Turning Back the Clock

Winning in 2022 and 2024 isn't enough, it is just the beginning of a generational fight to reclaim the Constitution and put the government jinn back in its bottle.

Liberalism (aka progressivism) isn't the root problem. These ideas have always been around - Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was fighting against them in France in the mid-1800's. What is different today is that those ideas have been combined with deconstructionism and postmodernism into a totally new cultural ideology called Wokeism.

Deconstructionism allows anything to be redefined as anything else - words are meaningless because they have no ties to reality, words become the tools of the powerful, both in culture and in governance.

Postmodernism is the ultimate in relativism. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody – a characteristic of the so-called “modern” mind.

Of course, none of this works. The one gauge of any philosophy is that it can withstand the scrutiny which it imposes on the nature of things. The glaring paradox of the postmodernist is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its own skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning.

As luck would have it, deconstructionism and postmodernism are of humanist creation and as such, are unbound from the governance of God, ethics, and morality.

It isn’t really luck, it is a result of a never-ending and entirely human search for a guiltless religion that never informs whether actions are good or evil, for even those definitions are left to the whims of human mind. It is the same behavior a child exhibits when they go from parent to parent trying to find the one who will award them permission to eat ice cream for breakfast.

That’s why authoritarians like it. Marx denied God and religion because it supposed a power higher than the state. He believed, as many on the contemporary left do, that religion is an enemy of the state. As Mussolini (a fascist dictator) said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Therefore the Constitution and the principles contained therein matter not to the American left, this is why they simply ignore the enumerated limitations and do what they want to do regardless of past laws, regulations, rules, and traditions. They are effectively making their own law, justifying their actions because they decided to define any opposition as illegitimated and not binding on them.

It is also why the left must be defeated in such a way they can never access the levers of power.

It hasn’t always been this way. Looking back in history, both sides of our debate agreed that our actions were governed by the same rules. Bill Clinton tried to do unconstitutional things but when called on them, he stopped. Hillarycare was stopped because Clinton’s advisors decided there was no constitutional basis for it.

I think adherence to the Constitutional rules began to fade during the last half of George W. Bush’s second term, and then, early in Obama’s first term, the wheels really began to come off when Obama adopted an “I’m going to do what I want, stop me if you can” attitude, and due to feckless and fearful opposition from the GOP, he was successful. The Democrats learned from that, the Republicans, not so much.

Victor Davis Hanson proposed that sometime about mid-2009 America began changing psychologically. America looked like the old America, but a large part of society began to think differently. He said that “a sizable fraction of the upper-incomes is hesitant, defensive, unsure — and to such a degree that for a while longer it is not hiring, buying, or investing in the old way. It believes not only that there is no certainty in the tax code, the cost of new entitlements, or our national finance, but that even if there were their own successes would be suspect and earn antipathy rather than praise.

Those of the lower incomes likewise became hesitant to take risks — unsure that the rewards of work in the private sector are all that much better than what government can offer through subsidies. The former group fears government will grow; the latter that it will not. The one suspects that government will confiscate more earnings; the other hopes that it will. The successful were hesitant to work more, to create more, for fear of being punished. The poor became hesitant to work more, given their expectations that entitlements will be extended and will be easier to come by.

It was the beginning of a two front war that continues today – in fact, the Biden Administration has mounted the largest frontal offensive since LBJ’s “Great Society” show came to town.

The result of this war is a feeling of uncertainty and chaos. Our system of justice has become so arbitrary and capricious, nobody has any certainty they will be treated fairly. From contract to civil to criminal law, the one thing we have learned to expect is the unexpected.

Wokeism presents a situation where nobody can ever be sure what the rules of the game are - does the company has enough LGBTQ employees, is your hybrid SUV still polluting too much, are your ESG scores are high enough?

No reality based person believes that government borrowing, massive new entitlements and spending are reducing unemployment, ending inflation, and raising GDP, but due to the postmodernist economic theory called MMT (Modern Monetary Theory), there is a belief that wealth can be created by record deficits and aggregate debt and that printing ever more money will not lead to inflation.

If it all seems wrong, that’s because it is.

Of postmodernism, Philosopher Richard Tarnas said it “cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself.” The same is true for our current environment. Compared to its own rules, nothing the American left does can stand. It is entirely contradictory and hypocritical.

Every vestige of this ideology must be excised from religion, society, and government. One election will never do that – largely because this is a cultural problem. This culture elected government officials who believe what the culture believes.

If candidates are not committed, heart and soul, to ending Wokeism, they should not be supported. The same goes for the graybeards already in government. If their only agenda isn’t cleaning house and starting from scratch, they must go.

Nothing can end before it starts.

We can pinpoint the when, how, and why America changed, and armed with that knowledge, we can begin the change back to a constitutional republic.