WHITHER THE DEMOCRATS?

JOE BIDEN’S “FIRSTS” ARE PUTTING AMERICA LAST

A few months ago Biden proudly proffered yet another “first” in the person of the first woman to head the US Navy, despite resistance from his own officials. This individual might well be qualified, but we’ll never know. For as with all such appointments, being selected in this way creates a lasting stigma. Due to blatant and unashamed policies being served up  based upon attributes rather than competence, any pretense of a merit system, fundamental to our way of life, no longer exists. 

But the consequences of this kind of policy are disastrous not just in performance of duties but in recruitment as well. There are good reasons why white men are not signing up for the military in ways they traditionally have.The message is clear to them, and it would be folly to join under this regime. Why does that matter?  War casualties and deaths have disproportionately been white. These tend to be people from small towns and suburbs still imbued with an older patriotism, who sign up for frontline duty and hazardous assignments in significantly higher numbers than any other group. If you don’t have frontline troops in sufficient numbers you can’t win a war, and pray that we don’t wind up in one under this government. 

THE TRANS DEMOCRATS

That may finally begin to change, as Joe Biden, Maker of Firsts, has really outdone himself this time. Incredibly, he has proclaimed this Sunday, Easter Sunday of all days, as “Trans Day of Visibility,” complete with color displays on national monuments. Buildings once adorned with crosses for Easter will instead now be adorned with this identity display. This tone deafness isn’t satire. It is real. Insanity is now official policy. 

Democrats are expert in demography. They are a transactional party, with the message being, vote for us and we’ll give you stuff. They create and combine interest groups into “coalitions” that can win elections. But what have they done here? Church attendance and formal religion may be in relative decline, but this is still a country that has an overwhelming Christian majority. Like others who aren’t very religious I find this highly offensive as well. Throwing Christians under the bus in favor of Trans people has to be one of the dumbest missteps of all time. This is what happens when radical ideologues control the institutions and set the agenda. 

Trans people, on the other hand, are a tiny minority the left is obsessed with. I recall an early Trump State of the Union speech in which he touted economic progress and things that matter to ordinary people. The Democratic response at that time was to put up a goofy Kennedy kid who began talking about the problems of trans children, and so forth. This left a lot of the audience scratching their heads and wondering what the hell he was talking about. 

Now however, having been subject to constant bombardment from the establishment, the public is more aware and not at all happy with it. How on earth can a party that stresses “women’s issues” be so bent on destroying women’s sports? This ideology represents no one, yet the rotten elite across the board are all in with it. Repression and fear are the tools that keep hapless institutional employees from expressing themselves, but many are chafing under this regime and may yet express it at the ballot box. That’s assuming, of course, that opposition has the presence of mind  to connect the Democratic Party directly with what they have wrought. Where are all the rational liberals, people who should know better but have allowed themselves to be steamrolled by radicals? 

I truly loathe dividing us into phony groups but that is what the Democrats have done with incessant identity politics. Yet despite the high level of unpopularity of “woke” policies, they have paid no price and gotten away with it. That is because most of the public has not connected all the weirdness directly to the Democrats. The left loves things like “consciousness raising,” and have done quite a job of it here, only not the way they intended. They have in fact primarily raised the consciousness of people who find these things objectionable and are reacting accordingly. If this carries over to the ballot box the Democrats are in big trouble, and deservedly so. 

THE KING'S SPEECH

Our government is a national embarrassment, across the board, and beyond partisanship. This ought to be apparent to anyone with any sense of decorum or dignity who watched the State of the Union address tonight. It came across in a circus atmosphere complete with your elected officials taking selfies like tourists in the place where they supposedly work. They jostle to get into pictures with bigger fish in front of the television cameras, and walk away beaming if, say their president, deigns to momentarily chat with them. 

He in turn walks down the aisle like the highest potentate in the world, giving and withholding acknowledgements as he sees fit. You have Democratic women again behaving ridiculously in common white dress, while a few on the other side engage in “colorful” political theater as well. The President gets to the podium, having been juiced with something to make him appear sufficiently aware so as to be able to make a forceful speech, which he does with a little too much force in an effort to prove he still a virile, vigorous leader. He has accomplished that much of his goal insofar as his party acolytes and the media are reassured that he is fully in command, but coming across as a kind of angry old man to most other people, I suspect. 

What is disturbing about all of this, regardless of who is playing the role, is the fact that the scene much too closely echoes that of the collapsing Roman Republic and the rise of Caesarism. He says “I” an inordinate number of times; how “I” have given you this, “I” am going to do this, “I” am the one holding all the cards, and “I” am the one who will dispense benefits to you from my unlimited resources. The problem is that this is not, in fact, a king, not an emperor with command of vast resources, but rather a very ordinary man purporting to “give” you things that are paid for by you in the first place; in other words with your own money.

Would you not rather be able to spend your money the way you want rather than the way someone else thinks it should be spent, based upon the notion that they reflect the public interest and know better how to appropriate it?But they don’t know better. They know far less than they claim to, which is why their best efforts usually wind up making everything worse. 

But even with this imperial spectacle they have to provide a “common” touch for ordinary people, so we have the usual gallery of special guests that are pointed to in the course of the speech. I truly wish Reagan had never started this, or at least that it didn’t get picked up by less gifted people going forward as a new tradition akin to pardoning turkeys. I think it diminishes the seriousness and solemnity of purpose that ought to accompany such events. 

Yet, then again, these are not serious people.They are like children playing musical chairs and jockeying for position. The problem is that they are charged with serious matters that entail enormous power. This effects the lives of everyone else, but they are simply and chronically not very good at it. That is why things seldom work well, or worse, are totally dysfunctional. This is what happens when you assign great power without the equivalent wisdom, restraint, humility, and competence that must come with it. That is why power should be located primarily in the the most basic simple social units, beginning with the individual and family, then the community, the county or city, the state, and lastly the federal government. Not top down but bottom up, but today that pyramid has been inverted, if not perverted. 

It was not always so. This began as a deliberately modest republic, where humility and probity were prized, and where men at least formally aspired to the highest level of virtue in serving the public. They didn’t always achieve it, but they did take it so much further than their descendants that they come across almost as god-like giants followed by increasingly diminished men, eventually yielding us the mediocre midgets of today. They never presumed to legitimate vast power in the hands of a few over the many. If Washington could so gracefully surrender power, ever cognizant of its potential abuse, how can we now bestow so much on the lesser people who now occupy the city bearing his name?