Nobody Believes It

Stop and think. Have you met a single government employee, particularly in regards to their government function, who honestly works to limit government power? How about to merely increase government accountability?

We can wax eloquent on the grand philosophical themes of the founders, but those folks are dead, and so are their ideas. Sure we have lots of ordinary Americans who can read them, even quote them, and believe them. They’ll get out and march and demand those ideas be put into action. But they won’t ever see them in real life.

Okay, so take this business of the recent California court decision to strike down voter-approved limits on gay marriage. It’s a silly question, carefully designed to distract us all from things that really matter.

On the liberal left, the gay marriage movement is stoking up its engines for a major push to legitimize — so they believe — homosexual relationships in a social as well as a civil sense, and make the final push for gay “equality.”

On the right, particularly the religious fundamentalist right, the scaremongering direct mail fundraisers are enjoying a major bonanza, frightening tens of thousands of little old ladies in Middle America to cough up $10, $20, and even $50 contributions to the Religious Right’s ongoing campaign to Save Marriage From Godless Queers.

In case you forgot, the Justin Raimondo who wrote that long explanation for Taki is himself openly gay. It’s worth your time to read it. What matters most to us is the reality both sides of this big argument very much want a bigger government with more power.

But the libertarians like Raimondo are generally wrong about government in the first place. It won’t matter what caveats they offer, there is a fundamental assumption if we could just teach people the truth, it would all turn around. All we have to do is explain what is in everyone’s true self interest. That is the underlying assumption of all their work. Wake up, libertarians — ignorance is not the core issue. Mankind is fallen. Ignorance is just a symptom.

I’ll bet Elana Kagan can easily quote Jefferson, too, but it hasn’t changed her view of what’s good and right in the world. Remember Jefferson’s chief opponent, Hamilton? We can be certain Hamilton had heard or read all of Jefferson’s arguments, and Hamilton promoted what we actually now have: a powerful central government which pokes its nose into every detail of life.

Raimondo notes at the beginning it was a matter of government forced by common practice to recognize the ancient and fundamental importance of marriage. Government’s response was to slowly grab the whole thing and control every aspect of it. Family Court? There can be no justice in that institution; it stands condemned before God Almighty. Family issues may well affect what government does, but by God’s revelation government has no business getting involved. Family business is family business, and using the state as a big club to win your side of the argument is sin. If there is one damned lie of Satan at work in America today, it is the notion what is personal is best handled in civil politics.

The answer is not simply getting government out of things. That condition is not possible in a fallen world. It is the matter of restoring the governing of things to God’s original plan for fallen mankind. That I keep harping on that simply indicates what a massive chore it is restoring the knowledge of that plan, because our entire Western Civilization is fundamentally opposed to it.

God’s Word demands we first acknowledge His design for human social structure, which happens to be tribal. Tribes can be based on any identity you choose. So for example, it matters not a whit there is no such thing historically as a Palestinian nation in the Middle East. If those folks want to congregate into a nation, all it takes is a valid covenant before God, and we aren’t in a position to judge that very much. So if they want to be the Nation of Palestinians, everyone else is required by God to at least give it serious consideration. Any mixture of any people who want to be a nation, who can present a united front with all the proper marks of tribal unity, is a nation in God’s eyes. Do you think “Jewish” is an ethnic identity? We can argue all day long over the meaning of the label, but according to God’s Word it meant someone who committed themselves wholly to the Covenant of Moses, which was the basis for their identity. Not a matter of DNA, but of clinging to God’s Law for that nation.

All our nifty scholarship arising from the Enlightenment creates an artificial divide between God and man; it revels in the Fall. It embraces as good and right the enthronement of human intellect, which is precisely why we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

So every political structure and system you can imagine has been tried already, and failed, so the search for Utopia through finely detailed variations means nothing. However bad we may think tribal social structures made life on this earth, it was the best we could possibly have after the Fall. It is the underlying assumption of all God’s Laws, His entire Bible revelation. Even the first churches were expected to be tribal, and it was a major challenge for the Corinthians, for example, to accept it.

Here is what’s crazy: It doesn’t have to be taught. It’s our instinctive behavior. We have to be untaught the lies. Every time I’ve been in a situation when the commonly assumed social rules did not apply, when events and circumstances rip off the false edifice of what we consider “civilization” most people know they need a leader, and they typically turn to people who seem unruffled by the chaos. That is invariably someone who has some experience with riding out chaos, and most of the time it’s someone who is older than the bulk of the group. They always come to the elder, at least elder in terms of maturity, the one person who is least at a loss to respond. They become in essence a family by association and interaction. It’s not education; it’s survival and we know it instinctively, and the only kicker is folks who have been conditioned to become savage. That is more a result of “civilization” than instinct, because nothing is more savage than the urban born.

But we have been so heavily schooled in everything else, we resist until the last moment. Guess what? God has had His fill of our ways, and He is in the process of crushing Western Civilization because it rejects Him, at least in the sense as He has revealed Himself. We’ll all be thrown back into chaos and social disorder so that we are forced once again to do it His way, even if only in half measure. Of course, since there is yet so much material property and resources of value lying around, we can be sure other organizing forces will quickly move in to harvest what is left.

God only knows what that will be, but it won’t be pretty. We have created for ourselves an impossible situation, so it is impossible for the situation to continue. Going back to recent history won’t solve anything. The persistent arrogant notion we are somehow wiser than the ancients is what will destroy us.