The Alibi of Tyrants

America's Trajectory Toward Statism

By: Andrew Deaton

With every general election seemingly since the dawn of time we have been given the ultimatum that this one – whatever quadrennial is at hand – is the most important election in decades, or our lifetime, or ever. When an incumbent is running for a second term, he will quietly imply that the new vote is the one that really matters (though he made the same claim four years prior). To be sure, most candidates at all levels of government use this tactic mainly as a rhetorical device to drum up support through intimidation and couldn’t care less whether they have any lasting impact past their term or not.

                                

However, it is in a very real way true that every upcoming general election is the most important one yet. The others are all on record; this is the one that is undecided. The past is safely known; the future is uncertain. It is important to understand, though, that the upcoming 2012 general election does in fact have its own historical bearing that is different not only in degree but also in quality from all prior elections taken as a whole. There are three primary reasons for this uniqueness:

The choices are about as far from one another as we’ve ever seen and are almost totally mutually exclusive. This election presents two fundamentally distinct alternative candidates which represent one of the greatest disparities in potential consequences our nation has ever faced in an election. Yes, Romney’s political platform is infected with the insidious undertones of statism, but his moral platform has a tone which is incongruous with Obama’s and which I think will to a great degree iron out many of the faults of his political platform.

To reelect Obama/Biden is to pass the point of no return while Romney/Ryan represents a golden opportunity for America that McCain/Palin and the like never hoped to match. The incumbent, if reelected, will push our nation past the tipping point in a tradition that most certainly did not begin with him, but which is perfectly embodied by him. In short, if Obama/Biden is reelected, the next primary election in 2016 might very well not be so important simply because we will have signed our own last will and testament by reelecting him now. His being barred from a third term is irrelevant; his reelection this year will set a tone that the next president in 2016 will find impossible or nearly so to unravel, even assuming that a future president is sincerely committed to doing so. The upside is that Romney/Ryan represents a dormant but still alive view of American greatness which I believe will represent the first steps in a revival of a positive political course for America, which we have not seen on the ascent in over a century. We have an actual choice for the first time since Reagan and Mondale faced off in 1984.

We can’t procrastinate about the decision any longer. Treading water is not an option. We either vote to seal our nation’s fate, or we vote to revive the faint echoes of the Founding Fathers’ vision which represent everything great about this nation, about Western civilization and about mankind.

Our current president’s overarching theme, his avowed raison d'être, is to equalize all individuals. After all, it is right there at the opening of the Declaration of Independence: All men have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This enumeration is based on the views of John Locke, an English philosopher of the 17^th century who was a massive inspiration for the Founding Fathers and might be seen as one of the philosophic pioneers who made the United States possible. Locke and the Founders, however, meant these rights to guarantee opportunity – i.e., leave individuals alone to succeed or to fail on their own merits – rather than guaranteeing success, which would contradict the “opportunity” interpretation reducing men to the status of wards of the state. Nowadays, we can see that the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to feel some sort of entitlement to the products of others, said entitlement to be brokered and enforced by the state. Barack Obama is merely the tip of the iceberg that is sinking the ship. It is important that American voters understand that his doctrine is not a fluke. There is a wealth of history to demonstrate the definite and powerful trend of statism’s increase in America and that it is directly causal of America’s decreasing greatness in the world, with Obama being the final nail in the coffin.

The political theme of Obama’s presidency traces back to a hairline fracture in the integrity of the Constitution itself, a fracture so seemingly innocuous as to go unnoticed by the Founders. That fracture is the commerce clause of the Constitution (article 1, section 8, paragraph 3). It gives Congress the power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”. The paragraph prior gives us no lead to this and the paragraph which follows changes the subject; in short, no clear context is given as to what exact means Congress is allowed to employ to this end – and statist politicians since have made damn sure that none has ever been given. The specific power used time and again to increase governmental purview is the phrase regarding power over commerce “among the several States.”

For the most part, the cancerous clause remained in remission until 1890 when Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which in a nutshell made the federal government the ultimate intercessor over the entire American economy. The first, but neither last nor most deft, champion of Representative Sherman’s cause was Teddy Roosevelt (served 1901-1909), who used as scapegoats the great tycoons of that period to corral votes through his infamous campaign of “trust busting”. His campaign rested on the complete lie that “robber barons”, the industrialists, were expropriating the wealth of citizens. The most famous of those persecuted tycoons, John D. Rockefeller, was once summed up by a contemporary as seemingly the only person on Earth unaware he had come to dominate the petroleum industry since he kept his prices so low and his products so accessible. Teddy Roosevelt’s successor and protégé, William Taft, continued his mentor’s crusade and busted even more trusts than the master of the bully pulpit.

T. Roosevelt passes on his policies to successor William Taft.

When Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (served 1933-1945), took the helm, he had a brazenness regarding economic regulation that T. Roosevelt would not have been able to imagine. While the Sherman Act had been seen by prior administrations as a basis for reactive measures against trusts, FDR changed the government’s power over the economy to be direct and proactive. “Central planning” was the theme of FDR’s administration, blaming unchecked competition as having been the cause of the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, stated in 2009 after having already assumed his office that he had found the Federal Reserve – his own institution, which holds a monopoly on monetary policy – to have been responsible for the Great Depression. So much for central planning.

FDR’s snake oil remedy was to consolidate the entire American economy under myriad three-letter acronyms which were to be ultimately headed by him. Essentially, no distinction can be made between FDR’s economic policy and Benito Mussolini’s fascist corporatism, wherein all economic sectors are organized into “corporations” (basically, political constituencies) to better serve as apparatuses of the state. Harry S Truman, upon succeeding FDR, continued his late superior’s campaign to nationalize the economy.

A decade later, Lyndon B. Johnson (s. 1963-1969) attempted to assimilate FDR’s “New Deal” into his own “Great Society”, as he called it. Already America was going broke from the unprecedented bloating of the American government, and LBJ’s “Great Society” was at least largely a failure even in the most optimistic (read: naïve or dishonest) circles. Meanwhile, LBJ and then Nixon (s. 1969-1974) let America suffer her first ever defeat abroad in Vietnam. It was a self-defeat caused solely by the fact that our successive commanders-in-chief wanted to avoid agitating the Soviets who sponsored our enemies in Vietnam and saw the waging of a “low-intensity” conflict as the way to go. This conflict was not legally a war since it was never declared by Congress and was ultimately just a deadly, farcical political tool for which American men and women gave their lives. However, for those servicemen, that “conflict” seemed a hell of a lot like war without the tickertape parade upon arriving home.

America was quickly losing her moral fortitude at home and abroad, and men looked more toward the government to fix the problem, not seeing the blatant fact that it was bloated government that led to this loss of nerve, the same quality that anticipated the fall of ancient Athens. When Jimmy Carter (served 1977-1981) took office, he appeared to be America’s attempt to punish herself for her newly adopted senseless guilt. He was the epitome of it. He felt the need to confess to Playboy that he had lusted after many women and then proceeded to chide the nation in his infamous malaise speech which meant nothing and went nowhere. He backed his words with action in that he decided during the Iranian hostage crisis to castigate Americans for the Islamic Revolutionaries' crimes by placing an embargo on importing Iranian oil which had actually been expropriated - "nationalized" - from the West. When he finally decided to “respond” to the Iranian hostage crisis by attempting a rescue operation, it was perfunctory, poorly planned, poorly executed and resulted in needless American deaths. In short, it was a repeat of Vietnam in microcosm.

George W. Bush (served 2001-2008) was essentially Carter’s protégé from across the ages. The attacks of September 11, 2001 – for me, yesterday – was the defining moment of his presidency, but in the worst and most senseless way imaginable. While it should have been the moment when he asked for and received a Congressional declaration of war – unlike the apologetic Vietnam nation-building debacle – on Afghanistan and followed his “Axis of Evil” speech with strikes on all other terror-sponsoring states, he instead characterized our enemy as “terrorism”. The enemy is, of course, not terrorism, which is a method of warfare, not an ideology and certainly not the set of adherents to an ideology. The enemy is Islamism, the followers of a doctrine that seek the conquest of Western civilization and its replacement with religious theocracy.

Former President G.W. Bush meets with current President Obama in the Oval Office in Nov. 2008.

However, channeling Johnson and Nixon from Vietnam, and most symbolically Carter’s entire presidency, Bush adopted the American crown of thorns, which we wove for ourselves, and evaded the fact that Islamism had initiated the use of force against us. Instead, he turned our airports into prisons for Americans and signed the PATRIOT Act which turned all of America into the prison yard. In the domestic realm, when the 2008 economic meltdown occurred, he saw it necessary to tap into the FDR-Truman doctrine and strap the American auto and banking industries with his own crown of thorns.

Now, what relevance does all of the above have to the election of 2012? The point is that Barack Obama has over a full century of momentum behind his doctrine. He is the culmination and executor of the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ, and most of all FDR. He is going to finish the self-flagellation of America that Carter and Bush lacked the stomach and cunning to finish. In the domestic realm, he has bound hand-and-foot the automotive, insurance, banking, medical, and energy industries – which in turn binds the rest of the American economy to him. In the foreign realm, he has time and again genuflected America toward Mecca for the sake of the Islamists who daily hurl threats, bombs and bullets at America and have made it clear that we can sate them only by our being annihilated. What is his plan if not the good of the people that he so commonly invokes? The hint is given to us by Albert Camus: “The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” Read Patrick’s “Letter from the Editor” below to know the details, the motivation and the final goal of Obama's plan and why Romney, while flawed, is still a better candidate.

Letter from the Editor

Presidential Election 2012

To whom it may concern:

This presidential election is not about voting for heroes – sadly, they rarely are. Some of us may personally know some heroes, but American political culture is such that these great men and women cannot make it into office, nor do they seem to want to. Why is that?

Our heroes have come to be such because of their unfaltering, principled stand against those who unjustly appropriate and embezzle the achievements of others for their own purposes. But these great heroes, both sung and unsung, cannot make it into positions of power in this country. It is not because of their faults that this is true – it is their goodness. For some reason, a principled stand against tyranny has come to mean extremism. Why?

The United States of America has long suffered an epochal stage of moral ambivalence, where we honor compromise over integrity just to “move forward”. But compromise doesn’t mean the things it is said to mean: Unity, brotherhood, progress. It means cutting short a tiresome argument and putting on a dishonest smile and a pretense of “cooperation”. These ostensibly noble things mean nothing, as everyone has their own idea of what the compromise should be, ending in the same polarization that we began with. The practice of compromise is the negation of principle. It is the avoidance of using our intellects to reach rational, moral solutions to real problems that are daily enslaving and eroding the real lives of real human beings.

Acting on principle means taking calculated risks, but we have become a culture that is terrified at the prospect of risks, of the prospect of failure, instead of committing ourselves to the pursuit of true happiness and success. To circumvent these risks, we have been promised for so long a fabled security in health, prosperity, and old age, from both Republicans and Democrats alike, and yet this country does not feel that security. Because this country has accepted these promises, we have come to accept these programs of “security,” like Social Security and universal access to healthcare, as the metaphysical norm. They are even tailored with names that sound so noble that how can we possibly reject them, even if it means attaining it on the backs of other hardworking, struggling men and women? This used to be called slavery in a former era. However, any opposition, even if logically and morally consistent, is doomed to failure because it is rejected as extreme and uncompassionate for not jumping on the bandwagon. But this is how tyranny has sold itself throughout history. Otherwise, it would have an ineffective PR program. It proselytizes with the fundamentalist worship of its deity, the Almighty Society.

The opposition is told it is “greedy” for not dutifully accepting these social programs in lieu of the product of its own creativity. It is claimed that these creators have wrongfully taken money and assets away from this Almighty Society, even if by voluntary association. For some reason, though, it is no longer greed if these same monies and assets are confiscated by the monopolistic force of government – because it’s in the name of disembodied anti-concepts like “The Greater Good”. Are the beneficiaries of this wealth not themselves “greedy”? That’s not the point. The point is the destruction of the good for the sake of being good and extolling suffering as a natural, unavoidable state. As Alfred poignantly states in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

The truth is that all positive things have been created by self-interest, by men following their benevolent passions, hoping for a prosperous life made on their own terms without sacrificing and snapping the spines of other men along the way. They did so not because of compulsion and guilt, but because of an admirable love of life and beauty and truth. But even these qualities can be maimed to ugliness if they are labeled with such a slimy-sounding modifier like “greed”.

One of the rejections of the tyrant is that liberty is indifferent, that the weak will be left in the gutter and thrown to the wolves. What does this rejection betray about their metaphysical view of humans? They don’t believe in our willingness to be benevolent on our terms. Their view is cynical: We are cursed to an innate, inescapable apathy, and therefore we must be forced – that a power elite is a necessary robotic agent of good will and generosity. If man is innately malevolent, then there can be no such thing as a good government. But this is not the case: Evil is not a natural state; it is a choice among others. What they are presenting to us is a despicable smear campaign against humankind.

The good, creative men and women have been intimidated so that they are terrified of defending such qualities lest they be called extremists. But extremism is a relative term. Once upon a time, abolitionists, men who fought against the enslavement of other human beings, were considered extremists by those who were comfortable with explicit, unapologetic evil. Extremism qua extremism isn’t the problem. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in a letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963, “The question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremist will we be.”

And look back to what it took for Martin Luther King Jr. to accomplish the great things he did: Extremism. His accomplishments required tenacity against imprisonment, ridicule, and persecution. Those who supported his goals, or those who simply treated blacks and whites impartially, were disparaged as “nigger lovers”. Then look historically at how our country arrived at this terrible place where US citizens can be detained without charges; taxed ad infinitum; felt up and molested at our airports; forced to purchase health insurance; sent to slaughter in wars for the welfare of other nations, with no regard for our own; told by both the secular (the left) and the religious (the right) that we do not have a right to our bodies – the list of infractions goes on. It has been a gradual process of entrenching more and more concessions to totalitarian brutes.

If this is extremist rhetoric – thinking conceptually – then so be it. But it is not exaggeration. It is not hyperbole. It is one of philosophy’s most important branches at work. It is called epistemology, a science which describes the nature of man’s knowledge and logic and how to implement them. It is a science that says man has no other means to understand his universe but to think conceptually. This is what it means to be human. Man can no more live by the mystic revelations of oracles and witch doctors than he can by the dictates of the mob and the state.

