Fay Voshell at The American Thinker writes on the subject of The Obama Fuhrer’s now infamous “you didn’t build it” speech. And it is important for us to understand just how honest Obama is being in this speech when he tells us that none of our accomplishments are really ours. Rather, they are made possible by government and government only. That is what he thinks of you.
This is, of course, a stunning claim coming from an American President. Our country was founded on the idea that the people are the sovereign and that the government derives its powers from all of us. Rights are derived from God, given to the people and then power is delegated by the people to the government in a specific and limited way. We like it that way because it gives we the people the maximum amount of individual freedom that is consistent with a society that is orderly and productive. Our system is predicated on the supremacy of the individual. As a free actor in society, the citizen following his dreams and building a life is mostly free from the state. Or at least that’s how it used to be.
Obama is the representative of the leftist view that those old ideas are invalid and should be replaced with the worship of the all powerful state and its countless minions. You are no longer to be a free individual following your dreams; you will have no dreams that do not derive from Washington. Your life will be guided, funded and ordered by others. You will not have a say. You will not have a choice. You will not speak up or protest. You will abide by the plans of others. You will not be given any other alternatives. You will obey.
For in the current administration’s words and actions, we are seeing a trend that portends the complete inversion of the relationship of the American government and the individual citizen as outlined by its foundational documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We are being told that the individual owes his existence to the State instead of the State owing its existence to the people.
The claims and actions of our current administration and its radically left allies are nothing new, but they have been a constant of history. The justifications for state control by omniscient elite have been the same for millennia. Egotistical rulers, reinforced by powerful bureaucracies and armies of the governments they control, are all clones, be they dead and in the antique past or living in the here and now. In fact, what we are seeing is a potential return to the governmental standards of antiquity. The neo-Assyrian, statist impulses that harassed the entire twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, be they pale imitators of fascism, communism, or any other “ism” which favors the almighty State, currently are rising right here in America.
We are seeing authoritarian political philosophies recycled and retrofitted for the consumption of Americans. The radical left and our president demote builders of businesses and followers of the American dream, building Washington into a virtual Babylon. And yes, they should be given the credit for building the American Babylon, the symbol of fundamental transformation into authoritarianism.
