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At the time of America's founding, the notion of civic duty was commonplace. Our entire system was predicated on the idea that citizens would take an active role in the governance of their towns, states, and country. Little was asked of Americans other than self-governance, jury duty, fighting wars when necessary, protecting the homeland, and living by the rule of law. In time, Americans were additionally "asked" to forfeit a portion of the fruits of their labor to foot the bills the government would incur.

Over the years, we have handed off most of our self-governing and civic duties to others. As the Founders anticipated, we elect town council members and state and federal legislators to "represent" us. But all too often, we leave the voting booth, brush our hands together, and go back to our normal lives thinking we are done...until the next election. In the meantime, we relinquish considerable power and control over our lives to the very people who are supposed to be working for us.

We have so completely shirked our personal and civic responsibilities that we have inadvertently created a class of professional politicians. With the economic and personal stakes being so high for these professional politicians, the legislation they enact is often compromised, and their re-election campaigns are motivated more by what's good for the incumbent than by what's good for the People.

Jury duty persists, but most citizens will do anything they can to get out of it.

We no longer have a draft. The brave men and women who volunteer do it out of love of country so the rest of us don't have to, and for that, we compensate them.

Most of us try to live by the rule of law and comply with tax burdens, but both have become so onerous that they encroach on our freedoms while bloating the State with power.

Protecting the homeland has two different prongs -- the physical protection of our country, our borders, our property, and our people, and the more metaphysical protection of our ideology, our way of life, our principles, and our freedoms.

The metaphysical is as important as the physical protection of our homeland, yet it continues to be sorely neglected. While most of us are dismayed by the erosion of our liberties, only a fraction of us are willing to fight for them and make the necessary sacrifices our men and women in uniform make every day.

Most of us realize we are in an existential struggle for the country's soul and understand that there are many aspects to this war. Our endgame is to restore constitutional governance, and a key battle will be waged on November 6, 2012. During the next eight months, we will encounter many clashes on many fronts and, like our soldiers, will be asked to participate in many operations -- covert and overt.

Yet many conservatives do not see the sense in standing around with a bunch of like-minded people holding signs. They do not think it accomplishes anything. They think it is silly, beneath them, and kind of embarrassing. They could not be more misguided. The strategic benefit to participating in a rally is tremendous.

We do much in the Tea Party that is targeted and action-oriented -- we petition; get out the vote; support constitutional conservatives; call, e-mail, and fax our representatives; run for office, sponsor initiatives and legislation, attend town council meetings, etc.

But we cannot underestimate the value of psychological operations (PsyOps) or forget to employ them.

Taking to the streets is essential in any battle for the country. It shows the enemy that we are alive and organized. It shows them that we are nimble and can mobilize large numbers in a short time. It gets our message out. It brings us together to network and be heard with one loud bang. And protests and rallies do not drain precious resources or cost much.

While Nancy Pelosi is yammering that Tea Partiers are "anti-government," what sends a more powerful message to progressives, Democrats, liberals, and Occupiers? A gathering of a hundred conservatives with signs in a park or a gathering of ten thousand?

What size crowd is harder for the press to ignore? A crowd of 250 or one of 25,000?

So get off your couch, tell your kids you cannot make their game this one time, arrange for that weekend getaway to take place on another weekend, do your taxes ahead of time...and be part of your local Tea Party rally. If you cannot find one, get on a train or bus or plane and come to San Francisco, where you can Tea-Party in the Belly of the Beast.

But do not think for a minute that someone else is doing it. They are not. We have eight months left to find the lost soul of America's constitutional governance. We need every able-bodied conservative warrior to show up and make the sacrifice. This is a tiny request in comparison to the demands made on those who put their lives, their time, their families, and their dreams on hold to fight for freedom.

We might not fight with gun and sword, but we do fight with pen and word. And you cannot be heard if you are not shouting.

For those who brush aside the Tea Party this year, any loss in November will be on your shoulders. It will not be because the Republicans couldn't come up with a decent candidate. It will not be because people didn't try. It will be because too few tried.

The political road is littered with propositions, initiatives, and candidates that failed to garner enough votes, and with petitions that failed to amass enough signatures. We cannot allow this election to be a casualty of inaction.

Ronald Reagan -- whom conservatives love to quote -- spoke often about the risks attached to apathy and lack of participation.

It doesn't matter if you wear a tool belt or a suit to work. It doesn't matter if you earn $20,000, $200,000 or $2 million a year. It doesn't matter if you went to trade school or law school.

