A majority of Americans believe that mail-in ballot fraud tainted the 2020 election, but most state and federal officials continue to pretend the results were aboveboard. A majority of Americans wish to put an end to mass illegal immigration, but the Department of Homeland (in)Security continues to do nothing to protect our borders from foreign invasion. A majority of Americans are worried about rising inflation, but the federal government continues to print and spend money and issue costly regulations. A majority of Americans oppose widespread government surveillance programs that intrude upon their privacy, but elected officials continue to give the Intelligence Blob full access to Americans’ most sensitive records and communications, in total disregard for the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches. A majority of Americans distrust mainstream news sources, but prominent news organizations continue to push ideological propaganda at the expense of truthful and objective reporting.
These are just a few of the many ways in which America’s most powerful institutions fail to faithfully represent or protect the American people. As the disconnect between the governing and the governed continues to grow, the dishonest state of our Union will become undeniable: an insular cabal of financial, corporate, political, and bureaucratic “elites” hold 99% of the American people hostage. When Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell speak about protecting “democracy,” what they want to preserve is an outrageously unbalanced system in which a few control everything and most control nothing. That’s a little like a Jenga tower of blocks, in which all the weight at the top sits perilously upon a couple of crooked supports. Eventually, such an uneven structure will collapse.
Most of us already feel America’s Jenga tower wobbling. The federal government feels it, too. That’s why it spends so much time censoring Americans’ speech, spying on their conversations, and abusing the criminal “justice” system to batter perceived political enemies. As with all budding totalitarian regimes that have risen in the past, the U.S. government has abandoned persuasive argument for intimidation and coercion. It is an ugly factory that produces nothing but nagging regulations. It is a second-rate club that protects D.C.’s privileged VIPs and shoves the rest of America behind a cheap velvet rope. It is an ear-splitting bullhorn that endlessly screeches, “Do exactly what we say!” And the more it nags and shoves and screeches, the more America’s Jenga tower wobbles.
Mirroring the Soviet system that collapsed thirty years ago, the U.S. government mistakenly believes that it can maintain control by exerting tremendous pressure on all of society’s constituent blocs. It spies on Christian churches. It threatens parents who refuse to let the State program their children in Marxist indoctrination plants posing as schools. It punishes businesses that refuse to engage in pronoun games and other renditions of “transgender” madness. It discriminates against white people (especially white men) who prioritize individual liberty over political correctness. It micromanages every market transaction by regulating the supplies and costs of available energies. It churns out countless new laws, rules, and regulations that are too byzantine for citizens and businesses to understand. In other words, the U.S. government has replicated the Soviet system’s blueprint for making every citizen a criminal beholden to the mercies of the State.
This kind of top-heavy society is the exact opposite of America as founded. Thinking again in terms of Jenga blocks, the Founding Fathers attempted to protect the United States from becoming another one of history’s wobbly towers by constructing a system that distributes power in the shape of a pyramid. At the bottom of this pyramid is the individual, who is meant to retain the lion’s share of power over the direction of his life. The individual citizen is the foundation of an American enterprise that treasures liberty. Free speech, gun ownership, due process, and guarantees that the government cannot invade a citizen’s home on a whim all aid the individual in preserving this base of power.
Above the citizen’s foundation in the pyramid of power lie local and state governments, which are formed when citizens hand over a small portion of their freedom in return for dispassionate enforcement of agreed-upon laws and security from outside threats. At the top is the national government, whose power does not materialize out of thin air, but rather arises from powers originating with the people and the individual states. By and with their continued consent, individual Americans and state governments lend the federal government discrete powers that are both limited in scope and explicitly itemized within the Constitution. In this way, the federal government exercises delegated authority over the smallest portion of an individual’s life. Though Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court jointly occupy the apex of the pyramid, the scope of their legitimate jurisdiction is tiny compared to the broad foundation of power possessed by each American citizen.
This pyramid of power distribution is what made America’s founding historically “exceptional.” Aside from a handful of tribal cultures and ancient city-states, never had political power been defined so explicitly as originating with the people. This idea was incompatible with European monarchical systems that traced all authority from the absolute power of kings and queens. As such, the American system did not just begin from a state of revolution; it advanced a notion of the State that was truly revolutionary!
By recognizing the people as the legitimate custodians of all political power, the Founding Fathers hoped to provide firm foundations for a limited but stable American government to persevere over time. Just as the pyramid is a remarkably stable geometric shape, a pyramidal distribution of power prevents any temporary government official from toppling over the whole system. A pyramid survives calamitous storms, while a Jenga tower collapses from a sneeze.
What do we have in America today? Well, we clearly have a Jenga tower once again. Congress passes laws (such as Obamacare’s national takeover of private health care) that are beyond the scope of its constitutionally delegated powers. The president barks executive orders that punish Americans for their religious beliefs or political speech. The Supreme Court regularly rewrites the Constitution to provide the federal government with new and more pernicious authorities absent the consent of the American people or the individual states. A vast regulatory bureaucracy makes and enforces rules that affect every aspect of a person’s life and property. The Intelligence Blob and Cheka FBI spend their time and resources crushing any American who opposes these unconstitutional usurpations. Decades of public school education have brainwashed too many Americans into believing that free expression is dangerous and that government agents should be empowered to “seek and destroy” any utterance that might be amorphously branded as “hate.” And because free speech expands the area of operations for all other freedoms, the U.S. government’s targeting of political speech as unapproved “disinformation” broadly threatens human liberty.
We still have a pyramid of sorts, but it has been inverted. Unaccountable spy agencies, central banks, and multinational corporations possess expansive, unchecked powers at the top. That power trickles down to administrative agencies, federal police forces, courts, White House officials, and members of Congress. The federal government treats the states as vassals obliged to do its bidding. And at the very bottom is the lone citizen who is expected to obey. Because the Bill of Rights is an easy-to-understand operations manual for a functioning American power pyramid, that pesky document has been buried six feet underground.
You would think that those who play Jenga with Americans’ lives would have learned something from the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Soviet Union: with the weight of so much power on top, the whole tower will inevitably crash.
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