The Coming American Dictatorship
A dictatorship is possible anywhere. Throughout history dictatorships are the conditions under which most people have lived. Pick any time in historyt,then make a mental estimate of what percentage of humanity lived under dictatorships of one kind or another at that time. There have even been times when everyone on the planet lived under a dictatorship of one sort or another,and, as if we can’t stand freedom, it seems as if every place men have won freedoms, the generations that followed them gave them away. Always. There’s evidence that that’s what we’re doing now.
The Constitution will still be there and not a word of it will be changed nor will it have been amended. It will remain in place, a showcase to the world, but it will mean nothing. We’re putting all the mechanisms in place that will make a dictatorship possible. Two hundred years ago, our Founding Fathers had put as many obstacles as possible in the way of a dictatorship because they feared that unless there were obstacles, specifically, the safeguards in our Constitution, a dictatorship was inevitable. but even then, many of them weren’t optimistic about our chances. When Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention, a Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia asked, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ Franklin replied, ‘A republic if you can keep it.’ He expressed the sentiment of many of the delegates.
Today, as if we’re bent on proving the cynicism in Franklin’s reply was deserved, we’re ignoring—no, we’re actually throwing away—the safeguards hammered out among the delegates to that Convention. We’re not changing the wording or the intent of the Constitution, we’re just ignoring it.
If I had to summarize what’s happening,I’d have to say there’s not just one thing we have to worry about; there’s a whole bunch of things that are undermining our freedoms,but I’m not going to say there’s a conspiracy, like some people do, though there may be. I really don’t know. But I’d have to say that if there’s a concerted attack on our liberties, whoever’s doing it is a lot smarter than we are and he—or they—have my grudging admiration because these changes aren’t being forced on us, we’re just going along with them.
There are six things that I’d say are sure signs that we’re in trouble.
First there’s the steady erosion of our basic rights, the ones a lot of people call our constitutional rights, though that’s not a good name for them. It’s better to think of them as natural rights, the way our Founding Fathers did—or think of them as God-given rights if you want. Thinking of them as constitutional rights is part of what is getting us in trouble. You have to realize that our Founding Fathers didn’t think of them as constitutional rights because they knew that if our rights are provided by either the Constitution or the government, what the government gives, it can also take away. As natural or God-given rights, they’re absolute. That’s the way they were intended.
The next problem we have is related to this erosion of our rights, but I’d treat it as a whole separate category. It’s the unintended consequences of having created new rights—legal rights created by Congress and which Congress and bureaucrats have decided supercede or nullify our natural rights. These include the new rights that have come about as a result of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Environmental Protection Act, and the American Disabilities Act. Unlike our natural rights, which come to us at the expense of no one else, the new rights have to be provided by someone else. It’s in having to provide them that our government has found ways to erode our natural rights.
Third there’s the unconstitutional bypassing of our legislative process by the President—not just this one in office now, but by all of the recent presidents.
Using what are called Executive Orders, they create laws that are not only illegal and unconstitutional, but are created without the consent of the Congress or the people of the United States. Some of these edicts, believe it or not, explicitly suspend the Constitution for an indeterminate amount of time on the whim of the President.
Fourth, there’s the new rules and regulations imposed on businesses by our federal government by which the government circumvents our Fifth Amendment rights by insisting businesses spy on us. This includes banks, airlines, and even manufacturers of things like light bulbs and paper.
Fifth is the creation of a professional, standing army. The Founding Fathers feared a professional army. They believed this country should depend on the militia—and I’m using the word ‘militia’ in the way they used it in the Second Amendment, meaning the body of citizen, not the National Guard or some other professional organization. Professional armies lose their allegiance to the citizenry and have a history of becoming the accomplices of tyrants. It’s highly unlikely there would have been any protests to the illegal war we fought in Vietnam if we’d had a professional army then.
Last of all, but not least, our economy is no longer a true free market economy. It is now one of the socialist economies. We’re now a fascist economy. For all of our posturing about how bad fascism is, we have created a fascist economy as a compromise between capitalism and communism.
All of these changes are milestones on the road to tyranny. If they had all been invoked at once, we’d have seen them for what they are, an attempt to subvert what had once been the freest society history has ever seen. There’d have been a revolution in this country; blood would have run in the streets,but they’ve come over generations, and the American people, whose collective attention span is brief and whose memory is even shorter, have come to believe that the way things are in this country today is the way they’ve always been.
Maybe, even though we are putting all mechanisms for a dictatorship into place...maybe it won’t happen. Though why we’d want to tempt fate by putting all the machinery for a dictatorship in place, I don’t know. If I had to bet, I’d say that sometime in the not too distant future we will live under tyranny. Sometime after that historians are going to look back to where the United States stood on the dawn of the new millennium and wonder if we’d gone mad or if we were just idiots. History is not going to treat us well; I can almost assure you of that.
For years, while I’ve been talking to people about this very subject, I’ve been telling them our government is illegal, that it violates Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, that it tramples all over the Bill of Rights. And just recently it dawned on me that in all those years not one person has ever said to me, ‘Our government is legal; it complies with the Constitution.’ Instead, they tell me, ‘Things are different now.’ Or, ‘We have different problems now.’
No one’s defending the actions of the government as legal, constitutional, or even right. They’re saying they know our government doesn’t operate within the confines of the Constitution anymore, but they say that’s okay because our problems are different from the problems the Founding Fathers faced. Or they just say the Constitution is old. Even Franklin Roosevelt said our Constitution was only fit for horse and buggy days and he never let it get in his way.The Constitution’s being trampled on but we the people don’t complain about it. We make no noise when the safeguards are breached. We don’t protect our rights from the very entity our Constitution is meant to protect us from, our government itself. If we don’t stop them, then it’s our fault.
