An interesting article from NOQ report talks about the decline between the founding fathers of the USA and the current leadership.
From the article:
The eminently quotable Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said sometime back: “Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots.” I heartily agree, and the problem is not self-correcting.
The principles behind the formation of America’s government were and are exquisite, but the American government, like all forms of government, is corrupt as hell. This isn’t an extraordinary statement. Exquisite things often break, and even the noblest of institutions become distorted over time until the original purposes for their creation are eclipsed (and often contradicted) by the personal motives of the men running those institutions into the ground.
There is no doubt that history repeats. And those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat its mistakes.
Anyway, the article continues:
John O’Sullivan, a senior policy adviser for Prime Minister Thatcher, wrote a short essay thirty years ago that should have made freedom-minded conservatives rethink any lingering attachments to institutional authorities.
He asked a question we often ask ourselves: how is it that almost all institutional bodies — whether governmental agencies or purportedly “nonpartisan” scientific academies or even religious groups and charities — transform over time into left-leaning entities? In grappling with what might seem inexplicable, he corralled three insights about organizational behavior: (1) Robert Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy asserting that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic their foundations, will come to be run by an elite group of people; (2) Robert Conquest’s Second Law stating that every organization behaves as if “headed by secret agents of its opponents”; and (3) O’Sullivan’s very own First Law positing that “[a]ll organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” In other words, Michels tells us that the key to understanding any institution is its leadership, not its charter. Conquest argues that the leadership will always have objectives at odds with the organization’s intended purpose, if for no other reason than that the leadership’s continued employment and future power paradoxically depend upon never completely succeeding. And O’Sullivan takes this insight farther by noting that the type of person who staffs such organizations tends to disdain private profit and the historic composition of Western civilization’s free-market culture.
Note also that these three observational laws explicitly take as a premise that the organizations have not been actively infiltrated by Marxist saboteurs or actual enemy agents, but rather evolve over time by the weight of natural sociological tendencies. When we add Occam’s Razor into the mix, it is just as persuasive to suppose that all institutions become increasingly socialist over time at the rate of success that Marxists have in quietly but persistently insinuating themselves into the hierarchical ranks of absolutely any institution with power, whether those with legal teeth such as the FBI and CDC or those with cultural teeth such as Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball. Hence, if Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” seems to have succeeded, it’s probably because the political left has never stopped marching.
NOTE FROM COGNY
I think while good intentioned, the article misses it on one point. The people who are running our country are not idiots, by any means.
Oh, sure, some of them are. And how they got elected is still a great mystery to me, at least in some cases.
But the problem is not one of intellect, but of moral failure.
The problem with our leadership is not a lack of intellect, but of a moral compass. People hungry for power put their finger to the wind and found out what people wanted, and simply promised to give it to them.
As long as people want power more than they want to serve, this is what we will get. The only way out of this is to pray for revival.