Rehabilitating Americanism

(This is the Old Hoosier Legionnaire's Opinion. It is not necessarily that of the Department of Indiana, the Officers and members, or the newspaper The Hoosier Legionnaire.)

The Old Hoosier Legionnaire thinks it's about time to rehabilitate a term that seems to have fallen into disuse, if not disrepute, over the past several decades, at least among those outside The American Legion Family: Americanism.

Americanism is not a jingoistic anachronism. It is a term with solid meaning behind it, a term that once defined the attitudes, traditions, and culture that the people of this nation deemed appropriate and necessary for transmittal to subsequent generations.

Most of those attitudes, traditions and attributes of culture are under assault -- at the highest levels of government, in higher education, in the news organizations and the entertainment industry. Most egregious, in the view of the Old Hoosier Leigonnaire, is the assault now under way by agents of the federal government.

One instance in particular prompts these thoughts: the idea enunciated by our President during his summit on health care that the process is not important, that the time for process has passed, that results are what matter now.

With all due deference to the President, he could not be further off base.

Perhaps in other nations, in other systems, the process is not important, only the ends. But not in America. In this nation, the process is the very essence of American representative democracy. "...governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..." as set forth in the Declaration of Independence.

It follows from that phrase that powers assumed without the consent of the governed are not just, and are therefore an usurpation of power that rightfully belong to the governed, to be by them reserved to themselves or delegated to agents of their own choice.

The current battle over health care is not a battle over health care, and it's not a battle over insurance reform. It is a battle over whether or not the consent of the governed still matters in matters of public policy. There is no indication that the governed have agreed to the government assuming the power it seeks to assume.

The issue is not one of right opinion or wrong opinion, correct remedy or incorrect remedy, potential abuse of the minority or misuse of the majority. It is not an issue of elected representatives voting their conscience or voting their constitutents. These objections are smokescreens to cover what is a conscious effort to govern by standards other than those set forth in our founding documents.

What say you?