Wes Riddle's Horse Sense Column #372

Creeping Coup
Wes Riddle

Something happened along the way to the American mind, and quite frankly it isn’t working well the way it used to. Americans today aren’t half the speculative or political philosophers their grandparents once were. They don’t sit on the porch as much, and they certainly don’t share opinions with family and friends in a constructive way that invites feedback or a counter tirade. They don’t read newspapers much either, or pass them around with or without editorial comment. The pastimes and concerns such habits represent have all but been pushed aside by busy lives and quasi-meaningless competing priorities. Increasingly, the capability to do so has lapsed for the want of practice.

Radio and TV shows talk a lot but without discussing anything, and politicians speechify to no end without real debate. Public education has all but ceased to teach the communicative and intellectual skills needed for critical analysis on which deliberative democracy is thought to rely.
Our opinions are no longer formed from the bottom up as it were, or even from side to side but from the top down. The Party, the Government, and the Media tell us what spin to believe in; and we no longer possess the filter of our own minds to commit to what we boldly call the truth, our truth even if it is a perception. The change is important, because it unhinges our past and supportive culture from the running of constitutional government. It is important to the whole country moreover, because it allows what professor of politics at Catholic University of America, Dr. Claes Ryn observes, is “a creeping coup d’état from within.”

The old American idea of government was likened closely to the Golden Rule “to love thy neighbor.” Its modus morality placed primary emphasis on individuals controlling their passions, fighting personal demons, leading considered and disciplined lives. Liberty depended on as much, since it made for strong communities and minimized the need for overarching government. In the early 19th Century, Alexis de Tocqueville recounted the tremendous reluctance on the part of Americans to give up any power over their lives to distant authorities, whether church or state.

The written Constitution has always rested on foundations unwritten, even upon the character of the American people, upon the quality of received inheritance: the religious, moral, intellectual, cultural and social habits and beliefs of the people. As these have changed, we should not be surprised that constitutional government no longer runs the way it once did, or that checks and balances no longer preclude accretions of power unheard of in the days of the Republic’s Founders. Ryn: “The moral momentum behind the old decentralized society weakened. Today strong, centralized Federal power seems to more and more Americans not merely acceptable but desirable… Americans say increasingly to government: ‘Act for us!’”
Americans no longer run their own government, the government runs them. We know longer tell the government how much tax we’re willing to give, but rather the government informs us how much of our earnings we’re allowed to keep. In the name of social good, in the name of fairness, in the name of crisis or necessity—anything but in the name of Freedom! Americans are detached from their historically unique, even exceptional tradition of constitutionalism with its deep cultural roots. Allegiance has shifted from something real and achievable to plastic abstractions and universal rationalist principles, more akin to the French Revolution than to the American. History and concrete experience once taught us the importance of self-restraint, as well as the importance of restraint on government power. Today we celebrate the unitary power of the modern president in spite of the checks and balances of the Constitution designed to restrain that power. Indeed, we search for an American Caesar to rid us of all our problems and to fix every hurt.

According to Ryn, “We are living through the progressive dismantling of America’s proudest political achievement” as we watch the Constitution die. Strict constructionists, even if the people should elect them to office, will find it nigh impossible to resurrect the constitutional edifice, much less perpetuate a system of government shorn from its moral-ethical and other culture that gave it birth. “Restoring American constitutionalism would presuppose some kind of resurgence of that old culture…[Americans] would have to rearrange their priorities and start acting differently, placing more emphasis on family, private groups and local communities. They would have to want to take back much of the power ceded to politicians.”