“What on earth is happening to the USA?”

Carolyn Hileman - The Voice | July 18, 2009

During the last 30 years we Americans have been so politically divided
that some of us have called this left-right, liberal-conservative split a
“culture war” or even a “second Civil War.” These descriptions are no Longer
accurate. The precise, technical word for what is happening in the United
States today is revolution.

Because of our country’s history, we tend to think of revolutions as
military conflicts, and of the revolutionaries as the good guys; the image of
Minutemen fighting valiantly against the British forces at Lexington and
Concord lies deep within our DNA. But sometimes-quite often,
actually-revolutions aren’t military conflicts, and the good guys are the
ones trying to keep
the revolution from happening. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed
chancellor of Germany by its elected president; he would spend The next
two years consolidating his power with the legislative connivance of his
political allies in the Reichstag. In October 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks
took control of Russia from Kerensky and his Social Democrats-who had
overthrown the Czar earlier that year-entirely through parliamentary
maneuvering
in Russia’s fledgling Duma.

What defines a revolution-and this is the crucial point to grasp-is that
when it’s over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws,
but its operating system.

Since most of us think of computers when we hear the phrase “operating
system” let me use this analogy to illuminate my point: Every computer
has an
operating system, and most of us are using either the Microsoft or the
Apple operating system. If you want to do something with your
computer-send an
email, watch a DVD, read an online essay like this one-you must do it the
way your computer’s operating system is designed to work.

No operating system is perfect, which is why Microsoft and Apple send
updates to their customers from time to time. And every so often these
companies launch new versions of their operating systems that incorporate
a lot of
modifications at once. Can you change the operating system you use? Of
course you can. Two years ago I threw out every Microsoft-based machine
in our
company’s office and replaced them with Apple products. Last month I met a
corporate CEO who had just done the opposite, and replaced the Apple
computers in his office with ones that run on the Microsoft operating
system.

Democracies and Dictatorships

Now, just as computers have operating systems so too do countries. In
fact, countries have dual operating systems – one political and the other
economic. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of each: Politically you
Can be
a democracy or a dictatorship, and economically you can have either a free
market or a command economy. Because countries don’t buy their Operating
systems off the shelf, the way we buy our computer operating systems, each
country develops its own versions. This is why our country’s democracy is
somewhat different from Canada’s, which in turn is slightly different from
Australia’s, and so forth. These countries all have free-market
economies, but
again they aren’t quite the same. Still, the similarities among
democracies and free-market economies are more striking than the
differences.

Likewise, while no two dictatorships are the same, and no two command
economies work in exactly the same way, the differences among them are
comparatively trivial.

Since no country’s operating systems are perfect, can they be improved? Of
course they can. Every time our Congress passes a new law, or enacts a new
regulation-or whenever the Supreme Court issues an opinion-that’s the
equivalent of an update to our political or economic operating system. Can
you
change a country’s operating system? Yes, you can. And the precise,
technical word for replacing one political or economic operating System with
another is-revolution.

When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to
preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is
what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new Piece
of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or
introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for
the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws.
Honorable people often will disagree about what to do-sometimes quite
strongly,
just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will Sometimes argue
through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system’s
code is an improvement or just “kludge.” But in normal politics The outer
limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to
preserving and improving the operating system.

In abnormal politics, the objective of one party isn’t to improve the
operating system, but to overthrow it.

With this analogy in mind, now we can see clearly what’s been happening in
the United States during the last three decades. While conservatives have
been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals
have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our
free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The
liberals couldn’t say this aloud, because if they did the American People
would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked
covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market While
working diligently to undermine both.

This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so
deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington, why
we can
never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured
scandal to another. It’s all been part of a decades-long effort by the
Liberals
to throw sand in our eyes-to keep us from seeing clearly where they really
want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on
some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism.
They’re afraid we’re on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some
fun, the next time you’re chatting with a liberal and he goes Nuts when you
call him a socialist, say to him: “I’m so sorry you’re offended. Please
tell me, what is there about socialism you don’t like?” You won’t get a
coherent answer; he’ll just accuse you of a hate crime.)

Obama’s Two-Front Offensive

With the election of Barack Obama as president, the liberals have launched
a massive, two-front offensive they believe will end in victory. They have
judged that our public education system is so degraded that only a few
Americans are left who even understand what a democracy is, and how the Free
market actually works. They are convinced that the majority of Americans are
too frightened by the current recession to care about preserving the
principles that made us the most powerful, productive and innovative
Country the
world has ever known. In short, the liberals are reaching for victory
because they believe that history now is on their side.

The speed and reach of their offensive is breathtaking.

At the core of democracy is the rule of law, and we have already lost it.
The liberals lecture us incessantly that everything is “relative,” but
that’s not true; some things are absolutes. You cannot claim to be
faithful to
your spouse because you never cheat on her-except when you’re in London on
business. And you cannot claim to have the rule of law if the government
can set aside the rule of law when it decides that “special
circumstances” have arisen that warrant illegality. When the President and
his aides handed ownership of Chrysler Corp. to the United Auto Workers
union, they tried to avoid sending that beleaguered company into
bankruptcy by
muscling its bondholders into accepting less money for their assets than
the law entitled them to collect. These contracts, and the law under which
they were signed, were mere obstacles to a thuggish President bent on paying
off his political supporters.

It’s going to get much worse, fast. President Obama has told us time and
again that among his criteria for choosing Federal judges will be “empathy.”

Empathy is a wonderful quality in any human being, but a judge’s job is to
rule according to the law. Once our courts are presided over by judges who
will reach verdicts based on how they feel about an issue-such as abortion
or the right of citizens to bear arms-the law will be whatever the judges
wish it to be; the rule of law will become an empty phrase rather than the
architecture of our civilization.

We have lost our free-market economy as quickly as we have lost the rule
of law. Money is to an economy what blood is to a body; life and death
resides within the organ that controls its flow. The government already
owns our
country’s leading banks, which means the government now controls our
economy. (And in all fairness to President Obama, it was the Bush
administration
that started us down this ghastly road.) One indicator of the Obama
administration’s real objective: When some banks that had taken federal
money
attempted to repay their loans, the Treasury Department refused to accept
repayment and step aside. This shows the government’s goal isn’t to prop
up the
banks, but rather to control them.

Here, too, things are going to get much worse, fast. The government now
owns General Motors Corp., is reaching for control of insurance companies,
and has launched plans to take over our country’s healthcare industry. It
even wants authority to set the salaries of executives in industries
that, at
least for now, aren’t being subsidized or underwritten by the government.

Put all this together, and what we have in our country today isn’t a
democracy and it isn’t a free-market economy. Reader, what we have now is a
revolution.

This revolution won’t be stopped, and our country won’t be rescued, by the
Republicans in Washington. This isn’t because they lack the votes. It’s
because most of them are careerist hacks who’ve been playing footsie with
the
Democrats for too long; with very few exceptions they lack the
intellectual firepower to articulate the present danger, and the political
courage to
stand up to this Administration and really fight. But for the absence of
frock coats and pince-nez glasses, these Republicans in Washington remind me
of those bumbling Weimar Republic politicians in Berlin who never grasped
where Hitler and the Nazis were going until it was too late to stop them, or
of those hapless Mensheviks in Moscow’s Duma who let themselves be tossed
into history’s dustbin by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. (Yes, of course I
realize it’s explosive to keep bringing up the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in an
essay about the Democrats. I’m not doing this to be incendiary; I’m doing
this
to be accurate.)

The Future’s in Our Hands

Our country’s future now lies within our own hands-yours, mine, all of us
who comprise what the Washington insiders sneeringly call the grass roots.
Good, because unless I’m very much mistaken the liberals have
over-estimated their strength. There still are more of us than there are
of them.

I mean ordinary, decent Americans from across the political spectrum who
may disagree about specific issues, but who understand who we are and how we
became who we are; who love our country, have a genius for
self-organizing, and won’t let the United States go down without a fight.

We need to launch a counter-offensive, so to speak, and the place to start
is at the local level. Working with our county and state political parties
when we can-or working around them when we must-our objective will be to
elect as many people as we can to public office who understand what a
democracy is and how the free market works. This will include city council
members, county commissioners, school board members, judges, sheriffs and
even
members of the local parks commission. With the strength and political
momentum their elections will provide, we can surge to the state level and
then-before it’s too late-take back the power in Washington DC.

I know this isn’t the kind of battle most of us want to fight; we would
rather watch the talking heads slug it out on Fox News than stand on a
street
corner handing out campaign flyers. And given our country’s history, for a
while it will be uncomfortable to find ourselves fighting against the
revolution and for the status quo. But we’ll get used to this as we make our
case over and over again-to our friends, our neighbors, at barbecues and PTA
meetings and at public rallies like those marvelous April tea parties that
drove the liberals insane. And we’ll draw strength as our ranks swell with
new recruits.

The alternative to launching this kind of peaceful and political
counter-attack is horrific. Right now sales of guns and ammunition are
rising
sharply. This reflects an intuitive grasp by grass-roots Americans of what
history teaches may lie ahead. It was only after the Nazis had secured
Their grip
on power in Germany, and only after the Bolsheviks had seized control of
Russia, that they set out to disarm and destroy the vast numbers of ordinary
citizens who – to the astonishment and fury of the revolutionaries-just
wouldn’t go along.

That’s when the real shooting started, and when blood began flowing in the
streets.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special
Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of
the CIA’s
ational Intelligence Council. He holds the U.S. National Intelligence
Distinguished Service Medal, which is the Intelligence Community’s highest
honor. He is author of The Cure for Poverty and How to Analyze Information.

American Conservative Daily

“What on earth is happening to the USA?”

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