To the Purist Voter
While I honor and respect any man who withholds his vote from Governor Romney on that grounds that Mr Romney is so evil from stem to stern that a vote for him will tarnish one’s immortal soul and damn one to hell, I cannot respect those who withhold their vote on the grounds that the mild annoyance of an ideologically impure or insufficiently libertarian Romney Administration is indistinguishable from an Obama Second Term.
No political contest in my lifetime, no election since before the Civil War, has been fraught with such grave and lasting likely consequences.
At the risk of sounding alarmist, I believe this election will either destroy the nation, economically and spiritually if not physically; or else destroy the Democratic Party for a generation.
While I would not be willing to imperil my immortal soul for the sake of my nation — for what profits it a man to gain the world but lose his soul? — I would be willing to imperil my ideological purity by voting for a candidate who says he supports my causes but might not, or who claims not to support intrinsically morally evil practices, but might yet. Is my ideological purity worth risking the collapse of the last nation on Earth which even plays lip service to my ideals?
The United States is the one Republican form of government left in a feotid and ever-rising sewer of broke, ugly, churlish, socialist welfare-state bureaucracies, and broke, bloodthirsty, post-communist dictatorships, and broke, inhuman, totalitarian theocracies across the Middle East. The United State is rapidly degenerating from a Christian nation to a sub-pagan postchristian neo-barbarian nation, but the cancer has not yet reached her heart. My vote is a statement for my God and my nation, for liberty and justice, and against leftwing pro-Jihadist totalitarian political correctness.
Shall I betray my nation because the GOP cannot produce a candidate sufficiently endowed with a desire to defend the Constitution? It would be like letting my mother get beaten to death on the street by a gang of thugs, and not coming to her rescue because she is a drunk.
Now, you might say that she has vowed not to be a drunk before and betrayed that promise before.
You might say that her promise to stop drinking is merely to get you to come to her aid, and perhaps the thugs beating her are not so bad. After all, the press is all on the side of the thugs and against your mother.
The old lady has a lot of toughness. She might live. A few more boots in her face, maybe it will break her nose and damage her bridgework. And who cares if Catholics have to pay for contraceptives, and Christians have to pay for abortifacient drugs? And if the press corp, hooting and whooping, draw near to urinate in the old lady’s eyes and nose and open wounds, that is not likely to kill her.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation, after all.
On the other hand, she is your mother, and a vote to save her, even if her promise to go to financial rehab is false, is better than the vote for the thugs, who claim she is not drinking heavily enough, and who want to see her humiliated and see her power broken and see her bankrupted and ultimately see her dead.
Why do the Leftist hate America? Because the old lady is not perfect. She is not Utopia. The Leftists are too pure and smug and superior to support anything less than absolute perfection.
Anything smaller than Utopia must be demeaned, suffer degradation, and be shattered like the spine of an old lady being beaten to death by street thugs before her son’s cold and indifferent eyes.
So are you failing to vote for Romney because he did not promise you to usher in Utopia this season? Because you think to vote for him is to vote for the rich, a vote for torture in Guantanamo Bay, a vote for unjust wars overseas and a vote which will not end abortion here at home? Because to vote for him is a sin?
But a man who sees his mother being beaten who does not life a hand to help her is committing the sin of omission.I tell you that indifference to the choice between a greater and a lesser evil condones the greater evil. And if the motive for your Olympian indifference to the outcome of the contest is pride, I tell you that man is a sinner and will not escape the judgment.
The patriot whose love of his nation is so great that rather that soil his lily-white kid gloves by voting for a man who will not in one hour restore the Constitution to its pristine virginity, and whose patriotism requires him to declare a curse on both the feuding houses of Jackass and Elephant, and who fails to cast a vote against the candidate who seeks to the Constitution in the name of social justice, I tell you that man is no patriot.
If it is so morally bad to vote for Romney, why can I not simply go to the confessional booth after I go to the voting booth and be shrived?
Of the destruction of the nation, I and others have spoken heretofore and at length. Maybe you think I am overstating the case, or exaggerating the risk. Maybe so. But consider the causes which lend credence to the troubling prognostication.
