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From Under The Rubble
January 8, 2014
Why Can't We Just Leave?
by Christopher Manion
fitzgerald griffin foundation
FRONT ROYAL, VA — "The problem our nation faces is very much like a marriage in which one partner has an established pattern of ignoring and breaking the marital vows."
So writes Walter Williams, one of the world's most sensible economists. But don't hold that against him: he's also a realist.
When the offending partner will not reform, he says, the time has come for a divorce:
Our nation is at a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative.
The only "peaceable" alternative?
Yes: all the others are violent. Williams might applaud a campaign that would successfully persuade petty tyrants to turn their SWAT tanks into ploughshares, but that isn't going to happen.
All of our political institutions have profoundly violated the constitutional principle of limits on power. It doesn't matter which party is in charge.
His critique is on target. All of our political institutions have profoundly violated the constitutional principle of limits on power. It doesn't matter which party is in charge.
Without a profound break with the tyrannical trajectory, we will either be further enslaved or we will be fighting in the streets (which, by the way, is why they have those tanks).
Without a profound break with the tyrannical trajectory, we will either be further enslaved or we will be fighting in the streets (which, by the way, is why they have those tanks).
Slavery or violence? Williams rejects both options. We should go our separate ways, he says — literally — and "find a way to peaceably separate into states whose citizens respect liberty and the Constitution."
We have said that Dr. Williams is a realist. Is this proposal for real?
Your devoted Rubbler doubts it. Rather, always the teacher, Professor Williams is rubbing the face of the Left in their own pathetic, pandering rhetoric.
The liberal Peanut Gallery gaggles pleasant paeans to diversity, but they are totalitarians at heart.
"If you believe in diversity, well, prove it," Williams says.
He knows they are lying. They would never let us leave without a fight — there'd be no sheep left to shear. There'd be no one left to blame for their abysmal failures. And no more other people whose money would pay their bills.
But there's a deeper reason, and it comes with a warning:
At the Last Judgment, Christ will separate the sheep from the goats.In the meantime, we can't.
Like Augustine, Williams knows that the powerful temptation to the lust for power is inescapable. If we "separated" today, that temptation would arise anew in whatever freedom-loving, "constitutional" republics we formed.
Our Founding Fathers knew that all too well. They "separated" from England, all right — and it wasn't peaceful. But that didn't solve the problem of tyranny: aspiring tyrants just changed hats.
The Founders recognized that the lust for power was the greatest threat to liberty in our young republic — and it is a threat that comes from within.
Since Augustine, western man has recognized the fundamental principle of limits on power. Those limits are as unique to Christendom as they are essential.
The purpose of life is salvation, Augustine taught, and government can't save your soul. Yet that is man's highest goal: so government must be subordinate to it.
But government is necessary. It must provide the foundation of peace, order, justice, and liberty, all of which man needs in order to work out his salvation.
Those limits also apply to the desires of man as well. As Aristotle observed, before he can rule others, man must rule himself. Today's tawdry tyrants can't do that so long as they continue to wallow in narcissism, self-indulgence, and denial.
And then comes Augustine's warning.
Like Williams, many of us would like to send the tyrants and their enablers into the wilderness, out there in the Land of Nod with the murderous Cain.
But who among us is so without sin that he can show them the door?
And who's to decide who's the tyrant? After all, no politician I know runs on a platform that says, "I'm a power-hungry, egoistic, greedy liar and I want to tell you what to do with your life."
Well, almost no politician I know.
Augustine understood power. The lust for power, the libido dominandi, is the deepest perversion of the will. It is the sin of Satan, who is the Prince of this World and the leader of the City of Man.
As Aristotle observed, before he can rule others, man must rule himself. Today's tawdry tyrants can't do that so long as they continue to wallow in narcissism, self-indulgence, and denial.
That City is very crowded. But it has no fences. People can change their hearts, and change sides, at will.
Yes, Satan's followers in the Earthly City — fallen angels and men alike — are consumed by the desire for power over their equals.
Members of the City of God, on the other hand, are united by love, not geography. Citizens of this Heavenly City can never be "separated out" from the City of Man and given their own states, because they too are fallen, and power lust will follow them there and tempt them ceaselessly – the way it did in our young republic, in which, today, the libido dominandi is the price of admission into the ruling elites.
To separate the saints from the sinners here on earth is the Manichaean dream. From the Communist ideology to "American Exceptionalism," it confers upon the anointed the authority to defy limits — all for a noble cause, of course.
The tyrant always tells his victims that "it's for your own good."
We can be "forced to be free" after all.
As Solzhenitsyn observed, falsehood always brings violence in its wake. Today Americans are gasping for breath, drowning in a sea of lies. As much as Professor Williams might welcome it, there is no "peaceable" way out. Where the lie rules, there can be no peace.
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From Under the Rubble is copyright © 2014 by Christopher Manion. All rights reserved.
Christopher Manion is Director of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae™, a project of the Bellarmine Forum. He served as a staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. He has taught in the departments of politics, religion, and international relations at Boston University, the Catholic University of America, and Christendom College. This column is sponsored by the Bellarmine Forum.
See a complete biographical sketch.
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