I am excited to share this bonus segment with you!!
Background: When I concluded this series on July 8th, I was wishing I could add something of a bigger picture as the ending segment. At that time, I had a pre-order in for Mark Levin’s new book “On Power” which I received on July 28th. Much to my surprise as I read it, the content more than fit the bill of what I was seeking. Hence why the bonus.
The Content: Levin begins the book by defining power and its importance on governance. He follows with the assertion there is only two types of governance power – negative power and positive power and an explanation of both plus how the administrative state fits it. Then he explains his view of how language is used to support each power type and the resultant effects on both individual rights and liberty. I found the content to be concise and profound.
My Takeaways: For me the content does several things: 1.Provides a framework to better understand the political divide in our country – how to think about it and analyze it. 2.Provides clarity in support of my gut level patriotic values. 3.Provides a clear mechanism to be able to better articulate and debate my perspectives with others.
I have condensed Levin’s 182-page book into excerpts. In doing so, I attempted to do justice to his work, but you may wish to buy the book and judge its contents for yourself.
Happy Learning, Harley
INTRODUCTION: Power determines your social arrangements, quality of life and, more to the point of this book, whether you are free or enslaved or some degree of either. In short, it determines your personal fate, the fate of your community, and the fate of the nation. Power is a term meant to describe some kind of force or energy that surrounds us all the time, is both ubiquitous in your life of the entire society and is consequential in every way. Yet without more to go on, such as context and circumstance, it can be ambiguous and elusive.
At a macro level, power shapes economies, politics, and governments. For most people, these are unstated and often unnoticed or obscure kinds of power. But they exist and matter. Power determines if there is too much liberty (e.g., anarchy) or too little (e.g., tyranny), depending on how power is exercised, who exercises it, and if it is bound by human rights.
The American Revolution is an important and obvious example of power properly pursued and exercised, the point of which was to promote individual and societal liberty, including by means of representative, limited, divided government – that is ordered liberty. Conversely, autocrats of every stripe, and in all ages, have exploited liberty to empower themselves at the expense of the liberty of others. There are democracies that have lasted several centuries, but they have all succumbed to the steady increase in the centralization of power and a decline in individual and societal liberty. Sadly, this appears to be the nature of things. Gone are Athens, Rome, and numerous lesser societies. Democracies struggle against the centralization of power almost from the moment they are established.
The word democracy is frequently used as a rhetorical weapon to deceive the true intentions and conceal the real nature of its abusers. These behaviors and tactics are not exclusive to tyrants and autocracies. It is a real and growing threat in Western societies, as they increasingly centralize power in the name of unlimited egalitarian and so-called righteous causes – environmental justice, economic justice, social justice, equity, reparations, nationalized health care, the “existential threat of climate change,” and so forth – which require and in fact demand the centralization of power to supposedly ameliorate the perceived, claimed, and in some cases manufactured societal maladies.
The idea that the centralization of power – which necessarily concentrates authority in the hands of fewer imperfect individuals, and whose base of knowledge is naturally narrow – is recipe for societal improvement, progress, stability, and well-being is not only counterintuitive but contrary to everyday human experience and mankind’s history. Indeed, what makes these individuals more perfect as decision-makers, more moral as people, or more informed, wise, or prudential than anyone else? Nothing. Autocrats are not known to possess such qualities or demonstrate them when exercising power. Most excel at acquiring power, but not much else. Indeed, those who achieve such a station exhibit a greater affinity for the darker side of human behavior, including corruption, dishonesty, immorality, hubris, irrationality, anger, vainglory, egomania, bigotry, and so forth. Moreover, where is the evidence that concentrated power in the hands of the administrative state, where the bureaucracy is to consist of specially trained experts and societal organizers who know what is best for the people and know how best to achieve those ends, has ever existed anywhere? Certainly not in America.
Philosophers and scholars have argued for the wisdom of diversified, dispersed, and mixed power within governments – that is, where power checks and balances power, which provides a greater likelihood of enlightened leadership and administration, greater respect and appreciation for the civil society and nongovernmental parts of society, and more protection of individual sovereignty and free will. In essence, a positive power structure attempts to contain and control the dark side of the human character and experience and emphasizes the capacity for a civilized, just society. Human beings are imperfect and ambitious, so we need a government structure that guards against abuses of power. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. So much of life orbits around this word, idea, belief – power.
