Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race. (audio Winston Churchill Address To Harrow School)
The War of Two Kingdoms
Since time immemorial has existed, a struggle between the human desire for self-directed freedom, versus the protean counter-impulse to lord authority over others. Governments always tend to assume untoward power. In the ancient world, such oppressive societies were everywhere represented by the deified state.
2 For instance, ancient Sparta is the model for Thomas More's famed Utopia. Common sense informs us a "utopia" should be the exemplar, par excellence, of enlightened governments of antiquity. Instead, Sparta stands as one of the most repressive regimes in the ancient world. This was because the city tried to dictate every area of life for this warrior state.
The deified state today is commandeered by neo-liberalism, which offers a generous "benign" trade of security for individual freedom, which furtively casts a long shadow of absolutism across the offer. And so the First Kingdom is one of individual freedom; whereas the Second Kingdom represents the foetid, decaying stench of human bondage, in myriad form. Symbolically, we note here a Manichean struggle between the historic forces of darkness and light.
It must be strenuously stated the division between the political left and right represents a colossal breach, an insuperable disagreement of values. The basis of this fissure is rooted in how the human person is defined by each group. In leftism, emphasis on classic definitions of human free will and potential for doing noble deeds is diminished to the vanishing point. This is because the notion of the soul and human nature are typically dismissed since Marx and his colleagues condemned all religion as fable, and man is left to his own devices. Instead, the helplessness of people and their propensity to violate one another by evils acts is stressed. Because of this, potential for virtuous behavior is negated by liberals. So a scheme to force people to behave and follow rules is established. And this occurs since humans are simply animals who perforce must be condescendingly herded along into proper conduct. This viewpoint contradicts traditional Western beliefs that humans are capable of good works and can be motivated to do just acts, once given proper education and rewards for good behavior.
So, why does one person side with state absolutists like Marx, Lenin or Mao, while others agree with small government idealists such as Burke, Locke and the American Founders? This is ultimately an unanswerable conundrum. But the political positioning comes down to world view, derived from what each person considers to be the core truth of the universe. If one individual believes humans evolved by sheer chance, have no immortal soul, or attendant human nature, then this materialism often leads to the belief men must be controlled like the savage, ignorant beasts they are.
Conversely, were another person to posit a God who created a universe where His ideas and things are to be established, thereby limiting the powers of human government against God's sovereignty, such convictions will leave a profound mark, as well. But either way, deepest commitments do have a great impact on one's government theory. Yet, against the grain, some principled atheists develop Conservative beliefs, while other religious persons are convinced of the need for a humanistic Great Society to help establish God's will on earth.
Recall within the long-range plans of true Liberals, is an undying desire to establish a heaven on earth, where every tear will be wiped away by the deified state. The writings of 13
th century Catholic rogue priest, Joachim of Floris, provided the template that all socialists and Marxists later followed.
3 The idiosyncratic dogma of Joachim posited that God's paradise could be jump-started on earth by committed followers laboring to build a heavenly city on terra firma. His tripartite view of history begins with the Old Testament Age of the Father; moves into the Age of the Son and concludes with the Age of the Spirit. The socialists merely hollowed out God from the model and inserted deified liberal man, whose government would organize and dictate all human affairs, led by the head priest or Dux e Babylone, ie the Duke of Babylon.
Consider the First Kingdom as representing everything good and wholesome in the reign of the Lockean small-government theory, including expansive legal, civil, and property rights, and a strong rule of law to support these. The Second Kingdom is the liberal socialist collectivist state, utterly devoid of constitutional checks against government power.
In the modern period, we can see these mutually exclusive desires existing between Marx's despotic dystopia of socialism where precious difference exists between its inhabitants and literal slaves, embodied by the U.S.S.R. Contrast this to de Toqueville's celebration of the hardy Republic and its Democracy of virtues, established in early America.
4 The two ideas represent mutually-exclusive theories. Either humans must be controlled and subjugated so a communist paradise might be established, or people are able to be educated to live virtuously under limited direction, and maximized personal, economic, religious and intellectual discretion. Only one of these claims can be true. And the tenor of these times demands we choose a side in the affray.
In early America, the state was founded on a preeminent Constitution and Bill of Rights. Religion existed lawfully outside state sanction, and all men had standing by vestment of rights empowered by access to courts where the rule of law was king. These totally opposed theories of mankind reveal the longstanding argument between the devotees of limited government rights versus those insisting on limiting human rights to favor the government. And one cannot but help notice that Europe's fixation on such small-government theories historically helped establish the preeminence of Europe these last 300 years. But the Marxian notion of a deified state taking the place of a religion and absorbing all human privileges and rights into its matrix is an ancient pagan model that has no place in a modern world.
Rise of the West
The West, as known today, did not have to exist at all. Its rise was not just unlikely, but wholly counter-intuitive. The many apparent chance happenings and fortuitous events
5 leading to the distinctive formation could have been stymied countless times. This distinctive Western tradition, which Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy described as having emerged "Out of Revolution," with favor for individuals over organizations, should never have been allowed to have been established in the realms of power loving kings and queens. It has understandably always been a battle of Two Kingdoms at every juncture, or what Thomas Sowell calls today a "Conflict of Visions." It pitted the Eastern view of authority positing an all-powerful state lording over and menacing vulnerable men, versus the Western notion of man-in-the-image-of-God with his attendant rights in demand of a non-absolutist state.
