The Risk That Americans Are Too Busy To Notice Our Dying Liberties
Americans are busy people—but the real risk in the lead-up to 2024 is that we may be too busy to pay attention to our last chance to preserve our liberties.
In one respect, we’re no different than any other people on the planet given that our primary needs are food, water, and shelter. Beyond that, however, Americans enjoy a life of leisure opportunities that virtually no one else on the planet enjoys. Not leisure that’s measured in hours worked as in France or Germany. Workers in most developed countries work fewer hours per year than Americans do.
No, what’s different is that Americans have so many ways to spend their leisure time: Motocross. Shopping. Video games. Countless cable channels. Amusement parks. Golf. Swimming. Skiing. Football. Baseball. Golf. Putt putt golf. Pickleball. Off-track betting. Gymnastics. Theater. Karate. Star Trek conventions. Habitat for Humanity. Cornhole. BBQ competitions. Quilting competitions. Beauty pageants for kids. These are only a tiny fraction of the myriad options Americans have at their disposal to entertain themselves or spend their leisure time watching or participating in.
If one were to compare the spectrum of activities available to the average American with the equivalent spectrum for any other country on the planet, it wouldn’t take long to see an enormous difference. Many countries share some of our pursuits, but the depth and breadth available to Americans is unparalleled. None of this came about by accident. The reason Americans have dozens of sports and thousands of activities to participate in, from grade school to the senior center, is because the nation has been so prosperous for so long, and the nation has exemplified creativity for things both consequential and not. The result is a nation where most people have available a level of entertainment and leisure unparalleled in history.
Image: Leisure activities by macrovector.
One consequence of such is that Americans are busy. So busy, in fact, that they forget to pay attention to some things that really matter—specifically, government. In a perfect world, no one would have to pay much attention to the government because it would be run like a well-oiled machine in the background that wouldn’t cause any trouble. But that’s not how governments work. Our Founding Fathers knew that, which is why they gave us a government of separated powers with staggered terms for those responsible for exercising them. But even such a near-perfect document cannot stand forever in the face of avarice and the lust for power.
That greed and lust for power is the defining characteristic of what we call the Swamp. And it was enabled by a plethora of acts that strengthened and emboldened the apparatchiks who man it. These included Executive Orders by JFK and Nixon giving federal employees powers or “protections” they’d never previously had, as well as a 1984 Supreme Court case that required courts to defer to federal agencies as it relates to rule-making when there is ambiguity in the legislation.
Together, these and other acts made the Swamp possible. They built a federal government where it’s almost impossible to fire anyone, and agencies essentially get to decide who and what they regulate while those affected have limited redress. So basically, we have agencies that decide what laws they want to write staffed by people who can’t be fired regardless of their failure, incompetence, or criminality.
Of course, every two years, the cacophony that is American life is made that much more dissonant by elections. Most Americans, however, unfortunately, spend less time learning what’s really at stake in those elections than they do selecting teams for their March Madness brackets or wondering what’s going on in the dysfunctional Kardashian universe. The reality of this disaster was demonstrated 15 years ago by John Ziegler.
This situation might have been acceptable 100 years ago when the federal government was relatively small and had little discernible impact on most American lives. Today, however, when the leviathan of the federal government seeks to control virtually every aspect of our lives, it’s simply not. There’s a tipping point in every endeavor in life, and the lifecycle of a Republic is no exception. Leaving the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked: “Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” He responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Two hundred and thirty years later, we are on the verge of losing it. The problem is that too many Americans have no idea what the danger is and have little interest in finding out. They’ve spent so much of their lives enjoying the leisure and entertainment our Republic has made possible that they’ve forgotten that the foundation of freedom and prosperity upon which those conditions are built are not ordained by God, not set in stone, and not guaranteed. The conditions underlying Americans’ freedoms and prosperity are far more fragile than most recognize but, like frogs in a pot of slowly warming water, they’re succumbing to the creeping threat. Indeed, there’s an inverse relationship between government micromanagement and citizens’ freedom.
In what might be the single most crystallizing example of government micromanagement of Americans’ everyday lives since Barack Obama’s attempts to destroy the suburbs, the Biden Administration is considering banning gas stoves and a plethora of other items Americans use in the normal routine of their daily lives. Think about that…
Natural gas has been a key element of cooking in America for centuries. It’s a clean-burning fuel, cheap and plentiful, with a variety of sources, mostly in red states, which makes it hard to control. So, if Democrats can’t control the supply of something, they simply take control of the demand. Doing so in this case has the twin virtues of harming the economies of red states while forcing Americans to buy new, “green lobby approved”—read: dysfunctional and expensive—appliances. All, of course, in the name of the “Climate Change” hoax.
