Of Fauci and the Founders.

From Dr. Anthony Fauci’s embarrassing performance before a Senate hearing last week we learn that he is every bit the self-dealing, narcissistic weasel that I – and many others – began thinking he was from the earliest months of the pandemic.

But we also learn something much more important and much more enduring. We learn that the COVID pandemic in the final analysis wasn’t about virology, epidemiology, or, as we were so often reminded, “the science.”

The key lesson that arises from the COVID pandemic is that the Founding Fathers were right. There is enormous danger in concentrating too much authority in too few hands.

Certainly, that’s what happened during COVID. With massive help from the media, Tony Fauci was transubstantiated from a semi-obscure career public health bureaucrat into a divinely guided oracle. His pronouncements came to be treated less as attempts at expert guidance than as sacred decrees, leaving little room for dissent.

Little room for dissent? How about zero room? Again, with help from the media, dissent from the received wisdom of Lord Fauci – however well-reasoned and however well-credentialed the dissenter – was viciously crushed.

What we have since learned is that we should have listened to some of that dissent. What we must also learn – again – is that dissent is the mechanism by which truth is ultimately revealed.

By deifying Anthony Fauci – while silencing all others with informed opinions about COVID – we made the country single-point failure vulnerable. (If you’re not familiar with the term, single-point failure is an engineering term that refers to a vulnerability in which the failure of one component causes an entire system to fail.)

In the case of COVID, that single component was the federal pandemic response led by Anthony Fauci.

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But this piece isn’t really about COVID. It’s about the U.S. response to COVID as allegory for the federalism that the socialists taking over the Democratic Party are dedicated to destroying.

Our founders displayed unusual brilliance in creating a nation comprised of sovereign states. Justice Louis Brandeis described the states as America’s “laboratories of democracy.”

Under our system, states are free to pursue different policies, observe one another’s results, and change course as evidence develops. Success can be copied. Failure can be contained. No single mistake need become a nationwide mistake like the mistakes made with COVID.

The self-proclaimed socialists who are ascendant in the Democratic Party believe none of that. They argue that government should be centralized in the hands of an expert governing class. Rather than federalism, they want a unitary system of government.

They’re wrong.

A unitary government for a nation of 330 million souls flung across an entire continent would be the very embodiment of single-point failure vulnerability. It would result in the failures of COVID writ large.

Yes, federalism is messy. But the apparent disorder is a feature not a bug. It’s a safeguard. It reduces the risk that one flawed judgment in one place can become a flawed judgment everywhere.

It is what has made America the most successful nation in history.

Paul Gleiser

Paul L. Gleiser is president of ATW Media, LLC, licensee of radio stations KTBB 97.5 FM/AM600, 92.1 The TEAM FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas.

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2 Responses

  1. Buddy Saunders says:

    Indeed, we can thank God and our nation’s founders for our having a federal form of government, and not a pure democracy. For the reason you make so very clear.
    With all 50 states existing as petri dishes of ideas, all swirling together to produce better or worse outcomes, we citizens are free to live in the states that turn out to be the most productive and congenial to a person’s living free and to his attaining his fullest potential.
    When it comes to choosing where to live and how to vote, the options boil down to something very simple:
    • If you like the ideas coming out of BLUE cities and states, move there and vote for politicians eager to give you more of the same.
    • If you like the ideas coming out of RED cities and states, move there and vote for politicians eager to give you more of the same.

  2. richard kaufman says:

    As usual, a brilliant assessment by Paul of the issue, and what caused it. The question is, will those citizens/voters who truly understand the lethal havoc that Socialism/Communism would wreak on the United States remain silent, or will they use their
    God-given voices to scream an impassioned warning before it’s too late”. Make no mistake…the liberal media will continue to push their destructive ideology with increased devotion and might. Make no mistake…we are in a civil war. It’s time for those who know the truth to speak up and be heard.

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