Max Borders writes:
. . . Toleration and open discourse is, well, no longer tolerated. We are slowly becoming a place of mere de jure free speech. And even that is being eroded by the day. I have to blame so-called “progressives” the most for this. They are people for whom the end justifies the means. So any lip-service they occasionally pay to civil liberties is but a tool of convenience to be employed on the way to getting things their way. A new cold civil war is emerging.
There is much truth in that. But I would go further.
Thanks to the lethal combination of left-statist demagoguery and voter irrationality, Americans are, among other things, saddled with
- a debilitating tax and regulatory burden, which has accrued since the “progressive” agenda began to take hold in the early 1900s
- the destruction of civilizing social norms, together with a high threshold of tolerance for criminals and a concomitant softness on matters of national defense
- the continuing nationalization of medical care, which began in earnest with Medicare and continues in the guise of Obamacare (with all of its potential for bureaucratic abuses of power)
- severe restrictions on economic output in order to satisfy the dictatorial urge to puritanism that lies behind the “warming” industry
As I have said,
[t]hese encroachments . . . are morally illegitimate because their piecemeal character has robbed Americans of voice and mooted the exit option. And so, we have discovered — too late — that we are impotent hostages in our own land.
I am reminded of these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
What we need is not a civil war — cold or hot — but a serious movement toward secession:
The legal basis for the perpetuation of the United States disappears when the federal government abrogates the Constitution. Given that the federal government has long failed to honor Amendment X [among many other parts of the Constitution], there is a prima facie case that the United States no longer exists as a legal entity. Secession then becomes more than an option for the States: It becomes their duty, both as sovereign entitities and as guardians of their citizens’ sovereignty.
Politics and Prosperity 