Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Monday, April 05, 2004  

This is the way the world ends

My father was visiting me last week for three days. We discussed a lot of politics, and I agreed with him when he said that eventually the Right will take over all the machinery of government in order to keep the barbarians at bay, and deal with the seditious within.

It occurred to me then that this is how it will probably happen: as America takes more a more hits upon our soldiers in which our response is weak (or abrogated by fear of negative reaction at home and abroad), at some point a military leader, former general or such, will run for President on the platform that military problems require military answers. He will promise to mercilessly destroy our enemies without regard for world opinion or foreign civilian casualities.

That candidate may not be elected on the first attempt, but he will eventually win. He will do as he said, and use military extreme force to annihilate our foes. This will produce massive internal dissent from the Left -- rioting, demonstrations, sabotage, and so forth. That will lead to a suspension of many civil liberties and the jailing of the seditious.

It may well come to martial law. Not because unrest is widespread, but because interference by civil institutions and states can only be deterred by such means. Such declarations of martial law must inevitably lead to an Imperium. Once the President becomes the Law, he must of necessity remain in office for life or until a coup d'etat.

The sad fact is that republics and democracies cannot last in this world. The slide downhill is irreversible. Politics under any government is of a nature that only a few pressing problems are ever addressed.

President Bush has focused all of his attention on the war on terrorism, a little on economics (tax cuts), and nothing on anything else. And so illegal immigration runs rampant and ruins many states; energy policy is ennervated; education is increasingly terrible and re-education centers for leftism; regulation and bureaucracy increases driving up costs for business and destroying incentive for enterprise; and so on.

No single one of those matters is incapable of correction or adjustment, but taken as a whole, they prove insurmountable and thoroughly debilitating. It simply takes too much energy and effort to overcome the hidebound situations of inertia, complacency, self-interest, bribery, posture, and indifference in any one field of interest to effectively overhaul a slew of them.

The first President who was elected for life was FDR, and the result was a disaster in that he instituted the Welfare State, and incorporated the belief that government can save people from themselves. We got the nanny state, high taxes, affirmative action, and thousands of programs and agencies that will never go away despite their uselessness.

posted by Mark Butterworth | 12:26 PM |

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