There’s a new web page at Quadrant Online to celebrate the 500th issue of the magazine. What an extraordinary achievement. Congratulations to Quadrant and Keith Windschuttle, the latest in a long line of great editors, who have help keep our liberties alive. And congratulations to Roger Franklin, the online editor, who has made the site a daily requirement. The dangers never cease and Quadrant remains one of the most important of our own institutions in trying to hold back the many threats to our freedoms. If you come here you should also go there.

And as it happens, I have an article on the Quadrant website today dealing with these very threats to our freedoms which is basically an alert to an article by David Horowitz. This is the quote from David which I have cited but there is much more:

Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting our country, and undoing our constitutional arrangements. Its contempt for consultative and representative government is relentlessly on display. This week Senate Majority leader Harry Reid defended his refusal to negotiate with Republicans over Obamacare and the debt in these words: ‘We are here to support the federal government. That’s our job.’ End quote. Forget about representing the people whom our Founders made sovereign. Forget what America is about.

The fact that I had a radical past allowed me to see much of this coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the prospect of a one-party state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a moment to think about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the state into a political weapon – and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive government program to gather the financial and health information of every citizen, and control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that can read the mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the country, you don’t really need a secret police to destroy your political opponents. Once you have silenced them, you can proceed with your plans to remake the world in your image.

I cannot tell whether the complacency comes from a deeper understanding that it can’t happen here or just from a belief that it can’t happen here even though it can. The article has been much linked to on websites such as this in the US but the likelihood that it will become discussed by the public in general is of course nigh on zero, mostly because the public in general has zero chance of even knowing such discussion is even taking place.