Surprise, surprise — the phony “fiscal cliff” negotiations have once again resulted in higher taxes and no serious spending cuts. But it doesn’t matter, because, the truth be known, the U.S. went over the so-called fiscal cliff long ago and is now in free fall toward the fiscal abyss that lies at the bottom of that cliff.

How will we know when we hit bottom? Easy. It’s when the government’s obfuscation and chicanery tactics no longer work and people finally discover that their paper money is worthless, their 401Ks are worthless, and their income is worthless.

Now, the question is, does any politician — Tea Party? Conservative? Libertarian? — have the honesty and courage to talk openly about the really important cliff, the one we’re still hanging onto by our fingernails? The cliff I’m referring to is the Tyranny Cliff.

Sam Donaldson’s recent rant about the Tea Party was a reminder that the far left is doing everything in its power to marginalize anyone who dare suggest that Americans are being tyrannized by their own government. Graybeard Sam’s diatribe, which had a “love it or leave it” ring to it, included, in part:

“The greatest slogan that I hated during this last campaign was ‘We want to take back our country.’ Guys, it’s not your country anymore — it’s our country and you’re part of it, but that thinking is going to defeat Republicans nationally if they don’t get rid of it.”

That’s odd. And here all along I was under the impression that Republicans lost the last election because their candidate did not think like that.

This is the left-wing media at its best, chastising those who dare to imply that Americans are losing their freedom. And, sadly, I believe that a majority of Americans do believe that they live in a free country.

The reason they are able to delude themselves in the face of ever-increasing government tyranny is that politicians, while increasing taxes and regulations and gaining evermore control over our personal lives, have been telling us for generations how lucky we are to live in the freest country on earth.

Such creeping totalitarianism is effective because each generation views conditions at any given time as normal. Thus, gradual change is desirable from a government’s point of view because people are not aware of small changes on a day-to-day basis.

In fact, by the early 1980s, with Ronald Reagan firmly entrenched in the White House, discussions about freedom became almost passé. This self-delusive attitude is not new to history, as evidenced by Etienne de la Boetie’s sixteenth-century observation:

It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say . . . that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.

Which brings me to the radical community organizer who now occupies the White House. Though I give Barack Obama an “A” for what he has managed to accomplish during his first four years in office — moving the country toward Marxism and dictatorial rule at mach speed — it has been a two-edged sword for him. He has moved so swiftly that he has also awakened millions of snoozing serfs who had heretofore been quietly and obediently marching in lockstep toward their enslavement.

Even so, long before Barack Obama and today’s far-left wackos in Congress took control of Washington, government had already established its superiority over its former employer, the citizenry, by teaching people to love their servitude. Control of men, as Machiavelli pointed out centuries ago, is much easier and far less dangerous if rulers can gain the cooperation of their subjects through mind control rather than by having to rely solely on the use of force.

But one cannot mislead millions of people on one’s own. Peaceful control of a nation is largely dependent on the efficiency of the government’s propaganda machine. This entails the effective use of large numbers of intellectuals and media personalities whose task it is to make the masses so love their servitude that government does not have to use harsh measures to force them to bend to its will.

The far left that now controls the reins of power has virtually unlimited access to the media, which makes it remarkably easy to disseminate its 1984-style propaganda. This access, along with virtually unlimited cash furnished by taxpayers and the Treasury Department’s printing presses, puts the Dirty Dems, aided and abetted by their establishment Republican enablers, in an enviable position to slant the news to their liking.

After all, David Gregory, Brian Williams, and George Stephanopoulos are never more than a phone call away. And they never fail the Dirty Dems when a synthetic crisis (global warming, energy shortage, “fiscal cliff,” companies too big to fail, TARP, etc.) needs to be invented and publicized to divert people’s attention away from their loss of wealth and freedom.

Many generations have come and gone since the Founding Fathers put their lives on the line by signing a document that declared themselves to be free of King George’s tyranny, and they undoubtedly would be saddened by the present-day tyranny in America. It’s only by comparing how and where our freedom began and where we are today that one can fully appreciate the extent of our drift toward a collectivist, totalitarian nation-state over the past 236 years.

Instead of wasting time on nonsense like the “fiscal cliff,” what hapless Republicans should be talking about is putting an end to government tyranny. The objective of the American Revolutionists was to make men free, to place them above government, but today’s reality is that government has become firmly entrenched as the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent guiding force in people’s lives.

The United States long ago fell off the fiscal cliff. The nation is bankrupt — get over it! But once the government is forced to officially acknowledge its bankruptcy — which is inevitable — the big question will be whether we will try to build a new nation on a foundation of government tyranny or on individual liberty.

It would be much to our advantage to start addressing that question now — before the inevitable is upon us — because, when the time comes, you can be sure that the left will try to blame America’s demise on the ruthlessness of capitalism and the evils of individualism.