These and literally tens of thousands of other federal regulations are the cost to Americans of not paying attention, summed up by the notion that politics is downstream from culture. Hollywood and the media destroyed American culture, which made turning Washington’s alphabet departments, agencies, and bureaus into tools of tyranny easy.
The question is, can anyone shake the American people out of this political stupor long enough for them to recognize the danger they face? Will Americans rise to the occasion in 2024, or will they instead continue to eat the fruit from the tree of liberty, oblivious to the rot of its roots?
Perhaps a paraphrasing of Martin Niemöller might help:
First, they raised the minimum wage, and I cheered because I had a job.
Then, they destroyed public education, and I didn’t act because I sent my kid to private school.
Next, they limited cable rates, and I applauded because I saved $20 a month.
When they came for my light bulbs, I didn’t react because it made me feel good to help the environment.
One day, they said ethnicity was more important than ability for college acceptance, but I said nothing because I’d already graduated.
They increased taxes on the rich, and I didn’t care because I wasn’t rich.
Then they came for my gun, my car, my job, and eventually everything I hold dear, but there was no one left to stand with me because no one remembered what real liberty was or how it was supposed to be protected in the first place.
You can follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA
Obama and the Broken Nation He Made Come Of Age
A generation doesn’t remember life before the crises he created.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Barack Obama turns 60 over the summer. The AARP cover with Barry posing next to a basketball and a shelf of bestselling non-fiction books he hasn’t read can’t be too far away.
Once the symbol of youthful hipness, the former boss of Hope and Change now lectures “young people” on what they should be doing. His legacy is being carried forward by 78-year-old Biden and the 81-year-old Pelosi. That’s above the average age of 80 of the House Dem leadership.
The average age of the Biden cabinet is two years older than President Trump’s cabinet.
The gerontocratic technocracy uses AOC as its younger foil, but she’s been a stalking horse for Bernie Sanders who will hit the big 80 in the fall. The big donors behind the American Left are even older with George Soros due to hit 90 the same month Obama gets to 60. The even bigger reservoirs of cash flowing into the leftist machine are coming from the foundations of men who were born in the 19th century like Henry Ford, John D. MacArthur, and John D. Rockefeller.
That’s about right for a 19th century ideology whose followers keep trying to make it look young.
Youthful leftism is anarchic. It’s CHAZ, BLM, and Antifa. It’s open air heroin markets, smashed store windows, and political assassinations. Turning that anarchy into collectivism requires hysterical propaganda and rallies that appear anarchic, but are actually tightly controlled, ideas that seem edgy, but are actually the work of men who were born during the age of the steam.
If you think Bernie’s old, Karl Marx celebrated his 203rd birthday in May.
Obama’s policies have aged as badly as Marx, Biden, or their front man. But instead of moderating as they grow older, they only grow more radical. Obama equivocated on gay marriage, while Biden entirely erases the existence of women by calling them “birthing people”. Obama covertly weaponized the government against conservatives, while Biden is doing it openly. Everything from election rigging through H.R.1 to indoctrinating every government employee with critical race theory is happening more openly and blatantly under Biden.
Youthful leftist revolutions break the system while leftist gerentocrats impose the tyranny.
Making tyranny look like freedom requires hefty doses of chaos and outrage that make it appear that the system is being broken when it’s actually being built up. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The revolution is the thing it’s revolting against.
The end of history keeps arriving only to vanish like a mirage when the youth reach for it.
"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal," Obama told his followers. Two years later, he privately snapped, "What does he think I'm supposed to do? Put on my f------ Aquaman gear and swim down there myself with a wrench?"
Thirteen years have passed and if the planet has begun to heal, Democrats won’t admit it.
The moment of epochal change can never be allowed to arrive because it would interrupt the permanent crisis. Salvation is always here and also always out of reach. But there’s always a new generation available to be fooled again because they know the past doesn’t matter.
History is radically revised every generation not just for what it teaches, but for what it doesn’t.
A revisionist history work like the 1619 Project doesn’t just impose a radical new racist history, it displaces the past. Another revisionist history will come along to displace the 1619 Project because manufacturing history churn is vital to destroying any continuity with the past. All the academic lenses being swapped one for the other like a mad ophthalmologist leaves a new generation with a lot of theories, but no clue that they’re being indoctrinated into a lost cause.
