Remember, as a child, those day-dreams of a life unrestricted by parental control, where it would be video games all night, ice cream, pizza, and soda all day?  What is amazing is upon reaching adulthood the thought of this lifestyle is disgusting.  First off, it would be horribly unhealthy—in the sense that those who indulge bulge.  Second, a party every day is totally unsustainable, someone has to do the work to keep the lights on and put food on the table.

Many people become more conservative as they mature and start to realize the value of the limitations they once spurned.  Yes, an adult will modify what was taught to them by their parents and community.  And some grew up in social environments where there was not much worthy to be preserved.  But to totally throw away everything inherited from prior generations is a terrible mistake.  Only an ideological extremist believes stripping it all bare is necessary and good.  It is wiser to build on what works.

That is not to say that the tradition passed down can’t become stifling and overbearing or limiting our potential either.  There must be a bit of flexibility, some Oikonomia, or means to adapt the rules as the need arises.  However, the opposite ditch, of discarding everything and starting from scratch very quickly becomes chaotic, everyone does what is right in their own eyes, and it soon requires authoritarian measures to enforce the vision.  This is the thing Nietzsche warned about—our morality is not self-evident and we should think long and hard about those monsters that we will release with our neglect.

Cultural revolution, while always promising to upend systems of oppression and usher in a new utopian age, ends up being worse than what it is replaced.  Yes, “All animals are equal” may be the founding cry, but is very soon after modified by opportunists who sadly are now unrestrained by those institutions despised and yet there for a reason.  The only good thing is that this out-of-balance off-kilter, ‘we know better than all who came before’ attitude, tends to implode on itself if given time.  The Soviet Union only lasted as long as it did because of Christian ethics within the population.

Two Visions For Our Future 

Recently, with the decline of Joe Biden and a failed assassination attempt against his rival, the Democrats decided it was time to make a change up top.  It is her time now—that is to say Vice President Kamala Harris—and there is plenty that could be said about her career thus far, but there is one peculiar repeat statement she has made that really deserves our attention:

“What can be, unburdened by what has been.”

This strange little mantra has been widely panned by the right.  This is more Kamala word salad, they chortle, and yet—while she does sometimes explain things like a school teacher talking to a kindergartener—it is not gibberish.  This is something Harris has apparently put some thought into and is something with a meaning that we should try to unpack.

What does it really mean to be unburdened by what has been?

I’m not going to sinisterize.

Most on the left I know have a glowing hope for the future and could never imagine that their philosophy could lead to Gulags.  I do not believe Harris intends it this way, but it does hint heavily of Marxist thought where we are to be liberated or emancipated from all that came before.  On the surface, this is an inviting thought.  Imagine a world with no abuse, no poor, everyone has their needs provided and has complete freedom.  This would be wonderful—and this is what every cookie-cutter college leftist has in mind as the end product of their efforts.

So how does the unburdening begin?  Well, it already has.  If you have been paying a bit of attention, everything normal is now being called fascist.  Believe that women exist as a category and isn’t something a man can ‘transition’ to?  Fascist!  Maybe you like the nuclear family and see it as a praiseworthy social convention?  Fascist!  How about a border where there is reasonable control over who is allowed in and who is kept out?  That makes you literally Hitler!  And Harris has embraced this side of the debate, she announced her pronouns and the nature of her politics.

None of this is to say that Harris is a terrible person.  I simply don’t want a leader unbound to existing ethics or any standard of decency, or who can write off Constitutional law as being a “what has been”  product of wealthy white men with some of them slave owners and thus should be discarded.  Sure, it may be a document with flaws, and could possibly use more amendments too, but it is better than nothing and represents the will of the people who signed onto this national project to this very day—white, black, Native, or immigrant alike.

What was established is for our benefit.  It is no more a burden than a wool coat in the blistering cold.  To think that we know more than every other generation that came before us, that science and technology have made us into gods, is delusional. 

Furthermore, the left’s unboundness means they do not care about precedents (except as a tool to restrict their rule-obeying opponents and the ends justify the means.  And they mean well.  They plan to fight injustice.  But this script has played out many times before and is the very thing that tradition is a bulwark against.  At the very least those who believe what “has been” has value will hesitate and consider before they destroy the foundations of civilization.

Make America Great Again

Donald Trump rolled out his red hats and MAGA slogan in his 2016 campaign.  The message was simple, a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s make America great again” encouraging answer to the total economic disaster of the Carter years.  As he said, in the 1980 Republican convention:

For those without job opportunities, we’ll stimulate new opportunities, particularly in the inner cities where they live. For those who’ve abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.

Trump knows a good brand and borrowed it from the best Republican leader since a guy named Abraham Lincoln.  The progressives lost their minds.  They dug up the one time it was used by the KKK.  And couldn’t decide to condemn with “America was never great” or be offended because “America is already great and how dare Trump suggest anything otherwise!”  If you were playing a game of “wrong answers only” this harsh criticism of MAGA as white supremacy would make a bit of sense.  

