Rethinking "Left" and "Right"

It is vital that we repudiate the false paradigm of left wing egalitarianism vs. right wing patriarchy. This vesitge of the French Revolution is a grand equivocation that is deceptive when applied to American politics. It supports the clever deception that liberals are about freedom and fairness and conservatives long to oppress people, when in fact the reverse is true. The real dichotomy is actually with regard to the fundamental role of government.
 
In a classical sense, "liberal" meant support for the proposition of the State being less controlling, offering the people more liberty; "conservative" meant preserving the prerogatives of the State to invade, control  tax and regulate the people's lives, holding the reins of power ever tightly. But America, with the help of ideas borrowed from elsewhere, was founded on the principle of limited government: the state inherently has no powers but those explicitly granted by the people. Liberal has come to mean loose with regard to the amount and scope of power the people allow the state to exercise: the government now spends quite liberally, for example, and elected officials and unelected bureaucrats tend to see few, if any restraints on their ability to regulate. By contrast, conservative now means giving the state less power and maintaining strict limits on its scope.

Even the terms "left" and "right" come from the seating arrangements in the french National Assembly. As in the French Revolution, leftist revolutions merely transfer the power of the State from one group of people to another, without substantially changing the fundamental presupposition that the State was to centrally control everything.
 
Because Leftism repudiates limited government, even leftist "revolution" merely devolves to functional feudalism, albeit by a different ruling class. Class warfare is the Marxist revolutionary's stock-in-trade. Leftists pit disparate interest groups against one another while dangling in front of both sides the carrot of special treatment by the state. Leftist egalitarianism is merely pandering to the envy of the masses in order to acquire the critical mass of power to control everyone, resulting in a least common denominator situation with everyone having the same amount of nothing, except for the ruling class. Economically, Leftism basically amounts to capitalism for a much smaller amount of people. Politically, it amounts to a neo-feudalism, with alliances forged not by marriages among ruling families but by the greed and hatred commonly shared among interest groups that function as tribal identities. Seeing the State as the savior who will give them what they see as equality, they readily relinquish their liberty and give the State more power.

Populism, the central rhetorical strategy of the left, is merely a means to an end: inciting the masses with a sense of cheatedness born of envy to leverage their collective will in a democratic majority that votes to transfer wealth from the minority into the hands of en even smaller ruling class, on the promise that they will in turn get a bigger slice of the pie. If not for the realities of human nature, this might conceivably work. But as conservatives acknowledge and liberals deny, consolidation of power in the hands of the State is a petri dish for corruption, abuse and tyranny. Thus, invariably, leftist leaders distribute confiscated wealth to their favorites, as they deem politically expedient.  

Those who long for the old way see the limited government as a regrettable development because it is an obstacle to them seizing that power to do all sorts of things they think are wonderful and noble. They need this power, they say, so they can impose their idea of righteousness on the world with scientific precision by means of new technology, toward a new destiny. Therefore, they call themselves "progressive." So, despite the Left's forward-looking aspirations of an evolutionary leap for humankind wrought by advancements of "new" organizational structures, progressivism is a significant regression to central control by an elite ruling class who thinks they can run your life better than you. 

What other terms ought instead to be used is fodder for another conversation. Suffice to say that in the very sense leftists use the term as a pejorative to disparage the authority of their parents or the wisdom of prior generations, you can't be more "patriarchal" than the progressive Left.

Thoughts on Paul Revere and the Shot Heard Round the World.

On this day in 1775, the first shots of the War of Independence were fired, but the war was won years before then, in the hearts and minds of American colonists. Paul Revere's Ride is not the story of one man on horseback shouting "the Redcoats are coming." It is rather the story of a whole community of proud and loyal citizens that was prepared to pull together in the face of crisis and rise in mutual defense of their God-given liberty. 
 

By midnight, Paul Revere had alerted the village of Lexington and the message went on from there: the anticipated mission by the king's troops to deprive them of their guns and natural rights was afoot. Not long after, the militiamen were gathered at the tavern, ready for a fight. 

