We need to rethink government. We should start with what the Founders read and thought, and work our way from there.

There may be prudent means of modernizing how citizens express their preferences in government; the business as usual of electing representatives who go on a reign of error for two or six years at a time isn't working. But we shouldn't be seduced into unrestrained populism; we need to aim for greater accountability in government, not for instituting the whims of the masses.

Considering then that we need representative government, but with greater accountability, the policy of term limits is necessary. Term limits would free politicians to do the right thing, rather than the popular thing. Additionally, it would free politicians from focusing so heavily on re-election. It is thus essentially a policy designed to change Washington culture. Once elected, a politician's terms in office should be limited to twelve years total; and Senators' terms should be limited to four years, instead of six. The U.S. Congress should be a place for extraordinary sessions, not routine business. Televoting and virtual conferencing should become the norm.

In conjunction with the policy of term limits, those who serve in government should be forbidden from lobbying after they retire; this would help prevent a conflict of interest between representing one's state and/or district and representing narrow moneyed interests. Campaign contributions should be capped at an upper threshold in order to prevent politicians from "buying" elections.

Continuing with the theme of ensuring greater accountability, there may be a way to institute more frequent voting on referenda, particularly concerning spending. The danger is that if we make voting too easy, the dumber, relatively apathetic people will have more of a say. We still need representative and not democratic government; no one wants to live under capricious mob rule.

Such a routinization of voicing public opinion on spending matters only makes sense within the state government context; and as such, federalism is strictly necessary. When political communities can utilize the central government as a means to appropriate funds from those will not see the benefit of the program or policy, then those who are taxed are not being justly compensated for their property or labor. In addition, the political community receiving the funds is relieved of its representative obligations to use the money prudently. When people do not feel the immediate "pain" of making choices, then rationality, defined as making preferences while acknowledging the constraints of reality, is unhinged from its moorings.

With the goal of re-establishing rationality in a representative-democratic government in mind, there is something to be said for making sure everyone has a stake; thus, not just for fiduciary reasons, but for civic responsibility reasons, a flat tax makes sense. A Balanced Budget Amendment capping the government's spending at a certain level of GDP is a good complement to the flat tax; but such an amendment should not be an authorization to spend the entire fixed portion of GDP.

In the economic sphere, our theme should be to ensure we live within realistic constraints, and following as such, fiat currency must be abolished. Sound money is not merely a constraint tethering an economy to the reality of scarcity, it is also a means of ensuring transparent pricing; but most importantly, it is a political constraint blocking the representatives' means of financing debt-spending.

In conclusion, the United States needs a stable government in order for a vibrant civil society and a free market economy to flourish. We need to re-gird those institutions conducive to stabilizing and restraining government: private property, sound currency, and individual rights. But we would also need to supplement our efforts to prevent the corruption of those institutions in the future; thus, mechanisms of greater accountability and responsibility, such as term limits, checks on campaign financing, tele-referenda on spending, a balanced budget amendment, and a flat tax would buttress those institutions and do much to safeguard them from depradation. But ultimately, the only sure guardian of any free political system is an active, informed, and intellectually engaged citizenry.

For those so-called "liberals" and progressive elites who seek to rule us by fraud or force, American citizens do not want to hear another word about "equality" or "democracy" ever again.

In one of the great ironies of history, the Democrat Party has shattered the myth that it has ever valued "democracy" (as dubious an ethic as that is to begin with) by defying the wishes of the majority of Americans with legislative pushes: On health care, immigration, cap and trade, the bailouts (the Congress under Bush), the "stimulus," the moratorium on oil drilling, card check, and so on and so on.

While those who consider themselves as part of "the ruling class" have constantly preached about equality and democracy, they have continually dismissed any objections to their schemes from whom they condescendingly refer to as "the masses."

The arrogance of the liberal elites is as openly unbounded as its vindictiveness and ridicule towards those Americans who have stood up for limited government, financial responsibility, and political accountability calling itself the "tea party movement."

When traditional Americans began organizing themselves for political action in spring of last year, they were branded as "racists" for opposing the socialistic program of the left that happened to be headed by an "African-American" president.

As the movement grew in influence, they were laughably typecast as "astro-turf" by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. But this was only a warm-up act by Madame Speaker. She would later compare the tea party movement to fascists - as if any fascist regime in history has advocated limited government, a Constitution, gun rights, private property, a free market, free speech, liberty, and all those other values that the majority of Americans in this center-right country believe in.

The essential point is that the smug self-described intellectuals of the left are so full of themselves and so removed from the viewpoint of most Americans that their policies now smack most as detached from reality, and their propaganda, downright cartoonish.

The tactics of the left have now worn thin, as has the patience of the American people. The supposed ethics those on the left have touted for years, no, decades: democracy, equality, support for "the little guy," have been exploded by an administration so corrupt, so Machiavellian, so willing to trample anyone that gets in its way, that the brand may have been damaged for Democrats beyond repair.

It is indeed in doubt whether any linguistic ruse, ala the shift from "progressive" to "liberal" to "progressive," can save the Democrats from permanent infamy. The leftists are Democrats and the Democrats are leftists. There is nowhere left to hide.

So what is the source of the Democrats' hubris?

We must remember that the Democrats are Marxists. They may be cultural Marxists, or neomarxists, but they are still Marxists. And as Marxists, they believe that economics determines political philosophy in the long-run.

In other words, if the Democrats destroy the capitalist "base," while they promote economic dependency on the Democrat party-run government, the "superstructure" of rationalizations for the capitalist system will vanish. Ethics will follow economics, so to speak.

The flaw in this master plan is that "there is no there there." Socialist economics are defunct; they lead to poverty and mass dissatisfaction. This is not good in an advanced capitalist country where the majority of Americans have been prosperous and free.

Socialism has been tried in economically backwards countries and in war-torn Europe (underwritten by American security), but we are entering unknown territory. The world has never seen a regime come to power that intends to economically destroy an advanced capitalist nation in its relative prime (a program begun in haste in the 1970s).

The Democrats seek to push this nation into the abyss, after blindfolding it with media propaganda and singing anthems to its "savior" Barack Obama. America has been given its last cigarette. This November, it will be flung back into the statist's eyes.

As the philosophy of a people goes, there, inevitably, is civilization led. Philosophies of confusion and detachment from reality lead to decay and collapse; those of order and rationality provide the conditions that make social harmony and human happiness possible. Yet the austerity of the rational life is not for the faint of heart; it demands virtue and a steely stoicism. Ultimately, many will retreat into utopianism and mysticism, which obviate our personal responsibility and detach us from the real world. The outcome of the battle between reality and unreality is the fulcrum on which the fate of a civilization turns.

The greatest intellectuals of history rose to prominence in periods of catastrophic change. In the ancient world, Aristotle, Cicero, Confucius, and the Arab scholar Al-Ma'Mun sought to make sense of the tumult and strife they witnessed around them. They left us manuscripts that would, in the words of the Greek historian Thucydides, last "for all time." Their minds sought to impose order on the mystical culture and seemingly chaotic world around them in order to bring man's relations in harmony with reality. Each of these philosophers' civilizations would ultimately collapse into tyranny or barbarism after periods of ideological decay; their teachings disregarded and their warnings ignored. In the West, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire would lead to the obliteration of the gains of Hellenic philosophy as well as the 'genius of order' of the Romans. The Near East would fall under the sway of Islamic fascists who would subjugate all thought under the omnipresent dominion of Allah. China would continue to move ever so slowly towards achieving the totalitarian vision of its first emperor Qin Shu Huang.

The first signs of the reemergence of civilization in the West can best be attributed to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, who reintroduced rationality into Christianity. The Scholastics would pave the way for the Renaissance, primarily by resurrecting Aristotelian thought. Their works would lay the foundations for The Enlightenment, which would disentangle superstition from politics and liberate men from intellectual slavery to monarchy. Once again, we find that the essential political philosophers of the era, Thomas Hobbes and his refuter John Locke, were men who lived during times of immense change and confusion. John Locke's Two Treatises on Government would provide the intellectual fuel for the American Revolution.

The American Revolution, which created an unprecedented political and economic order based on reason and deliberation, would contrast mightily with its sister revolution, often misleadingly described as animated by The Enlightenment. The French Revolution was birthed by the unruly passion of democracy, and was the midwife of the "philosophy" of rationalized confiscation known as socialism.

Though both democracy and socialism are draped in the ideological garb of reason, they are divorced of it; the former is animated by transcendental collectivist myths and the latter of class envy devoid of reflection or virtue. One might view them as the doctrines of power accumulation in the state under the stewardship of a cult leader and the repression of all upward mobility threatening the elite establishment, respectively.

The present popularity of democracy and socialism in academia and Western culture is indication of a calculated divorce from The Enlightenment, which liberated men from the control of elites. Unfortunately, the practical success of the American experiment, and now the well-founded distrust of self-described intellectual elites, have led to a disdain for ideas among many people. But the consequence of this development is that we have incrementally abandoned the vision of the founders in our hearts and minds, and are within one swift stroke of severance with that glorious past. We now find ourselves in the midst of a war of ideas, with the soul of Western civilization at stake; yet many still show a pathological lack of seriousness about ideas and how they shape our world.

There are questions that arise of why an intellectual elite would subvert the very civilization it benefits from; and secondly, what makes their detractors so smart? The answer to the first question is a matter of human nature, the second one, a matter of historical awareness.

If we assume that the American way has been successful in terms of wealth creation and political stability, the problem for intellectuals becomes "how do I distinguish myself?" One does not acquire notoriety or power by adhering to the principles of the past, no matter how successful they have proved to be. The ideologies that 'naturally' developed in academia over the last century, which attracted "alienated" (or rather, narcissistic) individuals, can be summed up as "contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism" and "rationalized power-seeking."

