Live from Music Row Tuesday 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 official guest host of The Tennessee Star Report Grant Henry in studio for another profound edition of Grant’s Rants.
Leahy: It is time for Grant’s Rants.
Henry: It’s that time. I read some of the following headlines and they start to become overwhelmed with how much the government has grown in such a short time period. Here’s one of the headlines. Federal spending grew 45% in Fiscal Year 2020: This is More Than Double the 2009 Increase Following the Great Recession.
And we seem to be going in the opposite direction of what we all know to be true. That is more community and less government is the solution to our problems. And in the book, The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet argued that the rise of the powerful modern state has eroded the sources of community.
The family, the neighborhood, the church, the guild. Alienation and loneliness inevitably resulted. But as the traditional binds fell away that used to tie us together, the human impulse towards community-led people to turn to even more government itself, allowing for statism and even totalitarianism to flourish.
And you understand what Nisbet’s saying here? He’s saying literally, the purpose of liberalism sometimes is to grow government and destroy community. As you destroy the community, the government will fill that void.
This is the same thing that the author makes the point of in the book Why Liberalism Failed. I disagree with some of the premises of that book, but listen to how he describes the process of liberalism and tell me if this is not exactly what’s happening in America right now.
First, tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust. Then, we see that absent such norms, anarchy ensues. Finding this anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that a mortal guard that will protect us even from ourselves.
Big government. They will tell us that we’ve been liberated from the restrictions of culture and the judgment of tradition, where we used to learn, grow and thrive through communities. We’ve replaced these things with an authority that punishes us when we “abuse our freedoms.”
Now, lacking any form of community, we are virtually assured that those abuses will occur and the government will continue to grow into even more minute realms. You see, liberalism and modern-day liberalism necessitate the growth of government and the destruction of community.
And as our communities are destroyed, so too are institutions destroyed American institutions that once cultivated a shared culture capable of creating the greatest citizenry this country has ever seen. You see, liberalism replaces shared culture with anticulture.
Liberalism, modern-day liberalism has rendered culture into holy, relativist beliefs and practices that are untethered from anything universal or enduring. We are living in a kind of matrix right now, a modern-day American matrix, a hollow shell of the original premise tasked by our founders.
We are eating from the husks of fruit. The government will never be able to provide us with a sense of belonging that we truly desire. There’s nothing to ground us to one another in government. There’s no common cause or purpose. It’s only divide and conquer in this modern game of government. But community, community is the place for restraint, is the place for flourishing and family.
Community is the only place capable of cultivating immediate virtues and values now, localized small. Through this process, I believe that there’s even a considerable amount of respect for common sense believe it or not.
So here it is Michael. I’m here to say that we need to destroy the government’s strong influence, and we need to undo what the other side has done to our country and to our government. Government has tentacles in places where it should not exist.
And once the government is out of the game of controlling each and every piece of your life, then our churches and faith communities can get back in and influence culture again. We have given up too much responsibility to the government ya’ll. It’s time for the people to take that responsibility back.
Leahy: And there you’ve you have, Grant’s Rants.
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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 “Grant Henry” by Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee.