NEGATIVE POWER: Negative power is power that is exercised by force or other less obvious coercive means. Among its purposes is to limit individual identity, sovereignty, and liberty. Its purpose is to devour and control society, not serve it. Consequently, it must denude individuals of their free will, self-worth, aspirations, development, progress, and human spirit and control society generally through the exercise of concentrated, centralized, unchallenged, and ubiquitous power. It is critical to restrict speech and debate, manipulate language, and manufacture new meanings for existing words and new words with self-serving meanings. Propaganda and repetition are the mainstay controlling communication, and the pursuit of ideas, information, and knowledge is condemned and punished – that is, to dictate thought. Conformity, predictability, regurgitation, and obedience are crucial to the lifeblood of the despotic regime. The goal is to create vigorous followers and fanatics for the cause and the regime, not a healthy and robust society of self-sufficient, curious, free-thinking, independent human beings.
For modern Western societies, most of which are said to be advance, enlightened, and democratic, negative power is more opaque – or what I call soft negative power. Typically, Western institutions have been established gradually, by experience and practice, or constituted by design, to counter or limit the most aggressive forms of negative power such as dictatorships or oligarchies. However, over time they tend to become susceptible to a softer form of negative power. The is authoritarian democracy. The exercise of power is steadily centralized and the citizenry increasingly peripheral. It typically results in rule by the unelected governmental branches – that is, the judiciary and the administrative state -- but can also mutate into excessive executive or legislative empowerment.
However, there are also those who benefit from the government’s use of soft negative power, including when that power is used, for example, to forcibly redistribute the wealth and property of those who produced and earned it for the use and enrichment of others, beyond the usual and basic needs of a civil society. The beneficiaries of such soft power are fully aware that they did not earn what they have received but delude themselves in various ways that they are deserving of it. Today soft negative power is ascendant – that is, the West is regressing toward the more primitive way of thinking and governing and the more aggressive form of negative power. The circle of liberty and security surrounding each individual is shrinking as the supposed “common good” and “public interest,” defined and determined by a relative handful of masterminds and politicians, is said to be increasingly imperative and paramount.
The Democrat Party is a political institution that exists for the purpose of agitating for and, in fact, breaching the Constitution’s firewalls, in pursuit of the every-elusive earthly utopia. It is home to, among others, a conglomeration of Marxist, socialist, and Islamist ideologues and activists. Of course, this is not to say that the majority of its membership shares these ideologies. However, the majority of its membership does not rule the party.
Tearing down the barriers to centralized decision-making and governmental power and diminishing individual freedom to reengineer society and, indeed, mankind, are essential objectives, if not the epitome of both soft negative power and negative power.
For much of the Western world, and certainly in America, the public do not seek a violent revolution. In fact, in America and elsewhere, there is no popular will to overthrow the existing society and, on the contrary, the people have and are prepared to fight and die for their country. Thus, out of necessity was born, at the hands of the progressive masterminds, a different kind of bourgeoisie, driven by the accumulation of power and built on authoritarian impulses and objectives. A ruling class with more power than the Constitution authorizes. The pursuit of authoritarian aims, at least in a republic or democracy is also easier and likelier achieved by softening up the citizenry and gradually disarming the people and inculcating them with state-run propaganda, ideas, values, and objectives.
Consequently, the election process, and the elective governmental entities, provide the patina of a free and open society and participatory government where the individual is said to have a real role in governmental decision-making and outcomes and believes it to be so, but in fact is increasingly more a rote routine – at least that is a necessary intent if not effect of soft negative power. For example, in America, Congress has created a budgetary device known as the omnibus bill. These bills are thousands of pages in length, laced with unrelated and diverse budget and spending matters, the language of which is complicated and intricate. The ruling class, its bureaucrats, lobbyists, special interests, and lawyers trained to interpret the language are to determine spending priorities involving in public money without the citizenry having a clue, let alone any effective input.
Indeed, the elected branches have engaged in a century-long building project, the construction of a massive administrative state, the contours of which are elusive and seemingly boundless, and constructed without a constitutional foundation. The delegation of representative government to nonrepresentative ever-expanding bureaucratic behemoth is, by intent and design, the overthrow of actual representative and consensual government.