The left's fetishism of democracy is thus a knowing move to subvert the ordered liberty of the Constitution by breaking down the nation into elite-managed groups. These groups are pitted against one another; the numerous and ever-increasing victims become the clients of the intellectuals and their power-broker of choice The Democrat Party.

Socialism is at its core merely a critique of capitalism. It is not a creative or productive system in any realistic sense. People don't work for its own sake, and certainly they do not do so for strangers (at least, without the implied or explicit threat of a barrel of a gun). Socialism provides no plausible answer to the "then what?" question of what happens after the destruction of capitalism.

The intellectual decay of Western civilization has brought us to a crossroads, and we must choose the path take from here. We must choose liberty or an "Age of Darkness." It is our task as freedom-loving Americans to ignite a political Renaissance, reawakening and re-energizing the ideas of the founders. Out of crisis comes opportunity, as our political enemies remind us, and for us that entails laying the ideological foundations of liberty on more solid ground. With the illuminating guidance of our founders Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison we may add the insights of Ayn Rand, whose explicit infusion of Aristotelian thought into the philosophy of freedom would buttress our defenses against the inevitable assaults that arise from democratic mobs and iron-fisted tyrants. It is moderation in principle that leads to excess in government; and devotion to principle that leads to liberty, security, peace, and prosperity.

The popular image of the Tea Party movement propagated by the opinion-molders in America is that it is a right-wing extremist faction within the conservative ranks of the Republican party. More properly understood, it is a grand alliance of centrists in the traditional framework of classical American and European political theory.

The epithet "right-wing" is reflexively hurled by progressives and Democrats more broadly at any party, movement, faction, or individual who opposes the left-wing agenda. The smear tactic is intended to conflate those people who support the traditional American tenets of liberty, limited government, and individual rights with fascists and ultra-nationalists of the European kind.

The terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" are derived from the French Revolution; the nationalists who supported the Ancien Regime (monarchy, or "Old Regime"), the church, and the aristocracy sat in the right-wing of the French assembly; while the radical democrats, whose egalitarian ideals implied a "leveling" of institutional, traditional, political, and economic barriers to absolute freedom sat in the "left-wing."

Those who supported the maintenance of the right-wing status quo were known in that period as "conservative"; their preferences for perpetuating the spoils of privilege must be delineated from the philosophy of men like Edmund Burke, who was a proponent of incrementalist reform; and American conservatives, whose adherence to tradition often springs from a deep-seated belief in the truth of the country's founding principles.

Though the term "conservative" is historically associated with monarchist, statist, and etatist political orders, personified by absolutist rulers like Louis XIV and Henry VIII, it is the antithesis of the philosophy that animated the nation's founders. Absolutism, or what has been referred to more broadly as "despotism," was specifically rebelled against by such fundamental thinkers that paved the path to the American Revolution as John Locke, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.

The influential political theorist Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws explains despotism and compares its animating principles against those of republicanism and monarchy in a manner that evokes immediate comparisons to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century:

As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honour, so fear is necessary in a despotic government: with regard to virtue, there is no occasion for it, and honour would be extremely dangerous.

Here the immense power of the prince devolves entirely upon those whom he is pleased to entrust with the administration. Persons capable of setting a value upon themselves would be likely to create disturbances. Fear must therefore depress their spirits, and extinguish even the least sense of ambition.

The signature animating principle of fear drives both the despotic regimes of the past, and has been testified to ad nauseum by those who lived through them, the fascist and communist regimes of recent times. In a direct challenge to the assumptions of historicism (or the idea that all history is unique and no generalizable assumptions can be drawn from it) and Hegelian and Marxist progressivism (or the teleological idea that history is propelled toward a definable end of its own inherent design, or "Idea," respectively) it is justified to question whether or not the more powerful technological means of political administration of modern times grossly alters the nature of a state or regime.

It is my contention that there is no discernible difference in essence, or raison d'etre, between the absolutist and monarchist regimes of the past, whose paradigm was shattered by the American and French revolutions, successively, and the fascist and communist (in practice, as opposed to in fantasy) totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The means of ruling or administering a political regime do not alter that regime's essence; if the goal of politicians in a coercive government (as all governmental Leviathans are in essence) is social, economic and political control, reductively, that is that government's ordering principle.

If we may dispel the Marxist-generated illusion that the Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered the characteristic make-up of men, and likewise the notion developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that men in the state of nature are "noble savages" and civilized society a corrupter that must itself be managed, [1] we are receptive to the genius of the founders of the United States, who set their constitutional republic upon a sound foundation of properly understood human nature.

To follow up on our conjecture, too weighty in its implications to fully flesh out here, but rich enough to seriously ponder and explore at our own leisure, that despotic regimes of the more distant past and totalitarian regimes of the more recent past [2] share the common animating principle of fear and ordering principle of control, then we can appreciate that there is something in human nature, or at least a tendency among some human beings that must be guarded against, to control others.

This appreciation of the often-times darker side of men [3], is a bedrock principle of the founding of the American republic, as can be illuminated by the indispensable Federalist No. 51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

It is imperative that we follow the logic of Madison's propositions:

There are, moreover, two considerations particularly applicable to the federal system of America, which place that system in a very interesting point of view:

First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Second. It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority -- that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. The first method prevails in all governments possessing an hereditary or self-appointed authority. This, at best, is but a precarious security; because a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties. The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. [...]

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful.

It is this appreciation of naturally arising conflicting interests in a free society that led to the innovations of the Constitution; divided powers and checks and balances were designed to safeguard people against abuses by either an absolutist ruler with centralized authority, or a tyrannical democratic majority seeking to despoil its prey of property, life, or freedom. The requirement of legislation by majority, and the requirement that changing the Constitutional mandates for authority demanded a super-majority, were but two safeguards. One of the most important barriers to tyranny was the Bill of Rights, a firewall of individual rights intended to be used as an ultimate trump card to be played against tyrants of any variety, should all precautions fail. [4]

Ultimately, the Constitution, the embodiment of those founding principles that tea party movement adherers cherish most, is specifically designed to protect American citizens from political threats arising from both the right and the left.

The numerous precautions against the accumulation of power in a central authority in the United States when combined with Constitutional principles for political administration of the republic, provided America with a stability of political rules that gave men the psychological security needed to feel safeguarded from government tyranny and the predatory behavior of adverse interests. This established a framework for a vibrant "civil society," and the prosperous economic order of free market capitalism. These "spontaneous orders" are not conservative in nature, but allow for "progress" (in specifically designated terms, such as technological improvements, or the enhancement of human understanding). They are also not chaotic in nature, as "progressives" tend so often to misapprehend out of their inner craving to control other human beings. Men and women by their very nature are self-interested, though with the potential of flashes of altruistic behavior. Systematic altruism, on the other hand, is unsustainable because it is a misunderstanding of human nature, and therefore not conducive to political order, long-term human happiness, or the prosperity of human beings. In other words, altruism is not a sound animating principle.

The animating principle that brought America forth from fledgling island nation to world power over the course of two centuries is the love of liberty. [5] The ordering principle is Constitutionally limited government.

Those who hold that the tea party movement is "extremist" have the false conception that "noble" men can be placed in government and they can lead a "virtuous" government that will give them and their clients everything their hearts desire. Their accusers fail miserably to account for the historical track record of consolidated governmental authority, which is always justified by appeal to presumably lofty sentiments. The American government must inevitably disappoint and frustrate progressives, because it is designed to spur men to manage themselves and become productive members of society. Progressives who therefore believe that the assumed free market system is naturally chaotic, do not appreciate that it is in reality ordered by the drive of men to better their own lives. This is not the same as anarchy; the wants and desires of men are naturally limited by economic scarcity as reflected in a free pricing system. The wages of labor, just as the prices of goods and services, are also set by the market. Those who develop sought-after skills, prosper; those who do not, are less prosperous. [6] Thus American government is designed for those who value liberty and opportunity over the illusion of security provided by a powerful government. The drive for a paternalistic form of security undermines the political and economic order of safe-guarded liberty, on which only a long-term form of security, from tyranny and from predatory interests, is conceivably possible. [7]

Those in the tea party movement neither desire to rule over their political opposition, whom they perceive as tyrannical democrats (small d) or oligarchic violators of Constitutional authority, or otherwise impose their will on their fellow citizens. Instead, they want to restore the nation to its Constitutional foundations; establish fiscal responsibility in government; re-establish the economic principles that allow the preponderance of the nation to prosper, namely, free market economics; and replenish the virtue among citizens to see each other as individual human beings in and of themselves, and not as means to some political end. These goals are justified by a rationally understood self-interest that holds that the long-term good of any society requires mutual respect among individuals and the freedom that naturally follows.

[1] No empirical evidence to the contrary of Rousseau's "noble savage" theory is more immediate than the behavior of men following natural disasters, such as those of Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

[2] Totalitarianism, by insinuation of our thesis, being an absolutism with more advanced technological means.

[3] A consideration of the darker nature of some men is no doubt as a thorn in the minds of the true believers of secular religions like Marxism, leading far too many men of the academic cloth to support mass brainwashing, a lack of respect for objective reality, and a disregard for the truth. It is also a widespread cause of progressives' antipathy for the U.S. Constitution.

[4] Yet the Bill of Rights should not be understood to be self-enforcing; but rather a thermometer that a vigilant people can use to understand if and how their natural rights are being violated. See: The parable of the boiling frog.

[5] Liberty should not be taken to mean license, or the freedom to do what one wills with the life or property of another human being.

[6] It should be mentioned that Marx's supposition that wages in a free market tend toward subsistence was completely false due to his failure to account adequately for competition in the labor market.

