Philip Ahlrich quotes Thomas Jefferson in the article excerpted below:
In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.
Then Ahlrich writes: “The Founders of our nation represented the genius of human thought in the maturity of its moral purpose.”
You need to read the entire article — here is just an excerpt:
Progressivism is not about consent — it is about rule. This is the wrong argument and the wrong action to carry into the 21st Century. It is a violation of the common trust, an intrusion of exclusive, radical interests upon settled law and upon the vital institutions of civilized life. It would open the American system to all the entrenched socialized ills of the European.
Progressivism is not an end; it is rather a means of habituating the people to rule by bureaucratic authority. It is an activist and proselytizing force, a process not of reformation but of unremembering, of unbuilding, and undoing. It is the soul of deconstruction, emphasizing that the language of justice is unreliable and open to continual interpretation and suggestion. It would innovate upon the American Constitution until its words dissolved in a cauldron of political expediency. Its scripture embodies a perpetual dissatisfaction with truth, with moral understanding, with principles of established order, limit, and clarity. As a political declaration, the new liberal doctrine of power is a necessary precursor to authoritarian rule, to self-appointed government, to the tyranny of an elite political class, to oligarchy — to socialism — not yet the thing itself, though immune to none of its evils, but serving as a pathfinder, a leveler, and maker of footholds. Its own testament erases meaning and value as it redefines the terms of social contract.
The liberal speaks in a new Orwellian language. He tells us that injustice is stronger than justice; and his interference with the democratic process has now rid the Democratic Party of its moderate voices. The intellectual desire to engage in dialectic — an instrument of reason by which we may understand both sides of an argument — is forfeit to tribal hatreds. Any appeal to reason is now the mark of cowardice. Any attempt to reconcile differences with the conservative opposition is the action of treason. A readiness to shut down debate, to violate the free speech and assembly of opposing groups on college campuses and in many other social environments is proof of one’s oath and loyalty to the emerging extremist movement. Political correctness is the new social contract. Collective salvation is the new secular order of acceptable truth. The determination to believe one’s own lies is a perfect measure of commitment to the progressive cause of social justice. INGSOC revisionism emerges on the American left in the radical newspeak of SOCJUS: Error is Progress, Subsistence is Growth, and Weakness is Strength.
Read more: American Thinker
