Obama's 'Change' Means Order Out of Chaos

E-mail from Bobby Garner to subscriber list
November 24, 2008

First consider this excerpt from Fifty Ways to Lose Your Freedom, a speech by Janice Rogers Brown (All bold emphasis, hyperlinks, and comment in square brackets are mine):

In the last 100 years—and particularly in the last 30 [the New Age Movement began with the Aquarian Conspiracy]—the Constitution, once the fixed chart of our aspirations, has been demoted to the status of a bad chain novel. Government has been transformed from a necessary evil to a nanny—benign, compassionate, and wise. Sometimes transformation is a good thing. Sometimes, though, it heralds not higher ground but rather, to put a different gloss on Pat Moynihan’s memorable phrase, defining democracy down.

My grandparents’ generation thought being on the government dole was disgraceful, a blight on the family’s honor. Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much “free” stuff as the political system will permit them to extract. What happened to the old time glory of constitutional democracy, which Woodrow Wilson praised for “the emphasis it puts on characters; for its tendency to exalt the purposes of the average man to some high level of endeavor; for its just principles of common assent in matters in which all are concerned; for its ideals of duty and its sense of brotherhood”?

I have bad news. Not only was the revolution not televised; most of us did not hear the radio broadcast; we missed it entirely.

Writing 50 years ago, F.A. Hayek warned us that a centrally planned economy is “The Road to Serfdom (1944) [The Road to Serfdom Revisited (2006)].” He was right, of course; but the intervening years have shown us that there are many roads to serfdom. In fact, it now appears that human nature is so constituted that, as in the days of empire all roads led to Rome; in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. If Hayek was writing today he would have to call his book “50 Ways to Lose Your Freedom.” Consider these lyrics:

Climb on somebody’s back, Jack;
just believe every lie, Sly;
plan the perfect man, Stan;
If you crave slavery, go to the back of the bus, Gus.
You don’t have to discuss much;
tell the powers that be, Lee;
they can throw away the key,
you don’t want to be free!

Well…Paul Simon probably has nothing to worry about. I’m just trying to make a point. Most of us no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers, and militant senior citizens.

The prevalence and permanence of this newly fledged feudal consciousness is a puzzle that led me — by a very circuitous path — to a new understanding of (or at least a new way of thinking about) the judicial role. As a conservative judge, I initially accepted the conventional wisdom that substantive due process was a myth invented by judicial activists who were up to no good. You all know the drill. Substantive due process is an oxymoron and Lochnerism is the strongest pejorative known to American law.

There are at least two problems with dismissing the idea of substance in the due process clause. First, substantive due process is still around, cleverly disguised as fundamental rights jurisprudence. Second, even conservative judges who take the rule of law seriously are appalled by legislative actions which violate the whole spirit, if not quite the letter, of provisions clearly designed to limit government. And most significantly, if we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a Kleptocracy — a license to steal, a warrant for oppression.

Much to my surprise, when I actually began to investigate the question, I found a small but credible body of scholarship suggesting that, in our history, the due process clause was viewed as a restraint on government, fashioned, in part, to protect the rights of property owners. Apparently, the colonists saw in the due process clause a guarantee which had a wide, varied, and indefinite content. The concept of due process like the words “the law of the land” in the Magna Carta put some liberties and some property interests beyond the power of government. Moreover, the language of the Constitution suggests the drafters clearly distinguished between the limited framework of that document and the whole law.

This revelation was what’s known in the precise, technical language of the judge’s trade as an “uh-oh.” It slowly dawned on me that the problem may not be judicial activism. The problem may be the world view — amounting to an altered political and cultural consciousness — out of which the judges now fashion their decisions.

At its founding and throughout its early history, this regime revered private property. The American philosophy of the Rights of Man relied heavily on the indissoluble connection between rationality, property, freedom, and justice. The Founders viewed the right of property as “the guardian of every other right” and reasoned that “to deprive a people of this right is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” The idea of constitutional government is deceptively simple: the government cannot legitimately infringe upon our rights even if the majority votes to do so.

But, by 1890, attitudes had changed radically enough for Alfred Marshall, the teacher of John Maynard Keynes, to make “the astounding claim that the need for private property ‘reaches no deeper than the qualities of human nature.’” A hundred years later came Milton Friedman’s laconic reply: “‘I would say that goes pretty deep.’” Marshall’s statement, however, signaled a seachange: a political and cultural shift from the American vision of humans as free and creative beings entitled to enjoy the fruits of individual effort back to the tribal view of man which continues to dominate European political philosophy. “Europe’s predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave to the absolute state embodied by the king, to the concept of man as a slave to the absolute state as embodied by the ‘the people’—i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chieftain into slavery to the tribe.” America sought to make government subservient to the people; the collectivist impulse which gained preeminence in Europe sought to keep people subservient to the government.

It is, I believe, this shift in world view which causes the conservatives to dread judicial activism. In short, we have been fixated on the structure’s gingerbread trim when we should have been focusing on its foundations.

Speaking to a conference of Ninth Circuit judges in San Francisco in 1946, Harold McKinnon identified a central problem with the socialist mystique. He understood the threat of the essentially antidemocratic and totalitarian political and legal philosophies gaining ground in American universities. Such teachings, McKinnon believed, denied the essential elements of a regime devoted to the preservation of natural rights. “[This teaching] denies that there is a moral law which is inherent in human nature and which is therefore immutable and to which all man-made laws to be valid must conform. It denies that by virtue of this law man possesses certain rights which are inherent and inalienable and therefore superior to the authority of the state. It denies that the purpose of government is to secure these inherent inalienable rights.” I take issue with one part of McKinnon’s catechism. He says the teachings are undemocratic. While it is true that natural law was a necessary precursor to the good constitutional republic; democracy need not be a good regime — as we are proving every day. Freedom and democracy are not synonymous. Indeed, one of the grave errors of American foreign policy is the assumption that merely installing the forms of a regime like ours — without its foundation — will automatically lead to freedom, stability, and prosperity.

McKinnon correctly concluded that adherence to natural law is the essential element of the American birthright.

“For if there is no higher law, there is no basis for saying that any man-made law is unjust…and, in such case, the ultimate reason for things, as Justice Holmes himself conceded, is force.

"If there is no natural law, there are no natural rights; and if there are no natural rights, the Bill of Rights is a delusion, and everything which a man possesses—his life, his liberty and his property—are held by sufferance of government, and in that case it is inevitable that government will some day find it expedient to take away what is held by such a title as that.

"And if there are no eternal truths, if everything changes, everything, then we may not complain when the standard of citizenship changes from freedom to servility and when democracy relapses into tyranny.”

Today these words sound strange to our ears. McKinnon could make such a forceful statement because he and his audience shared a common understanding. They accepted the necessary connection between natural law and natural rights and the centrality of natural law to any effective scheme of limited government. In short, McKinnon and his audience of judges shared a common devotion to a set of first principles — what Clint Bolick describes as that immutable body of law derived from the nature of people as rational human beings — “the law of nature that has from the beginning of human beings nurtured their progress and development."

In the context of law or morality, “natural” means “something which can be apprehended by natural man, by the use of faculties with which he is naturally endowed, including reason and the moral sense, and which does not require for its authentication more than reflection, thought, and the diligent pursuit of truth by practice, self-discipline, and attention to detail.”

The conservative/liberal debate has been completely transformed in recent years by the New Age Movement and its Third Way consensus methods of reaching a higher truth. The consensus is facilitated to a predetermined outcome which Ms. Brown accurately terms the "tribal view of man", which is socialism. This is the present reality in American society today, and it is supported by all political parties. We missed the revolution, but our ignorance of that fact in no way nullifies its reality. On the contrary, it was our gross ignorance of the fact which furnished the revolution its prime motive force. We consented by stepping out of the process, by allowing the radicals to exercise the liberties which define our freedoms, for the vile purpose of destroying them and enslaving us.

We became complaisant, and eager to please our captors, then complicity followed when we accepted their gifts of largess from  the public treasure. It is the purpose and intent of every deception to achieve complicity.

Where is the ground upon which an argument could be made that we as a nation have not succumbed to a complete and total deception? How are you able to deny that Revelation 12:9 must exclude you because of your Christian beliefs?

There was a time when finding an item of obvious value, we sought to locate the rightful owner and return it. Now we stand with both hands out to receive the valuable things of not only our neighbors, but our children and their children to untold generations to come.

Or do we believe that those yet unborn generations will never be born because we are facing the end of time and a certain judgment?
Was that the source of our abandonment of individual responsibility?
If this is your view, how do you suppose you will fare in that judgment?
If you believe in a final personal accounting,
and if you expect justice,
How will you justify your participation in this tyranny of the collective, forcing your neighbor to share the value of his labor through taxation and indebtedness? Or, do you believe that because God is merciful and forgiving, that his justice will always come down in your favor?

Janice Rogers Brown is hated for her stand in defense of Constitutionally limited government. She describes in clear unmistakable language how we have traded our individual freedoms and liberties for a benign, compassionate, and wise super nanny which we now know to be the community of our neighbors as described above, who are robbing us blind on the fraudulent authority of an out of control body of codified international law under the United Nations, known as Communitarianism.

We have just elected a Communitarian President, and the "Change" agenda he promised is full implementation of Global, Regional, Communitarian Law. I'm sorry if you thought otherwise. Your neighbors are already using it against you, and the threads of your denials are wearing extremely thin.

In case you missed it, Communism did not die, it has never lived. Marx taught that order comes out of chaos. What happened in Soviet Russia and post WWII China, and in all of the wars since WWI was the introduction of chaos. It was called communism by its creators, and set in conflict with Western society (the thesis) to function as the anti-thesis in a dialectic to work toward the synthesis of something rather benign which would lead to the order to which Marx referred.

The New Age, since 1980, introduced a period of conflict resolution, the Third Way, to deal with the many problems brought to the surface by the previous counter-culture. This period saw the development of Communitarian Law to address those problems and to satisfy the mandates established by UN Agenda 21 to achieve a sustainable future. Communitarian Law is the cultural shift from the American vision of humans back to the tribal view of man, the community of your peers. TV's reality shows are telling you how they will deal with anyone who fails to carry his load.

That sustainable future my friends, will be the transcendence to a place they have never told you about, and a place to which you would never voluntarily go, something resembling a feudal serfdom. Thats why the deception needed to be established to get your complicity in going there blindfolded. Do you believe Democrat Al Gore's reinvention of government was a failure? Do you believe that Republican Newt Gingrich' Contract with America was never performed on? These were two huge slices of the omni-political Third Way Communitarian pie which promises to satisfy your every desire while commanding your belief in Utopia: a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions (an impractical scheme for social improvement) - impractical: incapable of dealing sensibly or prudently with practical matters such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Its impractical because it stands in stark violation of the principles upon which creation is founded. God assumes no responsibility for fools who disregard them, and justice will be served when they fail.

Here is another great speech by Janice Rogers Brown, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"

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