This is not the time to worry about what your neighbor might think. This is a time for each of us to do his or her part to save the country. It is a time for valor -- maybe not on the battlefield, but certainly on the political battlefront.

You can simply quote Reagan and feel good about yourself for a few minutes, or you can get involved and preserve this shining city on a hill for generations to come.

Otherwise, as Lincoln said, "To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men."

Much of the political crisis facing America today stems from a disintegration of the ethical basis of the free society. That is why the core of the 2012 election fight is not tax rates, job growth, or the national debt. These issues, though of enormous practical importance, are merely the policy manifestations of underlying moral sentiments. The fundamental battle to be waged concerns nothing less than the nature of man, and the moral implications of that nature. If public disapproval of particular Obama policies is to become a lasting movement toward societal renewal, then the conservative's primary objective must be the restoration of American individualism.

The problem is that the warm quilt of entitlement and dependency which the left has so cozily tucked around American society not only restricts freedom of movement; it also effectively reinforces the anti-individualist morality that makes the left's advances possible. In the doublethink names of "fairness" and "security," soft despotism of the modern leftist sort produces a siren-song promise of carefree mother's love forever -- with its corresponding appeal to a toddler's moral myopia, the inability to concretize and respect the wishes and wills of other people. Thus, creeping socialism ushers in a hitherto unknown ethic, which we might dub "collectivist self-absorption."

"We Are the World" and "We are the 99 percent" are both products of this ethic, expressed as, respectively, self-aggrandizing "brotherly love" and self-aggrandizing slothful covetousness. In both cases, the heart of the message is, "We are one; give us what we want." This sensibility is the very meaning of the "entitlement mentality" with which the left seeks to charm America into moral and intellectual submission. The constitutionalist is therefore saddled with the thankless task of serving up the repeated splashes of cold water that might prevent the cozily blanketed moral invalid from drifting into the long, nightmarish sleep of collectivist authoritarianism.

The most indispensable resource in this struggle to renew the individualist ethic is a clear understanding of the moral terms of the argument, and a refusal to allow those terms to be redefined by the authoritarians.

Theoretically, "individualism" is a relatively recent concept. This is not to say that it expresses a new idea, but rather that as a historically significant notion it was born of modern philosophical debates. In short, as nineteenth-century liberal democracy came under attack from those who rejected natural rights and the politico-economic freedom those rights demand, both freedom's critics and its defenders saw fit to introduce a term that might encompass the crux of the ethical dispute. That term, "individualism," was born, therefore, of a need to explain the moral assumptions of liberty.

Individualism does not mean "selfishness," "greed," a reticence to work with others, or even a denial of the interconnectedness of humans and their fates. These misrepresentations are the products of leftist materialism's populist efforts to undermine faith in freedom by aligning freedom with amoral and anti-human inclinations.

At its base, individualism -- or, as its detractors since John Dewey have renamed it, "classical individualism" -- is simply the presupposition that fundamentally discrete human beings do, in fact, exist. Absurdly obvious as that may sound, this presupposition is precisely what modern leftism is calling into question -- not just implicitly, but quite directly.

Late modern philosophy has rejected outright the commonsense awareness, which was elevated to metaphysical theory by Aristotle, that individual existents are the basic facts of material reality. This notion applies, of course, to the category of man as to all else. From this accepted principle -- that the building blocks of human civilization are particular humans, who exist in logical priority to any community or social arrangement -- gradually arose the theoretical edifice of political freedom.

From the classical understanding of the individuated human mind as the essence of man, through the Christian development of the notion of individual moral will, philosophy at last turned, under the influence of modern empirical science, to the attempt to understand man's practical (i.e., moral) essence with a view to determining the most natural social arrangement. This latter effort ushered in the concept of natural rights -- moral constraints on men's behavior towards one another, grounded in the empirical understanding that the primary natural objective of each man is the preservation and progress of his own life, and hence that each man's range of moral authority both limits and is limited by every other individual's primary natural objective of preserving and promoting his own life.

The coinage of a uniquely "American individualism" stems from the fact that America was the first nation grounded explicitly in the most concrete and practical conception of this modern notion of natural rights. Thus, America was a political community that, in its very founding, expressly rejected the hitherto generally accepted premise that the leaders of communities may, and should, determine the purposes and limits of human action. By directly embedding the theory of natural rights -- understood as a moral fence around each individual -- into its basic law and its conception of government, the United States became the first nation founded on the premise that men are by nature free, and therefore that the purpose of government is, and must be, only the protection of that natural freedom.

