During the past 18 months, the relationship of the American people to the government has changed radically, as the Constitution’s failure to restrain the federal and state governments and to protect personal liberty has become manifest.
We know that for the past 100 years the growth of the federal government has been exponential. And we know that while formally the Constitution still exists, functionally it has failed miserably, as the deterioration of personal liberty since the spring of 2020 has been as grave as the losses of freedom in the past 100 years.
I am using 100 years as a benchmark because it marks the completion of the takeover of the federal government by the Theodore Roosevelt Republicans and the Woodrow Wilson Democrats who collectively comprised the Progressive movement. This movement brought us in a short 15 years the useless World War I, the destructive popular election of senators, the corrupt Federal Reserve, the theft of property called the income tax and the unconstitutional administrative state.
The war killed millions for naught. The popular election of senators undermined state sovereignty. The Federal Reserve destroyed economic freedom. The federal income tax legalized theft. And the administrative state created an unconstitutional fourth branch of government “experts” answerable to no one.
Yet the iron fist of totalitarian government visited upon the American people in the name of COVID-19 has struck at the heart of the Constitution and landed heavy blows on average Americans in far more acute and direct ways.
Here is the backstory.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that our rights come from God via our humanity, he and his colleagues set the 13 colonies on a path toward limited government based upon the consent of the governed. The Declaration proclaimed that the sole moral function of government is to protect life, liberty and property.
In 1776, the colonial governments here consisted of governors appointed by the British king and popularly elected legislatures chosen by the adult, white, land-owning males who bothered to vote.
I say “bothered to vote” because the colonists knew that their legislatures were largely subject to the governors. The same colonists who supported the idea of secession hated the colonial governors as they more frequently than not bypassed the legislatures and issued edicts that they then enforced as if they were laws.