Political Pistachio

By Douglas V. Gibbs

There is a saying, “the victors write history.”  That’s not necessarily true.  If it was, the Mexican-American War would be remembered in a very different way than is taught.  Ayn Rand wrote that philosophers determine history.  I’ve always believed that in most cases any ideology that leans toward tyranny typically writes history.

Ideologies emerge as civilizations develop.  Culture and ideology often goes hand in hand in the beginning, but as values emerge there are those who will then use ideology to attempt to shift it in their favor.  They enlist philosophers and strategists to assist them in their endeavor of shaping the cultural worldview in their favor and if done properly they can artificially maneuver society to accept their narrative and follow their expectations.  The problem is that when a narrative is artificially imposed, and at its foundation individualism and liberty is pushed aside, it creates a misbalance in society and ultimately cultural warfare will emerge until eventually the civilization begins to experience cultural decline.

Once a destructive ideology begins to launch its tendrils throughout the culture its venom spreads like smoke, curving into every nook and cranny, saturating the air, floor and walls, and ultimately luring everyone to abandon God and morality.  That, however, is a recipe for disaster.  Without God a society is doomed to collapse, and without freedom and a free market, tyranny will begin to consume itself and will ultimately experience self-destruction.

When I was still teaching history classes, government classes, and constitution classes I liked to point out that when one looks back into history it doesn’t take very long to figure out that collectivism fails where individualism succeeds, and secularism always destroys itself under violent fits but a godly foundation always results in freedom.  The Revolutions of the eighteenth century shows us exactly that.  The American Revolution was based on individualism and a biblical foundation, but the French Revolution was based on collectivism and secularism.  Even an average person knows that it was the American Revolution that was the more successful of the two.  After the American Revolution the United States wrote a new constitution that has stood the test of time, establishing a limited central government while preserving and securing our natural rights and encouraging prosperity and innovation.  Meanwhile, the French Revolution’s violence went beyond the battlefield and the gallows and guillotines of execution.  Any Christian influence was eliminated, and the powers who took over after the expulsion of the monarchy were more tyrannical than the people they replaced.  Following the tyranny that followed, France then endured a succession of dictators, and to this day has not recovered from the revolution that reshaped their culture over two hundred years ago.

After law and order became abolished in France, in 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto.  They called upon communism and socialism as being the solution to the problems in society.  From their point of view the French Revolution didn’t go far enough, and the liberty springing up in America was a great big mistake.  The collectivistic writings of Marx changed the culture in Europe, and shifted the continent’s desire from emulating the liberty of America to using revolution to build a system designed to give power to the working class and the poor.  The masses were enticed, and were happy to give power to the Marxist leaders who followed.

As communism was tinkering and planning in the basement, Western civilization that followed America’s lead was experiencing worldwide success.  The free market, of which Marx dubbed capitalism, lifted millions out of poverty through devices that rewarded individualism, innovation, hard work, personal accountability and a free market.  Communists quickly realized that the capitalists were their enemy, and they began their schemes to tear down the capitalist economic method.  Direct confrontation was not successful, however, so the scheming had to be adjusted, and the war must be fought within, behind the lines, where nobody noticed that the battlefield existed.  From hidden niches they worked to weaken the pillars of religious values, the family structure, loyalty-based duties and rights, and limitations on government powers.  If what made America great was the people’s adherence to godly values and free market principles then those things needed to be torn down.  The fabric of Western Society that emulated America’s liberty, however, must be torn and destroyed without the citizens realizing it, so they began a campaign of creeping incrementalism.  Socialist ideas were inserted in small doses, so small that people didn’t mind the leftward lurch because its size was so small it couldn’t possibly be a threat to their overall system.

As socialism was being injected into the system, history was also manipulated.  The foundational devices that encouraged liberty and a free market were questioned, and their value was reduced until, in the last half dozen decades, they even became labeled as dangerous, unfair, socially unacceptable and an embarrassing history that has even led to a call to eliminate those fragments of history to the point that books are being rewritten, statues are being toppled, and the public square is being cleansed in order to push those historical evils out of the view of the modern general public.

George Orwell in his book, 1984, warned of that kind of action, but the enemy of American liberty had disguised it and marketed it so well that not only has western society joined the ranks of those seeking to destroy the foundation of what made The West so great and prosperous, we are literally approaching the moment that Soviet leaders once proclaimed was on the horizon – raising the red flag of communism ourselves, gladly and with enthusiasm.

In America and Europe we are experiencing today what we saw happen in Russia in 1917, though they were able to move faster in the Russian Revolution.  They had to.  The foundation of God and Liberty is stronger in The West, and particularly America, than it was in Russia.  So it was all rebranded.  Repackaged.  Social change was not only being pushed in the culture, but slowly through indoctrination programs in education, entertainment and the media.  Science has been used to politically restructure social norms.  Critical theory has been used to change patriotism, to demonize it, and convince the younger generations that history and the foundation of American Liberty was actually founded upon a platform of oppressive bureaucracy.  Liberty is now seen as tyranny.  Morality is now considered immoral.  Truth is a lie, and the lies are now the truth.

