by Allen West
This does not mean we have to double or triple the size of our defense budget. It’s about building the most efficient and effective military, one that doesn’t stress our men and women in uniform with excessive combat tours of duty and that adequately cares for our veterans and military families.
We can secure the blessings of liberty by providing for the common defense. But it all starts with resolute leadership—something we have been sorely lacking for quite some time. I often reflect that during the 2012 presidential election, for the first time in seventy-seven years we did not have either a sitting president or vice president or a single candidate who had ever served our country in uniform. How different would our stance and standing in the world be today if we had? How differently would our enemies view us now if we firmly stood on our second pillar of peace through strength?
Finally, the third (and I believe the most important) pillar of conservatism. It is perhaps the least tangible, but it sets our nation apart from the rest of the world: our traditional American values. These values are the reason why so many have risked their lives to set foot on our shores and take part in this grand venture of liberty.
But to join in this grand venture, we must come together as one people and share the most basic and common bond: our language. Those who immigrated to this nation once relished the fact it was a great melting pot, where anyone from anywhere could become an American. Now Americans appear so over the top in support of multiculturalism that we’re in danger of “Balkanizing” our own country. We are making American culture subservient, and, well, that dog won’t hunt. This is America, and we have a sign on the front door that says (in English), “Open, come on in.”
Our traditional American values also include a respect for God, faith, and worship. We have no national religion—our founders didn’t want one, and no one is suggesting one now. But we do have a national heritage of faith. There’s a good reason our national motto is “In God we trust.” In the words of John Adams, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
But lately it seems we must fight to reclaim this faith heritage. Why? These values are a fundamental part of our nation, written into its DNA. A denial of faith is a denial of America. Is that what fundamental transformation means?
It is not a question of separating church and state. It is about ensuring we don’t separate faith from the individual. We welcome all faiths in America, but our coexistence must not come at the expense of our American values. As I have said many times, when tolerance becomes a one-way street, it leads to cultural suicide. And as far as I’m concerned, American cultural values shall never be subjugated to any other so long as I have air in my lungs.
Our heritage of faith points to our Creator as the source of the rights we are granted not just in this country but during our existence on earth. The first of those rights is the right to life. I may not speak for all conservatives on this subject, but I will certainly speak my mind. I fully support the right to life for our unborn. What does it say of our better angels if we deny the fundamental first right as articulated by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson? I believe neither late-term abortion nor abortion as birth control reflects our true values. Having a baby is certainly not a punishment.
In early April 2013, a woman speaking on behalf of Planned Parenthood before a Florida legislature subcommittee was asked a simple question: “Does a child that survives an abortion still deserve to die?” Her response was that the decision was between the patient and the doctor. You must understand that she was referring to the mother as the patient. When challenged again and asked if the surviving baby was the patient, the woman could not respond.
I know this is a sensitive and complex topic. But each of us must ask, is abortion reflective of our best system of values? The winning argument in Roe v. Wade determined the right of privacy was implied in the Bill of Rights and by Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 14. The US Supreme Court ruled a woman has a right to terminate her pregnancy up to ninety days after conception. Why ninety days? What happens magically at ninety-one? Has any human being been able to skip those first ninety days before birth? And is individual privacy of greater value than the unalienable right to life? I’m not sure the federal government should be the one to answer this question, but I am certain each of us must.
The final American value we must preserve is the family. Our country needs strong families to form the building blocks of our society. Wherever the family unit has been weakened, we see detrimental effects. In the black community, where only 30 percent of children have a mother and a father in their home, soaring crime, unemployment, and poor classroom performance are the results. When the fabric of our families unravels, our nation weakens. Stronger families ensure a stronger America.
Our American values matter. They define us, and they define the legacy we pass on to the next generation. These pillars of thought have blessed us with the greatest country the world has ever known. It was George Washington who said, “We are either a united people or we are not. If the former, let us in all matter of general concern act as a nation which has national objects to promote and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”
Now is the time to make a stand. We must do as Abraham Lincoln said and put our feet in the right place and stand firm. We must stand firm if we are to secure the dawn of a new America. We must stand firm if we are to be guardians of this republic. If we falter and lose this great blessing called the United States, it will be because we turned our back on our past and destroyed ourselves. But we can prevail. We know what the light is; we can be that shining city upon a hill. Let us be what our Founding Fathers hoped we would be and what our children and grandchildren need us to be. Let us be Americans.
