What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (46 page)

One hundred years after the Constitution became the law of the land, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, described the fall of ancient Athens with a succinct and accurate summary of how and why democracies decline. “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury,” he wrote. “From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

“From bondage to spiritual faith;

“From spiritual faith to great courage;

“From courage to liberty;

“From liberty to abundance;

“From abundance to complacency;

“From complacency to apathy;

“From apathy to dependence;

“From dependence back into bondage.”

We are now in the final phase. How did we get here?

What the @$%&! just happened?

The particular horror is that we are allowing the theft of freedom to be done
to
us by our own government. While we luxuriate in abundance, complacency, and apathy—many of us knowing nothing else—Obama and the kooks are maneuvering us quickly into bondage. Once we are truly bound, the relationship between the individual and the government will be changed irrevocably: the individual will have dwindling and ultimately meaningless “freedoms” and the people will be led toward European-style dependence; we will be an enslaved mob. This is why what Tyler wrote is so important. If people believe they can vote themselves a raise, they will. And once that mentality finds its way into the middle class, then America as the land of the free will be history.

Over the past few decades, the kooks have succeeded in uprooting many of the foundations of liberty built by the Founders and replacing them with an expanding nanny state over which they have near-complete control.

The state is in your paycheck, taking upwards of 50 percent of it for its endless demands. The state tells you what medical treatments you can and cannot have. The state tells you what you can and cannot eat, drink, and God forbid if you want to be merry. The state tells you how many calories are in that Big Mac. The state tells you whether or not you can build or renovate your supposedly “private” property, and, if it agrees to let you do what you’d like, makes you abide by infinite regulations and pay extravagant fees for the privilege. The state tells you how to heat, air condition, and illuminate your property. The state tells you that you may buy this toy for your child, but not that one. The state tells you that you cannot have plastic bags for your groceries and the paper ones will cost you. The state is in your car and gas tank, imposing fuel mileage standards and huge gasoline taxes. The state is on your telephone lines, taxing your landlines, cell phones, and text messages. The state is on the Internet, taxing your online purchases and monitoring some of your Web usage. The state is in every business you patronize with taxes, rules, regulations, and fees. The state tells you that you can smoke, just not over here, over there, and certainly not over there. The state tells you to hate Fox News and love MSNBC. The state tells you to hate pickup trucks and love the Chevy Volt. The state tells you to hate your mom and dad and to go instead with two dads named Barry and Joe. You literally cannot breathe in America without the government monitoring you. The kooks have plunged this nation into an Orwellian nightmare in which they pull the strings and you must dance at their command. The state is the ultimate buzz kill.

With every new state control, the leftists choke off more of your freedom and then leverage it into more power for their government Leviathan. They are turning America into a rotted-out, condemned building, a broken shell of something that was once great and majestic, where the riffraff of society occupy each abandoned level. There are street gangs and union thugs on Level 1, needle users and community organizers on Level 2, Democrats and MSNBC analysts on Level 3, and up on the rooftop of Level 4 is Paul Krugman, screaming into the sky about the evils of capitalism while dropping bowling balls on fancy cars driving by. This collage of mayhem is the next exciting role-playing game,
Final Fantasy: The Obama Years
.

At the same time, the kooks have downgraded American power internationally through apologias, retrenchment, an increasingly gutted military, the active cultivation of our enemies, and the willful disregard of our allies. In their hands, America has been cut off at the knees, left broken and limping, a second-rate power largely incapable—and undeserving—of projecting influence in the world without a multilateral orgy of approval.

The leftists’ grand design is centered on one basic premise: redistribute American power. Redistribute our wealth, economic energy, political strength, military power, cultural appeal, constitutional genius, and exceptional ingenuity both at home and abroad. Redistribute the elements of our greatness. Dilute our power in order to destroy it. They have executed their plan with precision and cold efficiency, particularly once they discovered their perfect agent in a mysterious stranger from the shores of Indonesia, the beaches of Hawaii, and the precincts of Chicago.

The allure of kookdom is its false promise of an easier life. At its core, it’s about the state coaxing—or forcing—you to transfer responsibility to the state. This is part of what made communism and socialism so appealing in theory: the nanny state would care for all of your cradle-to-grave needs. Don’t worry about a thing. The state’s got you covered, from your education and health care to your transportation, home, and job to how and when you kick the bucket. As the kooks adapted the redistributionist welfare state to make it go down smoother in America, they refined their sales job. As they assumed more and more responsibilities for you, they told you that they were clearing a path for a less burdensome life. It was a seduction to which many Americans succumbed—and continue to succumb.

In fact, the opposite is true: when the state seizes more power and responsibility, your independence and freedom are degraded. And rather than liberation from responsibility, you face a burden of dependence—yours and everyone else’s—that grows heavier by the day. It’s a devil’s bargain, and the devil is running the show.

The Founders saw things differently. They rejected the idea of an omnipotent state taking on an endless buffet of responsibilities. Instead, they saw the inseparability of freedom and responsibility. They made clear that if you want the unprecedented freedoms of America, you must accept the outcomes of your own decisions. That’s why they built America upon the simple and profound premise that freedom and responsibility rest not with the state but with the individual. And they expected us to fight for what they had created: a unique system of self-governance based on individuals responsible enough to manage their own—and the nation’s—liberty, power, and affairs. Are we still up to that challenge?

Enter the Happy Warrior.

