“November’s Election – None of the Above?” Sydney Williams
On a multiple-choice test “none of the above’ may be a legitimate response. But no matter how tempting that answer may seem to voters sick and tired of politics, such a response on November 3, 2020 is not acceptable. As we celebrate our country’s 244th birthday, we should consider the critical importance of the election four months out.
While no politician is the paragon of virtue drawn by Parson Weems of an idealized George Washington, character has slipped down the scale of traits we treasure when electing leaders. In 2020, we will be offered a choice between a man whose thin skin exposes a large ego, and a man whose intellectual capacity wanes as his defects wax. Mr. Trump’s flaws are well publicized – orange hair, ungrammatical speech, his volatility and personal insecurity seen in his untempered Tweets and his apparent admiration for dictators. But they are all superficial. No matter his appeasing words about Putin and Xi Jinping, he has been tougher on Russia and China than his predecessors. His dyed hair and manner of speaking may offend those raised in coastal, elitist families, but they are far less damaging to democracy than was the misuse of intelligence services by the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration in undermining a freely elected President. Charges of corruption against Mr. Trump have been investigated for four years by a zealous press, a partisan House, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and a complicit FBI. They came to naught. On the other hand, mainstream media has been largely silent on financial favors sought by Mr. Biden for his son in Ukraine and China and on his alleged sexual assault on a staff member.
Nevertheless, and despite the impurity of both candidates, the single most important factor in this election has been the hijacking of the Democrat Party by illiberal, so-called “progressives.” Professor Wilfred McClay of the University of Oklahoma described the random and willful destruction of statues, acts condoned by many city mayors: “…these acts of destruction are acts of pure, unmitigated hate…,” hatred not dissimilar in its intensity to that levied against President Trump by the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Unless new leaders come forth,” wrote Heather MacDonald in City Journal this past week, “who understand their duty to maintain the rule of law, the country will not pull back from disaster.”
This wanton destruction reflects George Orwell’s third slogan, “Ignorance is Strength,” that the past is what our leaders tell us it is, not historical facts. Such ignorance ignores the truth in what Thomas Sowell wrote two days ago: “History is what happened, not what we wished had happened.” This nescience reflects abandonment of the humanities by our universities and the life lessons taught therein. The recent anarchy and deaths in Seattle’s Capitol Hill area would not have surprised those familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and those who had studied Robespierre and his Jacobin Reign of Terror in 1793 Paris.
Polarization has become the norm, but in an election year it is exaggerated. Common sense about distancing, hygiene and the wearing of masks has given way to political diktats. While mainstream media has been filled with scare stories of rising new infections in states that did not lockdown sufficiently or opened prematurely, they have back-paged declining deaths from the virus across the country. Protesters of draconian lockdown rules have been blamed for infecting fellow citizens, yet those who march mask-less with Black Lives Matter (BLM) are exempted. It is okay to spread the virus if you are marching for “social justice,” but not if you are marching for your rights as a citizen. Despite ominous headlines about the virus, there has been some good news. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dr. Joseph Ladapo of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine wrote “…there has not been a single confirmed case of reinfection among the 10 million cases of Covid-19 world-wide, according to a May report in the Journal of the American Medical Association” – a positive piece of news, supporting herd immunity, that has largely gone unreported.
The campaigns must deal with the fact that we are in the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression – bad for the President but opportunity for his opponent. The media, urban and suburban elitists – those with little concept of what the recession and closing of schools have done to average families – have greeted the news with schadenfreude-like glee. Most continue to work from home offices, inconvenienced but not economically deprived. History-challenged politicians, university and school heads and business CEOs have agreed to the assertion that the U.S. is systemically racist. Millions of dollars have flowed into the coffers of BLM, which calls for the defunding of police and whose website (since removed) described the U.S. as a “corrupt democracy originally built on indigenous genocide and chattel slavery [that] thrives today on the brutal exploitation of people of color.” This mob of ignoramuses have no knowledge of history; they ignore failing schools and Black-on-Black killings in inner cities; they have forgotten (or never knew of) advances in civil rights over the past half century and are blind to the economic gains made by Blacks in the last two years of the Trump Administration. “They are,” as Communist expert and author Trevor Loudon wrote about BLM, “following the line of the Chinese Cultural Revolution… that toppled statues and desecrated monuments.” “It’s hard to find precedents for a civilization turning on itself with such fury,” said Heather MacDonald in an interview with The Epoch Times.
And yet, and yet, there may be a reaction to this madness – perhaps an over-reaction. Leaders at BLM may have over-played their hand. Just as Extinction Rebellion’s shutting down of London in October 2019 was an over-reach by extremists in the climate wars, the lack of wisdom shown by officials in Seattle to CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) may come to signify the height of political idiocy. The London episode led to Michael Shellenberger’s writing Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a commonsensical look at our changing climate. It is too early to say if some member of the “progressive” Left will, likewise, exchange advocacy and propaganda for reason and facts, as they pertain to the issue of race. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. “Jim Crow” laws were enacted by white, southern Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in excessive response to North-imposed Reconstruction, which provided needed assistance to former slaves but humiliated whites. When a pendulum is moved beyond its usual arc, it does not revert to its normal, central position. It Can’t Happen Here was a satirical play written by Sinclair Lewis in 1935. It was based on the rise of National Socialism in Europe. To believe that America today could not fall victim to authoritarian terrorist groups like BLM and Antifa is to be blind to the fact that schools, universities, media and corporations have already acquiesced to their demands. Democracy shuts down one door at a time.
The election is four months out. With the choice being an undisciplined Mr. Trump or a cognitively impaired Mr. Biden, the temptation may be to check off None of the Above. Such a decision is okay if one is offered a rotten apple or a spoiled banana, but that is never the right verdict in an election. Sometimes we must vote for the least bad candidate but choose we must. This time the choice should be easy. It is the Party, not the candidate. Democrats have become radicalized to a degree unthinkable a few months ago. Daniel Henninger wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that “this will be a revolutionary election.” Perhaps, but not revolutionary in the spirit of 1776. This time the “revolutionaries” are more interested in destruction than creation. Gone is the land of opportunity; the future they offer is nihilistic.
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