When the Founding Fathers devised the United States Constitution, they took very special concern with regards to human nature. They knew that when given the opportunity, most people would do the wrong thing rather than the right whenever there are no apparent consequences to their actions. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking, after all.
Bearing this in mind, the United States Constitution was designed with the idea that men in power would use whatever they could to expand their power and secure their rule. Knowing that such a thing would lead to tyranny, they limited the powers of our leaders so that they could not gain too many footholds.
In the end, however, it didn’t matter too much. This is because the United States Constitution still hinged on one simple thing: that those in power would actually adhere to it’s principles. This is what we call the personal responsibility of the politician. Without it, all government systems collapse and/or descend into tyranny, no matter how well-established they are. When you don’t follow the standards that were established for you by law, then what does any law matter?
Personal responsibility was destroyed in this culture by the Leftists movements of the 1960s. While the Left has always been reckless and loose with their morality throughout their history, predating even Marx, they finally got the cultural traction in mainstream America around that time. Regardless of how it happened, these people sought to bring us Heaven on Earth and they would do it by changing not only our political system, but by changing the cultural and moral systems that have done us well for so long.
So they demolished personal responsibility. Nothing was anyone’s fault anymore and this idea, while not new, became part of mainstream culture. But the problem with that is that Utopia cannot come to pass if everyone is an asshole (Sorry for the language, but what else do you call someone who lacks all semblance of personal responsibility?).
This is because when people are told that nothing is their fault by some perceived moral authority, they tend to get incredibly lazy. A workers paradise still needs diligent workers to keep things going, after all. Without that, well things tend to degenerate into a state of perpetual poverty and crime.
We have cases like this all over the country. The most prominent case is the welfare system’s impact on the inner city black community. With the removal of personal responsibility in the black community, black fathers tend to see little need to stay with the children they’ve fathered. Abortions are alarmingly high among black women, poverty is widespread. I remember walking through the projects in old town Alexandria as I went from the Braddock Road Metro stop to work and seeing clotheslines being used in the dead of winter. This is something unheard of in just about everywhere else, with few exceptions. Given the option, most people tend to use a dryer. I doubt the people living in those homes had a choice.
This is not isolated to the black communities in the inner city. These are just the most prominent examples that are so pervasive in our entertainment culture. There are pockets in rural areas like this and in the suburbs as well. You usually can tell if an area is a bad part of town. And race has absolutely nothing to do with it. White trash is white trash, after all.
So when the Leftist implemented their agenda, they simultaneously took away the means for which they could maintain their policies, I doubt this was intentional because most Leftists understand that in order to get money within the government, there needs to be some form of production.
But this is their paradox: while their policies would work, they are always doomed to failure because they take away the will of the people to continue doing the things that make them productive. Just be thankful that we have yet to experience Soviet-style governing where people were forced to work in an oligarchy more oppressive than what Lenin had promised the people (the truth also tends to be thrown out the window with Leftists as well).