Chapter 7
CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES OF GOVERNANCE
Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
—SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that we also dream.
—PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.
—BARONESS MARGARET THATCHER
Less than a week before the 2008 presidential election, then candidate Barack Hussein Obama proclaimed, “We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” The crowd went into a frenzy of cheering and screaming, just as there had been instances of fainting spells and hysteria at previous Obama speeches. What still amazes me to this day, however, is that no one ever asked what it means to “fundamentally transform America.” What was so wrong with the governing fundamentals of America that they needed to be transformed? After all, the Founding Fathers gave us a brilliant system whereby we could institute amendments to our law of the land, the Constitution.
Did anyone ever ask, “What is it, Senator Obama, that you feel needs transforming? Is it something about our system of checks and balances, separation of powers, the free market economy, individual rights, or constitutional limits on government? What exactly needs to be thrown out and remade?”
Why was it that even the ostensibly unbiased media did not challenge the young first-term senator on his statement? Was it perhaps because they knew the answer and wanted to conceal it? Could it be that even our own free press was complicit in hiding the truth from the people for some nefarious gain?
Who can say? Any attempt to challenge Senator Obama was met with charges of racism—a practice that continues today with ever greater absurdity from that bastion of rational reporting, MSNBC. According to Lawrence O’Donnell, comparing Obama’s frequent rounds of golf to Tiger Woods’s is racist.
To Chris Matthews, reminding people of Obama’s Chicago roots is racist. And according to Touré Neblett, using the word angry when criticizing Obama is racist.
As I mentioned before, during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. So in this chapter, it’s time for a revolutionary act: to define truthfully what the “fundamental transformation of America” means.
If we’re fundamentally transforming America, it must mean we’re moving toward the opposite of limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual sovereignty, free markets, strong national defense, and traditional values. But where did this shift come from, and how can we alert our republic as to how dangerous this new direction is? I am also troubled by a deeper question: do the American people even care they may be surrendering the country bequeathed to them, that a legacy of freedom could be lost forever?
To start, let’s take a look at where this “fundamental transformation” has brought our country so far. Since President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, nearly every objective measurement shows things have been fundamentally transformed … for the worse.
During his presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan asked a simple question of America: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” It sure would be refreshing if someone in the mainstream media would do a piece on what the fundamental transformation of America meant in 2008, what it means for us today, and what it will mean for our future.
To understand this fundamental transformation, it’s helpful to examine once again the prevailing models of political thought at the time of our Founding Fathers. We must revisit Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau believed compassion for his fellow man, and in particular for those less fortunate, was the greatest of virtues. He didn’t care for the recognition of distinctions among people, as he felt it led to inequality and divisiveness. For Rousseau it was better to view people through the prism of their good intentions rather than their appearance or achievements. He firmly believed in the good nature of man, but he saw fundamental problems in social institutions. In other words, Rousseau thought society was to blame for the corruption of the pure individual.
Contrary to John Locke, Rousseau maintained that the social institution that brought about the most corruption was private property. He viewed it as a destructive, impulsive, and self-absorbed institution that rewarded greed and luck. The bottom line for Rousseau was that inequality grew out of the fact that some people would produce and earn more than others. Because talents and abilities were not distributed equally, the original balance that existed in the state of nature would be altered and the resulting inequality would create conflict. Rousseau’s vision of a civil society was one where no one had the “right” to rise above the general level of subsistence without everyone else’s consent.
Herein lies the conflict between the political philosophies of Locke and Rousseau, between the classical liberal and the first radical liberal. Locke believed the individual had the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and estate. Where Locke promoted the minimization of the state/government, Rousseau wanted the opposite. Rousseau proposed a fundamental transformation of the relationship between the individual citizen and the state. For Locke the state of nature promoted freedom, but for Rousseau it promoted subordination and required a system of indoctrination to convince individuals that the public interest is greater and truly better for their personal interests.
Rousseau called for a merging of state and individual, in which each individual gives up his right to control his life in exchange for an equal voice in setting the ground rules of society. He advocated surrendering individual rights to a new moral and collective body, with one will, which was a fundamental change from the belief in the sovereignty of individuals and their indomitable spirits and personal will. In America we do “hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal because they are endowed with certain unalienable rights.” But as Rousseau sought to establish a different type of social contract, he completely redefined the relationship between the individual and the state.
