You’ve come this far; now can you advance the next step?

Do we just need “better Republican candidates,” Conservatives from the grass roots to go to Washington and roll back the worst government intrusions and abuses–perhaps even restore some of our lost Rights?

If you take this view, you have not yet arrived at a true Tea Party Consciousness, in my opinion. You still shrink from Tom Paine’s words put wholly into practice.

THE PROBLEM

Before Reagan, and specifically prior to the Bork nomination, Congress (and Washington governance in general) was run like a Gentlemen’s Club. Both parties knew their respective places and special interests. There was mutual respect, no partisan bitterness, no personal animosity, no one rocked the boat. After a vigorous floor debate (carefully moderated by rules favoring Democrats), a pre-determined result was made official, and the Republicans then went out to play golf with their “colleagues,” the Democrats.

Bit by bit, the American People paid the tab for this collegial Camelot, in money, Freedom, and in a slow erosion of their sovereignty. That is not the way the Two-Party System was supposed to work.

In this Best-of-All-Possible-Worlds for the professional governing class, they served themselves and betrayed our trust, and our faith in the System. They became an extra-constitutional institution, gathering and abusing power not delegated to them.

Today, we are seeing among so-called “Conservatives,” David Brooks, John McCain, and some others, a sighing nostalgia for this pre-Reagan, Golden Age of Autocratic Governance by this gentlemen’s aristocracy.

There is no more chance that this world will be restored than there is that landed gentlemen in powdered wigs will return to govern France.

THE SOLUTION

The Declaration of Independence says this:

“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them [The People] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

This describes well where we are today, in my view, and we need fundamental, even radical, reform to correct it:

Term limits; a Balanced Budget Amendment; repeal of the Income Tax (see Judge Napolitano); restore the 10th Amendment; reform the Two-Party System.

As I see it, some mix of these measures is the only way to take back our sovereignty from the Washington Elites and restore a correct constitutional balance of mediated power and well-monitored service to The People.

We need to remove the professional political class from power and go to a Citizen Legislature. There is just no way we can trust a professional political class ever again, given what they’ve done to us and to our country in practice.

Will any Party, or even the more edgy members of the punditry, suggest such a radical package for 2010?

Not a chance. Leadership on this can only come from the People themselves, from some new Tom Paine.

Both Bill & Bernardine should be living behind barbed wire, at best.

So should Teddy Kennedy, but…

Thanks for the lecture, but that’s outside the scope of the point I’ve been stressing with respect to moral adolescence.

The ability to detect a symbolic logic error in argument – e.g., like the ones incessantly presented by leftist intellectuals, who rationalize the specious basis and consistent failure of socialism through sophistry and informal fallacy – is not taught as a general part of public or higher education. Even back when I went to school it was limited to computer science majors, as if a People can form a sustainable society through rational public policy without the ability to discuss the merits logically.

Study of the classics, symbolic logic, the scientific method and basic economics/statistic – not to mention civics and history. All that has been erased from the curriculum as academia has been transformed into “activist factories” bent on distilling Western Civilization – and American History in particular – to a series of atrocities solely caused by Christianity and corporations.

The general thrust of this correct, but I must point out that there’s a vital difference between reality-based Aristotelian logic and non-ontological symbolic logic. Western Civilization is based on Aristotelian logic, not symbolic logic. For a clear and thorough explanation as to why symbolic logic is invalid, see Brand Blanshard’s excellent book “Reason & Analysis”.

44. Marc Malone:
“This is the third article I’ve read by Melissa Clouthier. All three have been excellent. I must agree about proofreading. I’m pretty sure Thomas Payne did not say “it’s government”, rather than “its government”. He probably knew about possessives.”

Yeah, but did he know how to spell his own name?

Kind of it in a nutshell . . . ya know?

“Who are your leaders vivo?”

My conscience.