But we are discussing an economic crises where the factors involved will combine to create a crisis not only rapid, but immense. We are not going deeper and deeper into debt to France or Germany, or some other world power that wishes us well, or at least can tolerate our way of life; we are going deeper and deeper into debt to Red China, who is the only reasonable candidate to supplant us as a world superpower should we fall.
We are not discussing a slow economic degradation, but a run on the banks, a flight into real value, a sudden panic when the market realizes that all the IOU’s on future earning of American taxpayers are worthless, and that no other bank or monetary system in the world has any reserve credit either.
We are not discussing a world that is at peace, by one which is agitated by an enemy both fearless, intelligent and pitiless in approach, but irrational and unpredictable in choice of target, which are selected for propaganda value rather than military value. Wars are expensive. They cost lives and money. So we are talking about a crisis which can be exploited or even precipitated by a deadly enemies.
The current economic policies of borrowing money from Red China to pay for every and any frivolity under the sun, from Big Bird to Green Energy boondoggles, to the take over of GM and the student loan industry, the medical insurance industry, to the utter and humiliating prostitution of the meretricious media, will impoverish our children and grandchildren for the foreseeable future, lead to hyperinflation, to the devaluation of the currency, to additional and sustained world wide depression. I before predicted unemployment rates reaching 50%, which is only twice the current rate, which in turn is only twice the rate when Obama took office.
Of the spiritual destruction of the nation, I have also spoken. If Chicago Machine politics become the norm, the election of Obama to a second term may perhaps be the last election when the number of honest votes honestly counted has any real effect on election outcomes. We have seen the Black Panthers engaged in voter intimidation, and go unpunished, and we have seen the ferocious efforts at resisting border security effort and picture identification efforts to clean up voter roles. If the number of voters who are clients, dependents and thralls to the government and who are tax eaters rather than tax producers, the vested interest of the dependents of the all powerful welfare state will make elections into meaningless rituals, as they are in one-party totalitarian dictatorships. The American character, the American dream of independence and self-reliance and the ambitions of self-made men, will all come to an end.
If my fears are reasonable, voting for a third part candidate, or failing to vote for Romney because he is not Republican enough nor Libertarian enough nor pacifistic enough nor warhawkish enough nor insufficient sincere in his anti-abortion stance or unwilling to close Gitmo, or for any other reason (aside from fear of eternal damnation) is a failure to vote for the salvation of the Republic.
Ruin can happen rapidly.
Look at how rapidly Great Britain declined. During the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, AD 1896, Britain had a world empire maintained by the strongest military power in history up to that day and wealth almost beyond calculation. By AD 1982, Britain could not maintain a single flotilla against Argentina in the Falkland Islands without overseas aid. British wealth and dignity were shattered. Her people, once famous for their reserve, courtesy, stoicism and sober good humor, are now famous for their hooliganism at soccer games, their absurdly inefficient socialized medicine, and their crime rates rising to the level of a permanent civil war. This all happened within one lifetime of an octogenarian. Men who in their youth where subjects of the greatest empire in the world saw their grandchildren as living as if in a Third World pesthole.
Or do you think a second Obama administration will not see another sixth of the private sector consumed by the government, another hundred years of debt added to our children and grandchildren, another set of disasters in foreign policy, more apologies, more impositions on religious freedom, and a press core even more fawning, servile, and false?
The nation can survive an ideologically impure Romney. It might even, if he carries out even half his campaign promises, recover from the damage Obama has done. If the revolution in energy production that looms on our horizon is not strangled in its cradle by rogue bureaucracies, we may see energy independence and the starvation, due to lack of petrodollars, of international terrorist organizations. The hostility of the press will, at the very least, prevent a monopoly of government power.
Under Romney, my libertarian brothers, we will not see a return to minimal and Constitutional government.
But we will not see taxes raised during a depression in an insane attempt to borrow our way out of debt, nor see the Defense Department eviscerated during wartime in a suicidal attempt to achieve peace by being as unprepared for war as possible.
