As one who had embraced radical libertarianism while in college in the early 1970’s, I fully understand the attraction of an individual-based system. I associated with others who introduced me to the libertarian concept, and who were active in the libertarian political scene. That was a time when trusting in “self” and radical self-government appeared to be the solution to all life’s problems. Instead, it was a Utopian fantasy. One of the blessings of growing up is the ability to understand the shortcomings of all men, including ones self.

He goes into much greater detail, but this section of the post will give you a good idea of what it is about. Be sure to read the entire post.

If humanity does not shrug off this illusion, it will self-destruct.

Here at Amerika, we retaliate with a few ideas:

• There is no equality. Crush their primal taboo, which is the idea of no hierarchy. We all have different abilities and most importantly, moral character. Some are stronger than others.
• Bring back the monarchy. We trust in institutions and lists of rules to make our leaders honest. It doesn’t work. Instead, pick honest leaders, or people who are ahead of the rest of us in moral character and leadership ability.
• Social Darwinism is a friend. Stop saving people from themselves. Stop welfare, stop subsidies, stop warnings. We don’t need (to) save people from themselves. Let natural selection work for us.
• Focus on nature. Our cities and even suburbs are designed to hide nature away. Instead, make sure everything is surrounded by forest so that people always know primal fear, and transcendental beauty.

Mr. Stevens’ Amerika blog has been a part of my regular reading for quite a while – highly recommended.

Three things come to mind as I consider where this country is headed – and where we are being dragged against our will. The first two are signposts along the way. The last is a look back at the culture and civilization America is leaving behind.

• The ban on women in combat has now been removed. Since the Old Testament days, the idea of sending women into combat was simply unthinkable. For thousands of years of human history, we had the good sense to understand the different roles of men and women in society. No civilized society worthy of the name would even consider such an idea. But then, we no longer are a civilized society, are we? The military is no longer a force to defend against foreign enemies and a deterrent to aggression. With this following in the footsteps of embracing open homosexuals in the military, our armed forces are now just another instrument of social change.

• The Boy Scouts of America have announced that they may lift the ban on homosexual Scouts and Scout leaders. The Boy Scout Oath ends with the words, “To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” Those are words that helped guide untold thousands of young boys into manhood – including myself. Those are words that will no longer have any real meaning if Scouting caves in under the pressure of the Cultural Marxists now in charge. One of the few remaining institutions that stood for what is good and right appears about to crumble.

• In contrast to those two items, our church just finished its 15th annual Bible Conference. One of my roles during the conference is to take photos to post on our church web site. As I snapped photos of the people during this four-day event, I was struck by the stark difference between what I saw there and what is now celebrated as the norm of present-day American “culture.” There were individuals and families (some spanning three generations), the ladies were all dressed modestly, the men were neatly dressed and well groomed. Everyone was as kind and polite as can be. People pitched in to help in any way they could. It was a slice of Norman Rockwell Americana. It was the way life is supposed to be in a civilized Western society.

Find and cherish the enclaves of our culture. Nurture and care for them. We are truly Leaving the American Sector.

Don’t Blame Romney, And Don’t Blame The Campaign is the title of an excellent post at The Hay Ride blog. I started to pull out some key quotes, but I ended up quoting nearly the entire article before deciding to limit it to only three paragraphs. Please take a moment to read the original article.

The current iteration of the Democrat Party is socialist to the core. It isn’t amoral, it’s deliberately immoral. It believes in government-sponsored infanticide, government-sponsored theft, unpatrolled borders, the destruction of the 2nd Amendment, the deliberate destruction of Pax Americana in favor of what can only be envisioned as the rise of a Muslim caliphate and the deliberate destruction of the nuclear family. It believes in the redistribution of wealth rather than its creation, which is perhaps the most offensive concept to the American economic ideal imaginable.
•••
In four years we will not recognize our country. In four years we will be without any illusions about the fact that we are in an economic depression. And in four years we will have a war – because war typically follows depression.
•••
Half the country voted against this future. But the other half didn’t. And because, given that choice, they opted for decline and the loss of individual responsibility and freedom.

H/T to Richard G. Williams of the Old Virginia blog.

The BBC broadcast a documentary titled Rivers of Blood. It begins with one man – Enoch Powell – using his position of leadership to warn his countrymen of the grave threat they face as the gathering storm begins to assail English culture and turn England into a land completely alien to those who inherited one of the greatest nations on earth. He warned that England was losing her sense of national identity, the shared values and traditions and history, the common thread that unites the English as a people. When Mr. Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech forty years ago, the term “political correctness” had not yet been coined, but that is what was at work

The force that destroyed England was a political establishment that used uncontrolled immigration as a weapon. Most nations can absorb small numbers of immigrants from other cultures without damaging the existing culture. In small numbers, immigrants are assimilated into the culture as long as they are not concentrated in certain areas. In large numbers, immigrants become an invading and occupying army. From there, they spread their influence beyond their enclaves of occupation.

The forces that are destroying our once-great land are not new and our experience is not unique. What is happening now in places like Dearborn, Michigan may soon be happening across the country – including our beloved South. The question is – will we recognize the threat and take action to stop it?

1/8

2/8

3/8

4/8

5/8

6/8

7/8

8/8

Egalitarianism is a topic that we have covered here a number of times. Understanding the corrosive effects of egalitarianism on a society is crucial to understanding how America has degenerated into what it is today. Egalitarianism is not the only factor at work, but it is one of the least appreciated factors, simply because we, as a people, have been propagandized to believe that it is a good thing.

Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself!

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

By listening to America’s political class, one would think our founding principle was equality rather than the consent of the governed. Both Democrats and Republicans now commonly pay homage to the Jacobin notion of equality, echoing Lincoln’s revolutionary ideas as expressed in the Gettysburg Address and elsewhere.

As we move toward another meaningless presidential election, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and neoconservatives, all prattle endlessly about the virtues of “equality of opportunity,” and some even seek to legitimize the insane notion of “equality of outcome.” But a sane nation will embrace only two kinds of equality: (1) the equality of men’s souls at birth; and (2) the equality of all men under the law. Another kind, the lofty sounding “egalitarianism” praised and practiced today as equality of opportunity and of outcome, is the tyranny of an elite wedded to a populous, vengeful underclass: the universal wolf of the modern age. It is poised to devour even the ruling elites who, for now, benefit from the madness.

The “underprivileged” and “oppressed” black female of the 1960s, for instance, today may well hold a job that traditionally belonged to a white male; she may send her children to schools with white children; she may live in a greening suburb rather than a slum; she may enjoy the franchise. No matter. Her life has deteriorated in ways that affirmative action statistics never will tell. Her real wages have declined since 1972, even while her nominal dollars have increased. Many of the students who go to school with her children will graduate from high school and college virtually illiterate, some to satisfy minority-hungry employers. And her subdivision, which in the 1960s was inhabited by folks who perhaps had locks on their doors, but owned no keys, is regularly visited by vandals, burglars, robbers, rapists, and murderers. The civil rights politicians she has helped elect now enjoy the emoluments of office and escape blame for her current woes by promising more of the same.

The egalitarian wolf, let loose by abolitionists to ravage the Old South, has now, as Rev. R. L. Dabney predicted, turned and attacked its masters in the victorious north. The beast was first unleashed by French revolutionaries. Lord Acton wrote in “Lectures on the French Revolution: “The deepest cause which made the . . . Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality. Liberty was the watchword of the middle class, equality of the lower.” Egalitarianism is the critical component in the rise of the modern totalitarian state, and its engine is driven by class hatred and envy.

Of the three pillars of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—only equality was foreign to Western civilization in 1789. Our Western forebears, beginning with Plato, realized that nature would not tolerate a system built on the falsehood that “all men are created equal.” Our present-day sanctification of equality as an end in itself stems from a misunderstanding of Jefferson’s unfortunate utterance. The great Virginian’s famous declaration to King George III was meant to assert the corporate political equality of Americans to Englishmen, and not, as we have been taught, to suggest that any one person is the mechanical equal of any other.

