The Shadow State and the Rule of Law
Donald Trump and his team are complaining of being stymied in his presidential efforts, to which I will return in a moment. Whatever one thinks of any leader’s policies and orders, it is probably a good thing that neither a president nor a prime minister, nor even a king, can do whatever they want, a la Machiavelli’s Prince, whether we like them or not. That was the central point of the 13th century Magna Carta, wherein the monarch’s power would be circumscribed by a written constitution and other checks and balances. This is what is known as the ‘rule of law’, developed by the Church in her social doctrine, “where each power (is) balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds”. This is to ensure that “the law is sovereign and not the arbitrary will of men.”
The three basic spheres of authority are the legislative (which makes the laws), judicial (which judges the laws) and executive (which enforces the laws). These are meant to work in harmony, in accordance with the natural moral and divine law, as clarified in divine revelation
Of course, we are a far way from this balance, and drifting further from divine and natural law. But what is also troubling is the ‘Deep’ or ‘Shadow’ State, what is doing much of the aforementioned ‘stymying’, a whole panoply of thousands upon thousands of unelected officials and bureaucrats, who belong to neither the legislative, executive nor judicial branches, but can, or think they can, make or break a president, running things behind the scenes. As presidents and prime ministers, congresses and senates and parliaments, come and go, these ‘shadow’ officials remain, unknown and anonymous, year after year, with the capacity to foster or hinder what legislation it likes, or to ensure such legislation is enforced or not.
One of the principal political tasks of the citizenry of any nation or society is to keep its own government in check, to limit its size and the scope of its authority, in accord with the principle of subsidiarity. For most things in life, from education to the economy, we private citizens should be responsible. The government is at the service of the people, not the other way around. De Tocqueville saw early in America’s history that one of the inherent dangers in democracy (a danger which may be applied in different ways to any form of government) is an implicit ‘tyranny’, that a certain group would seize the reins of power, through democratic means, of course, and then never let go. Enriching and empowering themselves through the nation’s own laws, which are made ever-more byzantine and inscrutable, their unelected power becomes ensconced, and more powerful the more hidden it is.
Thus we end up with practical socialism, a dictatorship of the State, covered with the veneer of democracy. The question now before us is, how democratic is Canada? The rebuttal of the liberals is, and Liberals, if you don’t like what you see, vote us out.
But how? A vast preponderance of people work for the government, either directly or indirectly, their votes more or less bought and paid for, teachers, university professors and students (heavily subsidized), military members, physicians, nurses and just about everyone in the medical field, including all the support workers, the whole political class, professors, police officers at all levels, all the city, province, and federal maintenance and office workers, prisoners of all stripes, all those on welfare, and benefits of supported Native reserves, and, then, we might add, even amongst the once-vibrant ‘private sector’ (whence all true wealth derives), there is every company that receives generous federal subsidies (Bombardier!, all the green energy boondoggle), every man-jack of them has a deep vested interest in voting for those who will keep them well and fully funded and employed. And this is before we start on the tens of thousands of refugees/migrants that Trudeau plans to bring over. How could they not see him as the new Moses leading them to the promised land? How can any rational argument take place in such a constrictive, socialist milieu?
Look what happened to Tim Hudak (remember him?) when he proposed downsizing by a measly 100,000 government workers (a number too low by one degree of magnitude in my own opinion), an idea that went down, and brought him down, like a dead Hu-duck.
Besides that, even if a more conservative government is elected, any efforts to instantiate conservative principles and policies, as we are witnessing with the Donald down south, are all too easily neutralized by all the red-tape judicial byzantine bureaucracy, at which the permanent Deep State operatives are expert, shuffling papers on their well-polished office chairs. All they have to do is find a sympathetic judge, somewhere in the multifold layers of the government. This is not conspiracy theory, for they have been rather brazen in their intentions. It is their way, or no way.
It gets worse, for ‘liberal’ policies reign almost uncontested in our schools and universities and media. Just about every single person in my generation and younger has had their minds and whole world outlook shaped and formed, one might better say deformed, by the socialist left, and that includes who have and continue to entrust their children to the State-controlled school system, from kindergarten to their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Justin Trudeau is an archetype, stamped most firmly with the Liberal ethos, where the only apparent ‘sins’ are rigidity and intolerance, not-being-nice (at least to the right people), ‘patriarchy’, ecological insensitivity, denying climate change and, as we have just seen with the bizarre case of Milo Yiannopoulos, even a hint of paedophilia (on which I will write soon).
Yet we on the side of ‘right’ (I despise those terms adopted from the French Revolution, but they are what they are) are so afraid to speak our mind. We are cowed and intimidated into a secular dhimmitude. Exhibit A: Even the staunch Catholic Andrew Scheer, running for the Conservative Party leadership, hopefully to become Prime Minister, has declared that he has no intention of legislating on abortion, apparently not to rock the boat on this settled ‘question’, which apparently is part of the Conservative platform itself. Whatever his own view of the prudence of this policy, the fact that he has to admit this speaks volumes. Must we who actually believe in life, sanity and societal cohesion therefore accept the status quo ad infinitum? The victories of the past generation have all, with very, very few exceptions, been on the side of immorality, societal disintegration, irrationality and death, with euthanasia murder-suicide the recent icing on the thanatophilic cake.
Implicit in all of this, as even the Left sees, is the danger of revolution and consequent dictatorship, as the State-media-university complex continues its stranglehold and constriction, shouting down opponents, even conscientious objectors, now with the not-so-vague threat of imprisonment. Without vigorous public debate and hearty opposition, and a vibrant give-and-take within a free society, wherein the truth can be clearly expressed an debated, the only recourse becomes simmering resentment and ultimate violence. The beginning of the attempt to outlaw ‘Islamophobia’, following upon homophobia and transphobia, is but one case in point. Thought and speech control rarely end well.
What is needed is not a trimming and pruning of ‘Liberal’ policies, but a whole house cleaning, a veritable hosing down of the Augean stables, which, alas, I do not think can be accomplished politically, at least not politics as it now stands in Canada. That may have to be God’s work, in His own good time.
In the meantime, we must continue our efforts to rebuild the culture from the ground up, regardless of the sacrifices and difficulties involved, always maintaining peace and equanimity within our souls, our minds clear and sure in the truth, which will win out in the end, one way or the other.
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Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów
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