Prior to the developments described above, "individualism" was not part of the philosophical vernacular, simply because the logical primacy of individuals -- the belief in the existence of individual human beings -- was the given in all theories of human experience. The concept became historically relevant precisely as a means of explaining the American ethic. America translated the Aristotelian "metaphysical" primacy of individuals into socio-political reality. Government may not, constitutionally, encroach upon natural liberty. The law of the land, unlike the laws of all other lands, is first and foremost a set of clear moral restrictions on government, in favor of individual citizens.

The American, then, is the only citizen on the planet who is -- in a manner that is more than an abstraction -- functionally superior in political status to his "government." The American head of state -- unlike all equivalent leaders throughout the world -- is not the "head" of the society (in traditional "body politic" fashion). American government is merely an instrument of the citizens, their tool, assigned a specific set of tasks, with the explicit proviso that it may and should be disbanded if it ceases to perform those tasks within its defined limits.

From this unique political achievement -- genuine practical freedom -- grows a unique moral sense. The American, related to his government in a manner that inverts the normal political relationship, duly sees himself differently. His non-subjecthood, if you will, produces a heightened sense of personal responsibility -- of having no (moral) choice but to "do it himself" -- from which is born the virtue of forward-looking self-reliance that is almost definitive of the American soul. This virtue is the core of the notion of "American individualism"; it is in part the source, and in part the moral outgrowth, of the translation of a metaphysical premise, the primacy of individuals, into a political system -- i.e., rights-based constitutional republicanism.

What came to be called "individualism" can be found in the citizens of other nations, of course; however, it exists as an apolitical principle, in the sense that only in America is individualism consistent with the duties of citizenship. The individualists of other nations, then, may be called "spiritual Americans."

Those who wish to subvert the American republic, and to undermine its founding documents, have always understood that the primary obstacle is ethical individualism. And this subversion, then, if one wishes to dig up America from its roots, requires an attack on the metaphysical presumption of the primacy of individual beings. Dewey, America's friendly face of socialism, shoved the spade in deep. Seeing that individualism was the source of natural rights, he sought to dissolve this nexus by undermining the metaphysical presupposition of discrete individuals.

For Dewey, the father of twentieth-century American public education, the individual as the given -- as an entity complete unto itself -- is the fallacy at the heart of all previous philosophy. Individual human beings -- i.e., individuated minds -- do not exist. Rather, individuals are created through social and educational influences. Thus, the theory of natural rights, which presumes the logical priority of individual men, is destroyed. Where there are no individuals, there can be no individual rights. Dewey, and others following him, expanded upon the European socialist theories that reject individual human nature, instead regarding historical social conditions as the fundamental realities. Community is prior to the individual; the latter is merely the product of the former. "It takes a village," to state this in one of its well-known contemporary manifestations.

Since "classical individualism" is based on a pre-societal notion of man, it tends toward the promotion of practical freedom, ultimately through natural rights. By redefining freedom as "a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of movements" -- as creative "individuality" rather than political liberty -- and by regarding the preservation of liberty through law and custom as a "repression" of genuine individualism, the leftist turns freedom on its head. Freedom now means unconstraint in the "experimentation" and "application" of one's "gifts" to promote the "growth" of the "progressive society."

On this model, Thomas Jefferson is a repressor of individualism; William Ayers is a true individual. This leftist reversal of the moral concepts of individualism and freedom is explicitly grounded in a profound, and profoundly stupid, metaphysical reversal: the proposal that society is prior to the individual, that the individual is a product and instrument of the collective.

Do not be fooled by the modern, Dewey-inspired smokescreen composed of popular lingo such as "individuality" and "being an individual." These groundless notions are the harbingers of the most fundamentally anti-individualist philosophy ever devised.

The struggle facing America and the world over in the coming generations is nothing less than a battle between individualism and collectivism. Do you exist as a unique, rational being, independently of any community? Or are you merely an amorphous blob of nothing, to be shaped by your society, and a "free individual" only insofar as you are "creatively" serving the growth of the progressive community that made you? In political terms, are you, by nature, the master of your "government," or is it, by nature, your master?

Compared to the task of restoring genuine individualism, paying down the national debt will be a walk in the park. However, without ultimate success in this task, all other efforts to save America from the abyss will be futile. The imposed moral infantilism of American collectivism must give way at last to the self-reliant adulthood that is man's birthright. "We Are the World" must give way to "I am in the world -- and I have a right to be here."

[1] Democracy and Education : http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm#2HCH0022