The social revolution of cultural Marxism has rewritten history and suppressed American patriotism to the point that through political correctness and other schemes the truth has been suppressed.  Historic values have been demolished.  All they have remaining is to kill God, and destroy any residue His Values with calls for free sex, unhindered sexual lifestyles and activities, free drugs, free abortion, open borders, a decriminalization of most crimes, reduction or elimination of penalties for lawlessness, and a culture of hedonism.  The catch-word for it all has become “tolerance,” which entails a campaign of adopting an intolerant stance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions that were previously outlawed or suppressed.  Do the opposite of what was considered good, call it evil, and then make mainstream what was previously considered as being evil.  Then, when differing opinions emerged, slam them down as intolerant, show a lack of respect for tradition, and through it America’s value system will be compromised and ultimately overwhelmed, which in the end ccreates a system that would end Western greatness once and for all.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of books an empirical structure in the future faces a collapse much like that of the Roman Empire.  So, the philosophers and historians of that society develop a plan to preserve the knowledge of the empire so that after the collapse they can rebuild it using the knowledge stored from the previous civilization.  The plan seems to be working.  The empire builders seem to have everything at hand, and their manipulation of society toward a new place of greatness seems to be working fine until an unexpected character appears.  In the novels he is called The Mule.  His tactics are so unexpected, and so firmly applied, that it puts at risk all of their planning and schemes, and all they know is that they must derail him or else their centuries of scheming and activities will be all for naught.  In our story, The Mule is Donald J. Trump.

If America’s traditional foundation of godly values, liberty and a free market is no longer an acceptable foundation for our future, than what must replace it?  For those seeking to fundamentally transform America the replacement is humanism, the humanist vision articulated by Karl Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Collectivism, as designed, has become the new basis of morality and anyone who stands against that is not moral.  Therefore, the new morality must embrace what one believes to be good for the society as a whole, rather than individualism, from the point of view of the humanist.  It is Secular collectivism at its worst..  In other words, they seek everything that goes against what made America Great.  The wealthy or successful must be knocked down to the level of the workers and the peasants, and the righteous must be knocked down to the level of the unrighteous.  Equal misery, after all, is the only way to be equitably equal.  Then, The Mule emerged as they were working to put the final pieces in place.  Donald Trump emerged like a bull in a china shop, crashing through their carefully placed Marxist pieces, cutting through their humanism and reminding everyone of the importance of the foundational principles of America, and the true creator of moral authority.

Trump has returned us to basic American civics, and basic American values.  He has pointed out what we should know; things that raised the American System of Liberty from the ashes of the Revolutionary War, and enabled the Founding Fathers to craft the wisdom found in the pages of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.  The Founders not only created a system that was more just and morally superior to anything that had been seen in world history, but they did it with a full dependence on and appreciation for the guiding hand of God Almighty.  They rejected England’s governance, considering it illegitimate.  They founded a system based on an argument that our natural rights are endowed upon us by our Creator, and that those rights may not be abrogated, much less led by a king who claimed to have a divine right to rule and tax based on his own whims.  Checks and balances were inserted, and a godly foundation pulled it all together.  The majority, nor any part of government, could overwhelm the God-given rights of the individuals in the public square.  And the belief in God, the fact that He was the author of all of our rights, was the foundation of the whole system.  And as the enemy seemed to be at its crescendo proclaiming that all of those things were evil, antiquated, and must be abolished, along comes Donald Trump saying that not only are those things important, but those are the things that made America Great, and he’s prepared to return us to those values so that we can make America Great Again.

Donald Trump, as our world’s version of The Mule from Asimov’s Foundation Series, essentially threw a huge stick in their spokes, and the bike has not only crashed, but it is on the verge of shattering into a million pieces, and they don’t know what to do about it.  Their only response, at the moment, is to return to Marx’s teachings which calls for violent revolution, agitation, and an overthrow of the old system.  The careful planning of the last century and a half has gone out the window.  They are desperate.  They can’t win in the arena of ideas, and they don’t know how to disarm Trump who is rampaging freely through their china shop, so they have only violence remaining in their quiver of arrows.  Resist, resist, resist.  But they have no ideas, and they can’t win any debates, so they are lashing out in a violent political temper tantrum.

Trump has studied them, as have we, but they know nothing about their enemy so they don’t know how to respond.  They are ignorant of basic Christian theology and American Liberty because they have spent their whole lives trying to destroy those things and close everyone’s ears to those things.  They don’t understand the natural rights theory of the Founding Fathers, and they are fearful of the components and applications of the free market.  They hate God because they believe He imposes values on everyone, but they cannot fathom that his message is not an imposition of values but freedom from sin and the consequences that always accompanies actions that run contrary to godly values.  They scream for us to be aware of the dangers of Christian Nationalism without understanding that at the heart of Christianity is the opposite of what they claim as they call for their own authoritarian control through secular collectivism.  While claiming Christians wish to impose their religious values on them, the supporters of secular collectivism and its socialist communist cousins defend a liberal order that seeks to impose its own values on everyone because in their arrogance they are convinced that they know what is justifiably moral.  But, since it all runs against the foundation, they are left with the reality that they must make their values legal by decree, using courts and laws to conjure up their new rights of murdering children in the womb, chopping up children’s genitals and abandoning meritocracy for the idiotic D.E.I. claims that are basically just another form of the racism they claimed to be against when it was pointed in a different direction.

Donald Trump stands against that, and while they are still trying to exercise their raw power through the courts and the media, if they don’t stop him soon even those avenues will slip through their fingers.  They are running out of china shops and the bull is rampaging through all of them.  Corporate America is abandoning them.  Voters they thought they had locked into a Democrat Party box are abandoning them.  Even other countries are abandoning them as President Trump puts the squeeze on them through his tariff policies.  And, they are being exposed.  The communist wing led by AOC and Bernie Sanders have been flowing to the top of their party in chaos.  Black Lives Matter has been revealed to be nothing more than a scam run by communists who seek to literally destroy the nuclear family and put ahead of everyone their version of social justice.  Trump has educated Americans and the average members of the general population are beginning to recognize the political and cultural madness that has been going on.  Gen Z, like Generation X who followed the hippies, is waking up as they watch the madness of the previous generation and cry out, “I want to be more like grandma and grandpa.”  America is shifting away from the communists, and while the battle is not over, our version of The Mule seems to have the whole resurrection of American Greatness firmly in hand.

History is being recovered, and the future for leftism is in crisis.  Through the Trump Revolution new philosophers are rising out of the ashes of the old republic proclaiming that the democracy does not need to be saved, but rather the republic needs to be restored.  Today’s new patriots lack faith in pluralistic society.  They lack faith in leftist dominated institutions.  They have no faith in whatever the lefties are claiming is science.  They have no faith in those attacking the religious beliefs and faith of their ancestors, and have determined that the best course of action is to return to our roots – godly roots and our roots in the system of liberty established by the Founding Fathers.

Feelings are no longer the driving force.  Facts, logic and common sense have been resurrected from their graves.  Gender-affirming policies are now being rightly seen as a huge problem, and godly morals are being viewed as the path out of the leftwing abyss we have been wallowing inside.  COVID revealed the authoritarianism of those who claim they want social justice, and individualism is being seen now as the best hope for those seeking a future, not government programs, institutions and dying systems wracked with unfunded liabilities and wasteful spending that nobody even knew about until Elon Musk began sticking his nose into federal spending.

It’s normal for up and coming generations to question societal foundations, but the interesting twist is that they are recognizing that the path forward is to go back even farther to the true foundations – godly and liberty influenced foundations put in place by Founding Fathers that they were told were evil authoritarian old white guys seeking to line their pockets.  They recognize the lies about history, and that it has not been the winners who write history, but the left.  The radical leftists have weaponized history and politics, and the newest generations who are watching Donald Trump now see the forest through the trees.  They are excited that Trump is rampaging through the left’s china shops, and they want to join him.  He is a unique political force, and they see the appeal of his call for liberty, traditional morals and a return to greatness.  The Marxists that inhabit the Democratic Party are no longer seen as purveyors of hope and change, but they are now ssen as confused oddities that probably ought not hold any kind of political power or position.

Interestingly, as the Trump Revolution rips through the fragile china shops of leftwing political camps, they seem to think that the best way to stop him is to double down on what led to his emergence and victories.  They have decided that more china shops and waving red flags in front of him is the best way to deter him.  Of course Donald Trump sees their antics as opportunity, and the new cultural community of America sees the Democrats as nothing more than failed losers who are throwing temper tantrums.  They are watching decades of failing liberal institutions and identity politics crumble before them and Trump ushering in with a new winning version of a cultural and political order that is winning and the old guard can’t be justified and the new guard is attracting them in ways they can’t understand.  And as a result, Trump’s popularity is growing, and the Democrats are on the verge of becoming a failed party, a failed ideology, and are at risk of doing what failed ideologies always do – vanishing into the dustbin of history.

Now, all they can do is spread lies and lash out, but the water has been thrown and like the Wicked Witch of the West they are melting because they are so old and so wicked, the nourishing waters of Trump’s new America can do nothing but result in their destruction.

— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary