Why the Tea Party Gives Hope to a Brit and a Canadian

Here is a great post from James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph. Here is a Brit whose feelings I resonate with as a Canadian. The United States of America is not just a country; it is the embodiment of the best of Western political ideals and the home of liberty.

As Daniel Hannan, another conservative Brit, would be quick to point out: the American Revolution was a conservative revolution in favor of ideals of English freedom which were under attack by an out of touch elite. America represents the hope we all have for Western civilization and it is no wonder that the enemies of the West hate Israel and America above all.

Delingpole writes in his post "Only the Tea Party Can Save Us Now":

Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt – as you do on returning to Britain these days – as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.

God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously – otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years – and not just in the US but throughout the Western world – government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.

What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this.

Delingpole laments the degradation of the once proud British Conservative Party into a party that merely advocates socialist decline more gradually.

Rarely have I felt more despondent about the world’s future than I do right now, Britain’s especially. At least when Blair and Brown were in charge, busily ruining things, there was always the consolation that soon would come the backlash which would see a decent, small-state, conservative administration regaining power and the country’s fortunes restored. This hasn’t happened. The similarities between the Eton Grocer’s Coalition and the New Labour government he ousted are far greater than the differences. All are run by a professional political mandarin class in the interests of the professional political mandarin class.

This is not a man who loves a foreign country more than his own; it is a man who sees the best ideals of his own country no longer characterizing his own country but being preserved elsewhere. He concludes:

Sure there’s no comparison (well not that much) between Obama’s US and Stalin’s Soviet Union; Coalition Britain and Mao’s China; Julia Gillard’s Australia and Queen Ranavalona’s Madagascar; sure the war we’re currently fighting doesn’t involve mass destruction like that of World Wars I and II. But it’s precisely because the ideological struggle we’re currently engaged in is so seemingly democratic and innocuous that it is in fact so dangerous. With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today’s encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the steady “engrenage” – ratcheting – of EU legislation; of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN’s Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America’s Environmental Protection Agency; of the stealthy encroachment of the Big Government into the most intimate recesses of our daily lives – not just under barely disguised socialist administrations like Obama’s even under notionally “Centre right” ones such as Cameron’s or Sarkozy’s. When the Enemy is as sly and insidious as that, it’s much much harder for the increasingly oppressed populace to rouse itself to the appropriate state of alarm and rebellion.

That’s why today I say: “Thank God for the Tea Party!” Though it has been typically misrepresented by the liberal media as a rattlers’ nest of gun-toting fruitcakes who want to ban masturbation and abortion, it is, of course, nothing of the kind. It is – whatever the increasingly redundant Moonbat may claim – a genuine grass roots movement inspired by the one great political cause truly worth fighting and dying for: the cause of liberty.

Our ancestors fought and died to preserve Western freedom against the hard totalitarianism of the fascist and communist regimes of the mid twentieth century. But now we, their decadent children, are in mortal danger of surrendering to the soft totalitarianism of the nanny state. But this is to narrowly avoid Animal Farm only to fall into Brave New World.

To my American friends I would say this on election night: you won't realize what riches you had until you suddenly realize they are gone. Don't trade liberty for security; it is not a good deal.