We are stuck in a rut. We are mired in a blockheaded assumption that there are few if any continuities in human experience. We are tacitly and openly told that we can make ourselves anew according to each passing era’s intellectual, cultural, and technological superficialities. After all, individuals, we are told, are blank slates to be inscribed with whatever lies about in a person’s social environment and/or can be pushed into the mind by media and the diktats of the schools. Therein lies the heart of progressivism, and its monstrous crusades to make people conform to fleeting fads of thought. The way is made wide open to endlessly fiddle with people and their personal arrangements, as in the silly-but-menacing Green New Deal.
As a high school American History teacher, an entire chapter in the textbook was devoted to the “living Constitution”. It’s the idea that condones the boundless busybody government so beloved by progressives and their intellectual cousins, the socialists. However, it’s a complete refutation of the common thread throughout time of the thing that resides in all of us: human nature. This generic quality is the primary and permanent thing in the wirings of Aristotle to Adams to your Sunday morning sermon. Today is a constant war against the sage wisdom of our cultural legacy.
The confrontation plays out in our elections. Elections are the means to an end for our progressive brethren. Instead of elections being a neutral process to gauge the voice of the people, they are seen by today’s progressives as something to be manipulated to achieve the desired end, and then they drag the rest of us into their ends-justifies-the-means hell. Herein lies their predisposition to cheat by flaunting and surreptitiously breaking the rules. The 2020 election elucidates this lesson, and many, many more. Here’s a few others.
First, as it seems now, the Republicans will never win a close election. The predilection of progressives to win at all costs leads to legal and illegal abuse of the vote. Massive mail-in voting is scandalous, period. The progressive resistance to the simplest measures to protect ballot integrity is shameful in the extreme. The system is tailor-made for cheating.
The amount of cheating is hard to determine at this point. But we do know what happens when the protections of a police force are pulled back. Look no further than Minneapolis, Seattle’s CHOP/CHAZ, Portland’s mean streets, New York City, Chicago, Kenosha, nearly anywhere a large concentration of people reside. What gets rewarded with no fear of consequence gets repeated. Ditto for election fraud when guarantees for election integrity are replaced by the equivalent of the Boy Scout oath as the sole stop for malevolence that lies in some hearts.
Second, stop early voting and tighten the qualifications for mail-in voting. Even in a pandemic, we must return to in-person balloting on a set day. Any mail-in ballots can only be allowed within a predetermined window of no more than 5 days before the election and certainly not after. Early voting means that a voter acts before all the information before the election has been presented. The Democrats were harvesting some ballots before the public got an inner glimpse into the seamy world of the Biden family. Some people may have voted for a man who might face impeachment and criminal prosecution.
Third, ad hominem and failure to articulate a policy rationale can be serious problems in a chief executive. Have I accurately described a significant part of the Trump persona? The approach may appeal to a fixed slice of the electorate but has little capacity to reach out beyond that cocoon. Results are definitely important but weren’t sufficient to overcome a wildly permissive election system and a portion of the public who couldn’t take the absence of a generous spirit. Much of this was baked into cake by Trump. It was euphemistically referred to as being Trumpy.
Being Trumpy for four years meant that he failed at expanding his base to compensate for the rabid opposition. Results were enough for some among the hesitant but an energized Left with its mobs, fellow travelers, and money – and there was much of that from the Left’s growing billionaire class – and those of the center-right who were put off by his manners made a solid mass of irreconcilables and an uphill climb. The virus was another one of those things that fell into a preexisting vortex. Trump is a two-edged sword of combativeness against the swamp and crudity. The persona has a niche audience.
Fourth, the Republican Party is now a working-class party. Nationalism, patriotism, economic growth, and opposition to the “woke” thought police are now the party’s watchwords. Our elites from the boardroom to the faculty lounge are lost, but it’s no great loss since they are numerically insignificant and already held in such great disrepute. The party must assiduously plow those demographic fields that knows no specific ethnic, race, or gender attribute.
Fifth, the great divide in our politics is no longer liberal/conservative. The catalyst for what divides us is culture. We are two different peoples irreconcilably separated by fundamental beliefs and ways of life. More accurately, liberal/conservative has been supplanted by tradition/avant-garde. The geographic complexion of the dichotomy is rural/urban or city/countryside, an age-old split.
Traditional notions of family and faith are more readily and publicly defended outside the metropolis, boardroom, and faculty lounge. The traditions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, equal opportunity, grace, and fidelity have an appeal beyond the frivolous categories of race, ethnicity, or gender. Therein lies tradition’s appeal to certain demographic segments nationwide, but the bastion is in the countryside.
This last lesson on our current state of affairs is fraught with the most danger. Culture defines us. Assaults on it and its related livelihoods will elicit strong reactions. Many nations, including ours, have been through this before. It isn’t pretty, and frequently bloody.
As long as the city continues the movement to separate itself from the rest of the country – and, indeed, it’s the city with its avant-garde reflex that is the engine of the separation – the country will be on the cusp of a fight, both physical and rhetorical. Be prepared for dark times despite the empty calls for unity, empathy, and accommodation in the election’s aftermath. The reality on the ground and the machinations in our institutions won’t match the speechifying words. Are we truly irreconcilable? We’ll soon see.
RogerG
