A friend asked if I could distill my political philosophy down to one sentence. “Absolutely,” I said, “If it takes more than one sentence to describe what you believe, you probably aren’t that sure what you believe. In most cases, I find that is true – if you can’t apply Occam’s Razor to your belief system, it is too complicated to understand.”

My one sentence definition is this:

“I do not want to govern you, I want you to govern yourself.”

One wonders how a country founded on the ideal that each of its citizens have a right to their own lives, a right to think, speak and do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t interfere with the rights of other citizens to do the same, can survive the millenniums old urge for the few “who know best” to tell the many how they should order their lives and what is the “proper” thing to think, speak and do.

Progressivism, envy and pure old nosy old yenta biddiness has taken a simple constitution and heaped upon it an ever expanding, multi-layered inverted pyramid of “emanations and penumbras” of laws in the vain attempt to be that “know-it-all” president of a national homeowner’s association on steroids.

There is no possibility every American will agree on everything, that is the miracle of our Constitution – it sets forth perhaps the minimum of the most important aspects of what a central government of a nation vast in geography, diverse in demography and divergent in ideology, should do for its collective citizens. Every step we have taken away from the brilliance of the underlying philosophy of this document has created less unity and more discord. In actuality, the broadest of actions taken by our government have led to a sharp narrowing of control – it is sort of an Inverse Theory of Governance, the more control enacted leads to fewer and fewer people exerting control and the less their accountability to the citizens becomes.

Do we have to believe the same things, be of the same religion, the same socioeconomic class?

No.

But there is a minimum of things we must absolutely agree upon.

In 2015, a young Brit artist by the name of James Bay recorded this song (it is a cover of an earlier recording) and in it, he sings:

So come on let it go
Just let it be
Why don’t you be you
And I’ll be me

Everything’s that’s broke
Leave it to the breeze
Why don’t you be you
And I’ll be me.

Not quite the Constitution but this is the only way we stick together as a nation without the use of force.

Why don’t you govern you and I’ll govern me…