Our Country Was Founded by Geniuses, but It's Being Run by Idiots Five years before John O’Sullivan was drafting these ideas, I was noticing the same thing present in the student bureaucracies funded by the Student Government at Oregon State University. I ran the Educational Activities Committee and was a voting member of the Student Fees Committee. Budgeting required holding open meetings to take testimony pro and con as to each of the entities funding. The deeper I delved, the more I realized that most of the entities were fundamentally socialist cabals designed to sluice money to the student bureaucrats' desired outcomes, not to achieve the stated goals of the entity. That experience sluiced me into becoming an avowed and permanent Classical Liberal desiring only the smallest possible, least intrusive, and most restricted government at every level. At the same time, I became aware of and began to adopt the "generations and saeculum" idea that history is cyclical that would later become the foundational idea driving the book The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny "The eminently quotable Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said sometime back: "Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots." I heartily agree, and the problem is not self-correcting. The principles behind the formation of America's government were and are exquisite, but the American government, like all forms of government, is corrupt as hell. This isn't an extraordinary statement. Exquisite things often break, and even the noblest of institutions become distorted over time until the original purposes for their creation are eclipsed (and often contradicted) by the personal motives of the men running those institutions into the ground. This phenomenon is apparent anywhere there is power. John O'Sullivan, a senior policy adviser for Prime Minister Thatcher, wrote a short essay thirty years ago that should have made freedom-minded conservatives rethink any lingering attachments to institutional authorities. He asked a question we often ask ourselves: how is it that almost all institutional bodies — whether governmental agencies or purportedly "nonpartisan" scientific academies or even religious groups and charities — transform over time into left-leaning entities? In grappling with what might seem inexplicable, he corralled three insights about organizational behavior: (1) Robert Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy asserting that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic their foundations, will come to be run by an elite group of people; (2) Robert Conquest's Second Law stating that every organization behaves as if "headed by secret agents of its opponents"; and (3) O'Sullivan's very own First Law positing that "[a]ll organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." In other words, Michels tells us that the key to understanding any institution is its leadership, not its charter. Conquest argues that the leadership will always have objectives at odds with the organization's intended purpose, if for no other reason than that the leadership's continued employment and future power paradoxically depend upon never completely succeeding. And O'Sullivan takes this insight farther by noting that the type of person who staffs such organizations tends to disdain private profit and the historic composition of Western civilization's free-market culture. Note also that these three observational laws explicitly take as a premise that the organizations have not been actively infiltrated by Marxist saboteurs or actual enemy agents, but rather evolve over time by the weight of natural sociological tendencies. When we add Occam's Razor into the mix, it is just as persuasive to suppose that all institutions become increasingly socialist over time at the rate of success that Marxists have in quietly but persistently insinuating themselves into the hierarchical ranks of absolutely any institution with power, whether those with legal teeth such as the FBI and CDC or those with cultural teeth such as Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball. Hence, if Gramsci's "long march through the institutions" seems to have succeeded, it's probably because the political left has never stopped marching." This letter from Thomas Jefferson is important because it defines the idea that liberty is not static but must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. There can be no doubt that it is time for patriots to marshal, for the tyrants are here to destroy the Great American Experiment in Liberty that the founding fathers so carefully built more than 240 years ago. The tyrants arise every 80 years or so and seek to overthrow the institutions and kill the people supporting liberty. It is time to fight these tyrants and water the tree of liberty with their blood if necessary. To William Stephens Smith Paris Nov. 13. 1787. Dear Sir I am now to acknolege the receipt of your favors of October the 4th. 8th. and 26th. In the last you apologize for your letters of introduction to Americans coming here. It is so far from needing apology on your part, that it calls for thanks on mine. I endeavor to shew civilities to all the Americans who come here, and who will give me opportunities of doing it: and it is a matter of comfort to know from a good quarter what they are, and how far I may go in my attentions to them.—Can you send me Woodmason’s bills for the two copying presses for the M. de la fayette, and the M. de Chastellux? The latter makes one article in a considerable account, of old standing, and which I cannot present for want of this article.—I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.—You ask me if any thing transpires here on the subject of S. America? Not a word. I know that there are combustible materials there, and that they wait the torch only. But this country probably will join the extinguishers.—The want of facts worth communicating to you has occasioned me to give a little loose to dissertation. We must be contented to amuse, when we cannot inform. Present my respects to Mrs. Smith, and be assured of the sincere esteem of Dear Sir Your friend & servant, Th: Jefferson
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