OUR SOCIALIST
MINDSET
By Balint
Vazsonyi
[First published February 2, 2000, in The
Washington Times, under the title “Socialist mind-set”]
No — this will not be not about the
president’s State of the Union address. Its blatantly
socialist content was noteworthy only to the extent to which
Mr. Clinton invoked the Founding Fathers. That, and his
shameless celebration of our armed forces, coming from a man
who never recanted his open hatred of the military, was a
performance on par with “I did not have sexual relations
with that woman — Miss Lewinsky.”
No, the thoughts about to follow were
prompted by the Republican response.
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) began her
speech with the following sentence: “Our Republican agenda
is driven by the simple but powerful truth that America will
continue to lead the world as long as our government allows
opportunity, initiative, and freedom to flourish.”
Allows? Government allows?
Is there a single passage in the
Constitution of the United States that asserts, or even
implies, it is the prerogative of government to allow citizens
this, that or the other? Is it not the letter and spirit of
the Constitution to define what government may or may not do?
Having spent my first twenty years in a
country where, indeed, citizens anxiously awaited government
decrees, the mindset of hoping for the benevolence of
government is familiar. On occasion, the government would
allow athletes and artists to travel abroad so long as their
hard-currency earnings were turned in. Or, the government
would allow the formation of a non-communist patriotic
organization on a trial-basis.
But in America? We look to government to
allow freedom?
Readers of this column might well have
become exasperated by excessive references to socialism, its
agenda and vocabulary. Perhaps this annoying preoccupation
could be reappraised now. Consider: It was not one of the 58
declared socialists who make up the Progressive Caucus of the
U. S. House of Representatives; it was not a closet-socialist
like Senator Edward Kennedy; it was the Republican response to
the State of the Union which demonstrated the presence of the
socialist mindset.
Senator Susan Collins is not at fault here.
Perhaps nobody is at fault here. Socialism is not a person,
not a conspiracy, not even ideology any more. It has become a
degenerative process that gradually eats away at a person’s
common sense and powers of reasoning, not unlike leukemia eats
away red blood cells.
The first symptoms are certain words and
phrases — some quite innocuous — that creep into every-day
use: reactionary, capitalism, exploitation, working Americans
versus the wealthy, private sector, human resources
department, world peace, politically correct, social justice,
economic justice, or calling people fascists. (The term
denotes exclusively members of Mussolini’s party in Italy,
extinct in 1944.) All the above are words invented or adapted
for the Marxist-Leninist dictionary. Words are immensely
powerful, whether used against us or used by us.
The next stage is a
growing preoccupation with problems that, by definition,
cannot be solved, such as disease, poverty, or world hunger.
Tangible and useful work in the community is replaced by
blustery slogans that lead to inaction and the early emergence
of megalomania, such as eight-year-olds who want to save the
Earth instead of learning to write their names. In the adult
world, it leads to politicians who, for example, preach about
global warming, instead of providing the service they had been
elected to perform.
The children and politicians in the
preceding examples claim divine powers for themselves. But we
have gone past even that stage by now if we have transferred
to government the power to “allow opportunity, initiative,
and freedom” so we may flourish.
“Transfer” is the appropriate word here,
for this nation’s formal existence began with the phrase
“We the People.” When, how, and who proposed that we
abandon our Constitution?
The “Re-Elect America” bus tour,
described before in this column, will pose that very question
to the People. When we speak of the rule of law as the North
Star of America’s compass, we mean the Constitution as it
describes itself in Article VI. “This Constitution, and the
Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance
thereof...shall be the supreme Law of the land; and the Judges
in every State shall be bound thereby.”
In practical terms this should mean that
neither Congress nor state legislatures may enact laws that
are inconsistent with the Constitution. Even a law passed
without a single dissenting vote is illegitimate if it cannot
be reconciled with the Constitution.
In practical terms this should mean that
even the opinion of a Supreme Court justice is moot if it
cannot be reconciled with the Constitution.
All laws, all interpretations must pass the
test of having been “made in Pursuance” of the
Constitution. That, by definition, is likely to result in
relatively few laws.
By contrast, the socialist mindset expresses
itself by making up laws — and handing down opinions —
based on an agenda of social justice. And since people’s
view of social justice changes all the time, the need is for
new laws all the time. Lots of them. Thousands of them. And
once we have been tied in knots by them, we become supplicants
hoping that “our government will allow opportunity,
initiative, and freedom to flourish.” In no time, we look to
government to educate our children, to manage our health, to
supervise our relationships, to settle our most private
disputes.
The time has come to admit that our
increasingly socialist mindset cuts across party lines. The
time has come to realize that our thoughts and attitudes have
been invaded by propositions utterly alien to America.
The time has come to re-elect America.
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