American Leviathan A new book explains how to break the bloated DC bureaucracy and restore the Founding Fathers’ vision. by Mark Tapson
https://www.frontpagemag.com/american-leviathan/
Conservatives have been complaining for a long time – at least as far back as the Reagan era – about reducing the bloated sea monster of our government bureaucracy, but not only does the state never get any smaller, it just keeps expanding, aggrandizing more power, and extending more tentacles grasping for our freedoms. What would the Founding Fathers think of what we have allowed to become of the limited-power, Constitutional Republic they left us?
Ned Ryun addresses this question in his new book American Leviathan, and traces the history of the progressive movement to undermine that Republic and replace it with an all-powerful state. Subtitled “The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” American Leviathan explores how our current government has little if anything in common with the free American Republic that was intended by the Founding Fathers and shaped by the original intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Ryun then asks, “What is the right size and scope of government for us today?” and proceeds to lay out a blueprint for rolling back this gargantuan, increasingly authoritarian bureaucracy.
Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority – a non-partisan political training institute whose mission is to mold the next wave of liberty-minded candidates and community leaders – and also of Voter Gravity, a Republican data firm used for voter mobilization. A frequent Fox News commentator, Ryun is also the author of, among other books, Restoring Our Republic: The Making of the Republic and How We Reclaim It Before It’s Too Late. His new book is not a boring policy white paper; it’s a concise, page-turning read, written with a passionate authorial voice and sense of humor. Check out this passage as an example:
The Department of Energy should be shut down and its building personally imploded by the next Republican president, with a Freedom Park built over it. The exact same goes for HUD and Education. What better way to signal the end of the administrative state than to literally blow it up and sow its fields with salt?
Ryun explains that, with the progressive Left, we are dealing with a utopian mindset which ignores the flaws and limits of human nature and instead pushes the dangerous notion that human perfectibility is possible through the mechanism of an all-powerful state. This fantasy has always and everywhere sown nothing but mass misery and death, but that has never stopped Leftist managerial elites from going back to that well again and again. After all, “At the heart of Progressive Statism,” Ryun writes, “is the belief that the state is God in this world.” He goes on to explore one of the intellectual roots of this delusion, the German philosopher (or, as Ryun calls him, “paid propagandist”) Georg Hegel (1770-1831), who taught that truth is relative and that “the whole of history is a continual march from the irrational to the rational, a march towards progress.”
A single quote will suffice to demonstrate Hegel’s appeal to the Progressive mind. He wrote, “It must be further understood that all the worth which a human being possesses – all spiritual beauty, he possesses only through the state… The state is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.” Armed with a deep belief in Hegel’s ideas, 20th century “Progressive Statists began to unwind the American Revolution and why it was fought,” concluding that the Founding Fathers’ notions of the separation of powers and a rights-based government were obstacles to the centralization of power for which they lusted. And so the rewriting of history began, a process still underway today as the Progressive Statists remain “hell-bent on framing and then dismissing the Founders as old white, slave-owning, misogynist racists who fought the Revolution for purely economic reasons.”
In his concluding chapter, Ryun declares correctly that we have reached the point at which there is no possibility of Left and Right closing the ideological divide and coming together to Make America Great Again. To restore our Republic, “it is time to declare political war on the administrative state” and “tear it apart piece by piece.” The next Republican President must get his personnel “right from the beginning” by selecting a team who understands that the administrative state must be “dismantled wholesale.”
In his concluding chapter, Ryun declares correctly that we have reached the point at which there is no possibility of Left and Right closing the ideological divide and coming together to Make America Great Again. To restore our Republic, “it is time to declare political war on the administrative state” and “tear it apart piece by piece.” The next Republican President must get his personnel “right from the beginning” by selecting a team who understands that the administrative state must be “dismantled wholesale.”
One of the reasons Ryun wrote the book was to light a fire under Americans who, perhaps out of ignorance or apathy or just a sense of being overwhelmed by this oppressive monster of a government bureaucracy, have simply come to accept it as an unpleasant fact of life. For those people, the book will be very inspirational because he offers a whole raft of specific, practical ways that “the next Republican President” – hopefully Donald Trump – can dismantle the administrative state.
Among those ideas: mass firings and reassignments for the over 800,000 (out of fewer than two million) non-essential federal civilian employees; presidential in-agency visits, in which the President puts the fear of God into bureaucrat management by delivering his orders face-to-face, and firing those who don’t comply for insubordination; reimagining and downsizing the Department of Justice; dumping the FBI altogether; gutting 90% of the career bureaucrats in the Office of Management and Budget, which is essentially the citadel of the administrative state. There are other suggestions as well.
Yes, finally draining the D.C. swamp will require tremendous political will from the President and a handpicked team who are loyal to the will of the people and to the idea of reclaiming the Founding Fathers’ vision for our Republic. The state apparatus that the President will be eviscerating has a vested interest in protecting its enormity and complexity, its power and privilege, and those who stand to lose all that will resist with every weapon at their disposal, legal and otherwise. But Ned Ryun is confident it can be done, and American patriots need to get onboard with that sense of determination and hopefulness.
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