. The end was visible shortly after September 11th, 2001, with the panicked passage of an unconstitutional Patriot Act during the erstwhile war on terror, which has since been so terribly lost.

True, much of the public remains unaware.“I didn’t even know it was sick,” they might say, preoccupied as they always are with earning a living and cleaning the gutters. But this is usually the case, until it isn’t.  A dark age of technologically enhanced authoritarian rule is descending—an age that I believe will not soon end. This brief time of passage must be taken as a last opportunity to recover our lost liberty. But what can the minority do? Certainly, any attempt at forcing the issue through violent revolution would only deepen the tragedy and coalesce support of the majority around the status quo. What then, can be done?

********************

DGH: Yours truly has long been one to assume the Republic was lost in 1865, after the first civil war abolished States’ rights. Ever since then, the three branches of government were made unequal, with the Supreme Court acting as the rulers of this once-great nation. There are thousands of laws rigidly enforced today that are clearly unconstitutional, yet no one will (or can) stand against them. Not many Americans alive today know what tyranny really is, but our grandchildren will painfully experience it, and perhaps set things right once again. Wishful thinking perhaps – yet what alternative does anyone believe there is?

********************

McCaffrey: C. S. Lewis defined the “abolition of man” in his great three-part essay by that name. His particular religious affiliation is irrelevant to the truth of his observation. Of course, other great philosophers have engaged the problem of “natural philosophy” and “natural rights,” from Confucius to Roger Scruton, but, I think, none so well.

“Men without chests,” as Lewis explains in part one, are those who have dispensed with any “sentimental” ideas about good and bad, much less good and evil, while attempting to reason without regard to their own ignorance; those who call themselves “intellectuals” so that any disagreement with them is an attack on intelligence, much in the same way, more recently, some “scientists” accuse those who question their statements as being “anti-science.”

The Republic, its death throes, and survival. President Trump invited to try out ‘Winnie’s’ favorite chair. The two fighters of freedom would’ve got on famously together…

********************

DGH: My boyhood hero Sir Winston Churchill posted up above, understood our situation today very, very well when he declared some 80-plus years ago; “If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

********************

McCaffrey: I would let historians ponder the failures, as well as the successes. My own sense of it is that we may have come very close to the “city on the hill,” and might again if we make the effort. A city might be rebuilt upon the ruins. And the alternatives being bandied about by the nihilists, all of them dependent on more government and less individual autonomy, have been proven time and again to be worse.

We cannot stand still while other world powers are moving around us, and capitulation means disaster. Such a retreat would only condemn our children, those who survive, to the job we have failed to do. Whether from a virus or a nuclear holocaust, starvation or a bullet to the head, this horror is not inevitable and historically not so very different from the burdens accepted by past generations.

********************

DGH: Ponder the fact that there’s no fear of God in our society therefore no wisdom and no morality. We can only restore a Constitutional Republic with a moral and religious people as John Adams said. That means without that portion of the population that loathes the idea and those of us that hold to it, attempts to embrace it with them still in the country are doomed to failure. For those who like to fantasize about victory in a civil war, the reality is that what We the (90 million+) People would have to do to win would likely finish off the Republic as well.

********************

McCaffrey: But a virtual “Constitutional Convention” can be called, nonetheless, and a viable alternative can be fashioned. A viable system of term limits would be a good start. Professional politicians are a curse. And an enlargement of Congress to better represent the population would help. A limitation on the bureaucracy would be another boon, with an enforced turnover to the private sector. The cost of “knowing who to call” is simply too great.

The great project of our age, then, is to build upon our ruins before they are lost beneath the sands. The founders had their inspirations. Let the more recent work of Thomas Sowell, Isaiah Berlin, Roger Scruton, Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, Harry Jaffa, and their kin offer guidance. We must reinvent ourselves. We cannot abide as did Ozymandias. Failure is guaranteed to those who do not try. [end]

********************

“This be the verse ye grave for me, here he lies where he longs to be; home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill”… Robert Louis Stevenson

DGH: The Republic died on the battlefield of Gettysburg. We’ve been an oligarchy since then, though the appearance of representative government was allowed to go on as long as the system in D.C. did not threaten the new powers. By the early 21st century, the wheels were coming off the money machine, and when Trump was elected, the oligarchy decided to make its move. The mask came off.

It matters not whose side you are on. The facts are irrefutable. It may have been that a Confederate victory would have led to the same result. We went from a Republic to an Empire overnight. The oligarchs even tried to use the “racism” smear again, just as they had ridden the Abolitionist train to power in the beginning. But the Deplorables finally get it. We see the end game. This is the hill we die on. Or European Man is done for.

And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise: God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. ~ Hebrews 11: 39-40

********************

Vincent McCaffrey, American Greatness: The Republic is Dead

********************

Soli Deo Gloria!