MY THESIS: GIVING UP ON AMERICA (long version)

GIVING UP ON AMERICA 

or:

How I Learned Not to Worry and 

 Love the Obombanation

By Thomas M. Kempf

This article is not an attempt to stir passions in anyone, especially patriots who rightfully believe that America is under siege and in danger of being tossed into the dustbin of history. I am one of you, but I am also dedicated to trying to understand what is really happening to our country, where it is likely to go and why. I have spent a lot of time over the last twenty years, and more intensely since 2007, consuming our political discourse, reading history and philosophy, and even writing a book which proposes a novel solution to our political conflict. In the process I have gained enough knowledge to draw the conclusion summarized in the title. 

Many people ponder our future also, and from the layman all the way up to Rush Limbaugh, nobody really seems to have a handle on it. Even Rush says that he doesn’t have any clue when or how things will turn around, but that he has faith in the people of this country to eventually rise up and throw off the chains of our increasingly oppressive government. Unfortunately I see it differently, and I want to explain it to you. When you see the facts I am presenting, maybe you will accept the inevitable and join me in trying to find another way to regain our freedoms. 

The bottom line for me is that, when we look at the course of our country since our founding, we have been moving away from the original intent of our Constitution pretty much the entire time. The usurpations were very slow at first and hardly noticeable, but they accelerated towards the end of the 19th century. It coincided with the rise of progressivism, which was influenced by Karl Marx’s writings in the middle of that century.

There were attempts to impose an income tax on all American citizens and to form a central bank during the Civil War with the Revenue Act of 1862 and the National Banking Act of 1863. Then there was the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Anti-trust Act in 1890, both giving our government  controls over American businesses. And  there was more, but nothing compared to the last 100 years.

Starting with Woodrow Wilson, we have had several major pushes by the left that have led us to where we are today, which is significantly distant from Jefferson and Madison. We are solidly into a welfare and regulatory state with a high degree of centralization in the federal government.  If you are a patriot you know exactly what I am talking about. You understood this at some level for years, and have been made more intensely aware of it since we elected our first marxist president. 

You wish to fight it in some manner, but to what end? To “save” the country, of course. From what? Socialism. Decay. Possibly from totalitarianism itself. And ultimately, you would like it if our current trajectory could be reversed, and we could move back towards a country with greater freedoms and rights. But that is not going to happen, and there are very real reasons why it won’t, which are explained in this article. 

So let me get to it, but please note: there are many reasons why America will not reverse course anytime soon, much less regain its status as the freest nation on Earth, and I list a brief explanation of them here. Each of these alone is a formidable reason why it is more or less impossible to get our liberties back, but together they are sufficient proof that America is truly a lost cause. I’m sorry to be the messenger:

• The left has almost total control over the pillars of society, including elected government, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the news media, the entertainment complex, the arts and sciences and the educational system. This allows them to manipulate the direction of our culture for their own ends, and is not something we on the right could change, even if we wanted to, in the near future. Unfortunately, the media still have significant influence, and have the ability to make good people look bad, and bad people look good. They can also do the same for the economy. How do you fight that? 

• Using that leverage, the left has effectively dumbed-down and brainwashed a large portion of the population, and especially the younger generations who have been fed a steady dose of liberalism their entire lives. They have also maneuvered many more people into positions of dependency, from single mothers on welfare and other entitlement programs such as housing assistance, to gigantic government retirement and health “insurance” programs, extended unemployment, educational benefits and benefits for immigrants, legal or otherwise. They are being manipulated by the left to help the left gain the loyalty and votes of the people, and eventually a permanent position of power.

• The left act as one, while the right constitute a disparate group of people unable to formulate consistent policies or to work together as a team. Making it worse, the Republican Party is essentially incapable of selecting real leaders.  Consequently, the political right, as a whole, has no offense and barely has a defense. You cannot play the game without a team, and we effectively have no team representing us in our government, which has been the case for a hundred years or more. As for conservative media outlets such as FOX news and radio talk-show hosts, they are primarily preaching to the choir and are not significantly impacting the knowledge of the populace. All our efforts are not enough to impact our cultural and political direction. If things are to turn around, it will have to be a spontaneous reaction by the people as a whole to future events, which we cannot know at this time, and which we cannot control.

