Democrats’ dictatorial moves bring country to the brink

The “deeming” has been the last outrage for many people. Jeffrey Kuhner writing in the Washington Times says that the Democrats “are assaulting the very pillars of our democracy,” and calls on the Republicans to run in 2010 on a platform of impeaching Obama if he signs a bill that the House “deemed” to have passed without having passed it.

The column is over-emotional in spots, and I don’t agree with all of Kuhner’s liberal-tinged rhetoric. But I think the piece accurately reflects the fact that if the Democrats carry through their power grab and pass this bill, they will be initiating a political civil war in this country. See the reactions to Kuhner’s column in the discussion at Lucianne.com.

During the post-election crisis in November-December 2000, Richard Cohen wrote a surprising column in which he said it would be better if George W. Bush won the stand-off, because if Bush were deprived of the presidency, it would awaken the sleeping giant of conservatism and shake the liberal order. I approved Cohen’s honesty and wisdom in seeing how great the stakes were if the Democrats actually seized the presidency by these outrageous means. Yet today, ten years later, the same Richard Cohen does not apply to the health care bill the logic he applied to the 2000 post election crisis; he does not advise Obama to drop the bill, lest he set off a conservative counterrevolution. Instead, in full flight of spiritual and political greed, Cohen urges Obama to disregard all restraints and ram through the health care bill at any cost: “ram the damn thing, Mr. President. Ram it!”

Thus have liberal Democrats morphed into what they always were in essence, but couldn’t afford to reveal because they lacked the power to carry it through: leftist revolutionaries. Ever since the 9/11 attack I have been saying that we are in the “apocalypse of liberalism,” meaning the uncovering of liberalism in its true nature. The liberals’ remorseless campaign to impose the nightmare of Obamacare on America has uncovered the nature of liberalism as never before. If they succeed in passing it, we are doomed to live in very interesting times for a long time to come.

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In the same column, Cohen writes:

The baleful fact is that the country suffers from a surfeit of democracy…. The black but necessary art of politics shies from the sun. Little gets done. Backrooms have been turned into rec rooms and meetings are seminars. We are doomed. Worse, we are bored.

The passage instantly reminds me of Hitler’s derisive comments about dry, boring parliamentary government, and his promise to replace it with the invigorating excitement of a strong leader who rules by will.

And I repeat: it’s not a “fascist” talking about the need to drop democracy and “ram the damn thing through.” It’s a liberal Democrat.

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Ian B. writes:

If this bill passes, we need to start considering some extreme countermeasures. I don’t want to be “doomed to live in very interesting times for a long time to come,” but I can tolerate it if I can live them as a rebel rather than a slave. We must create a way—somehow—of fighting back to the bitter end.

As I see it, if the Democrats succeed in doing this, then the “Republic for which it stands” that I have pledged my allegiance to so many times throughout my life will no longer exist, and will have been replaced by a fascist government that was created by a criminal coup of now-illegitimate representatives led by a now-illegitimate President. As such, I will owe and harbour no loyalty to this imposter government, and in fact, because of my allegiance to the Republic that was destroyed by it, it will be my—our—duty to bring the government to its knees.

We need to think of ways to do this. Perhaps we should start pushing for state governments who want no part of the bill to secede from the union. Individuals and businesses there would no longer have to pay federal taxes or suffer under Obamacare. Do you think Obama would try to use the military to force them back in this day and age, and even if he did, do you think the military would obey him? And if enough conservative states left and stopped paying federal taxes, the Union would be crushed under its own debt, since it is the blue states that are in the red, and require the red states to finance them.

LA replies:

If the federal government turns itself into a tyranny outside the Constitution, as is seen both in the health care bill and in the manner of its intended passage, then clearly the states have the right by nature (not the legal right, since there is no legal right to revolution, but the natural right) to secede from this tyrannical government.

Of course the neo-Confederates and paleocons will call me a hypocrite, given my criticism of the Southern states for the secession which sparked the ruinous Civil War. But, as I’ve pointed out many times, the only thing that had happened prior to the secession of the Deep South in 1860 was the lawful election of a president of the United States, and the only thing that the federal government did prior to the secession of the Upper South in 1861 was peacefully to deliver food and medicine to the beseiged U.S. soldiers at Fort Sumter. The federal government hadn’t done anything of a tyrannical nature against the South. It hadn’t done anything remotely justifying the South’s revolutionary attempt to destroy the Union by secession and by the bombardment of a federal fort.

By contrast, we are now facing a federal government that is claiming powers over the citizens of the United States that it has never possessed, powers that are being passed into law by dictatorial means outside normal procedure and even without a vote in the House of Representatives. The federal government is claiming unrestrained power over us—to tax some of us punitively, to examine us, to require us to purchase medical insurance on pain of fine or imprisonment, in the form of a bill that will automatically destroy the private health care industry and force everyone in the United States into a system of socialized medicine; and they are putting this power into place by grossly unconstitutional means. In short, they are attempting with all their energy to erect a tyranny over us. If they succeed in erecting that tyranny, all bets are off, and we would no longer owe any obedience to the “laws” of this government.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 19, 2010 12:30 PM | Send