Over the centuries developed the other-ness of Western ideas of government and law, highlighted in the Anglo-American Constitution and Bill of Rights tradition, arising from the common law like a sparkling gem field exposed after a flood. Constitution drafting was a response to the growing power of European states after the Reformation and Enlightenment, where the modern state was conceived between the lines of Calvin's Institutes, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau's Social Contract, Locke's Treatises on Government, and others.
By the time of the American Revolution, a large set of notions on government and law had already been put into play in Europe and especially in England. The theory that men had rights to life, liberty, property and due process of law outside of government, given by God, had been accepted by many after the indignities of the Puritan Revolution and English Civil War. These beliefs centered on securing mankind a government with limited powers under rule of law, where people could establish some material comfort and then pursue unfettered intellectual, artistic and theological pursuits. It has been the enshrinement of these theories, in the Declaration and Bill of Rights that allowed America its remarkable record of economic, legal and human rights achievements that the rest of the world followed like a North Star. Yet, of course, the Second Kingdom still battled against the First for supremacy, lurking as the marplot of Eden in the wings.
Untoward Developments Against Limited Government
Several seminal ideas bubbled up from the ferment of the 19
th century, forever changing mankind's view of himself. Charles Darwin's remarkable claims regarding human evolution sans divine direction caused a permanent division to erupt between science and Christianity. These ideas were fixated upon a material universe bereft of meaning or judgment. Karl Marx's writings were meant by him as an extension of Darwin's scientific materialism, explaining why all his theories were presented as scientifically beyond reproach.
Some truly spectacular mistakes made in America's past have lead to apostasy from the Founder's vision of a democracy of virtue. Most were wholly avoidable. For example, allowing John Dewey
6 to become the idol of modern US education, while at the same time helping draft the Humanist Manifesto, was unforgivable.
7 His emphasis upon progressive
8 "found" education touting exploratory learning over the classics, or any "rote" learning, was a recipe for intellectual suicide. It is no wonder that American youth are today skewered for often exhibiting indifference and ignorance when that is all they are offered by way of instruction. Of course, Dewey's model was like ancient Rome where an army of uneducated plebs service a small group of elites. Yet, such a cynical plan was needed to debase and replace the powerful Puritan model of education that created so many brilliant minds of the Founder's society.
Tolerating an ugly definition of the separation of church and state has also wreaked generations of needless trauma upon a virtuous land. We should never forget America began as a dream of a religious people, who now have to absorb the tyranny of a perpetual irreligious minority. This has been painful medicine to ingest. But the absurd conceit of the Politically Correct faction has laid a cancer on the soul of the Republic. The PC movement takes advantage of the perennially pious nature of America to always try to do the right thing. But our formerly wholesome and well-meaning culture is now set against itself in a self-consuming pogrom, seemingly using Goya's Saturn Consuming His Children
9 as the frightening ideal. That the PC movement is just contradictory leftist nonsense, hatched by the Marxist Frankfurt School to undermine bourgeoisie U.S. society, would not even register to most Americans.
Perhaps the most noxious conceit of neo-liberalism is the idea that only leftists are in touch with reality or have a vision for the future. Consider the many astonishing beliefs socialists comfort themselves with. Many sincere liberals believe that ONLY leftists: care about others; are educated or intelligent; are concerned with the environment; are committed to caring for their fellow man; have a clue about economics; are committed to the working class; can make a just society; care about the unemployed; are morally pure; are dedicated to science or understand its standards; can engage in trade without raping and pillaging; are intelligent enough to express intellectual views; care about other races or nations, etc. To see this litany of self-delusion and pomposity is truly breathtaking. It also explains why there is currently no culture of public debate between the left and right in American society. For why debate an immoral imbecile over matters already patently resolved?
Conclusion
The War of Two Kingdoms will never end until mankind is finished upon the earth. There will always be enslavers and those who recoil at the yoke of bondage. Bearing in mind the extraordinary achievements of the West and specifically by America, many citizens refuse to worry about the future. They don't imagine their own countrymen would try to change our historic formula and undo the Constitution, since our land is the envy of the world.
Yet, change is already at hand. So now we are confronted with a battle against rapacious American statists. We now must resolve how to best fight back for our ancestral rights without rending the country asunder. For the entire world depends upon the US championing the rights of all citizens, the ones that helped build America into the most remarkable country – the most free, prosperous, just and generous land the world has ever seen.
1Never Give In2 One of the most eye-opening books on antiquity is Numa Denis Futsel del Coulandges magnificent, seminal work
The Ancient City.
3Joachim Of Floris
4 Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America.
5 Consider Charles Martel's shattering the Saracen Muslims at Tours-Poitier, France in 732 AD
6 Was Dewey a Marxist? by William Brooks. St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning.
7 Humanist Manifesto.
8albany.edu
9 eeweems.com