• The progressive movement began in the late 1800’s and attained its signature achievement with the 16th Amendment (and the Federal Reserve). It is my contention that this event was the beginning of the end of America, and so long as it remains in place, our country will never be able to recover the freedoms that we once knew. So long as the federal government has its fingers in the pockets of the individual - the source of all wealth - it cannot be stopped. I repeat: It. Cannot. Be. Stopped. The only way to begin to reverse our course is to reduce funding to the government, and this just isn’t going to happen. Even with a consumption tax (federal sales tax) instead of an income tax, the federal government will still appropriate what it needs to continue on its present course, although such a tax would mitigate the government’s ability to “engineer” society, and would be a huge improvement. 

• Our country has been moving leftward continuously for over 100 years, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, but almost never have bad laws been repealed. There is an inertia to its movement that seems unstoppable, even when someone as awesome as Ronald Reagan is the president. It seems to me that, barring a major event of some sort (such as a major nuclear war), there can be no foreseeable change in direction in the near future (next generation or two). Those that pursue evil ends never quit or even slow down unless forced by those who represent the good, and there just doesn’t seem to be any real opposition to the evil that is taking over the country. 

• The 10th Amendment has been effectively abandoned. This was one of the primary means of keeping the federal government under control, but since the people of the country have allowed their government to invalidate the concept at almost every level for over 100 years (including and especially the 16th Amendment), getting it back is essentially a lost cause. Further, blue states are not interested in getting it back - they love a large, centralized authority - leaving only the red states to push for decentralization. Even if the conservative majority of those states began pushing back (unlikely), they’d have a real uphill battle against all the entrenched interests, from corporations down to every individual recipient of a government check. And people will fight to defend their Obama Bucks like a mamma grizzly will defend her cubs. 

• The regulations that have been adopted by our governments at all levels for over 100 years are so extensive and so pervasive as to be impossible to alter significantly. It would take a cataclysm, such as a large asteroid hitting Earth, to be able to shake up those entrenched bureaucracies. Like Rome in its final years, just who, exactly, is going to make it better? Even “the people,” rising up in mass anger, could not reverse what has accumulated for so long. In addition to repealing the 16th Amendment and significantly reducing federal funding, we would have to strip the executive branch of most of its alphabet agencies. Entrenched agencies. Good luck with that. 

• The outcome of our political process is entirely dependent on the voting habits of the people of the country, both locally and nationally. Those habits are primarily cultural in nature, a product of the values, customs and knowledge of the people, and they are moving further away from our original American ideals every year. Today they are at the tipping point (and arguably beyond), and these voting patterns may have already become a permanent feature of our country. It will take a wholesale change in those patterns to enable our society to ever have a chance to move back towards a country that values true individual rights.

• Those of us who are angry at what is happening to our country are not rising to the occasion, and our response has been insufficient. We should be doing what the Egyptians and Ukrainians did, but all we got was a one-day march on DC by a bunch of old farts and some street-corner protests, many of which I participated in. It was fun, but what if they gave a protest and nobody cared? If we can’t even keep Obama from being reelected, what difference, at this point, does it make? 

• Given the type of government we have (a representative republic), the only hope of effecting real change is dependent entirely on replacing a super-majority of elected officials with people dedicated to the cause of freedom, who will have the courage to fundamentally change America back into a free country. We would effectively need a 2/3 majority of Tea Party-type people in the House and Senate, and a Tea Party president (and probably at all levels of state government also), all of whom are hell-bent on fixing the country. And, as I said previously, we would also need to repeal the 16th Amendment. Yeah, like any of that is ever going to happen. The “people” are the ones electing the same politicians to office, including Obama, and barring some event that will cause them to suddenly change their minds en masse about what type of people they want leading this country, nothing will change. 

• Illegal immigrants are pouring into our country and our government has adopted a position of clemency towards them (Obama is actively importing them). It is angling to eventually confer amnesty and to make them citizens, with the right to vote. This will give the Democrats a decades-long majority across the country, ensuring Democrat dominance of governments at all levels. Add to that the increasingly poor and dependent (on government) Americans, who almost all vote Democrat to ensure the continued provision of entitlements and handouts. And the Republicans are happy to go along with all of this.

If my arguments do not convince you that to fight to regain our freedoms is truly a lost cause, then I am happy to hear any rational arguments against this position. But - just having hope and somehow feeling that it can’t be a completely lost cause, that there “has to be a way,” or that you just “have faith” in the American people doesn’t work. I need reasons - real reasons - based on the actual political and sociological (including demographic) dynamics of our country today, and on valid political and psychological theory.

You also need to have a plan of action that is feasible. Just saying we should educate the people, or teach our children better, or elect better people to government at all levels/run for government yourself just does not cut the mustard. These admonitions are all too general, and unfortunately these are all I ever see in articles from our highest thinkers on the subject. 

