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"America: The Failed Experiment"

Today, it is the most powerful nation on earth in every sense of the word, except moral. The moral authority of the United States comes from the barrel of a gun. It is feared worldwide, even by its friends, and dismayed that others don't unconditionally love it. Yet it is difficult for outsiders to credit that even Americans love it.
By Paul Harris
05/05/03:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3237.htm

Most Americans seem to think that the United States has been a monumental success. Even those who are disaffected would hesitate to say the country is failing. Perhaps it needs the eyes of people outside its borders to see more clearly what it has become and that what it purported to be was rarely achieved. Americans have deluded themselves into a failure to see the disaster they have wrought and the nightmare that is to come. The most common refrain I hear from Americans I have met abroad or who have written to tell me of their experiences outside the United States is that they had no idea what a failure the U.S. has become until they stepped outside their country and considered the other guy's perspective.

The United States is in decline; it is a society in an advanced state of decay. Its great experiment at participatory democracy no longer excites its people, who stay home on election days in vast numbers. Its love of freedom has been used over and again as the excuse for military engagement on the soil of many other countries and countless deaths among those foreign citizens. Its pursuit of personal freedom at all costs has resulted in a violent and morally bankrupt society. In its quest for power, it has blundered across the world like a colossus, always with the self-assurance of the Godly and with complete lack of concern for other people's wishes and needs.

America began with the genocide inflicted on native North Americans; it enslaved its own people and nearly tore itself apart in a cataclysmic war fought, in part, about that slavery. It has since spread its beneficence and its mayhem around the globe with casual disregard for all others. It remains a highly polarized society grouped together only by a collective fear of everyone else; within its own borders, groups of various sizes adhere only out of fear of other Americans.

The United States has relentlessly chased after the ability to annihilate its enemies with firepower beyond belief and convinced itself that it is right and just to do so.

America has degenerated into a puppet state, a puppet for the few special interests and corporate groups who long ago usurped power from the masses. We know from the experience of the 2000 elections that the will of the people is easily subverted but this is not the first time a President has come to office under such clouded circumstances; read about the Electoral College, the courts, and the state of Florida in relation to the disputed election of the nineteenth American President, Rutherford B. Hayes.

We also know that the American government rarely works for a more perfect union, or to establish justice and insure domestic tranquility, or to promote the general welfare. Significant effort, however, goes into securing the blessings of liberty for those in high places. Elected officials have as their only goal, success in the next election and for that, they need to toady up to the special interest and corporate groups who can fill their pockets.

America's Founding Fathers called their dream "the great experiment" and perhaps that is because they understood this was a gamble; it might be the last conceivable untried form of government. Perhaps they knew that the illusion of "people power" was just that, an illusion. Perhaps they also knew that if the great experiment failed, there was nothing left to try; mankind would have proved once and for all that it was incapable of governing itself in a manner that is worthy of being called "civilized."

Well, it is failing. So I come back to my opening question: what do we get next?

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The American Experiment In Liberty Has Failed

It is, perhaps, a fact provocative of sour mirth that the Bill of Rights was designed trustfully to prohibit forever two of the favorite crimes of all known governments: the seizure of private property without adequate compensation and the invasion of the citizen’s liberty without justifiable cause…It is a fact provocative of mirth yet more sour that the execution of these prohibitions was put into the hands of courts, which is to say, into the hands of lawyers, which is to say, into the hands of men specifically educated to discover legal excuses for dishonest, dishonorable and anti-social acts.

______ H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection, pp. 180-82

The American experiment in liberty has failed.  It is only a matter of time before people realize it. Official dogma exulting over the U.S. Constitution, which for so long was propagated through public schools, churches and government mouthpieces, will not forever withstand the exposure of the truth about American democracy now readily available on the Internet.

The greatest fear of America’s Founding Fathers has been realized: The U.S. Constitution has been unable to thwart the corrosive dynamics of majority-rule democracy, which in turn has mangled the Constitution beyond recognition. The real conclusion of the American Experiment is that democracy ultimately undermines liberty and leads to tyranny and oppression by elected leaders and judges, their cronies and unelected bureaucrats. All of this is done in the name of “the people” and the “general welfare,” of course.  But in fact, democracy oppresses the very demos in whose name it operates, benefiting string-pullers within the Establishment and rewarding the political constituencies they manage by paying off special interests with everyone else’s money forcibly extracted through taxation.

The Founding Fathers (especially Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, and James Monroe), as well as outside observers of the American Experiment such as Alexis de Tocqueville all feared democracy and dreaded this outcome.  But, they let hope and faith in their ingenious constitutional engineering overcome their fear of the democratic state, only to discover they had replaced one tyranny with another. As one contemporary libertarian has put it :

“It is hard to think of other examples in history where so many checks and balances were placed upon centralized political power – and it is also impossible to think of a more dangerous and powerful government than the modern American leviathan. The abysmal failure of such a noble experiment should give all moralists pause. If the smallest possible government has grown into the largest conceivable government – within a few hundred years – it is hard to imagine what kind of theoretical system could conceivably control state growth in the future.”

Perversely, at the same time the U.S. Constitution was slowly unraveling and being brazenly rewritten by lawyers and judges over the course of two centuries, the founding document and the drivel spewed forth by judges and lawyers called “constitutional jurisprudence” took on an almost sacred aura, deluding most citizens into believing it was all succeeding marvelously.

A few people recognized the slow-motion failure of the Constitution right along, especially after the New Deal memorialized the dramatic alterations that had occurred since the War Between the States.  For example, in a 1947 exchange of letters with Ludwig von Mises, journalist, war correspondent, and novelist Rose Wilder Lane wrote:

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