The European historian Lord Acton, an early thinker in the
formation of modern conservative thought, wrote as follows:
”
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the
highest political end. … Liberty is the only object which
benefits all alike, and provokes no serious opposition. … The
danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every
class is unfit to govern. … Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.
”
The European historian Lord Acton, an early thinker in the formation of modern conservative thought, wrote as follows: “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end. … Liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no serious opposition. … The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. … Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The devastating effects of the exercise of naked, dictatorial power occupied center stage in the history of the Twentieth Century. The totals are staggering: Russian Communism/Stalinism, 68 million dead; Nazism/Hitlerism, 10 million dead; Chinese Communism/Maoism, 55 million dead; Cambodia/Pol Pot, 2 million dead. These are not war dead, but victims within the dictatorships cited. A political and philosophical Conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke and William Buckley is skeptical of power wherever it is found. The guideline is this; if the body or structure in question is strong enough to help you, it is strong enough to hurt you. Thus, a central tenet of conservative philosophy is that vigilance is constantly required to assure that effective checks and balances are in place to counter any concentration of power. This central theme of the Founding Fathers forms the conceptual basis of the so-called balance of power in the structure of the U.S. Constitution.
What power? Here is my own list of power structures and institutions that need to be watched with constant diligence and oversight.
n Federal Government; effective balance between the three branches is crucial.
n Federal Judicial Branch, Federal judges.
n Multinational Corporations.
n State governments.
n Large corporate media.
n Labor Unions, especially the public employee unions. The California Teachers Association is a prime example. The powerful state Democrat party basically will take up no position that is not supported by the CTA.
n Tenured Liberal College Professors.
n Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. $1.6 trillion is the 2002 estimate of expenditures by the NGOs worldwide. These organizations are not publicly elected, nor are there expenditures under public oversight.
n Large government bureaucracies
n The United Nations.
Concentrations of power ultimately result in the greatest threats to liberty. Why? The answer is that concentrations of power threaten individual expression, and the creative power of a nation lies not in the collective, but in the individual. The sacred moments of communion with that higher power within each individual, that scarce moment of clarity, of revelation, of illumination; these are the sources of power and actualization and advancement for the individual first, but then for society. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men – that is genius.” These words come to us from the great American transcendentalist of the early 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The spiritual tradition of the sanctity of the individual underpins and informs the American experiment today, as it has since the founding. Nowhere is this spiritual bulwark more elegantly expressed than in the writings of the above mentioned Emerson. This tradition serves as a main tributary to the historic flow of political Conservatism.
“In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not original … that they are not superior to the citizen: that every one of them was once the act of a single man. … But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen … and that the form of government which prevails, is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.”
Power is that which every individual has as a unique potential, endowed by the Creator, at birth. Why then should power be ceded to other structures and institutions when the power of each individual acting on his aspirations and inspirations, has the capacity to inform kings, presidents, and senators? It is good on the occasion of Independence Day to reaffirm the centrality of the individual, and his indispensable enabler, liberty, in the American constellation. Together they stand against the unbridled power of the State and its pogroms.
Al Kelsch is a Hollister resident who writes a weekly column for Free Lance that runs on Saturdays.
