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What’s the Point?
We live in a country where fraud and lies are expected by nearly everyone. Where our values and beliefs are repeatedly trampled so that there is nearly nothing left of them. Where our children will be estranged from us because the authorities’ agenda uses propaganda to alienate them from us. Where loyalty to one’s party is superior to protecting the laws and beliefs of our country. Where the Constitution and Bill of Rights are discredited as archaic and useless. Where the federal government and its bureaucrats reign supreme. Where dissent is labelled as dangerous and allegiance to the state is celebrated. Where crime on the streets is considered to be the new norm and the criminals roam freely. Where our personal fortunes can be seized by the government if they deem it so. Where we can be banned from the streets and imprisoned in our homes for the greater good.
This realization must be akin to being mugged.
Or maybe I’m being melodramatic.
I feel abandoned and numb. What now?
Published in General
Okay, I think we’re saying the same thing, essentially. I disagree, though, with the idea of “imposing morality.” Morality needs to be taught. Or perhaps you mean the same thing as “(traditional) morality needs to be reinforced, encouraged, celebrated.” Which I am all for.
I think that’s a bit unfair. Most Lefties in Pennsylvania probably felt camaraderie with Fetterman due to his situation. I mean, after watching Fetterman struggle with a severe mental impairment, most Progressives probably thought, “Wow, I can identify with that.”
They can’t stop me.
And that’s my grumble. Can we vote them out?
Religion.
No, I also mean enforced.
Of course, it needs to be taught, too. At home, and at church, and in the schools, in my opinion. But I think that we can do some things to enforce it at law, and other things to encourage it through law and policy.
Why do you think that it’s a bad thing to impose morality? I think that law is all about imposing morality.
Because that’s not a person being moral, it’s a person afraid of punishment. Prohibition, for example, imposed a flavor of morality, and was an epic failure. It ended up creating criminals.
“Law Imposed Morality” has to have wide agreement on what is moral. To take one law, almost all societies have seen murder as immoral and made it illegal. In our society, it’s generally agreed that fraud need to be punished.
But pretty much all societies have seen sodomy as distasteful and something not to be encouraged, much less celebrated. That didn’t stop people from committing that act. Throwing them in prison didn’t stop it either. And to throw a wider net, as it were, pre-marital or extra-marital sex used to be frowned upon, with unmarried pregnant women thrown out of the house or forced into a shotgun marriage. Was that better?
Throwing them out ain’t right, but shotgun weddings were better than we have now. The government is the people’s father, and an increasingly abusive one. We could have avoided this election result with more fathers and less welfare over the last thirty years.
I agree. Maybe the shotgun weddings were a better solution, but I need some convincing on that.
And it’s really the last 50+ years. So how do we get back to where we were? It took generations to get here.
Do everything that’s right.
But if it’s a successful political strategy you want, I don’t have it either.
Election integrity improvements in all states. Massive educational reform. Some kind of pro-family policy. And every governor imitates RDS. Maybe those four things will help.
No. No. And Hell no! Allegiance to God is a great thing. The STATE is only a necessary EVIL. Do not worship the state.
I didn’t put a lot of stock in this election. I was already feeling this way because my desire to see a reconciliation in the GOP seems hopelessly naive. And yet… there’s this governor out of Florida who seems to just about embody a way out.
I didn’t say worship.
In Bexar County (San Antonio TX metro area) only 44% showed up to vote yesterday, and they all voted blue. This 44% voter group represents a “dominant minority,” or a minority group that has overwhelming political, economic, or cultural dominance in a specific location. This appears to be somewhat the same for nearly all large metro areas here in the U.S., where low voter turnout (< 45%) is the norm, allowing for a minority group to control the social/political landscape.
I first saw the term “dominant minority” reading Arnold Toynbee’s works: A Study of History. Toynbee argued that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate. He argues that civilizations continue to grow only when they meet one challenge only to be met by another, in a continuous cycle of “Challenge and Response”. He argued that civilizations develop in different ways due to their different environments and different approaches to the challenges they face and that growth is driven by “Creative Minorities“: those who find solutions to the challenges, and who inspire (rather than compel) others to follow their innovative lead. This is done through the “faculty of mimesis” were creative minorities find solutions to the challenges a civilization faces, while the great mass follow these solutions by imitation, solutions they otherwise would be incapable of discovering on their own.
Toynbee did not see the breakdown of civilizations as caused by loss of control over the physical environment, or by loss of control over the human environment, or by attacks from outside. Rather, it comes from the deterioration of the “Creative Minority“, which eventually ceases to be creative and degenerates into merely a “Dominant Minority“. He argued that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their “former self,” by which they become prideful and fail adequately to address the next challenge they face. I would add, dominant minorities have a tendency to “kick the can” rather than find solutions.
Finally, Toynbee argues that the ultimate sign a civilization has broken down is when the dominant minority forms a “universal state”, which stifles political creativity within the existing social order. The classic example of this is the Roman Empire, though many other imperial regimes are cited as examples in his work.
I’m not saying the U.S. political/social/economic system is broken down, but if anything else yesterday showed me is that there is a lot of work to be done if we don’t want to go the way of Rome.
What do we do when our creativity is severely damaged on the Right?
Golly, that sounds like Andrew Klavan talking about the cultural elite, especially moviemakers.
Yes, it was much better. Levels of sexual immorality and illegitimacy used to be lower. They went up when we stopped enforcing these laws, I think.
We are a 50 50 country. Their values aren’t our values and they are working hard to make their values our values. We need to refuse to accept their values.
Have seen my Pope? Not much hope there.
