Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, there are a couple of articles that I’ve read recently and one is from The Wall Street Journal and it is titled: Xi Jinping Approaches Multiple Points of No Return. Then there’s another story in The Wall Street Journal or it might have been another paper, but it talked about Vladimir Putin and Russian culture. I think it was The Wall Street Journal.
And it’s saying that the Russian culture is one that is steeped in authoritarian rule. Well, China is very much the same. And so there are a lot of Americans, a lot of pundits in the media, mostly on the right, occasionally on the left, who say that Putin won’t last because the Russian people will rise up.
Or that Xi Jinping is in trouble because there are protests all across China. And then I start thinking about our own culture and the American culture and where, you know, the Chinese culture came from thousands of years of dynastic rule.
It’s not dynastic rule now in the sense that the top person isn’t called the emperor, but it is dynastic rule because the top person is the head of the Communist Chinese Party, which is authoritarian in nature. In Russia, it used to be the czars, and they ruled with an iron fist if they so chose to do so because they didn’t answer to anybody and they didn’t answer the voters.
And as long as they could retain their power, they kept it, and they could rule as they chose. And if they were overthrown, the people who overthrew them ruled the same way. And that was true in the dynasties of China. The United States was different in the sense that the Declaration of Independence lays out why we should exist as a sovereign country.
And our culture is based on that document. But here’s what’s interesting, Michael. At the time of the American Revolution, a third of the American people felt strongly that the Declaration of Independence was absolutely correct and that we should fight for our freedom.
A third were opposed to that, and they weren’t willing to fight on behalf of Britain, but they didn’t want to fight with Britain. And a third of the people had not formed a clear opinion. And so it’s not as if the American people as a group rose up and said we want to be a sovereign nation.
But our culture, even those who didn’t want to fight the British, supported the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. They just didn’t think it was winnable. Those who hadn’t made a decision were pretty much on the same page. They just hadn’t made a decision whether or not we could win or whether we could lose.
But everybody shared the ideas that were in the Declaration of Independence, and much of those ideas then became part of our constitution. And so you look at the way that we are supposed to be organized today, and I say supposed to be because when the Constitution was written and even though it’s been amended many times, there are certain things that the federal government does now that is antithetical to the Constitution itself and to any of the amendments in the Constitution.
But Congress passed certain laws, and this primarily has to do with spending, and the Supreme Court, at varying times in history, has said that those spending bills are constitutional. Now, you were talking about talking with Senator Johnson, and I heard him as I was driving it, and he said, we have $26 billion worth of projects here in Tennessee.
About 18 months ago, there was a so-called trillion-dollar infrastructure bill passed in Congress. And my math is this. The people of Tennessee represent about two percent of the population of the country. Two percent of a trillion dollars is $20 billion. So are we going to be getting our share of the $1 trillion in infrastructure?
Or was that infrastructure bill named an infrastructure bill but really spent on other things? And so culturally, what we have to worry about in this country is that, and we have, and this is a real problem, and Republicans are not immune to it, but Democrats are absolutely guilty of it.
The Democrat Party is now a party that wants to give money to only the people who support the Democrat Party. Look at what’s going on in California. They are explicitly passing legislation at the city level and at the state level that gives money only to people based on their color or their sexual identity.
And I suppose that in our states’ rights world, it’s okay for California to do that, but we don’t live in a complete state’s rights world. And so one of the things that we will need to be very focused on over the next few years is strengthening our culture from a values standpoint and being able to articulate how that culture and those values lead to the greatest amount of prosperity and freedom for as many people as possible.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “American Flag” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
