Manifesto Defies Big Brother
Today, the Mount Vernon Statement will be released prior to the opening of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC):
"Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty," said Louis D. Brandeis, a Supreme Court Justice.
Justice Brandeis was referring to our bloody, savage, eight-year War of Independence where 25,000 Americans -- a significant percentage of the population -- died so that the human yearning for freedom could live. After the British surrender at Yorktown in 1783, The Founding Fathers who survived the carnage realized that to prosper as a nation rather than fall from mob rule or foreign enemies, the loosely-conjoined sovereign states must permanently unite under a federated government.
Fearing tyranny from the concentration of too much power in a central authority, tyranny of the type they and their countrymen had just overthrown at unimaginable cost, they labored to frame our Constitution so that it limited the size and scope of the federal government. And as we struggle today with the encroachment of an out-of-control government into every niche of our lives and all we hold dear, the Founders' wisdom was never more clearly evident.
Throwing down the gauntlet
National conservative leaders are gathering today at Collingwood, Virginia -- the site of George Washington's River Farm -- to sign a document commonly referred to as the Mount Vernon Statement. This conservative manifesto is a message to Big Brother that a united and resurgent conservative movement is declaring philosophical war against authoritative government and the failure that is socialism.
Conservatives are publicly defining their battle against collectivism and the moral bankruptcy championed by cultural, academic, and political leftists, dutifully parroted by their submissive thralls in state-run media.
The full document will be posted online at MountVernonStatement.com at 3 p.m. today, but a few brief snippets have been provided:
"In recent decades, America's principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.
Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead -- forward or backward, up or down? Isn't this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?
The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles."Framers of the statement hope to renew a sense of common purpose not seen since the beginning of the Reagan era 30 years ago. They believe that the American people, already leery of and angered over the current regime's anti-American agenda, will react positively to its principles.
Founding ideals
The statement's aim is to unite advocates of limited government, social and religious conservatives, and proponents of proactive foreign and domestic policies that conform to the tenets of the Constitution. In brief, the Mount Vernon Statement is nothing less than conservatism's national pledge of renewed dedication to First Principles.
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell stated, "It's a document that we hope is going to serve as a compass for the movement so that when we have a debate such as, for example, on socialized health care, there should not be a degree to which government participates in national health care but whether government has the authority, the right to interfere in this issue. If it doesn't have the specifically enumerated right and responsibility spelled out in the Constitution, then the federal government should not be involved, period."
Timely resurgence
As Alan Caruba outlined in An Endangered America, we are a nation in danger of being deprived of everything so many Americans worked for, fought for, and too often died to defend."We are a nation in danger of being deprived of everything so many Americans worked for, fought for, and too often died to defend." We are being misled by collectivists whose beliefs are, at best, diametrically at odds with the American system of governance. There can be no misunderstanding of the peril -- during the last century alone, applied socialism in one form or another killed more than 100 million people. The number of those who survived and were forced to endure its oppressive yoke is unimaginable.
We are being coerced by the flagrant application of fear, as one "crisis" or another is conjured up or manipulated to advantage by the current regime. We are being weakened by the political elites of the Democrat Congress who have arrogantly and needlessly plunged the nation into a debt so vast it is incomprehensible. Our progeny will suffer thanks to their theft that now spans generations.
Perhaps the conservative manifesto will resonate with enough Americans so that we can reclaim America from those who are deliberately doing grievous harm. We must do so in the memory of all those who came before and for the sake of all those who follow. All decent, hard-working, law-abiding Americans should demand an end to the plundering of the public treasury, government takeover of private enterprise, and any scheme to control our lives through unconstitutional central authority.
The heralded American poet, writer, and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish is attributed with a line that says it all:
"There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream."
That American dream is a dream shared by billions worldwide. It inspires hope everywhere. It draws to our shores those who want to live and thrive in freedom. And it is now in grave jeopardy.
Here's to the Mount Vernon Statement and a successful resurgence.
Hype and Chains.
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Image by Global Graphica
An Endangered America
Conservative manifesto makes bid to reunify
Conservatives Philosophical Declaration of War against Big Government
Saying No to Big Government