The Left has no new ideas. Like Hollywood, it makes old ideas seem new by rebooting them, by making them appear hip and trendy, and by destroying a meaningful connection with the past. And that way audiences don’t realize they’re just seeing the same movie remade over again. What might be creative bankruptcy in a movie theater is a more seriously sisyphean problem described by Churchill as, “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
But how does a new generation learn from a past that isn’t allowed to exist on its own terms?
Demonizing the past is a convenient way of obscuring it. The only thing students are taught about the past is that it was a horrible time, its people backward, its customs savage, its learning wicked, its institutions racist, and its ideas horrifying. In postmodern history, the past exists only as a cautionary tale gleaned for historical struggles that fit into the new narrative.
History is an incomplete present whose revolutions were never fully fulfilled. It’s a revolutionary story of a world ruled by villains until they were overthrown by the forces of good. And this revolution against history must continue until all of the past is negated by the present.
The destruction of statues and burning of books forces ‘presentism’ for the past to conform to the dogmas of the moment. The biggest problem with the past isn’t that it’s politically incorrect, but that it’s repeating itself. The Black Lives Matter movement transparently harkens back to the 70s. So do most of the radical social impulses in which the Left cloaks its real power agenda.
The revolutionary chaos is doomed to fail again, but each oscillation breaks the country more.
The social activism is window dressing. A proper Marxist regime has little use for militant minorities, feminism, gay rights, police defunding, transgender bathrooms, pipeline protests, abortion, or any of the other issues the radicals have been using to waste our time. If you doubt that, go look at how many of any of the above you can find in China, Cuba, or North Korea.
The Russian Futurists vowed to throw the art and literature of the past overboard from the “steamship of modernity”. But the Bolsheviks were not looking for disruptive art and when the revolution arrived, modern art was tossed overboard and the former revolutionaries settled down to producing socialist realism and recreating the art of the past for the Soviet Union.
After a brief permissive period, the Soviet Union criminalized homosexuality and insisted on traditional marriages and roles for women. Those feminists who resisted were soon shown their place with one of the more notorious free love figures being forcibly married off by Lenin.
The dictatorship had eclipsed the revolution and the past was quickly rewritten all over again.
As Obama approaches his sixtieth birthday, the age at which Khrushchev struggled for control of the USSR and Mao launched his Great Leap Forward, two events that would require a good deal of historical editing, our American past is already being rewritten. Only those who are at least in their thirties will remember that there wasn’t a racial crisis before Barack Obama.
And there hadn’t been such a crisis for a generation before he took power.
Our racial crisis is not a legacy of 1619, but of 2008. Obama’s victory was not a revolution against a crisis, but the revolution that created the crisis. To a new generation, the racial crisis is a permanent feature of life. They have always lived under the crisis and expect to always live under it. That is why critical race theory and white privilege rants have become so pervasive.
Without a generation coming of age in a world shaped by the toxic idea that all white people are evil and all minorities are victims, no one outside academic circles would have willingly accepted them. And if that generation seems all too easy to radicalize into supporting the most insane policies, that’s because it grew up in a world defined by the hysteria of manufactured crises.
The world as they know it is doomed by melting ice caps, the rich getting richer, and the genocide of black people at the hands of the police. Every radical program is backed by a sense of urgent crisis which is killing people and destroying the future. They can’t imagine a present without the crisis and don’t remember ever living in a world not defined by crisis.
As Obama gets closer to his AARP cover, a generation lives in the world that he made.
Like Obama, his radical political movement speaks endlessly about the past, but has no actual past. Its past is always being reinvented and retold through new narratives, but with no facts.
The Obama revolution has come and gone. We have skipped past it to the Soviet Union of Chernenko and Andropov, of gerontocrats building the tyranny with the beams of revolution. The decline is everywhere as the theories fail, the factories close, and the stores stand empty.
The youth are being rallied to cheer for the revolutionary tyranny of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer who are promising a new era in history no one believes in anymore. Since the election their cause is no longer free college, it’s federalizing elections through H.R.1.
Federalizing elections, eliminating the filibuster, and packing the Supreme Court are compelling issues in Washington D.C., but the regime plotting new coups has little to say to the ordinary people facing high prices for gas and bread. Land, Bread, and Peace has given way to a race for total power over the country as the revolution of Hope, Crisis and Change comes of age.
There’s no change without crisis, and without hope, there’s only hate.
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