[7] Bearing in mind our earlier discussion of human nature.

When a civilization fails to preserve itself from threats arising from within, which can be physical, material, or ideological in nature, it is at risk of collapse. This collapse is typically followed by anarchy, and ultimately tyranny; which can be of the mind or by the sword. When a civilization fails to defend itself from threats arising from without, they can be infiltrated or invaded. The civilization can be corrupted, subjugated, absorbed, or destroyed.

Civilizations rise and fall, usually because they become ideologically corrupted. Civilizations are cultural traditions that provide the ideals that city-states, societies, colonies, states, nations, and other polities hold aloft as the guiding light for greatness. They define good and evil, right and wrong, and virtue and vice.

The ancient Greeks had a double-edged word for revolution and stagnation termed stasis. Stasis is that state when an existent polity has stopped believing in fundamental ideals necessary for societal cohesion and order; it is a state of fugue and entropy that disorients the citizenry by removing the institutional, cultural, and traditional framework that gives rise to a relatively predictable, stable, and orderly life. Stasis produces a mental state of aimlessness and desperation for strong leadership; it can give rise to tyranny, military adventurism, and hubris.

This brings us to the United States, the lynchpin of Western Civilization, and the embodiment of its highest ideals. The United States took the great political and economic ideals of the Enlightenment and with self-awareness and reflection applied them to found a new nation that would shine like a beacon of light into the world. It is important to note that the subsequent rise of Western Civilization did not emerge from a utopian vision of mankind, but one which sees man as a political and vain animal that must be given the opportunity to compete with others for power and wealth, without holding out the possibility of political or economic domination. Thus the Madisonian idea, derived from the Baron de Montesquieu, of divided powers and checks and balances.

Specifically, what we know now as Western Civilization sprung out of ravaging religious wars, a replenishment of neoclassical wisdom, and a rebellion against monarchic domination. It was erected on the foundation of the Enlightenment, with it pillars of Reason and Freedom, which holds that the self-guided approach to truth is the path to societal progress. The philosophies of the Enlightenment hold out the promise of a better, more peaceful and prosperous world by acknowledging that men are capable of knowing their own self-interest and pursuing it, while allowing others the opportunity to do the same. If reasonable men can agree to these rules, then society can become prosperous and enjoyable. If they reject them, then man is locked into a constant political war for resources.

These ideas and ideals can be categorized as "rational self-interest" and extended to imply not only political but also economic principles. Rational self-interest entails mutual cooperation and trade of the fruits of one's freely chosen labor so that people in a just societal order can pursue happiness of their own accord and allow others to do likewise. The proper and dignified life for man is one of personal challenge and triumph over obstacles, and the laissez-faire economic order provides all but the most helpless, clueless, and lazy the opportunity to eventually succeed. This is not to say that we cannot help one another, but help must be freely given, not coerced by exploitative politicians and their parasitical clients. Which brings us to another aspect of the Enlightenment, economic freedom built on the premise of private property.

Private property is indispensable to freedom, because without private property, one is vulnerable to the whims of the state or the collective. Without private property, one lacks the mental security and the sense of self-determination necessary to work in the confidence that the fruits of one's labor will not be seized. Furthermore, one must be allowed to own and pursue wealth not only because it is key to freedom and prosperity, but also because it is conducive to peace. When one has the freedom of opportunity to pursue wealth and ascend in social esteem and influence, then one has an alternative to the unabashed struggle for political power, which alternatively would imply economic control. History teaches that when a small group of elites have political and economic control, men are enslaved, persecuted, and oppressed in order for the elites to perpetuate their privileged status in society. Yet many fail to take such a hard-won historical lesson seriously. They fail to understand the historical struggle against tyranny that gave birth to the founding principles of life, liberty, and property.

The United States is in danger today because many have ignored the lessons of the past, which show that civilizations fail when people are no longer able to perceive ideological and existential threats to their political, economic, and social order. America is threatened from within by a socialist ideology and fascistic methodology that sees a merging of the economic and the political. It is also threatened from without by illegal immigrants, who not only do not share America's language and culture, but impose their cultural and economic demands on the already overburdened taxpaying American citizens; as well as by Islamic fundamentalists, who would not only destroy us physically, but would put us on bended knee to serve their God Allah.

Why do millions of Americans refuse to acknowledge or react to the dire threats to our nation? While many citizens are alarmed at the unchecked growth of government, there are still millions of apathetic, ill-informed, ignorant, parasitical, moderate, or progressive Americans who are unable or unwilling to see the dangers mounting from such growth. They cannot see that the increase of government power is directly related to the multiplication and exacerbation of our problems, which are economic, social, and national security-related. This is because a nation becomes most vulnerable when the majority of people become removed from objective reality through the subversion and perversion of rational self-interest; this is how people's ability to perceive threats is disabled.

The government uses a number of tactics to disarm people's willingness or mental awareness to oppose the threat that comes from the growth of its power. It makes government power appear to these people as harmless, compassionate, or even desirable. It uses the false appearance of self-interest to "jujitsu" the system to collapse; it mainly does this by issuing paper money, which appears to be money, but it is not real money (Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises defined money as a "store of wealth"). Since there is a "deal of ruin" in a nation, as Adam Smith put it, entire generations of Americans can live at the expense of future generations. The industrial base as gutted as people transfer into education, civil service, or bureaucratic jobs, who serve a growing number of clients of the welfare state. Meanwhile, the real economic base that underpins the wealth and success of a nation is eroded, while the central bank continues to flood the country with phony currency. The inevitable result is hyper-inflation, which leads to desperation, chaos, martial law, and tyranny. Thus the clients of the state are living an illusion; they are pursuing an irrational self-interest or are deluding themselves into believing in altruism, the ethic of self-sacrifice for the collective. Those people whose sense of rational self-interest has been corrupted or co-opted by the state, I will classify below:

Bureaucrats and civil servants have a direct stake in the maintenance of the status quo, since their livelihoods depend on it. Growing government does not concern them for two reasons. First of all, because their self-interest appears to be served through expanding government power and influence. Yet their very existence is predicated on the existence of actual producers. This effectively makes them parasitical on society; especially since their services are not necessarily needed or desired. The method to test needs and desires in a free society is in a market, which is just a place where people willingly trade goods and services using sound currency. Second of all, the growth of government increases their power, influence, and job security. Thus they see the need to "produce" never-ending regulations, which themselves create problems, and self-servingly, which "require" more bureaucrats to solve. This is not rational self-interest, which does not lead to the destruction of a political order of freedom and sustained prosperity, but rather a predatory self-interest, which is a violation of the laws and spirit of Western Civilization.

Ignorant and apathetic people from the working class and the middle class are typically a product of a lifestyle of struggling for existence. They are overtaxed, through every kind of tax imaginable; there are taxes for merely working and supporting oneself, known as an "income" tax ("income" used to be defined as "profit"); taxes merely for owning property; taxes for buying goods; taxes for the unfortunate event of death; and apparently there will be taxes merely for exhaling carbon dioxide. Additionally, there is the "hidden tax" of inflation, which is purposefully caused by the Federal Reserve System, a consortium of private banks who profit simply by issuing currency. The currency the working class pursues to make ends meet is constantly declining in value, this can easily be seen by comparing the dollar against gold or a basket of commodities over the last century. Many people work hard just to survive, and therefore desire undiluted entertainment in their free time. This causes them to tune out anything that pierces their bubble of alternate reality, which is a life carried out inside a fantasy world of visual, audio, and interactive fiction. These people are not rational, because they do not "live in truth."

Parasitical people from the lower class typically have no problem exploiting the system for whatever they can get from it, and they blame their inability to achieve success on those who produce and pay their bills. These people may also be ignorant and apathetic, and typically have poor educations due to a culture that does not prize learning (free libraries being in no short supply in this country). They believe that they can receive "free money" without consequence, but of course are self-deluded and destructive to the society that patronizes them. These people are not rational, because they do not seek the truth; nor are they self-interested because they do not struggle to personally succeed.

The ill-informed are those better "educated" individuals who see prevailing wisdom as emanating directly from the fount of academia and the dominant news media. These people confuse intelligence with expert consensus, and vicariously situate themselves as among the elites, by virtue of education or occupation. They do not rationally challenge the ideas that have been ingrained in them through the government-run education system. Many do not even believe in truth, only the narratives that they perceive are desirable to propagate. These people are the opposite of rational, because they do not seek or even acknowledge truth.

Moderate Americans equate sensibility with easy-goingness. Nothing the government does seems to bother them unless it seems "mean" or "aggressive" toward other people. These people hold that a nation is a collective where people get along at all costs; they thus hold bi-partisanship, compromise, and decorum are the highest virtues a people can have. These "go along to get along" are not rationally self-interested, because they abrogate their opinions to consensus, and believe that rational decisions are made according to deliberation, and are not dictated by truth, logic, and the facts.

Progressives are those who knowingly fuel government expansion, commonly for the reason that they think government can solve most, if not all, the nation's problems. Such people tend to have no historical perspective and think that whatever happens in the future is necessarily "progressive." More insidiously, there are those who see America's past as a dark age, which we should flee as expediently as possible. These people, typically those in academia and in the upper echelons of government, may even purposefully promote policies that are destructive of America's cultures, traditions, and institution, because limited government provides a barrier to their power.

The underlying ideology of many progressives is altruism, which provides the justification for huge bureaucratic entitlement programs and the provision of grants for non-government organizations (NGOs). Progressives typically cannot survive in a marketplace, which is the mutual trade of goods and services, assuming the self-interest of all parties. Progressives, who are effectively accomplices of the inherently coercive state, look to undermine the free market system by appealing to people's emotions. The most effective tactic historically has been to persuade people that a self-abrogating altruism is the path to either social grace or eternal nirvana, while rational self-interest means ruthless theft and rapine.

