Category Archives: Political Philosophy

Beck Breakthrough?

Constitution, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, IMMIGRATION, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Liberty, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Republicans

In his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck touched today on the differences between Republican and Democrat progressives vis-a-vis foreign policy. This was the closest Beck, the unambiguously pro-war, military-booster came to examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via war) the founders would have abhorred.

“The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.”

Militias are what the founders bequeathed, not mammoth standing armies.

Beck came close to articulating what readers of this space have been reading and imbibing for years. Warring for Democracy is the Republicans’ homage to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism; nation-building abroad is how the Democrats prefer to honor his “legacy.”

Beck quotes Thomas Jefferson a lot, as he should. But ideological wars like Iraq, unequivocally backed by Beck, belong to the Jacobin—not Jeffersonian—tradition.

I thought I heard Beck quote the 1821 words of secretary of state John Quincy Adams (the 2nd part of the program is not yet on YouTube): “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

If not Adams, Beck recited another founder’s exhortation against empire.

The next step for Beck is to reject the recreational wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan with the support of his ilk, and espouse a foreign policy compatible with limited authority and republican virtues. You can’t embrace small government at home and big government abroad. The last Republicans are in the habit of euphemizing as a “strong national defense.”

The beauty of Beck is in his goodness. The fact that at times he says remarkably confused things doesn’t change this.

Here are some glaring mistakes Beck made in today’s program. (Continued below.)

He declared that if Americans knew about the Progressives and their creeping, clandestine agenda, they’d reject it.

It all goes back to immigration, mis-education; the changing face of America, and general rot. A few guns and G-d types may reject the “conservative socialism” (progressivism) in which we are mired based on a visceral feel for the principles of the founding. But most Americans I talk to are clueless—and even hostile to the founding ideas. So let Glenn not presume that progressivism is not in the DNA of a changing America. Once the country is 50 percent Third World, Glenn might as well be talking to the hand.

LOST IN TRANSLATION. After bemoaning how Progressives, having infiltrated America’s institutions, have toiled to alter the meaning of the Constitution, Glenn proposed his own revisionism: rewrite the Federalist Papers so that Americans, whom Glenn insist are never dumb, can understand these brilliant, but difficult, debates.

“Writing In The Age Of The Idiot”:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’ That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be ‘a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.'”

Updated: Coakley’s Corrupt! What About Journalism?

Democrats, Ethics, Etiquette, IlanaMercer.com, Intelligence, Journalism, Liberty, Media, Political Philosophy, Private Property

WE KNOW that Attorney General Martha Coakley, who lost Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, is at the very least philosophically corrupt. But what about the said omissions of those who’re supposed to check the “lady” and her posse? I mean the roving citizen journalists, endeavoring to expose her?

I watched the hereunder YouTube clip twice. Perhaps I missed something but, as far as I could see (and hear), nowhere did the “journalist” filming the Coakley goons’ crass conduct articulate for her viewers why they ought to be furious at the conduct of these fascistic public servants.

WATCH the clip. What lessons for citizens does it impart? How does this YouTube snippet help, or even convey, the cause of liberty? The answers to these questions: “Nada” to the first; “it doesn’t” to the second. Not unless you consider being polite and not calling journalists Nazis as contributions to liberty and freedom.

Goons say to journalist, “You are on private property.” Journalist replies softly, “We want some questions answered,” “Why so rude?,” and, “We’re on a public sidewalk.”

Unless “journalist” is able to append a principled tag to her gritty clip, the Democrat mafia appears merely impolite.

THE SHORT, SWEET instructive reply to these fattened fascists would have been this: “You are NOT on private property but on public, taxpayer-funded property. You and Coakley are civil servants, beholden to the public who pays your way.”

What service do you perform as a putative journalist if you cannot convey the only philosophical truth the viewer ought to take away from this snippet? None, as I am sure a Democrat journalist could easily film similar infractions.

All this journalist has done is add a tit to the other side’s tat.

I grow impatient with the “Age of the Idiot” activist. Resources such as this blog and its companion site, ilanamercer.com, can help the corrupt and the clueless (with attribution please) become acquainted with the now “defunct foundations of the republic.”

But to take instruction, one has to have courage and humility. Dream on, ilana.

Update (Jan. 24): Say the Democrat Party paid for the offices of this candidate. Is this property then accessible only to a select portion of the public? Was Coakley seeking to represent some constituents to the exclusion of others? At the very least, journalists ought to be able to pose such question, when a politician’s brown shirts turn them away from said premises on the grounds that the offices from which a candidate is operating are walled off from the individuals she is endevoring to represent.

What do you say?

Updated: The Democracy Über-Alles Crowd

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Journalism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Pat Buchanan:

“Query: If democracy, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, brings to power parties and politicians who, for reasons religious, racial or historic, detest the ‘white, rich Western world,’ why are we pushing democracy in these regions?

Our forefathers were not afflicted with this infantile disorder. John Winthrop, whose ‘city on a hill’ inspired Ronald Reagan, declared that, among civil nations, ‘a democracy is … accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.’

‘Remember, democracy never lasts long,’ said Adams. ‘It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’

Added Jefferson, ‘A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.’ Madison agreed: ‘Democracy is the most vile form of government.'”

[SNIP]

Homework: Make a list of all the pundits who persist in promoting the exportation of democracy. Unless it’s Willie Kristol, Ann Coulter, etc., provide links. Let’s out the Democracy Über-Alles Crowd.

Update (Jan. 15): In the above, as yet unheeded homework, I meant to include the neoliberals too. Out the bums who advocate wars for peace and/or nation-building expeditions.