That antebellum Americans generally abhorred the French Revolution’s leftist ideology is evidenced by the rough treatment given, both north and South, to radical abolitionists and other advocates of equality. In the South in particular, an hierarchical social order was accepted as natural and proper. Democracy’s two main precepts—political equality through the franchise and majority rule (John Randolph of Roanoke’s “King Numbers”) largely were rejected by Southerners. They knew Shakespeare and agreed that hierarchy, not equality, was “the ladder to all high designs,” that without it “the enterprise is sick.” Southerners seemed instinctively to know that equality could be enforced only by an arbitrary act of government—a government that would assume the role of Procrustes, the evil son of Poseidon, who either stretched his victims or amputated their limbs in order to make them fit his bed.

Alexis de Tocqueville compared ancient despotisms with modern democracies. Of the former he wrote: “. . . their tyranny rested very heavily on a few but did not extend to a great number. . . : it was violent but limited in scope.” Of the latter he noted: “. . . if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it would have different characteristics: it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.” So it has. But, ironically, not all of us equally. If egalitarianism rules, we must disallow the hierarchical ranking of individuals. How then to understand talk of “role models,” when no one is any better or worse than any other? How then to have heroes?

What today we paradoxically call “individualism”—licentiousness combined with a fervent belief that a ubiquitous government will shield one from the consequences of his actions—found no root in the traditional South; rather, the emphasis here has been placed on families and communities in which real men and women gauged acceptable behavior according to a fixed moral standard and took responsibility for their every deviation, expecting government to keep out of their business.

Two views of equality emerged in the Renaissance era. The one inherited by the South, that of Christian humanism, held that man and his institutions mattered only because he was created in the image of God and by Him was given dominion over the earth. The Christian perspective instructs us that Christian equality (equity) means the subjugation of everyone under God’s law.

The other Renaissance view of equality had been formed in antiquity by the Greek Sophists in opposition to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and promoted the belief that “man is the measure of all things,” not merely terrestrially, but universally. By setting up man and the civil governments he creates as the highest authority, the secular humanistic tradition deifies its own will. If indeed man is supreme in the universe, and some men succeed in acquiring political power over others, then to whom can the ruled appeal for the preservation of their “rights” should their rulers become despots? They, obviously, can appeal only to the conscience of the ruling class or to force. Rulers realized this, and, having no consciences, but wishing to avoid constant insurrection, resorted to the sham of democracy. The masses, if properly fed and entertained, would compromise between a demand for “liberty” and the desire to be led; they would elect masters who gave them the illusion of self-rule.

The Southern vision of a “Republic of Republics” founded on the natural, Christian inequality of man came face to face with a Jacobin northern vision of democratic nationalism founded on messianic egalitarianism. The Russian novelist Dostoyevsky remarked that “When a nation abandons its religious concepts (e.g. the Christian concept of man’s natural inequality), a wicked and fear-inspired craving for union is generated which has as its goal the salvation of its belly (i.e. materialism). In this case social union has no other aim.” Thus, Lincoln undermined the Southern States’ economies through the democratic process (superior numbers supporting high tariffs), and after Southern secession he “restored” the union again by sheer force of numbers (multitudes of Yankee soldiers coerced by conscription), welding the South as an economic colony to the northeast.

In our own day the purveyors of egalitarian democracy seek not, as de Tocqueville said, “to prepare men for manhood,” but on the contrary, “to keep them in perpetual childhood.” And they have done their task well, for the masses presently can be counted on to reason along sophomoric lines. Compulsory public (mis)education is the lynch-pin of the totalitarian state. New England Puritan divines, in company with the marquis de Sade, advanced the idea that lies at the heart of compulsory state (mis)education: that children belong to “society” rather than to their parents. The goal of modern egalitarians is, as Henri Frederic Amiel noted in 1862, “to create no longer complete human beings, but wheels of the great social machinery.” The American Establishment elite demands uniformity and an unquestioning acceptance of its childish myths, and most people accede like wide-eyed, fearful kindergartners.

De Tocqueville foresaw this tendency some 150 years ago: “I do not know a country where there is in general less intellectual independence and less freedom of discussion than in America.” There, he noted, “the majority builds an impregnable wall around the process of thinking.”

As long as unthinking Americans continue to keep in power those who uphold the evils of egalitarianism and keep silent when praise is heaped on its modern architects—from Lincoln to Obama–while the “accumulated wisdom of the ages” is ignored, it shall be a sure sign that we yet have Shakespeare’s universal wolf by the ears.

