In The Public Square - Blog

The Permanent Ruling Class

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-05-27T02:26:00Z

Listen in as In the Public Square Team discusses the American bureaucracy that cannot be changed. Since Civil Service Reform in the 1890?s (The Pendleton Act) the idea that government should be run by ?professionals? has resulted in the creation of a permanent class of government employees who cannot be fired or laid off. Consequently, all our elected representatives are beholden more to the interest of public service unions and bureaucrats than to the American people. Congressional Representatives, Senators, Cabinet Members and Presidents come and go by the election process but the same old government employee class continues to accrue power and empire build without any recourse in the process of democracy. Ultimately, this means that America is less and less a government of, for, and by the people, and more and more a government controlled by a permanent ruling class.

Download Program: http://www.inthepublicsquare.com/archives/inthepublicsquare/100526.htm

The Ticking Debt Time Bomb!

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-05-22T21:06:00Z

New Program Posted: The Ticking Debt Time Bomb!

With rioting in Athens Greece and the gathering darkness of a looming debt crisis descending over Europe and the United States, In the Public Square takes on the tragic meaning of debt, its relationship to character and national moral health, and the deeper implications for... Christians who do more than account in dollars and cents. Listen in as Mr. Curmudgeon, Engineer Extraordinaire Nick Ellis and Host John Snyder discuss--The Ticking Debt Time Bomb!

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Poverty, Tea Parties and the Constitutionality of Prayer

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-05-19T14:43:00Z

Download the next edition of "In the Public Square" Podcast!
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In the Public Square tackles Tax Day and the Tea Party Phenomenon, the Recent Federal Court Decision that declared the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional and the sources and cause of poverty as Nick has recently returned from El Salvador where he worked as a volunteer for a international charity organization. Listen in as Host John Snyder, Engineer Nick Ellis and Mr. Curmudgeon recover from the April 15th blues.

Or if you prefer tune into Public Square Network Radio and catch this and many other excellent programs 24/7/365 at www.publicsquarenetwork.com

Nullification and Secession

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-04-20T16:01:00Z

New program from In the Public Square: "Nullification and Secession".

There has been much political talk among Conservatives who are alarmed and properly outraged by recent federal power grabs. The growing question is this: Do states have recourse in "nullification" and "secession" to assert their reserved powers under the 10th Amendment? Listen in as Host John Snyder, Mr. Curmudgeon and Nick Ellis discussion the Constitutional and natural law question: How do conscientious Americans resist lawless government?

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We Are Not Like Them: Wait for the Imprisoned Lightning to Speak!

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — 2010-04-03T09:46:00Z

Some of us say we are afraid—afraid as we were the day after 9-11. We are afraid that Obama and his new plan for America means the death knell of liberty in our country.

But I was never afraid on 9-11. Nor am I afraid now. You see, 9-11 made me angry. Righteously angry. And so like in those dark days, Obama does not scare me either. He is stirring to life an urge to resist. He has pulled from the contented, distracted man, a fiery resolution to fight back in the name of everything that I love.

I am not motivated by fear. I am resolutely summoned by invincible love.

Like the terrorist Osama Bin Laden, Barack Hussein Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid presume too much upon our cultivated civil restraint. They presume we are shallow, mutable, stupid and easily cowed, like the people who are their natural constituents.

But we are not like them.

There have been others in the history of our Republic who have made this same miscalculation, because their arrogance allowed no counsel to enter their elevated company but that of lickspittles and toadies. Like our enemies in the past, these too are prisoners of their own vain imaginations.

But we are not like them.

Like George III, Jefferson Davis, the Kaiser, Mussolini, Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Obama is about to receive a civics lesson in the meaning of Liberty--in the Spirit of a Free People. He does not understand what a proud, self-respecting, talented people are capable of. We are not all for sale, as he believes. Like a thuggish gang-banger, he thinks he is invincible until he meets a real opponent. He has strutted so long among the dependent, sheepish old and weak and fearful, he thinks we are like them.

But we are NOT like them.

He and others have been condescending so long to the obsequious and docile thralls of inner-city ignorance and dependency, he has no idea what the son of Sam Adams are about to do. Like a child molester, he thinks he can get anyone into his grip with the promise of candy.

But we are not like them.

Obama, Pelosi and their party of plunder, have not a clue as to the invisible love that floats in the air of our country. They do not understand what liberty means to real Americans. That dead old musty piece of American mythology was never a part of the Alinsky education. But it will not be reckoned in subsides or promises of silver—they very soon are about to receive a new curriculum. Like all the other over-reaching and imperious minions who have destroyed themselves by underestimating the Spirit of Liberty, their days are numbered and judgment stands like a sword over them.