The European Union (EU) is a supranational organization of twenty-seven countries, with each country ceding certain economic, legal, and governing authorities to the union. Hence, an international governmental sovereign stands above the national governmental sovereign, a hierarchy of negative power. The severity of this governmental arrangement is intended to erode if not smother any serious or effective connection between the top-tier ruling class, made up of international elites, and the citizenry of a member nation, who are at the lowest level of the power tier. True participatory and representative government is a mockery, as the circle of liberty surrounding the individual is squeezed tighter without any practical or adequate recourse. This is authoritarian democracy.
POSITIVE POWER: Positive power starts from an altogether different premise than negative power. God is the sovereign. And through God, his children – that is, the individual and the people – are sovereign. Thus, power properly understood and exercised, in the context of government, is about the well-being of the people, not the rulers. The people are the sovereign, not the governing authority, and importantly, the belief in God-given eternal truths, natural law, and unalienable rights is the basis of a moral and virtuous society than transcends any ruling class.
Faith was fundamental to America’s founding. Judeo-Christian values and beliefs redounded throughout our society from the earliest days of the colonists and still do today. Their teachings have shaped ethical frameworks, legal systems, and cultural norms. Concepts like human rights, social justice, and the dignity of life are rooted in their teachings. It was never to be a repressive religious state that smothers alternative religious beliefs or a state that punished or silenced nonbelievers, atheists, or agnostics. On the contrary. Early on, religious tests and requirements that existed in some of the colonies would quickly disappear.
Positive power originates not from mankind’s hand or mind, although certainly practical and earthly application does, but its origin is transcendent and inherent. When we speak of universal or eternal truths – the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), the Ten Commandments (e.g., “Thou shall not kill”), good and evil, etc. – these are fundamentally moral precepts understood and engrained in the human conscience and openly expressed in free and democratic societies. But knowing what is right from wrong is distinct from doing what is right from wrong.
By contrast, “political Islam” seeks the centralized control over mind, body, society, and government. Dr. Zuhdi Jassar, a prominent Muslim scholar, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and a leader in the Muslim reform movement argues that the people of the Muslim faith deserve much better than this. Like Marxists, Islamists obviously reject liberty. However, Marxism rejects faith altogether and in fact insists on the eradication of not only faith but, like Islamists, all historical and social ties that contradict or compete with its ideology and delay or interfere with the inevitable revolution. For Marxists, faith is said to be a fiction that shrouds the truth, dupes the people, and is incompatible with a new society and economic order. Marxism and Islamism share their disdain for the West and seek to destroy it. Hence, you see Marxists and Islamists openly working together against the West.
Prominent American Marxists in Congress, such as Bernie Sanders, support the Islamists, and Islamists, such as Rashida Tlaib, support the American Marxists. Both are typically members of the Democrat Party or mostly aligned with it.
Marxism replaces faith with a cultlike, man-made order where there is no higher order than man, or more precisely certain men. Indeed, even reason is whatever man says it is, or more specifically, whatever the ruling class says it is. Hence, both faith and reason are repudiated. There can be no conflict of ideas or interests, no compromise or settling. Conformity and uniformity of belief and behavior are essential to Marxists and Islamists, as well as other forms of autocratic enforcement.
In America today, like much of the West, most public debate about politics circles around who exercises power, almost to the exclusion of the meaning, purpose, and nature of power, which are central to understanding positive power. Although the “who” part of power is an essential area of inquiry and discussion (e.g., separation of powers versus centralized coercion), it is not enough. The former, without more, is to debate the issue of power on the terms of negative power – that is, the abandonment of the quintessence of positive power and the civil society for a secular view of power unmoored from the principles that informed America’s Founders and the Constitution’s Framers.
LANGUAGE: The pursuit and maintenance of negative power require the utilization of negative techniques of communication, including manipulation, deception, repetition, deceit, concealment, distraction, and fearmongering, in language that is intimidating, self-serving, and orchestrated. It is an approach that seeks to arouse prejudices and stifle independent thought. The purpose is to exert power over language and to control the population without moral reservations. In the political context, when language is applied this way, it strikes a central part of the democratic system, denying the body politic information with which to make knowledgeable, qualitative, and collective decisions. Moreover, communication of this sort exists for the purpose of arousing and angering the citizenry and exhorting them to action that is destructive of the existing society and their own lives and lifestyles in service to the demagogue and his aims. The agitator seizes on the emotional aspects of the issues to arouse his audience to indignation or action. Agitation is thus the use of political slogans and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the public and thereby to mold public opinion and mobilize public support. Propaganda, by contrast, is the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated and so-called ‘enlightened’ members of society, such as party members. The combination of agitation with propaganda is agitprop. Simply put, it is thought control of people. Totalitarian propaganda highlights socialism and race as two key categories of exploitation because they neatly lend themselves to group identification and exploitation – that is class and ethnic warfare.
Positive language emphasizes the power to, whereas negative language emphasizes the power over. Positive language taps into the individual and societal benefits of communication, including persuasion, interaction, truth-seeking, and the competition of ideas. It is language that is solicitous, factual respectful, tolerant, informative, and well intentioned. The power of language is to reason and to think freely and, in the political realm, to encourage debate, inquiry, deliberation, contemplation, and learning. Thus, free speech is an essential value and precept in the application and exercise of positive power in an open society and democracy. In point of fact, consensus is how democracies function. Consensus is reached through the free will of individuals and their liberty of conscience, open interaction and debate, not imposed by despots, governments, or political movements. It is the power that works its way through the body politic and government from the bottom up, not the top down.
If a minority or non-consensus view takes the form of agitprop, thereby inciting coercive action against the free speech of others through intimidation, threats, or violence, it ceases to be free speech or an exchange of ideas and an instrument of persuasion but their opposite. Thus, free speech in these circumstances, while remaining the free speech of the speaker, is used to destroy the free speech of others. As such, it is no longer positive language. It is negative language used in pursuit of negative power – that is a weapon with which to pummel free speech. These are the mob tactics of tyrants and totalitarians. The ambition and motivation is to ramp up the degree and reach of power in such a way as to spark a Marxist-Islamist revolution against an open and democratic society.
Clearly then, language, whether negative or positive, is like power itself, mutable. Depending on the user’s intentions, it can be liberating, coercive, transformative, informative, manipulative, persuasive, uniting, disuniting, transparent, ambiguous, emotional, conversational, etc. It has many characteristics as human beings themselves. It reflects human nature and conveys the mental processes of the human mind. Thus, language control is mind or thought control – negative language. Free speech, properly understood, is mind-or thought-liberating – positive language. It can be said that language is behind power, and power is behind language. It influences power, reveals power, and reflects power.
Truth is often abused in democratic societies. To be clear, it is different in kind and degree than in autocratic regimes, but the danger it poses in a democracy is not to be ignored or downplayed. In relation to politics and government, candidates, public officials, the media, etc., the people are routinely the target of deceit intended to convince them of a viewpoint, to vote for them or someone they support, champion a policy or cause, etc., by employing negative language, including fabrications, misrepresentations, and exaggerations. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders, a Marxist who self-identifies as a Democratic Socialist, has repeatedly accused the Republican Party of supporting tax cuts for billionaires and of being a party of billionaires – a typical Marxist-based class-warfare mantra. Of course, three of the Democrat’s most notable supporters are among the wealthiest men in the world each multibillionaires – George Soros, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet.
Additionally, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also self-identifies as a Democratic Socialist, denounces the Republican Party and President Trump as wanting to destroy Social Security and Medicare, it is another falsehood intended to incite fear and anger. Why would Republicans run on an agenda of destroying these programs when to do so would disunite their party and ensure electoral defeat? Obviously, they would not. But the purpose of the negative language is not to communicate the truth. It is to deceive, manipulate, and upset the public in the pursuit of votes and power.
A favorite negative language technique is repetition. With repetition, the more likely you are to accept and believe the supposed truth of what is being repeated, even if it is untruthful. Moreover, the more you see or hear something, the more likely you are to remember it. Repetition as such destroys the conscious mind, the ability to reason, and moral clarity. People are thought to be too ignorant, obtuse emotional, self-absorbed, etc., to reason for themselves. But that is precisely what the dictator squeezes out of them – the ability to reason, think and act independent of the state. However, not all repetition is the same. It can actually be used in service to positive power, hence positive repetition. Let us begin with the basics. For example, athletes and dancers repeatedly practice the same movements. Singers memorize lyrics and students memorize historical facts and mathematical formulas. This demonstrates that repetition, when applied in a positive way and for the right purposes, enhances learning, improves the mind, and creates success.
In the military, among other institutions, repetition ensures discipline, routine, and order, all necessary to build an effective fighting force. The old saying “Practice makes perfect” certainly is apt in these instances. That which distinguishes negative and positive repetition is the purpose of the repetition – that is, for what purpose is the mind being rewired? The next question is, what behavior is being discouraged or encouraged?
In America, classes from kindergarten through twelfth grade would start each morning with the Pledge of Allegiance. The purpose was to build allegiance and unity for the country (patriotism). The behavior that was encouraged was to be an upright American citizen. Unfortunately, many school districts have dropped the Pledge from their daily routine. Positive repetition, which is intended to build allegiance to and patriotism for the country, is reinforced behavior that is crucial to the survival of democracy. It is an affirmation of values and beliefs that reinforce an open and free society. This also explains opposition to the Pledge and its reference to God, among other displays of allegiance to the country, by American Marxists and their ilk, who seek to displace the existing society with their own political and social construct.
Two simple questions prove the lie of the Marxist workers’ paradise. Who has a better life in nearly all aspects? The assembly-line worker in America and the West, or the assembly-line worker in any other Marxist or other form of autocratic regime? Of course, in America and the West. Indeed, where are the largest middle classes with the largest number of mostly free, mostly satisfied, and patriotic people? In America and the West, which is why totalitarian regimes build walls to force their people to stay, whereas the United States builds wall to manage the influx of people escaping these regimes. If the tyrant is to survive, he must institute constant purges and terror throughout the population, for which language is weaponized. Today, the West is inundated with manifestos and the language of tyranny. Not enough is being done to challenge and confront it.
RIGHTS: I begin with the premise, underscored by the Declaration of Independence, that individual and human rights, liberty, and equality predate governments because they do not originate from governments.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
The significance and magnitude of these two straightforward and concise sentences are impossible to overstate. Rights, or moral truths, are God-given through natural law and, therefore, are transcendent and universal. Through right reason, man discovers these truths or is innately aware of them.
The 19th-century philosophers who inform the Democrat Party, its progressive/American Marxist ideologues, and their Western counterparts are, among others, Hegel and Marx. Of course, Woodrow Wilson’s influence as a scholar and president was enormous. Their views were contemptuous of the foundational principles relied on in the Declaration and the consensus view of the Founders.
Clearly, the basis for America’s founding and the ideology of the American Marxist are utterly incompatible. Indeed, this is at the heart of the competition for governing power or, more accurately, the power struggle that exists today and has for one hundred years or more – that is, two opposite and irreconcilable worldviews about the individual and humanity itself competing for power.
There is no liberty without rights, and rights precede government. However, the societal effectuation and earthly manifestation of those rights are determined by power – negative or positive power. On March 29, 1792, James Madison penned an iconic essay on rights in the context of property rights.
A man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them. He has property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his right.
Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions. Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own. According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just securing to property should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property. Where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest is not a just government.
Thus, sovereignty is in the individual and the people, not the government. Again, God is the sovereign, whose sovereignty is reflected in his children – we the people. No government is legitimate but for the consent of the people. Therefore, representative government is imperative. It checks the rulers and serves the people through elections. Limited government is the only kind of government that can reflect and respond to the will of the people. Massive bureaucracies with hundreds of departments and agencies populated by millions of employees making and issuing regulations (laws) without input from the people conflicts with representative government and functions without the consent of the people. Importantly, people outside the government are to be represented by people inside the government. The government today is increasingly devouring the private sector – that is, the civil society, becoming a power unto itself.
Let me emphasize the Framers themselves understood that the Constitution might need adjustment on occasion. And in Article V they provided the two processes for amending it. The amendment processes intentionally involve the entire body politic and require its consent. They also require supermajorities to adopt proposed amendments. This is a far cry from members of the ruling class, whether judges, legislators, or presidents, altering the Constitution by assertion or, more likely, by manipulation, deceit, or stealth, and shrouding it in constitutional and legal language or concealing it within the haze of bureaucratic red tape. This is a mutinous encroachment on the rights of the individual, the civil society, and the Constitution that was intended to secure and protect them.
