Confessions of an Enlightened American

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      A reader recently confessed, " I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. Socialism has taken over my party. They, the Progressives, differed in their assessment of the problems and how to resolve them, they generally shared in common the view that

government at every level must be actively involved in these reforms. The existing constitutional system was outdated and must be made into a dynamic, evolving instrument of social change, aided by scientific knowledge and the development of administrative bureaucracy. These party members wave the American flag but they are pushing a non-American vision. This is the issue of the next election is whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."

     We were told  by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. One Senator referred to the President as "our moral teacher and our leader," and he says he is "hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document."(The Constitution) He must "be freed," so that he "can do for us" what he knows "is best."

       Another articulate Democratic spokesman, defines liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government." "The full power of centralized government" was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use propaganda and coercion to achieve its purpose.

Others in the Democratic party have stated:

• "The cold war will finally end through our acceptance of a democratic socialism."
  
• "Capitalism has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state."
•  "Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 21st century."
• The Constitution is outmoded.  
•  "Natural inalienable rights and natural inalienable liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology."
• "The school of political theory, endorsed in the Revolution, has been discredited and repudiated.

     
       This is nothing new in this country, it is just accelerating.  Back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Democratic Party was taking the legacy of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. He walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died -- because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the Socialist Party.

      This country has proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing or trial by jury? They can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine? All in direct violation of your rights assigned to every citizen by the Constitution?  Such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute.Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment in history.