The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Who Determines Your Happiness?
Over the years, numerous studies have shown that those on the Left tend to be less happy than those on the Right. Why is that? Former Republican Representative Thaddeus McCotter takes a stab at the answer:
In their sagacity, our founders recognized the God-given right to define and pursue one’s own happiness. As the Declaration of Independence avers:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Indeed, if one cannot define and pursue his or her happiness, there can be no liberty. And without liberty, what is life but a penal sentence beneath the boot of a tyrannical regime?
Further, the founders differentiated the pursuit of happiness from its attainment, something that is impossible for any government to guarantee. Throughout our nation’s revolutionary experiment in self-government, generations of Americans have realized that a government powerful enough to provide your happiness will also be powerful enough to define what will make you happy — with or without your consent. This is likely to make one very unhappy, indeed. As former President Gerald R. Ford succinctly expressed the danger: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
The Left, however, traditionally has conflated the pursuit with the attainment of happiness; and attempted to seduce citizens with the siren song of a Leviathan government able to provide the means to one’s happiness. Of course, this promise can never be fulfilled, which has compelled the Left to try and “fundamentally transform” Americans’ expectations both of what constitutes happiness and how it must be pursued. In the process, the Left fundamentally rejects the foundational principles of sovereign citizens engaged in self-governing, and their consenting to the acts of a subservient government.
This struggle between Liberty and tyranny is really what defines today’s political divide. Via cancel culture and other leftist thought policing, they are seeking to squelch happiness, not guarantee it.
Politically, the Left’s goal is patent: the accumulation of power over Americans to dictate its radical agenda. Yet, on a more personal level, the Left’s behavior has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with animus. …
The Left’s radical ideology is not about making you happy. It is not even about making them happy. It is about making you as miserable as they are.
McCotter rightly notes that “what the Left wants is not progress; it is power.” That, ironically but predictably, is what makes leftists miserable. But he concludes with hope:
Nonetheless, the Declaration of Independence also provides a remedy for those who seek to define and direct their own pursuit of happiness, safeguarding their liberty, livelihoods, and lives from the governmental Leviathan:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Thus, we citizens possess the power to secure our rights by peaceably assembling and pacifically abolishing or altering our servant government every election.
Thanks, yet again, to the genius of the founders.