The Constitution isn’t there to tell us, the citizens, how to behave; [B}it’s there to set limits on government.[/B] We’ve got to hold them to it. For the first 150 years or so of this country, it worked pretty well,but now the government ignores the Constitution whenever it’s convenient for them to do so. And I mean government at all levels—federal, state, and the local level.
We expect the so-called average citizen to obey the law, even when it’s absurd or unfair, but we don’t want our politicians or bureaucrats to have to obey it if we figure there’s a payoff for us. And every time we allow exceptions to the Constitution, we do it because we expect some kind of payoff. You see, the worst enemy of liberty is not the tyrant without, it’s the tyrant within us all : we all want to be free, but we want to dictate to our neighbors. There’s always something our neighbors do that we don’t like and that we think there should be a law against. I’m not talking about murder or robbery where there’s a victim and upon which we can get almost universal agreement that it’s wrong. I’m talking about gambling, prostitution, drug use, putting additions on your house, wearing seat belts, how children are educated, etc. I think there should be a law against something you’re doing or not doing and you, in turn, think someone should make a law against something I’m doing, and there’s always a politician trying to curry both of our votes. So he’ll try to get the laws enacted, laws you want imposed on me and laws I want imposed on you. So we get drug laws, zoning laws, laws about politically correct speech, guns laws, restrictions on businesses—you name it and somebody wants it outlawed or regulated and there’s a politician somewhere listening. But you can’t blame him. He’s just doing what both you and I and all of our neighbors are trying to do to each other.
The net result is that we are imposing tyranny on each other, often in defiance of the Constitution and the guarantees in the Bill of Rights, and we create bureaucracies to manage and enforce our rules and these bureaucracies benefit from the existence of these new rules, these new laws. And, no matter how unconstitutional they may be, soon the bureaucrats themselves will fight to keep bad laws in place, even when you and I have seen the light and want those laws repealed.
Drug laws started out as tax laws not long after the turn of the century. But we need to fast forward to 1934, when Prohibition was repealed, to see how they got worse. When Prohibition ended, there was the question of what the government was going to do with all the agents it had hired to run down the bootleggers, speakeasy owners, and rumrunners. The obvious answer was to send them home. But FDR was too kind hearted to throw anyone out of work once they were living off the largess of the taxpayers, even though, in his election campaign, he had sworn he was going to cut the size of government. So he set this crew off to chase drug users.
It was a practical decision. Prohibition had failed because it had been imposed on whites; whites wanted to drink so whites ended it. But whites didn’t do drugs. Only blacks and Mexicans did. So Roosevelt turned the otherwise idle agents of the war on alcohol to pursuing drugs, and the rest was history.
No one foresaw the 1960s when white kids would start smoking pot, dropping acid, and snortin’ coke the way their parents and grandparents had been swilling beer, wine, and bathtub gin,but suddenly, white America found itself throwing its own children and grandchildren in jails.
The drug laws are unconstitutional. The federal government has no authority to make such laws. The 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution make it pretty clear that we can do with our bodies as we wish. The 14th Amendment says the states have got to leave us alone, too.
In a cruel twist of fate, by the 1960s the antidrug campaign had become a huge industry. There were people who benefitted from it despite the fact that it is illegal and was ruining millions of lives.
The livelihoods of police, bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, and many others depend on drugs being illegal and remaining illegal. And, like many other industries, the drug prohibition industry is a growth industry; it grows by making more and more laws which are increasingly pervasive and harsher and have less constitutional basis, like RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. When RICO was passed, it became legal, despite the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, for the police to deprive citizens of property without due process. They can do this simply on the suspicion alone that the property is linked to a crime. They don’t have to have a warrant, they don’t even have to prove their accusations. RICO is not only unconstitutional, it abrogates the body of common law and tradition our legal system rests on. The state no longer has to prove citizens are guilty of anything to seize their belongings; the citizens must prove they are innocent through an almost impossible and expensive process which includes posting bonds which, in theory, the government can also seize.
The same goes for prisons. If the War on Drugs were dropped and the P.O.W.s, the hostages taken in that war, were sent home, some three quarters of our prison population would disappear.
Today the United States imprisons a greater percentage of its own citizens than any other country in the world.So what would all the prison guards currently employed to do this do? Where would the wardens get their next jobs? What would happen to all those communities in the middle of nowhere whose main industry is the prison? As prisons closed, real estate would plummet in those communities and people would lose their life savings. Do you think someone with $100,000 into a house, in one of these backwater towns, wants the illegal War on Drugs stopped? Think about it.
How do you think lawyers would fare if drug laws went away? Have you ever stopped to think of how much of the legal system is employed prosecuting or defending people in drug cases? Even court appointed lawyers are on the payroll. How many lawyers would suddenly discover they can’t afford to feed their kids if all the laws concerning drug and other victimless crimes disappeared?
the economics reaches even beyond them. It goes all the way to corporate America which manufactures drug detection chemicals and equipment, builds prisons, even makes uniforms. Many livelihoods depend on these laws, and the amount of money involved runs into the hundred of billions. It’s more money than goes through any of the corporate giants in America today.
People are going to prison, losing their property, having their lives destroyed, and sometimes they are dying because of these unconstitutional laws. And we all have blood on our hands.
The rights we bought with blood more than 200 years ago we now exchange for loaves of bread. As a friend of mine once said, "the War on Drugs is nothing more than a Full Employment Act for lawyers, judges, policemen, prison systems, corporations, and their attendant bureaucracies," and he’s right.
Aaron J. Cuffee
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
- H.L. Mencken