Is America Becoming a Fear Society?

From Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror, pp. 196–197:

For dissidents within the former Soviet Union, these moral lines [between good and evil, right and wrong] were practically self-evident. Unlike philosophers and rights activists in the West, we dissidents did not feel the need to split hairs over the precise nature of human rights.
We knew that to determine whether or not human rights were being generally upheld in a particular country, we only had to ask a few simple questions:
Could the people in that country speak their minds?
Could they publish their opinions?
Could they practice their faith?
Could they learn the history and culture of their people?

We understood that for those living in a fear society, the answer to most of our questions, if not all of them, was no. The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies. While these structures are not always sufficient to ensure the protection of human rights, our experience had convinced us that without them. human rights would inevitably be crushed. Every political prisoner in the Gulag recognized the moral chasm that separated free societies and fear societies. We recognized that a free society did not guarantee the protection of human rights, but we knew that a fear society guaranteed their violation.

When someone like Phil Robertson is excoriated by society for speaking his mind, for having his opinion published, for expressing his religious beliefs, I have to wonder whether America is not turning into the type of fear society described in Sharansky’s book; when courts are packed with liberal judges who legislate from the bench, when the press blatantly shows its bias for one particular party, when efforts to insist on proper voter identification are characterized by the press and one political party as voter suppression rather than its opposite, when the press and the political party in power try to convince the minority party to remake itself in the opposition’s image, I have to wonder whether America is not turning into the type of fear society described in Sharansky’s book.

Edmund Burke

It's funny how Edmund Burke anticipated the Occupy movement, and its support by the Democrat party, by over 200 years:

The plunder of the few would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation ; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.

Reflections on the Revolution in France, page 55.

(There have been several earlier passages in this book that have been evocative of current events, but none more so than this.)

OK, I lied.

Well, not  “lied” so much as “made an unwarranted extrapolation” (in that I am willing now to give Governor Romney the benefit of the doubt where, prior to his selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, I was not).

Pray To End Abortion

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.

I said in an earlier post that, “[r]ather than discard it, we should seek to strive for the ideal.” Thus,  Republicans, after first having sought to end slavery, seek now to end abortion. Meanwhile, the Democrats, after first having been the party of slavery, are now the party of abortion.

And yet the Democrats, in their guilt, must over-compensate—in the case of slavery, with the doctrine of Affirmative Action, which does nothing but to perpetuate what President Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and in the case of abortion, with the push to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, requiring countries to “act in the best interest of the child” (an irony considering that they see no rights for the unborn).

The right to life enshrined in the Declaration of Independence should extend to the unborn; adults have a responsibility to defend the defenseless.

A Primary-Season Poem

With all that Barack & the Democrats have done,
A Republican campaign should be smooth sailin';
But if Rom-i-ney is the nominee,
I'm writing in Sarah Palin.

Do nothing.

I would much rather have a “do nothing” Congress than a repeat of the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Congress of 2008–2010.

What a demagogue.

Ooh, this just pisses me off.

You are not “a warrior for the middle class.” You are a warrior for the low-class, entitlement-class losers who see themselves only as victims. Seriously. Surely everyone knows that the tax rate goes up as one’s income goes up.

The only way “a billionaire [would] pay the same rate as a plumber or a teacher” (rather than a higher rate) would be if Congress were to pass the flat tax.