Thinking Outside the Box

President Donald J. Trump delivers his remarks Saturday, Feb. 29, 2019, during his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Vice-President Joe Biden speaks during a welcoming and swearing in ceremony for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon, March 14, 2013. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/Released)

If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with?

Well, sort of …

In American Greatness, Rod Thomson admits that, like many, he was not necessarily a big fan of Donald Trump. As a self-proclaimed “Bible-believing Christian,” Mr. Thompson, married for “42 years with eight children,” felt that Trump represented a lot of what Thomson considers wrong with America. When measuring the other option, however, Mr. Thomson confesses to spending roughly “a non-second deciding that Trump had his vote.”

Called a hypocrite and “fake” Christian (usually by non-Christians, he said), for years afterward, he was reviled because of his increasingly vocal support for President Trump.

Thomson’s Advice

Do not be moved by the slings and arrows of people or media with deceitful motives and malicious intent. Think bigger.

I was surprised at just how conservatively Trump governed. As a pro-life “extremist,” what I saw was the appointment of Supreme Court justices who overturned the atrocity of Roe v. Wade—to say nothing of the container ship full of other successes from the border to the economy to the Middle East to energy independence.

So You Don’t Like It?

Mr. Thompson lays out the stakes, especially if readers don’t like it.

I sure don’t (like it). It’s simply reality. In truth, it probably always has been. But at this stage in our Republic’s rapid decline, we deny this truth to our own demise.

How It Works

In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama said definitively that marriage was between one man and one woman. Many knew instinctively he was lying. But his base that was friendly to gay marriage didn’t care. They turned out in droves to vote for him because they didn’t apply a purity test. They understood what he meant to say.

Four years later, he was maintaining that position until the bumbling Vice President Joe Biden spilled the beans publicly and Obama was forced to say his thinking had “evolved”—political speak for flip-flopping, or in this case, telling the truth. Again, he was not punished for it at the polls. His supporters helped give him a second term. In those eight years Obama appointed Supreme Court justices that took the issue into their own activist hands and divined that gay marriage was indeed constitutionally protected.

Progressives, at their zenith of power and privilege, have steered U.S. civil rights, education, and welfare policies almost exclusively for 50 years, Gilbert T. Sewall reminds Spectator readers.

Social Justice’s Failed Theories:

• Federalized transgender protections
• Academic collapse
• The expansion of a dependent, often disreputable underclass for whom permanent government-based custodial care is the only feasible option
• Food Stamps
• Medicaid
• Section eight, and other public income support that evidently sap incentive and enterprise

In next month’s elections, the Democratic Party will be asking voters to validate the nation’s wretched state of affairs, laments Mr. Sewall.

It asks all Americans to “do more” to affirm the impossible and shore up failed theories of social justice. But the midterms can only begin to bust the voracious administrative state. The nation’s interlocking ideological directorate has such a grip on minds and hearts that the demos might not possess the legal machinery or even desire to dismantle its project.

The nation’s civic future lies in operational states and localities that actively choose to protect quality of life, property and children. Civic-minded and self-interested asset holders are setting their sights on well-managed, pleasant zones as far from the scaries, lawbreakers and tax parasites as possible.

Welfare capitalism’s behavioral sinks are not going to disappear. But sooner or later, some jurisdictions will unapologetically sequester crazies in asylums, put criminals in penal institutions, and say no to troublemakers, freeloaders and drifters.