What does the attempted socialist take-over of America say about the neoconservatives’ belief that all human beings desire freedom?

Neocon Fred Barnes writes, if the bill passes, that will not be the end of strife, but the beginning of strife in this country that will go on for a generation or more.

Thus, Barnes says, even if the Republicans took control of the Congress by a veto-proof, two-thirds majority in 2012 and repealed the bill, the Democrats would then strive to pass it again as soon as they had the chance:

America will be in a constant health-care war if ObamaCare is enacted. Passage wouldn’t end the health-care debate. Rather, it would perpetuate ObamaCare as the dominant issue for decades to come, reshape politics, create an annual funding crisis in Congress, and generate a spate of angry lawsuits. Yet few in Washington seem aware of what lies ahead….

Enacting ObamaCare would be only the beginning. The controversy surrounding its passage and how it might work would preoccupy the president, Congress and millions of average Americans for the foreseeable future—and then some.

But wait, how can this be? Haven’t the neocons always said that all human beings without exception, regardless of culture and religion, desire freedom and democracy? How, then, could one of America’s two major parties and a large part of the American people have a fixed desire to turn America into a bureaucratic socialist tyranny? So it looks as though freedom is not a fixed desire in every human breast, doesn’t it? Has that thought ever passed through the brains of the neocons?

In this connection, Carol Iannone brings to my attention this statement by Ronald Reagan:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

If the neocons ever understood this fundamental American truth, they threw it on the ground and stomped all over it after September 11, 2001, when they began spreading the inane and dangerous notion, and putting it into the head of George W. Bush, that every human being simply by virtue of being human “deserves” freedom. Instead of freedom being something that has to be secured by common political action and defended over and over again (as stated in the Declaration of Independence), freedom according to the neocons and Bush is something which is given as a “gift” by God to all humanity through the global agency of the United States, and which all human beings (a) desire, (b) deserve, and (c) are ready, able, and willing to maintain. Just as Rousseau denied that man could be inherently evil, since man is inherently good, the neocons and Bush denied that man could be inherently anti-freedom, since man is inherently freedom-loving. Combining Rousseau with American conservatism, the neoconservatives perverted conservatism into its opposite; and, even today, not one of them has acknowledged the transformation of conservative belief that they achieved, and the disasters, via Bush’s leadership, that it has brought about, including, not least, the election of a leftist president and leftist Congress bent on subjecting Americans to socialist slavery.

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Ferg writes:

“Thus, Barnes says, even if the Republicans took control of the Congress by a veto-proof, two-thirds majority in 2012 and repealed the bill, the Democrats would then strive to pass it again as soon as they had the chance…”

I don’t believe we can get a veto proof majority in one election cycle. It will take two, but I don’t think I have seen one in recent memory. Just real hard to do, and getting harder for the Republicans due to the huge demographic shift that is taking place.

Ferg

LA replies:

Obama could be defeated in ‘12. Then a simple majority in House and 3/5 in Senate can repeal.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 18, 2010 02:45 PM | Send