“Don’t worry, boys. Nothing’s lost save honor”

The statement is attributed to 19th-century financier “Diamond” Jim Fisk, shortly before he and his cronies decamped from New York for New Jersey, one step ahead of the process-servers. Yet it is an expression that could just as well serve as the motto of the Democratic Party, particularly the modern-day robber barons who constitute its leadership. Obama, Pelosi, Reid et al propose to steal the personal and corporate financial capital of this, and future, generations, through obscenely high deficits and taxes, as well as to diminish our quality of life and to eliminate some of our most basic rights, through, among other schemes, the government takeover of health care. And they mean to accomplish this using means fair or foul (fair obviously isn’t going to work, so they’ve cheerfully embraced the foul, with their strategies of reconciliation and the legislative magic wand of the Slaughter rule, under which a bill is “deemed” to have passed without ever having been voted on). The various iterations of a health care bill are all singularly unpopular with the voters, the Democrats stand to suffer enormous losses in the elections this fall, and still the junta marches on, confident that, the autumn bloodbath notwithstanding, this gigantic entitlement will serve as the indestructible cornerstone of the statist future for which they yearn, with a passion that defies all logic, and that is perhaps only really explicable in terms of a congeries of psychological disorders, or in the older and wiser language which told of the snake in the garden.

Herein lies one of the most baffling and maddening ironies of democracy, to wit, that although it is a system, not only theoretically, but historically, conducive to the optimal development of personal freedom, it almost inevitably leads to the development of government dependency, up to and including variations on the theme of socialism. There are many factors that converge to effect this end; however, one of the most difficult to alter is the fact that the kind of people drawn to government and public policy are frequently leftists who view the state as an end in itself. To them, state and society are virtually indistinguishable, and, given their anti-historical consciousness, nothing more than an enormous set of tinker-toys, the structure subject only to the limits of the (government-approved) architects’ imaginations, which tend strongly toward the impossible perspectives of an M.C. Escher.

Others – the majority – who are either conservative or, if apolitical, at least practical and wise, know in their bones that government is not an end, but a necessary evil, which, if not reigned in by constant vigilance, becomes a willful and bloody-minded servant, only too eager to rule in the master’s stead. So we avert our eyes from the whole distasteful process of government, permitting the leftists to take the wheel by default, and we leave them carrying us all toward the ditch at breakneck speed.

But there is now a groundswell of fear and resentment and, perhaps most important of all, truly righteous anger over the usurpation of our liberty by the engineers of the provider state; and the Tea Party movement and the protests and the threats of electoral retribution – these things, too, are democracy, and a sign that the people have not yet become accustomed to the heavy hand of government. A good sign it is, and maybe even in time.

Update: Smitty has pictures of the patriotic uprising.