Dem's at Odds with Founders - WSJ 01-19-2012

Democrats At War With America's Founding Principle

By KERRY JACKSON
Posted 01/17/2012 07:10 PM ET

The president says Republicans are a threat to the "very core of what this country stands for." Obviously, the man who promised to fundamentally transform America has his parties mixed up.

There's no straight line running from the architects of our republic to the modern-day Republican Party. The GOP is not perfectly representative of what this country is all about. But it is closer than the Democratic Party.

Central to today's Democratic manifesto are policies that would gall our founders, men who wanted to be free of tyranny, to be liberated from a government that interfered with their God-given right to pursue their own lives.

Democrats of the last half century have taken the opposite path. They want to order people's lives; to supervise, monitor and regulate; to rule rather than represent. Sending swarms of officers to harass the people, and to eat out their substance is their idea of good governance.
Democrats are the grand promoters of the welfare state, a wider and deeper dependence on government and a bitterness toward those who have more. Is that what the framers were thinking about when, at their peril, they drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence?
Is creating conditions in which the productive half of the population supports the other half a core value of our country? Is giving away other people's money a traditional virtue cherished by the American people?

Too many Democrats relish punishing success and rewarding failure, sloth and poor choices. Those are core values of their party, but not of the republicans — lower-case "r" — who built our form of government.

Like his European counterpart, the American Democrat condemns wealth creation and obsesses on economic equality and economic security. He does this even if inequalities and economic insecurity occur naturally in a system in which each person is free to decide for himself if he will work to succeed, where men are able to trade among themselves without government intrusion.
To pay for economic security and to iron out the wealth and income inequalities, the Democrats have pushed the federal debt to new heights. What did the founders say about this?

Thomas Jefferson believed that "we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves." He also warned that "to preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."

These are words no contemporary Democrat would ever speak.

At the top of the Democratic Party is a man who was sold to voters as a brilliant scholar of a document that lays out what America stands for. But scholarship of this sort is useless to Democrats, because in their minds the Constitution doesn't mean what it says — it means what they want it to mean. It's a "living document," they claim, that has no absolutes and can change with the times. Which means that it means nothing at all.

This, of course, is the same Constitution that Obama swore to "preserve, protect and defend," and the same one, presumably, that he said "reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day."
In the final analysis, it's fair to ask if Democrats believe in liberty at all. At one time, they could be counted on to at least defend 1st Amendment freedoms. No more. The Democrats have successfully forced speech codes and political correctness on much of our language.

While the founders were not a monolithic group — there were disagreements, some of them sharp — they were consistent in their defense of liberty. The core of what this country stands for isn't rooted in welfare statism, envy, bitterness, fear-mongering, wealth redistribution, dependence, central planning and soft tyranny.

Ours is a nation founded on freedom, and that is still our core value no matter how much the fact has been denied, obscured and watered down.
• Jackson is an IBD editorial writer.