Lew, I don’t believe anyone is advocating that any states allow slavery, as the pro-lifer Web site says in its critique of Ron Paul. The fatal delusion of these self-appointed defenders of the unborn is that they think they can somehow capture and control the entire federal government and take it on a pro-life crusade. Well, as you pointed out, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House for quite a while, and did absolutely nothing — nothing — for them. (I’m told by a former GOP bigwig who was actually with Reagan in his hotel room at the 1980 Republican convention that the Republican Party hierarchy laughs at and mocks these people behind closed doors since they are so gullible and easy to manipulate.)
This fantasy about a benevolent Leviathan state has an “intellectual” underpinning, of sorts, in Straussianism. That’s why the Straussians are Lincoln cultists and harbor such vitriol for those of us who espouse the Jeffersonian position of decentralizing government as much as possible (and then eliminating it). When I debated Harry Jaffa on Lincoln about nine months after 9/11 he made the remark that “9/11 proves that we need Big Government more than ever” to protect us. The truth, of course, is that 9/11 proved that Big Government has little inclination or ability to protect us. It wasn’t even able to protect its own headquarters from attack by a few guys armed with box cutters.
Alan Keyes sings the delusional Straussian song with regard to abortion whenever anyone will listen. We need big, centralized government, he says, so that King Alan Keyes can become the next Abe Lincoln and save the world from abortion. It’s all about them and their delusions of grandeur, in other words, not about a practical approach to the issue of abortion.
These people are delusional. They think that if only philosopher kings like themselves can control the Leviathan State, the State can be tamed.
4:14 pm on January 11, 2010
