“You get the government your society deserves”, to paraphrase an old saying. Unfortunately not everyone in a society is deserving of poor, overreaching, overbearing government and therein lies the pity in this current situation.
I have always tried to think highly of my fellow Americans overall, I learned this “Trust the American people, they will do what’s right in the end” attitude from Ronald Reagan and have found it useful to buoy up my hopes when things looked bad. After all, you can’t have an exceptional nation unless the people are exceptional as well.
While that might be true, I cannot help but think that Ronald Reagan might have second thoughts in this regard if he were alive today.
This attitude of “Trust the American People” was sorely tried after the reelection of Barack Hussein Obama. Not the election that put him into office, in a world of free will and choice anything can and will happen once. Rather the election where he was reelected and the American people “doubled down” on the folly of letting a man who stands four square against our foundational principles and uses his knowledge of our Constitution not to support that document but to find means of defeating it, lead this nation.
Even so, Ronnie’s view of the American People was reaffirmed magnificently when America shrugged off the manure the Left was peddling and elected Donald Trump in defiance of punditry and probability. The political pendulum swings and it had begun to swing back again. We faced a lot of problems when Ronald Reagan took office and he solved a lot of them. Same goes for Donald Trump …
That pendulum isn’t something you can count on, however. Out on each end of the swinging arc, just out of grasp is a hand that is reaching to seize that pendulum and hold it locked in place forever. The hand on the right end of the arc is small and weak, the Right keeps it that way knowing the threat it presents. The hand on the left end of the arc is strong and growing stronger as the Left patiently feeds and empowers it intentionally. The pendulum of politics swings a little further left every time. This is a true peril to our Republic and to the concept of Democracy in general.
This is nothing new, there have always been threats to the Republic and the Republic has always overcome them. This isn’t a battle of ideologies so much as it is a battle against the darker forces driving human nature. Those dark forces clothe themselves in ideologies, the ideology being no more than the beard on the face of their prophets. It is the ages long struggle of good against evil. Good keeps evil in check, evil feeds its evil nature.
The lust for power is an immutable darkness in human nature which has been and will always be there. We have known of this fault in ourselves for millennia, ignorance of it is no excuse for mankind. Religious texts point this fault out very clearly. For example, in the Bible, Lucifer is described as a subtle being of great beauty and power. Lucifer’s greatest desire is “To ascend to the Throne of the Most High God”, to seize power for himself. This is an epitome of evil and The Great Lie (“I will become like God”) warned of in the Jewish and Christian faiths. Despots throughout human history have sought unlimited power and even named themselves as gods.
The reason for the clause in our own First Amendment regarding Freedom of Religion is to protect Faith from Government, not vice verse. It was put there because Kings claimed Divine Right and Authority. The King we had just fought was not only a political tyrant but the head of the Church of England and in that capacity claimed to speak for God Himself. He had in effect “ascended to the Throne of the Most High God” and exercised not only civil authority but according to the system that empowered him he also represented Divine Will. This is an example of the State usurping the Divine for purposes of unlimited power.
This lust for power runs very deep in the human condition. Even if you do not subscribe to any religious faith the cautionary values in religious texts against seeking absolute power are unavoidable and undeniable. Those cautions are something we have been aware of in ourselves for a very, very long time. The Founding Fathers were very much aware of this basic, inimical, intrinsic problem in human nature and sought to curtail it. Good keeps evil in check.
In America we have a unique situation where The Good has been codified in the foundational laws of the nation. Every other government on Earth tells the people what rights it will grant them, in America the principle is for the people to grant the government only such powers as it needs to fulfill the minimum functions for the health of the nation. America’s system is unprecedented, exceptional and to date the apex of human government.
There are only two directions for the American system of governance to go. It can remain on that apex and build upon it, reaching for ever more liberty and the prosperity that accompanies freedom or it can chip away at that apex and seek a level with other types of government. The former is a manifestation of good and the latter is a manifestation of evil. This is as the Founders declared “A truth we hold to be self evident”.
Whichever way it goes, it will be both the achievement and the fault of the American People. To a point. Building ever higher that hand out there on the right end of the pendulum swing becomes weaker and smaller, erosion of the apex results in the hand on the left getting larger and stronger. At the point where that larger, stronger hand on the left end of the arc is able to seize the pendulum of politics the swing is arrested, perhaps forever. The sad part of all this is that it doesn’t have to be that way. For the first time in human history The People hold all the reins of power, it is up to The People to decide what to do with that power.
Even if we manage to defeat the left and vanquish the insidious threat it presents, that will not do away with evil and its lust for power. Evil will still be there looking to take yet another shape. This unavoidable situation is the reason why Liberty requires eternal vigilance. As a people, not as individuals like we who believe this way but as a mass, America has been doing very poorly in the realm of vigilance and that is why we find ourselves once again in a desperate battle against evil.
To quote Robert A. Heinlein, “Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes ….” So how do we recognize evil when we encounter it? How do we know which side is evil and which side is good? We know evil by its fruits, evil calls good evil.
One reply on “From the perspective of evil, good is evil.”
We’ve talked some around here about how Trump has broken the media. He’s also broken a lot of the bureaucracy and the Deep State.
It’s not just the pendulum but a problem that takes things to such an extreme that it breaks the whole thing. Things like transgenderism destroying feminism, let alone destroying gay culture. It broke itself. It was inevitable.
The biggest example within government bureaucracy as it affects society is federal funding of private universities. Right now there are only a handful of private universities that are willing to stand by their principles and go it alone, without public funding. The best thing the Trump administration can do for the future of our country is to disentangle federal funding from education, especially higher education. It looks like the tide may have just turned with the Dept of Ed going after Princeton for its self-declared “racism,” on top of free speech rulings. Of course, there’s a lot more work to be done.
I would like to get rid of the Department entirely and all public funding of private universities. This is one of those things that seems hard to do, but the addiction to federal money has got to be destroyed. Our society will be so much better off twenty years later.
Perhaps that’s pie-in-the-sky stuff but Trump has broken so much, I hope he can break this.