Matt Walsh, that’s who. So, who is Matt Walsh? Some pinko-commie? A left-wing tenured professor lurking in the halls of academe? Perhaps he's a lunatic, trans-racial fraud tortured by the white guilt boogey man? No, he’s a conservative Catholic blogger with a big following. Walsh recently penned a column entitled, No, America Is Not a Great Nation.
The concept of American greatness is perennially under attack from elements of the Left. However, it has become fashionable for certain pundits on the Right to join the Left in the funeral dirge. American politics and government, specifically the entrenched Left-wing bureaucracy, are rightly condemned for perpetrating a host of atrocities upon the dignity and conscience of the American people. The last six years of the Obama presidency has produced an atmosphere of malaise, uncertainty, and fear. We feel sour and morose. Matt Wash’s grousing is not without justification, though it does lack nuance.
We’re all on a big government party bus, careening down a slope. Anyone paying attention can see the cliff just ahead. But, many people are too distracted with the latest episode of Dancing With the Stars to notice impending doom. So, Obama stomps the gas pedal and lumbers forward with purposeful abandon. In a recent comment, Obama said that he intends to squeeze every last drop of “change” out of his remaining term. People respond positively, instinctively to the word “change,” but progressing toward the gaping maw of the abyss is not a good thing.
The Greeks are on the same sort of party bus, they’ve just arrived at the cliff face before us. The drinks keep flowing, the girls keep dancing, and the pretty bobbles spin and glint in sync with the melody of Obama channeling Jim Jones. He’s the national DJ, and will certainly keep scratching vinyl until we come to a sudden stop at the end of a long fall, compressed and sheared in a twisted heap of financial, constitutional, and social ruin. He’s leading us to our doom and we’re laughing along our way—tweeting on Obama phones about whether we’re man, woman, white, black, or human at all.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are, for many, dungeons of narcissism and museums of mundanity. Social rot flows in thick torrents through the conduit of social media and exposes clownish vapidity exemplified by people like Ariana Grande who bobs along in the sludge like a bedazzled hunk of human flotsam, tittering about her hate and disgust for America while she drags her forked tongue over the sugared surface of the nearest doughnut. She greedily clutches in her spattered grasp the hard-earned dollars of millions of Americans but balks to pay for the doughnut wrecked and vandalized by her sputum. She gleefully mocked Americans who pay for the derivative product injected into her vacuous skull—art, so called, piped through sneering, honeyed lips. Grande is an archetype of the social detritus produced by the industrialists of entitlement who betray the engine by which they derive great wealth, deeming their philosophical assassination a social responsibility.
The doom sayers like Walsh are right, but only tangentially. We are a diminished nation and the shadow of a former greatness. We allow our children to be slain, especially those gestating within the wombs of minority women. We have allowed marriage to be deconstructed by progressivist vultures, bounding and tearing at the carcass of the sacrosanct, leaving only the bones and clinging flesh of a marriage ceremony turned macabre and absurd. We have allowed a single party within two terms of a single president to drag our military from the Middle East, leaving our allies to be butchered by a stone age power and the hard won conquests of Liberty to be consumed by the forces of Islamist fascism. We have allowed hordes of illegal immigrants to march across our borders like an army of locusts, consuming $2.40 cents for every dollar they “contribute” to the economy. We have allowed the third world to offload its deviants, its deranged, and its homicidal all for the sake of Democrat party ballots or for cheap labor. And, our citizens pay with their lives for this despicable political pandering. The parents of murder victim Kate Steinle can personally attest to the horror of Democrat party policies. The Steinle family has been snubbed by an aristocratic and callous administration disinterested in anything not viewed as redounding to the image of Obama’s gilded divinity. Republicans who stump for a “pathway to citizenship” are as bloody as permissive Democrats who have unhinged our doors and have quartered the barbaric among us. We, the people, have allowed these and a host of innumerable calumnies, scandals, and sins to accumulate to the gates of heaven itself. But, there is still greatness in us.
