So, What Do We Do?

This question is asked all the time. I'm going to try to answer it.

I’ve long proposed that any sustained political change must start at the cultural level. My belief that political change comes from cultural change is still strong and I have seen nothing to alter that belief, but I have come to understand there is no salvaging the Republican Party as a home for classical liberals (the artists formerly known as conservatives). It is clear to me that if I must support a Republican candidate because of his supposed “electability” as the primary driver; I’m not going to be very happy with the eventual result.

Here’s what we face.

Classical liberals do not have:

• A voice in either major political party.

• Support in the media (the mainstream media doesn’t even understand liberty)

• Any meaningful organizational structure.

What we do have is the Constitution, and in my mind, this is a significant tool.

The revolution we seek cannot be fought on a battlefield that is owned by our enemies and we must find one where we have at least an equal chance. This will not be easy because the progressives/statists/secular humanists have infiltrated every area of American life. In fact, my friends, the communists that were fought and pushed back in the 50’s and 60’s have today almost won their greatest prize – America.

The “progressive” agenda has been institutionalized in the:

• Schools – from kindergarten to graduate school, the government is there in funding, defining curriculum, setting standards, forcing the teaching of a “progressive”/secular humanist agenda – at the college level, colleges and universities are suckling at the teat of federal student loans,

• Local governments – that beg at the federal altar for funds that have been taken from other communities.

• State governments – again that beg at the federal altar for funds that have been taken from other communities.

• Federal government – reaching into every aspect of contemporary life via a myriad of agencies, commissions, courts and legislative and executive process – there isn’t a single thing that you can touch from the time that you awake until you go to sleep that hasn’t been regulated, certified, taxed or labeled by some agency or by a private firm as a government requirement – there is a government mandate for the fluorescent light bulb you switch on in the morning to the mandated warning label on the mattress you go to sleep on – probably is one on your pillow, too.

• Judiciary – activist judges abound, looking to foreign law for support for their “progressive” desires.

• Political parties – the two major parties are “progressive” at their core. Republicans are pulled to the right by movements like the Tea Party, the Democrats go left and embrace the communists and collectivists like the OWS “movement”, International ANSWER, the unions and the Communist Party USA

• Media – “progressive” bias abounds in the major outlets.

• Churches – “progressive” orthodoxy has largely replaced the Word of God in many of the most liberal denominations and these congregations have allowed God to be replaced by the government as a spiritual authority.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are grossly outnumbered. There is a lot of inertia behind the cycle of dependence this “progressive” agenda has created. We are in a pattern where the government is responsible for a crisis or an unintended consequence and instead of stopping the practice that caused it, they create another program or policy to mitigate it (but they never mitigate it completely and it never goes away) and by doing so insinuate even more government presence than before. Then it becomes ingrained into our psyche, and we accept more government as “normal”.

Democrats always claim that “everybody should have a chance go to college” – but let’s look at how this gets accomplished. What happens is that from the first day of kindergarten, every – and I mean every – student, regardless of desire, skill or educational ability is told that in order to be successful, they must go to college. For the larger population of students, our preparatory schools are dumbed down by federal guidelines and waste time teaching things like “diversity” because the progressives in the education establishment also see the schools having another mission, an agent of “progressive” social change and a vehicle for social engineering. This confused mission churns out students who are grossly unprepared to progress to higher education, so much so that remedial classes and “how to study” courses are taught to a significant percentage of incoming freshmen at our institutional of higher learning.

Pardon my harshness – but if a kid has just graduated after 12 years in school and they must be re-taught to read, do math, write coherently or be taught effective study skills, perhaps the 12 years were more about babysitting and “social change” than true learning.

So now we have kids who are not qualified for college but a society that says that the must go – no credentials and no money – no problem! Crazy Joe’s Payday Student Loans Company is here to help! Universities suck up the student loans, drawing in massive amounts of money and in many cases imparting little of value to the student -leaving them with a crippling debt and no marketable skills to earn enough money to pay the loan back and – boom! Higher education bubble, here we come! The Fannie/Freddie/Community Reinvestment Act/Dodd/Frank created home mortgage bubble worked so well as a social engineering policy, why not do it again with education, right? You can always just “forgive” the loans, right?

Students leave high school and college unprepared for work, college students loaded with debt (the colleges are the ones who benefited from the sweet federally guaranteed loan cash) and are underemployed or unemployable – “boom!” again – food stamps, rent assistance, unemployment insurance, federal jobs training programs, welfare, Earned Income Tax Credits, Medicare, Obamacare, etc. Welcome to government dependency – and we aren’t even talking about the welfare queens and their baby daddies here – most of these kids are from middle class homes.

We must understand the cycle to break it – the “progressive” agenda is more than theoretical and ideological today, it has grown into a functioning leviathan that is grinding the soul of America in the cogs of a massive “Brave New World” machine, belching the combusted freedom and liberty out its exhaust pipe like diesel smoke.

There is still hope. Like Sarah Connor in the Terminator movies said, “There is no fate but what we make”. The weak point in the “progressive” plan, the chink in the armor is not the schools, the media, the churches or the political or government structure – those are lost to us. These are too far gone, too impenetrable, too steeped in the “post-modernist” relativist logic to be redeemed.

The key to the revolution is the family.

This is the one area of which progressives still have not gained complete control. They are closer than ever, but not there yet. We still have cards to play.

We still can separate our families from the outside world long enough to get their attention and teach our children about the America of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, we can still teach them about God and how we owe our natural rights to our Creator. We can still teach them self-respect, loyalty, honor, right from wrong and help them to build a conscience. We can still teach them the evils of Marxism and the benefits of self-reliance and independence. We can teach them how to manage to a budget and the satisfaction of a day’s work well done. We can teach them the TINSTAAFL Principle (there is no such thing as a free lunch).

We can teach them about philosophy, truth, logic and critical thinking – but mostly we can provide them core principles and a solid basis them to think for themselves. We have the tools – the Holy Bible, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Locke, Montesquieu, de Tocqueville, Hobbes, Rousseau, Plato, and Socrates.

We aren’t going to be able to do this without our kids. Our job is to hold the line until they can come along and clean up the mess that we and the Baby Boomers have made.

Just remember, the most difficult part of winning a war is making it stay won.