We do not belong to them.

America has a future because her people are the sons of free people. Because for the vast majority of us, freedom is not a synonym for socialism or free-stuff. It is a heritage, a principle, a clarion to action. What does Obama know of this? We are not like Barack Hussein Obama. Our fathers fought at Iwo Jima, and Bataan, Valley Forge and Normandy. They left their bones in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq to repel the hand of those who preferred slavery to freedom. What do the urchins of distributive justice know of the resolution of a free-people?

We are not like them!

We are Americans. We are not neo-fascist, euro-socialist, pseudo-Stalinist, silver- tongued Fidelist wannabes who look forward to living in the shadow of the state. They do not know what is coming, and they cannot stand before the tempest that is about to blow. On that wind sound the trumpets that never call retreat. On it, resonates a quarter of a millennium of rousing words from Jefferson to Webster, to Lincoln to Roosevelt and Reagan. We the People are about to speak with our sovereign voice. And when we speak, our voice will be as thunder! From every hearthstone and patriot's grave- there is a voice calling us into long unbending lines, like the ones that formed in the smoke at Bunker Hill, Antietam and Gettysburg.

But what does Obama know of these things? Did he learn them from his father? Did he drink of this communion as a lisping child from his mother? Did his Uncle Saul Alinsky teach him to love his country? No. He was suckled on the paps of a lie, on that old dry thing, the words of men presuming to be wise who are fools. He has sat at the feet and fawned on the voice who whispers deception from the Garden to this day...he has eaten the fruit of corruption. And the winds are blowing. The trumpets are calling. The guns are sounding. And we are coming to save our country. That army will arrive in November, an army of the old and young, an army of every color and state, but all of one common heritage—the heritage of Freedom. That long-suffering silent army is coming. And there is no place to hide, Nancy. There is no bunker to cover you Barack--you who are the enemies of liberty. There is no lie that will shield you. You will be thrown into the gathered ash-heap of all our infamous enemies. Because Freedom is rising. The columns are forming. The boots, and sandals and barefooted are forming in silent ranks, like battalions at the ballot box. The winds are blowing into your uncomprehending eyes, Barack. We are coming for rescue Liberty— to throw off the ancient chains that so often have been forged to bind her. But wait for November! Wait for the thunder America! The imprisoned lightning is about to speak!

Because we are Americans! We are the Sons of Liberty!

PSN Radio & Toolbar!

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-03-29T18:04:00Z

Tune in to PSN Radio! If you haven't listened yet, take a few mins, and tune in to PSN Radio!
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The purpose of the PUBLIC SQUARE NETWORK is to bring together intelligent Christian commentators on issues of Theology, Philosophy, Law, Politics and all other aspects of modern Culture and History. It is to provide an intelligent Christian voice in the Public Square.

It is the mission of the PUBLIC SQUARE NETWORK to show that Christians have minds and can make persuasive and reasonable arguments for the things that we believe. It is to rediscover and broadcast the great tradition of thoughtful Christian integrity that was the basis of the Reformation and the political freedoms that have flowed out of it.

Programs on PSN include:
Reasons to Believe
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Apologetics.com
Living by the Word
In the Public Square w/ John Snyder
Curmudgeon Moments
Please Convince Me

...and more!

You can even find PSN through the Windows Media Guide and Itunes under the Radio / Religious options - then look for Public Square Network. PSN even has live streams making it possible to take PSN on the go with your iphone, windows mobile smart phone, or blackberry - so you can listen in the car.

Also be sure to download the PSN Toolbar if you'd like even easier access to PSN radio, allowing you to play it right from the toolbar app, as well as get updates on PSN articles and news. http://www.inthepublicsquare.com/ToolBar/PSN_Bar.htm

Give it a try! Tell us what you think! We've worked hard to bring great intelligent Christian programing to the foreground to show the world there are intelligent Christian ideals worthy of some serious consideration.

A Conversation with Joe

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-03-27T18:45:00Z

Listen in to In the Public Square: 3/27/10
Atom Smashers, Apologetics, String Theory, Judaism, Denominationalism, Works Doctrine and the New Mighty Men of God pass under cursory examination, along with other subjects in this wide ranging discussion between Host John Snyder and a fan named Joe.

http://www.inthepublicsquare.com/

Law and Lawlessness: Nullification is NOT the Answer

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — 2010-03-22T07:33:00Z

In the shadow of the abyss that has presently opened before us, there are premonitions of death, a cold wind that carries the stench of putrefaction into the nostrils of fearful Americans; it is a distant whisper that all is lost. Is this the death knell of the Great Republic? Is this the end of the Last Best Hope?