There had been many false alarms in the prior weeks, many times the people had mustered and then dispersed. But they remained vigilant, ready and eager to respond to the call because they knew the cost of complacency.
 

The legacy of the colonial militias lives on in America's citizen solders, who take seriously our oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and will not trample, but defend the people's rights. It also lives on in the social networks of watchdogs who, like the Committees of Observation, organized to keep a close watch on the government and pass the word.

Boston Bombing was NOT the Work of Patriots

by Joel Barret

 

A tragedy has occurred on Patriots Day today in Boston, with two bombs exploding at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and another at the JFK Library. The terrible carnage at the scene is not unlike what the colonists experienced as they picked up the dead and wounded along the Battle Road in the hours after the opening shots of the Revolutionary War when British forces fired on the colonial militia at Lexington, Mass before proceeding to Concord on a mission to confiscate the people's guns.

 

It is unknown who the perpetrators were, but you can be sure the NRA and Tea Party will be blamed, just as they were in the hours following the Sandy Hook, Colorado Theater, Fort Hood and Phoenix massacres. Progressives in the media, government and academia, and garden variety group-thinkers love to parrot the inane arguments that private firearms ownership is the source of violence in America and gun bans will prevent criminals from acquiring and using guns to commit crimes. They are also itching to grab hold of any evidence, however thin or specious, to generalize a perception of the typical gun owner as both a moron and part of a sleeper cell.

 

The great irony in these accusations is that the Boston Bombing is another example of how the insurgent’s weapon of choice is not a gun, but a bomb, as all modern insurgencies have shown. Despite all the chest-thumping by gun advocates about the Second Amendment’s purpose in empowering the people to revolution if necessary, civilian gun ownership, training, and actual use are uniformly defensive, and patriotic respect for police and military is a distinguishing factor among conservatives. In any case, a fundamental principle of the firearms community is that guns are not to be used for intimidating people into compliance with any particular political view. The Second Amendment exists to protect the First. Any fear that gun ownership will actually foment a rebellion is really a straw argument designed to garner support for policies that have less to do with guns, than control.

 

But if it can actually be shown that someone even remotely associated with the NRA, Republican Party, Tea Party, or the neighbor of a distant relative of Ron Paul, this would be a liberal's wet dream.

 

This time, it's perhaps understandable why associations to the gun rights or limited government community would be drawn: this year April 15th is also the third Monday in April, which means that Tax Day coincides with Patriots Day. In view of the current discontent over federal tax policy and the progressive efforts to trade in the values of the American Revolution for those of the French Revolution, the timing couldn’t be more obvious.

 

In fact, President Obama’s wholesale rejection of both the proper duties and proper limits of office is not altogether different from the complaints the Founders lodged at King George III in the Declaration of Independence. Obama's administration is overreaching with limitless expansion of an omnivorous government bureaucracy, draconian regulations, confiscatory taxation and flagrant disregard for the natural rights of the people and longstanding traditions of limited government. He is appointing judges who do not respect the Constitution, ambassadors who do not place American interests first, and hordes of unaccountable “czars” to regulate everything under the sun. His administration refused to take proper measures to protect our embassies and consulates abroad, then said “who cares.” He has undermined military morale and readiness, and is permitting invasion across open borders by criminals and migrants who seek the benefits of American society without its responsibilities or loyalties. Obama may play fast and loose with language and the truth, but he is keeping his promise to "fundamentally transform this country."

 

In fact, the timing of the Boston Bombing may be a little too obvious… I seriously doubt any patriotic, limited government advocate would be so stupid as to sully this day by perpetrating this evil, terrorist act, although every movement has its nutcases. But unlike the progressive movement, which curiously has strong sympathy for Islamic Fundamentalists and Occupy Wall Street rioters, conservatives consistently repudiate any violent extremists. It's as likely, or more so, that the perpetrators were Fascist Islamists, anarchists, or that this is a false flag event to cast blame on all gun owners and advocates of limited government. Remember, the Tea Party Rallies were all peaceful events with zero incidence of criminal activity, while the Occupy Wall Street protests were rife with violent crime, including robbery, rape and murder.

