Paradise Lost: How The Americans Discarded Their Freedom

John F. Gaski, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Mendoza College of Business
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
© John F. Gaski

Most historians now pinpoint the determinant event as Barack Obama's election back in 2008. Along with his party's majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress, including a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate, President Obama acted very quickly after his inauguration to essentially legalize all the illegal aliens in the United States. Naturally, this action operated as a magnet, as intended, for even more illegal immigration and, through the efforts of partisan organizations such as Acorn, huge numbers of the former illegals, and even still-illegals, were soon registered to vote. The transparent Democrat Party aspiration that the overwhelming preponderance of these new voters would also be liberal Democrats proved out. This alone made it impossible for any Republican ever again to be elected to office at the national level, and allowed the Democrats to consolidate power in a virtual one-party state. Those who had suspected the Democrats of being closet totalitarians were vindicated intellectually, if not allowed to enjoy that purely academic triumph.

Curiously, before the pivotal '08 election, the compliant American media never asked candidate Obama about his relevant plans concerning immigrant amnesty policy.

Then, as if they really needed it, the Democrat Congress repealed even the limited measures recently enacted to subdue vote fraud. This gave them carte blanche to steal the few elections they were not "winning" anyway. Another tidy totalitarian touch was forced unionization of the national labor force through the "card check" law, effectively removing the secret ballot from union elections. In retrospect, it is remarkable how simple the transition to dictatorship can be, and was in the U.S. case. Recall as well the German Nazi election and subsequent "Enabling Laws" of the 1930s.

The poor, naïve Republicans had been pointing to the 2010 and 2012 national campaigns without realizing that those would not be real elections, having been virtually fixed.

Further analysis, with the advantage of hindsight, illuminates earlier tell-tale signals of what was to come in the former United States. Low-grade suppression of politically incorrect speech, as a symptom of liberals' intolerant compulsion for orthodoxy, had become pandemic in the U.S. in the two decades preceding the Obama victory. After the Democrat takeover, more and more Democrat-appointed courts found, first, any criticism of President Obama and, then, any criticism of Democrats, to be unlawful "hate speech," with corresponding criminal penalties, including some not seen before.

Then came re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine, by stealth, upheld by a 4-4 Supreme Court vote, which quelled the last vestiges of opposition in the alternative media. And nationalized health care achieved the Democrats' dream of giving government literal death-grip power over citizens' lives. This crowning touch followed nationalization of the banks, which gave the Democrat dictatorship a stranglehold over money and credit. Historical opinion now recognizes that the anti-conservative fear campaign originating early on in Obama's Homeland Security apparatus ranks somewhere between the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Kristallnacht as an instrument of domestic terrorism by government.

Another harbinger had been the "politics of personal destruction" diversionarily decried by President Bill Clinton but energetically practiced by him and his party during the 1990s against anyone who was a threat to them. As a poignant illustration, perhaps the most under-reported scandal of that time was how the Clintons literally tried to railroad an innocent man into prison just because he was in their way. Such was the stark nature of what they did to a man named Billy Dale who had a position the Clintons coveted for patronage in the White House Travel Office. (Behavior on trivial matters can be a non-trivial window into the human soul.) Looking back, it is borderline astounding that the American public did not grasp the implications of this amoral cynicism and cruelty by the leading Democrats. Short of murder and possibly rape, is there anything worse than this? If Democrats will stoop to this--think of it, trying to send an innocent man to prison!--is there any limit to what they will do? America was to find out.

In other words, the liberal Democrats in the U.S. had been inadvertently revealing hints for years about their true Stalinist tendencies. Their party's young radicals of the 1960s and '70s, who had appeared to adopt the principles of the international ultra-left so completely, really did, and didn't change. "Pinko" fellow travelers, as they had been caricatured? It turns out to have been true all along, and then some.

In fact, there were other such contemporary stirrings of the Democrats' heavy-handed, even brutal, proclivity to criminalize any opposition to their agenda-i.e., a bloodsport political orientation of "we will not only ruin you, we will prosecute you"-but this trait was manifested manifold in the Obama administration's Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war crimes trials. The families of the star-chamber-convicted officials always believed that Mr. Obama himself would not have authorized the executions, that he would have been content with convictions followed by his own magnanimous pardons. But after Barack Obama's untimely and mysterious resignation from office, the ascension of his Vice President to become President Rodham left the hapless Republican sacrificial pariahs with no chance. No way would Hillary disappoint her rabid and blood-thirsty base of MoveOn.org types, especially given her own ruthless record, partially cited here. (See also total warfare waged against her husband's sex victims.)

Again, this action was previewed in campaign trail remarks by Obama's temporary first Vice President, Joe Biden, but few seemed to take notice. So then it was, "we'll not only destroy you and put you in prison, we'll kill you." Understandably, this had a chilling effect on residual Republican and independent opposition, just as the Democrats intended.

A digression: Yes, the Obama resignation seemed shocking at the time, but scholarly consensus now fixates on the likelihood that successor Hillary Rodham had something big on hi m, that is, knew what he was covering up in his university and medical records. When those documents and their staggering contents came to light years after Mr. Obama left office, it became clear why the Obama strategy of planting the rumor about questionable citizenship was a brilliant misdirection.

What of the Americans' beautiful and beloved Constitution (still regarded worldwide as the model)? Liberal jurists had already been ignoring it for years so it was a short step for their nation's legal foundation to almost immediately become as irrelevant as the old Soviet constitution had always been, ironically.

