“Communism would have worked if we had just killed more of the right people.” The man who says things like that, entirely too frequently, is a relative of mine. A close one. A former high-ranking Eastern European police official, he ran a huge region at the height of the Cold War. Millions of people had been under his control. Given the chance, and some vodka, he will lecture you for hours about how he could have built an actual workers’ paradise if he had been allowed to really deal with those no-good dissenters and trade unionists. His commitment to Marxism is just as great today as it was in 1963 when he first got his party card. The collapse of the system has dimmed none of his enthusiasm. Neither did the 20 years he spent running a bank for a notorious oligarch. Somehow, Marxism and Capitalism seem to blend together quite harmoniously at a certain level.
I have been thinking about him and his kind a lot lately. Since Trump’s election in 2016, his supporters have felt that they were up against all the major powers in American society (if not the world) – big Tech, the mainstream media, academia, major corporations, public sector unions, leftist billionaires, radical movements (BLM / Antifa) and the permanent bureaucracy, particularly that of the National Security and Law Enforcement Agencies. We felt that Trump and our other candidates were unfairly maligned, our policy positions distorted, and our characters impugned. As evidence of voting fraud continues to mount, we even feel the ballot box was rigged against us. And now, it appears to us that these same powerful, dangerous forces are close to securing a lock on the executive branch. And the various members of the anti-Trump coalition seem to be holding a very, very big and potentially dangerous grudge.
In the recent election, 70 million plus Americans rejected the Left-wing, corporatist agenda. And not just by voting for Trump over Biden. Republicans will likely keep the Senate, even after Democrats dumped $300 million dollars into trying to defeat three key Republican senators. Republicans picked up seats in the House and could be well-positioned to win control in 2022. At the state level, Republicans now hold 27 governorships, compared to 23 for Democrats. Across the nation, Republicans control 61 state legislative chambers, up two since 2018.
Even if Biden takes office as president in January, it will be by the thinnest of margins. With at least half the country against him, Biden will have no real mandate for the massive social changes Chuck Schumer was thinking of when he joyously proclaimed, “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world!” Millions of Americans have loudly told the party of Senator Schumer to stuff those changes, because they prefer the world as it is. Or at least, as it was prior to Covid.
Unfortunately, as they tend to do, the Marxists have taken this all very personally. Wajahat Ali, a contributing writer for the New York Times, wrote “You can’t heal or reform the GOP who are now an extremist party. They have to be broken, burned down and rebuilt. When Biden is in power treat them like the active threats to democracy they are. If those who committed crimes aren’t punished, then they will be more emboldened.” He is right about that, of course. Just look around you at the Antifa / BLM rioters. They haven’t been punished, and they are absolutely more emboldened.
But Trump supporters in the GOP aren’t destroying homes or burning down businesses. They are political opposition, not opponents in a street battle. Unfortunately for Republicans, Marxists have a history of persecuting their political opposition, even if they don’t outright imprison, torture, and kill them. The angry Left certainly appears to be getting ready for some kind of action against its enemies. Megyn Kelly Tweeted this in response to Martina Navratilova:
Martina, the vitriol went well beyond Trump-some 70m ppl have been called vile, bigots, racists & xenophobes & are now being threatened w/being put on target “lists” as punishment for supporting him. They’ve been demonized by the very ppl now sanctimoniously demanding “civility.”
Politically conservative Americans hear this dehumanizing rhetoric and get very concerned. But when we express this feeling, many other Americans dismiss us out of hand: “This is America, not some European crap hole with 1,000 years of history! Oppression can only happen here to minorities via systemic racism. You have white privilege. Even the minorities who voted Republican have white privilege. We have a Constitution that will protect you. Don’t be hysterical. You are perfectly safe. This can never happen here!”
It might seem over-the-top when Leftists write about the need for Blacklists, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, re-education camps, national lock downs, indoctrinating kids in Critical Race Theory, nationally mandating a vaccine, or when Chris Cuomo says that Republicans have to concede or they “are going to lose way more than this election.” And in different times, most of us would also have chalked all this up to overheated and empty partisan rhetoric. The problem is that way, way too many things that “could never happen” here are actually “happening here” right now. Based on how things have gone in 2020, there is ample reason to doubt that the American system of government is stable enough to protect the freedom and safety of the opposition from the various political opportunists, grifters, corporate lobbyists, and Marxist true believers currently comprising the Biden governing coalition.
In the past year, we have learned that state governors, and even mayors, can completely shut down our economy. The government can dictate whether or not we can leave our homes, what we can buy when we do, how many family can come to Thanksgiving (if any), whether we can see our parents before they die, and can even make us wear a mask just because we need food for our kids. In the United States, we don’t have a right to free travel, to worship, or to earn a living if some level of government chooses to suspend those rights in the name of a “crisis.” Millions of our fellow citizens will not only willingly comply with any government mandate, no matter how ludicrous, they will rat us out if we don’t. Two weeks to flatten the curve can turn into 7 months of lock down, and we just keep going. The checks and balances we thought existed to reign-in government power and guarantee our natural rights simply do not meaningfully exist at the moment in this country.
If local and state officials can do all that, what more could a president do?
Through this unprecedented trampling of our liberties, we have learned that most police will follow orders at all costs. If the police are ordered to close businesses and arrest innocent moms in front of their kids over useless masks, then that is exactly what they will do. If they are ordered to abandon areas of the city to looting and arson, then that is also exactly what they will do. If people who defended themselves against a mob are indicted, then the police will show up and dutifully arrest them. While BLM and Antifa can burn down buildings with impunity, police have no problem arresting peaceful anti-lock down protestors or just citizens trying to visit the parks their taxes pay for. Even God is not exempt from harassment, as police have no compunction about shutting down churches if ordered to do so. The First Amendment was a great idea, once upon a time, but in today’s world the police can’t be bothered to respect peaceable assembly for speech or worship. With the exception of approved groups like BLM and Antifa, that is.
Outside of a few sheriffs, we are hard-pressed to find any police in America whose dedication to God or liberty or the Constitution has so much as created a speedbump on the road to tyranny. Conservatives are very prone to “back-the-blue.” Well, the “blue” is definitely not backing us in maintaining our Constitutional liberties, and we don’t believe that will change. At this point, we do not discount the possibility of police following any orders given, no matter how blatantly unconstitutional.
Politically motivated prosecutions frighten us. If you attract the attention of a prosecutor, your life is over. Even if there is no merit to any charges or it is a blatantly political prosecution, we don’t expect the courts to save us. Even if a regular, middle-class defendant eventually prevails, it is at the cost of financial, personal, and professional ruin. Lacking the means for a court contest, most of us would plead guilty to almost anything just to preserve some money to feed our families. Growing up on courtroom dramas that focused on the pursuit of truth, most of us never imagined being afraid of our own legal system.
It isn’t just “social distancing” that has made us less friendly and more solitary. Cancel culture has made many of us secretive, unwilling to discuss anything even remotely controversial in an audience we aren’t absolutely sure of. Online, we have taken to posting cat memes, lest our woke employers find out about our political opinions and fire us. Holding beliefs that were uncontroversial a mere five years ago can render you unemployable. The effect on free speech is absolutely chilling and only in one-direction. And that is just private censorship, without the government choosing to play a role. Yet.
So we are worried. And with the decline in the effectiveness of protections for our individual rights, can we be blamed for that? It isn’t up to the tens of millions of us who feel threatened to make New York Times’ writers, journalists, Leftist politicians, and billionaire tech moguls feel secure. The onus is on them to reassure us that they respect our rights as citizens. Biden and his handlers need to do more than talk about “unity.” They need to demonstrate good faith in a lot of tangible ways, and they can start by distancing themselves from the heated rhetoric and actions of radicals like AOC. Biden cannot govern in a centrist, pragmatic fashion if he is surrounded by corporate lobbyists and cultural Marxists (often the same people) who are dedicated to goals which half the country can never accept.
Biden cooling the “revenge” rhetoric, toning down the name calling, and increasing the level of respect would help. However, those actions alone are unlikely to be enough to avoid a serious problem in this country. The fact remains that the Biden / Harris Administration is committed to a platform of policies that not only did we vote to reject, but which many of us will actively defy. And not only at the individual or local level. Many parts of the Biden platform such as “ending right to work laws,” a national mask mandate, refusing to enforce borders or immigration law, and a national lock down of 4 to 6 weeks to “control” the virus – directly impinge on the rights of states. Given their recent performance, we can’t say for certain what Red State governors and legislatures would do if Biden executive or administrative actions were seen as unwelcome federal overreach. But we can say that it is likely, given the hostility of their voter base to much of Biden’s agenda, that at least some deep Red States would be willing to defy Washington’s dictates.
And if we as individuals, communities, and/or states refuse to go along with what we believe are clearly unconstitutional federal actions? What then? How much force could or would Washington employ to coerce our compliance? What role would the courts be allowed to play in this “crisis,” be it Covid or Climate Change or the next one we can only guess about? There is a lot of uncertainty around such questions. Uncertainty breeds fear that leads to conflict that can quickly escalate to levels none of us want to see.
It would be a very bad mistake for the Left to try and leverage what is, at most, a narrow presidential victory into an attempt at fundamentally transforming American society. Our fears right now are driven by our impression that the modern Democratic Party of Joe Biden is full of Marxists who want to forcibly transform our society into a “Utopia” of Universal Basic Income, zero-carbon emissions, socialized health care, national masks forever, “progressive” churches open while all others closed, and 72 genders on a sliding scale with kids transitioning at will. And from our perspective, those are just some of the highlights. The Biden plan is very comprehensive.
Conservatives would really, really like to live in peace. While most of us believe in the necessity for a moral order, the majority of us are not Puritans seeking to rid the world of sin. By and large, we are a live and let live kind of people. We even vote, for the most part, for politicians who most promise to leave us alone. That’s what all that talk about freedom really is – our desire to be left to our own devices in our own communities and, for those of us who are Christian, to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. But the Marxists running the Democratic Party don’t appear content to ignore us the way we are more than willing to ignore them in their native Blue State habitats. That probably puts us on a collision course that no one should want, but that we may not be able to avoid either.
Alexander – Member of the Orthodox Church in America, global financial analyst
