In the 2000 movie, The Patriot, when Benjamin Martin, played by Mel Gibson, was debating whether the colonies should engage in a revolutionary war against England to free itself from King George’s rule, he asked a simple question, “why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?” He went on to explain, “An elected legislature can trample a man's rights as easily as a king can.”
There are approximately 330 million people in the United States of America, and we have 546 people who run our federal government, who basically, have the power to trample our rights; 1 President, 1 Vice President, 100 Senators, 435 Representatives, and 9 Supreme Court Justices. Essentially, we have 546 potential tyrants living in Washington, DC, and if you include all the unelected permanent bureaucrats embedded in our federal government who write the laws, the number of tyrants that control our country, that dictate our lives, is probably much higher than 3,000 Benjamin Martin spoke of.
America has arrived at a place that many in our country have feared for centuries. America’s foundation, its strength is based on a delicate balance of power between the three co-equal branches of government, Executive, Legislative and Judicial. This delicate balance of power prevents the dictates of one side, while protecting the voice of the minority, not only racial or religious minorities, but political minorities as well. That balance is so tenuous that if its upset, then that which makes our country great, which is the root of our prosperity, will crumble.
The true American patriot politician understands this, and therefore puts country over party, sacrifices individual power to maintain this delicate balance for the lasting stability of the nation. The selfish power-monger politician, like those currently in power, puts party over country, chooses personal power over national stability, risks destroying the eternal greatness of the country for fleeting adulation of the self. We are witnessing this desecration of the foundation of our country in real time. Those in power think only of themselves, their power, and have neither the understanding nor the concern of the irreparable harm that their actions are having on the country they’ve been entrusted to lead. They are strip mining our country of all that is good for their own enrichment, and leaving the rest of us with a ravaged empty shell of a country, and they are doing all this under the guise of a self-ascribed dubious virtue.
In the last year and a half, we have witnessed this insidious attack on the foundation of our country. Our current leaders are pushing school systems, which are failing to educate our children, to teach the racially divisive Critical Race Theory to purposely inflame racial tension and division throughout the country. They encouraged the 5 months of racial riots in 2020 which destroyed many of our major cities. They have denigrated and defunded our local police forces, and sat idly by while violent crime in our cities have risen over 150%. Our current leaders have opened our borders to millions of illegal immigrants bringing with them disease, crime and poverty, yet we can’t get basic goods and necessities into our country to stock our grocery store shelves. Fentanyl is pouring across our borders in unprecedented amounts, leading to an all-time high in the number of drug addiction and overdoses. And not only is no one in Washington doing anything about it, they are encouraging it. A large percentage of the American people did not vote for any of this, yet we will be the ones who will pay the biggest price for our politicians’ decisions or inaction.
All of this is done or allowed to happen in order to disrupt the delicate balance of power on which our country rests, so the politicians can wrest even more power for themselves. The Biden Administration is working with big tech monopolies to censor political speech they don’t like by citizens to help ensure their re-election. Our Legislature is working to pass laws which will dictate which kind of energy we can use, and what type of car we can drive. They are pushing to nationalize our local elections, so every election will be as corrupt as the ones in Georgia and Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2020. They are pushing to nationalize law enforcement, so they can further dictate to each America citizen what they can or cannot do or say. In essence, the 546 people in Washington, DC, are acting like a bunch of little tyrants, and many average citizens who just want to live their lives are at the will and whim of these people they didn’t vote for, and didn’t have a chance to vote against.
But really, it only takes 270 people to agree to pass laws, and 268 of those people were elected in elections I was not eligible to vote in. Instead of understanding the dynamic that many of our leaders are leading people who didn’t vote for them, or didn’t even have a chance to vote against them, and work with all representatives to create legislation that benefits all Americans, we have “leaders” who have come to power with the slimmest majorities, and are imposing their will on the rest of the country, forcing legislation down the throats of people they don’t want, making them deal with consequences of decisions they were against.
All newly elected politicians speak eloquently about being a representative of all the people, not just those who voted for them, yet, they govern the exact opposite way. They make decisions and pass legislation that solely benefits their voters or more accurately, their donors. They have a blatant disregard for the rest of the population, imposing their will on the rest of us, a tyranny of 270.
Very few politicians give a damn about the average American citizen. They say they do, but they don’t. So, we should stop giving a damn about them, stop caring about them. They work for us, and collectively they have failed at their jobs. If any of us failed at our jobs as colossally as our “leaders” in Washington have failed at theirs, we would have been given our walking papers long ago. Our leaders are not great people. They are not highly moral or ethical people. They are not people with high integrity. They are not highly intelligent people. They are not people to be admired. They are not special or impressive. So, let’s stop acting as if they are. They won a popularity contest financed by millionaires and billionaires in exchange for access to the power that 51% of the voters entrusted them with. They work for us, but they are really the puppets of their donors, and we are at the mercy of the puppet masters.
Our system of government is corrupted to its core, maybe irreparably so. That is why it’s absolutely comical when many of these corrupt politicians clutch their pearls at the accusation of voter fraud in the 2020 election, as if our system is as pure as the driven snow, and even the mere suggestion of fraud is a threat to the integrity of our elections. Donald Trump was not an existential threat to our country and political system as it is often charged, he was an existential threat to the embedded corruption in Washington, DC, and the corrupt employed every lever of power at their disposal to get rid of him. Trump’s presidency was the canary in the coal mine for our Constitutional Republic. And the canary died, or more accurately, it was slaughtered.
I voted for none of the elected leaders who are making decisions that control my life, and only had the chance to vote against one of them, and this dynamic is why concentrating so much power in the federal government as we have in recent decades is so very dangerous to our country, and essentially disenfranchising to almost half the citizens. And that is the main reason why we are so divided as a country. Until we get back to the original vision of our founders, a true representative republic, our lives will be ruled by the whims of the 3,000 little tyrants each of us had little say in coming to power.
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.