Reality Check 101

Which is more important, to think or to do, to ponder or to live?  In the midst our current multiplicity of national crises, which is the best way of national preservation and renewal, to fight for hearts and minds or to meet on the social/political battlefield in a quest to out-strategize and out-maneuver?

President Biden’s first State of the Union address was an expose.  In a tragic kind of way, it was an expose of the worst of America’s possible future. The address served to crystalize just what a dangerous place our nation is in at this moment in history: insurgency at the southern border, weaponization of federal agencies, willful crippling of the economy, continued lawlessness on the streets and in courtrooms, usurpation of guaranteed constitutional rights, and the unprecedented progress of evil in the world because of the conscious evisceration of American power – and the president said little if anything about any of it.

It was an “ah-ha” moment, not because the President of the United States forcefully and clearly stood before us as a man for the time, ready to lead us out of the threats, but because it was a display of a toothless tiger with little to offer except destructive aspirations and fly-by honorable mentions of everything everyone outside the Washington bubble endures every day.  It was “ah-ha” because suddenly any anticipation of courage and hope from the administration was dashed in that single hour – record time, just like the one year of destruction that led us to this point.

So, what to do?  The question goes back to the first questions above.  Conservatives, Christian and otherwise, until very recently, have argued amongst themselves and struggled to be relevant in the face of decades of the advancement of the slow insidious infiltration of the Progressive socialist dream of paradise into every facet of America’s life.  There has to be a better way forward if what makes America great and good is to be passed on to our children, grandchildren, and beyond.

Glenn Ellmers of American Greatness has written an insightful (and lengthy) essay which is important to the question of what to do ( https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/15/we-must-all-hang-together/ ).  The essay resonates because Ellmers faces head-on and analyzes what to do but does so by causing his reader pause long enough to think about the conservative movement’s bickering over the supremacy of principle over action or visa-versa.  The only thing his essay lacks is God’s perspective and actionable steps.  But the principles laid out by him are a significant grid through which to see the chaos being created by the Biden administration. 

Ellmers has much to say about prudence; “the combination of knowledge of goals or ends (what is good or desirable…) with knowledge of means (how to reach that goal under these particular circumstances)”.  But prudence, like anything else, can be used by evil as well as good.

I have long believed that the impotence of conservative efforts to defeat progressivism/socialism (the Left), does not rest only in our inability to out-strategize or out-maneuver them (means) – although that is true, but in the seeming ignorance or naiveté about our opposition’s real goals. 

To put it as bluntly as possible, in the same way that Vladimir Putin is waging an all-out war of destruction against Ukraine in order to, as he has said many times, rebuild a new Russian empire built on the old Soviet geography, so the Left has been in an all-out war of destruction against America’s Judeo-Christian foundations and her federal system of a representative republicanism in order to, as they have declared for decades, rebuild her from that destruction into their hallowed Marxist topography.  That prudence for the Left; being committed to their goal and employing any appropriate means to achieve that goal, paid big dividends in the first Biden year.  There is no other explanation for the Left’s celebration of Biden’s faltering shallow State of the Union address than that they saw in it the capitulation of the president of the United States to all they hold dear.

It is 1939 in America again and she is being guided by Neville Chamberlain.  He, Biden-Chamberlain, has faced off against his Hitler and come back to announce “peace in our time” if only we give him, Putin-Hitler, another pound of Ukrainian flesh.  As all Democrat and establishment Republican leaders know, tyrants are honorable men, as long as the road to Kyiv-Prague is not littered with obstructions.