Government bureaucracies overwhelm our society today like locusts swarming over amber fields. Oppressive taxes stultify our waking hours from teen to twilight years. And the odorous rot of corruption eats away at even the honorable pillars of Washington as drab Machiavellians extend the tentacles of government everywhere. Yet despite such unbearable intrusiveness, our establishment pundits remain blithely impervious to the outrage of it all.
We are told by prominent foundation scholars that our nation is headed toward an “unlimited future of economic prosperity and social justice in a new world order of triumphant Americanism.” We are informed by Democratic savants in face of populist unrest in the heartland that “Americans don’t want less government, only more efficient government,” and by Republican schemers that “a spirit of bipartisanship rather than radical reduction of government is needed.”
Such are the illusions of today’s smarmy Demopublicans and slick political operatives, so ensconced in Beltway celebrity and egalitarian sophistries that they are incapable of seeing the most obvious facts of historical reality. These government zealots have lived in, or catered to, Alice’s Washington Wonderland for so long and have become so emotionally committed over the years to its siren call of collectivism, that it now becomes impossible to opt out and face up to the destructive perversions of their paradigm, even as its socio-economic structure crumbles all around them.
A Secular Heaven on Earth
For over 50 years, the collectivist New Deal coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Washington, in conjunction with endless claques of academic “progressives,” has attempted to implement its statist dream of a Great Planned Society for our nation. Such a society was supposed to be the exemplary model of what enlightened technocrats with zeal for public service can do for their fellow men. It was to be the citadel of sociological splendor, a secular heaven on earth, that shining example of what politically committed men and women can accomplish if only they will be wise enough and unselfish enough.
But in reality, our Great Planned Society hasn’t turned out to be any of these things at all. It isn’t noble, or shining, or humanitarian, or heavenly. It is a blind, guilt-driven, envy-ravaged attempt to establish a government run Utopia where success is no longer personally achieved through one’s virtues and strengths but arbitrarily granted by bureaucratic edicts of the State – better known as Frederic Bastiat’s “great fictitious entity by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.” It is a nightmare of orgiastic spending beyond all rational means. It is unconscionable power and corruption and waste – the perfect example of what Tocqueville warned us would happen if the arbitrary whims of the majority were allowed to prevail unchecked. It is social welfarism at its best all right – tyrannical, unworkable, unconstitutional, and corrosive to every ideal this country was founded on and has stood for through two centuries.
The question, now that the Great Mega-State of the Democrats and Republicans has so obnoxiously failed, is what can be done? Most people throughout America, whether they be on the left or on the right, are beginning to come to grips with this. But despite such awakenings, no genuine reform has taken shape in the political arena.
Ross Perot tried to storm the Bastille in 1992. “Run the present Congress out of office,” he lectured to us from the Larry King Show. Bring a contingent of “high-minded experts” to Washington, and together they would “get under the hood of our system and make its motor work properly again.”
But such naïve pragmatism was doomed to fail even if Perot had made it to the White House. It is not the “politicians” we have elected, but the “ideological policies” we have adopted that have taken us to the despotic and degenerate state of affairs that now plague us in America. What is needed is a visionary patriot leader who understands that we must radically reduce, rather than comfortably accommodate, the Alice in Wonderland programs of Washington. What is needed is a patriot leader who has the courage to preach and put into play a “return to federalism” in America. This is the only means to save the country.
The Coming Quake
For the past seven years, we at Americans for a Free Republic in Dallas have been working to launch a genuine third-party challenge to the Democrats and Republicans, based on federalism that can actually win on Election Day. We have believed for as far back as we can remember that Victor Hugo was profoundly right when he said, “There is nothing more powerful in history than an idea whose time has come.”
Every great revolution has to wait for that time when the people are ready. Once that time comes, then the most entrenched and dictatorial of regimes will be swept aside as a new and fairer form of socio-political organization wins the day. Hugo was talking about “critical mass” being reached in citizens’ minds where decades, sometimes centuries, of frustration and injustice reach a crescendo and a mighty revolution takes place. We at AFR believe that such a time is almost here.
Alice’s Washington Wonderland is ripe to be radically transformed. But the conventional third-parties in existence cannot do it. Nor can it be done by trying to transform the GOP into a freedom party. Our National Independent Report explains why and what must be done to take on the Democrat-Republican establishment successfully.
The people are crying out for such a challenge; Donald Trump’s popularity shows this unequivocably. But Trump is not the political savior to bring this about. His role is more John the Baptist. He is telling us that the revolution is coming. He is the tremor, not the quake. The quake lies up ahead in 2020.
Many among us have hoped the elections of 2016 would be the beginning of America’s salvation. But the forces of history move at their pace, not ours. A revolutionary quake sufficient to topple the tyranny of Washington is still in the building stage.
Much, however, can be done to hasten the arrival of this revolutionary quake. AFR’s Four Pillars of Reform are the antidote to the egregious statism suffocating us today, and the American people need to learn about them. To all patriots who are fed up with the tyrannical stultification of today’s politics, come join us at AFR. America needs to be told about 2020 and the coming quake.
Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. A graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, his articles have appeared in such publications as The American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman, The Social Critic, The Dallas Morning News, and the San Antonio Express-News, as well as on numerous Internet sites.
He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values
Email: NelsonHultberg (at) afr.org
