After the midterm elections, the prognosticators, who got everything wrong, have morphed into misguided Monday morning quarterbacks. The Never Trumpers want to blame Trump despite an eighty-percent endorsement success rate of candidates he picked that won in the general election. Others have reserved their long knives for incumbent Republican leaders McConnel, McCarthy, and McDaniel despite McConnel’s super Pac (the Senate Leadership Fund) that spent over $230 million in the 2022 election cycle on GOP candidates including most of Trump’s picks. Others blame the candidates themselves, yet Democrat, Tony DeLuca, won his state election despite being dead. Democrat John Fetterman won the PA Senate seat despite not being able to hear nor speak coherently due to a debilitating stroke.
The diversity and disparity of Tuesday’s election results provide sufficient fodder for any narrative the political pundits want to put forth with their digital pens, tailored to their personal agenda. The non-partisan observers will eventually coalesce on the fact that Republicans’ inability to shift to the new election mechanics of mail-in ballots and harvesting votes is the structural impediment to their being competitive. Democrats’ mastery of mail in ballots is their Blue Wall and turned Republicans’ red wave into a pink trickle. Republican leadership needs to proactively address the new normal election season before 2024 or remain a minority party indefinitely.
While there are pockets of silver linings for Republicans such as Florida, North Carolina, and the hundreds of flipped school board seats over the past year, the electorate has essentially hunkered down into their respective political bunkers. The real question is, “How did we get so polarized and divided?” The arguments run the gamut from media and entertainment bias to Marxist indoctrination embedded in our K-12 public education system, to the progressive Left petri dishes at universities, to identity politics, all the way to Big Tech’s collusion with the Democrats. All are valid. But what is behind the rapid shift to the Left of these venerable cultural institutions? What are the seeds of their corruption?
We are a divided country. We are divided on biology, where “men” can give birth. We are divided on medicine, where quarantining healthy people and mandatory mask mandates were supposed to stop a highly contagious airborne virus measured in microns. We are divided on education, where the State wants to own your child. We are divided on a common fact base, where 340 million individuals can have their “own” truth. Is it any wonder why we have reached gridlock at the ballot box?
The proverbial “fork in the road” where Americans parted ways can be fundamentally and finally traced back to one’s view of God. What a society thinks about God matters as do their corresponding culture of ideas. That is, what is your worldview. The godless, secular progressive Left which informs and saturates the Democratic party’s views has been on very different path than the Judeo/Christian conservative right which informs and permeates the Republican party’s views. There are five core assumptions that when compared and contrasted highlight how the Judeo/Christian beliefs differ from the secular Left’s beliefs and how these assumptions led each group to dramatically different end points:
1. Man is Born Fallen vs Man is Born Good – The former leads to a commitment to individual accountability and responsibility. You are called to improve yourself as opposed to trying to change the world and the best social program is a job. The latter believes that society corrupts Man which leads to victimhood, dependency on the State, and political activism is your religion. Defund the police, critical-race theory, diversity, equity and inclusion, a massive welfare state, and statism are the derivatives.
2. God created the Universe, Earth, and Man vs Everything Exists due to Random Chance – The former leads to Man’s sovereignty over nature while the latter results in elevating nature above Man leading to population control, draconian energy production restrictions, and belief in the Mother Nature. Man-made global warming, carbon neutrality, Paris climate accords, fracking bans, and Keystone pipeline shutdown are derivatives. (Environmentalism’s Unintended Consequences – A Wake of Destruction (townhall.com)).
3. Objective Transcendent Truth vs Moral Relativity – The former leads to a nation of laws with morals and taboos, the means are the ends (freedom to do good), and science discovers observable truths. The latter leads to atomistic individuality (freedom to feel good) where everything is allowed, ends justify the means, and science exists to serve the political narrative. The derivatives are abortion on demand through the ninth month of pregnancy, no cash bails, censorship, a nation of men not laws, and Covid lockdowns and vaccine/mask mandates. (I'm from the Government and I'm here to Help, or NOT (townhall.com))
4. Men and Women are Binary and Complimentary Sexes vs Gender is a Social Construct – The former believes marriage is sacred between a man and a woman, the family is the fundamental building block of society, and that parents are to protect, provide and educate their children. (The Upside-Down World of the Left (townhall.com)) The latter believes marriage is malleable, endorses third wave feminism and toxic masculinity, and that children belong to the State. Drag queen story hours and the transgender movement of puberty blockers and sex change operations without parental consent are derivatives.
5. Love God and Others vs Love Self – The former is called to be obedient to God and love their neighbor by performing sacrificial service where Man’s freedom and free will is a means. This produced orphanages, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the pro-Life movement. The latter is belief in self as God, freedom is the ends, and that society exists to serve “me”. Mass narcissism, ever expanding entitlements, an explosive crime wave, and a medicated society are the derivatives.
One path leads to human flourishing. The other path leads to human suffering, misery, and death (The Left’s Legacy – Subjugation, Misery, and Death (townhall.com)) God is the answer to man’s problems. Dennis Prager summarized it well, “The bigger the God, the smaller the government. The smaller the God, the bigger the government.” The midterm elections are just a temporary scorecard.