 

To caricature the other side with hasty generalizations and irresponsible exaggerations is something we have come to expect as a cornerstone of progressive rhetoric. How else could they label the Tea Party and other advocates of limited government as anarchists who want no government at all? What’s even more revealing is how the militant Occupy Wall Street movement has morphed from a populist phenomenon, demanding more socialist goodies from the state and greater regulatory control over business, into an anarchist underground brooding for a revolution that would topple the government entirely. It’s rather reminiscent of the work of admitted domestic terrorist, America-hating socialist reformer and longtime Obama friend and fundraiser, Bill Ayers. Saul Alinsky would be proud.

 

But don’t underestimate the conservative movement’s ability to self-destruct. It wasn't so long ago when millions of "staunch conservatives" did their level best to re-elect Obama by refusing any support for Romney. Warnings abounded that gun control would be a major priority for Obama's second term, and whaddya know, it is -- along with a litany of odious encroachments by the fascists who run the Nanny State. 

 

Conservatives, you missed your chance at the ballot box in November, 2012. Don't let foolish antics destroy our chances of winning back the Senate in 2014. We need that to prevent approval of international treaties that restrict our rights at home.

 

In reflecting on the events of April 19^th, 1775, John Adams recalled the carnage he beheld walking the length of the Battle Road the following day, saying, “O Posterity! You will never know what it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it.”

 

The Founding Generation fought the War of Independence so that subsequent generations of Americans wouldn’t have to. They gave us a republic, if we can keep it. When asked when the Revolutionary War began, Adams said that although the first shots were fired April 19^th, 1775 at Lexington and Concord, it was won years before then in the hearts and minds of the American Colonists, in their resolve to live free.

 

The battle to rebuild our nation’s foundations in liberty and limited government is an urgent one, but it will not be won in a day. And yet, it can be lost in a day if we allow the values of the founding to be sullied in popular perception by false association with domestic terrorists who do not represent us. It took a century to lose this country, and it will take time to win back. We must do the hard work of bringing clear arguments for liberty and limited government to the American people. Change must occur through the electoral process, or we’ll have no hope of rescuing our nation. If it comes down to a violent revolution, we’ve already lost.

 

Let us honor those who fought so long ago to secure for us the blessings of liberty, as well as those who were hurt by the Boston Bombing, by recognizing that the road ahead will not be a sprint, but a marathon.

 

 

Hanukkah and American Patriotism

Thousands of years ago, a particular people lived in exile in their own land. The king, who despised them and everything they stood for, enacted a totalitarian cultural campaign to completely re-engineer their society. He declared their religion illegal, desecrated their temple and erected a statue of himself. Government forces prohibited time-honored customs that the people held dear, drove public expressions of faith from the public square, and even told the people what they could and could not eat. Needless to say, taxation was draconian. Under intense political, economic and social pressure, many of the people conformed. 

But others turned to God and stood fast. In the face of colossal odds, they united and were led to victory by Judah Maccabee, who has come to be known as a universal hero in the struggle for religious liberty. However, it is neither his military or political victory that Jewish people celebrate each year during Hanukkah. Rather, they celebrate how the people rededicated their temple and the renewal of their purpose as a special nation under God, to be a light to the world. 

The founders of America drew inspiration from Israel’s special sense of purpose because they knew that we would be a special nation, a city on a hill, if we held fast to our values of liberty, justice, faith in God, and e pluribus unum (from many, one). They knew that such a great aspiration and destiny could not be regulated into existence by a theocratic government. Instead, they had every confidence that God would lead the nation if the people themselves followed God with all their hearts, minds and strength. Thus, they were determined to protect the rights of the people to freely worship. Surely, it is no coincidence that the freedom of religion is one mentioned in the Bill of Rights. 

With this in mind, I wish a very blessed Hanukkah -- not only to our Jewish friends and family, but also to all Americans -- with hope for our nation's rededication to the true purpose and source of liberty and freedom.

And the Political Darwin Award Goes to...

Christians who refused to vote for Romney all need to do a collective forehead slap for seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Romney wasn't the ideal candidate, but he was immensely qualified, and people had pretty much figured out that after 4 years of blaming Bush, Obama was still not getting the job done and his policies were to blame. How then was Obama re-elected?

What the 2012 election boiled down to is that a slight majority of Americans want a big, all-powerful "something" to be their mother and father, to make sure everything is alright and everyone gets the same amount of cookies and juice. And instead of putting their faith and hope in a God they cannot see, they put it in a government and princes who cannot save.

It's not that there weren't enough Christians in America to avert this. No, millions of Christians triumphantly voted for Obama's social gospel, thinking that the government's job is to be the people's hired mercenary to do the practical acts of compassion they themselves are unwilling to perform or pay for. It's a self-gratifying sort of compassion that demands nothing of themselves, and all from someone else. I pray for the mercy of God on our nation, and strength for God's people to be the hands and feet of Jesus before the government fails.

But the Christian progressives really can't be blamed. Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. 

My beef is actually with the millions of Christians who know the progressive social gospel is bunk, yet refused to do anything about it.  In their obstinate political pharasaism they wanted a perfect candidate who couldn't win because he didn't exist. So they voted for Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, or simply sat on the sidelines and refused to vote, saying "it's all God's will" and "Jesus wouldn't like it if I voted for a Mormon," and a litany of other sanctimonious copouts. 

There's an organization that gives postumous awards to people whose greatest gift to the gene pool has been to remove themselves from it -- as evidenced by dying as a direct result of one's own embarrassingly foolish action. It's called the Darwin Awards.

How fitting, that the most rabid right-wing Christians (the type whose blood boils at the very mention of Charles Darwin), effectively removed themselves from the voter pool this election, by casting throwaway votes that worked against their own political aims by clearing the way for Obama's re-election, even though his animus toward conservative Christians is well-documented, and whose policies have demonstrably infringed on the rights and consciences of conservative Christians. They effectively picked the greater of two evils, all because Romney wasn't a magic bullet for recreating a Jefferonian conservative paradise?

It will be interesting to see how many votes were actually cast for Johnson and Paul, but we'll never know how many Christians simply stayed home this election. But for at least the next 4 years, each time our children come home from school regurgitating socialist propaganda, each time the decisions of a solid leftist majority on the Supreme Court hands down a ruling that undermines religious freedom, erodes parental rights, makes gay marriage the law of the land, each time we pay $5 for a gallon of gas, we can look to the fundamentalist holdouts and gently say, "thanks for nothing."

Die for a flag?

I've had just about enough of people scorning the American flag, saying that it's "just a piece of cloth that too many people have died for." Don't think for a minute that people die for a sheet of fabric; that completely misses the point. First of all, no soldier aspires to die for his country, the idea is to make the enemy die for his. But more to the point, brave Americans die fighting to uphold what the flag represents, and so by respecting the symbol we respect the lives given for what it represents: 13 Colonies, 50 states, woven together by the essential American values of Liberty, e pluribus unim, and In God We Trust. That's why I salute the flag. Not every child can understand this, nor the adults who think they're so sophisticated that they can take it for granted. But teaching them to respect and salute the flag lays the foundation for passing these values on from generation to generation so that the question at the end of the forst stanza of the national anthem is a resounding YES! The star spangled banner does still wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The Good Samarit-Mormon: a Biblical basis for Christian holdouts to vote for Romney

With the 2012 Presidential race coming down to the wire, the fundamentalist Christian protest vote against Mitt Romney on the basis of his Mormon religion may be just what progressive secularist elitists need to realize their dream of entrenching for generations to come a Marxist social gospel that portends more of the very sort of policies conservative Christians most strongly oppose. Despite Barack Obama’s track record of trampling the consciences of Christian family businesses and nonprofits who conscientiously object to Obamacare, among other egregious overreaches, his well-documented scorn for all who “cling to religion,” and his predisposition toward judicial nominees that are sure to erode constitutional liberties, a small but significant number of devout Christians actually cite conscience as their reason for preferring to see the country go down in flames rather than touch a Mormon candidate with a ten foot pole.

Evidently, the story of the Good Samaritan is not to be found among the well-worn prooftexts these fundamentalists ardently wave in justification of their principled, yet self-congratulatory, stance. For if it was, they might see the very words of Jesus with regard to acts of civic righteousness by religious heretics as warrant for the idea that one need not necessarily be a bona fide Christian to engage in a ministry of common grace -- a category in which government belongs. One need look no further than the story of the Good Samaritan in chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke for clear biblical validation of a heretic’s ministry of common grace being preferred above the religious purity of those whose doctrinal imprimatur serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for doing good in the world.

I raise this issue not to suggest that religious fundamentalists don’t help the poor – much to the contrary, they tend to be immensely charitable, and do so voluntarily with their own money -- just as Romney does -- unlike the progressives who can never spend enough of other people’s money but manage to proliferate the image that they have a corner on the market when it comes to compassion. Rather, I think the story of the Good Samaritan invalidates the fundamentalists’ grounds for disqualifying Mitt Romney for their votes.

The story of the Good Samaritan is not merely a benign story glorifying random acts of kindness toward a stranger. Context reveals Jesus’ clear intention to portray in sharp relief a theological point that was unmistakably political. It is the story of righteous acts done by someone whom your religious community has anathematized as an enemy of God.

In those days, Samaritans were considered by faithful Israelites to be theological deviants as well as political enemies. Jews thoroughly despised Samaritans. Samaritans did not worship the right way. They didn’t participate in the annual pilgrimage feasts that brought faithful Israelites to Jerusalem three times a year for proper worship. They did not subscribe to Israel’s national ambitions to restore a monarchy that would, among other things, direct the nation to right worship. Instead they offered worship to God at shrines up in the mountains, the same kinds of places where the pagans offered despicable, obscene and demonic worship to Molech and Baal. Thus, faithful Israelites reasoned, Samaritans couldn’t possibly have any true knowledge of God. With such irreconcilable theological differences, the Jews viewed the Samaritans as apostates, half-breeds, enemies of the one true God. Any association with the Samaritans would make a Jew feel unclean and disobedient to God.

What an indictment of their religious and political sensibilities for Jesus to depict a Samaritan, and not a faithful Israelite, help a man who has been robbed, beaten and left for dead by the side of the road, and thus an exemplar of righteously walking in the ways of God! Worse, the Samaritan comes along only after both priest and Levite have abdicated moral responsibility and abrogated the second greatest commandment: to love one’s neighbor.

Would the priest and Levite have been made ritually unclean by touching the wounded man, and therefore unfit to properly offer worship to God? Was the Samaritan somehow disobeying the Law of Moses by pouring UNKOSHER wine on the man's wounds? Did this somehow defile the beaten man? In the strictest sense, many Pharisees would have answered “yes,” then perhaps wince at the realization that myopic insistence on ritual cleanliness would have left the man to die, naked, in a ditch. They were more concerned about their own religious purity than doing righteous acts of justice to help a fellow man who bears the image of God.

The priest and Levite could have stifled the cognitive dissonance by using “the sovereignty of God” as a fig leaf. I can just imagine one of them saying something to the effect of ….“it was God’s will for the man to die… I remained faithful and therefore will escape his judgment.” That’s precisely the view of my fundamentalist friends, who think that voting for a Mormon would defile them, thereby exposing themselves –and the nation – to the wrath of God. And if Obama is allowed to take America down in flames with a Marxist anti-gospel, “well, that’s God’s will, at least I remained faithful and will escape his judgment.” They blithely congratulate themselves for being too pious to vote for anyone who shares their values but not their sectarian doctrines.