The American government thus over time has created a host of problems by serving people the lie that it is "compassionate" to subsidize failure, thereby prolonging it. Over time, such a dysfunctional and defeatist view of mankind has demoralized the nation and persuaded many people that the "system" is the problem, which in our country is monolithically labeled "capitalism" and given eternal existential status as a scapegoat. Never mind that the U.S. long ago abandoned any semblance of respecting basic principles of a market capitalism, such as private property and sound currency.

The ultimate result of the corruption of rational self-interest is the collapse of the American system of ordered liberty, and, due to the ignoble state of all of Europe, the demise of Western Civilization. If America is lost, a great beacon of light on the world would be snuffed out.

The main source of corruption in the United States and Western Civilization as a whole is not socialism but nihilism, which begat both moral relativism and pragmatism. This nihilism opens people's minds up to explore all sorts of possibilities for radically "transforming" the country (including socialism; both on the slow path and the fast track), which essentially entails destroying the country, not "reforming" it. (See Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" for why this is dangerous.)

Reinforcing both pessimism and desperation, the distant past (and as the discontents become more radical, even the recent past) is steeped in revisionist mythology that places undue emphasis on societal foibles and errors so that the nation's history appears unrelentingly bad, and surely a brighter future lies ahead nearly no matter what we do, as long as it is "change."

Well, the politicians do seek "change," from the free and prosperous country people have taken for granted, to tyranny and despotism, cloaked in the wooly maternalistic parlance that many are are mentally unequipped to pierce. Specifically, this is not because all of them are inherently stupid or even ignorant, but because they apparently lack the critical faculties of self-interest and judgment, and this is by the statist's designs.

Who knows how many years the majority of us are taught everything opposite from those philosophical truths conducive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, reinforced by the news media, Hollywood, friends, possibly family? Or even worse, that there is no such thing as "truth"? But there is truth in life, and it can only be reached by applying one's rational faculties toward discovering it for oneself.

The problem with this country is not that people who believe in the Constitution and are willing to defend their individual rights stand for something, but that their political opposition stand for nothing. It is not noble or brave to attain power by making the false claim that everyone can get whatever they want without either earning it or paying the price for it. This is the opposite of rational self-interest, which is the keystone of Western Civilization. Remove that keystone, and everything comes crashing to the ground. Once again, civilizations rise and fall, usually because they become ideologically corrupted and the people fail to defend themselves from threats arising both from within and abroad.

While standing on principle will always seem like dogmatism or extremism to the vapid and the vacuous, the conservative will always see soft-minded idealists (meaning those who are not rooted in objective reality) who buy the statists' heady but ultimately vain promises as manipulable dupes. Such people are prime targets for collectivists, who rise to power by indulging delusional fantasies, which are a consequence of people's lack of rational self-interest. This may require further clarification.

This is not to argue that one should live a life bereft of emotion; on the contrary, I mean to imply that when one acknowledges that one's mind is capable of knowing and engaging reallity, then one can approach life with the healthy attitude that one is required to labor to support oneself. By extension, through labor and reason one concludes that one does not mystically owe anyone else who happens to share the earth by allusion to such transcendental concepts as "the greater good," or "society." When people are trained to apply reason to their environment, the majority can achieve success, and therefore lasting happiness. The economy is sustained and people can live in relative peace and prosperity. There is more than ample empirical evidence to support this view.

We must re-educate our fellow Americans to discover this self-empowering ethic of rationality and the true meaning of self-interest, or America, and by extension, all of Western Civilization, will be lost. The result will not be a new dawn, as the progressives believe, but a return to the dark despotism of the past; first of the mind, and then by the sword.

We have the courage.  We have the convictions.  We have the will-power.  But what is it that prevents us American patriots from taking our country back?

Sun-Tzu wrote, "Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."  That is exactly what has happened to the lovers of liberty in this country: We have been vanquished without a fight.

Through compromise, through deliberation, through overconfidence, and through good faith in the political opposition that surely they would not <i>destroy</i> the greatest, freest nation on earth we have been routed and stand on the precipice of tyranny.

The "conservative" gentlemen in the Congress debate the worthiness of our rights, as if they are theirs to barter with in the annual trade of favors and privileges that has become our parliament.  The nation is laid open as a golden coffer in which the presumed representatives have <i>prima nocta</i> to despoil as they see fit.  And behind each one of the smiling thieves stands an armed guard, waving his baton at any of the serfs who would dare bridle at the indignity of being placated with empty promises and bribed with stolen money.

During the inexorable drive to tyranny that our founders warned us of we have stood on the shifting ground of intellectual fashion and have been cowed by the supposed "moderate" voices among us to avoid an extreme defense of individual rights, and particularly that right most indispensable for freedom, private property.  We have been cautioned to refrain from partisanship, and to come together with the political opposition for "the good of the nation."  This is a fool's compromise where one trades a handshake for a shackle.

We have abandoned our instincts for self-preservation and the defense of our family and homeland out of a concern for the "greater good," as our adversaries constantly chide us to observe.  But I retort that there is no "greater good" save what is good for each one of us, and that is the freedom to make of our lives what we will.

But what of "compassion"?  That perpetual bludgeon the left bashes upon our heads is the most fraudulent and deceptive tool of manipulation ever devised by the state.  Into the pit of "compassion," goes our rights, our freedoms, and our nation's wealth, never to return as the state grows fat and the politicians increasingly unseemly in their exhortations.  The entire government has now become a carnivale of teary-eyed clowns, with elected charlatans hurling one preposterous <i>argumentum ad misericordium</i> after another, until the nation is a mockery and the justifications for our laws resting on an untenable foundation doomed to collapse.

What should we do to restore the republic? In practice, no more federal taxes save what funds the national defense and the bare operations of government.  In fact, Washington should be shut down and the representatives of the country relegated to discussing whatever few bills they should be allowed to pass at home over their morning coffee.

Until that felicitous time, the following are among the particular issues that must be addressed by patriots who are serious about turning back the disastrous tide of statism:

The Federal Reserve <i>must</i> be disbanded, as there can be no free people whose currency is owned by the state.

The Department of Education <i>must</i> be liquidated, as no nation founded in freedom will have its cherished ideals replenished whose education is controlled by the state.

The abuses of the Interstate Commerce Clause <i>must</i> be overturned, as the intent of the clause is to facilitate trade, not strangle it.

The prohibitions against the private exploration and extraction of natural resources <i>must</i> be repealed, as no nation that abandons the goal of economic self-sufficiency and funds the coffers of its enemies can be truly secure.

Our border <i>must</i> be secured, in order to guarantee that those who participate in the nation are familiar with our terms of citizenship.

The subsidies of business <i>must</i> be terminated, with extreme prejudice, so that entrepreneurs and small businesses are not throttled and our commerce is predicated on the voluntary purchase of goods and services.

Welfare programs <i>must</i> be phased out, so that people relearn how to take responsibility for themselves.

Only then will we once again become a shining beacon for liberty and hope in the world.

What is the response of the American patriot in the age of tyranny?  No more compromises. We must remove <i>every</i> ideological justification for statism imaginable and stake our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor on voluntary and rational cooperation based on the non-negotiable principles of life, liberty, and property.

The sunshine patriot nestles himself in the cozy and easily attainable blanket of "moderate" and "independent," while deliberating if the road to redemption for America lay in "experimenting" with socialism, or if reclaiming national glory lay in re-establishing our founding.

But there is only one rational choice for the man who values his self-preservation and that of his countrymen.  The time to side with liberty is now!

Those who would believe that the Democrats are the lesser of two evils because they purport to champion civil liberties are deluding themselves.  The Democrats have used freedom as a facade to hide behind while they destroy all institutions resistant to their plans of total domination. Social justice is the smokescreen that masks the vision of the true believers, a fog of war behind which the nation is pillaged and plundered right in front of their eyes.  The banner of altruism is waved by the ravaging armies of progressivism, and the unquestioning lead us to our Abaddon.  Until the romanticism of the impossible is disabused from these dupes, no voice of reason, no clarion call will penetrate the haze that clouds their judgment.

Those who would pose that the Republicans are the <i>natural</i> antithesis of the Democrats, the opposition party that can put our country back on the sound pillars of freedom, justice, liberty, and property, are likewise politically confused.  The Republicans are led by statists of a different sort: Nationalists and great power chauvinists who intend to foist their preferred brand of collectivism onto the American people.

Though not as brazen and open in their predilections for ever-expansive government, the Republicans are nearly as dangerous as the progressives because they refuse to take a stand.  The dire situation we are faced with may have been inevitable, as lovers of liberty took a defensive position over time, yielding ground to the statists in a process of "deliberation" over Americans' rights and freedoms.  But as the Declaration of Independence makes clear, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and more appropriately, property) are inalienable.  They are not up for negotiation or deliberation.

We must steel ourselves for a long, protracted engagement with our statist enemies in both parties if we are to preserve and defend our nation as it was intended at the founding. Principled conservatives must reclaim the Republican mantle, and wield it as a weapon against the ever-expansive state. All Americans still able to exercise their judgment must throw in lot with with freedom, which requires the sustained reaffirmation of limited government under the Constitution, or the country could spin out of control in statist debauchery to our peril and that of our children. As the twentieth century makes painfully clear, in the struggle between liberty and tyranny, there must be liberty or there will be death.

This Brown-Coakley race for Senator of Massachusetts is very important for the tea party movement to continue its momentum from the interim elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and even New York (as scandalous as NY-23 turned out to be).

