The Leviathan and the Left

The Almighty Leviathan

Nota bene, American Left:

The Hobbesian notion that individual liberty can be understood as the right of a man to obey his appetites ignores the higher capacities of the human soul because it necessarily gives rise to the "strongest powers" in order to maintain society in being. Jouvenel indicates that contemporary liberals fail to see that government based on free discussion and free opinion presupposes the human capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood and to define general principles of justice that transcend the human desire for power. -Dr. Daniel Mahoney, Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity ISI Books, 2005.

The accumulation and expansion of power is the Left's main preoccupation, nay, obsession. Read the scoop on Obama and The Alinsky Administration, by Jim Geraghty.

Moderates thought they were electing a moderate; liberals thought they were electing a liberal. Both camps were wrong. Ideology does not have the final say in Obama’s decision-making; an Alinskyite’s core principle is to take any action that expands his power and to avoid any action that risks his power.

As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it.

Are conservatives totally immune from this contagion? No. But true conservatives are, I think, at least partially immunized from the power-at-all-cost modus operandi that so doggedly ensorcels the Left. Read Montesquieu, Coke, Acton, Burke, Madison, Kirk, Buckley, Reagan, et al. for the conservative perspective.

Joseph Ellis notes that, from the point of view of the founders, "The worst thing about a consolidated government...was that, once in place, its relentless expansion of arbitrary power was unstoppable, its tendency toward corruption was inevitable, and its appetite for despotism was unquenchable."

As an aperçu to mercifully close out this somewhat disjointed post, I remember coming across an observation made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi explaining how, when she was a little girl, she wanted to be a priest because it was the priests who "have the power."