RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/2024-freedom-or-tyranny/

Ever since consensual governments were invented in Greece 2700 years ago, one question has been repeatedly debated: Are citizens, no matter their birth, wealth, or brains, capable of managing the political community? Or must we rely on “managerial elites,” whether aristocrats, plutocrats, or technocrats, to control collective power and determined the actions and purposes of the state?

But this question has always had a corollary one: Freedom or Tyranny?

This debate has been going on since ancient Athens, and ultimately influenced the creation of the  United States. The Founders created the unprecedented structure of our Constitutional order to avoid the various excesses of the old regimes, especially those ruled by elites, which typically degenerated into tyrannies. The ultimate goal of the Founders was to avoid both the tyranny of the elite few, and the tyranny of the volatile many, both of which are toxic for freedom.

The rise of the leviathan federal government and its technocratic agencies, and its expansion under Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and subsequent presidents from both parties, has now under Joe Biden’s Potemkin Administration reached a level of intrusive power that if left unchecked much longer, will end up in full-blown tyranny.

On November 5, 2024, we the people will have a chance to impose a reckoning on the Biden regime that, in addition to egregious policy failures both at home and abroad, has brought us dangerously close to tyranny.

The struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to the question of authority, or as Lewis Carroll’s Humpy Dumpty put it, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Hence all aspiring tyrannies seek to aggrandize authority and neutralize or demonize alternative sources. That’s why the progressives at the turn of the 20th century started targeting the Constitution, our supreme political authority.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/31/the-pitfalls-of-benevolence-unpacking-the-toxic-mix-of-universal-good-intentions-and-political-correctness-in-the-new-year/

New Year’s is traditionally a time for reassessment and meditation. Wise sayings and saws are dredged up for reconsideration even as the chorus is getting ready to reprise “Auld Lang Syne.” It is easy to dismiss such scraps of wisdom, especially as they tend to come glazed with an unpalatable frosting of sentimentality, not to mention familiarity.

But it is important to note that many clichés are clichés precisely because they articulate important truths.  Consider, for example, the admonition, which you probably first heard from your mother or father, that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Why should that be the case? Regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I believe a large part of the answer involves the metabolism of benevolence.

Benevolence is a curious creature. Its operation tends to be more beneficent the more specific it is. This was a point that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great nineteenth-century critic of John Stuart Mill, made in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. “The man who works from himself outwards,” Stephen wrote,

“whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others… than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race—that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind—is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.”

“A moral Don Quixote”: that is a line worth remembering. Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole as its object, with rigid moralism. It is a toxic, misery-producing brew.

The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/02/americans-overwhelmingly-frustrated-angry-with-federal-government-ii-tipp-poll/

As nearly all parts of the political spectrum agree, average Americans are extremely unhappy these days. The latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows that a hefty majority sees the federal government’s recent performance as the cause of their disgruntlement.

With news stories regularly highlighting widespread anger among voters, we asked the following question for our December national online poll, taken from Nov. 29-Dec. 1 by 1,464 adult registered voters: “Which of the following best describes how you feel about the federal government?”

Respondents were then given four possible responses: “satisfied,” “frustrated,” “angry,” and “not sure.”

“Satisfied” never had a chance. Overall, just 14% said they were satisfied with Washington. A shocking 55% called themselves frustrated, and another 23% said they were angry, for a total of 78% of all responses. 

Another 9% responded that they were not sure. The poll has a +/-2.6 percentage-point margin of error.