There is much talk now, on the political right and among leaders, and commentators who should know better—talk of Nullification—of attorneys general ignoring the law, as did the South during the Civil Rights Movement, as did the Confederacy in 1861.

No thought of Nullification may properly reside in a patriotic American. Nullification is lawlessness because Ordered Liberty is anchored in our commitment to the Rule of Law. The idea of refusing to obey the laws is contrary to the character of a Conservative. Any talk of actions outside the mechanisms of the Constitution and the Laws of the United States—carries with it the same stench of putrifaction that is wafting from the diseased halls of our corrupt Congress.

Any such talk of Nullification or Insurrection or Secession is a betrayal of the Rule of the Law. Such actions would make us no better than Leftists who are the enemies of lawful government. One form of lawlessness cannot displace, cancel or redeem another form of lawlessness. The path to saving our country from the insidious grip of socialist contempt for law is obedience to the law; it is to pledge ourselves obedient servants of a Constitutional Republic.

So what am I advocating?

I am advocating Voting. Petitioning. Arguing. Marching. I am advocating that we, unlike the lawless men and women of this Congress, that we stand four-square on the unshakable conviction that Barack Obama like Jefferson Davis, that Nancy Pelosi like Justice Roger Taney, that Harry Reid like Alexander Stephens, speak as perverters of the laws, and that they, therefore, are doomed to the ash heap of history in the long moral struggle to secure liberty under the protection of written Constitutional law accessible to all literate Americans.

I am advocating electing representatives dedicated to interpreting the Constitution according to the clear meaning of words.

I am advocating the lawful and systematic dismantling of the calculus of illegal and immoral laws that threaten to reduce a nation of free men into a nation of dependent and servile Dred Scotts.

I am advocating that Republicans, just as they did after the usurpation of law by the Taney Court, not ignore the laws, but scrupulously obey the laws as they are currently interpreted, but to change the laws as they are understood, by challenging, overturning and reasserting the limits of government through proper legal channels.

I am advocating a Political and Cultural Reformation that will not yield to this grotesque and cynical re-writing of the Constitution by scofflaws and dissimulators. The Dred Scott Decision was not overturned by Nullification. The usurpation of the Constitution was not ended by the Civil War, rather title to the Constitution was returned to its rightful sovereign, The People, and cured by Reconstruction in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

That is what I am advocating.

I am saying be wary. Do not imagine that two wrongs make a right. We need to shape by a clear vision of purpose and legal action, those 38 states whose attorneys general are flirting with Nullification and direct them to set into motion the process of amending the Constitution such that the General Welfare Clause shall not be construed so sweepingly that it becomes the exception that consumes the rule that limits the enumerated powers of government. This crisis cannot be improved or edified by 10th Amendment arguments or assertions of State's Rights; it is rather an Article I Section 8 controversy—an issue flowing from the limited powers enumerated to Congress by the Constitution. It is Not an issue of powers reserved to the states.

We need the Republican Party or Tea Party or an alliance of both to become an unstoppable reforming opposition to the designs of these neo-national socialists that have precipitated a constitutional crisis, if not a coup. We need to dedicate ourselves to first containing and eventually overthrowing this modern Slavocracy just as we did 150 years ago—legally, through the mechanisms of the law-not by Nullification. We can do it, just as we did in that great crisis long ago, by transforming out national government from one controlled by the lawlessness of the Democratic Party, to one controlled by those who respect the rule of law under the clear limiting authority of a Constitution that has meaning.

Most of us in America are Conservatives—notwithstanding all the assertion by the Left to the contrary. We are Conservative because we believe in WE THE PEOPLE, in the CONSTITUTION and the RULE OF LAW. We are Conservatives because we deplore lawlessness, and antinomianism. We are Conservatives because we are not like them. We do not think that our wills may properly trample the mind of the law or the restraints of the instruments of liberty. We must change the law-- and we change the laws by taking the government back by election and placing these abuses of power in the tethers of legal constraint, by constitutional mechanisms of legislation and the amendment process.

I advocate that we pledge allegiance to “One Nation, under God, INDIVISIBLE, with LIBERTY and JUSTICE for all.”

Nullification abandons part of the WHOLE people to the servitude of sectional socialism. It wrongly imagines that we have no duty to the WHOLE. This is OUR country. All of it. And I'll be damned before I skulk away under the fig leaf of Nullification--as if it offered redemption from the grasping hand of tyranny. Abrogation does no such thing. We, by our proxies long ago, pledged “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” to a Union under law. I am a Republican. I am not a Confederate, a nihilist, an anarchist or a coward. I will march on Washington before I allow a Slavocracy to pervert our Constitution--but first, FIRST we have recourse in the LAW. We have remedies in the political process. This is a contest between the champions of the Rule of Law against the Principalities and Powers of Lawlessness. It is not a war of lawlessness against lawlessness. As Lincoln said, "Let us have faith that Right make Might-- and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The present contest is not about health care, it is not about the rules of Congress or anything so pedestrian as a balanced budget or a national debt; is about the CONSTITUTION and whether the title of that instrument of liberty is held by the Courts and Congress or by We the People. This is a nation, of, for and by the people. This is not the first time that powerful men and women have conspired to defeat the laws and ignored by lies and subterfuge the clear meaning of words in the legal instruments of our Republic. Every generation must secure liberty anew and if we are true to our heritage, if we love liberty and maintain against all lawless instincts a profound respect for the supremacy of law, America can and shall have a New Birth of Freedom. The winds that sweep from Washington will cease to carry the diseased stench of lawlessness, but rather carry forth again, the sweet sounds of liberty—a liberty consecrated and maintained under the security and protection of a Constitution whose meaning is anchored in a common understanding of words as they are written, and honored by reverent respect affirmed by the mutual assent of We the People.

Iran and the Bomb

nick.ellis@inthepublicsquare.com (Nick Ellis) — 2010-02-22T16:41:00Z

It is becoming irresistably evident that Iran is developing an atomic weapon. Still, the West and the United States seem to be dedicated to ignoring this horrifying possibility. What is it about our post-modern, post-Christian world that refuses to come to grips with hard facts and difficult choices. Listen in as Host John Snyder, Steven Z. Nemo (AKA Mr. Curmudgeon) and Mr. Everyman, Nick Ellis discuss, Iran and the Bomb.

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American Aristocracy

john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com (JohnSnyder) — 2009-11-22T06:19:00Z

Allow me to test some ideas by means of a kind of thought experiment.

Image that I was to sit down with a group of Chinese Communist leaders. And imagine that I was to ask them—off the record—whether it was a good policy or not for the United States to undertake massive social spending in the midst of a deep recession. Imagine further that I was to ask these socialists whether accumulating debt for “healthcare reform,” and undertaking trillion dollar deficits would harm America productivity.

What do you imagine a boardroom full of Red Chinese Economic Wonks would answer?

I believe they would respond by saying something like this: America’s exorbitant social spending, especially in the midst of a deep recession unquestionably endangers the world economy and especially the Chinese investment in American treasury instruments. This spendthrift policy is so dangerous it threatens to destroy the value of America’s currency.

Of course, this is not just a fanciful invention of a thought experiment. In fact, this is the very message of concern that is coming from Communist China. Apparently, the Chinese Communists have become smarter Capitalists than the new and improved “progressive” America of Barack Obama.

So what does it mean when a nation that has long shown the world the wonders of free-enterprise has moved so far toward economic experimentation that even Chinese Communists doubt the wisdom of America’s “progressive” left?

I do not mean this as a flippant throwaway rhetorical question.

Allow me to offer a different perspective on this phenomenon, something which I hope will result in a much needed paradigm shift away from the standard model of political discourse which presently prevails in the conservative public square.

We are told that all the forces of “leftism” in America are presently arrayed to seize the golden moment of their political ascendency. Swiftly are they hog tying the America economy and siphoning off as much wealth as possible in re-distributive payoffs to their various constituents.

The voices of opposition, which once were called Republican, (but I restrain myself from using such meaningless expressions), voices like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Mark Levin declare emphatically that this constitutes a radical swing to the left, a monstrous power grab by the Bolsheviki to seize control of the engines of production and distribute American wealth as a grand socialist scheme of social engineering.

Isn’t this the common perspective of the political right?

