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Conservatives have been complaining for a long time – at least as far back as the Reagan era – about reducing the bloated sea monster of our government bureaucracy, but not only does the state never get any smaller, it just keeps expanding, aggrandizing more power, and extending more tentacles grasping for our freedoms. What would the Founding Fathers think of what we have allowed to become of the limited-power, Constitutional Republic they left us?
Ned Ryun addresses this question in his new book American Leviathan, and traces the history of the progressive movement to undermine that Republic and replace it with an all-powerful state. Subtitled “The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” American Leviathan explores how our current government has little if anything in common with the free American Republic that was intended by the Founding Fathers and shaped by the original intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Ryun then asks, “What is the right size and scope of government for us today?” and proceeds to lay out a blueprint for rolling back this gargantuan, increasingly authoritarian bureaucracy.
Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority – a non-partisan political training institute whose mission is to mold the next wave of liberty-minded candidates and community leaders – and also of Voter Gravity, a Republican data firm used for voter mobilization. A frequent Fox News commentator, Ryun is also the author of, among other books, Restoring Our Republic: The Making of the Republic and How We Reclaim It Before It’s Too Late. His new book is not a boring policy white paper; it’s a concise, page-turning read, written with a passionate authorial voice and sense of humor. Check out this passage as an example:
The Department of Energy should be shut down and its building personally imploded by the next Republican president, with a Freedom Park built over it. The exact same goes for HUD and Education. What better way to signal the end of the administrative state than to literally blow it up and sow its fields with salt?
Ryun explains that, with the progressive Left, we are dealing with a utopian mindset which ignores the flaws and limits of human nature and instead pushes the dangerous notion that human perfectibility is possible through the mechanism of an all-powerful state. This fantasy has always and everywhere sown nothing but mass misery and death, but that has never stopped Leftist managerial elites from going back to that well again and again. After all, “At the heart of Progressive Statism,” Ryun writes, “is the belief that the state is God in this world.” He goes on to explore one of the intellectual roots of this delusion, the German philosopher (or, as Ryun calls him, “paid propagandist”) Georg Hegel (1770-1831), who taught that truth is relative and that “the whole of history is a continual march from the irrational to the rational, a march towards progress.”
A single quote will suffice to demonstrate Hegel’s appeal to the Progressive mind. He wrote, “It must be further understood that all the worth which a human being possesses – all spiritual beauty, he possesses only through the state… The state is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.” Armed with a deep belief in Hegel’s ideas, 20th century “Progressive Statists began to unwind the American Revolution and why it was fought,” concluding that the Founding Fathers’ notions of the separation of powers and a rights-based government were obstacles to the centralization of power for which they lusted. And so the rewriting of history began, a process still underway today as the Progressive Statists remain “hell-bent on framing and then dismissing the Founders as old white, slave-owning, misogynist racists who fought the Revolution for purely economic reasons.”
In his concluding chapter, Ryun declares correctly that we have reached the point at which there is no possibility of Left and Right closing the ideological divide and coming together to Make America Great Again. To restore our Republic, “it is time to declare political war on the administrative state” and “tear it apart piece by piece.” The next Republican President must get his personnel “right from the beginning” by selecting a team who understands that the administrative state must be “dismantled wholesale.”
One of the reasons Ryun wrote the book was to light a fire under Americans who, perhaps out of ignorance or apathy or just a sense of being overwhelmed by this oppressive monster of a government bureaucracy, have simply come to accept it as an unpleasant fact of life. For those people, the book will be very inspirational because he offers a whole raft of specific, practical ways that “the next Republican President” – hopefully Donald Trump – can dismantle the administrative state.
Among those ideas: mass firings and reassignments for the over 800,000 (out of fewer than two million) non-essential federal civilian employees; presidential in-agency visits, in which the President puts the fear of God into bureaucrat management by delivering his orders face-to-face, and firing those who don’t comply for insubordination; reimagining and downsizing the Department of Justice; dumping the FBI altogether; gutting 90% of the career bureaucrats in the Office of Management and Budget, which is essentially the citadel of the administrative state. There are other suggestions as well.