America the Barbarous: New Pentagon Policy Sanctions Women in Combat

by Elijah Brown and Wesley Strackbein, Vision Forum staff writers

America has become a nation of barbarians.

For more than a decade, women representing the U.S. armed forces have been dying in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have reported on this fact numerous times at Vision Forum, previously highlighting a 2004 front page New York Times article which featured a gruesome cover image of a wounded female soldier, blood running down her leg, with three men surrounding her, screaming. Rather callously, the Times titled the article, “A Routine Burst of Chaos Leaves a G.I. Wounded.” In writing the piece, journalist Dexter Filkins in no way keyed in on the fact that the wounded G.I. was a woman — he reported the story as if she had been any other male soldier hit by enemy fire.

While the Pentagon’s official policy has been to exclude women from being assigned to most units “whose primary mission” is “direct combat on the ground,” the reality has been far different, as was noted in a 2008 USA Today editorial which we previously cited on our website:

On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s policy on women in combat looks like this: Women risk their lives as truck drivers, mechanics and medics attached to combat units. At checkpoints, they do a job that men can’t: search Iraqi women. They fire rifles and lob grenades. And when they are struck by the IED blasts and suicide bombers that characterize this war, they are wounded or killed just as surely as their fellow soldiers.

In other words, the written policy is divorced from reality.

Now policy has caught up to practice, as last week the Department of Defense announced a formal change in policy to “allow Military Department Secretaries to assign women in open occupational specialties to select units and positions at the battalion level . . . whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground.”

This will open nearly 14,000 “combat-related positions to female troops, including tank mechanics and intelligence officers on the front lines,” as the Washington Post summarized.

While American servicewomen have been in harm’s way for more than a decade — with nearly 200 coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq in body bags since 2001 — the Pentagon’s new policy now authorizes women to be officially attached to combat units on the ground, the very goal of which is to engage the enemy in battle.

This is a first for the United States of America, and it is a cause to mourn as our nation’s leaders — in the name of “empowering” women — are now self-consciously placing women in combat units to be shot at and killed as men.

What are we to think of a culture that openly welcomes our mothers and daughters being assigned to the heat of battle to have their limbs severed, their faces scarred, and their consciences seared as they lie beneath a flag-covered casket? Does this “enlightened policy” represent the fullest expression of Woman, as feminists would have us believe?

Not hardly. It represents an abolition of womanhood and the perversion of God’s design. It represents a deeply-rooted rebellion against the natural roles and functions by which God has distinguished manhood from womanhood.

Women are to be cherished as the weaker sex, not exploited to fill the roster of an army. Combat is the province of men, and God calls on men to protect women and children. Men fight when their homes and communities are threatened by wicked regimes and lawless rogues who would despoil their loved ones. When necessary, men carry weapons into battle and give their lives to preserve the liberty and sanctity of those they hold dear.

It is barbarians who place their women in the midst of war’s brutalities to fight as men. This is what pagan tribes in Scotland did before they were Christianized and embraced the “Law of the Innocents,” written by the evangelist Adomnan, which forbade sending women into battle.

Though America possesses advanced weaponry and great military might, we have become a nation of barbarians.

It is high time that we as a people repent of our barbarism — that we cherish our women as women, and call on our men to act as men.

— Elijah Brown and Wesley Strackbein, Vision Forum staff writers

This essay is being discussed on the Vision Forum Facebook page.

While there is no doubt that the London riots began as yet another race riot triggered by the police shooting of a known criminal and gang member, it quickly morphed into something much more sinister – a crime spree with no pretense of “social issues”. The looters included a large number of the English (the English are, by definition, White). Racial conflict was the spark, but a massive cultural change over the last 60 years is at the heart of the problem.

The remnant of civilized culture is seen in the second photo – hundreds, if not thousands, of English men and women armed with brooms, preparing to clean up yet another mess made by the spoiled brats created by a far-left socialist system.

These rioters had absolutely no claim to any sort of political injustice. Their only claim to legitimacy was one that they would never admit to – that they were told by society that they deserved a high standard of consumption without the need for any effort on their part. They were taught by society and by government that they were entitled to everything and required to do nothing.

