When Republicans Changed
NeoConservatives: Changing American Politics is a new DVD produced and released by The John Birch Society available at JBS.org. It features John Birch Society CEO Arthur R. Thompson and John Birch Society President John F. McManus as narrators and guides throughout. The mini-documentary explains the history of neoconservatism and the confusing effect that it has had on our American political landscape, as well as how America got into these politically confused times, where America is headed, and, most importantly, how America can exit from its self-destructive mode.
NeoConservatives does a good job of repudiating the perceived political reality that holds that Republicans promote conservative ideals and legislation and Democrats put forth liberal, big-government agendas. The actual political reality is that on core issues, the two parties are woefully in agreement. These agreed-upon (yet strangely untrumpeted) issues include working toward never-ending foreign entanglements, super-sizing the federal government, advancing questionable economic policies, and perhaps most alarmingly, treating the U.S. Constitution as a flexible document. Indeed, it seems that if Democrats and Republicans opened a circus, the U.S. Constitution would be their dutiful contortionist, guaranteed to increase ticket sales for their large-tent event even when the typical donkey and elephant tricks fail to do so.
The irony is not lost upon the producers of the video that, regardless of party affiliation, presidents have, for a while at least, broken their oaths to defend the Constitution, while weakly insisting that they have been defending the Constitution. To make this point, the educational video begins with an expertly crafted opening montage made up of news footage of every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama taking the oath to uphold the office of president and “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” Notably, everyone who holds elected office in our nation, and some who hold unelected ones, is required to take a similar oath. Whether there is some overarching conspiracy to ignore the Constitution, whether they have the best intentions, or whether they merely get hung up on the to-the-best-of-my-ability part and have pathological self-confidence issues, somewhere along the line they almost all seem to forget that oath.
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- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically