by Thomas L. Krannawitter
All questions of candidates, policies, and parties are secondary to the question of what kind of regime We The People will choose, accept, or have forced upon us.
Questions about what our regime is, or what it will become, span generations. They are larger in scope than fleeting feelings about individual politicos or the headlines of the day.
A man who acts despotically within a good regime, after all, is a problem that can be solved with relative ease; within a bad regime, that problem becomes gigantic, perhaps even tyrannically murderous on global and historic scales.
Regimes matter.
For our current generation of citizens, the most important political questions are:
What kind of regime is the United States now, and what will it become?
Who will rule, and for what end or purpose?
Who is sovereign?
These are fundamental, or foundational, political subjects. All questions of candidates, policies, and parties are secondary to the question of what kind of regime we Americans will choose, accept, or have forced upon us.
Set aside the word “republic” for a moment; even that term is too complex and carries too much baggage for the basic questions I am raising: Will we be a self-governing regime of any form or kind? Or will we become subjects of unelected lords, lieges, bureaucrats, and union bosses?
Over the past century, the United States has been mutating from a self-governing constitutional republic into a German-style administrative state, where the (alleged) scientific expertise of bureaucrats, not the consent of the governed, legitimizes ruling power.
The regime we now inhabit—our (post)modern United States—is hardly recognizable when compared to the constitutional government the Founders bequeathed us, and the American culture that used to honor virtue and personal responsibility, even when individual Americans fell short.
Now, living in a regime produced by a century of progressivism, we stand at a crossroads. Down one path lies the extinction of political self-government and the sovereignty of We the People, replaced by the arbitrary rule of bureaucratic fiat. The other path points to the difficult but vital recovery of political self-government (though few today can imagine what that recovery looks like, so accustomed have we become to the suffocating weight of an unconstitutional and intrusive administrative state).
Standards By Which To Judge
We don’t have many standards remaining by which to judge politics in our (post)modern United States. The Constitution, which used to be our guiding standard, has become virtually irrelevant because most of our government today, the entire administrative-regulatory-welfare state housed within the Executive Branch, is blatantly unconstitutional.
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and decades of unconstitutional growth thereafter produced myriad government agencies and programs untethered from constitutional authority. President Obama made this clear when he boasted he needed only “a pen and a phone” to govern, not Congress.
Think about it.
How do we measure, say, the Department of Education or the Department of Health & Human Services, both plainly unconstitutional, by constitutional yardsticks?
What does the Constitution say about disputes between unconstitutional agencies, or which among many unconstitutional spending programs has priority over the others?
How do we judge the constitutional powers We the People vested in Congress that Congress then unconstitutionally transferred to the Executive Branch?
At this late stage in the cancerous growth of progressivism, the United States Constitution is no longer a relevant reference point for much of our current governance. Nearly every political question now involves multiple layers of unconstitutional government institutions and power.
Yet one fundamental question still applies to the choices and actions of the political class: Do they restore the sovereign power of We the People over our government, or do they strengthen and further insulate the unelected bureaucracy?
Every time a President or Congress defers to an unelected bureaucracy against the wishes of the American people, it is another passing bell for political self-government. Every time the Supreme Court proclaims the importance of administrative agencies being “independent” of presidential or congressional supervision, the Court ensures those agencies remain independent from We the People.
By contrast, when a President, entrusted with a mandate through electoral victory, pushes back against constitutionally illegitimate agencies, he provides a boost for political self-government. When Congress reclaims powers it has wrongfully ceded, or abolishes unconstitutional programs it has created, it helps restore the sovereignty of the people. When the Court declares unconstitutional offices or agencies constitutionally void, we move one step closer to real self-rule and one step further from progressive fascism and the soft tyranny of bureaucratic control.
High-Level Questions
These are the questions we must ask if America is to be a self-governing nation of free citizens in the future. They transcend party labels and skirmishes fueled by the late-night comedians to whom millions of Americans turn for news and philosophic enlightenment. These are questions of what kind of regime we are and what we will become as a nation.
If your reaction is to sneer about your hatred of one politician—Orange Man bad!—or if you’re the type who chuckled about what Hillary Clinton labelled her husband’s “bimbo eruptions” and now you wring your hands with concern about the current President’s alleged sexual proclivities, this discussion is not for you.
There are plenty of other forums where you can vent your selective anger and hatred. This conversation is for those who are willing to think, and to think seriously, about the most important political questions of our time: Will we govern ourselves, or be governed by bureaucrats? Are we sovereign over our government, or should government be sovereign, reducing us to mere subjects? As fellow citizens, what is the right way of life?
Dr. Thomas L. Krannawitter is the founding president of Waypoints—a teaching system for high schools based on primary source documents and key ideas of liberty—and proprietor of the Substack Zetetic Questions.
