Republicans never know what to do with power once they have acquired it.  Democrats, on the other hand, know what to do with power, but it's always the wrong thing.

The affliction is ideology.  If the ability to live, to work, to learn, to think and speak freely, to associate with whomever we wish, or to practice our just pursuits without asking permission of government is ideology, then so is the light of the sunrise.  The Republican will make no laws that may interfere with the natural rights recognized and protected by our federal Constitution.  The Democrat, on the other hand, operates under a template of progressive ideology that rids his soul of conscience, that bends every study of mankind, every observation, thought, and action toward the ends of centralized government.  When the Democrat spies the sunrise, he immediately confirms his influence upon it.

The Democrat – the liberal, in service to an ideology of force – promises to act in the interest of "the greater good," but we have to understand that the interest and the "good" to which he refers are entirely those of his own political advantage.  We may applaud the promise without realizing the sleight and the force of its misdirection.  The power to do the good, rather than the good itself, has become the object – and indeed the virtue – of liberal government.  The liberal tells us that he will use the powers of government to protect the middle class, when in reality he is the chief architect of the means, through excessive regulation, taxation, and penalty, of separating the middle class from its earned wealth and property in order to subsidize his vast entitlement programs.  The liberal tells us that he is the champion of blacks and Hispanics and of every available ethnic or minority group, but he has done little more than stir their anger and envy in order to acquire their votes.  He tells us that he has provided affordable health care to every American, but the first purpose of the Affordable Care Act, passed into law without a single Republican vote on the eve of Christmas, 2009, was to craft an entitlement – an artificial dependency on government – allowing the State to seize control of fully one sixth of the nation's economy.

The liberal defines virtue not as "the good," but rather as "the power to do the good"; and by means of this one rhetorical gesture, he has turned every generous thought into an active political weapon.

The power to do the good differs not at all from the power to do wrong.  As soon as one examines the liberal policies born of good intentions, we discover that the anticipated good separates into a range of political elements and vanishes under a government apparatus designed entirely to keep targeted constituencies in a perpetual state of dependency.  The intended good simply collapses under various federal and state programs that use the greater part of their regulatory powers ultimately to expand the authority, not to enact the purposes, of these programs.  Tax revenues that could directly have given Americans – the poor and the disadvantaged as well as middle class families – the tools, the training and experience they needed to improve their circumstances in life and to ensure their dignity and self-reliance have been wasted instead on federal entitlement programs and additional bureaucratic infrastructures that require ever increasing revenues to maintain their ever diminishing returns.

In justifying bad behavior with good intentions, progressive doctrine brings a perverse rationality to Error.  The liberal is suddenly free to act wrongly and selfishly in pursuit of the power to do the good.  By diminishing our regard for long established social institutions, by lowering our standards of excellence throughout the culture, by rewarding mediocrity in art, literature, and entertainment, by teaching a few how to intimidate millions, the new liberal order makes everyone a fool.  By promising a socialist inheritance of wealth to every "victim of society," by promising free health care and free education for everyone, and by promising citizenship and voting rights to all who come to America, he is wasting the maturity and accomplishment of an entire generation of young Americans upon a destructive and self-defeating political ideology.

The liberal speaks always of the power to do the good, and that may be his only virtue, but he cannot comprehend the unilateral nature of Evil, and he will make no judgment against it, nor will he look for the words to define it – perhaps out of fear that he shall find himself included in the definition.  He has a sense of the good but no moral understanding of the means to accomplish it.  In the instructional boot camps of our debased culture, he has turned ugly and vicious, like a Pit Bull Terrier bred for violence, bloodsport, and the hunting and driving of livestock.  He is tortured and guided by a malicious activism, both to guard the operation of a progressive political agenda and to attack anyone who disagrees with it.  The entire force of his argument turns not upon the original liberal principles of representative government, but rather toward a despotic transformation in the relationship of government with society.

The rhetorical and practical effects of liberal "good intentions" have now combined in force to establish a sophisticated vote-farming operation.  Activists have targeted social groups, dividing the nation into a trust network of self-interested voting blocs, in order to subject them to a common dependency on government assistance programs – and having created the addiction, they are free to establish permanent and reliable constituencies.  The government they forecast is the only taker and giver, one that regards these constituencies as political property.

Under the vote-farming scheme, the American people do not share a common purpose, a common language, or a common life.  So dismissive of the democratic process are liberal practices that Americans no longer know what democracy means anymore.  Progressive tactics, since the '08 general election, have encouraged a perverse form of pluralism: a condition of society in which minority groups maintain their cultural differences without assimilating into the traditional American ethos.  In their systematic division of society, activists within the new liberal class have interfered with and destroyed the capacity of the nation to be whole.  Their propaganda tells us that every person is part of an identifiable minority at some level of society, and that each minority, itself a victim of some oppression, must separate itself from the dominant society so that it might participate in the new social justice movement.

So seductive is liberals' language and so false their purposes and so contrived their outrage that they are able to play upon strong negative passions, thus creating the vote-farming system – plantations of entitlement, of distinct minority and special interests, each dependent on the State for its subsistence, and the State dependent on each for its crop of suffrage.