“The philosophy of Christ is a philosophy of compassion…The day we decide that the Government is our brother’s keeper, that is the day the personal responsibility for our brother has been lost.” Herbert Hoover, 1953
On October 25, 2023, the US House of Representatives voted Mike Johnson of Louisiana as its 56th Speaker. In a town where anyone to the right of Lenin is labelled an extremist, Johnson’s unapologetic Bible-believing Christian worldview is triggering much wailing and gnashing of teeth. What terrifies former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki is Johnson’s belief in Judeo-Christian principles as the foundation of our Constitution, a view Psaki decries as “completely out of line with what America actually is” [emphasis in original].[1]
Quite by accident, Psaki’s fatuous claim, like all good propaganda, contains an element of truth. An author of far more erudition writes, “There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, ‘Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out’…There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them.”[2]
The author is not referring to Donald Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again, nor Joe Biden’s plan to Build Back Better. The quote is from a 1944 pamphlet titled The Revolution Was, penned by the neglected genius, Garet Garrett. Against the huzzas of the apostles of John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt, the author convincingly argues the New Deal, ostensibly an economic recovery program, in reality was a transfer of power. In the presidential campaign of 1932, “a bund of intellectual revolutionaries, hiding behind the conservative planks of the Democratic party, seized control of government” (2). Unwittingly, the American people had surrendered control of government.
That certainly was not the intent of the voters. But Garrett’s generation forgot, and ours was never taught, the warning of Aristotle (384-322 BC):
The people do not easily change, but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state [emphasis added].[3]
A revolution in the state? In American minds, then and now, revolution denotes overthrowing government by force, violence. Americans are repulsed by political violence, going so far as to outlaw wars of aggression via the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. Unsuspicious by nature, few Americans realized that modern-day revolution is no longer an uncouth business. “The ancient demagogic art,” notes Garrett, “has, as we say, advanced. It has become in fact a science – the science of political dynamics…Always the single end in vision is a transfer of power” (12).
The implications are clear: there occurred a revolution in the relationship between government and people, not through force but through the ballot box. Before going further into the details, stop for a moment and consider the repercussions of the preceding allegation. Prior to the election of 1932, the American citizens were self-governing. But what does that mean? From its founding, our is a system of free men and free enterprise, voluntarily cooperating in society. The essence of our self-government lies in this cooperative system of “self-government of the people outside of government,” professed Herbert Hoover in 1953, and is “the most powerful development among free men that has taken place in all the world.”[4]
When government bureaus replace the voluntary, altruistic activities of citizens, civilization is over. Our Declaration of Independence proclaimed the self-evident truths that our Creator (God) endowed each of us, as His children, with unalienable rights, including, and by no means limited to, the right to our life, our liberty, and the fruit of our labor – property. The concept of unalienable rights, fundamental to English and Scottish liberty, stands in opposition to the divine right of kings.
Rights do not come from the government, as brilliantly argued by Samuel Rutherford in Lex, Rex (1644), the “most influential Scottish work on political theory,”[5] Can the people deposit all of their rights and liberties into the hand of a king/government? “They cannot resign to others that which they have not in themselves,” declares Rutherford.[6] “Nemo potest dare quod non habet,” which means one cannot transfer to another more rights than they possess. The Creator endowed our individual rights, they are a gift to be enjoyed until our death. They do not include a right to give, transfer, or trade them away – they are unalienable.
While the independent States of the New World were in the process of establishing a federal constitutional republic, Old World German and French philosophers such as Johann Fichte, Friedrich Hegal, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte, championed a militant atheistic, or at least agnostic, philosophy, reviving the medieval theory of the divine right of the king, a centralized, absolute power. All collectivist ideologies – socialism, fascism, communism, communism, globalism – insist that individual freedom is dangerous, therefore, the State must increase in power while the individual citizens decline in power.
The founders of America dismembered government, through a division of powers, a system of checks and balances. The balance of power was local, and the States served as the bulwark against the encroachment of a tyrannical federal (or national) government. The New Deal recreated Big Government – a government not too big to fail, but too big to control.
It is hard to imagine, but not one person alive today has experienced life in the American Republic which existed under the American Constitution for 144 years. We have lived, as eloquently stated by the fearless economic journalist John T. Flynn, “in the war-torn, debt-ridden, tax-harried, Red-wracked wreckage of a once imposing edifice of the free society which arose out of the American Revolution on the foundation of the American Constitution.”[7]
In the next post, Our Enemy, the State, I will detail how the election of 1932 became a “bait and switch” fraud on the American voters.
[1] Jen Psaki, "The Danger of a Wolf in a Suit Jacket," MSNBC, October 28, 2023, https://msnbc.com/inside-with-jen-psaki/gops-new-house-speaker-mike-johnson-trump-wolf-suit-rcna122551.
[2] Garet Garrett, "The Revolution Was (1944)," in The People's Pottage (Belmont, MA: Western Islands, 1965), 9. The Mises Institute offers the essay for download in pdf format here.
[3] Aristotle, Politics: A Treatise on Government, trans. William Ellis (1912: repr., London: J M Dent & Sons, 1928), Book 4, Chapter 5.
[4] Herbert Hoover, "Federal Socialization of Electric Power: Nation-Wide Broadcast at the Diamond Jubilee of the Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, Ohio, April 11, 1953," in Addresses Upon the American Road by Herbert Hoover, 1950-1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1955), 142.
[5] David Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644-51 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 235.
[6] Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex (1644: repr., Monee, IL 2022), 173.
[7] John T. Flynn, The Decline of the American Republic, and How to Rebuilt It (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955), 5.