The Happy Warrior believes in two essential truths: first, that America
can
be saved, and second, that it is
worth
saving. We need a nation of Happy Warriors—focused on those two truths and the tough reality that the threats to our survival are all around us—to perform the rescue operation.

What is a Happy Warrior and how do we become a nation of them? There are ten essential keys to the Happy Warrior, all of which require hard work, dedication, and attitudinal changes. But if we understand and undertake them, the journey to renew America will be spectacularly rewarding.

First, we must recognize that the Happy Warrior is above all a
warrior
. We must realize that we are in a war. We’re in an ideological war, an economic war, a political war, a cultural war, and a war abroad for our superpower primacy. When Reagan became president, he knew we were in brutal economic and international wars for America. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, she knew Great Britain was deep in those wars as well. Once we recognize that we’re in the war, then we must be prepared to fight it. That means understanding that the other side is going to hit back ruthlessly and relentlessly, and that we’ve got to persevere despite the attacks and hit back too, as difficult as that may be. So the first step for the Happy Warrior is to realize that we face a very real danger and that there’s no getting out of the war without fighting it.

Second, we must win these wars before they escalate into bigger cataclysms. We’ve got to be smart and self-aware enough to learn from our history, avoid repeating it, and letting things deteriorate until a devastating war is upon us, as with the Civil War, World War II, and September 11, 2001. We must adopt a warrior attitude
now
, before it’s truly too late, and be prepared to be strong, confident, and unwavering as we fight it.

Third, we must recognize that any war requires pain and sacrifice. The Happy Warrior’s choice—and
only
choice—is to face those uncomfortable things now or face much greater pain later.

Fourth, in most cases, we are at war with
ourselves
—the tendency to go wobbly, seek the easy way out, relinquish responsibility to the nanny state, fall into the waiting arms of the kooks promising the path of least resistance. We must fight these impulses in
ourselves
in order to form the
national
strength to fight these wars.

Fifth, the Happy Warrior fights to hold the other side responsible for its actions. The kooks fight to transfer responsibility and power away from the individual to the state. They argue that
we
are the ones who have to change and adapt to
their
freedom-crushing template. We reject that perversion of the American ideal.

Sixth, the Happy Warrior is fully comfortable that the underpinning of freedom is, in fact, individual responsibility. The kooks try to sell, hypnotize, and addict us to the idea that they will assume responsibility for us without requiring us to relinquish our freedoms. We know that we’ve got to turn back that Big Lie and take responsibility for fighting for American interests, at home and abroad. The Happy Warrior is responsible for himself and believes that everybody else is responsible for themselves. If we all fought determinedly for that belief, the state would naturally shrink as we the people won more of our own power back.

Seventh, the Happy Warrior believes in the inherent goodness of man. We believe that the state should get out of the way not just so we can prosper, but so we can share that prosperity unencumbered by the state. The Left’s philosophy of “social justice” requires the state to
compel
“charity” in order to “spread the wealth around.” And yet, without government compulsion, the American people are the most charitable on earth. Most other countries give about 1 percent or less of their national wealth to charity. The United States doubles that. While we recognize that there is a proper role for government to discharge its constitutional duties and provide a reasonable social safety net, we also recognize that the kooks have so expanded government in the false name of “compassion” that we now have a nearly unrecognizable America.

Eighth, the Happy Warrior doesn’t believe that America is zero-sum, that success in one place must be punished to elevate the less successful somewhere else. The depraved premise of the kooks is that the rich got their wealth by “taking” it from the poor. In fact, approximately 80 percent of all millionaires are the first generation in their family to be rich. They didn’t inherit their wealth, à la Paris Hilton. They earned it through hard work and sacrifice. Unlike the professional victimhood hustlers of the Left, the Happy Warrior believes that economic expansion creates real growth. We don’t believe in expanding the
money supply
in order to create the
illusion
of growth in order to redistribute all over the place. We believe in restraining government so individuals can do their thing and prosper.

Ninth, an effective Happy Warrior is a disciplined one. As long as our directives are consistent with the founding principles of constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and properly regulated free markets, we must focus on the fight for them until America has been restored.

And finally, the Happy Warrior is, in fact, happy. We take on our mission joyfully, certain that traditional American values are worthy of a passionate defense and that American power is not something to be ashamed of but celebrated. The attitudinal shift away from Howard Beale outrage to Reagan/Thatcher exuberance will animate the fight with our natural optimism. The best way to temper the inevitable pain of the battle is to carry it out with good cheer, confident in our mission, its integrity, and success.

What made previous Happy Warriors such as Reagan and Thatcher particularly strong leaders was their vision of individual freedom and national power, their charismatic articulation of it, and their ability to persuade their people that their policy path was the right way to go. Today we need people who are proud to make an unequivocal, unapologetic, and full-throated case for America. We need people willing to make the
moral case
for the free market and American superpower. We need people willing to reject outright the kooks’ contention that redistributionism is a moral system of “economic justice” and argue for how and why capitalism empowers the individual and creates a steady expansion of prosperity and opportunity. We need people willing to make the
moral case
for a strong U.S. presence in the world, keeping the bad guys at bay and advancing the causes of freedom and peace. We need people willing to tell the truth about the kooks’ lies that redistributionism at home and wobbliness abroad ensure greater global “justice” and “equality.” And absent leaders who will make these arguments, we must take it upon ourselves to make the moral case for America. We have our work cut out for us, because the class warrior and defeatist punks aren’t just going to step aside.