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In a letter written on December 17, 1814 to U.S. Senator John Taylor, President John Adams wrote that a democracy would quickly become an oligarchy and then to a despotism. He wrote:
Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.
IN CLOSING
In his book Leftism, Kuehnelt-Leddihn elaborates on these very thoughts that President John Adams addressed more than a hundred years earlier.
Leddihn emphasized that the masses are not pure as the wind driven snow. They are not innocents whose moral and civic infection came only by American education, publishing, the press, the theater, and the movie industry.
Those negative public influencers of culture I've just listed have simply promoted ideas which have appealed to the already existing seamier side of human nature. Public influencers have exploited the dark side of the American soul.
Ideas once commonly understood as pernicious have been articulated, through various media (including the American classroom), using twists of language presented in clever and coherent ways.
Corrupting ideas once more hidden in the American mind in nascent and undeveloped form were given a language which seemed to justify the unwholesome as something we should all be proud of.
All of a sudden, the second half of the first chapter of the book of Romans came to America. As did Genesis 19 (Sodom & Gomorrah).
America did not even know to blush!
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