Entitlement is dependence, and dependence means power for those who control the distribution of those “entitlements”. We have allowed a political system to evolve that combines the characteristics of a dictatorship with the illusion of freedom. How so? We have elected leaders who promise to “give” us goodies (always paid for by “someone else”) as long as we continue to vote them into office – just as the tyrant rewards his cronies with that which was forcibly taken from the productive people. We have knowingly voted those people into office, so we fool ourselves into thinking that we are free.

This same fuse has already been lit here in America, and I fear it is too late to stop it. If we are to have any hope of extinguishing that fuse before it detonates, then we must take action now. No one is entitled to anything more than the basic God-given freedoms that are enumerated in our Bill of Rights – as originally written, not as amplified and expanded by power-hungry judges wanting to write law rather than interpret law.

Noah Webster

Any serious discussion about why the “American Experiment” has failed will eventually come to the same conclusion: The problem is not who we have in positions of leadership – the problem is who votes to put those people into positions of leadership. In a word, the fate of America is determined by Suffrage – who is permitted to vote.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”
Alexander Tyler on the fall of the Athenian Republic

Why would we place the fate of the nation in the hands of those who do not have a concrete and well-established stake in the future of that nation? Why would we place the fate of the nation in the hands of those who base their decisions on kumbaya-style feelings rather than on solid moral principles? Why would we place the fate of the nation in the hands of those who receive direct financial support from the treasury?

The question of who has the right to vote has generally been decided by the individual states. Early criteria typically included white male property-owners over the age of 21. The vote of men was presumed to represent the corporate vote of a household, with the husband being the head of the household. Back when it was clearly understood that the family unit was the solid foundation upon which all civilized society is based, there was little or no controversy about having only men voting. Society recognized that by having one vote per family, there was a built-in incentive to vote for candidates who would support the family. Further restricting the voting pool was the requirement that the voter be a significant property owner – one who had a financial stake in maintaining the all-important legal concept of private property rights. One who owned property was not likely to support someone who might be in favor of taking away property to redistribute to others. Yes, it was “unfair” to single women and to poor men – at least that is the way today’s society would see it.

The election that carried Thomas Jefferson to the White House sent Noah Webster to the statehouse. In 1880, Webster was elected to the Connecticut legislature. He served until 1807. As a legislator, he chiefly occupied himself with attempting to block bills eliminating the property qualification for voting – in the hope that no more fools and knaves like Jefferson would ever be elected again. He called men without property “porpoises” (by which he meant that they would swim in a school, and not think for themselves). He himself had earned the right to vote, he was keen to point out, by writing his spelling books. “I am a farmer’s son and have collected all the small portion of property which I possess by untiring efforts and labors to promote the literary improvements of my fellow citizens.” He would not stand for political decisions to be made for him by men who had no similar stake in the world. “If all men have an equal right of suffrage, those who have little and those who have no property, have the power of making regulations respecting the property of others,” he reasons. “In truth, this principle of equal suffrage operates to produce extreme inequality of rights, a monstrous inversion of the natural order of society.”

Despite Webster’s best efforts, the United States grew more and more democratic, as more and more states lifted property restrictions on voting, and declaimed in favor of universal suffrage. “The men who preached these doctrines have never defined what they mean by the people, or what they mean by democracy, nor how the people are to govern themselves,” Webster complained. As he saw it, democracy is rule by the people and the people are, generally, insufferable idiots. In his 1828 dictionary, he put it this way:

PEOPLE, n…2. The vulgar, the mass of illiterate persons. The knowing artist may judge better than the people.

One lone legislator, however ill-natured, could scarcely slow the expansion of the franchise. As his home state grew more democratic, Webster insisted that he “wished to be forever delivered from the democracy of Connecticut.” He would even be willing to make the great sacrifice of moving to Vermont, if that state could be “freed from our democracy,” adding, “as to the cold winters, I would, if necessary, become a troglodyte, and live in a cave.”

Noah Webster’s worst fears have come to pass.

(Note: portions of this post were copied from a book about Noah Webster, but I cannot locate the original source. I will add the source credit if/when I find it again.)

