Kevin D. Williamson:
There is a line from John Adams of which conservatives, particularly those of a moralistic bent, are fond: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” The surrounding prose is quoted much less frequently, and it is stern stuff dealing with one of Adams’s great fears — one that is particularly relevant to this moment in our history.
John Adams hated democracy and he feared what was known in the language of the time as “passion.” Adams’s famous assessment: “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.” Democracy, he wrote, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”
If you are wondering why that pedantic conservative friend of yours corrects you every time you describe our form of government as democracy — “It’s a republic!” he will insist — that is why. Your pedantic conservative friend probably is supporting Ted Cruz. The democratic passions that so terrified Adams have filled the sails of Donald Trump.
At some point within the past few decades (it is difficult to identify the exact genesis) the rhetorical affectation of politicians’ presuming to speak for “We the People” became fashionable. Three words from the preamble to the Constitution came to stand in for a particular point of view and a particular set of assumptions present in both of our major national political tendencies. Molly Ivins, the shallow progressive polemicist, liked to thunder that “We the People don’t have a lobbyist!” She liked to call lobbyists “lobsters,” too, a half-joke that she, at least, never tired of. Dr. Ben Carson likes to draft “We the People” into his service. Sean Hannity is very fond of the phrase, and so-called conservative talk radio currently relies heavily on the assumption that the phrase is intended to communicate: that there exists on one side of a line a group of people called “Americans” and on the other side a group called “the Establishment,” and that “We the People” are getting screwed by “Them.”
I write “so-called” conservative talk radio because the radio mob dropped conservatism with something like military parade-ground precision the moment it looked like the ratings — and hence the juice — were on the other side. Donald Trump, talked up endlessly by the likes of Hannity and Laura Ingraham, apologized for by Rush Limbaugh, and indulged far too deeply for far too long by far too many others, rejects conservatism. He rejects free trade. He rejects property rights. He rejects the rule of law. He rejects limited government. He advocates a presidency a thousand times more imperial than the one that sprung Athena-like from the brow of Barack Obama and his lawyers. He meditates merrily upon the uses of political violence and riots, and dreams of shutting down newspapers critical of him. He isn’t a conservative of any stripe, and it is an outright lie to present him as anything other than what he is.
What he is is the embodiment of the democratic passions that kept John Adams up at night. Trumpkin democracy is the democracy that John Adams warned us about.
A proper republic under the rule of law is, as Adams wrote, “deaf as an adder to the clamors of the populace.” It is that which “no passion can disturb” and “void of desire and fear, lust and anger,” being, as it is, “mens sine affectu.” The Trump movement is light on the mens, being almost entirely affectu. Our law is a law of property, commerce, trade, and individual rights. The democratic passion — which informs the campaign of Bernie Sanders as much as it does that of Donald Trump — rejects those things.
another journalistic whore pandering his own propaganda-he is no different than Joseph Goebbles. Goebbles was an artist at propaganda this write is a lackey.