To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (3 page)

That project will allow the Chinese to save energy, improve the environment, and dominate the world’s high-speed train market with the most advanced manufacturing in the world. They have an investment strategy rather than a stimulus strategy. They focus on getting the job done, rather than on following bureaucratic red tape.

We could apply the same technology in the Boston-Washington corridor or along the Florida and California coastlines, but the combination of union work rules, land use studies, bureaucratic red tape, and the likelihood of litigation bottles everything up, keeping Americans trapped in obsolete, slower trains—even Amtrak’s high-tech Acela is outdated by the new Chinese standards.

Similarly, the United States has enormous amounts of energy reserves.
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However, American energy is trapped by litigation, regulation, and hostile bureaucracies. Even when a decision is made to open up federal land for natural gas exploration, bureaucrats slow down the permitting process. Then, when the permits are finally issued, left-wing environmental groups file lawsuits. The Left’s goal is to exhaust the time and money of potential energy producers so they will develop foreign resources instead of American ones. The result is a government-created energy scarcity that increases prices, drives jobs abroad, and hurts our balance of payments.

Again and again the process of studying, organizing, preparing, and then regulating and litigating adds months, years, and even decades to critical American initiatives.

Yet, the secular-socialist machine will resist any effort to bring back America’s traditional can-do attitude, which would reduce the machine’s power. The Left have spent decades building a trap of bureaucracy, union work rules, and litigation to erode the independent, competitive, and productive instincts of the American people. And they will not relinquish their system without a fight.

Elected representation is the heart of the American political system.

Since our Declaration of Independence in 1776 proclaimed that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights—among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” we Americans have believed we have been entrusted by God with rights that no politician, bureaucrat, or judge can revoke.

This concept of freedom came to Americans during our long, bitter dispute with the British Empire, its London bureaucracy, and its imperial and dictatorial judges. Our forefathers believed ultimate power should always reside in the people, who would loan power to elected officials and who could reclaim it from them if necessary.

The government was viewed as a servant of the people, not the other way around. New Hampshire’s state motto, “Live free or die,” was typical of the intensity with which Americans guarded their natural-born rights.

Characteristically, one of the first acts of the first Congress was to pass a Bill of Rights that strictly limited the power of government. The First Amendment protects the right to free speech and also prevents the government from trying to control religion.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms—something that is not understood by many politicians today who confuse it with the right to hunt ducks, as President Clinton once did. The Founding Fathers knew better. The British were stopped at Lexington and Concord by a well-trained and well-armed local militia. The American right to bear arms turned out to be the key to retaining all other rights in the face of tyranny.

Secular socialists believe it’s the government’s right, and even its duty, to change the people—to make them more progressive, more secular, and more “tolerant.” Thomas Jefferson believed so deeply in the opposite proposition—that it’s the people’s right to change their government—that he declared every generation might need its own revolution. He was speaking about a peaceful, democratic revolution, and he proved his seriousness in 1800 when a political party he helped to create, the Democratic-Republican Party, swept away the establishment and took control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

For the first 100 years of American self-government, elected officials dominated relatively small, politically appointed bureaucracies. The Jeffersonians completely reshaped government after their 1800 victory, abolishing over half of all sitting federal judges—eighteen of thirty-five. A generation later, Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 led to a “spoils system” in which the winning candidate could dramatically reshape the bureaucracy by packing it with his supporters. And at the beginning of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln regarded one of his most important tasks to be appointing people to federal jobs. He believed the bureaucracy had to be changed to heed the will of the people as expressed through their choice of elected officials.

One occasion when unelected officials tried to impose their views on the country was the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. Extending slavery to the entire country, the decision was a major
cause of Lincoln’s reentry into politics, and it sparked the rise of a Republican Party that split the nation and led to our most devastating conflict—the Civil War.

After a century of subservience to elected representatives, the bureaucracy began accumulating power in the 1880s, when the rising professional class produced a civil service movement that aimed to modernize government. The Progressives, as they were called, believed well-educated professional bureaucrats were more capable than elected officials of rendering “correct” judgments. This view, derived from the snobbish elitism of the professional classes, gradually came to dominate our bureaucracies, courts, and our universities, leading to a much bigger, more dominating federal bureaucracy.

Today, we have moved from a world of decisive elected officials to a world of elected officials being limited and trapped by red tape, litigation, bureaucrats, and lawyers. And the American people know it. A recent Rasmussen poll revealed only 21 percent of Americans believe the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.
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Much of the current anger at the political establishment resembles the righteous rage Andrew Jackson and his allies felt while fighting to clean up what they perceived to be an oligarchy trying to impose a corrupt, Washington-centered, elitist system on the American people.

“I weep for the liberty of my country,” said Jackson, “when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.”

Today, the tea party movement, the explosion of insurgent primary challengers, the general anger at Washington, Sacramento, Albany, and all the other centers of unionized bureaucratic power—all these elements are coming together to force a fundamental choice
in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tradition: will the American people continue to select representatives to whom we loan power? Or will America become a European-style country in which the permanent bureaucrats and permanent judges decide virtually everything, while the politicians merely play partisan games to entertain the public and satisfy their own ambitions?

