America is a nation divided against itself.

There are few people in America who follow politics who would disagree with this statement. We are divided by class, by race, by religion, by sex and our preference for whom we might sleep with; We are divided by nominal labels such as liberal, conservative, democrat and republican. We are divided on our outlook on social issues ranging from the paying of reparations for the ancestors of slaves to whether abortion is murder or simply another medical procedure. We are a nation fractured and fracturing along all fronts.

There are a few values that have attained near universality, but they are not the stuff of a binding societal glue. We have accepted that the purpose of the political process is to elect leaders who share our own broad world view, and trust that they will go about imposing our moral view on the rest of the populace, and failing a legislative route to this end, we trust that they’ll appoint individuals to positions in the judiciary who will enforce our view of morality in contravention of a legislative repudiation.

Most political divisions in this country are a function of the complementary beliefs that the purpose of legislation is to impose the will of the majority upon the recalcitrant minority, and that the supreme court is properly the final arbiter of issues where competing versions of morality butt against one another. We have abandoned our first principles - that the purpose of government was only to achieve the protection of the liberties of all people - in favor of a near omnipotent institution of government who has the power to enforce the social and moral viewpoint of the winners of the electoral lottery upon the losers, while periodically alternating which side has an opportunity to wield the reigns of intellectual hegemony.

Thomas Jefferson understood the dangers of allowing every matter on which men might have differences to be settled from the seat of power of a central government overseeing a nation as broad and disparate as the United States. “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” (Thomas Jefferson to Charles Hammond, 1821)



Jefferson foresaw the fate that awaited our nation if the general populace ever lost their understanding of and zeal for liberty. “Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction; to wit: by consolidation first and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.” (Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1821)

We have come to the end of the road that Jefferson feared we’d some day travel. Americans in general have no better understanding of what liberty means than they have of the finer points of quantum physics. We have allowed politicians and agenda-driven interest groups to tell us that liberty means universal health care, low emission vehicles, preserving traditional mores dictating who may or may not be married and eradicating the traffic of illicit drugs; In short, the people have forgotten what liberty means. The politicians have either forgotten, never knew or are purposefully acting in opposition to liberty for their own self-interest and personal enrichment. Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t speak well of the political state of our nation, and doesn’t offer much hope to those interested in protecting freedom and staving off totalitarianism.

The genius of the American experiment was it’s limited scope - It did not require acquiesence to the moral or practical view of our peers - it only required a desire to be free from the infringement of our own right to self-determination and a pledge to allow to every man that same protection. It was a premise of government that all men could coalesce around.

We have lost our way. Freedom has become a meaningless construct, as proponents of every diverse idea under the sun seek to impose their view upon their peers through the apparatus of federal power. Without the universal adoption of their own view, they cannot feel free.

We have abandoned the premise of government that allowed a near universal acceptance of it’s legitimacy, and through this has become illegitimate, no longer resting on the consent of the governed. Every 4 years, half of the eligible population fights a token war against marginally different partisans; each side points to the illegitimacy of the government when their side fails to carry the day. Coupled with the non-participating population, that means that at any given point, nearly 3/4 of the population doesn’t support the legitimacy of the federal government. We no longer have a government resting on the consent of the governed; it instead rests on their complacency.