ZGram - 11/22/2004 - "Sobran: How Tyranny Came to America" - Part I

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

November 22, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

This being Thanksgiving week, it is instructive to take to heart a 
few history lessons.  I am running a five-part Zgram on how Joseph 
Sobran, one of the finest analytical minds in America, with a 
linguistic talent to match, explains how far down on the slippery 
slope this once-great country now finds itself at the very start of a 
new millennium. 

I enjoyed reading this essay, and I hope that you will, too. 

[START]

How Tyranny Came to America - Part I

One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the 
conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the 
language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, 
in their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own.

The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the 
political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps 
widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because 
much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, 
or American history is really modern liberal propaganda. Sometimes 
this is deliberate. Worse yet, sometimes it isn't. Our ancestral 
voices have come to sound alien to us, and therefore our own moral 
and political language is impoverished. It's as if the people of 
England could no longer understand Shakespeare, or Germans couldn't 
comprehend Mozart and Beethoven.

So to most Americans, even those who feel oppressed by what they call 
big government, it must sound strange to hear it said, in the past 
tense, that tyranny "came" to America. After all, we have a 
constitution, don't we? We've abolished slavery and segregation. We 
won two world wars and the Cold War. We still congratulate ourselves 
before every ballgame on being the Land of the Free. And we aren't 
ruled by some fanatic with a funny mustache who likes big parades 
with thousands of soldiers goose-stepping past huge pictures of 
himself.

For all that, we no longer fully have what our ancestors, who framed 
and ratified our Constitution, thought of as freedom -- a careful 
division of power that prevents power from becoming concentrated and 
unlimited. The word they usually used for concentrated power was 
consolidated -- a rough synonym for fascist.  And the words they used 
for any excessive powers claimed or exercised by the state were 
usurped and tyrannical. They would consider the modern "liberal" 
state tyrannical in principle; they would see in it not the opposite 
of the fascist, communist, and socialist states, but their sister.

If Washington and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton could come back, 
the first thing they'd notice would be that the federal government 
now routinely assumes thousands of powers never assigned to it -- 
powers never granted, never delegated, never enumerated. These were 
the words they used, and it's a good idea for us to learn their 
language. They would say that we no longer live under the 
Constitution they wrote. And the Americans of a much later era -- the 
period from Cleveland to Coolidge, for example -- would say we no 
longer live even under the Constitution they inherited and amended.

I call the present system "Post-Constitutional America." As I 
sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to 
our form of government.

What's worse is that our constitutional illiteracy cuts us off from 
our own national heritage. And so our politics degenerates into 
increasingly bitter and unprincipled quarrels about who is going to 
bear the burdens of war and welfare.

I don't want to sound like an oracle on this subject. As a typical 
victim of modern public education and a disinformed citizen of this 
media-ridden country, I took a long time -- an embarrassingly long 
time -- to learn what I'm passing on. It was like studying geometry 
in old age, and discovering how simple the basic principles of space 
really are. It was the old story: In order to learn, first I had to 
unlearn. Most of what I'd been taught and told about the Constitution 
was misguided or even false. And I'd never been told some of the most 
elementary things, which would have saved me a tremendous amount of 
confusion.

The Constitution does two things. First, it delegates certain 
enumerated powers to the federal government. Second, it separates 
those powers among the three branches. Most people understand the 
secondary principle of the separation of powers. But they don't grasp 
the primary idea of delegated and enumerated powers.

Consider this. We have recently had a big national debate over 
national health care. Advocates and opponents argued long and loud 
over whether it could work, what was fair, how to pay for it, and so 
forth. But almost nobody raised the basic issue: Where does the 
federal government get the power to legislate in this area? The 
answer is: Nowhere. The Constitution lists 18 specific legislative 
powers of Congress, and not a one of them covers national health care.

As a matter of fact, none of the delegated powers of Congress -- and 
delegated is always the key word -- covers Social Security, or 
Medicaid, or Medicare, or federal aid to education, or most of what 
are now miscalled "civil rights," or countless public works projects, 
or equally countless regulations of business, large and small, or the 
space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants, or subsidies to 
the arts and humanities, or ... well, you name it, chances are it's 
unconstitutional. Even the most cynical opponents of the Constitution 
would be dumbfounded to learn that the federal government now tells 
us where we can smoke. We are less free, more heavily taxed, and 
worse governed than our ancestors under British rule. Sometimes this 
government makes me wonder: Was George III really all that bad?

Let's be clear about one thing. Constitutional and unconstitutional 
aren't just simple terms of approval and disapproval. A bad law may 
be perfectly constitutional. A wise and humane law may be 
unconstitutional. But what is almost certainly bad is a constant 
disposition to thwart or disregard the Constitution.

It's not just a matter of what is sometimes called the "original 
intent" of the authors of the Constitution. What really matters is 
the common, explicit, unchallenged understanding of the Constitution, 
on all sides, over several generations. There was no mystery about it.

The logic of the Constitution was so elegantly simple that a foreign 
observer could explain it to his countrymen in two sentences. Alexis 
de Tocqueville wrote that "the attributes of the federal government 
were carefully defined [in the Constitution], and all that was not 
included among them was declared to remain to the governments of the 
individual states. Thus the government of the states remained the 
rule, and that of the federal government the exception."

[END]


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