If you want to get an idea about how to oppose totalitarianistic governments, read this article: http://smallthoughts.com/blog/permalink/0188.html. It is long and detailed in a way that few others are (at least not that I have found yet). However, it doesn’t diverge outside of the theme of “fighting back.” That’s all well and good, but if you read the rest of my articles, you will find me trying to get outside of the box we are in, and attempting to assess all the possibilities before us. This is only possible if your assessment is that the fight is essentially futile, which, to my knowledge, is uniquely mine. 

Now, I know that if Rush were to read this article he would stand firmly against it. He would certainly say that it’s the wrong attitude to have towards our circumstances and that we must stand and fight! I often wonder though, with his intelligence, he does not seem to have a better grasp on this question. 

I know he’s busy defending freedom and mocking our opponents (which is all good fun), but can he not see that the cards have already been dealt? Why can’t he put this all together, and conclude as I have that it is a lost cause? I know he doesn’t want to believe it, but that is merely an emotional position, and I know that Rush is much more rational than that. Unfortunately, he cannot elucidate an answer to this issue, which is evidence, I believe, in favor of my position. He simply refuses to integrate the facts as I have stated in this article. 

And, you might say that I have simply bought into the Democrat lies, that I am doing exactly what they would want me to do, and that I am giving up needlessly. Sorry - if anybody knows better than that, it is I, the person who spent two years writing a book called “The Two-State Solution for America.” In which nobody was interested. I have learned from my experience, and it has forced me to confront certain realities, which is what this blog is all about. I’ve presented you the facts - now  you tell me where I am wrong. 

My position is basically that I want to live in a WORLD WITHOUT LIBERALS. That’s it, and no less. I want to live in some place, somewhere, somehow, where liberals do not have enough political clout to make a difference in my life. I also want a world where our laws can be reset to that of our original constitution (minus the part about blacks being only three-fifths of a human being), and it can then be reinforced to account for all the depredations that have been placed on it since then. 

And also to prevent future depredations by anybody, liberal or conservative. My book was an attempt to design such a world within the confines of our country. In it the country would be reorganized into two sets of states - red and blue, naturally - and each would be in charge of their own domestic laws. There would still be a federal government, but it would be relegated to the very few functions that James Madison designed for it in the first place. This arrangement would allow the people on both the left and the right to live apart from each other and govern themselves how they like, without interfering with their political opposites. All this, and without secession. 

But I learned that that is a bridge to nowhere for the vast majority of people in our country, and they would rather just live with the status quo. And in this, there is basically one choice: you can either choose to fight the evil that is taking over our country, or you can simply accept it as a fact, and learn to live your life around it. 

If you continue to fight, good for you. It may be useless in the end, but you might delay the onset of real totalitarianism. If you just accept it for what it is, that’s fine too, but you get to live with the consequences. 

There is another choice, however, and that is to seek alternatives outside of the current arrangement. This one requires courage and dedication to seeking a better life under better conditions, to attempt another, better version of America. That is what my other articles attempt to explain. 

But I am sick and tired of the left in our country, and all their lies and deviousness, and their intent to subvert and destroy all that is good in humanity, all for the purpose of gaining control and domination. It is a sickness I want to flee, and I am so fed up with it that it has motivated me to spend years thinking about what else - anything else - that can be done to get away from them, and to be able to live somewhere without liberals. Fleeing evil is not dishonorable - Ayn Rand did it, and went on to write one of the greatest fiction novels in history - Atlas Shrugged. 

And finally, no, you don’t have to love the Obombanation - but I appreciate it for what it has done for me - it helped me to see the light regarding the future of America. It is obvious to me now, as it never was, that we are on course towards some sort of socialist society, and that we cannot stop it. 

This is extremely important to know because it has taught me to not worry about it, because, if it is truly beyond your control to do anything about it, then why worry? And why fight it? Why invest your time, money and emotions in it when you are not going to affect the outcome? (See this article to learn more about that). 

So what should we do? What is the recommendation for freedom loving people if we can’t stop the juggernaut? The goal of these essays, then, is to understand where we are headed, and to be able to act accordingly. If our leftward movement is inevitable, why spend your capital fighting it? Why not put your time and money towards preparing for the current realities as best you can, or, better yet, to seeking out alternate solutions?

Read on. 

Copyright notice: All the articles in this blog are written by and copyrighted by Thomas M. Kempf, unless otherwise noted. You may link to, copy, use and disseminate these essays in any non-profit capacity so long as the copyright notice and the following links are included.  www.ttssfa.com  and:

http://givinguponamerica.blogspot.jp/p/introduction-to-my-blog-giving-up-on.html