I again turn to Marxism, which, despite its various versions, provides the greatest, albeit not exclusive, threat to the American experiment. In fact, Marx directly and often denounced natural law and individual liberty, as all would-be autocrats must. The real political legacy of Marxism in particular, and autocracies generally, and the imposition of negative power to destroy the individual and societal rights and liberties. It is deeply distressing that so many, including Democrat Party politicians and officials, broad aspects of Marxism are more prominent if not central in their mind-set than Americanism and the essential principles of our country’s founding. To understand this contemporary reality is to comprehend the nature and worsening divide in our country, and the profound political and social disputes in which we find ourselves. The negative power of Marxism is the polar opposite of the positive power of republicanism.
Ultimately, they conclude that the power over rights, and hence the power over the individual and society, rests in who controls government. Therefore, in modern parlance, the endgame is not social justice, environmental justice, economic justice, equity, etc., but raw power. The rest is nothing more than propaganda in pursuit of power.
For the American Marxist, the means is the relentless war on the nation’s founding and Founders, American history, the Constitution and the law, freedom of speech, the family, the culture, faith, the economic system (capitalism), and more. Therefore, it is essential that they secure power inside or as the ruling class, where they plot to hold governmental power as long as they can and pass it to succeeding generations of like-minded ideologues. They are unwilling to abrogate their power at the whimsy of the voter, even when and if they go through the motions of surrendering elective office to a victor outside the ruling class. Hence, the overarching importance of an omnipresent administrative state and an unelected judiciary to protect it – it being the permanent government.
The last century saw a huge movement toward a massive welfare state, including entitlements and such, and the American people have accepted it, and that these are the new rights that are now implicit in the Constitution, leaves a great deal unsaid and obscure about the future of governmental power. It enables the advocates of economic and social right to create virtually any kind of painting they wish – impressionist, post-impressionist, but mostly abstract. As they cannot achieve the kind of economic and social equality (now termed equity) promised or expected, the answer will not be to abandon negative power for positive power associated with individual and societal rights and liberty, but to tighten the reins of control and centralization. In fact, the targeted beneficiaries and the true believers will become agitated and dissatisfied and demand more from the ruling class when their hopes and expectations are unmet. In short, the government grows stronger and bigger, not less so, at the expense of the individual and society.
Looking further into the struggle over rights, and most crucially which rights will prevail, we see that there is a constant struggle to be the ruling class, a constant struggle within the ruling class, a constant struggle between the people and the ruling class. Again, it is positive power and the rights approach of the Founders that provide civil lanes for compromise, tolerance, moderation, and peaceful resolution both in society and government. Negative power and the economic and social rights approach provide no such lanes and in fact weaken those that exist. To say that the people are satisfied and supportive of the massive welfare state, a welfare state that is not static and in fact history shows is always growing and consuming, is to say nothing about the accompanying centralization and coerciveness of government. The role of the people continuously diminishes, including their ability to defend their individual and societal rights.
The only question to be asked according to the proponents, is the after-the-fact inquiry of whether people like and want to keep their benefits. But their approach is authoritarian in character. Consequently, they insist that this form of rights and the further empowerment of centralized and coercive government is virtuous. If challenged, they defend the use of negative power as ironically, confined by positive power, the very power they are diminishing. Moreover, they rhetorically insist that if you disagree you obviously oppose helping the poor, the sick, and the underprivileged. The justifications for a pervasive central government with vigorous police powers are unlimited. Therefore, for the American Marxist, authoritarian democracy is a virtue.
It does not seem to occur to these individuals a ruling class is not uniquely qualified, or well qualified at all, to manage society – that is, millions of individuals with diverse interests and backgrounds, collectively involved in billions of activities and interactions every single day. We know from our own experiences as individuals and as a citizenry that no such ruling class exists. In point of fact, we know that incompetence and corruption are widespread, and practical experience and common sense are in short supply.
A major reason for the ruling class’s noxious and unhinged hostility toward Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is the fact that they did more in a few months to expose the vast and immense financial, programmatic, and policy disasters of the ruling class than at any time in the last century. They uncovered billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse, subsidies for fringe and perverse events, antiquated computer and accounting systems, payments going to deceased and nonexistent people, the employment of far more people that necessary, money squandering overseas, and much more. The institutionalized bloat and corruption have a large constituency not only within the ruling class but among its beneficiaries outside the regime. Unsurprisingly, it also has a political home in the Democrat Party, a public invoice in the media, and defenders in academia. After all, they are the architects of the administrative state, going back in earnest to at least Woodrow Wilson. Those who persist in promoting and defending the existing administrative state, without reining it in, limiting it, as well as the ruling class that gives it unfettered latitude and license, cannot be said to be of good and moral intentions.