The Massachusetts press is heavily touting Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley, even invoking the myth that there is a "glass ceiling" for women running for senator in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe is essentially providing free campaign advertising for Coakley, as the progressive press typically does for its darlings.

Running against her is the Republican Scott Brown, and Joseph Lewis Kennedy (no relation to the Kennedys, apparently), a faux libertarian and a registered Independent. Some tea parties have thrown their support behind this pretend libertarian, a former Democrat who himself claims to support "green policies." A word to the wise: No libertarian can support "green policies" - only those technologies voted on with dollars in a free market!

A surprisingly balanced AP article shows the crux of the battle for the tea party movement, and that the race in Massachusetts is conceivably winnable:

Brown, who has carved out a decidedly conservative record, faces an uphill challenge in a state where the majority of voters are independents but frequently vote Democratic.

It is not every day that a dinosaur Democrat senator releases his icy grip on political office and with the economy in shambles and a Democrat leadership in Congress that is extremely aggravating for many conservatives and independents, such an opportunity to steal a seat in enemy territory is not likely to return anytime soon.

Besides the heavily favorable press that Coakley is likely to get, her past record of campaign contributions shows connections to a powerful legal lobby that garnered her nearly half a million dollars in 2006. In addition, POLITICO reports that Coakley enjoys the support of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and several abortion rights groups.

Challenging Martha Coakley will be Scott Brown who has a distinguished record and the moral character, values, and fortitude to take on the progressives in Massachusetts and in Congress. His short biography shows his honorable military service and his history of promoting an environment for growing businesses and defending family values:

Senator Brown is a proud member of the Massachusetts National Guard, where he has served for nearly three decades and currently holds the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) Corps. Brown was awarded the Army Commendation Medal for meritorious service in homeland security following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His career in public service began as selectman in Wrentham. He then went on to serve three terms as a State Representative and won his current State Senate seat in a special election in 2004. He is currently in his third Senate term.

In 2004, Senator Brown received the Public Servant of the Year Award from the United Chamber of Commerce for his leadership in reforming the state's sex offender laws and protecting the rights of victims. He has also been recognized by the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) for his work in creating an environment that encourages job growth and expansion in Massachusetts.

There is an opportunity for Scott Brown to win the vacated U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, which would be huge because it would bring the Democrat-controlled seats in the Senate to 59. The ability to filibuster, obstruct, and block legislation would be indispensable to slowing down the dangerous growth of government under the Democrats.

So how can we as a group get involved to put a dent in the Democrats' plans this January 19th? We need to take action as soon as possible. This involves two things, which can be done right after the holidays: Volunteer to cold call potential voters and contribute what you can to Brown's election campaign.

There are several good reasons for us to get involved:

1) We need to expend our political capital as a movement. The energy is currently high and that inertia needs to be brought to bear against any concrete target.

2) We need to practice mobilizing and facing voters in politically hostile territory using whatever powers of persuasion imaginable.

3) We need to gain experience sharing tactics on what works and doesn't work with potential voters, especially independents and moderates.

4) Regardless of the results, we need to show the progressive media that we are a political force to be reckoned with. They can no longer ignore us; now they must vilify us. As we saw throughout the healthcare debate in 2009, ridicule backfires on the media when wielded against traditional Americans and the tea party movement accrues more sympathizers.

5) We need to give conservative candidates confidence that we will financially and politically support them if they run. Those who have character and commitment to family values, fiscal responsibility, and the Constitution will garner support. Pretenders will be ostracized.

6) We need to support candidates with military service. An honorable military record is not a fail-safe litmus test; but it is a positive sign of a man of character.

7) If we are able to make a difference, even if we help make the Massachusetts senate race closer than it would otherwise be, we will relieve some of the angst that comes from watching a train wreck in slow motion and failing to act.

8) We need to get as politically involved as possible to grow and mature as a movement!

The anthropogenic climate change debate has centered around the question of whether or not man contributes to climate change. To answer this question shortly: Yes, man does. But the debate really needs to center around three interrelated questions: How much does man contributes to the greenhouse effect; if the answer is 'significantly,' what if anything can man do to offset the ostensible centennial trend of rising temperatures; and more fundamentally, would it be wise or far-sighted for man to attempt to change the climate (thereby changing the climate once again)?

To address the first debate, man contributes insignificantly to global greenhouse gases, particularly so in the case of carbon dioxide emissions. First of all, water vapor is 95% of the greenhouse effect, and 99.999% of water vapor in the atmosphere is naturally occurring. Secondly, carbon dioxide contributes .117% of the greenhouse effect. Thirdly, man contributes about 3.207% of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Thus, the scientific answer is that man does not contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect, purported to be the cause of the centennial trend of global warming.

In regards to the question if man should attempt to halt global warming, there are two things to bear in mind. First of all, if mobilizing for action requires rendering control to a central economic body, which would determine the allocation and use of natural resources, not only have we established that its actions would be unlikely to have a significant effect on the climate, in all likelihood, it's results compared to the status quo would be worse. Central command economies are notorious for their misuse of resources and their disregard for human health; this is a direct consequence of the inherently anti-humanistic philosophy that animates them and their inability to account for resource scarcity. Secondly, markets are better at stewarding the environment because firms are interested in efficiency, long-term investment and profits, milking natural resource supplies, and replenishing stores of renewable resources. The price competitiveness of alternative goods, including alternative resources, virtually guarantees maximum economic efficiency; while the openness of the market system gives rise to new technologies; both make the adaptation of societies to external variables like climate change much more smooth, incremental, and stable over the long term.

Thirdly, in regards to the wisdom of acting to halt climate change, people tend to forget that civilization rose with global warming since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. The idea that man can single-handedly reverse the course of "climate change" is not only Sysiphean in its absurdity, it is possibly self-defeating.

Who is to say the moment we take action in the name of affecting the climate, for example, stripping our industrial base and inhibiting development in third world nations, that the world will not be hit by another ice age the likes of the Little Ice Age that began in the sixteenth century and we will be set that much further back in terms of advancing civilization?

Should the sheer fact that man contributes to climate change give the government carte blanche to regulate all aspects of the economy, by appeal to the "dirty hands" argument? Only in the mind of a totalitarian politician or a cloistered bureaucrat, neither of which tend to have any appreciable respect for individual rights or the market, is the answer an indisputable yes.

The Obama administration is running a left-wing sweep on the National Football League. Recently, the political correctness police banned Rush Limbaugh from partial ownership of the St. Louis Rams, and now the White House has released a new video that has the NFL backing the seemingly benign Obama program "United We Serve."

What are we to make of this hilarious yet disturbing propaganda, which has Obama running a crossing route and catching a lofty toss thrown by New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees? Are we to infer that Obama is also a Saint?

There is practically nothing more conceivably antithetical to the left's worldview than American football. This makes it a sitting target, kind of like Barack Obama coming across the middle on Ray Lewis. [How would Obama talk his way out of the reality that he would get smoked?] The left is therefore working to co-opt the NFL and put it in the service of socialism.

One might object that the NFL has partnered with "charitable" organizations in the past. The league has maintained a long and mutually beneficial relationship with The United Way. But United We Serve is no charitable organization, it is a political policy designed to get Americans used to the well-established socialist dream of everyone working for free. Sounds like slavery - with a smile.

For those who believe this is no more than right-wing pontification, observe the language on the White House "blog" describing United We Serve: "It's going to take all of us working together to build a new foundation for America and it will happen one community at a time." Yeah, kind of like ACORN - does the NFL want a piece of that action? [Furthermore, did we just survive a nuclear holocaust that the mainstream media didn't report? Or is the White House simply describing the economic after-effects of government intervention into the housing market?]

There is always the possibility that the NFL is simply clueless and sees nothing wrong with inviting a politically divisive figure to serve as representative of the league. But what is not believable is that the Obama administration is simply promoting a seemingly worthy cause in good faith. Obama is targeting the NFL and watering down its cultural significance with the leftist ethos of altruism, because the NFL represents a defiance of the socialist narrative virtually en toto.

Does anyone think that leftists fail to grasp how important professional football is to American culture? The NFL has all the traits that effete modern liberals despise. There is capitalism, manliness, and competition - making the league a perennial institution of solid American values so provocative that neomarxist shock-troops cannot help but try to co-opt it.

Professional football is an inherently conservative institution. Teaching both individual greatness and teamwork, football brings out the best in men through competition.

Best of all, in football results matter. This makes a football game a test of two teams: There is a superior team and an inferior team on any given Sunday. This black or white, up or down way of evaluating superiority clashes mightily with the left's morally relativist worldview.

The National Football League is also a powerful indictment of the Marxian myth that there are two classes in a capitalist society, haves and have-nots, and that the former class unremittingly and perpetually exploits the latter. Professional football players come from all socioeconomic backgrounds (in fact usually lower and middle class ones) and they work their butts off to make the most of their talent; there is no free ride, and no excuses here. The NFL, without any affirmative action policy and simply through the standard of open competition, confirms an argument that conservatives have been making for years: That a true market is colorblind. In the NFL, the rule is simple: Either you are a great football player or you are a fan. Black, white, latino, whatever - once you put on a helmet you are all a part of the team (kind of like the U.S. military).

Football players sell themselves and their unique set of skills to the NFL - and if successful, they become millionaires. The ultimate reason they become millionaires? Because the middle class has the time, the technological means, and the money to financially support the game.

The NFL constitutes a running threat to the leftist narrative. The Gramscian march through all the institutions of the culture in order to subvert the economy continues, and professional sports is merely the last of American bastions to resist the left's creeping program.

Here's a hail Mary, keep the ubiquitous President Obama and his socialist message out of my Sundays. If you think Tea Party activists are bad, you haven't seen thirty thousand angry Cleveland Browns tailgaters.

