by Bruce Thornton
The battle ahead.
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The Christmas and New Year festivities have been joyous for us Americans who have suffered through the four years of incompetence and malignity inflicted upon us by the previous administration, the most dysfunctional since at least World War II. Both at home and abroad, a Democrat party hijacked by the left-over left defied nature and nature’s God with policies and programs astonishing for their gross violations of reality and morality, not to mention common sense and the laws of science.
But as we rejoice over our deliverance, and look hopefully to January 20, we should gird our loins and steel ourselves for the fight to come, starting with whatever feckless policies that lame-duck Biden’s puppeteers manage to get passed. The damage to our culture and Constitutional order has deep roots, and has poisoned our institutions and culture both openly and so insidiously that even those who know better still tolerate or endorse the same policies that have weakened our Republic.
Most of us can catalogue the examples of Democrat malfeasance. Take the “renewable energy” and “net-zero carbon” grift that has disrupted our economy and fed inflation in a nation blessed with huge reserves of oil and natural gas, enough to make us energy self-sufficient. But no, the Lefty Dems have been addled by the scientifically dicey “global warming” hypothesis tarted up with lurid apocalyptic panic and promiscuous scientism, all greased by corporate subsidies and tax incentives that have befouled the free market, and created a huge moral hazard for the future. At the same time, an already existing, actually “clean and renewable energy”––nuclear power–– has been put on the shelf and starved of funding, while billions are squandered on intermittent solar and wind energy that enriches China.
Another Dem failure to “follow the science” is the transgender fad preying on neurotic children and teens. Science tells us that mammals are either males and females that together procreate, yet doctors presumably trained scientifically are openly poisoning children with puberty blockers and cross-hormone treatments, then move on to irreversible surgeries that leave their victims mutilated for life. Whether through greed or misplaced “compassion,” doctors are blatantly violating their Hippocratic Oath that in the original Greek requires physicians not just to do no harm, but to benefit their patients.
Nor should we forget the Uniparty’s feckless economic policies that print, borrow, tax, spend, and redistribute trillions of dollars to political clients. Or what Rudyard Kipling called “Robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,” and Churchill dubbed “Government of the dole-drawers, by the dole-drawers, and for the dole-drawers.” The unscientific mitigation policies and spending sprees during the Covid pandemic damaged millions of people, and flooded the economy with more money chasing fewer goods, the eternal formula for inflation.
More pertinent are the massive costs of entitlement programs, the biggest items in the federal budget, a list now including the interest on the debt used to pay for this largess fast approaching unsustainability––in just eight years, the biggest of the big spenders, Social Security, will have to cut benefits by a fifth. Yet the Dems continue to create more and more unfunded liabilities with larger and larger numbers of beneficiaries, now including 10 million mostly unvetted illegal aliens welcomed into our country over just the last four years.
Meanwhile, our defense spending has dwindled to just 3.4% of GDP, even as China, our most powerful and malignant rival, is spending freely on materiel, subsidized in part by American corporations and businesses partnering with the Chinese communists.
But on this issue of overspending on entitlements––to a greater (Dems) or lesser (GOP) degree–– we all are complicit, no matter what party we follow. All democracies since ancient Athens have preferred spending money on “butter” rather than “guns.” And they use their votes to punish politicians who try to rein in spending by reforming or––horribile dictu!––eliminating some entitlements. But the bill will have to be paid at some point during Trump’s second term to keep our economy from imploding because of debt, overspending, and deficits.
On our foreign policy blunders, the Democrats generally are more culpable than conservatives. But the last two Dem presidents have completely owned foreign policy disasters––the consequences of which we are now confronting. That’s because the idealistic “rules-based international order” is the foreign policy preference of the bipartisan establishment––diplomats, national security agencies, the Pentagon, university faculty, scholarly journals, think tanks, and media.
For example, this preference for “soft power” and especially “diplomatic engagement” instead of force explains Barack Obama’s extreme appeasement of Iran over its nuclear weapons program, murderous proxies, and bloody adventurism throughout the region.
Worse than signing the “nuclear deal” in the first place was Obama’s sticking with it even as Iran––as Israeli intelligence documented––serially violated the terms of the agreement, and continued its aggression against our military forces in the region, and our ally Israel’s interests and security.
Donald Trump left the deal, but Joe Biden rejoined, and spent his term trying to bribe Iran to acknowledge its deals terms. But Iran blew off these cringing supplications while pocketing billions of dollars in cash and sanctions relief. Unchecked by this failure, Biden ordered a shambolic skedaddle from Afghanistan, stranding Americans and leaving our Afghan allies to the tender mercies of the Taliban, who also received the strategically critical Bagram Air Base, along with billions in materiel. Whatever deterrent power we had left after the nuclear deal and Afghanistan debacle was gone, which encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine, and Iran and its proxies to start the savage war against Israel.
These examples of the Dems’ failures illustrate the general principle that bad ideas most often are the cause of bad policies. Take the “rules-based international order” that has warped our foreign policy establishment. It is predicated on the belief that the problems of humanity that lead to conflicts and wars are the result of unjust political regimes that deny people their human rights and freedoms; Western sins like imperialism and colonialism; natural resources plundered by the West, impoverishing those peoples and keeping their societies undeveloped; and the persistence of dysfunctional beliefs and superstitions, especially religion and nationalism, that interfere with progress.
Marxism and progressivism are the political ideologies based on these dubious and dangerous ideas. From them come the technocratic, anti-nationalism, “one world” globalism that fancies itself, as did Marxism, a “science” that only the uneducated, uncultured, retrogressive Bible-thumpers reject, thus making them the prey of the plutocrats and “fascists” for their own malign purposes. But all these claims are based on begged questions, not science or fact, and serve the progressives’ and leftists’ lust for power in order to create the utopia of perfect “social justice” and “equality” of wealth.
For history, millennia of experience, common sense, both our Greco-Roman and Judeo- Christian founding civilizations, all teach us that human beings are driven by destructive passions and selfish interests, all empowered by our freedom to choose, and making utopia impossible to achieve. Or as Immanuel Kant said, “From the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight can be made.”
The Framers knew the truth of humanity’s destructive flaws, and so gave us a Constitution that mutually checks and balances the Federal government’s powers, and a Bill of Rights that protects individuals from tyranny. They also ensured holding power accountable with regularly scheduled elections, which give we the people the ability to choose a government that does not assault the Constitutions and our freedoms––as we just did on November 5.
But the flaws of human nature, magnified by bad policies that distort or ignore that truth to increase the scope of self-serving power, does not surrender power easily. The Dems, supported by their media press agents, are already conniving and leaving political IED’s to cripple Donald Trump’s presidential powers. And they are abetted by Fifth Columnist Republicans, Leviathan’s uniparty guildsmen who are full of passionate intensity.
Now begins the hard work of keeping our Republic and restoring our Constitution.
Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center,
an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State
University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of
the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/now-the-hard-work-begins/
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