The Work to Restore Our Republic is Just Beginning Tyranny never surrenders power easily. Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-work-to-restore-our-republic-is-just-beginning/
Just as the Founders intended, the American people have used their First Amendment rights and freedom to vote, and rebuked the Democrats for their political malfeasance and hubris. So definitive has been the message that the Donks are now devouring one another over who or what is to blame for the debacle. Of course, they’re avoiding the real causes of their political disaster––their long leftist project to “fundamentally transform America,” as Barack Obama infamously put it.
But we shouldn’t take this entertaining autophagy to mean we still don’t have a lot of hard work to do in order to solidify and strengthen our battered Constitutional order. Remember, tyranny never surrenders power easily.
The first order of business obviously rests with President Trump. He’s already made a good start by naming his campaign manager, Susan Wiles, his Chief of Staff. Her brilliant management of the campaign bespeaks the skills and temperament needed for the huge task of staffing the federal government with the right people who can repair the damage done over the past four years.
To do that, Trump must staff federal agencies and his cabinet not just with the competent and ethical, but also patriots and Constitutionalists rather than technocrats, opportunists, and feral careerists. The issue isn’t just partisanship, but the very nature of large-scale government bureaucracies that are not accountable to the citizens. Such institutions are vulnerable to “professional deformation”: the institution’s legitimate function displaced by its own self-serving narrative, which exists to determine hiring and promotion, and is prone to fossilization into received wisdom––that is, the proverbial “box” we’re supposed to think outside of.
Every one of the 4000 positions filled by presidential appointment should be replaced by employees who are thoroughly vetted––especially given how federal agencies and some of their leadership undermined Trump during his first term, and colluded with a left-wing media that functioned as press agents for the Democrats. The national security, military, and foreign policy bureaus are particularly critical for the country’s security and interests abroad, and its employees must be carefully selected, and swiftly fired when they fail.
Take, for example, the idealistic, “rules-based international order,” the stale orthodoxy of our foreign policy and defense agencies. The notion that “diplomatic engagement,” and multinational treaties and institutions can keep the peace and serve our national interests, has for decades not just failed, but allowed enemy states to double down on challenges to our power; or allies to work against our national interests while serving their own.
The best example of this malign dynamic is Iran’s ongoing development of nuclear weapons, which is close to success. Barack Obama and leaders from several other nations created the 2015 “Iran deal” that promised to keep the theocratic regime from achieving its aim. The West’s foreign policy establishments went along with this Chamberlain-class appeasement, and transferred billions of dollars to the Mullahs despite the intelligence provided by Israel that documented the continuous violations of the treaty. Trump’s new appointees should be chosen for their foreign policy realism.
Similarly, Pentagon appointments and hires must comprise those who reject DEI protocols, “systemic racism” race-hustlers, and “trans” identity promoters. All these dubious ideas have been endorsed by some progressives in the Pentagon, who should be replaced with those who don’t want to politicize our country’s services, but instead get back to training warriors for war-fighting.
This would be a big step toward improving the services’ dismal recruitment numbers at a time when our autocratic global rivals are planning for World War III. Trump’s Secretary of State and other State Department positions also must be closely vetted to keep out feckless idealists and political operatives, and instead choose those who want to restore our country’s foreign policy to its traditional realism about human nature and motivation.
With the foundation of the right personnel, the administration can start restoring our government to its Constitutional structure and ideals. For a century progressivism and left-wing influences have besmirched the Constitution, and tried to dismantle and weaken the Bill of Rights. These influences have taken over the Democrat Party, and accelerated these attacks. Most significant has been the assaults on the First Amendment’s right to free speech and worship. Thanks to Trump’s victory, this degradation of the cornerstones of our freedom can be stopped.
One reform that could strengthen those rights is putting more conditions on the $175 billion a year given to universities that are failing to teach these foundational principles. Campuses with policies that violate free speech, or in other ways violate the Constitution, should not be eligible for government grants. Nor should they be allowed to offload tuition expenses onto taxpayers through government subsidized student loans, which the Biden administration was eager to “forgive,” blatantly violating a Supreme Court ruling in the process.
Also, there’s no reason taxpayers should give money to a university like Harvard–– coddler of anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism––that is flush with a $51 billion endowment. If Harvard and other universities are truly committed to “diversity,” then they should pay for their DEI admissions and hires, instead of overpaying their faculty and dolling up their campuses.
All these dysfunctions reflect the growth of a big-state technocracy: government not run according to the principles of the Constitution, all of which exist to protect the political freedom and equality of the citizens. The progressives, like other collectivist governments, have always wanted government controlled by “scientists” and “experts” who know better than citizens how to create “progress” and “social justice.”
In other words, the tyranny of the minority, the government clerks who are unaccountable to the electorate, and the slaves of scientism––bad ideas that are dressed up in the quantitative data and forbidding vocabulary of real science, but are in fact the products of politicized pseudo-science. Hence, they are dangerous to our country, even as they empower grifters and opportunists who wax fat on government subsidies and other transfers of taxpayer money.
Climate change, of course, is the obvious example. The dubious theory claims that human-created CO2 emissions will destroy civilization unless fossil-fuels––the cheap, abundant energy that has created modernity and enriched the West––are banished and replaced with unreliable “renewable energy.” As a result of these policies, created and promoted mostly by Democrats, higher energy prices have damaged our economy, and threatened our national security by empowering nations like China that have no intention of damaging their own economies by ostracizing fossil-fuels–– not when they can reap the benefits of cheap energy as their geopolitical Western rivals wreck their economies and make themselves vulnerable to their enemies.
Again, while staffing agencies like the EPA, the Trump administration should avoid anyone who buys into the “climate change” grift. As he proved in his first term, Donald Trump used executive orders and other tools to slow down this regulatory juggernaut. But for this issue and others, legislation is needed to strengthen the reforms required to correct such suicidal excesses.
Of course, that’s more easily said than done. The story of the United States has been its diversity, which from the beginning has been more complex than the race-hustlers’ recycled “scientific racism” obsession with physical differences. And we the people must not forget that we have the power to choose whom and what we vote for. Self-interest has always been the bane of self-government, but today it is empowered by secularism, affluence, leisure, politically corrupt legacy media, toxic social media, trashy entertainment, and failing educational institutions from kindergarten to university.
For all those dysfunctions, failures, and erosion of the Constitutional guardrails of our rights and freedoms, this election has demonstrated that diverse citizens of every stripe can make the right choice. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we’ve rescued our Constitutional Republic, now we have to keep it, and that will require diligence and holding our leaders accountable.
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