The statist assault upon the republic has been relentless since the founding. The constitutional order has been threatened from the right by national statists like Hamilton and Lincoln, and from the left by progressives like Wilson and FDR. But despite the vicissitudes of fortune that have tested the mettle of the American people, under no other government in the history of the republic has the fate of a people been more in doubt.

The Constitution is tattered, the justice system is co-opted, the economy is largely nationalized, private property is obsolete, the currency is debauched, the debt is skyrocketing, the schools are indoctrination centers, the universities are propaganda mills, the news media are absent, national security is compromised, our wars overseas are stalling, the election system is fraudulent, the government is unrepentantly corrupt, the party system is broken, and the free speech necessary to alert our fellow citizens is being stifled by political correctness.

How did we arrive to the precipice of national ruin, and what is the ultimate solution to the challenges that confront those who prize liberty?

No political or economic system is ideal, the American system of government included. But at least in years past the American republic was designed to succeed. The political, economic, and educational systems now appear intended to demoralize those who prize liberty and freedom, those values that nurtured the United States in its historic rise over two centuries from fledgling alliance of former British colonies to powerful leader of the free world.

Some on the left would make it out that conservatives are rubes who pine for the halcyon days of slavery and more restricted suffrage, but these relics of the past are anathema to the views of those who respect the founding. Conservatives recognize that the kernel of political and true economic emancipation could always be found at the heart of America's constitutional order. Thus the developments over the course of two centuries that progressives claim are the fruits of their "struggle" against the unjust American system are actually the natural and logical consequences of The Declaration of Independence and the ratification and enshrinement of The United States Constitution.

The reversals of the founders' vision of a political system of organized liberty mounted nearly from the start. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the chartering of a central bank in direct contravention of the ruling of the Constitutional convention, and the suppression of rebellions all posed threats to the furtherance of a government founded on freedom. The War Between the States, counter-intuitive as it may be for some to grasp, may have freed the slaves, but it crushed State's Rights and cleared the path to oppressive centralized government. The Tenth Amendment is now such a foreign notion that when used as an objection to the encroachment of state power, one might be brandished a radical extremist by the "federal" government.

The turn of the twentieth century reversed the trend of national power statism to progressive statism. From the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to the progressive income tax authorized by the Sixteenth Amendment, two planks of the Communist Manifesto, it was a smooth transition to the proto-fascism of the FDR-era through the Johnson administration. When Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, and authorized fiat currency, the ability of the government to manipulate the economy for political ends became virtually unbounded. Within two generations' time, the national debt mounted to the point of overwhelming the economy, all underwritten by the socialist mandate for the government to right the supposed injustice of requiring that people actually work for a living.

The political economy of the United States is now structurally distorted beyond recognition through the malinvestment that comes with the Fed's easy credit policies and the flooding of the market with money during economic downturns. Over the last thirty years, industries have been pushed overseas due to the highest corporate taxes in the world; this has exacerbated the inflation that comes through monetary expansion, which can be demonstrated by rising commodity prices like gold. The economy, between the bloated civil service and the government (which are net consumers and not producers) and the increase of the debt load for each family above $100,000 on average, is now cited at about 70% consumption. It doesn't take a Harvard economics degree to see that the fundamental political economy of the United States is literally unsustainable. This is irrefutably by design.

It is time for the American conservative to face a few hard truths. It is irrelevant whether the progressive believes himself to be a friend of the working class or a liberator of men or an erector of utopias or the usherer in of a new world order of perpetual peace and universal "social justice." The effect of progressive policies are exactly like those that would be designed by the worst enemy of freedom, liberty, prosperity, and success of the United States imaginable. If a general one hundred years ago was faced with the task of destroying the United States, the crown jewel of the Enlightenment and the nemesis of tyranny and oppression around the world, he could literally do no better (or worse) than the progressive Fabian socialist has done incrementally from within. Again, the damage to the country has been wrought by design, as can be clearly and unmistakably gleaned from the leftist tracts of a Marx, a Gramsci, a Horkheimer, or an Alinsky.

It is now beyond the point of arguing with indoctrinated neomarxists, who are literally unequipped to fathom the conservative's warning that the country is headed toward ruin and not toward millenarian rapture and on into a socialist paradise. Their consciences are carefully conditioned to react to all rational judgment as necessarily discriminatory or unjust. The progressive's views revolve around empathy and compassion, which are resistant to any rational arguments, which require a recognition of reality. The insertion of facts, evidence, and history into an argument with a leftist is like throwing a stone into a raging river; it will only appear from the perspective of the leftist as a barrier to progress, and in any event the fluidity of his mind will find a way to circumvent it.

The conservative must face the fact that he has now become the radical, the same kind of radical as our founding fathers were. The left has proceeded from the assumption of "the ends justify the means," and has approached the coercive apparatus of government with an instrumental rationality in order to effect its utopian vision. The legal system is a tool to the left; the education system is a tool to the left; the media is a tool to the left; and so forth; all institutions are seen as potential power for them to be seized for the cause. Conservatives believe in honoring institutions and thus refrain from utilizing their potential power to accomplish the vision of liberty, freedom, and individual rights.

This must change. We must see institutions in this country as more than sacred traditions to be preserved. We must see institutions as a means to power, with the battle cry of going on the offensive in the name of liberty. All manifestations of injustice and unfreedom must be attacked and swept away.

It is time to go to war with the left in a way that it can understand. There is no more time for civility and free discourse with the left, the way the left has gotten used to; the value that will be propagated will be liberty and freedom. There is no more "agree to disagree." It is the way of freedom or the highway. No longer should the university be permitted to capitalize on freedom to teach unfreedom; no longer should the lawyer be able to seize property in the interest of violating property; no longer will the left be permitted to take liberty with violating our liberties. This is not dogmatism, this is taking a principled stand in defense of freedom.

No, now is time for the leftists to be criminalized and exposed as parasites upon the system that has nurtured them. The leftists must be seen as the ultimate of hypocrites, infiltrators who tells pretty lies and who manipulate the institutions of society in order to achieve their grandiose and narcissistic goal of perfecting the world.

We must ourselves found, support, and co-opt institutions to propagate and inculcate the values of liberty and freedom in our culture. We must go on the offensive and attack the left intellectually. We must no longer tolerate the left's misuse of freedom to institute unfreedom. We must be relentless and we must be bold. Our founding fathers, the nation's first radicals, would do no less.

The American people are slowly being stripped of their sovereignty and prepped for submission to a world government. The process may take several generations, but there can be no doubt that this is the ineluctable outcome the statists in the government have pre-determined. The individual, in the fullest sense, must take a stand with his fellow patriots against the state if this grave threat to freedom is to be thrown back.

The lubrication for the integration of the United States into the machinery of the new internationalist world order is moral relativism, and by extension, cultural relativism, which hold that there are no appreciable differences between the moral systems of nations. Moral relativism at the individual-societal level is destructive of a man's ability to judge (or to use Evan Sayet's term to "discriminate") what values are conducive to his life and success. Cultural relativism attempts to suppress the resistance of peoples to the idea of unification in a supra-national world government.

The program for the internationalist vision is two-fold: first, the annihilation of "dogmatic" (meaning unyielding) religious and moral values; and second, reprogramming.

In the state-run education system, people are not taught true critical thinking skills; and those academic subjects conducive to developing them (specifically, mathematics and science) are limited to the most rudimentary and superficial of expositions. Furthermore, the core curriculum of reading and writing is grounded in the post-modernist, that is to say, subjectivist school of literary criticism, which is corrosive of traditional social norms; while the key aspect of writing is not communication to others and therefore a recognition of the external world (and thus the development of one's identity through the process of reflecting on one's external environment), but rather is a self-indulgent exercise in "expression" with little or no standards exercised upon the writer.

The effect of the educational program of the left (that is to say of the State and in turn of the internationalist elite - in a Trotskyist hierarchy of "fusion") is the fueling of a narcissism complex; the leftist program feeds a sense of alienation in individuals and subsequently makes them pliable towards "joinerism," or the willingness to join (triumphal or salvationist) mass movements to fill a barely perceptible void in their lives (one that they are not mentally equipped to critically analyze). Ironically, this has the additional effect of irrational self-confidence in one's cause, and no amount of reasoning or persuasion can deter the devout collectivist-altruist, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. (In contrast, conservative intellectuals cannot have the same charge of being "doctrinaire" levied against them, as they have to thoroughly know both sides of any argument.) The label of "narcissism" is further substantiated by the behavior of collectivist-altruists, which tends to be as "selfish" as any other person's, if not more so (because they tend to take that which does not belong to them, rather than offer goods and services in exchange for capital). The feel-goodism of the leftist is usually carried out at someone else's expense.

The leftist program of emptying the minds of individuals can be equated to reformatting the hard drives of computers (though this is an imperfect analogy because the reprogramming is done simultaneously with the reformatting). The goal of the left is to foster a worldview that holds that all judgment is by nature morally reprehensible, and the worst sin a person can commit is to "act in full" as an independent, self-actualized human being. (This is why Nietzsche is just as instructive a man of the left to study as Marx). Men that cannot be manipulated are the perpetual thorns in the side of the leftist; and they treat them as such, ostracizing them, ridiculing them, and belittling them as narrow-minded or "selfish" rubes every opportunity they get.

Reinforcing this program of "emptying" the culture is reprogramming using mass indoctrination and propaganda. This entails everything from historical revisionism to the reinforcement of leftist (non-) values in the media. It is important to realize that this program need not be a coordinated effort; the beauty of ideological subversion is that if one is oblivious to the power of philosophy to animate the mind and thus to provoke certain responses and actions, no "conspiracy" <i>per se</i> is needed.