This November, America is put to a pivotal test of defining its soul. Will we choose the sacrifice of millions of Americans to this god called Society and the Greater Good? Or will we choose something different? Something that doesn’t require the sacrifice of anyone, rich, poor or middle class. Something that rejoices in the beneficent, voluntary associations of men and women.

Let us choose the latter. The only system that is commensurate with these values is capitalism. Historically and to the extent that it existed, capitalism was the system that delivered us into the modern age where disease and starvation aren’t nearly the anxiety that they used to be. It united the world through prosperous trade rather than the brutal colonization of our mercantilist ancestors. It raised the standard of living and decreased infant mortality rates exponentially.

Now our nation must ask: Which presidential candidate represents these life-affirming values? Does incumbent Barack Obama? Does challenger Mitt Romney? Or does a third-party candidate?

Sadly, none of these choices is ideal. It is the sad state of our political culture, but it is nonetheless a reality we have to approach directly. The question is not which man is our ideal candidate, but who will buy our nation time so that we can begin again its rectification. That candidate is Mitt Romney.

He is not a consistent man. As the governor of Massachusetts, he has overseen the shackling of the healthcare industry in his state, and it is clear that he sees a place for the mystic dictates of religion in politics. Yet he also claims to support decelerating the growth of our government, to slow it from moving closer and closer to totalitarianism with every passing day. No, he is not consistent. But he still retains some semblance of the American spirit of love – not hate – for prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. His work as a private equity capitalist corroborates a fundamental admiration for America’s sense of life.

Among his opponents are candidates who either bastardize America’s fundamental love of liberty or seek to destroy it outright. The former are primarily rooted with the likes of Ron Paul and the Libertarian Party, who assume liberty as an ethical primary without acknowledgement of all the proper intellectual elements that make liberty possible (see Andrew Deaton’s characterization of their principles in his essay on anarchism). The latter is the current man in power, President Barack Obama.

He is a man who has disparaged the American businessman and workingman, claiming that human creativity is a product not of individual thought and action, but of Almighty Society whose clergy are the bureaucrats who enslave man. And not only that – he requires the subjugation of the American to that vengeful god and its clergy, claiming that each of us is our brother’s keeper, counting on us to buy into his morality of slavery masquerading as nobility.

His ideas have materialized over the past four years, and like all tyrants, he is squirming to convince our desperate nation that its strife and his inefficacious policies are “inherited,” contemptibly appealing to fatalism rather than the responsibility of free will. If all presidents merely inherit their problems, then politics is dead. No president or leader can be charged with responsibility of leadership because whatever policies are to be inherited will be realized regardless of who is in power. But his inheritance defense is not an appeal to responsible leadership; it is an appeal to mediocrity and its corollary: blame. In the context of history and its great leaders, his excuse is objectively invalid and disdainful. It is no wonder that he championed the unpopular bailouts that followed the financial collapse in 2008 – a corporatism eerily reminiscent of the fascism of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

President Obama’s advocates defend his policy saying that he couldn’t help it; President George W. Bush did it; the capitalists did it. Not only is it historically untrue that the financial crisis is a failure of capitalism or entirely Bush’s fault (it extends much farther than that, through years of government intervention via the Federal Reserve and a barrage of congressional legislation dating back to President Jimmy Carter), but it is blatant political opportunism herding America under the growing purview of an all-encompassing government. And if the policies fail, and they have, who gets the blame? Not those in power; we do. And it’s so easy because the suffering of good people never happens inside the White House or in the Capitol Building. It happens in the household and the street and the marketplace and the hospital and the bank and the courtroom. That makes it easy for them to place the blame and ask us to wait just a little longer and sacrifice ourselves just a little more. This has been the essence of Barack Obama’s leadership, and it must come to an end.

Preceding the presidential election of 1972 between Richard Nixon and Democratic challenger George McGovern, philosopher Ayn Rand characterized how to approach an election like this: “If there were some campaign organization called ‘Anti-Nixonites for Nixon,’ it would name my position. The worst thing said about Nixon is that he cannot be trusted, which is true: he cannot be trusted to save this country. But one thing is certain: McGovern can destroy it.” Simply substitute Romney for Nixon and Obama for McGovern and our present is put into perspective.

It is absolutely imperative that we elect Mitt Romney, and once we do, we cannot dispense with our vigilance. There will still be much to be done, but it is important to remember that we are not pawns in Obama’s fatalistic universe. We are thoughtful, rational human beings who do not want to conquer or enslave, but instead live for our happiness and prosperity. We are free to do so, and no man or group of men has the right to stand in our way.

Sincerely,

Patrick T. Adams

Editor-in-Chief