What Happens in a Republic Has Its Constitution Overthrown?

I think the threat we face today is even more evil than the threat our founding fathers had back in their day. Today the tyranny is global. Every country in the western world is affected by this. Ironically, Russia seems to have more freedom that we do except for the 2nd amendment.

Sadly, true. What protects against this sort of degradation of the People – and really what affirms those people’s “rights” and the “restrictive principles” that Ayn references in the first place, is moral law and purpose.

The framers held up many such examples of these inherent problems with their proposed systems of checks and balances, centralization and decentralization through their debates on Federalism etc. as well as the character of the People; what attributes were required of them, how they would be protected and propagated, all those things that were, in fact, conditions precedent to any of these propositions of self-governance as well as the purpose of said governance.

So much of the debates over governance loses the plot over the intricacies of the levers and switches of the Machine, when it needs to be about who defines the moral soul that animates the People, and thus their self-governance.

This always comes down to morality, who gets to define it, how it is defined, and ultimately what is “right” or “rights”.

Which of course comes down to the question of our time, “Who are We?”, and further, if “We” are simply anyone desiring to live within the jurisdiction, how can a people of diverse and often oppositional moral foundations coexist?

How do they frame any argument of rights, let alone the very question of Government in the first place, i.e. “What is the purpose?”, when there is no longer a People but rather many distinct peoples who will never agree on any of these questions.

This is setting aside the small matter of FUSA being a distinct population of British colonists for a very short period of time before rapidly growing into multiple nation-states, and finally a Union of States, before that all went ugly over this very same problem of defining the People and their moral imperatives.

We see this reflected profoundly in how our ‘Economy’ does not serve the People at all and nor does our Government, regardless of whether they count our votes or our Senators and Reps agitate for our local values.

It is entirely imperfect and subject to all matters of decay, which is why there was always the appeal to God. That the universal moral arbiter was not a man or a majority of men, but rather that men were to serve God through governance, just as they would their daily lives.

When the toxins of Enlightenment entered the elite, and eventually the commons, we began to decouple the moral argument.

What is right, and thus what are your “rights” became separated from its origins, and the inversion of purpose continues to this day.

When we talk about losing the culture war, we are merely lamenting the predictable downstream conditions of the great divorce of a moral, largely homogenous people from her governance. We lost our People but got to keep the system. Or whats left of it.

Which is why we cling to the mythological aspects so bitterly. We aren’t allowed to have a people but we can pretend to have a nation. Good luck with that.