Category: liberty

They know not

Listen to this post:

They’re having a partisan primary election here in Wisconsin today. There’s lots of conversation and the usual nasty political ads on TV.

I try to avoid the partisan wrangling as much as I can. The two major parties have mostly abandoned the issues that interest me — an end to warfare and freedom from government intervention in our lives — so I almost feel as if I have no dog in this fight anyway.

I do have to admit I’m a little alarmed at the Democratic Party’s shift towards embracing democratic socialism. I sense more socialism and less democracy in the kinds of things they’re saying.

The growth of the movement baffled me until I remembered that the Tiananmen Square Massacre was in June 1989, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, so people now in their twenties and thirties have never witnessed what a powerful socialist or communist nation looks like. 

I was born more than 11 years after Pearl Harbor, so that terrible incident and the war that followed are history to me. I need to remember that to the people who have been born in the last 25 years, the events of 9/11 are as in the same category as World War II is to me.

And so when they advocate for socialism, they have no personal knowledge of the horror they are wishing upon themselves and the rest of us. Since freedom from government intervention in our lives is one of my two big issues, I have no use for this brand of Democrat. 

Meanwhile, I did not vote for him, but the president was starting to grow on me when he boasted about ending eight or nine wars in the first year of his term. However, then the Washington war mongers got to him. So, as I said, I have no real dog in this fight because no one is taking seriously the issues that I take seriously. But the lesser of two evils is the side that does not embrace candidates who would remake America into a socialist utopia.

However, as I wrote a year and a half ago for Wisconsin’s spring election, which covers public posts that are supposed to be nonpartisan, my bottom line is the knowledge of two things.

1. My peace of mind is not dependent on anything the government does, nor is my freedom a gift from the government.

2. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

I stay sane by reminding myself of those two facts as often as I can.

Happy Independence Day

A postscript to my thoughts about H.L. Mencken yesterday, in which he accurately described contemporary politics: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is still an ideal 108 years after he wrote that. The republic may be hanging on by a thread, but it’s still here.

I am not entirely enamored with the state of the republic, but the loyal opposition has spent the last 10 years presenting naysaying or a Soviet-style state (like the one we lived from 2021 to 2024) rather than legitimate alternatives, and so here we are.

But this is July 4, and so I come to celebrate. The Declaration Of Independence is a sacred document, containing as profound a statement as humans have ever declared — “that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain, unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We hold these truths to be self-evident, that is to say obvious and undisputed, and yet from the beginning every word has been disputed, every phrase has been challenged.

Who is this Creator? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord of hosts, the King of glory.

That Creator has endowed us with “certain” rights, that is to say “clearly defined”; “unalienable,” that is to say, to take a phrase from another sacred document, “shall not be abridged.”

Gosh, is it really 25 years ago that I sent reporters onto the streets of Green Bay to reproduce an experiment — show people the Bill of Rights, describe it as a petition, and see if people were willing to sign it? “I don’t know if I could support this,” one law officer said in response to some of the limits on law officers. Others expressed skepticism about limits on free speech, the ownership of arms, the right to an attorney, and just about every other tenet.

I think all pretenders to the throne or other public office ought to be pressed regarding how serious they are about defending the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Judging from their performance, I dare say nearly all of them would fail.

The words are a little more complicated than “live and let live,” but that’s the essence. Don’t tread on your neighbors, lest there be consequences. And that phrase “all men” is meant literally: “All” means all, and of course the word “men” also includes all women in this context.

It is literally a revolutionary concept, and it has been constantly challenged for a quarter of a millennium, battered but never beaten. May the beacon shine ever brightly against the darkness.

A riot of peasants

A friend posted a Fox News report about an earthquake off the Russian coast that sparked tsunami warnings in Japan, Alaska, and the entire west coast of the U.S. of A. (and, I presume, Canada). I applied search engines and found no news coverage; a further inspection found that the Fox report was dated July 29, 2025. Once again, the words of the philosopher poet Tom Petty ring true: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

Afterward she asked, perhaps rhetorically, why these sort of things appear in her Facebook news feed, and I replied with H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about practical politics and hobgoblins, adding, “Social media algorithms seem to have been designed with practical politics in mind.”

I wanted to quote Mencken accurately, and so I turned to In Defense of Women, the 1918 book where that wonderfully succinct sentence appeared, and I discovered that the context remains also tremendously relevant:

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers.”

I’m not sure if I would ever describe war as “waged by the will of superior men” or “the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race,” but I probably forget that Mencken was possessed of a supreme wit and sense of irony. 

The point is that Mencken, 108 years ago, described war and politics as accurately as one of our contemporaries might. Of what are our practical “republican” or “democratic” politicians capable beyond “throwing the mob into a panic”? Who are they other than “mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers”? And how could you better describe our political conversation than “an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”?

When I peruse what passes for the news of the world today, I need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, no matter how insane it all appears, God is in control, and “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Second, Henry Louis Mencken was one of the canniest observers of the human condition ever to have lived.