In two and a half centuries, we have gone from this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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."

To this:

You must, against your conscience and free will, submit to forced government injections of experimental chemicals developed by pharmaceutical companies motivated by profit and their bottom line, accept that medical treatments will be administered according to race, and consent to being digitally tracked in perpetuity to ensure your continued compliance with any future mandates the State may deem necessary for the "common good" — or you can lose your job, your property, your liberty, and any possibility for future happiness.

Is it any wonder that Democrats work so hard to "cancel" the Founding Fathers and their project for human freedom?  If Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were alive today, they'd take one look around, spit on their hands, grab some soft dirt, and get back to work.  The American Leviathan can't have that.

If we were being honest, we would acknowledge that the current U.S. government has much more in common with Pablo Escobar than Thomas Jefferson.  The Colombian drug lord and terrorist who controlled the Medellín Cartel in the late 20th century was fond of telling those who considered opposing him that they could choose either plata o plomo — silver or lead — riches or execution.  I'm not saying that these experimental injections for the Chinese Flu are a death sentence — although for anybody who experiences an adverse reaction from forced treatment, especially when we won't know the potential long-term side-effects for a decade or longer, all of this still has to feel like a game of Russian roulette in which the first five players have already pulled the trigger and your turn's up next.

No, the real bullet the U.S. government has loaded in the chamber is for those who resist its medical dictatorship and find themselves denied their natural rights altogether.  Plata o plomo, America!  Reap the rewards of obeying the government's new authorities, or find out what life is like for those who will not comply.  Following in Escobar's footsteps, the U.S. government has decided that threats and coercion are effective tools for selling a lot of drugs!

From my vantage point, the federal authorities have lost all goodwill with the people.  Our current circumstances bring to mind a question posed by Boston clergyman and Loyalist Mather Byles (one revived by Mel Gibson in The Patriot): "Which is better — to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?"  I know this much: if we could rid ourselves of all three thousand tyrants today by sending them all three thousand miles away, we as a people would be much more safe, secure, prosperous, and of course free.

In reflecting upon the crises collectivists and globalists have unleashed on civilization, Brandon Smith over at Alt-Market asks an important question: "Is there a way to prevent psychopaths from getting into positions of power?"  He rightly sees free societies as being under sustained attack by a collection of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths who have effectively taken over government and today conspire for "mutual gain" at the expense of those governed, "much like a pack of wolves" hunting and tearing apart their prey.  He sagely notes that our current situation is ironic because the construction of democratic institutions over the last three centuries was intended, among other things, to liberate populations living under daily threats of death and turmoil brought by the rule of royal dynasties genetically predisposed to psychopathy and self-grandeur.  Democratic institutions, in contrast, were supposed to provide strong mechanisms for "weed[ing] out aberrant individuals" through transparent elections.  

Looking around today at who runs for office and holds power, though, it would seem that having an "aberrant" personality is more of a requirement than a disqualification.  Our ruling psychopaths make running for office highly undesirable for good decent people, and the psychopathic 1% of the 1% pushing globalism down our throats have found it perhaps even more easy to control the votes and actions of poor elected representatives and bureaucrats than to deal with all-powerful kings or mercurial dictators.  Smith sees an unavoidable fight coming in our future but does recommend a future electoral system should the psychopaths ever be "exiled" where a random public lottery (à la mode de William F. Buckley, Jr.), aided by strict term limits, fills every available political and government job.  Hear!  Hear!  

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and we do have a problem today: our "precious democracy" is filled with government actors you wouldn't trust to dog-sit, let alone babysit.  This phenomenon is nothing new; power tends to attract the worst kinds of people.  The good news is that our Founding Fathers devised a system that protects individual rights, champions liberty at the expense of government, and inherently limits power by separating it into distinct jurisdictional branches that compete against each other.  The bad news is that the modern federal government threw out the Constitution decades ago so that the Supreme Court could act as a supra-legislative oligarchy, congressional authority could be controlled by a small monied international ruling class, the president could use his "pen and phone" as would a king, and administrative agencies could simultaneously harness the powers of all three branches of government with hardly any accountability owed to the voting public at all.  

It should be no surprise, then, that our political leaders talk only about "saving democracy" these days and have nothing to say about "preserving freedom."  If we actually preserved our freedom, they'd be out of office permanently.  If "democracy," on the other hand, means nothing more than Club Psychopath, then those in power will rush to preserve their abomination faster than they jumped at the chance to board Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express.  If "voting rights," as the Democrat Congress calls them, mean opening the electoral floodgates to large-scale mail-in balloting initiatives implemented by partisan political operatives and shielded from scrutiny by federal power-hoarders, then "democracy" is just another word for total and permanent control by an entrenched aristocracy.  Democratic institutions are no good in and of themselves if they do not serve to preserve and protect the very natural rights and freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and given such robust spirit by our own Declaration of Independence.

It may be a modern proverb (one often incorrectly ascribed to Benjamin Franklin because it sounds as if it came straight from Poor Richard's Almanack), but it is no less true: "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.  Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."  And when "our precious democracy" has more in common with Pablo Escobar's way of doing business than with Washington's or Jefferson's, we must always be prepared to contest the vote.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.