The Second Industrial Revolution created extraordinary capital and wealth and a huge and, yes, comfortable middle class. And where and when our society wanes or fails, as all imperfect people and societies do, whether in economics or civil rights, etc., Americans have both the capacity and motivation to correct course. That is what positive power is about, and America’s founding teaches us that. It is how a civil society not only survives but improves, reforms, and hopefully thrives. The same cannot be said of Marxist or other autocratic societies and regimes.
The Second Industrial Revolution created technologies that changed the world forever, benefiting humankind from then until now. Indeed, so ubiquitous is the miracle of capitalism, swirling around us every day, its presence is mostly ignored and taken for granted. The marvelous results have come about because of an ever-increasing supply of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and all the conveniences of life, and the progressive reduction in human fatigue and exhaustion. All of this has taken place on a foundation of science, technology, and capitalism, which have made possible the continuous development and introduction of new and improved products and more efficient methods of production. It has produced the sewage systems and the automobiles that have removed filth from human and animal waste from the streets of cities and towns. It has produced vaccines, anesthesia, antibiotics, and all the other “wonder drugs of modern times”. As a result of industrialized civilizations, not only do billions of people survive, but in the advanced countries they do so on a level far exceeding that of kings and emperors in all previous ages – on a level that just a few generations ago would have been regarded as possible only in a world of science fiction.
Conversely, the entire Marxist project plays into the jealousies man has, one for the other, by focusing on unequal economic outcomes. It institutionalizes finger-pointing – that is, who is responsible for the individual’s dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Marx does not recognize the individual and free will. Thus, the state and its economic system, and those who are said to have created it, sustain it, and benefit from it are responsible for a person’s difficulties and life challenges. Again, this is among the reasons Marx rejects individualism and free will and relentlessly attacks the existing society (natural law and eternal rights), the state (representative democracy), the economic system (capitalism), and successful citizens by smearing and demeaning them. They must be obliterated, every part of them, it the workers’ paradise is to be achieved. Yet the society that comes closest to a workers’ paradise is the American system.
LIBERTY: Democracies do not guarantee liberty. They can provide the institutional framework for a humane government. And that institutional framework requires certain essential characteristics – a just rule of law, representation and consent, divided powers, private property rights – and a virtuous and moral people. However, liberty is not a product of democracy. When the Declaration of Independence speaks of “unalienable rights” it is talking about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To take it a step further, by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness the Founders were highlighting the essence of human existence – your right, as a child of God, to live, to be free, and to pursue what fulfills your being. Adams and many others underscore the importance of the right kind of collective power that creates a civil society and, subsequently, a just government, the purpose of both being to secure a good and moral life for the individual and the people. Still, we do not have a definition of liberty, only a description of how to try to safeguard it – ultimately the application of positive power.
On August 26, 1789, the French National Assembly issued the Declaration of Human and Civic Rights.
Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others; thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by law.
The Law has the right to forbid only those actions that are injurious to society. Nothing that is not forbidden by Law may be hindered, and no one may be compelled to do what the Law does not ordain.
Yet if the celebration of centralized government is not the monopoly view of the Democratic Party, the media, and academia it is certainly their overwhelmingly held view. They also seek their agenda through an activist reinterpretation of the Constitution, not amendment processes in which they would surely fail. Critics are right to ask: Exactly what do the negative-power advocates seek to achieve and why are they not explicit about it? Of course, some are, but I am not speaking here of the more fanatical and openly hostile among them. My focus is on those politicians and academicians who claim to embrace and uphold the Constitution while using it, by manipulation and perversion, as a means to dismember its most critical parts, especially of powers, the consent of the people and federalism.
It is only the Constitution’s remaining yet weakened barriers against negative power that protect us from the logical progression of an increasingly centralized government with an authoritarian ruling class – that is, authoritarian democracy. The Constitution is constructed around America’s founding principles, as concisely and formally proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. These are to be the guiding principles for government and governance. The progressive glorification and even deification of centralized authority – whether in courts, an executive, or a legislature --, in the end, is antithetical to liberty and the sovereignty of the people. And even in this, they favor such centralization and exercise of negative power only when it expands their authority and promotes their governing ideology. Source: On Power by Mark R. Levin (2025)