The problem is that while these indictments describe what is going on, they do not explain. Why would Communists and European Socialists view with skepticism the policies of Obama and the American Progressive Left, as they are euphemistically called, if their ideas were truly socialist? The last socialist experiment in America under FDR, for all its foolish inefficiency and injustice, resulted in the electrification of rural America and the building a network of dams that were the envy of the world. One of them was the Grand Cooley Dam-one of the great electricity producing machines in the world. Many of the greatest public works in our history were products of big government. Despite its wrongheadedness, New Deal socialism could proudly point to accomplishments that indisputably enriched and improved our country. On the other hand, what policies advocated by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aim at bettering our lives or signal great economic improvement in any real “progressive” sense?

Allow me to offer another, perhaps more sobering, assessment of what is really going on, one that I believe explains more than the rather pedestrian analysis that is common among talk show hosts and Fox News personalities.

I really do not think Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama is a socialist in any meaningful sense. I do not think they are coherent enough to have a comprehensive if flawed view of man and the state. I do not think Harry Reid is a socialist either for the same reasons. What I think America is witnessing is something much more ordinary in the life cycle of declining states than anything as romantically revolutionary as a social or Marxist revolution. What we are witnessing is the formation of a political cleptocracy. Cleptocracy is and has always been, since time immemorial, the principle enemy of economic and political society. International socialism is a relatively new phenomenon in history—and while it shares some striking resemblances, socialism and ruling class cleptocracy are not identical. Cleptocracy is as old as the world.

This “revolution” is nothing more ideological than that which motivated Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, or Idi Amin, or Hosni Mubarak, or Anastasio Somoza or even Pablo Escobar. All this is to say, that there is no ideological underpinning to what we are witnessing. Rather, what we are watching before our very eyes is something vastly simpler and more obvious and it is not a conspiracy of socialist ideologues. We are watching our nation becoming a banana republic, not a Soviet styled communist state.

Allow me, at the risk of being didactic, to begin with certain assumptions that are presently lost on our culture.

The conservative mind in this most recent chapter of the culture war has fallen into the pathetic dialectical trap of arguing that the first and greatest enemy of the American experiment is socialism. I am no friend of socialism. I despise the notion that man is but a piece of a collective. Nevertheless, the presumptions of this school of thinking have evolved out of the Cold War necessity of vigilance. It declares that leftism is the greatest natural enemy of our way of life—that the enemies of our republic are primarily Saul Alinsky leftists or European style socialists or even Trotskyite communists.

Yet if you were to ask candidly those same Chinese Communists, in my thought experiment, whether or not this present course of America economic profligacy were good for us or for them, a committee of high Level Chinese Communists would probably uniformly tell us that we are behaving irrationally and self-destructively. How can the Obama revolution be communists when the communists themselves think we are behaving with some kind of death wish?

Allow me to offer a different paradigm than the shrill champions of anti-communism.

You see the first and greatest enemy of self-government is, and always will be ARISTOCRACY, which is to say, elitism and rule by a privileged class— not, socialism.

· The American Revolution was not fought to overcome Russian style communism; it was fought against the prerogatives of a king who felt entitled to rule other men without consent.

· The War of 1812 was not fought against socialism; it was fought against the imperious high handedness of royal policies that disregarded the rights of men.

· The Civil War, the greatest conflict in our history, was not fought against European style leftism; it was fought against a ruling class in our own country who presumed to order the lives of men without their consent.

· The First War World and the Second World War were not fought against Communists; they were fought against rulers who presumed that their countries were personal estates. So was the War in Panama, the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. So was the first war we ever fought as an independent country: the war against the Barbary Pirates.

The oldest and most ancient foe of human liberty is— and always will be— the fallen instincts of power and privilege to steal from and order the lives of other people without their consent. Where did we get the idea that communism, in its narrow ideological strain, is the ultimate threat to our Great Republic? Like so many armchair generals, the right wing political class is fighting the last ideological war.

Because we are using the language of the Cold War, we are unable to see what is plainly before our eyes. What America is witnessing, is the war of the Aristoi on the bourgeoisie, the war of royalty against the power of those who would and can govern themselves without the prerogatives of a ruling class.

Enlisted into this modern royal army against the middle class is first, the age-old ally of aristocracy—the university trained bureaucrat. Universities were created and patronized in Medieval Ages primarily as institutions for training up men to work in the administration and counting houses of kings. That is what the great Universities in America have become, training grounds for the apologists of a new aristocracy, those who take seriously the “rights and privileges” of their special training to manage and order society better than ordinary “untrained” people themselves.

The second natural ally of a ruling class is hard for the America mind to fathom. Nevertheless, there has always been a natural relationship between the underclass mentality and the ascendency of an aristocracy.

