By Alan Keyes
Thursday, April 19, 2007
The 2008 presidential election cycle is well under way, hurried along by decisions of more populous states like New York and California to move their primaries to February 5, 2008.
For some time now, I have been receiving emails asking my view of the election and the candidates who are competing for nomination, both Democrats and Republicans. Some people have urged me to get involved as I did in 1996 and 2000. Since I ran against him in Illinois in 2004, some of the media have sought my comments on Barack Obama's campaign and personality.
Frankly though, I don't think it's constructive to discuss candidates and personalities until we have a good sense of what is at stake this time around in the choice the American people will make.
Turning point
For a long time, I have believed that the 2008 election would be a turning point for the survival of the American republic--i.e., our nation's system of constitutional government based on the sovereignty of the American people and respect for their inalienable rights.
During the past several decades, the trend in American life and politics has been adverse to just about everything needed to sustain American liberty. In our intellectual life, we have embraced theories and concepts that are simply incompatible with the ideas of human equality and inalienable rights that shaped our institutions of self-government. In the moral realm, we have legitimized attitudes and practices incompatible with the self-reliance and self-discipline that make limited government practicable. We have lived with policies on taxation and our economic life that destroy the rights, self-sufficiency, and initiative of the people. We have thoughtlessly adopted--and allowed our elites to implement--an understanding of political life that destructively erodes the sovereignty of the people.
The end result is a crisis so pervasive that our preoccupation with its many symptoms and manifestations keeps us from appreciating its overall extent.
Train of abuses
In many ways, the American people are like a monarch whose legitimacy, character, and resources are being systematically eroded by those who mean to replace his rule with their own.
One advisor tells him that the borders are under assault, and that parts of his kingdom must be sold off or surrendered in order to defend them. Another encourages him to kill off members of his family who might challenge him for the throne, while seducing him to waste his time in lustful pursuits with willing partners procured for the purpose. A third assuages his guilt over these crimes and vices by convincing him to abandon the stern morality of his ancestors, and turn from the religion that required it.
Distracted, demoralized, by turns arrogant, resentful, ashamed, and confused, he stumbles from one preoccupation to another, never realizing the truth--that each issue and temptation is only one part of a train of abuses that will end in his removal from the throne.
Upcoming series of articles
In a series of articles over the next several weeks, I will examine this crisis and its bearing on the choice we face in 2008. In the course of this examination, I will deal with a wide range of issues, but my main purpose will be to place each and all of them in the larger context of the threat to our sovereignty as a people.
I hope that by the end of this effort, those like myself who deeply cherish the hope for humanity America is supposed to represent will be moved to view the 2008 election with the same sense of urgent foreboding that I do. I hope they will realize that the American people must create and seize the opportunity to break free from the grip of the ambitious, self-serving elites who have been manipulating them toward destruction.
We must find a voice that can rally us to implement the vision of restored faith, self-discipline, and self-government that alone can save our sovereign constitutional power and America's identity as the land of the free.
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