America's Progressive Democrats Have Adandoned the Constitutional Compact and Ignore the Need for Virtuous Liberty

THE REAL NEWS TODAY IS THE DEMOCRATS HAVEN'T CHANGED. The Republican Party and its congressional leadership must not give in to the siren song of Progressive Democrats running from their responsibility for the terrorist-style political violence battering America by making nice speeeches, while they remain determined to bring down President Trump and the GOP. • Let's put a little historical perspective on what's goingon. • • • AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO FIND A SOLUTION TO POLITICAL VIOLENCE. Among them is David French, a lawyer and well-known writer at National Review. French wrote on Wednesday about the attack on Republicans : "We protect free speech because it’s powerful, but with power comes responsibility. If the initial reports from Virginia are true (a big “if”), America may have just witnessed a textbook example of lone-wolf progressive terrorism. According to multiple news reports, the man who opened fire on a baseball field full of Republican lawmakers and staffers this morning was James T. Hodgkinson. He was an outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter who, according to his local paper, belonged to a potpourri of anti-Republican and anti-Trump Facebook groups, including ones with names such as 'Terminate the Republican Party' and 'The Road to Hell is paved with Republicans.' Moreover, before opening fire, he reportedly asked whether the players on the field were Republicans or Democrats." • We may safely tell David French that the stories coming out of the Virginia shooting were "true," although his #NeverTrump conservatism would not make it easy for him to accept. In January 2016, French said that he would vote for Donald Trump if he were the Republican nominee, then changed his mind and said he would not vote for Trump. Bill Kristol, a leader of the Stop Trump movement, named French as his choice to run for President as an independent conservative candidate to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Trump. French later said he had strongly considered running, but ultimately decided that he didn't have the name recognition and financial support to mount a viable campaign. • Got it?? Okay, now let's consider what French said following the terrorist-style shooting of Republican members of Congress on Wednesday. French began with Gabby Giffords : "Those of us who remember the terrible shooting of Gabby Giffords in Tucson are familiar with the political exploitation of tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of that attack, before any of the meaningful facts were known, many on the political Left issued a clarion call for “civility” in the same breath as they began blaming conservative rhetoric. (It was Sarah Palin’s fault for “targeting” Giffords for electoral defeat. It was the Tea Party’s fault for employing inflammatory anti-Obama rhetoric.) It later emerged that Giffords’s shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was a paranoid-schizophrenic conspiracy theorist, and he was initially judged unfit to stand trial. His political views were all over the map. Loughner was the wrong poster boy for alleged conservative terrorism. But though the Left might have been wrong about him, it was still right about one thing: Political speech can inspire violence." • Are we to assume that French believes the GOP and conservative Trump supporters inspired Wednesday's violence?? French should look at the Trump hate pouring from Hodgkinson's Facebook entries. French is playing to his readers because they, like he, are mostly #Never Trump-ers. • BUT, French finally made a good point : "Conservatives are correct to perceive that the present-day political environment is full of toxic anti-Republican rhetoric and symbolism. French mentions all the usual suspects -- Kathy Griffin with Donald Trump’s severed head, a mock execution of Trump in Shakespeare in the Park, internet debates about when it’s acceptable to “punch a fascist.” Even "otherwise respectable politicians" accuse Republican lawmakers of killing people by repealing Obamacare." That is a Pelosi line -- can French possibly label Nancy Pelosi as an "otherwise respectable politician"? • David French's solution is to turn to "virtue,"quoting Edmund Burke and John Adams. Starting with the truism that people are still responsible for their actions, French writes :"Absent virtue, liberty can lead to disorder. In the face of that disorder, however, we shouldn’t restrict liberty; we should rebuild virtue." Enter Burke and Adams on ordered liberty, interpreted by David French : "Edmund Burke famously and correctly argued that 'the only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them.' When John Adams insisted that 'our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people' and that 'it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,' he was getting at the same point." • • • I can verify the John Adams quotation. It is often quoted when discussing the foundations of American constitutional republicanism. As for the Burke quotation, I don't recall it and tried to find it, and I have failed -- but one of my dear readers is a Burke scholar, and perhaps he will enlighten us. • • • BURKE AND OTHERS ON LIBERTY AND VIRTUE. Edmund Burke said many things about the relationship between liberty and vitrue : "What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." • "Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist." • "It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist." -- "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsel of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." • Other political philosophers have suggested that a virtuous culture must exist as a prerequisite for liberty. Benjamin Franklin stated that "only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." James Madison likewise declared : "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea." • • • THE HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF LIBERTY. Philosophers from earliest times have considered the question of liberty. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD) wrote of "a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed." • Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) said : "a free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do" (Leviathan, Part 2, Ch. XXI). • John Locke (1632–1704) rejected Hobbes's definition of liberty. According to Locke : "In the state of nature, liberty consists of being free from any superior power on Earth. People are not under the will or lawmaking authority of others but have only the law of nature for their rule. In political society, liberty consists of being under no other lawmaking power except that established by consent in the commonwealth....Thus, freedom is not 'A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws.' Freedom is constrained by laws in both the state of nature and political society. Freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the lawmaking power established in it. Persons have a right or liberty to (1) follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and (2) not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others." • • • THE SOCIAL COMPACT. The social contract -- or compact -- theory, formulated by Hobbes, John Locke and Rousseau (and, first suggested by Plato in The Republic), was one of the first political theories to provide a political classification of rights instead of obligations. The thinkers of the 18th centruy Enlightenment reasoned that law governed both heavenly and human affairs, and that law gave the king his power, rather than the king's power giving force to law. Later, in the 19th century, in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill defined the "...nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual," and he described an inherent and continuous antagonism between liberty and authority and raised the question that has prevailed ever since -- "how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control." • • • WHAT IS LIBERTY? Reading the following commentaries, we will conclude that David Franch is right that virtue is what is missing in America today, but he is wrong to think it can be created out of political compromise -- it must live in the sinews and souls of the American people, and that is where the problem lies. • Every discussion of freedom depends of three key components : who is free, what are they free to do, and what forces restrict their freedom. • Burke expressed his support for the grievances of the American Colonies under the government of King George III and his appointed representatives. On 19 April 1774, Burke made a speech, "On American Taxation," on a motion in Parliament to repeal the tea duty : "Again and again, revert to your old principles -- seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself....Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it.... Do not burthen them with taxes.... But if intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern...you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question.... If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body of men will be argued into slavery." • On 22 March 1775, in the House of Commons, Burke delivered a speech on reconciliation with America. Burke appealed for peace as preferable to civil war and reminded the House of America's growing population, its industry, and its wealth. He warned against the notion that the Americans would back down in the face of force, since most Americans were of British descent : "But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation -- the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience....In this character of Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole...this fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth... [the] men [are] acute, inquisitive, dextrous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources...." • In his definitive "Reflections on the Revolution in France"(1790) that reflects today's American Progressives, Burke wrote that he saw liberty as something within the law and not as an excuse to do whatever one would like....He believed that the revolutionaries would find themselves further in trouble. Their actions would cause more problems. The revolutionaries, in his opinion, did not understand that “there are no rights without corresponding duties, or without some strict qualifications.” • In Burke's last publications, the Letters on a Regicide Peace (October 1796), written when William Pitt's government was negotiating for peace with revolutionary France, Burke regarded this peace as appeasement, injurious to national dignity and honour. Burke wrote of the French Revolutionary Government : "Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The State is all in all. Everything is referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The State has dominion and conquest for its sole objects -- dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms." This statement by Edmund Burke is regarded as the first explanation of the modern concept of the totalitarian state. Burke regarded the war with France as ideological, against an "armed doctrine" -- for Burke, the war was not against France, but against the revolutionaries governing her. Burke said: "It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France." • • • WHAT IS IN THE SINEWS AND SOULS OF DEMOCRAT LEADERS AS THEY ATTACK TRUMP AND THE MAJORITY OF AMERICA? • Kathy Griffin ‘Beheads’ Trump in a despicably graphic photo. • Madonna says : “I’ve thought a lot about blowing up the White House.” • Snoop Dogg “Shoots” Trump in the head in a music video. • Robert De Niro says of Trump : “I’d like to punch him in the face.” • Joss Whedon said : “I want a rhino to f*ck Paul Ryan to death.” • Shakespeare in the Park cqst stabs ‘Trump’ to death in a performance of "Julius Caesar," and American taxpayers paid for it. • HBO's David Simon said : ““If Donald Trump fires Robert Mueller and is allowed to do so, pick up a goddamn brick. That’s all that’s left to you.” • Mickey Rourke threatened to beat Trump with a baseball bat, adding : “He can suck my f*cking d*ck. I’ll meet him in a hotel room any motherf*cking day of the week and give him a Louisville slugger. Kiss my motherf*cking ass you b*tch punk c***sucker.” • Actress Lea DeLaria threatened to ‘Take Out’ Republicans and Independents with a baseball bat after Trump won : “[O]r pick up a baseball bat and take out every f*cking Republican and Independent I see, adding the hashtags “#f*cktrump,” “#f*cktheGOP,” #f*ckstraightwhiteamerica” and “#f*ckyourprivilege.” • Rappers YG and Nipsy Hussle released a song during the 2016 presidential campaign called “F*ck Donald Trump,” with lyrics that contained several threats toward the then-candidate : “I like white folks, but I don’t like you/All the n*ggas in the hood wanna fight you/Surprised El Chapo ain’t tried to snipe you/Surprised the Nation of Islam ain’t tried to find you/Have a rally out in L.A., we gon’ f*ck it up,” You vote Trump then you’re prolly on dope/And if your ass do win, you gon’ prolly get smoked." They compalined when their record label was contacted by the Secret Service. • Marilyn Manson killed ‘Trump’ in a music video released right around Election Day, showing the shock rocker standing over the lifeless body of a man resembling Donald Trump while ripping pages out of a Bible. In a flash, a man wearing a suit and a red tie -- a not-so-subtle allusion to Trump -- is seen decapitated on the ground in a pool of blood. “It’s about the desperate acts of people who believe something that is preached by an unbeliever,” Manson told the Daily Beast of the explicit visuals in the video. • Rapper Everlast warned Trump: “I Will Punch You in Your F*cking Face" in an interview with Billboard in April 2016 : “F*ck that dude. I’ll smack that f*cker’s comb-over right off his f*cking scalp,” he said. “Like, for real, if I met Donald Trump, I’d punch him in his f*cking face. And that’s not a joke. Even if he did become president -- watch out, Donald Trump, because I will punch you in your f*cking face if I ever meet you. Secret Service had better just f*cking be on it. Don’t let me anywhere within a block. This is horrible.” • Former late-night host and Daily Show contributor Larry Wilmore joked about suffocating Trump during a segment on his Comedy Central show The Nightly Show : “Anyway, since we’re talking about bigotry, we have to mention Donald Trump,” Wilmore said. “Sorry everyone, I don’t wont to give him any more oxygen. That’s not a euphemism by the way; I mean it literally. Somebody get me the pillow they used to kill Scalia, and I’ll do it. I’ll do it!” Wilmore then proceeded to demonstrate what suffocating Trump to death might look like, before adding: “I could get in trouble for that, actually!” • In February, Colbert’s Late Show on CBS featured a segment that depicted Trump aide Stephen Miller being attacked in different scenes from cable TV shows. The segment included Miller being beaten by The Walking Dead‘s Negan and his spiked bat, and ended with the Trump aide’s head superimposed onto a spike in a parody of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Colbert has since upped his anti-Trump rhetoric, and he came under fire in May when he said during his show that Trump’s mouth is only good for being Vladimir Putin’s “c*ck holster.” • In a tweet in February, the comedian and vocal leftist activist suggested the US military could join the anti-Trump “resistance” and help overthrow the President, tweeting : “WAKE UP & JOIN THE RESISTANCE. ONCE THE MILITARY IS W US FASCISTS GET OVERTHROWN. MAD KING & HIS HANDLERS GO BYE BYE.” Silverman was one of Senator Bernie Sanders’ earliest celebrity supporters. • • • I APOLOGIZE FOR THE VULGARITY. But, we need to know the Progressive Democrat side of America -- the side that hates Trump and all of us who support him. There is no such vulgarity on the conservatice GOP side of America, and it undoubtedly is a consequence of the conservative embrace of the virtues of Christianity, whether as a religious commitment or as a moral imperative. • • • NEWT'S ADVICE SOUNDS LOGICAL. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox News on Wednesday that Republicans would do well to study Attorney Jeff Sessions' testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee : "He was angry; he was direct. He took on the left head on, and he raised the right emotional tone." Gingrich warned that Republicans need to realize that "this is a real war, the left wants to destroy them, and being passive and being slow doesn't count." Pointing to Sessions' comments that accusing him of colluding with Russians was a "detestable lie," Republicans would do well to follow his tone and intensity, said Gingrich : "If every Republican could learn the tone and the intensity and every time a Democrat attacks them on healthcare, [they could] turn and say wait a second, you passed Obamacare, you destroyed the insurance system, you left millions of people without coverage. How can you even talk to us when you haven't got the guts to reform anything?" • Gingrich was echoing both Edmund Burke and John Adams when he said : "One of the great problems facing Republicans is that they come out of a culture where they think we are going to be reasonable. The other side is in the Super Bowl with full pads coming straight at you to knock you on your butt," but, said Newt, Republicans are answering : "Gee, this really isn't very nice." • • • DEAR READERS, Representative Steve Scalise remains in critical condition and faces multiple surgeries. Second Amendment Foundation founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb says : “When liberal leftists support the assassination of President Trump on stage what do you expect to happen. Hate speech and actions incite this kind of violence. It is time for Democrats like Representatives Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi, Senator Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and many of the talking heads at CNN and MSNBC to shut up.” • Earlier this month, bricks were hurled and a gas bottle thrown at police officers who were trying to quell the violence between groups of demonstrators both supporting and opposing President Trump when they converged in downtown Portland, Oregon. Police arrested at least 14 people and confiscated various weapons, including a knife, brass knuckles and a homemade slingshot used to launch balloons with a foul-smelling liquid, Fox 12 reported. Fresno State University Professor Lars Maischak wrote on his Twitter account shortly after the President took office : “To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better.” Then, the 'professor' tweeted : “Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?” In February, a teacher reportedly told her English class at Campana High School in California that she lost a $100 bet because President Trump had not been shot on Inauguration Day. • This hate-filled politics of the Progressive Democrat Left has consequences. Representative Rodney Davis (R-NY) told CNN shortly after Scalise's shooting : “I believe that there’s such a hatefulness in what we see in American politics and policy discussions right now -- and social media and the 24-hour news cycle. This has got to stop." • Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh accused the liberal mainstream media of radicalizing James Hodgkinson, the man suspected of shooting House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and four others on Wednesday. Limbaugh pointed out Hodgkinson had made it very clear that he hated President Donald Trump. Limbaugh did not mince words : "I have been worried for quite a while about the cumulative effect or impact of this constant anti-Trump hysteria everywhere in mainstream media : New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC," Limbaugh told listeners. It's hysteria. It's lies. It's things that are completely manufactured about Trump personally, about Trump and Russia, about climate change, about any number of things. "I have been very concerned about what all of this is doing to the average, base Democrat voter. I have sensed them getting more and more fringe and imbalanced, and the evidence for it is everywhere in the things that they tweet. They openly promote violence, and advocate some of the most despicable things happening to their political enemies. The hatred is raw, it is undiluted, it's just savage. These are the mainstream of the Democrat base, and I don't have any doubt that they are being radicalized." • The majority of Americans are angry about not only the hateful political rhetoric, but the aggressive Democrat push to destroy President Trump with congressional hearings and legal tricks that the majority Republican leadership seems unable or unwilling to counter. They see their country being ripped apart by undemocratic forces that they see nobody trying to stop, while they recall a GOP frozen into inaction as the ProgDem Obama administration broke laws and disregarded the Constitution. For example, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the Trump probe, headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller, now includes a litigator who has been reprimanded for obstruction in past cases. He and another new member of Mueller's team reportedly also donated thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates. GOP Congressman Sean Duffy told Fox News : "This seems more like an effort to prosecute Donald Trump. What the hell are we investigating?" noting that ex-FBI chief James Comey testified that there is no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. "Why are we going through with this charade?" • Despite Nancy Pelosi's we-are-friends posturing on the floor of the House on Wednesday, she managed to insinuate in the same speech that the GOP has no women on its baseball team. Experts warn that the divide will only get wider. And, we can be sure that the ProgDems and the MSM will find a way to blame us Republicans and President Trump for their own violent politics and its consequences. • Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Tuesday before the shooting : "Today we have a White House under siege. The new DOJ criminal investigation that the president is no doubt the subject of will attempt to discover whether he corruptly attempted to interfere with the work of an independent FBI and whether he attempted to bribe its then-director. The White House is also the subject of five congressional investigations involving the Russians and the 2016 election, the firing of Director Comey, and the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions from much of this. And the investigation of Clinton is back from the grave for a third time to determine whether she was exonerated because of a lack of evidence, a lack of will or an Obama political imperative. These are perilous times for men and women of goodwill and intellectual honesty who are charged with enforcing our laws and running the government. The government should not be terrifying. But it must be fair and transparent. And it must always enjoy the consent of the governed. For without that consent, it is illegitimate." • All roads lead back to Burke and Adams. There can be no ordered liberty in a free society unless there is a common and widely-held understanding of what constitutes virtue. General Douglas MacArthur said : "History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster." • And, although he never met any of them, Edmund Burke seems to have understood America's current Progressive Democrats pretty well. So, let's give Burke, the father of conservatism, the final word : "Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing."