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Wither America?

Most Americans consider ISIS and what is termed “radical” Islam to be a menace. They are correct insofar as their being a physical threat to America. A more subtle and existential threat to the United States is the growing appeal of progressive politics and their attendant social policies. America’s decline as the unparalleled land of opportunity now approaches the “tipping point” described by Malcolm Gladwell. As a nation, we have forsaken the Founders’ precepts of being a moral, religious, and educated people. At stake is no less than our liberty and freedom. As Hosea prophesied to Israel between 750-725 B.C., we have sown the wind and we will reap the whirlwind.

Progressivism denies the existence of “unalienable rights” as proclaimed in the US Constitution. Rather, adherents to this political philosophy claim that rights are created only by societies for its members. It follows, then, that what societies have given, they can take away. This includes Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, the latter of which to the writers of our Constitution meant acquiring and protecting property.

Early Progressives, among them John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, essentially disagreed with the Founders’ views regarding the rights of men and argued that the Constitution was conceptually and fundamentally flawed. Progressives, broadly representing the liberal and leftist viewpoints, have not bothered to amend the Constitution, but rather have ignored it in promulgating socialist policies and enabling legislation. Sadly, our Supreme Court has been complicit in gutting the Constitutional assertion of unalienable rights. In the view of many, no longer are we endowed with certain unalienable rights conferred upon us by the Creator of the Universe, as the Founding Fathers wrote. Instead, we only have those rights that are vested in us by society, to whom, Progressives hold, we owe all and at whose pleasure we serve.

Much of America along with the liberal left has abandoned the virtue of self-reliance, preferring the siren call of Progressivism. We are rapidly becoming a society in which one claims the wealth of another with impunity and, often, the force of law. Our country is no longer the land of equal opportunity, but of equal outcome regardless of effort or merit.

In “Destiny of the Republic,” author Candice Millard offers a glimpse of America the way it used to be. The book is about James A. Garfield, the 20^th President of the United States, his grand character, and his horrific and untimely death. He was the epitome of the self-made man.

President Garfield was not yet two years old when his father died after saving the family’s log cabin from a wildfire. James, his mother, Eliza, and three older siblings carried on in their Cuyahoga County, Ohio farm, although, as the author explains, debts forced the sale of much of their land. Eliza, with the help of James’ eleven-year-old brother Thomas, avoided giving the younger children to more prosperous families by farming what land they had left. Eliza “ . . . was fiercely proud that she and her children had ‘received no aid, worked and won their living and could look any man in the face.’”[i]

Eliza Garfield and people like her built this magnificent country. Hers were the values captured by the Founders of our union in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

Our country’s Founders were clear: maintaining liberty required a people that embraced morality, religion, and education. They were God-fearing men and any inference that they eschewed religion or belief in a Creator is woefully incorrect. The Declaration of Independence makes several references to Nature’s God and Creator. Including such references to God only as a matter of form, as some suggest, would not have been easily suffered by the likes of John Adams and James Madison. The latter stated, “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe . . . .” [ii]

Our country’s Founders were also adamant about the role of the Creator of the Universe and that the rights of man are derived from God, not man or societies of men. The Declaration of Independence states, “ . . . all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . .” [emphasis added].

The effort over the last fifty years to drive God out of the institution of government[iii] is the work of those who would put their faith in government rather than God. We are reaping the bitter harvest of that evil effort.

Recently, I was standing in a checkout line and overheard a conversation between the cashier and a customer, with whom the cashier was evidently friendly. The cashier gleefully told the customer that he had successfully convinced his employer to reduce his workdays from three per week to two. This way, he explained, he would qualify for an additional 26-week extension of his unemployment benefits. Knowing he was gaming the system was not much of a moral or ethical barrier to this person. He is not the only one.

The Wall Street Journal (“WSJ”) reported on February 11, 2013 that millions of people have improperly claimed subsidies under a US program called Lifeline, which is funded by adding a tax to the phone bills of rate-paying Americans. According to the article, the U.S. government of spent about $2.2 billion of these taxes last year to provide telephones, both landlines and cellular telephones, to low income Americans. The Wall Street Journal asked the FCC to review the five top recipients[iv] of Lifeline support. These recipients are the phone companies or remarketers that provide the telephone and services under the Lifeline program. That analysis showed that 41% of more than six million subscribers either could not demonstrate their eligibility or did not respond to requests for certification.

What this is telling me is that America is in the midst of a moral and ethical crisis.

The growing role of government in welfare and other “entitlement” programs is undermining the Judeo-Christian ethic so clearly embraced by our country’s Founders. Faced with increasing share of the income tax burden and the frustration with government ineptitude in managing waste and fraud, many taxpayers are giving up, to some extent, on caring for their fellow human beings. The temptation to say, “it’s the government’s job” is just what Progressives and atheists espouse. They have abandoned the Creator of the Universe and the unalienable rights bestowed on all of us by Nature.

Paul Harvey had it right when he wrote in 1964[v] that if he were the devil he would take over the United States. He would convince the young that man created god and that work is debasing. He would infiltrate unions, peddle narcotics to whom he could, and encourage schools to refine young intellects, but neglect to discipline emotions. He would designate an atheist to front for him before the highest courts and get the courts to vote against God. He would evict God from the courthouse, then from the schoolhouse, and then from Congress. Sounds like someone has stolen Harvey’s playbook.

Our country is under attack by those who, through ignorance or malice, seek to replace America’s Constitution with Progressive political and social concepts aided by disavowing our Founders insistence that liberty requires a moral, religious, and educated populace. Such an outcome will devastate any hope for our future as an independent and self-reliant people, and we, as a nation, will wither and die. The effects are already being felt across the United States. If we let this happen, this magnificent “land of the free and home of the brave” will become neither.

[i] Millard, Candice Destiny of the Republic. New York: Random House, 2011.

[ii] “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments”, James Madison, 1785.

[iii] See US Supreme Court cases Engel v. Vitale, Abington v. Schempp, Wallace v. Jaffree, Allegheny County v. ACLU, and Lee v. Weisman.

[iv] Two of the Lifeline subsidy recipients, TracFone Wireless Inc. and Nexus Communications Inc., asked the FCC to keep their counts confidential, so their results were not included in the study.

[v] “If I Were the Devil I Would Pray, Our Father Who Art in Washington”, Paul Harvey, Gadsden Times, October 13, 1964, as referenced in www.Snopes.com.