You have definitely kindred spirits over here in the Panhandle and if what you said is being melodramatic then both of us here have been melodramatic since being “treated” to such delights, for example, that a large number of American citizens actually voted for one of the few people in public life who may be as mentally challenged as the “President”, voted for Hochul in NY who is one of the scariest people to come along since Hildebeast, voted for the other scariest person since Hildebeast, the downright frightening Whitmer in Michigan, voted for … well, this sums up better than any words I could use what millions and millions of Americans apparently like as they voted for all of this:
We were talking this morning about how depressing all of this is and I ventured the opinion that the only time I may have been as depressed about an election or any public event was the re-election of Obama in 2012 but, as much as it pains me to say it, there were some very understandable, if not laudable, reasons Americans felt they had to vote for him a second time. This time, it is unforgivable in my opinion, for anyone to have thrown away their franchise in favor of these thugs and criminals. I cannot help but note that if Kari Lake loses to the truly execrable Katie Hobbs, which would be a true tragedy in my humble opinion, we have at least one Ricochet colleague to thank for that as he has proudly (?) advertised his personal and financial support for a candidate who advocates for abortion to the moment of birth. That’s just another way of saying: Murder. What were people thinking when they voted for some of these candidates, such as, most tragically, Fetterman? Can they possibly seriously think he is fit for the incredible pressures of serving in the Senate? Although perhaps he will use his Good Old Uncle Joe as a role model and simply stay on vacation all the time. Nice work if you can get it. I sincerely thank you for this post and the most interesting dialogue it has prompted. I just pray that if the Republicans do take the House that weak sisters like Kevin McCarthy will not give away the farm in an effort to appease the editorial writers at the NYT and the WaPost. And I close with my usual words, which, if possible, mean more than ever on this particular evening: God Bless America!
Hence my earlier comment.
I was in that landscape for a short while, lone Republican in the big city. What was interesting about it was showing up to vote in a primary and being greeted with obvious skepticism by the Republican poll official. He didn’t seem to believe my party affiliation. There’s a ‘welcome’ for you.
So…what do we do? Nothing we can do. The party, however, could do something as simple as sending a post card to registered ‘Pubs in Chicago, or in the Boroughs, etc. that says their help is needed with statewides. Anything to snap them out of the vote doesn’t matter habit.
That’s a practical thing, but the simpler answer is in this question: why are we at Ricochet? Mutual support probably comes into the equation. If there is no one to inspire from the top, (Trump is technically inactive right now, and DeSantis is a long way away from, say, downtown Denver), maybe that post card does the job.
Eh, it’s a little touchy-feely, I know, but there are too many excuses when you’re in the city. Hassle, no time, doesn’t do any good… truth is 44 percent turnout is high, not low. The last Chicago mayoral election I voted in had a 17 percent turnout. Daley took in the high 60’s percentage of the vote and claimed a mandate…from maybe eleven percent of the electorate. Plus, trying something is better than nothing.
Why are we still so enamored of Reagan? He did the job for us, and so did Trump. Truth is we weren’t fighting the fight. Not then, not now. D’s satiate their voters by making them feel virtuous. I prefer empowerment…hence, my previous comment.
No, I meant good religion.
Or maybe I should say:
Yes, and his name is Benedict. He’s all right.
Have you seen my Messiah? There’s the real hope.
In the last 10 years I have become much more engaged with politics and the elections than at any time in my life. This one, by far is the most depressing (except 2020). I have no idea what direction we should take.
All things are possible.
This comment represents exactly what I feared and what I saw more than one commentator express concerns about- that the voters of the “compassionate” party, a/k/a the party of people who cheered on the George Floyd BLM riots, the attempted assassination of a sitting Supreme Court Justice, the overt threats by a Senate Majority Leader in front of the Supreme Court building to the Justices who were thought to be voting to overrule Roe v. Wade, etc., etc., — would vote for a functional ignoramus who should have been cared for by a loving family and not put out before the lights of a campaign. How anyone can find that to be a positive thing is way beyond me, but then after last night, and actually before last night, almost everything is beyond me. President Calvin Coolidge, in my humble opinion one of the truly great Presidents in American history, had this to say about that kind of misplace priority:
Some day, I pray, we will return to the good, solid, American common sense of Presidents Coolidge and Reagan.
God Bless America!
I heard no one discussing the possibility that his condition might not improve. That window might be closed. A person only has the capacity to improve for a limited time. That someone could replace him is irrelevant.
You guys in Florida knew what to do. Same for my team back in Oklahoma.
I guess we solid red state residents are living in bubbles, because the results are inexplicable.
I had a conversation with a pastor-friend about this. I’d realized (after a very gloomy morning) that the fight goes on because the fight is eternal. Good and evil. Light and darkness. Love and Not-Love.
It would have been wonderful if the red wave had been huge, and a real soaker…but even if it had been, evil would still not only exist but dominate. It always has and it always will, this side of heaven.
Because this is how we are. “We” meaning human beings. We’re a fallen bunch: selfish, small, prone to violence and the tolerance thereof, easily led by obvious creeps and charlatans. It’s a wonder God bothers with us at all. What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
It is a huge, but common mistake/sin to think that human beings have the capacity for perfecting human life. We don’t.
We can make improvements, but even these aren’t permanent. “Making the world a better place” isn’t like carving a marble statue, it’s like cleaning a public restroom—that kind of work, and just as impermanent. It’s not creation (God did that), it’s maintenance.
So I told myself: “You know, as soon as your mood improves…pick up a sponge and a can of Ajax and get back to it. ”