Amerika

Donald Trump can be best described as an attempt to return to the Reagan era on the wings of the Tea Party, trying to get us to a more libertarian America so that it can stop chasing the Clinton-era ideal of civil rights plus globalism.

George H.W. Bush may have invented the term “New World Order,” basically a warming-over of the WW2 propaganda that the West was good because we had freedom and free markets, but Clinton fused it with the civil rights agenda.

He did that because his goal was to revitalize what Abraham Lincoln did, mainly to achieve total federal control so that he could liberalize a country and therefore, make it an international market and bring in the big bucks.

Like all of his Tammany-style cronies, at the end of the day Bill Clinton was all about the Benjamins and nothing but. He wanted to control the world with American markets and outsource production and possibly even the military to China.

Guys like Bill Clinton, who think they are the smartest in every room, tend to do this sort of thing since they have no idea how limited their own perception is. They quickly form opinions based on a few principles, then dash off to seize power.

At this point, we are re-living the Carter years that were so horrible that we got Reagan, the closest thing to Hitler (so The New York Times told us) since WW2.

Carter shows us the human ego in action. Motivated by altruism that he feels makes him closer to God and universal human esteem, he did all the “right” things and forced them on an economy that then collapsed as it always does under socialism.

Clinton did the same, and his second term brought permanent economic malaise and social distrust; Obama did the same, and his second term also brought about a moribund economy and sense that America was unraveling.

The voters resemble a group of people on a boat, running from one side to another, trying to keep it balanced, but never noticing that in the process, no one is steering the boat toward an ultimate destination.

They are just keeping it afloat.

When Reagan came into power, he synthesized the Buckleyite conservatism lite of the day with a commonsense pioneer libertarianism, but also extended federal power like Lincoln and JFK.

This just gave government more power for when Leftists won an election, and Clinton took it to the bank. As long as conservatives make a nice healthy society for Leftists to dominate, we will keep going down the path to nowhere in our boat.

Our only chance to achieve greatness begins with a tiny first step of what Reagan and Trump wanted to do, which is change our direction from heading toward Leftist Utopia back toward our pioneer roots, a social order that emphasized self-reliance and constructive contributions.

Keeping in mind that this is the first baby step of many to get society back toward actual health, with such a change we would be moving to political agnosticism. We would not be Right nor Left, but right down the middle, although leaning to the Left because libertarian “classical liberalism” is fundamentally still egalitarian and therefore, still liberalism.

For us to do this however we have to reject the fundamental idea of the Left, which is equality.

Mainstream conservatives and dissident Right conservatives fear doing it because their audience does not understand anything but an egalitarian system, which means that saying no to equality will be unpopular.

People forget that we have three choices when someone proposes an idea to us:

1. Yes: affirm the idea and pursue it.
2. No: reject the idea and condemn it.
3. No thank you: avoid the idea and refuse to adopt it.

The word “no” may be the purest expression of human language since it allows us to avoid following others down the abyss of whatever illusion they are chasing. All standards and values rest on that “no.”

If we gently reject equality, we are simply saying that we have no wish to pursue the conjecture that says equality is good, and will be turning toward something else like hierarchy, values, competition, and culture instead.

Instead of saying, “we like equality because that way we can have freedom,” we need to realize that saying yes to equality means that we will be funding it, it will grow in popularity, and soon it will replace us.

And yet… conservatives of both stripes cannot stop themselves from seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.

The affirmation of human equality in 1776 was addressed not simply to the British crown or the parliament or even to other Americans, but to “a candid world.” It presented an enlarged conception of natural rights applicable to all men at all times. It has proved the “sheet anchor of American republicanism,” as Abraham Lincoln called it. Put differently, it has provided what America’s final founder, Martin Luther King Jr., called a “promissory note” to all Americans. And yet, it also contained the germ of universal liberty that Jefferson hoped might spread to every nation.

In common with a great many other patriots and lovers of liberty, Lincoln appreciated the unique moral force of the Declaration—the self-evident truths of which were “the definitions and axioms of a free society”—and couldn’t resist paying homage to its author, a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament. For those who wish to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow, a small but significant task is to keep Jefferson on his pedestal.

In other words, they want us to throw our lot in with those who argue for equality. Jefferson waffled on the issue, saying that we were “created equal” as a means of saying that birth is the only equality we get, but still endorse equal natural rights like any other libertarian.

Under Lincoln, that quickly morphed into “civil rights” or “human rights,” which are guaranteed and therefore enforced on everyone by government. Don’t want to bake the gay cake or rent to the sexual offender? Here comes government to Ruby Ridge your posterior.

Conservatives when they are dishonest try to curry favor with a “bipartisan” compromise approach, basically telling Leftists, “we’re just like you but want the ability to be conservative on our own time and dime.”

This never works. Leftists correctly read this as weakness, say “thank you,” and take over.

Here we can see another case of conservatives seizing defeat from the jaws of victory by accepting Leftist dogma as part of “conservatism”:

For King, you were to be judged on your individual character, not lumped into a category. You were a child of God made in the image of God.

The Rev. King’s views on Marxism and socialism are notoriously difficult to pin down. Garrow would put King in the camp of some form of “democratic socialism,” probably closer to that originally envisioned by “social justice” Catholic Michael Harrington during his founding of the Democratic Socialists of America in the early 1980s, a DSA far removed from today’s DSA — the DSA of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush.

As a professor at Grove City College, I got an email last year from the parent of a prospective student really upset that one of her young kids was being taught that she as a “White” (upper case “W”) person was part of the oppressor class. As such, the girl needed to admit to her “White privilege” and unacknowledged racism and how she inherently discriminates against people of color, even if she believes she doesn’t. The kid, whose family every year at home celebrates MLK Day, was completely flummoxed by the whole thing.

If we adopt MLK, we are adopting egalitarianism in the notion that government should lift up ethnic minorities so that they can be part of our society, instead of asking them to adapt to our society (or, in a burst of sanity, recognizing that diversity brings only “racism” and genocide, and rejecting it).

That is the “lesser evil.” It shows us the weakness of Hegelian thought: if we find a counterpoint, and then a compromise, to a bad thing, we have moved our boat closer to pointing toward that bad thing as our destination.

Conservatives have lost ground for years by adopting this strategy of choosing the lesser evil relative to a greater evil, because they end up defending lesser evils like MLK and classical liberalism instead of pointing our boat toward conservatism.

Being cautious types, conservatives like to avoid being radical and outright opposing things, prefering instead to try to make safer versions of them. You cannot do this with equality; as the simplest and most popular idea in the room, it simply takes over.

For conservatives in this era, the only consistency and sanity can be found in rejecting all egalitarianism. We do not have to oppose it, only oppose adopting it in any form. If we fail to do this, we simply become free market Leftists.

Tags: abraham lincoln, bill clinton, conservatism, donald j. trump, jimmy carter, joe biden, john f. kennedy, martin luther king jr.