When the left says, “Do you know who else said make America great again?” and then goes on to associate this benign statement with all manner of evil, they’re poisoning the well.  There is zero reason to interpret this slogan as Trump’s desire to bring back Jim Crow or the racial policies that were once championed by Democrats.  But this does whip the left into a frenzy and it keeps them from deviating and making an independent decision whom to vote for based on the actual positions of candidates.

What does Trump mean by “make America great again”?

Trump is a businessman, his interests are mostly economic, rebuilding our industrial base, bringing back gainful employment for blue-collar workers lower taxes, and less red tape standing in the way of entrepreneurial spirit.  My wife, who opened a store in her home country, complains that the US is not a free country and is appalled by the many layers of taxes and requirements.  This is what dooms many to working for “the man” or corporations that can afford compliance costs while drowning their competitors with cheap imported foreign goods.

From a 2016 Trump campaign speech on jobs and the economy:

Jobs can stop leaving our country, and start pouring in. Failing schools can become flourishing schools. Crumbling roads and bridges can become gleaming new infrastructure. Inner cities can experience a flood of new jobs and investment. And rising crime can give way to safe and prosperous communities.

Had Trump’s first term not been sabotaged by COVID and blue state shutdowns, there is no doubt this would have been fulfilled.  In fact, by the third year of his presidency the minority unemployment rate reached record lows.  Even NPR, while downplaying it, could not deny these numbers Trump touted were real.  Biden’s only success comes from not rolling back those tariffs the fear-mongering media had so roundly criticized.  It is strange how the success and failure of policies is determined only by who is employing them, isn’t it?

No, Trump’s not woke.  He believes in hiring based on qualifications.  He doesn’t want to continue world policing and the massive expansion of government programs.  This is why he is the enemy of those who derive all of their power from the administrative state and sap our resources.  He is keenly aware that a free flow of cheap labor, while it helps elites who want nannies and landscaping at a discount, pulls down wages for those who do not come from wealth.  Even a Senator named Barack Obama understood this:

If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole—especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan—it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.

Make America Great Again is not about a swerve in the direction of Nazism or some new form of ethno-nationalism.  It is about restoring the economic conditions that had allowed our grandparents to buy their home and a car on a single income.  Back in 2015, Bernie Sanders had blamed open borders on a right-wing conspiracy, that will make everyone poorer, but now the left is saying that normal border security is racist.  What changed?  Why are these Democrat policies, like the immigrant cages during the Obama administration, demonized under Trump?

It is really disorienting for those who soak propaganda like a sponge.  They never see that Democrats did this full 180 on multiple issues where they had been right.  Trump is right about the border.  It should be the top priority.  Just the Fentanyl overdoses alone are a reason.  I’ve lost a former high school classmate and football teammate this way— 83,000 Americans died in 2022 alone—and it had ironically played as much role in the death of George Floyd as a knee on his shoulder.  Why do we even talk about that dozen killed in a school shooting or Ukraine in light of this?

Reform, Not Revolution 

Progressives tear at the fabric of civilization without understanding the consequences of their actions.  They believe that the erasure of history, destruction of monuments, or the degrading of religion (see Paris Olympics) is a path to a better future.  But this amounts to cultural vandalism and is ignorance of the positive contribution of these religiously created values we’ve internalized.  There is truly nothing that is written on the substrate of the universe that says slavery is wrong or that genocide is evil—the stopping point to “unburdened by what has been” is a return to animalistic impulse.

The frontal lobe of the brain is developed by the myths and moralities that progressives do everything in their power to destroy with ridicule and sacrilege.  And it will inevitably go much further than anticipated.  We rarely have enough appreciation for what we have been given.  Everything is taken for granted until it is gone.  And when there is a vacuum that is left to fill, and the ‘demons’ waiting in the wings will come rushing in:

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.  Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.  Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation. (Matthew 12:43-45 NIV)

Christianity led to equal rights in the West, the abolition movement, is a product of St Paul advocating for Onesimus or telling the Galatian church, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  The left assumes the values it has are universal.  They see only the faults without giving credit.  

The progressive left, by contrast, denies all limits and conventions.  Their “can be” may seem good at first glance.  But is opening Pandora’s box, it is releasing what previous generations have built social structures to contain and could end up being more like a trip on Event Horizon.  America has been good and bad, had moments of greatness and failure.  We should tune the ideal it was founded on, not tear it down to start all over again.  There is much to conserve in “what is” with an eye to improvement.  Veer not too far to the right or left.

At least with Trump, morally corrupt as he may be, he comprehends that our inheritance is not a burden. For him, there is something that can be recovered “again” from the past generations even if those lessons were not perfectly applied to him.  He’s a grandpa, he has seen trends come and go, old enough not to care about what is currently popular.  Trump may have some narcissistic traits, at least that is the character he plays on television to the roar of the WWE crowd—but he isn’t trying to be God.