The people’s fight to take back power from the bureaucracy is a fight all the Founders would support. With Bill Forstchen and Steve Hanser, I recently completed two novels on George Washington and the American Revolution. When you immerse yourself in the stories of people who fought to create this country, you realize how passionately they believed in liberty. They really did risk everything—their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor—to give us a free country. And they fought for eight long years.

At Gettysburg, commemorating the first national military cemetery, Lincoln observed that Americans were involved in a great struggle to decide if we will have “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” He was prepared to fight our bloodiest war—620,000 Americans killed—to ensure the continuation of this Union where people lent power to those they elected.

Now we will discover if we have the same commitment to America that Washington and Lincoln had, the same willingness to endure, and the same courage to stand for our beliefs.

Historically, America’s insistence on the rule of law and honest government has contrasted sharply with the tradition—and even acceptance—of corruption and dishonesty around the world.

America, of course, has had corrupt episodes—look at the Tammany Hall political machine in New York City during the 1800s, or the Democratic machine that dominates Chicago to this day. But
the American people have never tolerated corruption—we’ve consistently tried to clean it up as soon as we learn of it, lock up the crooks, and maintain a standard of honesty.

Part of this attitude stems from the religious core of the American experience. “Thou shalt not steal,” the Eighth Commandment God gave Moses during the exodus from Egypt, is an injunction taken seriously throughout American history. Furthermore, if we were “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights,” then stealing someone’s endowment is an offense against the Creator. Finally, if we’re all born with equal rights, then theft by one diminishes the rights of another.

Americans have also understood that honesty is the key underpinning of the free market. If people trust you, they’re more likely to undertake bigger projects and take bigger risks with you.

The American belief that honesty is the key to a successful free market drew much of its inspiration from two very different men. The first was in some ways the first modern American—Benjamin Franklin. As a successful businessman, social entrepreneur, scientist, and politician, Franklin understood the importance of hard work, honesty, frugality, and of opposing corruption. His writings in the Almanac and in his autobiography show he was a prototypical self-made man.

The second champion of honesty was a Scottish intellectual, Adam Smith, who wrote two introductions to free-market theory. The first,
A Theory of Moral Sentiments
, outlines the importance of honesty and conscience in living the good life. His classic work arguing for free enterprise,
The Wealth of Nations,
was published in 1776, the same year as our Declaration of Independence. Note that moral philosophy came first and free markets second in Smith’s writing.

Smith and his fellow writers of the Scottish Enlightenment strongly influenced the Founding Fathers. In fact, one of the most
famous phrases from the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson’s reference to “the pursuit of happiness”—was borrowed from the Scottish Enlightenment. In that context it meant “virtue and wisdom,” not “hedonism and acquisition” as it’s often interpreted today.

Abraham Lincoln’s life was marked by this same sense of simple honesty, which obliged him once to walk miles to return a few cents to an overpaying customer. Furthermore, as a young man he voluntarily took on the massive debt that his unscrupulous business partner left behind when the partner skipped town. It took Lincoln years to pay it off, but he earned a growing reputation as “Honest Abe,” a name that resonated with a population that valued honesty, self-sufficiency, and clean government.

Americans traditionally have believed corruption favors the privileged few at the expense of the many. The rule of law, in contrast, favors the average person because it means everyone—rich and poor alike—has the same opportunity.

Thus, the Wright brothers in their bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio, could believe they had as good a chance to invent the airplane as the top researchers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Henry Ford, working for Detroit Edison Electric Company and building his first car in his garage at night, could believe he had as good a chance to invent the mass-produced automobile as the most powerful person in the country.

But today, an un-American tolerance for corruption has spread throughout government. When Henry Paulson, a Secretary of the Treasury who had been Chairman of Goldman Sachs, pushed through a bailout that placed $13 billion of taxpayer money in the hands of Goldman Sachs, Americans knew something was wrong.

When a mortgage company gave Senator Chris Dodd a sweetheart deal for a home mortgage while the committee he was chairing
had oversight of that company, Americans knew something was wrong.

When fellow congressmen tried to protect William Jefferson after police found $90,000 in cash hidden in his freezer, Americans knew something was wrong.
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The scale of corruption at every level of American government—from local city and county officials, to state officials such as former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, to members of Congress—now rivals that found in some of the worst governments around the world.

There are three forms of this corruption. First, there is the “gaming the system” mentality outlined above. It’s exemplified, for example, by Americans willing to lie to get workmen’s comp or disability pay, or to take money while doing no work.

Second, there is the natural corruption of big government. As Jefferson and other Founders argued, big government is
inherently
corrupt. Markets are ultimately fair because they empower individual consumers to make their own choices. Bureaucracies, in contrast, are fundamentally unfair because they empower a few insiders who inevitably drift toward cronyism and corruption. The only solution for big-government corruption is smaller government—any other solution is self-deception. As Lord Acton warned, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Third, there is the corruption of the secular-socialist machine, which knows if it competed fairly in the political system it would be crushed by the vast majority of Americans who oppose its values. Thus, out of necessity, left-wing politicians routinely encourage vote theft, lie about their policies, and defame their opponents.