Remembering Republicanism

It's the Fourth of July. A long time ago, a group of sagacious men gathered in the summer heat in Philadelphia to commit an act of treason against HM The King. Their reason was an inalienable belief in the rights of man. Their focus on the liberation of the individual was all-encompassing. Despite what we've been told in the modern era, men like Jefferson wanted to see the liberation of slaves and the extension of franchise to worthy citizens.
Regardless, the America they sought was a society based on the notion of respect for individual rights that are granted by God and thus in man's nature. They knew that a society that protects the rights of individuals provides the best basis for continued advancement.
They were correct. The country that they built grew rapidly, attracting immigrants and, on their industry, building a vastly strong nation out of a pastoral colony that by its two-hundredth anniversary stood above all others and dominated the earth. The Republic's power eclipses that of any potential rival by a substantial margin in both crucial areas of economics and military might.
Adding to the truism, new injections of liberty spurred on greater growth. After the abolition of slavery, for example, the nation redoubled its development and rebuild after a long and destructive civil war and continued to grow until the Spanish-American War, when the US beat a European power both by land and sea.
Similarly, after the enfranchisement of women in 1920, the US built up its power (after the great depression and FDR's lacking economic programmes)until by the end of the Second World War, it eclipsed all of the European nations altogether.
Then a different sort of struggle for liberty happened- the Civil Rights struggle.
This bit of history is interesting, as it never should have been made necessary. With the passage of the XIII, XIV, and XV amendments to the constitution after the civil war, Blacks were enfranchised and extended full rights. However, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that the states could still practice private discrimination, and gave segregation its blessing in Plessy v. Ferguson. Thus, the practice of discrimination and the infamous Jim Crow laws could have been prevented. However, the Supreme Court had other ideas.
What is especially ironic is that when the problem of discrimination was finally tackled, it was done so with further government involvement. Rather than merely stating the fact that the XIII, XIV, and XV amendments in their nature prohibited discrimination, there was a massive amount of government involvement. The state took over many aspects of the lives of Afro-Americans, building massive projects for them to live in and subjecting them to social engineering. The result is that racism has merely gone underground, and finds new fuel in the controversy over the social engineering programme known as affirmative action. Further attempts to root it out have more deeply entrenched it.
Such is the result of government interference. When you outlaw racist talk, racists re-invent themselves as "alternative politicians" and, rather than expressing their true opinions that would offend any sensible person, they hide their rhetoric behind a mask. Eventually, when their cause becomes popular enough, they unmask their beliefs when it is too late to do anything about them. Such is the case in Europe, where we see the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen and other radical politicians, who let loose racist and anti-Semitic diatribes that are immensely popular.
What do governments do in response? They increase the rigidity and scope of the orthodoxy. Eventually, it gets ridiculous, as people who express the wrong political views or wearing the wrong colours on your t-shirt. This is a ridiculous state of affairs, and a "reactionary" one at that. Rather than racism being an out-of-date and dying ideology going through its radical death-rattles, it is instead a dynamic and expanding ideology that has the initiative. The racists pick and choose battle-grounds while those ostensibly charged with defending the God-granted rights of an entire group of people only come up with progressively more authoritarian five-year diversity plans and proposals for hate-speech laws. This is ridiculous! They can't stop the tide of racism so they turn to purifying those who aren't, trying to purge them of undesirable political opinions. Why? We all agree on the same thing. What's the point of branding people with the scarlet "R" if they criticise the hip-hop culture or the practice of affirmative action?
We see the same thing happening in other aspects of our lives. Islamist terrorist threaten the lives of people across our civilisation. They pull off a massively successful terrorist attack to demonstrate their power. The result is massive restrictions on everyone else. Proposals for national ID cards have floated about, and have been formalised in the odious REAL-ID act. We all pay the price, made literally into Plebians by the Transportation Security Administration. We aren't allowed to see their extensive rules and regulations, but we are still subject to them. As anyone who's had the pleasure of a Fr. Kevin Quirk law class, one knows that a law is not truly legal unless it has been promulgated.
As I sit here on a rainy Independence Day and reflect on the last several years, I realise that I never imagined I'd wake up in a country that was becoming, by degrees, a police state. Like most everyone else, I laughed at those who predicted that we would live in this kind of society. Yet we're waking up further and further entrenched in it. It's enough to make one wonder.