Where in the World  Are We Headed?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/20/20

            Calls for unity from presidential candidate Joe Biden, if heeded, would lead only to fake unity. These are no longer the more cordial times of Reagan and Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neil or, more locally, of Johnny Isaacson and Roy Barnes.

            Biden’s call for unity was preceded by four years of Democrat rejection of Donald Trump’s “illegitimate” presidency, not to mention name calling: Russian spy, traitor, racist, and self-serving egotist. And now we’re being urged by the oh-so-conciliatory Democrat candidate to join together and be civil?

            Come together, they say. The election is over. No, there are a few more steps between now and January. Media stars don’t get to “call” elections. Voters do. Meanwhile, as those legitimate steps are being taken, Democrats  who dragged a duly elected president through the mud, refused to attend his inauguration, and sanctimoniously looked down on his 63,000,000 unwashed, uneducated supporters are now calling for unity. And don’t forget “Russia, Russia / collusion, collusion / impeachment, impeachment and ventilators, ventilators.”  Hypocrisy, thy name is Democrats. 

Never before has politics been about so much more than just politics.  Aristotle’s definition of politics was “the affairs of the polis,” the city, that is. Aristotle lived when great city-states like Athens and later Rome were the centers of power. Nations as we know them now with distinct borders were yet to come. Localism, not distant governance, was the order of the day. “The affairs of the polis,” of course, always involved power, and power is addictive. It’s the drug of the emotionally needy.  

This is not to say that all who hold political office are power-hungry. Cincinnatus wasn’t and had to be persuaded to leave his fields to lead Rome. George Washington wasn’t, refusing all efforts of the few who wanted him to be a king (Hamilton among them, duh! Kings are what we gained independence from!).  

Yes, politics is now more than politics, far more than love of and care for the polis. It is now the ideological vehicle upon which revolutionaries have hopped and seized the steering wheel. How else do we explain the Democrat defense of the Black Lives Matter organization? (I said the organization, not the concept which, even so, has been sullied; all lives matter.) And Antifa? How many Democrat leaders have disavowed them? Had Portland been burned down by right wing thugs instead of by the Democrats’ ideological buddies, Democrats would have gone ballistic.

Leftist politics is now anchored to the notion of “transforming” the nation. Transform the police, the electoral college, the Supreme Court, health care, our narrow, out-of-step notions of human sexuality, our union itself by creating more states (guess why), and most transformative of all, the definition of free speech. The 1960’s flower children heralded free speech to the strains of Peter, Paul and Mary yet their grandchildren have turned free speech on its head. If it’s news they don’t like, that news is a “conspiracy theory.” If it’s you they don’t like, you’re canceled.

And of course the Covid “pandemic” (let’s talk about that word) has not been wasted by the President’s enemies. A pandemic is “an outbreak of disease that affects many lands.” Pan, the goat-headed Greek god of nature, darted everywhere around and outside the city. His name is always in reference to the number of nations, not the depth of a disease within a nation. Divide 330,000,000 (the USA’s population) into 11, 025,046 (the number of cases as of this writing). Divide 330,000,000 into 246,108 (the number of deaths). Then decide whether or not you really need to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So where are we headed? Toward unity with those who are ho-hum about infanticide? Toward more non-ending wars? Toward Biden-Bernie socialism/theft that takes from producers (the villagers) and gives to the village (the government)? Toward sanctimonious Christians who can’t forgive and forget a President’s past? Toward forgetfulness of a billionaire president who energized good, common sense folks?

These questions will be answered by the Georgia U.S. Senate race in January. Never has any local election determined so greatly the direction of the entire nation.

There’s hope for conservatives, however. Even though the cemeteries went strong for Biden, Black and Latino support for the GOP increased. Pollsters again embarrassed themselves. Their power to influence is waning. By 2022 for the off-year Congressional elections, deplorable strength will have increased. In 2024 if the Republican nominee isn’t Trump it will surely be a candidate who espouses Trump’s agenda.

 Re-elected or not in our still undetermined current election, Donald Trump has remade his party and the world. His army of deplorables are by no means down and out.

 

Roger Hines

11/18/20