Yes, finally draining the D.C. swamp will require tremendous political will from the President and a handpicked team who are loyal to the will of the people and to the idea of reclaiming the Founding Fathers’ vision for our Republic. The state apparatus that the President will be eviscerating has a vested interest in protecting its enormity and complexity, its power and privilege, and those who stand to lose all that will resist with every weapon at their disposal, legal and otherwise. But Ned Ryun is confident it can be done, and American patriots need to get onboard with that sense of determination and hopefulness.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
America needs to totally pull out of the United Nations and elected them from America Period lets turn the UN Facility into a Homeless Shelter
I whole heartedly agree.. Include WHO . We do not need health dictators
in our short lives.
Thank you for the article about this vital topic!
I wonder about all the mass firings advocated by Mr. Ryun. I suppose most of those people have generous pensions, but they would not take kindly to losing their jobs.
It seems to me that a lot of blood will be spilled in the future amongst Americans.
The intellectual roots of the American Almighty State lie in Christianity. Consistent and serious Christianity leads to a welfare-state theocracy, not to Laissez-Faire Capitalism.
Hegel is a disciple of Kant and Kant’s philosophy is an attempt to save Christianity from the onslaughts of reason and rationality.
Jesus Christ was never interested in the pursuit of happiness and wealth on earth.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” – Richard M. Salsman, “Holy Scripture and the Welfare State”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/04/28/holy-scripture-and-the-welfare-state/?sh=14d008a724f2
I knew it was too good to be true. But I see nothing has changed. At least you are consistently miserable and monumentally ineffective.
Same old crap even after a 3 week vacation, which mercifully spared us from your Objectivist gobbledegook.
A handbook on how to dismantle the socialist welfare state is useless and impotent against the morality of altruism.
The crucial issue isn’t the practical but the moral.
Morality always prevails over the practical. If men are led to believe that socialism is moral and capitalism is immoral, they will choose socialism over capitalism.
“The fallacies and contradictions in the economic theories of socialism were exposed and refuted time and time again, in the Nineteenth Century as well as today. This did not and does not stop anyone: it is not an issue of economics, but of morality.” – Ayn Rand
Obviously rancid Randism failed to stop whatever she was on about as well. We sure as hell don’t need a lecture on morality from you and your familiar.
After three weeks without hers, and your nagging, Randy and you seem more stale than ever.
Nice review Mark but the book is futile and the proof is that it was written in the first place. “how stupid is the average guy? Half of them are stupider than that!” George Carlin
For the book to have any effect it would have to be purchased and then read by the average voter. Then the voter would have to contact his congressman. Then the voter would be opposed by the big financiers who employ his congressman. Who will the congressman obey? A paycheck worker who cannot afford to contribute to him or the guy that gives him a check? HMMMM!
The congressman is a physically unattractive lawyer who was scraping by on writing wills because of his lack of academic standing among his peers and not having the social connections to bring in large clients. When the Constitution was written by highly educated and financially independent men there was no concept of socialism. They expected graft but not its’ continual purchase by a self appointed nobility. That is why our conundrum is insoluble by constitutional means.
It was a nice run until Woody Wilson and Frank Roosevelt ruined it.
If something like this is not done, we are done. This book should be sent to Trump and remind him that this is what he is running on and most of us expect him to keep his word this time!
Yes, we need morals all right, as the Founding Fathers believed, and which the Left ain’t got. How is instituting a combination of Castro and Sodom as the new USA altruistic? Cut the crap and call a spade a spade.
Drain the swamp.
Who is running the White House.
Sleeping Joe is only ther 40% of the time,Kumala is never there now.
The Neocons should be jailed.
They call Putin a dictator, ya right.
The president is a placeholder
Kumala will sign anything that is put in front of her.