Last time we compared the fundamentals of NFL football, blocking and tackling, with having engaged citizens fighting the political information war and accomplishing the political groundwork that must get done. The reason the left controls Washington, D.C. and my state of Illinois is because leftists do that work, and the political right does not. That is not an oversimplification.
Those of us who are older learned in grammar school that a crucial founding principle of this country is that governmental power derives from the people. True self government, Thomas Jefferson believed, required the active participation of well informed citizens.
Today there are too many elected officials who have a safe Republican or Democratic district so they do not fear election day. Too many unelected bureaucrats hold too much power in our government. Thus, these two groups lack accountability. Those elected officials and unelected bureaucrats are able to do whatever benefits themselves and their ideology and are not accountable to voters.
Jefferson believed the way to avoid this lack of accountability required the direct involvement of the people themselves. “We the People” are the direct repository of the spirit of liberty.
There is an application of this principle to political activism, the modern political party and the role of today’s elected state legislators and members of Congress. As Republican-voting and conservative Americans have left the political process to others, they have experienced what Plato warned about when he said that if a person won’t get involved, they should expect to be governed by their inferiors.
By and large those “elites” we hear about are our inferiors. The policy disasters we see all the time prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt. When too many people on the right delegate their responsibilities of citizenship we get what we have now—corruption, terrible policies, rampant crime and a foreign policy that endangers the United States.
It needs to be said again and again: Big political donors on our side have to wake up from their nap and face the fact that the beneficiaries of their largesse, the Republican Conservative Industrial Complex, are not all that different from the rest of our national “elites” when it comes to success and failure.
The Ground War ongoing series of articles can be found here.
Image credit: www.frontpagemag.com.
