It fits in the rhythm of history like a foot in a sock.
After the 2016 elections, many of us asserted that the election was only marginally about the candidates—it was more akin to a peasant revolt that caught the ruling class, elites, and professional politicians flat-footed. It was driven by the accumulating evidence that the federal government was working more actively against its citizens than for them and cared very little about what average Americans want, need, or believe.
Americans voted with their gut instincts that the two Washington political parties had merged into one—united by graft. They were corrupt, intellectually and financially, to their core. Worse, they no longer cared that the voters knew it. A brazen callousness and arrogance had hardened like cement.
Citizens saw that their capital city (and too many state capitals) was piled high with dishonest politicians from both parties, making mediocrity look like a door prize. Their legislatures were enslaved to overstuffed staff, teeming herds of paid lobbyists, full-time fund-raising, and special interest groups the way prostitutes are to their procurers.
Worse, the largest bureaucracy known to history had become the preeminent yet unelected and unaccountable branch of the federal government, with its own rulemaking, courts, and agendas. With 9.1 million workers, nearly 6 percent of the US workforce, comprising 2 million federal employees, 4 million contract employees, 1 million grant employees, 1.3 million active-duty military personnel, and more than 500,000 postal service employees, it stands like Utah’s massive 106-acre quacking aspen tree and its interconnected 47,000 stems and root system— the largest living organism on earth, seemingly impervious to its surroundings for thousands of years.
Ultimately, the 2024 national elections too had less to do with Donald J. Trump or the human stage prop, Kamala Harris, and only loosely represented the competing interests and philosophies. Yet rarely has an election proved the glaringly obvious with such resounding clarity.
2024 was far more than an intellectual event. It averted disaster, akin to slamming on the brakes at the last moment when you realized there was a stop sign at the corner. Productive, working-class, lower-income, and middle-income citizens saw the immediate danger of unbridled collectivist radicalism playing out right in front of them.
While befuddled Joe Biden and the merry band of Marxist Obamaites – who were actually running the country, armed with the “autopen” we now learn – tried to give America the final shove over the cliff into the socialist global order, the truth was that an ever-increasing number of citizens understood that their so-called “betters” were blatantly attacking the family structure, sexual normalcy, faith, education, and their love of community and country – in other words, attacking them individually.
The election was a reckoning, a spiritual war: good vs. evil, love vs. indifference, faith vs. depravity, civilization vs. barbarism, freedom vs. despotism. It fits in the rhythm of history like a foot in a sock. As with ancient Rome, the sacred Union for which so many died sits teetering between its founding as a republic and the never-ending siren call of power and empire. The wreckage of the Obma-Biden catastrophes litters the landscape like trash on the beach after college spring break.
But history rides on the ripples of singular events. In the United States, significant events changed the nation’s character—the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the World Wars are prominent examples. Some are less so, however, but just as dramatic.
Sixty-one years ago, the murder of John F. Kennedy, followed by the Vietnam War catastrophe and the attendant communist ‘days of rage,’ implanted the embryo of national cynicism – and the slow realization on the public’s part that all was not as it seemed in Washington. Over the decades, skepticism grew into contempt, with every year bringing more evidence to support the premise that malevolent self-interest was the only thing that motivated Washington.
The 9-11 attacks in 2001 and their aftermath only exposed it more. The fabric of liberty was torn and shredded for a nebulous something called “the security of the homeland.” Its preface was the “temporary” Patriot Act, now etched into stone. What followed was the unleashing of an unrestrained intelligence community, FBI, and corrupted Department of Justice to do as they pleased and spy on and investigate whom they pleased. The wars that followed became open-ended experiments on nation-building among people who didn’t want it.
Then followed the COVID pandemic, when the true nature of the massive bloated bureaucracies from the country, state, and federal governments and their disregard for the law and Constitutional order destroyed what little public trust they had. Even worse for the country was the exposure of the fabric of lies, obfuscations, fraud, and outright corruption of the medical-scientific-industrial complex that had a stranglehold on public policy.
Ironically, the very fate that President Eisenhower warned the American public about in his farewell address in 1961 came to pass in full view of the public. The corruption of public money, private institutions, corporations, and the “scientific elite” has become a self-perpetuating apparatus without regard to outcomes, efficacy, or deference to basic moral norms. Trillions of dollars were squandered, siphoned off, or lost, and millions of lives and livelihoods were lost or destroyed.
Against these events, Washington tried to marry off the freest, most prosperous nation in history to the global blob and its dream of a managerial “expert class” to take the place of the silly wants and desires aroused in a functioning democracy. The US was to be just another undefined, unremarkable country without the backbone of its extraordinary and unique Constitution, its core doctrines of God-ordained human rights, and the ‘consent of the governed.’
The 2016 and 2024 campaigns – and their rationale – led by Donald J. Trump have resonated in European nations. Nation after nation, including the UK, are ruled by radical far-left governments desperately clinging to power parading as democratic assemblies, including the European Union itself. At the same time, reform-minded conservatives are rising – Make Europe Great Again, if you will. And the more the liberal order comes apart, and freedom-centered nationalism builds, the more dangerous they become.
In Romania, the likely winner in last year’s elections, Calin Georgescu, whom the state media label “extreme right wing,” found the election annulled, and last week, Romainia’s high court banned him from the upcoming election entirely. (Reminiscent of the 2014 Ukraine’s American government-financed and led” revolution” to overthrow then president Viktor Yanukovych and install a more compliant government.)
Meanwhile, the EU Commission is now embroiled in a widening political funding scandal where it has been caught using non-governmental organizations – NGOs – much like the USAID blowup in the US (here).
Citizens in these countries see the same pattern that US voters have reacted to. Modern Western governments are abandoning the values of their Western faith, family, community, heritage and the rule of law – as Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio voiced in Europe only weeks ago.
Freedom of speech and so-called “populist” voices are under constant attack by draconian “hate” speech laws and campaigns against “misinformation” based on, of course, socialist-Marixist dogmas. They have opened their borders to millions of migrants while at the same time gutting their own industrial bases and their jobs, hollowed out their military while depending on the US military, and devastated their energy production while at the same time greatly increasing energy costs by the insanity of pursuing “zero” reliance on petroleum.
Following WWII, the post-war “liberal” order was busy assembling itself and dismissed faith, family, community, individual freedom, and national identity as the dangerous ingredients – the root causes – of national violence and economic misery instead of the formative requirements of societies and everyday life together. It was the neo-Marxist fantasy that humankind would rid itself of war and economic struggle if it abandoned the building blocks everywhere evident in the natural and moral order.
Now, seven decades on, the on-going battle for the American Republic and its European cousins will be to reassemble what they so foolishly broke. Faith, family, community, freedom, and nationhood.
