The Claremont Institute features an insightful review of Amity Shales book The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
The student of history, regardless of ideology, need only make a superficial comparison of how the United States operated 100 years ago and how it operates today to conclude that the two bear little resemblance to one another.
Why is that? If our country no longer operates as it was intended to, what went wrong?
This book and the review point out that the critical point at which the United States went off on a tangent was under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This excerpt illustrates how America has in the last century transformed from a nation of limited government and private freedom to one that has thrown aside constitutional limits and boundaries, and looks to government as the Great Provider:
The book focuses also on the transformation of another forgotten man, Wendell Willkie, the utility executive who became FDR's Republican challenger in 1940. Originally a New Deal sympathizer, Willkie grew disillusioned with its politics. By the presidential race, he called upon Roosevelt to "give up this vested interest that you have in depression" as the rationale for a "philosophy of distributed scarcity." Willkie was defeated in large part because Roosevelt's political revolution had succeeded, even if his economic one had failed. But Willkie had it right. FDR's political interests were deeply tied to continuing economic misery. His class-warfare rhetoric became self-fulfilling. The more the government failed, the more the people resented Big Business, and wanted Roosevelt to punish the "economic royalists." The longer the economy remained depressed, the more justifiable seemed the New Deal's permanent welfare state and its abandonment of federalism and other constitutional restraints on the federal establishment.
The abandonment of federalism. What is federalism and why is it important?
Federalism is a key doctrine upon which the United States was founded. You may recall that after the U.S. won it's independence from Great Britain, it was not simply one large area on the North American continent. It was made up of 13 colonies, or 13 states.
Federalism means that power and authority is shared between the central government of the United States and those states themselves. Both the central government and the state governments have separate and unique authorities. There is probably no clearer illustration of federalism than in the Tenth Amendment which says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Has the Tenth Amendment been repealed? Does our current situation reflect the intent and practice of the Tenth Amendment? Do the states have an autonomy and authority outside the central government of the United States? Or has our situation devolved to a point where the states simply handle the petty local matters that the federal government considers unworthy of it's attention?
Federalism and the Tenth Amendment were instituted at the foundation of our national government to restrain the central government and protect the freedom of the people and the states. If federalism is only a whispy illusion of what it once ones, what does that say for the security of our freedom?
Here's an interesting bit you probably didn't know:
Of course, FDR was no cruel dictator. But he saw nothing wrong with using the mechanisms and aesthetics of dictatorship in order to advance the Progressive transformation of the American state. Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that "what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way." That so many liberals today find that not only forgivable but laudable should tell us something about their ambition. After all, the FDR myth remains liberalism's most "usable past."
In other words, "Yeah, we weren't acting like like a free country. But it was for the people's own good."
The review also points to a Leftist behavior which is still the modus operandi today in quashing dissent to the "progressive" plan for America:
Nonetheless, as is often the case, the poetry gets us closer to the truth than the social science does. When liberals speak of unity and hope, what they really mean is success. The 1930s and 1960s, unlike the '20s and '50s, were decades when liberals, broadly speaking, were "winning." When you hear liberals bemoaning divisiveness and insisting that we must "get beyond" "labels" and "ideological" differences, what they are really saying is that their opponents should shut up and get with the program.
You can count on it: anytime you hear these calls for "civility" and "bipartisanship" and the lamentation of "divisiveness," know that liberals are telling conservatives (who typically honor the traditional design of the United States government) to shut up and let them be about the business of transforming our country into a socialist utopia.
This part of the review points to why FDR's New Deal was anti-American at it's very core:
Recommitting liberalism to the doctrine of a "living constitution" pioneered by Woodrow Wilson, the New Dealers believed that the Constitution could be reinterpreted on the fly, to create a new open-ended constitutionalism that depended not on texts, but on the will of those in charge of interpreting them. "I want to assure you," FDR's aide Harry Hopkins told an audience of New Deal activists in New York, "that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal."
When you take this attitude toward the constitution, you basically have no constitution. The very purpose of a constitution is to set down in writing the lawful parameters of your government and how it is supposed to act in relation to it's people. The very purpose of having a constitution is to prevent various and successive leaders from simply governing by what they feel at the moment is the best way to govern.
It might also be said that a constitution is a contract between a government and it's people. That contract outlines what the government can and cannot do; or in the case of our limited, enumerated government, by default it cannot do what is not expressly authorized. Since FDR, our leaders have blatantly been ignoring this contract. How would it make you feel if a friend or business associate ignored their part of a contract with you? How does it make you feel that your government has ignored its part of the "constitutional contract" with you?
The Founders built into our constitution in Article V a system for making any necessary changes to that document: the amendment process. It requires that 2/3 of Congress must approve a proposed amendment, and 3/4 of the states must ratify it. This prevents "government by whim," even popular whim. It protects the liberty of the people. And again, this specifically demonstrates that the constitution is not to be "reinterpreted" to fit the goals of current leadership.
Yet this is exactly what FRD did! And it is what congressmen and presidents and judges continue to do to this day!
I'll say it again: a constitution that is not firm and solid, relying on original intent, is not a constitution. It becomes merely a guidebook, a list of suggestions, something leaders can follow it it suits their purposes or ignore at will. Such a document provides little in the way of protecting the liberties of the American people.
FDR and Lyndon B. Johnson with his "Great Society" initiatives have done grave damage to the design of American government, and to the freedom and initiative of the American people. Their assault on the American form of government has continued under a number of other lesser minions over recent decades. At this point, it is uncertain whether this slide away from what our government was designed to be can be halted.
But if Americans want to preserve their freedom, if Americans want to keep a measure of independence from government, if Americans want their children and grandchildren to be free, they will have to rise up and demand an end to this blatant disregard for the Constitution. They will have to say "No" to the taxpayer-funded bribes foisted upon us by our own government every day.
If Americans want to preserve the last best hope of mankind in the world, they will have to soon tell their government, "Enough! Accountability starts with me!"
Technorati tags: Constitution, government, FDR, socialism, federalism
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