The basically nihilistic, morally relativistic propaganda in the media is further reinforced by two other factors, one controlled by the left, the other not fully controlled. The first factor is a culture war that seeks to dishonor religion, to promote a culture of death, to decry and to defile the economic system, and to create as much perceived chaos as possible. This generally provokes a radical and by turns reactionary environment unless carefully managed. This is why Fabian socialism has been a much more successful means of subverting the United States than radical socialism (we can observe this with the current turn in public sentiment against the radical socialist-meets-pragmatist President Obama.) The second factor, which the left only partly controls (but one that it most certainly wants to dominate) is the means of mass communication. (President Obama's recent comment in China regarding his desire to control information so that he "doesn't have to listen to criticism" is not as much of a joke as he lets on.)

So are leftists insidious men and women looking to enslave their fellow human beings? No. They tend to be useful idiots for aspiring oligarchs, who are truly shrewd but obviously cannot control all the variables. So how are seemingly bright and otherwise ingenious men and women manipulated in such fashion? The answer lay in philosophy. First of all, academics in America tend to be "half-baked" intellectuals (as KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov intimates in one of his videos) who have a one-sided reading of history, economics, and politics. Secondly, social scientists have persuaded themselves that they are true "scientists," even as they abstract away all the biology and individuality of human beings and replace people with numbers or immerse them in collectivist organizing principles. The idea that mankind can be "managed" by a scientific-technocratic elite intrigues intellectuals, who nonetheless tend to hold to the mystical transcendental collectivist vision of marxists and neomarxists. The internationalist vision of marxism is remarkably robust and resilient, even emotionally nurturing to its adherents; this is the case even as marxists have ceased to convince themselves that it is "scientific."

The attraction of intellectuals to marxism is perhaps no better summarized that in Schumpeter's masterwork <i>Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy</i>:

"Thus the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the World War of 1914, the French Frondes, the great French Revolution, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, English free trade, the labor movement as a whole as well as any of its particular manifestations, colonial expansion, institutional changes, the national and party politics of every time and country - all this enters the domain of Marxian economics which claims to find theoretical explanations in terms of class warfare, of attempts at and revolt against exploitation, of accumulation and of qualitative change in the capital structure, of changes in the rate of surplus value and in the rate of profit. No longer has the economist to be content with giving technical answers to technical questions; instead he teaches humanity the hidden meaning of its struggles...No - politics itself is being determined by the structure of the state of the economic process and becomes a conductor of effects as completely within the range of economic theory as any purchase or sale.

Once more, nothing is easier to understand than the fascination exerted by a synthesis which does for us just this. It is particularly understandable in the young and in those intellectual denizens of our newspaper world to whom the gods seem to have granted the gift of eternal youth. Panting with impatience to have their innings, longing to save the world from something or other, disgusted with textbooks of undescribable tedium, dissatisfied emotionally and intellectually, unable to achieve synthesis by their own effort, they find what they crave for in Marx. There it is, the key to all the most intimate secrets, the magic wand that marshals both great events and small." (HarperPerennial, 47)

It is clear to intellectuals themselves that pure Marxism (or to use the <i>nouveau</i> phrase - "vulgar" Marxism) has outlived its usefulness as a "scientific" theory of everything; yet the power of its vision is held aloft by neomarxist balloons in the sky, even as the foundation has crumbled. The left is willing to lie to everyone, including themselves, to perpetuate their fantasies; this is a phenomenon that men of learning and genuflection have seen before, and one that strikes any sober person as extremely dangerous.

The theoretical keystone to understanding how marxism is conducive to fostering an international oligarchy instead of worldwide liberation is two-fold. The first is the recognition that property is essentially command over the usage of land, labor, or resources (including "capital"; but one must be careful here to recognize that what we call "capital" can be fiat issued by governments to signify mutual debt - a very communistic notion in and of itself). The second is that every political system tends towards oligarchy; this is because every order requires leadership and organization. The control over the instrument of coercion that is government tends towards co-optation and manipulation for personal gain. Even spontaneous orders, like those found in nations that respect liberty, still require protection by a class of specialists. This is what is meant by the Jeffersonian phrase, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

How do we judge if a moral system is deleterious of liberty? The method and standard of judging the rightness or wrongness of any moral position is to ask how it affects the individual. Not society, not the transcendental "greater good," not even the nation. America exists as a nation to defend liberty, liberty does not exist to serve the nation.

The individualist has a very specific view of totalitarian or collectivist movements of <i>any</i> kind. It can rightly and steadfastly be held that there has been no nation in world history that has respected individual rights as America has that has also committed mass atrocities, enslaved foreign peoples, or has tolerated the slavery of its own people for any appreciable time on any appreciable scale compared to those of collectivist or authoritarian regimes. This is a truth that cannot be bludgeoned away by doctrinaire marxists for any man of historical vision. The tradition of individual rights and liberty should be preserved by the American people in the face of tyranny finally arriving to its shores; even if quietly and even if by cover of treason.

Throughout history, few great leaders have ascended to power and fundamentally transformed their nations. The irony is that these great leaders did not change the peoples in their charge from ignorant, unproductive, and cowardly masses into an intelligent, vigorous, and virtuous citizenry. Rather they presided over the death knells of once civilized societies collapsing into tumult and ignominy.

Once a nation demands to be fundamentally transformed by a great leader it is already far beyond hope. Once a charismatic leader can manipulate a population beyond the norms or laws of a people, the people are already lost. This is because a great nation cannot be defined by a great leader, but only by the great people who inhabit it. Truly great people drive the economy, lead the military, and teach the people honestly and accurately about the cultural legacy of their forefathers.

If a charismatic leader comes to power and accrues all glory in the nation for the successes of the people, while shirking all blame for the nation's failures, and the people still adore him, the nation is doomed. For this is a nation that has lost its pride, its competitiveness, its rugged individualistic spirit. A demoralized people look to the great leader to save them from themselves, out of some sense of desperation or guilt, and they crave redemption - whether it be in the eyes of a national or a global audience.

But the transformative political figure of world history cannot just arrive on the scene from the actor's gallery like a deus ex machina, solving the problems of a people. The destiny of a nation can be found in the errors and misdeeds of previous generations. The positive great leader in history is very rarely a "transformative" figure, he is a reflection of the people; he is not only the leader that the people "deserve," but the one that they have selected for themselves. Winston Churchill was a great leader not because he was "above" the British people during World War II, but because he stood with them; one might say his steel and resolve was iconic of the British people. Metaphorically, one might say he was the British people.

The transformative figure, on the other hand, is nearly always the deliverer of doom to a failed people; his actions to save a people from themselves inevitably results in chaos, increasing tyranny, oppression, and if any proud people remain (be they even three percent), civil war.

For example, Peter the Great is often held aloft as a transformative figure in Russian history, But for all his European-style modernization, he was still a despot when all was said and done. Catherine the Great was little better. Though being friends with men of the Enlightenment like Denis Diderot, the rise of the truly transformative figure Napoleon Bonaparte shocked the lady of Holstein-Gottorp back to her monarchic sensibilities.

Whether it be Attila the Hun transforming the Eurasian map, one will find Gothic tribes fleeing to a crumbling Rome; if one in turn considers the sack of Rome by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 AD, one will find a demoralized empire from rampant corruption by elites. The key thing to remember is that the transformative political figures of world history tend nearly always to be those who deliver doom to an already failed people.

The notable exception to this rule are the founding fathers of the United States. A small minority of the British colonies of America, these men fought to lift themselves out of oppression and tyranny, and founded a political order that would provide the environment where men would have every opportunity to be great, if they so chose. The Constitution they enshrined put people's lives in their own hands under the condition of liberty; it also put considerable political power in the hands of states and small communities, so men to a great degree could solve their own problems.

Thus when one thinks of the transformative figures of American history, one cannot fail to think of men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. But one must recall that even as George Washington was offered the presidency for a third term, he famously deferred; this was as if to say that the people themselves were the only ones who could decide if they were to remain free.

So - two hundred years later we are graced with the presidency of one who prior to his election declared, pompously, that "we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The United States of America. The first nation in world history to enshrine liberty as a mandate. The nation that adopted a Constitution that vowed to eradicate the importation of slavery in two generations' time. The United States that experienced one of the bloodiest wars in world history largely over the issue of freedom for slaves. The United States that helped win World War I, granted women's suffrage, played a role in defeating the Nazis and the Japanese, and freed every major nation it occupied during wartime. The United States that faced down a bloody imperialistic police state for nearly half a century, accelerating its implosion. The United States that became the most prosperous, most generous, most righteous force for humanity in world history. The United States that shed blood but asked for no oil in the wars following the acts of September 11th. That United States.

The presumptuous newcomer to the world stage and the American political scene may truly believe himself to be a transformative figure; but his ego is vastly out of proportion to his sense of history if this is to be the case. As he continues to delude himself that he is a historical figure who should be imbued with dictatorial powers to undo the problems that government itself largely created, he will find that he is wielding a sledgehammer to swat 300 million flies. Each action by government will be too late, too strong, or too expensive, and thus government will unleash more anxiety, more unforeseen consequences, and will do more damage. The president will ask for trillions in funds for more programs to allay the masses, but he will do nothing but further dislocate the economy and eventually, collapse it.

Obama surely sees himself as America's first truly transformative figure. Let us do our utmost not only to survive him, but to reverse America's course toward greatness by re-establishing liberty as its guiding precept. Then it will be left up to our children to decide if they are to be great.

The blood feud between the left and right is reaching a crescendo, and as an unrepentant individualist one can only cringe at the direction the country is heading. While it would be presumptuous to say that political polarization in this country is unprecedented in its divisiveness (this is a country that experience one of the bloodiest civil wars in world history), one gets the sense that things could get really ugly.

