A Government Based on Fear

In this political climate, all segments of the population are looking for change. Some of those people desire more radical changes than others, and their numbers only seem poised for growth for the years ahead. But are the arguments and debates of this generation really so dissimilar from those centuries ago?

Without question, the U.S. is run by two prevailing parties. Certainly we have the tried-and-true Democratic and Republican parties that have existed in the US for centuries. But these two parties are only the descendants of the initial philosophical arguments that the populace faced all the way back in the 1780's, after the Articles of Confederation were formulated.

Back in those days, the two reigning parties were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. And, although both the Democrat and Republican parties have changed substantially (and have even flipped ideologies), they are essentially speaking in the same tones, and in the same voices as their Federalist predecessors.

Not unlike the prevailing parties of today, the Federalist platform was all about adding government power by scaring the populace into submission. The tools used then were no different than those used by modern politicians. The algorithm is simple, plays on emotions, and is proven to be effective. The propagation of panic and of fear in the fledgling country held sway by means of a subversive argument; the need for government protection against both domestic and foreign parties, that are forever on the verge of doing us harm. It is a tactic of forced paranoia, which still works to this day.

We hear about it all the time in every conceivable media outlet available to us. Terrorist threats are on the rise, we have to protect our borders and that means increased taxes. It means war, and that means we need bigger military expenditures. Or, someone just got shot, we need more laws to control everyone, ban guns, increase taxes for enforcement. Or, some company is making too much money, let's regulate them under false pretense. Or, some country is making money, let's institute a tariff on their products.

Whatever the spin is, the end result is, and will always be, a decrease in the economic and personal freedoms of the citizenry. And the only enemy that is left in the aftermath of it all, is the government which is allegedly protecting you from the invisible threats on the stage -- both foreign, and domestic.

But the above is a Federalist viewpoint. What about the Anti-Federalists, whose ideology was similar to our current day libertarians? They believed that the world was a better place, not through stronger military forces and increased power at the discretion of government, but by freedom and trade.
And although they knew that there would certainly be issues encountered along the way, the eventual consequences of government's slow, deliberate, and inevitable encroachment of the rights of domestic citizens was also well known to them. Not all risk can be mitigated, unless we choose to live our lives in vacuum.

Just like today's government debates are started by some incident, the flash-point for the ideological battle hundreds of years ago was a weapons raid that occurred on a militia armory by domestic citizens. Although the damage was trivial, certain politicians saw an open avenue for consolidating and increasing government power. Thus began an argument which has never, and likely will never, be concluded. An argument that is as much about reality as painting is about paint-by-numbers.

Over the course of the last two centuries, we have seen a consolidation of political and government power like few other nations have experienced in their histories. Generations of U.S. citizens have grown up in a world where freedom no longer reigns as a guiding principle of life. Instead, we live in a society where fear for our lives causes us to deliberately give up our freedoms. The end result is a society where even the most mundane of actions require permission from a government entity, and even the pretense of 'security' is no longer a necessary precursor to the creation of new laws; laws whose real purpose is to extort the people of their economic power, via fines and unnecessary taxes -- the earmarks of which can never be truly verified by the public.

The only way in which we can reverse the course of unfettered government domination is to change our own perspective as a people. We need to be courageous, as our Anti-Federalist predecessors were, and envision the larger picture -- which is to know, without question, that we can rise above any challenge without giving up our rights and freedoms to a faceless entity.