Tea at Trianon: Biden's Authoritarian America

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 3, 2020

Biden's Authoritarian America

From The American Thinker:

The pivot of limited government is restraint.  Under the Constitution, government is confined to those powers that protect life, liberty, and property.  James Madison warned, "It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it" (Federalist 48).

Despite accusations of fascism from the left, President Trump has attempted to scale back the power of government by eliminating or curtailing many federal regulations and by reducing the size of the federal government and the federal work force.  He has made mistakes, to be sure, but in terms of actual policy, his critics are hard pressed to cite substantive examples that amount to a pattern of "tyranny" and "fascism."  Instead, much of the criticism surrounds his sometimes reckless language and his verbal attacks on the press.  (Ironically, it was Barack Obama who abused government power by investigating, spying on, and harassing journalists.)

Under a Biden administration, we will see a colossal escalation in the scope and power of government, projected by authoritarian policies, many of which were put in place under President Obama.  The apparently affable Biden is a Progressive who believes that the primary purpose of government is to engineer social and economic structures in order to create a "just society."  Progressives have no limiting principles to restrain government growth because they are convinced that government is a benign agent of the people — a supremely naïve belief according to the American Founders.

The prospect of an authoritarian government under Biden is not a nebulous accusation, but a concrete extrapolation based on his record and his current positions and policies.  The examples that follow are drawn from my eBook, The War on America's Founding Principles: How Progressives Are Dismantling America One Plank at a Time.  The book can be downloaded for free. (Read more.)