Rousseau and the Collapse of American Constitutionalism
Rousseau and the Collapse of American Constitutionalism
Who is the mastermind behind the Democratic Party’s unhinged efforts to impose an elitist ideology on the American people?
Hint: it is not Barack Obama.
Try Jean Jacque Rousseau, that’s who.
A “Dead White European Male,” Rousseau was born in 1712 in Geneva and died in 1778 in France.
In his 1762 proposal for making a Heaven here on Earth -- The Social Contract -- Rousseau designed the template for what would become what the scholar J.L. Talmon called “Democratic Totalitarianism.” Rousseau was followed by the socialists -- international (Communists) and national (Fascists) -- and then by the postmodernists.
It was Rousseau - not Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, or Saul Alinsky -- who created the social theory inspiring today’s progressive Democrats.
Rousseau begins with a call for self-indulgence and entitlement -- “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Thus, his Social Contract supposedly liberates each person from oppressive relationships with others.
So today in America the new social contract proposed by the Democrats provides, for example, that if you decide to be a man, be a man. If you decide to be a woman, be a woman. If you want even more personal freedom, be either from time to time. If you are a girl, then America is your oyster. If you don’t want to have a baby, don’t have a baby. With immigration, if you want to be an American, come here and be an American. If you want to join the ruling elite, just register for college. Someone else will pay your tuition and, presto, without much effort you will have your passport into the new American elite. If you struggle with illness, taxpayers will free you from that hardship.
But there was a bait-and-switch in Rousseau’s design template. None of us really will have individual authority to live as we might wish. We must surrender our rights to the collective which has all sovereign power. Rousseau demands that each of us make a pact with one another whereby each gives ourself “absolutely” in everything we are and have to the collective which thereby comes to incorporate into itself the entire community. That collective then orders our lives for the better, each of us being the equal of all.
To keep the social contract alive and well, Rousseau insists that “whoever refuses to obey its will shall be compelled to by the whole body.” This provision turns his social contract into a “Big Lie.” It is really a tyranny of an elect over all the rest.
Today’s Democrats love similar imaginary “Big Lies” and they love to be our superiors in all things.
The social collective follows what Rousseau called a “General Will” or what we would call today an ideology. What the General Will wants us to do can only be discerned by insightful intellectuals and must not be left to the voters. Rig elections, anyone?
According to Rousseau, whatever each of us wants is only our self-seeking “Particular Will.” Because they do not follow the “General Will” of the collective, each and every “Particular Will” must be denied authority and social power.
Rousseau said coldly and viciously: “Now, the less the relation the particular wills have to the general will, that is, morals and manners to laws, the more should the repressive force be increased.”
No wonder Democrats today demand government action to root out what they claim to be “disinformation” and “misinformation” on social media.
To further keep us all in chains, Rousseau proposes creation of a new religion -- worship of the State and its government to make the sovereign -- “the object of the citizen’s adoration.”
He concludes that there should be “…a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject.”
And so today in America we have the “civil religion” of the Democrat Party -- a gospel of racism on the part of Whites only, of DEI privileges for some, of no objective standards in education but with public schools as therapeutic havens for children traumatized by racism, sexism, and so much more, of marginalizing the police function, of no punishment for crimes provoked by social injustice indignities, of abortion under most any circumstance, of intrusively regulating the economy to “save humanity and our planet from global warming,” of creating money to give everyone a “fair deal,” Trump Derangement Syndrome, etc.
The “insurrection” narrative attached to the Jan 6, 2020 riotous disrespect for law and its breaking and entering into the Capitol fits to a “T” Rousseau’s formula for legitimating ostracism and punishment of “heretics.” Those accused of “insurrection” had obviously failed to follow the “civil religion” of the Democrat Party’s Federal State. Long prison sentences have been imposed by Federal courts on a few who refused to accept the party line on the legal perfection of the 2020 Presidential election. Such “malefactors” -- what Rousseau called all such unbelievers -- had by their intemperance flaunted their heresy by trespassing into spaces held sacred by the Democrat Party’s civil religion.
Recently a grandmother was sentenced to 15 months in prison for having “trespassed” on the Capital on January 6th for less than 20 minutes. Her husband, however, has been sentence to 12 years in prison as a member of the Oath Keepers for participating in the Jan 6th -- what shall we call it? -- an illegal temper tantrum brought on by belief in an alternative faith.
Acknowledging her lack of criminal history, devotion to her family, and work in her community, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta insisted this grandmother still must go to prison for not understanding the ‘broader context” of her involvement in the events of January 6. “We don’t have January 6, it does not happen, without people like you,” Mehta scolded.
MAGA advocates are similarly heretics to the civil religion proposed by the Democrat Party. They are, therefore, to be banished from our politics.
Joe Biden’s speech at Independence Hall this month last year, entitled “on the continued battle for the soul of the nation”, was completely Rousseauist:
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Rousseau says that anyone who attacks “social rights” (Donald Trump perhaps?) becomes a rebel and a traitor to his country. “In such a case, the preservation of the State is inconsistent with his own, and one or the other must perish.” Those who “break the social treaty” can no longer be ”members of the State.” In hewing to Rousseau’s thinking, the Democrats have brought four criminal indictments against Donald Trump to destroy him as a threat to their civil religion and their right to rule the rest of us.
In the 1970s Rousseau’s fixation on the General Will and rule by an elite of self-appointed saints proselytizing their own civil religion were brought over from France to the United States principally in the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, missionaries for postmodernism. Then out of our universities metastasized a new Democrat elite having no nourishing roots in “Americanism.”
This new elite has been and is quite dedicated to bringing about, as Barack Obama once proclaimed, a “transformation” of the United States into a society where everyone will be “free” and maintained by the government in indulgent self-absorption.
Rousseau and the Collapse of American Constitutionalism - American Thinker
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