Thus spoke then-President George W. Bush a week after the 9/11 attacks. He was, of course, referring to the terrorists that perpetrated the attacks and radical Islam in general. This statement, lauded by some and mocked by others, endures, and will always be associated with GWB.
Fifteen years later, the observation is ironically applicable to people of a more domestic origin: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s ascendance has its roots in opposition to free trade and free movement of people. His rhetoric on trade reeks of Smoot-Hawley protectionism, and we all know how he feels about immigration from the South and from the Middle East. Trump is also on-board with NSA surveillance, he supports the Patriot Act, he’s enthusiastic about eminent domain takings, he’s spoken about shutting down parts of the internet, he’s cool with denying the gun rights of people on the no-fly list (where you can be placed without due process or conviction of a criminal act), wants to end birthright citizenship and deny the liberties it guarantees, seems to have no issues with restricting speech via campaign finance reform, and has even talked about registering all those who believe in a certain religion.
Clinton, inconceivably, is even worse. She’s of a mind with Trump on free speech and the Internet, she’s flipped over to protectionism on trade, she’s all-in on the surveillance state, she supported the Patriot Act, she’s a bigger warmonger than any recent president, she wants greater government control over every sector of the economy, she favors not only a higher minimum wage but greater involvement in the employer-employee relationship, she opposes anything remotely related to religious liberty, and she’d confiscate every legally owned gun in the country if she thought she could get away with it.
If we layer this on top of Obama’s history of hostility to individual liberty, we witness a nation whose leadership, current and future, epitomizes GWB’s observation that “they hate our freedoms.”
The great nations of humankind have historically done far worse to themselves than have had done to them from without. The Roman empire collapsed from internal rot. The Byzantines, likewise. 15th century China’s isolationist turn changed her from a world power to an irrelevance for centuries. The British Empire overextended and mismanaged itself. The Soviet Union ignored the disastrous outcomes of its socialist policies all the way to its demise. America, arguably the greatest nation in the history of the world, built its greatness upon then-radical principles of individual liberty. The two major parties that have been governing the nation for the past 150 years are, of late, tripping all over themselves in a race away from those founding principles.
America has the historical lessons of those past nations/empires to draw from. America also has the historical success born out of the commitment to individual liberty and limited government as proof of what she should prioritize. Americans, unfortunately, are in their picks of Clinton and Trump, ignoring the lessons of history (again) in favor of people who hate our freedoms.”
When Benjamin Franklin was asked, at the end of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a Republic or a Monarchy?” he replied:
A Republic, if you can keep it.
We’re failing to keep the Republic that the founders built. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
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