Tyranny IS lurking around the corner

By: American Decency Staff

Several weeks ago, President Obama gave a commencement address to a class of graduates of Ohio State University.  As he stood before these students, Obama found the need to defend the expanding role of government to his robed audience who would soon go out to either launch their careers or move back into their parents' basement.

"We don't always talk about this idea much these days – citizenship – let alone celebrate it. Sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time, a distant past – one that's slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition above all else… we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition…"

"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's the root of all our problems, even as some of these voices do their best to gum up the works; they'll warn that tyranny's always lurking just around the corner.  You should reject these voices.  Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted. We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems, nor do we want it to, but we don't think the government is the source of all our problems, either…"

"As citizens, we understand that it's not about what Americans can do for us, It's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government."

I'm not sure whose voices the president was referring to, since schools rarely teach what our nation's founders said, but if they did those OSU students might have recalled the words of Thomas Jefferson:

“Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

And one from Patrick Henry, "guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."

And of course, there's the famous line from Ronald Reagan, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."

So, yeah, I guess a few people have suggested that "tyranny is always lurking around the corner."

Also, "self-rule" has historically meant 'each man ruling himself' not 'each man voting on who would rule them.' Jefferson had something to say about that, too:

"A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities."

I have one more aside.  I'll take a brief moment to note that the idea of the citizenry working together to advance their nation and not themselves is the definition of fascism, not of a republic.

But, back to the subject at hand, if the president wanted to convince the public that the government was not some scary, tyrannical federation out to control their lives, he probably should have made sure that his employees were not harassing his political opponents and using their positions in the Internal Revenue Service to do it.

Here we are, however, in the midst of prying out the facts surrounding discrimination against conservative groups applying for 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 tax status with words like "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their groups' names.

The biggest question on everyone's mind is, 'how far up does this go?' As an anonymous Obama aide put it to CBS, “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”  Those do, indeed, seem to be the options.  The problem is the 'idiot' defense starts to look so suspicious when it is used so often – the Benghazi cover up, investigating Associated Press and FOX News journalists, now the IRS, etc.

Ultimately, no matter how high any of these scandals go – whether President Obama is a master puppeteer or just a clown who's lost control of his car – the lesson will be the same.  It is that between President Jefferson's idea of government and President Obama's idea of government, it is Jefferson's that has been proven true.  Here it is again, “… even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

The more power a government has, the closer it gets to tyranny.  Tyranny IS always lurking around the corner, because when someone has power over someone else – especially someone they disagree with – it is often too tempting to exercise it inappropriately.  Obviously, one would be a bigger violation of the public trust than the other, but, at its essence, it doesn't matter whether the person in power is the President of the United States or a renegade IRS agent.  Either way, they have perverted their power into tyranny.

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