Premises And Precedents

     Richard Lyons has given us some background on the contemporary oppression of political opponents. Most critical is this observation:

     Let’s now go back to the era of Woodrow Wilson. Our 28th president spent his life on Ivy League campuses, being steeped in the “Ideal State” philosophy by his intellectual mentors, Richard Ely and Herbert Adams. Wilson believed what Hegel wrote: “It is the moral Whole, the State, which is that form of reality in which the individual has… freedom. All the worth a human being possesses… he possesses only through the State.” Therefore, only the “State” has rights.

     It was based on this common philosophical root that the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, founded our Administrative State; it was with this philosophical seed that Woodrow Wilson planted Socialism in America.

     Tellingly, in Wilson’s political work The State, he demands that there is no such thing as Universal Law that transcends time or place, such as the Ten Commandments or the Constitution of the United States. Wilson believed that laws, any laws, were changeable, based on the will of the “State.” Finally, Wilson held that Russia had it wrong — socialism by revolution was wrong. America would grow socialism the right way — through evolution.

     Any American with even a moderate grounding in the history of the West will know that socialism is not a new idea. Now and then, socialist flacksters have attempted to sell it as new – typically, as a new solution to some “problem,” such as poverty, “inequality,” or environmental preservation – but the core premise, which Mussolini expressed as “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State,” is centuries old. Indeed, it predates the Enlightenment.

     Remember the above when some snide Leftist accuses you of “living in the past.” And with that, let’s have a little music: