Grant Power Only to the Accountable

China’s constitution contains a list of conventional rights as impressive as anything in the West. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are there, as they typically are in Communist constitutions after Stalin’s.

It also has a clause that follows that listing of rights that says the following: “When exercising their freedoms and rights, citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall not undermine the interests of the state, society, or collectives, or infringe upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.” (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: We the People Can Break the Culture of Lies)

In practice, it is the CCP that decides when this clause is sprung, and the constitution’s protections disappear. In practice, those protections matter little, as scholars Ling Li and Wenzhang Zhou wrote in China Law and Society Review:

The constitution appeals to the Chinese Communist Party because it does not provide solutions to fundamental issues of governance. Instead, such issues are kept out of the constitution so that they can be addressed by the Party through other regulatory mechanisms outside of the constitutional realm. 

As anyone who is bothered by the Deep State knows, this is not a phenomenon unique to China. The complaint of Deep State critics is that, more and more, the real decisions of governance are made by unelected officials largely immune to popular pressure. The complaint surfacing in this election is that even the nation’s highest elected post may be occupied by someone who:

1. never received in a single primary vote for her party’s nomination;
2. was crowned the nominee by an opaque closed-door process;
3. evades public critical engagement on policy issues; 
4. evades all discussion of principles unless couched in language vague enough to allow denial of any commitment; and 
5. seeks to evade all responsibility for the policies which she advocated and was empowered to implement on the highest of levels.

The emptiness of substance and principle, the addiction to rehearsed responses, the tricks of expressing a verisimilitude of sincere emotion, together signal that she does not hold herself accountable to anyone save for the power she means to attain by checking the right boxes for those who support this massive effort of the machine.

The key to our freedom, such as we have enjoyed it, stems from the high awareness of Founders and Framers that we are all accountable, and that true power, the highest power, creates and governs by stepping back and honoring the liberty and relying on the affection of those subject to its power.

That is why the Constitution tells us from the start, that we, the people, are the sovereigns, and that, as the Bill of Rights concludes, the federal government has only the power we delegate to it. But delegate we do — having the power, we step back and make a compact to be ruled by the laws the government creates and to be adjudicated by the courts it empowers. It is, like the divine covenant, empowered by the love of those who partake in it for each other and what they jointly create through it.

All of this stems from something absent from Athens, the lack of which doomed its democracy to an early demise and to be a laughingstock of rulers for centuries. That thing that was not present was the Biblical understanding that there is a unified reality underlying this world that calls us into being and steps back to give us the room to attain meaning of the highest sort by allowing us to be moral agents — even if it means that we may sin and hurt that reality temporarily.

The Jewish mystics spoke of God’s contraction of Self; the rabbis of old, following Genesis’ principle that humanity is created in the image of God, applied this idea to humans: “Who is the mighty person?” one sage asked, and then answered his own question: “The one who conquers his own chaotic inclinations.”

This is the power of a parent who loves a child by not caving in to his or her every whim. It is the power of a teacher who corrects a student, knowing that at present, the student will not like the correction and may even feel it hateful. The parent and the teacher exert power over the chaos, channeling it so that it might yield only creative goodness and not mere indifferent — or noxious — novelty.

Illegitimate power runs in the opposite direction — it amplifies the chaos to appeal to those whom it terrifies. You will find the agents of chaos disguising themselves as psychopaths do — emulating the phrases and echoing the words meant to convey proper convictions, to play and game those whom they despise for being so manipulable. They do not wish to be seen as chaos agents, and so they must pose as those who will rescue us from it. 

They hope to so empower themselves that they no will longer have to play the chaos game. The one thing they want is sure power. But even having gained power, and using it amply to suppress any opposition, they still will not stop lying even then. As Solzhenitsyn wrote of the fully metastasized Stalinist state: They lie, we know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, and they go on lying still.

In Kamala’s California, in Labor’s Britain, that’s where we are already. Political memes and satires will be subject to government oversight and will be banned and authors criminalized if they offend the gentle sensibilities of the state. The UK, even under the so-called Conservatives, had already created an atmosphere in which a Jew wearing an item of traditional dress was forbidden by police to stand in public places where crowds were crying for the destruction of the only Jewish nation in the world because he would be “provocative.” (The Jim Crow South said the same thing about those who “got uppity.” It all stems from the same evil and its desire to control.)

The name of the party doesn’t matter, as we see by the Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk going towards the freedom and some others who had stood as constitutional conservatives showing other priorities. We need to focus on what constitutes good and its opposite in the political sphere, on the principles of the matter. 

When we address that question, we see that the political question is nested in something deeper. Our deepest values are not set by politics but inform our politics. Do we seek political power on our own terms, content to take it away from others to get the result we want? That is the world of the Caesars of every age. (READ MORE: Kamala’s Words Mean Nothing Against Hamas)

Or do we seek it on God’s terms, using the power given in trust for the sake of those who gave it — God in the first place, and in the second, His creatures, who heard us, deliberated deeply, and freely exercised their choice?

When we take that step back from catastrophic falseness and honestly place our case before our fellow citizens, we must know that that is true power on the highest model. It deserves our trust, for we saw how the deep trust of freedom broke down the Soviet walls we thought would last for centuries. 

It is our strength now as well. It speaks to every heart and though we cannot say exactly how or perhaps even when, we trust they will listen and our Republic will live.

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