Testifying to the breathtaking pace of events in this classic case of how world history's paragon of liberty lost it all, the sequence recounted here took less than three years to completely unfold. If that were not enough, with their crypto-dictatorship in place, the U.S. Democrats (so-called) rapidly ran their world-dominant economy aground. (Very few U.S. citizens were even aware that their economy had had seven straight years of growth extending almost to the time of Obama's election. A profound, perhaps supreme, irony and cosmic injustice: It was those Democrats who almost exclusively caused their country's financial crisis and panic of 2008, and then were rewarded with total rule because they succeeded in diverting blame! If the American electorate had not been so dumbed-down by 40 years of malpractice by the liberal education establishment in the U.S., they might have seen through the Democrats' smokescreen and understood how the Dems themselves compelled all those bad loans, and then the fall of America never would have happened. It is almost as if the De mocrats executed a four-decade overthrow scheme exactly as planned. It has to be regarded as one of history's great instances of perverse consequences that pursuit of a noble aim, expanded home ownership, could be transmogrified into the death of a nation because of unsavory political interference, over-regulation, and corrupt abuse.)

From the comfort of their fortified Washington salons, the new American dictators cared little, though, apparently because they never really cared much about economics or even the welfare of their people, despite their relentless posturing about civil liberties. Those who always knew that the U.S. Democrats were hypocrites were validated, as well, for what it is worth. As later confirmed by excavated internal documents of the Democrat bureaucracy, they actually destroyed the U.S. economy intentionally in order to lubricate the imposition of socialism. (For example, with pension fund assets zeroed out, and even the value of the currency annihilated, the citizenry became totally dependent on government.) This, in fact, had been Obama's aim from the beginning, as should have been evident from his first two months in office.

One other thing the brain-dead American voters of Obama's era missed: You don't spend 20 years as a close friend and acolyte of an anti-American racist, Rev. Wright, and work closely with an anti-American terrorist, Bill Ayers, unless you, yourself, are anti-American. As we now know as well, a Barack Obama doesn't stay married for 20 years to a woman who intensely disdains her country unless he shares that sentiment. Moreover, if the American public had not been so brain-damaged by liberal educational malfeasance they might have reasoned that, as Obama's Senate voting record was to the left of an admitted socialist, Sanders of Vermont, then Obama himself must be either a socialist or something even more extreme.

Readers also surely know, from their elementary school history, the ugly details of the reign of a successor U.S. ruler, a generation after the Obama-Rodham regime, who became known as "the American Caligula" while demonstrating the maxim that "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

But it was such excesses and depravity that led to final collapse (following a couple of horrific rebellions by American patriots unwilling to live in a Union of Socialist States of America or USSA), satrapy receivership by foreign creditors for what was left of their state, and subsequent world dominance by the Eastern hemisphere culminating in the "Chinese century"--which replaced some rather severe international depredation coming out of the anarchic Middle East. Without America's traditionally benign leadership to oppose Eastern appetites, Dark Ages II did befall the world for a time but, fortunately, we are now able to examine and appreciate the golden age that the originally-constituted United States of America embodied and fostered. (Another Democrat tactic of the American period was to deny or belittle their country's unparalleled success. Historians still wrestle with how that approach could have been so politically effective domestically.)

Of course, some modern scholars hold that the American tragedy merely reflects a routine case of the evolution, decline, and fall of nations, i.e., that extreme affluence begets terminal weakness in the ending throes of a national life-cycle. Yet it truly appears that it need not have happened to America. The necessary condition, the tragic flaw, would seem to have been the left's oppressive infiltration of public education in 20th Century America. If not for the abandonment of values and standards in the schooling of two whole generations of U.S. citizens just prior to their democracy's fall, that citizenry--a better-educated one--would not have ignorantly succumbed to the fatuous nostrums of liberal Democrat (later exposed as socialist and outright Marxist) politicians at such critical crossroad times, especially the fateful and fatal 2008 election. An honest media would have helped, too, but they were in league with the "Democrats" until it was too late. Another factor, to be sure, was Republican meekness during the same period, exemplified by their last President Bush's acceptance of his role as punching bag for the opposition party and media.

Many lessons permeate the end of American history, as we all know, such as how easily a great power can crumble-ironically, again, in this episode as the rival Soviet Empire had done a few years earlier. But America fell harder and farther, and never recovered. From our historical vantage point it is tempting to wish to ask American voters of that 2008 watershed, if we could, "How could you be so stupid?" Alas, we also know the answer: They couldn't help it. Their soon-to-be dictators made them that way, and that condition not only set the process in motion but sealed their doom.

R.I.P., USA. You really had something special, the closest thing to a real "Shangri-La" or utopia that our world will ever see, which we, the "honest historian underground," continue to admire vicariously.

A final irony, however: The Americans never would have expected their epitaph to be written in Mandarin and Arabic.

Respectfully submitted,

Dr. Bu-Hu No-Mo Usa
Professor of History
Beijing University
Beijing, United States of China

Dr. Osama al-Hussein
Professor of Western Antiquity
Arafat-Obama University
Mohammed City (formerly Tel-Aviv), Palestine


November, 2009

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The real author has been a registered Democrat for over 20 years. Rebuttal to any who disagree with the forecast: It is merely a minimalist extrapolation of present facts and trends, and what we already know about the national Democrats.