And perhaps we will not see your children and grandchildren going into hock to Red China going to pay the salary of Jim Lehrer.
But let us look at the stakes on the other side.
A vote for Romney may put an end, for a generation at least, of the Leftist domination of the Democrat Party, and hence eliminate, for a generation at least, the single greatest internal threat to the peace, wellbeing, security and liberty of this nation.
Daniel Greenfield pens a fascinating article along these lines. I hope I will be excused the discourtesy of quoting the whole thing. All his remarks are interesting, and time does not permit me to find his gems judiciously. (http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/10/obamas-last-stand.html)
Democrats do not have a great track record in the White House. The number of Democratic presidents who have won second terms is small and becomes much smaller with the second half of the 20th Century. Unlike Congressional shifts which reflect regional politics more than a national referendum, the Presidency is a referendum on the usages of the nearly unlimited power of its holder.
The Democratic strategy has been to substitute iconography for competence and their iconic presidents have invariably been men of dubious character. FDR rode to power on the coattails of the Roosevelt name, after conducting a smear campaign against Teddy Roosevelt’s son who would have been the natural candidate.
Once in power, FDR assembled a grab-bag of bad ideas from European Socialists and Fascists and employed a small army of writers and artists as propagandists to lionize his programs. Marginally competent, Roosevelt the Second cultivated an aristocratic paternal air, surrounded himself with experts and programs to create public confidence.
FDR did not fix the economy, but he did lead the country through World War II while preemptively losing World War III, which was enough to give him the iconic status that had made his presidency possible.
The Roosevelt Administration, with an assist from Harry Truman, had largely created the Soviet Empire through its betrayal of Eastern Europe and the Republic of China. The Liberal camp had been thoroughly infiltrated by Communist agents and was full of sympathizers for the Soviet Union.
Before WW2 the USSR had been a regional backwater power with a network of international agents at its beck and call. After WW2, Communists were on the verge of swallowing up Western Europe and had taken China.
Truman’s disastrous China policy led to the Communist takeover of a potential world power and to the bloody Korean War. The aftermath of the FDR Administration was largely preoccupied with covering up the disastrous results of its Communist-friendly program. The campaigns against McArthur and McCarthy were necessary to cover up the consequences of Truman’s China policy and FDR’s USSR policy.
The Democrats lost the White House and the public turned to Eisenhower to clean up the strategic mess left behind by the progressive party. The great national crisis was Communism and the Democrats had not seen the crisis coming and had no credibility in deploying a policy to combat the Soviet Union.
To retake the White House the Democrats needed a new image and a candidate with credibility fighting Communism. That candidate was to be a Kennedy, a member of a family at odds with FDR due to its Nazi sympathies, whose patriarch had taken careful care to burnish the Anti-Communist credentials of his sons.
FDR had been the avuncular figure in the chair; JFK was to be the youth candidate. The new man, a creature of the old Joe Kennedy, with fresh new ideas written for him by ghostwriters. Like FDR, JFK was a manufactured figure. And like him, JFK was a man of ideas with no ideas who disguised that lack with an army of experts and the cultivated illusion of intellectualism.
JFK was not particularly Anti-Communist, but that was a necessary qualification for any candidate looking to carry on FDR’s work. The Democratic Party had adapted to the collapse of its old coalition of New York merchants and Southern plantation owners after the Civil War by embracing Republican Unionism with a vengeance and jettisoning the last of Jefferson to become the party of big government.
FDR had borrowed Lincoln’s ruthless unionism and blended it with Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-monopolism; mixing together the work of two Republican presidents and claiming it for his own. JFK similarly took up elements of a Republican civil rights program and blended it with their aggressive Anti-Communism to create a new Democratic identity.
The underlying program in both administrations had nothing to do with the depression or war; but of building up a national political machine using the same methods of urban political machines. The core ingredient was class warfare. FDR put a genteel patina over class warfare while JFK phrased it as an idealistic ambitious form of American Exceptionalism that made it seem American.