“America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”
This statement has been attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, who attempted to survey the 19th century American experience. The quotation has become a truism and attribution is, therefore, rather unimportant. But, America’s greatness is related to the goodness of her citizens. Some of our founders owned slaves and the despicable practice persisted and festered in Democrat party Southern strongholds. Yet, America, even in the throws of such barbarity, was considered to be a great nation. But, why?
Alexis de Tocqueville made this statement in the first volume of Democracy in America, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” (Hat tip: Steve Deace at Conservative Review)
On balance, and in time, we the people make our voices heard and, one way or another, effect reformation. Notice de Tocqueville didn’t say that our greatness lies in our power to “change.” He used the word “faults” which denotes moral failure. The word “change,” is as vacuous as Obama himself. It’s an empty vessel that holds whatever context is poured into it. Like Obama, it’s a slippery eel. We may, for a time, suffer under the indignity of Godless, Liberal leadership. And, during these times it seems that the whole world has gone mad. The policies of Liberal Democrats set our nation on edge, creating a social dissonance that propagates geometrically as they promulgate policies that run roughshod and contrary to the will of the people; while a complicit entertainment industry and lap-dog news media magnify a perverse minority. However, America isn’t its bureaucracy. America isn’t a political party. America is not Hollywood, nor is it a statistically insignificant LGBT lobby. And, this is the nuance that critics like Matt Walsh miss or discount.
Most people are familiar with the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. But, most people are ignorant of the conversation recorded between God and Abraham. God told Abraham that He was about to visit terrible judgement on the two wicked cities but Abraham plead with God and appealed to His boundless mercy. “And, Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?” (Genesis 18:23) The result of Abraham’s intercession on the part of these exceedingly wicked cities was a promise from God that He would withhold judgement if only ten righteous men were found. The cities were found to be completely corrupt, save for Lot and his family, and were destroyed by fire and brimstone.
The lesson for us today is relatively simple. Does America harbor policies, practices, and people that are, as the Bible puts it, “exceedingly wicked?” Of course. From our founding, America, being a product of fallen mankind, has contained elements of evil and injustice. But, what has always made America great and what has made her exceptional is that our form of government is subject to the will of the people, that evils may be reformed, that elements inimical to liberty and to the civil society may and have been abolished. And, from the birth of our nation the righteous have flourished among us. America is still the world’s exporter of Christianity. We are a missionary minded people and bring the blessings of God’s spiritual liberty to a world cloaked in the darkness of tyranny. We have yet to reach the tipping point; there are still ten righteous among us. Though we may be tempted to lament like Elijah, God has yet reserved to Himself a faithful remnant. (I Kings 19: 14-18)
This is not the time for despair. This is no time to withdraw within the easy confines of church and family, cloistering ourselves in practical monasticism. This heretical ideology has permitted the diabolical wretch of Liberalism to gain control of the primary mechanisms of culture—education, entertainment, jurisprudence, politics, and the church itself. We are called to courage and fortitude: “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.” (1 Corinthians 16:13) We are called to action and attendance to prayer and other spiritual duties does not absolve the Christian of his or her civic duty. To hide in one’s prayer closet is to tempt God.
Certainly, a great nation is one which, through its institutions, points its people to the natural law, to God’s immutable truths. We still see the vestiges of this nobility on our currency, in Congress with the morning prayer, and in the warp and woof of our founding documents; the sham and fraud of the fictional “separation of church and state” not withstanding. There is much to do and little time in which to accomplish the daunting tasks set before this generation. It is time for protest and demonstration. It is time to assert our civil rights and it is long past time to bend our knees and seek the spiritual reformation that is the precursor to any social revolution.
Let us enter the fray in our schools, in our city halls, in our work places, with our families, friends, and fellow citizens. You must confront the evil of your time where you stand, in your community, within the sphere of your influence, and cudgel relentlessly with the Bill of Rights and bind up the wounds of a vanquished foe with the truth of the Gospel. The sun is setting on American greatness but there is much yet to be hoped for—there is no time to waste on a sniveling fatalism.
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