Heather Cox Richardson - February 29, 2020 - Letters From An American

[applegrove]

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

"SNIP.....

In a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention on February 26, Attorney General William Barr said “Politics is everywhere. It is omnipresent. Why is that?”

His answer was illuminating. He believes we are in the midst of a conflict “between two fundamentally different visions of the individual and his relationship to the state. One vision undergirds the political system we call liberal democracy, which limits government and gives priority to preserving personal liberty. The other vision propels a form of totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda. It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective.”

Barr’s defense of “personal liberty” against "collectivism" is the same argument made by elite slaveholders before the Civil War, and made by the country’s richest industrialists in the 1890s and the 1920s. They argued that the government’s only role in society was to protect the liberty of individuals to accumulate as much as they could, because only such leaders knew what was best for society. They would become wealthy and powerful, and use that wealth as stewards of the nation to promote civilization by funding libraries and social programs and advancing American interests overseas. If the government became involved in regulating the economy, or providing social welfare, or promoting infrastructure, it would destroy society by promoting a redistribution of wealth designed to make everyone equal, a sort of socialism. Wealth would become more evenly distributed. Those at the top would not be able to accumulate fortunes, and society would no longer advance.

Such a stark division of the world meant that those in power must stay in power, no matter what it took, in order to protect “liberty,” or their opponents would destroy America through a sort of communal leveling. “[T]he difference between the parties is as the difference between the light and darkness, day and night,” said Republican President Benjamin Harrison in 1889, shortly before his party added six new states to the Union to try to guarantee they would never again lose control of the government. “Either the Republican party must be right and the Democratic party wrong, or the conditions must be reversed. One is certainly right, and if so, obviously the other is wrong.”


.....SNIP"

They've stolen the word liberal democracy. It is they who are neither liberal nor democratic. They are autocrats. Don't let them rename all the players in the political arena to gain for their narrative. Don't let them steal our totems/touchstones.

[KT2000]

1. Religious and Ayn Randian

Man is that guy a mess.

[essaynnc]

2. There's a book...

"Democracy in Chains", this movement is described exactly, their roots, their motivation, their methods. Been working towards this goal of "wealth knows best for the country" since the civil war.