The fact is, you don’t have to agree with Romney’s Mormon metaphysics or Christology to concur with the sincerity of his regard for limited government, sensible budgets, lower taxes and respect for traditional morality and unassailable record of personal charity. After all, nowhere did Jesus concede the point about the errors of Samaritan doctrine. Nor, for that matter, did he shrink from declaring truth to the Samaritan woman at the well when she tried to use a theological and political point of contention to sidestep the question of her own need for redemption.  The fact that the Samaritan, a veritable heretic, acted as the good neighbor is central to Jesus’ point. This is part and parcel with a major theme of Jesus teaching, as well as that of many rabbis throughout the centuries, that saving a life is a greater imperative than strict adherence to religious strictures of ritual cleanliness that define holiness according to group identity. How much the imperative to avert calamity for an entire nation?

The story shames all religious fundamentalists, by drawing in sharp relief the contrast between religious purists who abdicate responsibility for taking just action in an imperfect world, and religious deviants who are reviled by the fundamentalists, yet walk in the ways of God through practical acts of justice and compassion. Meanwhile, we see that the same “religious deviants” whom fundamentalists doctrinally despise and politically shun, can in fact do the will of God.

Romney ain't perfect, but he'll do

After all, who has been a better neighbor than Mitt Romney, giving away his entire inheritance to charity and as much as 30% of his personal income, managing a sizeable benevolence organization for his community on top of serving the public both as governor and saving the Olympics for zero pay?

Furthermore, why is it that the ancient Israelite King Ahab is excoriated for pagan practices, while Cyrus, King of Persia, also a pagan, is considered praiseworthy? The main difference has to do with the fact that Ahab was using the political infrastructure to coerce the nation to worship pagan gods, while Cyrus acted righteously in supporting the religious freedom of God’s people. Similarly, the concept of free will, or agency, is so central to Romney’s religious sensibilities that he’d be the last person in the world to use political office to impose his religion on anyone else, and his record as governor supports that.

At the crux of this issue is a theological error exhibited by both the conservative fundamentalist Christians who oppose Romney’s candidacy and the liberal, Marxist progressive Christians who are pulling for Obama: they both fail to distinguish between a) the special grace of God that characterizes not only the Christian doctrines of salvation and vocation but also the very concept of spiritual revelation and faith claims in general, and b) the common grace of God that characterizes natural blessings, conscience and civic righteousness, which is available to all people without regard to either doctrinal creed or spiritual election, both as a gift and as a ministry. Although both special grace and common grace are equally manifestations of the Sovereignty of God, the distinction is vital for understanding how God can ordain the human institution of government without human government being the means for redeeming the world. It is also helpful for understanding why someone’s actions may be properly understood to be righteous without needing to make any inference about the person’s eternal destiny.  

The audacity of HYPE

The doctrine of common grace provides a solid theological framework for understanding the inherent limits of government. America's predominantly Christian founders understood this distinction, which is why the Constitution forbids any religious litmus test for office. But today, it's a concept neither the advocates of Marxist utopianism not the proponents of an idealized Christendom seem to be able to accept. The fact that these two totalitarian groups would be so diametrically opposed in the policies they advocate should not in itself be surprising. Left wing progressives’ failure to distinguish between special and common grace enables them to posit government as the means of redeeming the world, as though law will make people good, while right wing fundamentalist’s failure to make the distinction is what permits them to think that America’s wellbeing hinges on voting for only born-again Christians in every office in the land, as though that will make America “Christian”. Both groups’ aspirations are characterized by their eschatological ideals, with religious fervor that propels them to resort to heavy-handed political absolutism where the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Pastor Robert Jeffress: almost sorta kinda starting to get it?

In Obama, progressives have found their ersatz messiah and they’re devoted to him despite his being the second coming of Jimmy Carter. Many fundamentalist Christians, finding themselves unable to resurrect Ronald Reagan, and hopeless to clone The Gipper from recombinant Ron Paul DNA, seem content to effectively sit this one out. Some, like fiery Dallas preacher Robert Jeffress, are sort of starting to come around.

Hopefully before Tuesday enough will figure out it’s OK to vote for a good Samarit-Mormon.