A country is made up of, and defined by, the people who live there – not by geographic borders and laws and systems of government. When the makeup of the people change, the country changes. While the main topic here is national origins, the makeup of a country also includes the prevailing beliefs (or lack thereof) of the population. America has undergone radical changes in the last 40 – 50 years. This is not the same country that it once was – and the change appears to be a deliberate effort to destroy the Occidental culture that America – and The South – was founded on. The Marxist position is that diversity strengthens and improves and enriches a culture – a position that is a treasonous lie. Diversity is the dilution of every culture that is included; mixing cultures, like an invading parasite, destroys the host culture.

The New York Times has created a map that shows the population breakdown by race, comparing census data from 2000 and 2010. Take a look at it and see what is happening to your county and state.

Egalitarianism was the force behind the period of bloody anarchy known as the French Revolution. It was claimed as the cause for the Russian Revolution and the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” which resulted in the deaths of millions. Egalitarianism is the smilie face that Communism and Socialism hide behind. It is at the heart of the murders of thousands of White farmers in Africa and the resulting starvation when those once-productive farms are turned into wasteland by the “new owners”.

Egalitarianism is behind the “one man – one vote” system in America that has devolved into a situation where our leaders are chosen by those who are promised the biggest share of the loot taken from the rapidly shrinking pool of the productive.

Egalitarianism is a system where everyone is assumed to be completely equal, and thus have equal results. When equality produces unequal results, an egalitarian system reacts by trying to force equal results on unequal people. Since those of lower abilities cannot be force-fed greater abilities, the only option left to an egalitarian society is to place obstacles in the path of those with greater abilities. A classic example of this is “affirmative action” and other racial and gender preference programs. In each of these cases, any equalizing of results are due solely to penalizing one class of people to the benefit of another class of people.

Egalitarianism says that all cultures are equal. When people no longer recognize differences between cultures, they take the path of least resistance. They discard the self-discipline and responsibility that are the hallmarks of higher cultures and adopt the irresponsible, the crude, and the base. That is why we see Black culture spreading far outside that race. The pants-halfway-down look, the acceptance of “rap” as music, the acceptance of children out of wedlock, the  lack of respect toward women, the trashing of the English language (far beyond the normal slang of youth) – all of these have spread far beyond the Black race. The egalitarian claim is that when people are mixed (usually through coercion) the best from each group will prevail and be adopted by all. Just the opposite happens: just as churches that bring the world into the church become just like the world, people tend adopt the worst traits of others. There are notable exceptions, of course. There are those few who recognize superior cultures and adopt that culture in order to better themselves and their families. Those are very rare exceptions. People descend to the lowest common denominator when they accept the egalitarian lie.

Egalitarianism is at the very heart of communism – it is the equal sharing of misery. It is a system that discourages individual achievement. It punishes the high achiever and provides moral cover for the slothful. Why work hard to excel if the rewards of hard work and diligence and personal responsibility are taken away and given to others?

Inheritance taxes were devised as a means to promote the egalitarian agenda. These draconian taxes assured that a family could not build the wealth of the next generation. Inheritance taxes just barely cover the administrative cost involved – they exist primarily to promote the egalitarian agenda, not to fund government services. What better way for a government to assure an egalitarian system than by effectively resetting each generation to zero by confiscating their parents’ wealth through inheritance taxes?

One of the major cultural differences between North and South in the years leading up to the War for Southern Independence was the egalitarian nature of Northern culture and the stratified nature of Southern culture. Radical egalitarians like Thaddeus Stevens and John Brown sought to tear down what they saw as the unfair social structure of the South. Southerners, on the other hand, had built a highly refined agrarian society that recognized social and economic standing as something to be sought after, and provided the opportunity to excel both socially and economically. True, advancement seldom came quickly – it might take a full generation or more. The culture of the Old South instilled patience and took a long term view of matters where the years it took to build a better life would be rewarded in the end. That end may be one’s children or grand children, but Southern culture was quite content with a slower pace.

The statement in our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” was simply a rebuttal to the political theory of the divine right of kings that America was declaring her independence from. It was never intended as a literal statement about the nature of man. The radical egalitarians hijacked the phrase and used it as a powerful weapon in their war on the Western European culture that America was based on.

The only case where all men are truly equal is in the sight of God. In His eyes, we are all sinners in need of salvation through the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. Other than that, no two people are equal, nor are any races or any other groups of people equal, and any system based on such a lie is doomed to failure.