Well Worth a Second Effort

Prior to the War Between the States, people said:

"The United States are . . . ."

Since then it has been:

"The United States is . . . ."

The difference reflects the centralization of power in the national government . . . and its ever increasing insistence that we all march in step. That step is almost always determined by the chic enclaves in which dynastic ruling elites establish political and cultural boundaries that suit them and impose those boundaries on everyone in the entire country.

That is not what our nation's founders had in mind when they broke away from British rule and thereafter wrote a Constitution that ordinary citizens could and did understand, celebrate, and protect. The size, scope, cost, and authority of the federal government took several big jumps -- with corresponding diminutions of the autonomy of the states and individual liberties -- under Lincoln's administration and the War Between the States. The process accelerated under Theodore Roosevelt's "progressive" leadership and then again with World War I under Woodrow Wilson. With only a brief and very limited respite during the Reagan years, the trend has been accelerating ever since F.D.R.'s inauguration and the enactment of his "New Deal."

The upshot of all this is that we today have a virtually unlimited federal government that has become corrupted by its insatiable quest for ever more power. Our "leaders" occasionally pay lip service to, but in reality completely ignore the Constitution. Consequently, there currently are no limits on the constantly expanding role of the central authority at the expense of individual autonomy and freedom. This trend now has such a head of steam that it probably has become inexorable and unstoppable. It will not end until the rotting structure that such corruption produces falls of its own weight.

As indicated above, the political and cultural mindset behind what is transpiring is set in -- and spreading from -- the nation's major metropolitan areas. Most of what the leaders in the chic urban enclaves refer to as "flyover country" -- the "red states" and the people who live there -- have not yet been infected by the received wisdom of the elitists who look down on them.

The basic difference between the two areas is that the urban centers are dominated by people who manipulate and work with concepts, ideas, and theories. In the uncontaminated areas, the dominant mindset is that of people who manipulate real things, tangibles, people who deal with reality and do most of the nation's truly productive work -- things like growing its food, extracting and processing its minerals, and harvesting its timber, to mention just a few examples. The latter group adheres to the same traditional values and remains committed to the concepts of individual freedoms for which the nation's founders fought and sought to enshrine in the Constitution.

In the long run, however, the trend toward urbanization of the nation's is unlikely to end and, as Thomas Jefferson noted:

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."

In fact today's "progressives" openly express their desire to have the U.S. become more like Europe.

If freedom is to be preserved anywhere -- and it exists in only a very few (and diminishing number of) places in the world today -- it is going to have to be preserved in rural and small town America . . . in the less densely populated "red counties" and "red states." For it to be preserved there, the people in those venues will have to resist succumbing to what is transpiring at the national level and, instead, act decisively to preserve their culture and liberties by separating from the central power and going their separate way.

This blog is dedicated to exploring this proposition.

Two additional points require mention.

1. In contrast to the first attempt at secession from the U.S., which was intertwined with preserving slavery, the effort this time will be to escape from slavery and to preserve and enhance freedom.

2. We have a ready made Constitution -- the one that the U.S. has abandoned. It requires only minor changes to (a) close the loopholes through which judges, the legal profession, and members of a decadent intelligentsia have managed to seize control of, and twist and corrupt it, (b) add a provision proclaiming that "this time we really mean it,"and (c) establish legal processes whereby individual citizens and private entities could challenge and prevent or reverse governmental expenditures and actions not authorized by the Constitution.