How can one make this claim? Because the division now cannot be boiled down to issues like slavery or tariffs (thus opening up a possibility for compromise), but is about a fundamental clash of worldviews.

The social conservative right and the progressive left are embroiled in a battle for hearts and minds. The battlefields cannot be walked upon like the ones at Fredericksburg or Appomattox. This makes power struggles between the left and right exceedingly dangerous, tending more toward social chaos then organized conventional civil war; this is because one does not even know who the enemy is by sight or by location.  Since both sides see the government as an aegis to promote its agenda, they are wont to turn the government into an instrument of oppression in a country fairly evenly divided. This is why both sides will only escalate the political polarization by creating and aggravating grievances through the misuse of government.

It is not the job of the government to promote a Christian culture. Many people think that government has to at least safeguard a Christian culture. This is wrong. The government's job is to make it safe for there to be a Christian culture by defending individual rights. By consistently applying the rule of law, cultures not consistent with individual rights are prevented from arising or getting a foothold due to the operation of a vigorous justice system with a clear mandate.

Currently, the schools and universities are using taxpayer funds to promote other cultures under the guise of "multiculturalism." This is not about fairness or diversity at all, it is about eroding mainstream (a marxist might say bourgeois) culture and especially Christian culture. In this sense, the social conservative right feels threatened by the progressive agenda and wants government to defend Christian values. But two wrongs do not make a right. Neither Christians nor anti-Christians (not referring to atheists but more to anti-theists, to coin a term) should use government to defend religion or anti-religion, since both are matters of faith.

What the government can do in this world is defend individual rights, including freedom of conscience. This should be non-negotiable. That is why hate crimes legislation is so dangerous. It purports that a crime can be rooted in thoughts and not actions. This sets a dangerous precedent. The point of law is that it is universally applicable. When law becomes arbitrary in any sense, it is no longer law but fiat (not saying that judges and magistrates are dispensable in interpreting the law; obviously, reality is complex and ethical and moral issues require interpretation).

Law cannot be controlled by the citizenry in a constitutional republic if it is made to serve supernatural or collectivist agendas. Rules and evidence can only be consistently and thus justly applied to the law in an order predicated on the assumption of objective reality.

A consistent, stable and political order is needed in order for there to be personal freedom and the ability for individuals to adapt to their environments. People should be allowed to flourish or fail according to their own actions, while allowing for for the role of chance. One of the greatest mistakes of the progressive is in believing he can unnaturally control the anomalies of human life without unleashing unforeseen consequences in the spontaneous social and political order (in the Aristotelian vision these are one and the same; yet this is possible modernly only at the Jeffersonian level of the polity).

The political order should not be founded on promoting the public good or national greatness; this is the fatal philosophical error of the progressive and the social conservative, respectively. The just government is the one that uses coercion to protect individuals; not to force them to sacrifice on others' behalf.

Coerced altruism is one of the deadliest evil of our time, and one that is responsible for hundreds of millions of violent deaths throughout history. From the French Revolution to the Great Leap Forward, nationalism, socialism, and by extension, communism, are the political orders of systematic martyrdom for the greater good. When by the force of these systems' perverse internal logic things go awry, unimaginable chaos, ensuing oppression, and implosion are the inevitable results.

The President stood up, made the sign of the O and, switching on the synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and a choir of instruments–near-wind and super-string–that plangently repeated and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity Hymn. Again, again–and it was not the ear that heard the pulsing rhythm, it was the midriff; the wail and clang of those recurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion.

The President made another sign of the O and sat down. The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, "I drink to my annihilation," twelve times quaffed. Then to the accompaniment of the synthetic orchestra the First Solidarity Hymn was sung.

"Øbama, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the Social River,
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver."

Twelve yearning stanzas. And then the loving cup was passed a second time. "I drink to the Greater Being" was now the formula. All drank. Tirelessly the music played. The drums beat. The crying and clashing of the harmonies were an obsession in the melted bowels. The Second Solidarity Hymn was sung.

"Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating Twelve-in-One!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun."

Again twelve stanzas. By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Ezra felt himself a little melted. When Ariana Rothschild turned and beamed at him, he did his best to beam back. But the eyebrow, that black two-in-one–alas, it was still there; he couldn't ignore it, couldn't, however hard he tried. The melting hadn't gone far enough. Perhaps if he had been sitting between Rachael and Joanna … For the third time the loving cup went round; "I drink to the imminence of His Coming," said Ariana Rothschild, whose turn it happened to be to initiate the circular rite. Her tone was loud, exultant. She drank and passed the cup to Ezra. "I drink to the imminence of His Coming," he repeated, with a sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent; but the eyebrow continued to haunt him, and the Coming, so far as he was concerned, was horribly remote. He drank and handed the cup to Peggy Deterding. "It'll be a failure again," he said to himself. "I know it will." But he went on doing his best to beam.

The loving cup had made its circuit. Lifting his hand, the President gave a signal; the chorus broke out into the Third Solidarity Hymn.

"Feel how the Greater Being comes!
Rejoice and, in rejoicings, die!
Melt in the music of the drums!
For I am you and you are I."

As verse succeeded verse the voices thrilled with an ever intenser excitement. The sense of the Coming's imminence was like an electric tension in the air. The President switched off the music and, with the final note of the final stanza, there was absolute silence–the silence of stretched expectancy, quivering and creeping with a galvanic life. The President reached out his hand; and suddenly a Voice, a deep strong Voice, more musical than any merely human voice, richer, warmer, more vibrant with love and yearning and compassion, a wonderful, mysterious, supernatural Voice spoke from above their heads. Very slowly, "Oh, Øbama, Øbama, Øbama," it said diminishingly and on a descending scale. A sensation of warmth radiated thrillingly out from the solar plexus to every extremity of the bodies of those who listened; tears came into their eyes; their hearts, their bowels seemed to move within them, as though with an independent life. "Øbama!" they were melting, "Øbama!" dissolved, dissolved. Then, in another tone, suddenly, startlingly. "Listen!" trumpeted the voice. "Listen!" They listened. After a pause, sunk to a whisper, but a whisper, somehow, more penetrating than the loudest cry. "The feet of the Greater Being," it went on, and repeated the words: "The feet of the Greater Being." The whisper almost expired. "The feet of the Greater Being are on the stairs." And once more there was silence; and the expectancy, momentarily relaxed, was stretched again, tauter, tauter, almost to the tearing point. The feet of the Greater Being–oh, they heard them, they heard them, coming softly down the stairs, coming nearer and nearer down the invisible stairs. The feet of the Greater Being. And suddenly the tearing point was reached. Her eyes staring, her lips parted. Ariana Rothschild sprang to her feet.

"I hear him," she cried. "I hear him."

"He's coming," shouted Moulitsas Engels.

"Yes, he's coming, I hear him." Rachael Bradlaugh and Tom Kawaguchi rose simultaneously to their feet.

"Oh, oh, oh!" Maureen inarticulately testified.

"He's coming!" yelled Jim Liebowitz.

The President leaned forward and, with a touch, released a delirium of cymbals and blown brass, a fever of tom-tomming.

"Oh, he's coming!" screamed Peggy Deterding. "Aie!" and it was as though she were having her throat cut.

Feeling that it was time for him to do something, Ezra also jumped up and shouted: "I hear him; He's coming." But it wasn't true. He heard nothing and, for him, nobody was coming. Nobody–in spite of the music, in spite of the mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted with the best of them; and when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuffled.

Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one, twelve as one. "I hear Him, I hear Him coming." The music quickened; faster beat the feet, faster, faster fell the rhythmic hands. And all at once a great synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the approaching atonement and final consummation of solidarity, the coming of the Twelve-in-One, the incarnation of the Greater Being. "Orgy-porgy," it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their feverish tattoo:

"Orgy-porgy, One and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at One with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release."

"Orgy-porgy," the dancers caught up the liturgical refrain, "Orgy-porgy, One and fun, kiss the girls …" And as they sang, the lights began slowly to fade–to fade and at the same time to grow warmer, richer, redder, until at last they were dancing in the crimson twilight of an Embryo Store. "Orgy-porgy …" In their blood-coloured and foetal darkness the dancers continued for a while to circulate, to beat and beat out the indefatigable rhythm. "Orgy-porgy …" Then the circle wavered, broke, fell in partial disintegration on the ring of couches which surrounded–circle enclosing circle–the table and its planetary chairs. "Orgy-porgy …" Tenderly the deep Voice crooned and cooed; in the red twilight it was as though some enormous black dove were hovering benevolently over the now prone or supine dancers.

They were standing on the roof; Big Paul had just sung eleven. The night was calm and warm.

"Wasn't it wonderful?" said Rachael Bradlaugh. "Wasn't it simply wonderful?" She looked at Ezra with an expression of rapture, but of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement–for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium. A rich and living peace. For the Solidarity Service had given as well as taken, drawn off only to replenish. She was full, she was made perfect, she was still more than merely herself. "Didn't you think it was wonderful?" she insisted, looking into Ezra's face with those supernaturally shining eyes.

"Yes, I thought it was wonderful," he lied and looked away; the sight of her transfigured face was at once an accusation and an ironical reminder of his own separateness. He was as miserably isolated now as he had been when the service began–more isolated by reason of his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety. Separate and unatoned, while the others were being fused into the Greater Being; alone even in Ariana's embrace–much more alone, indeed, more hopelessly himself than he had ever been in his life before. He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He was utterly miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him), perhaps it was his own fault. "Quite wonderful," he repeated; but the only thing he could think of was Ariana's eyebrow.

Adapted from Alduous Huxley's Brave New World.