FDR and JFK both borrowed Lincoln’s martyrdom, FDR by acting as a long-serving wartime president, and JFK, posthumously through his assassination. Obama has taken on a crude form of that martyrdom by virtue of race.
JFK’s death left his upgrade of Eisenhower’s “Dime Store New Deal” unfinished. LBJ took up the baton as the consequences of Vietnam tore apart the coalition between Liberals and Leftists leading to a culture war.
FDR died before events would have forced him to block Communist ambitions in Europe and turned the intelligentsia against him, allowing him to retain the services of the progressive propaganda corps. But JFK’s façade of Anti-Communism had committed him to international policies that broke apart the coalition between Liberals and Leftists. As much as the left might have supported JFK’s domestic program, and even forgiven his domestic show of affiliation with the Anti-Communists, by the time he was replaced by LBJ, the stress fractures were just too big and they tore apart the Democratic Party.
After that the Democrats lost the ability to compete on national security. Their attempts at salvaging the white male vote led them to two southern governors. Carter imploded on National Security, but Clinton thrived through two terms in the Post-Soviet period when history no longer seemed to matter. But history did matter.
The Communism menace had risen on FDR’s watch. Muslim terrorism began its ascent under JFK and reached critical levels under Clinton. The Democratic failures on Communism made Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan possible. Their failures on Islamism made Bush possible.
Obama was the third Democratic bid at an iconographic presidency. Like FDR, he was confronted with an economic crisis, and like JFK he faced a global conflict. And like both men, he proved inept at handling both, relying on armies of experts and making unwise decisions. As with JFK’s first term, the consequences of his foreign policy have not still struck home with a decisive enough emphasis to turn the public against him, but unlike FDR, there is no war to distract from the economic situation.
Obama has been running on his iconography for a while now and like an old beat up car, he never noticed that it gave out on him a while back. The debate was a wakeup call, but it won’t be the last one. He has to run on something, but he can’t run on the economy or race and that just leaves national security. The Benghazi attack emphasized the disastrous consequences of his foreign policy, but they also did him a favor by shifting the debate to the foreign policy arena.
With FDR fading and the cult of JFK not as strong as it used to be in the twilight of the Boomers, the Democratic Party needed a third icon to further integrate its political machine into the infrastructure of the government.
The Democrats needed to win badly in 2008 because it put them in a position of exploiting a crisis to protect and expand their institutions, both private and public, that might have otherwise been targeted by a Republican on an austerity mission. Defeating McCain, who despite his own reputation for pork had a cost-cutting streak, was a major victory because it avoided the specter of having McCain do to them what Prime Minister Cameron, another non-conservative conservative, had done to the institutions of the liberal state in the UK. Defeating Romney, who is also running as a cost-cutter, is an even bigger priority for the same reason.
The ideological and emotional issues are secondary to this core bureaucratic mandate of protecting the political machine that the post-Civil War Democratic Party had built up. Unlike Bush, Romney is not running as a compassionate conservative looking to reconcile social spending with conservative politics. And Romney’s campaign is not focused on the international politics that might divert him from putting the domestic house in order.
Pushing Romney back into Bush territory, as Benghazi may have done, may neuter him even if he wins, and shifts the focus away from the economy. But the public does not appear prepared to follow that shift with polls still showing the economy as the primary focus. And that focus contains a dangerous trap.
Any shift to foreign policy risks a dangerous discussion about the Islamist rise to power that was aided and abetted by Obama, in the same way that FDR had aided and abetted the rise of Communism. The Democrats did not survive the debate when it broke out during the Truman Administration. Should an honest discussion begin about the defeat in Afghanistan and the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the Middle East under the guise of the Arab Spring, the result may be as great a blow to Obama’s prospects.
Obama’s last stand is also the Democratic Party’s last stand. A hundred years of foreign policy and economic failures at the hands of a corrupt mafia is about to come home to roost. The Democratic Party has marginalized itself, abandoning mainstream Americans while openly embracing a trillion dollar welfare state.
Iconography elevated Obama as it did FDR and JFK, but it cannot see him through a constellation of crises. And if he falls, then his party falls with him.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
