Saving the Soul

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, if my memory is correct, a few months ago, on one of the Sunday morning news analysis programs, the topic was the Republican Presidential campaign with 17 competitors.  Former Democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman suggested we are witnessing a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.

AM:  I saw the same episode.  When I heard her say that, I thought, “at least the Republican Party had a soul!”

IM:   And by implication, then, the Democrat Party sold its soul to the devil, probably when Woodrow Wilson initiated his progressive agenda for America.  He and his fellow progressives, like John Dewey (the father of public education in America), Frank Goodnow (advocate for the same concept of collective liberty as that advanced by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler), and Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), refused to acknowledge natural rights.  Instead, they believed all rights were conferred upon members of society by the government.  This allowed them to establish an administrative state that became the moral authority for all rights.  This now justifies, for example, why administrative law judges can avoid due process (no jury of peers; only the agency-paid judge, the plaintiff, and the defendant) punish bakers for not wanting to participate in same sex weddings.

Old Gadfly:  Let’s bring this back to today, where the Republican Party seems reluctant, even hostile, to accepting Trump as the presumptive nominee.

AM:  Don’t forget, early in the primary season, the Republican Party went to great lengths to get Trump to sign a pledge that, if he were not the Republican nominee, he would support the final nominee and not compete as an independent candidate.  He signed the pledge.

IM:  What the Republican establishment presumed was that Trump would not be the nominee.  Those that are now resisting his nomination and even talking about hijacking the nomination are hypocrites.  They insult the American people.

Old Gadfly:  The “fair and balanced” Fox Sunday with Chris Wallace aired a segment in March 2016 with the title:   “Can Donald Trump unify a Republican Party he fractured.”

AM:  Trump merely tapped into a fracture the Republican Party created on its own.

Old Gadfly:  Do you have any evidence?

AM:  Tons of evidence.  First, during the George W. Bush Presidency, when he committed armed forces to Iraq, based no less on a bipartisan joint resolution of Congress, he had nearly a 90% approval rating from the American public.  When democrats saw no political capital from this undertaking, they decided to derail the Bush momentum.  Democrats and the press were brutal—“wrong course,” “lies, lies, lies,” and so forth.  Instead of being good wingmen, Republican congressman slinked into the shadows.  This allowed Democrats to establish the conditions that led to a major political shift in both houses of Congress in 2006, and the political wolf pack momentum carried Obama into the White House.  During the last two years of the Bush Administration, the Democrat Congress pushed their progressive agenda while a morally defeated Bush capitulated to their demands. 

IM:  And while this will sound racist, the truth is, Obama was elected because he was black (to assuage the guilt of white privilege and previous racism in America) and because progressives were successful in blaming the 2008 financial crisis on Bush policies.   We discussed these false narratives previously (see here, here, here, and chapters 3, 4, and 5 here).

AM:  Obama’s resume had no qualifying experience for the position:  what might be learned from school records have been sealed; he was a Saul Alinsky trained community organizer and the author of two memoirs that had more to do with his socialistic worldview because there were no notable achievements to reflect upon; he did one-term touch and goes at the Illinois state legislature and the US Senate, with no legislative distinction except for being a leading critic of the Iraq war; but he has excellent oration skills that would make the ancient Sophists proud. 

IM:  The mess created during the past eight years was not because of Obama’s chosen race (his mother was white after all), but because he tried to fundamentally transform America from a constitutional republic into a socialistic administrative state (Woodrow Wilson would be pleased).  Then, in 2010 and 2012, when the Tea Party movement influenced a major swing back to Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, the elected officials seemed to lose the courage to follow through on campaign promises.  Knowing there was no way Democrats would compromise; Republicans capitulated because Democrats could and did shut down the government and could blame it on Republicans because of a complicit media.  And the IRS successfully shut down the Tea Party voice between 2010 and 2012 (in time for a presidential reelection) with Democrats shielding Lois Lerner and others involved.  Thus, many Americans, while feeling under assault by internal socialist pressures by progressive Democrats, also felt betrayed by the Republican Party.  They feel orphaned by a lack of moral leaders that would and should do their duty to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Old Gadfly:  What are the implications?

IM:  While the media ruminates about apparent racism and fraud in the Trump University civil suit, there is no media interest in $16.5 million paid to former President Bill Clinton to serve as honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities.  In return, the university received $55 million from the US State Department while Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.  It took a liberal law professor from Georgetown University to alert the public about this (see here).  Is the media so biased as to be blind about what deserves scrutiny?  Ideology can be dangerous when it becomes moral orthodoxy.  This is why secular humanism, which partially defines American progressivism, is the new state religion.

          AM:  Trump has emerged as a signal from the American people.  This signal is to restore the constitutional republic that made America the leader of the world.

Old Gadfly:  How does this relate to the soul of the Republican Party?

AM:  The presidential campaign is a wake-up call.  This is an opportunity to seek forgiveness and redemption for betraying George W. Bush and the American people, and for the hypocrisy in insisting that Republicans support the Republican nominee assuming it would not be Trump.  The Party can do this by “helping” Trump to clarify positions on important issues, by ensuring the Party can restore a constitutional republic, and by repudiating the progressive ideology that seeks to substitute the ideals that made America great with their notion of utopia and human perfection.  This thinking was vividly portrayed by Margaret Sanger and her eugenics and neo-Malthusian cohort and carried on by the Planned Parenthood crusaders today.  Of course, the anthropomorphic cause of climate change (and corresponding political punishment for skeptics) conveniently dovetails into these notions of utopia and human perfection.

IM:  That is a big mountain to climb.  Let’s hope Trump’s exertions and the blessings of American liberty can overcome the progressive ambition so appropriately portrayed in the myth and fate of Sisyphus.  Here is an excerpt from a Wikipedia entry on Sisyphus: 

James Clement van Pelt, co-founder of Yale's Initiative in Religion, Science & Technology, suggests that Sisyphus also personifies humanity and its disastrous pursuit of perfection by any means necessary, in which the great rock repeatedly rushing down the mount symbolizes the accelerating pace of unsustainable civilization toward cataclysmic collapse and cultural oblivion that ends each historical age and restarts the sisyphean cycle.

Old Gadfly:  Trump’s and the Republican Party’s exertions require a healthy soul, inspired by the blessings of natural rights and the duty to preserve and protect them by a constitutional republic that guarantees a just society where all citizens and legal residents are equally protected and empowered by the rule of law.  Let’s pray that we can break the current Sisyphean cycle.