For there to be a king there must be peasants. Peasants aren't defined by their wealth but by their belief that others should rule them.

Generally speaking peasants believe as they do either because they have been taught since birth that the King is better than they are or because without the King they feel they would not survive in a dangerous world. While America was founded by the antithesis of peasants, liberals have been working to reestablish the peasant class because liberals view themselves as the modern nobility; wiser, kinder, more knowing than the folk in flyover country and obligated by their superiority to rule over others. We see this when Obama complains about having to deal with Congress, even a Congress run by his own party, or when Obama says he's envious of how the Chinese leader rules China.

The DNA of Americans is such that any attempt to produce a peasant class by convincing folks that liberals are superior to the average Joe or Jane is doomed to failure. As a result, liberals have taken the second path -- frighten the people to the extent that they feel the government is the only source of safety. The liberal social experiment began with Obama's icon FDR. Like Obama, FDR inherited a very bad economy, and like Obama FDR made the situation worse through poorly-formulated government plans. But both men realized that the more that people depended on the government for their daily bread, the more power the government could wield.

A bad economy worked in both FDR and Obama's favor because it put fear into Americans; sufficient fear that they would turn to government largess as a seemingly safe haven in a time of economic despair. Any candidate who tried to point out that welfare only works until you run out of other people's money stands little chance of getting the votes of people convinced that lavish government spending is their only chance to survive.

The reelection of Obama is not surprising. FDR was reelected even though the U.S. economy didn't recover until, and because of, WWII. Even FDR's support of England -- which was very unpopular in the days before Pearl Harbor -- couldn't get FDR thrown out of office. In the same way, Obama's continued support for the war in Afghanistan and the Gitmo detention facility didn't adversely impact Obama's reelection.

What kept both men in office was the fear of Americans who believed that without the massive government spending on welfare, jobs programs and so on that Obama and FDR supported, they would starve.

Prior to FDR, taking care of the poor was an exercise for private charities. And even in the depths of the Depression, only a tiny number of people died due to poverty. But FDR started the process of making it acceptable for people to live on the government dole without being ashamed, a change that was crucial to making a new class of American peasants.

The momentum picked up under LBJ, whose "Great Society" made it acceptable to spend one's whole life on welfare while having a series of illegitimate children; destroying the black family in the process. While one may argue that LBJ didn't intend to create a peasant class, by the 1970's it was obvious that the "Great Society" was creating an underclass wedded to multi-generational welfare.

Yet liberals fought tooth and nail to avoid reforming welfare. Bill Clinton only agreed to welfare reform when it became clear he wouldn't get reelected if he didn't. Obama gutted welfare reform in order to return as many Americans to economic dependency as he could. He was rejuvenating the peasant class.

Having succeeded in making living off their neighbors through massive government transfers of wealth socially acceptable, the next step liberals took to create the new peasant class was to convince Americans that without government intervention the average person would be exploited and even killed by the private sector, the environment, or their neighbors.

How often do we see the liberal culture and the government blame companies for every ill of society? Guns kill people; letting killers out of jail doesn't kill people. We need the government to keep people from having guns or we will all be killed. Corporations rip everyone off and exploit their workers. Without the government corporations would make us all slaves while selling us carcinogenic food and destroying the environment. We need a massive government to avoid death by global warming. We need a massive government to prevent pharmaceutical companies from selling dangerous products. If you're black whites are out to kill you, and only the government can save you. If you're a union member, conservatives want to reintroduce slavery -- only the government can save you. If you're Hispanic, conservatives want to exploit you and only the government can protect you.

It is not by accident that liberals unleash an unending stream of scare stories in which the only way to avoid a messy, early, and unpleasant demise is by giving the government more control over your life. Even people who don't need the government to pay for their housing and food can be convinced that government should be all-powerful in order to protect the average American from rapacious corporations and the unending list of new and more horrifying dangers lurking around every corner.

A third aspect of the liberal plan was their changes to immigration laws that made it easier for people from countries where they had learned that rights flow from the government not from God to enter this country. Liberals support illegals because illegals are in a precarious situation and massive government, so long as it views illegals as its friends, is seen as a protector.

Liberal efforts to break up the family -- so successful with Black Americans in the 1960s and 1970s -- are based on the need to eliminate a familial support structure. While Hillary believes we need a village to raise a child, she's thinking in terms of government not in terms of extended families. If you have no family to turn to allowing the government to control your life in return for security becomes a more credible option.

Finally liberals have worked to make America a land of people, not of laws. The original intent of the Constitution was that it should apply to all people equally and that it should be based on the will of the voters. Liberals have subverted both of those concepts in ways that make people more comfortable with the creeping autocracy of the government. Hate crimes, for example, are a way to allow favored minorities, usually members of the new peasant class, to receive more protection under the law. A crime against a member of a protected group can be prosecuted twice, with the perp facing a harsher penalty. Similar discrimination against Blacks is illegal, as it should be, but discriminating against whites and Asians is in fact enshrined in current law.

Additionally, the law has been taken out of the hands of the people's representatives via the obscene concept of judicial activism. The Supreme Court is no longer a court; instead it is a collective monarchy which feels comfortable with remaking the law as it sees fit rather than interpreting the law in light of the intentions of the elected people who passed the law. From Miranda to Roe v. Wade to the latest ruling on ObamaCare, Americans under 50 years of age have grown up seeing that the Supreme Court can turn the legal system on its head with a single opinion. Congress is nothing unless the Supreme Court approves and the Constitution is a living document that the Court can reshape at will based on the latest liberal trends.

Liberals are not advocating a monarchy -- that pesky American DNA again -- because they have learned that elections are fine as long as the peasant class is large enough. Once a sufficiently large percentage of the population believes that they need to bow to the government in order to survive, no politician who advocates self-reliance and independence can hope to win.

The new peasant class feels comfortable with taking money from their neighbors via the government, with allowing government to control their lives -- for their own good, of course -- with the courts having super legislative power, and with a government based on people, not on laws. They feel that way because they believe the alternative is literally fatal.

Many of those who voted for Obama did so more out of ignorance than because they belong to the new peasant class but because they were affected, if not controlled, by their fear of what would happen if they had to live without the government being there. For a young single woman in a culture that allows men to use women and then dump both the woman and her children it's not irrational to turn to the government to provide the support that used to come from families and husbands especially if you come from a broken family yourself. Over time many of these people will fall into the peasant class especially as the economy worsens.

A nation cannot exist half peasant and half free because eventually the free will not be able to support the peasants. When that happens societal chaos that often results in dictatorships and far more blatant oppression than even Obama advocates is likely to occur.

The challenge America faces is how to turn the peasant class back into the independent people they can be. If we don't succeed in the near term it will happen in the long term with the collapse of our economy. We can see the future in Europe; the Europe of today and of the 1930s where economic collapse lead to Fascism and the Holocaust.

You can find more of tom's rants at Conversations about the obvious