Reagan, both a Lion and a Fox

“..he [a ruler] should take as his models among the animals both the fox and lion, for the lion does not know how to avoid traps, and the fox is easily overpowered by wolves.”

Machiavelli, The Prince

Politics is where the visionary world of dreams, beliefs, and the love of humanity meet the realistic world of deals, calculated appearances, and brute military force. A true political leader needs to provide his people with a vision that can only come from a set of core beliefs and convictions, but, in order to make that vision a reality, he also needs to be skilled in expressing his vision to the world. Politics is no place for the pure idealist; a successful leader must use the weapons of political reality to turn his vision into true accomplishment.

The inspiring vision of human liberty stood atop the world by the end of the Reagan administration, even to the point where credible writers were speaking about its being the so-called “end of history,” that utopian point in time when the goal of man’s dialectic of political conflict would resolve itself into a final peaceful solution. Even Bill Clinton said that the time of big government was over. From those heady days of victory in the cold war, economic juggernauts at home, and socialist humiliation worldwide, history has turned Reagan’s party out of the White House and into an overwhelmed minority in congress. The American people have spoken and they have said that they want an avowed socialist for President and a legislature sympathetic to his ideology. History’s failure to end is now a reality as big government appears to be our immediate future.

What happened? The forces of liberty had lost a great leader, Reagan, and had cast their fates in with men who, while perhaps well-meaning and strong of heart, were unskilled in the art of political expression. While Reagan demonstrated the heart of a lion and the guile of a fox, both Bush Presidents were lions only. All three Presidents had the lion-like qualities that defeated foreign foes, but Reagan also had the ability to communicate to the American people the importance of remaining independent and self-determining citizens.

The press hated Reagan because, unlike them, he did not find wisdom in the enslaving policies of Stalin, Zedong, and Che Guevara, but Reagan’s skill at communicating the truth kept him popular throughout their propagandizing attacks. They hated the Bush family for the same reason (socialism is, after all, just the “institutionalizing of envy”), but the Bush family did not have the communication skills that Reagan had. The attacks on the Bush family stuck like Velcro where they had slid off Reagan like Teflon. Only the fox outwits the ensnaring traps of the predator.

The primary factor that liberty has going for it is that it is the truth. Socialism fails wherever it is tried. In the final analysis, the only systems that work are the ones that give their people the liberty to find their own happiness. But if liberty is to prevail, it will need a leader who not only has the heart of a lion, but the clever fox’s ability to expose the traps of deceit.

1. A Libertarian Philosophy

Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must realize that the basic principle of our freedom is freedom to choose ...
Dante

Many of us have an intuition that there is something fundamentally correct about libertarianism but lack a solid philosophical grounding to support that sense of correctness. In addition to our intuition, there is the massive empirical evidence that the basic ideas of libertarianism promote an economic marketplace that is free, successful, and fairly just. Our willingness to accept a physically challenging universe as non-victims provides us with an appreciation for the importance of human liberty; however, we still long for an ultimate theoretical grounding to support what we know in our hearts is profoundly right.

It is the intention of this blog to provide the libertarian reader with an axiomatic grounding for his beliefs – one that is both solid in its principles and sufficiently simple in its logic to provide the besieged libertarian with a defense to those statist who claim some public right to his person and property.

Even the most carefully planned vessel of thought, however, can be wrecked upon the shoals that lie beneath the surface of such appealing terms as “rights,” “justice,” and “morality.” It is my hope that libertarianism can be anchored in a haven safer than that provided by those ideals that are so often resorted to by the entitled whiner demanding an end of his victimhood.

Rights are a favored ideal among the English-speaking world, having grounded our relatively libertarian idea of government upon the Magna Charta, common law, and the philosophies of John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the American founding fathers. Rights to our own persons and property, however, require a “giver of rights,” necessitating a religious faith in a world where faith is a libertarian’s individual choice. Belief in a giver of individual rights to our person requires an act of faith that can be countered by the secular statist’s faith in the giver of a society’s rights to our person. Rights, like justice and morality, require the leap of our individual faiths and therefore are not a sufficient grounding for our demands for liberty from other individuals.

In the following posts to this blog, I will assert a philosophical foundation of human liberty based not upon a deeper foundation of ideals that, themselves, require a still deeper foundation. The foundation that I will assert will be based upon the pragmatic but very radical idea that liberty is the only manner in which man can relate to his fellow man in peace and dignity. Every alternative to liberty is war.