While Jefferson wrote of the “consent of the governed,” Rousseau believed individuals had to consent to the “general will,” which was essentially whatever everyone else wanted. When forced to obey the general will, people were actually obeying themselves. Rousseau asserted that individuals would voluntarily transfer their personal rights to the community in return for security of life and property.
But this system has a downside. As Edward Younkins explained in his book Capitalism and Commerce, “The result is that all powers, persons, and their rights are under control and direction of the entire community. This means that no one can do anything without the consent of all. Such universal dependency eliminates the possibility of individual achievement. Life is a gift made conditional by the state. All power is transferred to a central authority.”
Needless to say, our founders completely rejected Rousseau’s ideas. When the general will is always right, the individual’s ideas, values, and goals mean nothing—a point of view thoroughly incompatible with the founders’ vision.
The Founding Fathers could not agree with the theory that freedom was a result of obedience, and equality of servitude. They were appalled by the concept of a universal dependency and the subjugation of the individual will.
The disturbing aspect of Rousseau’s theories was his perspective on opposition. Once the general will makes its decision, Rousseau permitted no disobedience. Even if individuals disagree with the decision, their will must be subordinated, because anyone who disagrees with the general will must be simply mistaken! Certainly writer Andrew Sullivan was echoing Rousseau in his January 2012 Newsweek cover story, “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” where he asserts that anyone, conservative or liberal, who criticizes the president is simply wrong.
Our Founding Fathers did not adopt Rousseau’s philosophy of governance, thank God, but others, such as the French Jacobins, did, plunging their country into a brutal civil war and revolution in the late 1700s that led to the Reign of Terror. Those groups who adopted Rousseauian philosophy always expressed an exuberant yet quite deceptive concept of social humanitarianism, where violent means justified supposedly peaceful ends.
In Germany in the early 1800s, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel picked up the mantle of Rousseau and expanded on his theories to assert that it was only through social institutions that one could realize oneself. Hegel believed the state represented the high point of human history, through which the sublime spirit used individuals as its instrument. In Hegel’s mind the coercive powers of the state could be legitimately—and paradoxically—exercised to achieve individual freedom. The antidemocratic themes of Rousseau may have been hummed by Hegel, but they received a full-throated yeehaw from Karl Heinrich Marx.
The idea of communism or “communal living” was not new. For many thousands of years, humans had been living together in communities because it provided many advantages over solo hunting and gathering. But to Karl Marx, communism was the natural and preferred result of “historical materialism.” In Marx’s view, capitalists squeeze profit from an exploited working class, which causes a class struggle, igniting a revolution, and eventually culminating in sunny communism.
Commissioned by the Communist League in 1848, Marx and Friedrich Engels’s book The Communist Manifesto was a criticism of capitalism intended to build enthusiasm for a revolution among the working class. The fundamental result of the revolution would be the elimination of capitalism and the establishment of a national collective economy and nationalized welfare state, along with ownership and control of the major means of production. There were two collateral objectives as well: setting people free from the prison of material dependence, and the creation of the secular state.
Key aspects of the philosophy of governance known as Marxism included the definitive class structure divided between the “bourgeoisie,” those owning most of the wealth and the means of production, and the “proletariat,
” or the working class—terms that fit nicely with the modern-day “1 percent” and “99 percent” labels used by our current White House administration.
In addition, Marxism incorporated the concept of wealth distribution: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This social egalitarianism would be attained through a central government authority, a political entity that directed and enforced compliance with the general will.
A few months back, I took some heavy flak for suggesting that members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus share more governing philosophy with other communist countries than with our own. On that note I’d like to present eight of the ten planks of The Communist Manifesto so you can decide for yourself if I was right.
1. Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose. You only need to talk to US representatives from western states about the immense expansion of the federal government and consider how many energy resources are located on “public” lands in America. This was a policy established by President Theodore Roosevelt, who redefined himself as a Progressive candidate (more on this in a bit).
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Prior to 1913 America used a consumption-based system of taxation related to goods and services purchased. Then in 1913 we created the individual income tax, with a top rate one hundred years ago of just 7 percent. Today the top marginal tax rate is 39.6 percent, and we hear the drumbeat of the rich paying their “fair share,” “economic equality,” “economic patriotism” … hmm, sounds an awful lot like “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
