Selected Extracts:
Hillsdale College’s Matthew Spalding wrote a persuasive and best-selling book called We Still Hold These Truths. He made the case that despite shockingly poor educational outcomes, at heart, Americans still believed in the founding principles. Indeed, most people still tell pollsters
they strongly believe in freedom, limited government, and personal responsibility. But do they?
Many of the “long train of abuses” that led to America’s rebellion from the British Crown are eerily similar to the excesses of America’s own government today. The Declaration of Independence listed grievances against King George III that are all too familiar. The authors accused him of refusing “his assent to laws necessary for the public good", of forbidding locals to pass laws “of immediate and pressing importance", even of dissolving local representative bodies.
How different is that from a Congress that cannot pass the most essential bills for annual appropriations and budgets? How different is it from today’s “supreme” federal system that routinely overrides local and state laws, especially by federal court orders and “constitutional” rulings based on premises that are not in the Constitution?
The Crown had “obstructed the administration of justice” by controlling judges’ tenure and salaries. Today’s government does so by empowering judges to usurp legislative powers by making up new laws rather than interpreting laws passed by the people’s representatives. It is a more modern technique, but with the same anti-democratic result.
King George III had “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance". By 2020, the federal government had more than four million employees, at a cost approaching $5 trillion a year. The King “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution" much as our modern leaders compromise America’s sovereignty to institutions like the U.N., international courts, the World Health Organization, and foreign trade commissions.
The founders said government should protect private property, but today’s Supreme Court lets government take private property and sell it to developers, destroy the value of land by denying the right to use it, and forces landowners to give up their land for endangered species habitat, parks, trails, and “open space". The first “inalienable [unalienable - ed] right” in the Declaration was the right to life, but today’s courts prohibit states from protecting it. If Americans still believe “all men are created equal,” how can they justify racial preferences in school admissions, government contracts, or congressional reapportionment? Freedom of speech is central to the Bill of Rights, but it is under attack by politically correct thought police all across America, especially at government-financed educational institutions.
“The policy of the federal government,” wrote President Jefferson, “is to leave her citizens free, neither aiding nor restraining them in their pursuits.” Today, Americans face restrictions on how to plan their own retirements, design their own health insurance, or even devise their own children’s education. The endless intrusion reaches into every facet of their lives, from where they can hike in the woods to how their hamburgers must be cooked. Both parties instinctively look to government as the first answer to all problems. Even many Republicans propose solving issues like illegal immigration by hiring thousands more federal employees.
There is one crucial difference: Unlike their colonial ancestors, contemporary Americans voluntarily agreed to all these usurpations with their votes. Voters have been warned frequently to be alert to threats against their freedom, but have often shirked that most essential duty of citizenship.
Americans have two clear choices: Do they really want to declare the America of their founders dead, and accept the mediocre socialism it has devolved into? Or, will they withdraw the “consent of the governed” and revive the American experiment that made them the freest people on earth and the envy of the world?
[The] tradition of passing down the principles of American greatness has become dislodged.
People cannot pass along memories they don’t have, and neither can a nation. The failure to educate future generations guarantees a loss of national memory and, thus, national character. Sadly, this is happening—on purpose—as people increasingly look to government for solutions to every problem, and decline to teach history, values, principles, and civics to their children. Is the entire American system of self-government slowly and painfully committing suicide?
American history is a spellbinding tale of how ordinary people from all their diverse backgrounds have worked and fought together to throw off the chains of the past, and to forge a better and freer future. It is about how they continually come together, as the Constitution says, “to form a more perfect union". But that spirit, which made America a beacon of freedom and prosperity, is in sharp decline. And that puts America’s future in jeopardy.
[Note: By “unalienable” was meant “unsellable”. Something cannot be “insellable”, so “inalienable” is wrong. In the intended meaning of the word as used in the Declaration of Independence, the “right” to life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness, was in each case unalienable in that it was not a property that, like most property, could be sold; it belonged to the individual as indispensably as (say) his brain for as long as he existed.]
Comment: Broadly speaking, I think the writer makes a convincing case that America is in decline.
