January 24, 2017
To whom it may concern:
I have decided to make a submission for publication. This
is 700 words.
Thank you for your attention.
Lynn Swartos,
P.O. Box 129
Great Falls, MT 59403
(406) 671-6628
klmfs2009@gmail.com
Like a great animal shaking itself free of
restraint the ocean roils and heaves under the fading light, but the detritus
of rot will not be shaken off; and now penetrates to once clear depths.
Writers who do not define their
terms can be difficult to understand and when dauntlessly asseverating of
politics in such terms lead one to seriously wonder if, as Darwin believed it
more frequently so, ignorance rather than knowledge has begotten their
confidence.
This possibility exists in Joe Lieberman and Jon Huntsman’s latest claim to
knowledge of an emerging new center in American politics, wherein we shall find
solutions to our “most urgent problems” if only we join them there. Whether
this is a genuinely Liberal or Progressive—that is totalitarian—center they do
not say. But it seems like the same empty line progressive mountebanks have
been selling. Therefore their proposition’s location must be determined and
evaluated.
Our culture had its beginnings in individuals agreeing together to govern
themselves. So were formed communities that eventually begat states and
ultimately the United States government. The authority to govern originated
locally in the consent of the governed and emanated from there, but without
renouncing the legitimacy of self-governance at every level. Thus lines of
authority were demarcated, duties defined, purposes recognized.
Today’s culture is a
model of the inverse, we are commanded by force from the top down so that we
are no longer our own masters and our customs accord with Montesquieu’s dictum,
they are a part of our servitude—invalidating democracy; and local, personal,
and associational freedoms are negated by this irresistible foreign
authority—invalidating liberalism.
The authors do not
confess support for this political illegitimacy but neither do they object.
Instead they propose to knead some Democrats and moderate Republicans, for what
they are worth, into one bland lump dedicated, they say, to defeating
polarization and gridlock and instilling their “core political values –
opportunity, security, accountability and ingenuity.” This gives their
political features a semblance of righteousness. Until, that is, the impartial
light of history reveals their “goods” are provided at the pleasure of a state
entirely foreign to liberal democracy, that ever forces itself, most
intimately, into our lives, and never lets go, judging and forcing us to comply
with its corrupting ukase. We can, therefore, be sure they oppose bigotry,
which means views contrary to theirs held by republican liberals who dare march
under the banners of liberty and equality; who defend the rule of law, of
justice and decency; who understand that for as long as reality has existed,
just as the laws of science exist with no beginning or end so to permanent
values of right (and wrong) called traditional, and that make their holders
better human beings—duty, good courage, and beneficence, for example—have never
passed away or been subject to revision. It is for good reason that conservators
of liberalism hold traditions and mores, formed of habits, attitudes and ideas
that shape a salubrious culture, not to be tinkered with by those who tempt the
credulous, the careworn, or those of weak or malformed character with the
indulgence of rebellious appetites fulfilled by intellect unmediated by just
sentiments.
Lieberman
and Huntsman say they want to bring polarization and gridlock to an end.
But Americans have grown so far apart in their political conceptions that
common ground has slipped into the intervening void. These mutually exclusive
antipodes were created predominately by a divergence in the United States
culture and its defining ethics. For instance, progressives want control of
each little bit of our lives; liberals think that progressives should mind
their own business.
It comes as no
surprise then that progressives have demonstrated no respect for society’s
organic structure, destroying old authorities while forcing acceptance of their
jurisdiction over society by force of government. Nonetheless, Americans of a
liberal vintage do not surrender well.
Progressives’ politics
of domination are hostile to freedom and have thus redrawn our original
blueprint for order in order to, by degrees, further centralize and
legitimize their power over us. Understanding human and political nature as
reluctant to relinquish power once acquired we may dispense with hopes, anytime
soon, of a regenerated constitutional republic.
1. Evolutionary Writings, Ed., James
A. Secord
