As the Democrat Party’s base moves farther and farther left, and as the political left keeps making ‘moral correctness’ more important than ‘factual correctness,’ I thought I would take some time to explore the moral underpinnings of collectivism. Since collectivist thinkers, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, have sworn an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ I also thought I might look at our founding documents, including the Constitution, to see how compatible the moral underpinnings of collectivism are with the document these people have sworn to uphold.
What I found is, to say the least, troubling…
Collectivist thought starts with a very simple premise: the people, collectively, own the government. The key here is that the people only own the government collectively, or, to put that another way, the collective owns the government.
Under collectivism, each individual is owned by the collective, making us nothing more than property, and since the collective is organized and ran by the government, we are, for all practical purposes, the property of the government. Under collectivism, we are, for lack of a better phrase, slaves of the state. Other than the right to vote, collectivists hold us as being no different than farm animals.
Under collectivism, the collective is the source of everything, and particularly the source of human rights. We must be always observant of the fact that any rights granted the individual, are necessarily removed from the collective, and that the collective is infinitely more important than is the individual. As such, while human rights may be important on one level and can thus be said to exist, on a larger level, government must violate them when necessary in support of the collective – making all human rights less than absolute. One might even say that collectivists consider human rights mere guidelines, to be recognized only when convenient.
Nothing you have, or consider your own, is truly yours, as your right to it comes from the collective, and the collective, through it’s instrument of government, has every right to take back whatever it gives, whenever doing so serves the collective. That includes your life. If your death serves the collective better than does your life, the collective has every right, and indeed a moral obligation, to sacrifice you toward the greater good. If sacrificing you in the most horrific way imaginable provides a deterrent to keep others from going against the collective, then a horrific death is what a collectivist government must ethically provide. Greed is particularly evil, under collectivist thought, and the quest to kill greed is what has driven every collectivist government in history to kill people by the millions.
Let’s take a look at how this collective sense of morality gels with our founding documents.
The Declaration of Independence specifically states that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Liberty is further defined as ‘the quality or state of being free; the power to do as one pleases; freedom from physical restraint; freedom from despotic or arbitrary control.’ Collectivism is the moral opposite of individual liberty. The collectivist state is actually required to physically restrain every individual who wishes to do anything other than what the state arbitrarily allows.
All ‘unalienable rights,’ under collectivism, are applied to the collective, and by extension, to the government. Individuals cannot possibly have ‘unalienable rights’ under collectivism, as every individual right is a restriction upon the state, and by extension, the collective. Individual rights can only exist as permitted by the collective, and the collective always has the right to violate those rights whenever it sees fit.
Collectivism is also incompatible with the US Constitution, the preamble of which reads:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty, to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The preamble does not confer any specific powers, but it is a statement of intent, making it instructive when interpreting the powers conveyed throughout the rest of the Constitution.
The Constitution establishes justice, making it the law upon which all other laws are based. The Constitution insures domestic tranquility, giving the Constitution the power to restrict both the Federal Government, as well as the individual states, from infringing on the powers inherent to the individual. The Constitution provides for the common defense, protecting us from those, outside our nation, who would restrict our inherent rights. The Constitution secures the blessings of liberty, which we already defined as the unalienable right to do, essentially, whatever one wishes, as long as one does not interfere with others’ rights to do as they wish.
‘General Welfare’ is a phrase that occurs twice in the Constitution. We see it in the preamble, and we see it again in Article 1, Section 8.1. Article 1, Section 8, defines the powers of Congress, but the first paragraph, where ‘general Welfare’ occurs, is explanatory in nature – the things listed (such as ‘general Welfare’) being defined by the specific powers listed in the rest of Article 1, Section 8.
In other words, the Constitution is a restrictive document, that defines the specific powers the federal government has. The federal government has no powers, under the Constitution, other than those directly specified in Article 1, Sections 8.2-8.18.
The notion that government can be limited in power, or scope, is antithetical to collectivism. By extension, our Constitution is antithetical to collectivism. The very basis of our country is antithetical to collectivism.
Ironically, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other practitioners of collectivism within our House and Senate, have taken an oath of office to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ The oath of office goes even further, saying, ‘I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’
The Constitution is antithetical to collectivism, and it is thus impossible for someone to support collectivism while also supporting the Constitution of the United States. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and others like them are liars when they claim to ‘bear true faith and allegiance to the same.’ These people have no intention of supporting and defending the Constitution, as the Constitution forbids collectivism.
Even some Democrats accept that most Democrats have completely abandoned their oaths of office. Howard Schultz, a life-long Democrat who owns Starbucks, recently said he might run for President as an independent. He said, on 60 minutes, that he could not ‘in good conscious’ run as a Democrat, as he believes the bulk of the party has moved so far left as to having become ‘a reckless failure of their constitutional responsibility.’
When centrist Democrats recognize that the bulk of Democrats in public office are grossly in violation of their oaths of office, that’s a problem.
We are already beginning to enter the next election cycle, and many of the people running for the Presidency are collectivists, none of whom can honestly take the oath of office.
Collectivism is antithetical to everything the United States stands for, and if we allow collectivism to take hold, our country shall be no more.