The underclass, notwithstanding popular myth, has been throughout history, the greatest champions of monarchy. Why? Because aristocrats profess to protect the poor man from the rich man. That is what Jefferson Davis professed to do by resisting Northern industrialism. We laugh now. But he claimed to be protecting the wretched slave from the oppression of the industrialist and the overwhelming challenges of an overwhelming freedom That was the claim of all the great monarchs of Europe. Only men of special talent and class have wisdom and prudence enough to govern men who are too lazy and unwise to govern themselves. That was the argument of Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun against the soulless urbanization of the North.

An aristocrat always claims to protect the poor and lowly from the exploitation of self-sufficient men. Indeed, the very promise of a king, as we witness in the Book of Samuel is that a king and his men will fight our wars for us. No longer must free men oblige themselves to fight for their own interests. Royalty serves the instincts of sloth by providing a class of nobility that will do the business of governing in behalf of those who cede that power to them. The Southern aristocracy used this argument to assure to the world that slavery was a positive good for those intrinsically unable to govern themselves.

At the risk of over-explaining, the French Revolution was not an uprising of the poor; it was an uprising of the middle class. The poor loved the monarchy. They wept at the death of their beloved royalty who had provided them with cakes and circuses. Indeed, history shows that the poor serfs of France stood beneath the scaffolding in the Place de Concord to bathe their unwashed bodies in the blood of the monarchs they adored. You see aristocracy, professes its moral right to rule because of a superior sensitivity to things, particularly benevolence for the common person. And why? First, because the poor generally work for and are organized by middle class people. The middle class is the stratum of society that creates wealth and organizes labor. This makes the middle class the apparent enemy of the poor. This makes the middle class the common object of hatred of both those who feel they are morally superior and those below who resent their order and self-discipline of success. Second, the common man believes he cannot protect himself—at least that is the opinion nurtured by the ruling class. The king and his nobility rule in order to govern for the benefit of the weak and the poor.

The impulse of aristocracy is to operate with contempt for self-sufficiency. Aristocracy by its nature needs to be needed. It needs to be justified. Despite the aphorism of the political right that limousine liberals are motivated by guilt, the better answer is more obvious. The wealth of the left, accumulated primarily as a result of privilege, and university training, and not work, is justified by the noblesse oblige of being members of a ruling class that “cares” more deeply for the down trodden and the destitute than heartless businessmen. It is not guilt. It is the noble duty and obligation of a ruling class. Even where there are no destitute or downtrodden, the creation of such a class is necessary for the self-justification of a ruling class.

For those who are naturally independent and self-sufficient, they have no need of kings. People who earn and make money, design and create things do not need the king’s men to assist them. The middle class, or what has been contemptuously referred to as Bourgeoisie, do not need the largess of monarchs or the vicarious excitement of royalty to fill up otherwise empty lives. Free men are free because they distain the instinct to find meaning through the glitter and awe of a ruling class. Freemen have identity outside and apart from men who claim to rule over them. The despondent, the undisciplined, the depressed, the drug addict, the mindless drone of TV dramas, must live through the energy and vicarious thrill of celebrities, TV stars, basketball heroes, and “Camelot”-like political celebrities, like Louis XIV, John F. Kennedy and now, Barack Obama. These are men of style, charisma and je ne sais quoi,—or to rephrase it: the ruling class.

Noblesse oblige: it provided the games in the Coliseum of ancient Rome at public expense. It explains why Obama worked so hard to get the Olympics into Chicago. It explains the deep psychological need to lead and manager others. It is the age-old formula of despots. An aristocracy casts farthings from their royal coaches in return for the adoration of those who have little or no respect for themselves.

The enemy of our country today is not socialism; rather it is the emergence of a definitive ruling elite. But more tragically, it is the emergence of an indoctrinated class of men and women who view themselves as objects of charity rather than respect. It is the slow decaying of the dignity of liberty and self-sufficiency. Too many of us have been told too many times by elitist advancing their agenda— that we are disenfranchised-- and we believe it, because it caters to the worst qualities of self-pity. Hard work and self-sufficiency takes character. Then behold! The champion of those wretched underlings arrives on horseback to share not the promise of equality, or the challenges of liberty, but an equal promise that allows men to live through the greatness of those who are above them. In short, we may work so that a better class of men and women can do great things in our behalf. For this rising class of modern thralls, we are no longer the land of the free, or the home of the brave. We just want to live through the majesty of those we set over ourselves for great tasks, and for the honor of receiving on occasion a deigning look and brass penny from the passing royal coach.