Sadly, the US republic is currently being ripped apart by socialist statism (has been for the past 80 years or so, but the assault is currently in hyperdrive) and heading towards the same tyranny that the Founding Fathers were desperately trying to ensure and protect the nascent republic from.
The facts remain, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. If a people opt for tyranny, they will get one, either through one fell swoop, or by increments. I find it interesting that there are Westerners championing the thought of “democracy” breaking out in the ME, all the while they are more than happy to sit in a soft tyranny at home.
Each generation has to relearn that statism in any shape or form is an evil, and to be resisted against, not by just the founders of the republic, but by each generation inheriting the state into which they were born. KGS
Thomas Sowell: Is the Mideast ready for freedom?
There is very little sign of tolerance in the Middle East, even among fellow Muslims with different political or religious views, and all too many signs of gross intolerance toward people who are not Muslims.
Freedom and democracy cannot be simply conferred on anyone. Both have preconditions, and even nations that are free and democratic today took centuries to get there.
If there was ever a time when people in Western democracies might be excused for thinking that Western institutions could simply be exported to other nations to create new free democracies, that time has long passed.
It is easy to export the outward symbols of democracy – constitutions, elections, parliaments and the like – but you cannot export the centuries of experience and development that made those institutions work. All too often, exported democratic institutions have meant “one man, one vote – one time.”
We should not assume that our own freedom and democratic form of government can be taken for granted. Those who created this country did not.
As the Constitution of the United States was being written, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what he and the other writers were creating. He replied, “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.” Generations later, Abraham Lincoln also posed it as a question whether “government of the people, by the people and for the people” is one that “can long endure.”
