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The Conservative Paradox: Protection against fear requires that you always fear something._
Immediately below is the text of what I received today from Newt Gingrich, on behalf of GOPAC.
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Do you agree with the following statement?
Conservatives believe that this is a great country, filled with good people and they achieve remarkable things. While those on the left believe this is an inadequate country, filled with untrustworthy people, and they have to be policed by someone.
If your answer is "yes" then please make the most generous contribution you can to support GOPAC so they can continue electing conservative Republicans.
For 30 years, GOPAC has trained and elected conservative Republicans who understand the power of ideas. The fact of the matter is ideas are what elected conservative Republicans to state and local offices throughout the 1990s and in the early years of this decade.
GOPAC has been and still is training candidates through the promotion of ideas that relate to freedom, ideas that relate to being endowed by our Creator, ideas that relate to the production of wealth, and ideas that relate to the right of every human being to live in safety and to be free from fear. [Emphasis mine]
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That very last phrase is the one that has recently been most destructive of the protections enshrined in the United States Constitution. Think very hard on what is core to such a postulation, that it is "the right of every human being to live in safety and to be free from fear."
Someone, some thing, some entity is going to protect you, so that you will be safe and that you will not know fear. What entity will that be? Not you, or your neighbor, or your community; each and all are too small, too inadequately funded and equipped.
Who else then?
The state: that is the only entity with the resources to provide some warranty backing those protections.
But what must you relinquish, to the state, in exchange?
First and foremost you will have to relinquish your right to challenge the state, on any issue, in order for it to be most effective. Ongoing subservience to and a deeply rooted inculcation of "My country, right or wrong." Except, lest you be deemed an apostate, your country can never be wrong, always right. You will also have to concomitantly work through a Gordian knot dilemma that is in fact a complete contravention of the shucking off of the fear thing: While you are living in a state unafraid, you will also have to retain a pervasive underlying sense of fear, you must be afraid, you must be very afraid of something. Otherwise, what would there be for the state to protect you from? What would be the raison d'être behind the state's assertion of a claim for funding of the resources necessary to protect you, to keep you safe? While never scrupulously defined, you must always feel lurking there is something out there that thankfully the state is protecting you from.
How about "terrorists"? And who are they? Really? That dark-skinned fellow at work, the one with a peculiar accent, the one you were never quite sure of? The liberal couple down the block who act "strange," who don't think the way "real Americans," like you, do?
And I ask you, when was the last time you read Brave New World, or 1984, or the Constitution?
Oh, that's right: No need to nowadays, so long as you have the conservatives to protect you. Yeah, just go shopping, or to a ballgame. Put your little mind at ease. Relax, everything is under control.
Conservatives and conservative orthodoxy: the greatest threats America and "Americans" have ever known.
