Republic on the Precipice

I sometimes wonder if Americans really have any idea of the scope of the danger facing this country. I also wonder if they don’t deserve the disaster that is coming.

Americans loudly focus their anger on the President, who is seeking to profoundly alter the structure and nature of the United States. But they cannot let themselves off the hook; they elected this man, after all, and by a wide margin.

Remember, Barack Obama had long kept company with loathsome men overflowing with hatred for the United States. His associates included an anti-American, unrepentant terrorist (Bill Ayers) and a deranged, anti-American preacher (Reverend Wright). And Obama’s own stated economic philosophy is confiscatory redistributionist – “spread the wealth around,” as he so forthrightly put it.

All of this was known in 2008. And Americans elected him anyway. And now they whine and complain that this man attempting to socialize the republic? What a thoroughly unserious people – if you stick your head in the gaping maw of a ravenous lion, you would be a fool to complain when it closes its jaws. It is the nature of lions to devour flesh; it is the nature of socialists to devour liberty.

And there is another culprit who must not escape blame.

The Republican Party, which botched a war – a just war – so badly that it made a leftist “community organizer” seem like presidential material. The Party which acquiesced to massive government expansions at the expense of liberty throughout the 20th Century; the New Deal, the Great Society, untold bloated federal programs which shamefully betray Republican fingerprints, programs which have habituated Americans to a certain amount of socialism in their society, including socialism in our health care.

And now the GOP makes a stand? Now it draws a line?

Please. It is far too little, far too late. Once people have accepted a little socialism, it is not a very far bridge to convince them to have a little more, and a little more still, until freedom is but a faint memory. The trajectory of the last century in America has been this: Virtually no government control in health care, to government control of health care for the elderly and poor, to now coming within a hair’s breadth of health care becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Uncle Sam.

We know where that trajectory leads. Almost all the Western democracies have succumbed to the socialist temptation, to one degree or another. If and when that happens in America, the Republican Party will become a vestigial appendage – a slightly less liberal alternative of the very liberal majority party. Republicans will not repeal a massive government program instituted by liberals, because they never have. Because when people start receiving gushers of money from the public treasury, they almost never vote to plug the spigot

Remember, even Scott Brown, Republican savior and new dragon slayer, elected on his promise to stop Obamacare, previously helped to institute government health care in his home state, and as such is a living symbol of GOP culpability, confusion, and hypocrisy.

Brown and his allies may yet stop Obamacare. But even if they win this battle, the war has barely begun. Indeed, it is already half lost, because they have already surrendered too much.