Mr. Beck, making a graphiphany (which is to bloggers as a theophany is to gods–but he’s been blogging even less than I have) refers to Reagan’s “morning in America” time as the Reagan Delusion, and goes on to comment on very recent politics:
This will never be voted away, and the idea that there is something valuable afoot in this threadbare charade in Massachusetts is as appalling a thing as anyone ever knew.
…to understand that the snow will never melt in your remaining lifetime.
We can always hope for a catastrophic collapse. (Hmm, does that now mean I have to register in South Carolina?) As the Rabbis of the Talmud said of the Messiah and the tumults they expected to precede and accompany His arrival, “May he come soon, and may I not be alive to see it!”
I’m not quite as pessimistic as Beck is, but I also don’t think that America was as ever quite so much the shining land of freedom he seems to believe in. This isn’t because of slavery or any of the other stuff leftists use to throw mud on the image of 19th century America. I say that because I don’t think the principles of individual liberty were ever truly core beliefs of much of American society, and certainly not of American politics and government. The document produced in Philadelphia in 1787 proves that by itself: this was the product of a movement to make as strong a central government as was possible back then.
The tendency to strong government was disguised for over a century by the existence of the frontier. If, at anytime in the 19th century, you didn’t like the political setup in your local area, if you thought that the powers that be had too much power over you, you could always choose the option of moving to a relatively unsettled area where government strictures were either non existent or much more tenous. Go West, Young Man! and Middle Aged Man, and Young Woman and Middle Aged Woman. Even, in some cases, Old Man and Old Woman. You could find your own property and build your life there, if you chose. (And it should be noted that the very fact that someone chooses to migrate, absent the threats of war, major famine, etc, whether to a frontier area or to a new country, is itself a sign that they have more than the usual motivation to succeed at the business of living, in contrast to the folks who were content with things as they were and stayed behind.) I don’t think it’s an accident that the West seems to hold more firmly to the principles of liberty and individual responsibility than the East, as a sort of cultural inheritance.
(Yes, California is in the West, but it was after all a Spanish colony and then a part of Mexico, and when American settlers (meaning mostly forty-niners at the start) came, they weren’t dealing with politically virgin territory.)
