So AOC thinks Venezuela is south of the equator. Probably thinks all South Americans are alike.
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What's with Netanyahu's low-profile visit to the U, S. recently? Avoiding the long arm of the UN court? A great idea from Kathy A.: They're planning heavy-duty Iran action, but they don't trust their domestic electronic security.
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What would happen to a farmer who polluted a waterway a fraction of the degree the government has polluted the Potomac?
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The president of a Florida insurance brokerage firm and the CEO of a marketing company were sentenced Wednesday to 20 years each in prison for leading a sprawling, $233 million Affordable Care Act fraud scheme
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Outrage. Surrender. Despair.
Overwhelming national and personal debt. Governments that can't prevent fires or rebuild after the damage. People who immigrate here because the filthy streets and rivers look just like home.
Growing evidence that what people do is ineffective and that government is a foolish backup plan.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitude that could arise in a nation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion. Once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.
Enervation eventually gives way to frustration, and then to rage, as soft despotism fails to achieve utopia. Then the people are left with a stark choice: a reversion to freedom, or the embrace of autocracy. As de Tocqueville concluded, “The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.”
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitude that could arise in a nation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion. Once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.
Enervation eventually gives way to frustration, and then to rage, as soft despotism fails to achieve utopia. Then the people are left with a stark choice: a reversion to freedom, or the embrace of autocracy. As de Tocqueville concluded, “The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.”
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