The United States is “united” in name only. The blue/red state political divide masks a much deeper cultural divide that exists within states, within cities, within suburbs, though less within rural America. The divide even exists within the two major political parties. Donald Trump did not cause this divide — he exposed it, and for this, we should be eternally grateful to him.
The anti-Trump forces in this country were used to getting their way in political and cultural affairs even under Republican administrations, but no longer. That is why many of them have taken to the streets in major cities across the country — Los Angeles, Chicago, New York (and more to come) to protest the lawful enforcement of federal immigration laws. That is why they previously took to the streets to protest George Floyd’s death. And that is why they consistently use violence — a Marxist-Leninist tactic designed to produce government repression and create a revolutionary environment. The uncomfortable truth is that we are two Americas. (RELATED: Do We Have a Nation?)
The anti-Trump political forces led by Democratic Party politicians feign attachment to God, but it is a God unrecognizable to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, he noted that both sides in the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.” In today’s political and cultural divide, that is no longer true. The anti-Trump cultural forces led by the legacy media, Hollywood, and academia are hostile to the Judeo-Christian religion of Lincoln’s God.
Instead, the roots of the anti-Trump cultural and political forces can be traced to the French Revolution, which was hostile to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of the New Testament. And the French Revolution is the antecedent of the Marxist-Leninist revolutions of the 20th century, which were equally hostile to the Judeo-Christian God.
The great Whittaker Chambers understood the “religion” of today’s anti-Trump forces. He explained it in his “Letter to his Children” in Witness. The West’s struggle with communism, he wrote, was a clash of “two faiths … the two irreconcilable faiths of our time — Communism and Freedom.” The communist vision, Chambers explained, is
the vision of man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals.
Similarly, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott in Rationalism in Politics called the real “God” of today’s anti-Trump forces “modern Rationalism,” which substitutes “reason” for religion and God. Modern rationalists, Oakeshott wrote, are the “enem[ies] of authority … of the merely traditional, customary or habitual.” The modern rationalist is a skeptic — “there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls ‘reason.’”
Why can’t men become women and vice versa? Why shouldn’t biological males compete in sports with females? Why shouldn’t men be able to have babies? Why shouldn’t elementary and middle schools have drag queen hours? Why shouldn’t illegal aliens be able to stay in our country and vote in our elections? Why shouldn’t we “defund” police to make our communities “safer?” And why shouldn’t violence be used against federal law enforcement officers who are attempting to enforce democratically passed laws?
The anti-Trump cultural and political forces constantly invoke “democracy” and claim that Trump is a threat to democracy because he takes seriously his constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed. The modern rationalists insist that enforcing laws against illegal aliens and using force to restore law and order are evidence of Trump’s “authoritarianism.” These modern rationalists, by the way, are the same forces who imposed authoritarian restrictions on people, churches, and businesses during the COVID pandemic, required certain people to take untested “vaccines” to keep their jobs, required employees to wear masks, and enforced “social distancing.” (RELATED: The Wages of COVID — Part Two)
Today’s American rationalists are reminiscent of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks during the revolutionary turmoil at the end of Czar Nicholas II’s reign in Russia. They want to topple the incumbent Trump administration and are willing to encourage, support, or tolerate violence to bring that about.
But there are other forces at work — more reminiscent of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who commit violence and terror to create the revolutionary environment that they will use to seize power. Those are the people (and the organizations funding them) who throw rocks at and burn police cars; who attack law enforcement officers; who set fire to American flags and wave the flags of foreign nations; who block freeways. They are the vanguard of the revolution. And they and their rationalist allies are testing Lincoln’s pledge made in his Gettysburg Address, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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