Wolves In Waiting: Jefferson on Elective Despotism
What Oklahoma's Acceptance of Biden's Blood Money (ARPA) means about the present state of our representative democracy.
Oklahoma’s Elective Despotism:
Oklahoma’s Elective Despotism
Thomas Jefferson predicted the day Oklahoma leaders and legislators sold the bodies and minds of its children for Biden’s ARPA blood money, while making everyone believe they didn’t.
What’s interesting about Jefferson’s text below is the use of animal imagery - seeing government as a “wolf” whose teeth and claws would need to be pulled if liberty were to survive.
We are surrounded by wolves, Oklahoma. They dine with you. They call you their friend. But make no mistake, their talons of ignorance and self-interest are already imbedded deep in our liberty, but we’re getting off easy.
A majority of our children won’t get off so easily. They will pay for our ignorance and complacency with their lives.
“Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess, or may assume. The public money and public liberty, intended to have been deposited with three branches of magistracy, but found inadvertently to be in the hands of one only, will soon be discovered to be sources of wealth and dominion to those who hold them; distinguished, too, by this tempting circumstance, that they are the instrument, as well as the object, of acquisition.
With money we will get men, said Cæsar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them.
They [the assembly] should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes.
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.”
-Thomas Jefferson