My own fears on this are that the media keeps all of us ignorant, including the political classes running the country. Although, to tell the truth, they are sometimes acting out of the desire to remain popular among the ignorant rather than out of ignorance itself. It makes me very loathe to support large enterprises of violence such as wars except where all of the facts are crystal clear.

A justifiable concern, considering how few members of Congress, for example, actually have military experience compared with their predecessors — who were more likely to have their own sons serving even during war time.

The rot in Congress makes itself felt in a lot of ways. The current senior military leadership has a number of problems. David Hackworth always has reliably bad things to say about ‘managers outnumbering warriors.’ http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Hacks%20Target%20Homepage.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=26&rnd=36.636475986156825

It’s a mess that Congress is responsible for.

Unfortunately, Congress capitulated its solemn role a first among the branches of government long ago. When was the last time it reacted with real indignation when the courts or the bureaucracy usurped its power? It is not as though Congress does not have the tools to retaliate; it simply has not the heart for it.

The Proposition Nation folks thought that a constitution is self-sufficient, self-running. Not true. A constitution needs _people_ to keep it running, people who get indignant when it’s threatened. And for people to have such indignation and courage, they need to feel themselves part of a people, a concrete society. But all that has been leached out. Liberalism and modern conservatism have no cognizance of the human and spiritual dimension of political reality. They think it’s just a matter of ideas. So, when our polity began abandoning the Constitution step by step, not defending it, not getting really alarmed and angry when the courts usurped powers and all the rest of it, the intellectual classes didn’t grasp what was happening either. All those Warren and Burger Court decisions in the ’60s and ’70s should have produced a revolution. They didn’t because by that point liberalism had already undone the concrete substance of the American people and so the conditions for the necessary indignation I’m speaking of were no longer there. By the ’90s there’s wasn’t even a remnant of devotion to constitutional rule. For example, of hundreds of articles in the conservative press about the Clinton health-care financing scheme, only one that I read said anything about its lack of constitutionality.

A good point, Mr. Auster. I would add that the revolution in sentiments you describe, dissolving the notion of a cohesive people, was aided greatly in its success by what we might call the naiveté of the American people regarding the whole apparatus of revolutionary philosphy and practice. They had little recognition that an alien disease, or perhaps a dramatic though subtle distortion of something less alien, had entered the body politic.

A parallel is the general naiveté of Americans to this day about the depth of Communist penetration of this nation, its society and culture, from the 1930s on. Whittaker Chambers and his tremendous story, even bolstered by an almost unending stream of documentary evidence, still is not part of our “official” history. As Garet Garrett wrote, “To the revolutionary mind the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Gheghis Khan’s first view of China — so rich, so soft, so unaware.”

And I’ll note that both Garrett and Chambers shared the view that the New Deal had been a revolution alright, and that after it, the traditional American system of free enterprise, protected by constitutional government, was reduced to a conquered province.

And going even further back — what about the Federal Reserve? I heard Rep. Ron Paul on C-SPAN ,during a hearing with Chairman Greenspan, comment wryly that it is considered improper during such occassions to even mention the Constitutional issues involved. He noted that the Constitution clearly specifies how our monetary system is to be constructed, that is, on the basis of real money.

And when one considers that the 16th Amendment apparently was fraudulently ratified to begin with, (www.TheLawThatNeverWas.com) we embarked on this course starting way back during the Wilson administration. Well, before that really…

One lady has recently won a court case against the IRS for not having paid hundreds of thousands of dollars she supposedly owed in income taxes. The jury found her not guilty on the basis of the fact that the prosecution could cite no law that actually requires an American citizen living in the country to pay such a tax — http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34031

The Constitution only provided for _apportioned_ taxation on the Federal level. But few are as fortunate as she, (facing about 30 years in jail had she been convicted.)

And I’ll only mention in passing the civil forfeiture laws that have come along, whereby citizens can lose their property without even being charged with a crime! Conservatives did not stand up against this outrage because it was most prominently implemented in the context of fighting against ‘drugs,’ perceived as far more important than protecting property rights, the most basic rights a citizen enjoys, and without which we are hardly free.

Thanks for those links, Joel. And let’s not forget the folly of the 17th Amendment!

http://www.articlev.com/repeal_the_17th_amendment.htm

Thank you kindly, Mr. Cella. :-)

I couldn’t agree with you more on the urgent need to repeal the 17th Amendment. I am amused to recall how in my youth I thought it was such a wonderful, ‘progressive’ thing that we had instituted direct election of senators. I could never have imagined believing otherwise.

Then when I saw that simple chart, (a couple years ago on NewsMax I think,) delineating the original relationship between the People, the States, and the Federal Government — and the other chart showing how it had changed — it was like an epiphany.

Clearly repeal of this Amendment is necessary to restore true federalism that entails the balance of powers envisioned by the Founders.

It is much like the Electoral College system; so easy to be misled by superficial arguments until one grasps exactly what that system accomplishes. If the College were done away with, and direct election of the President ensued, then the death of our republican form of government would be all but complete, leaving us with a seemingly oxymoronic ‘democratic monarchy.’