The Election Was Great For Lovers of Freedom — But It Won’t Fix Everything

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America’s troubles are extremely deep-rooted, and they didn’t spring up overnight; the seeds of today’s headlines were planted as far back as when the Long March Through the Institutions began in the 1960s, and even before that. Many, if not most, of our problems as a nation revolve around the culture war, a war that is being fought on many battlefields and which has been waged during Republican and Democrat presidential administrations alike, as well as while both Republicans and Democrats have been in control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The culture war will rage on no matter which party is in control of the various branches of government and will advance even in the face of attempts to stop it.

Leftists today have embraced insanity on a large-scale Insanity cannot be reasoned with, but since this fantasy and falsehood is being pushed on Americans so relentlessly, it has to be answered point by point or it will gain traction. Some of the difference between the Left and those who reject it stems from differing core assumptions: belief in God (to be sure, many Leftists believe in a God or gods, but generally one made in their own image), and an ordered universe versus belief in matter alone, moral absolutism versus moral relativism, an ethos of respect for all people versus a valuation of people based on their alignment with one’s own principles. At certain points, there is no reasoning; there is only action to safeguard ourselves and our children from the sinister influences of those who would recruit them for a life that would ultimately lead them to physical and moral ruin. For that is all too often the progression of moral relativists who follow their principles.

Leftists like to call themselves “progressives,” a name that has come to be favored because it gives their pet programs and policies an air of inevitability. History, they will tell us, is progressing in the direction they want, and those who oppose their agenda will find themselves “on the wrong side of history.” Leftists are patient and even complacent in the face of what they see as this historic inevitability, although that complacency never manifests itself as passivity. If they don’t get what they want in this election, or from this president, they will get it from the next. They never give up on their program or agenda, no matter how often or thoroughly they are defeated.

In the face of that, many patriotic Americans who reject the Left’s program and agenda are tempted to be discouraged and to see the upcoming elections as not promising much relief from the Left’s relentless assault upon American culture, history, identity, and more.

However, those who reject the Left’s idea of an inevitable historical progression should also reject the Left’s collectivism and recover a sense of the power of the individual. Imaginative, intelligent, courageous individuals have made a decisive difference at numerous points in American history. The nascent republic might not have survived without George Washington, a figure who was acceptable to all factions and respected by everyone, and who was able to navigate through numerous difficulties with consummate skill. If Abraham Lincoln had not been elected president in 1860, the Civil War might not have started at that point, the intractable problems the nation was facing at that point would have remained unresolved, and the entire history of slavery and race relations in this country would have been different. It is virtually impossible to imagine World War II in America without Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the 1970s and 1980s, only one man, Ronald Reagan, saw that the Soviet Union was in imminent danger of demise and needed only a bit of pushing to meet its downfall. In our own day, there is Donald Trump.

Those were all presidents, but the same thing can be said of innumerable key figures inside and outside of the government. Every individual has a huge effect on those around him or her. For better and for worse, America would be vastly different today if Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Robert Oppenheimer, Martin Luther King, or Elvis Presley had never lived. The power of the individual is so massive that every election in the United States and elsewhere could be absolutely pivotal. This nation’s problems didn’t spring up overnight and won’t be solved overnight, but if the right people are elected—people with clear vision and sound values—an immense amount of what seems to many (above all, to leftists themselves) to be the inevitable march of the Left to total victory and absolute dominance can be stopped.

The nation is still full of people who hold to Judeo-Christian values, who believe men are men and women are women and reject the Left’s sexual politics, who believe that the nation’s laws should apply to everyone equally without fear or favor, and who don’t think it either wise or productive for America to become the new home of everyone in the world who wishes to make the move. There are still Americans who believe in American exceptionalism in the sense that America is or should be a uniquely just and free society, outside of the control by arrogant elites and super wealthy oligarchs.

Lovers of freedom found the election heartening, but the showdown between the individualists and the collectivists, the pious and the libertines, the patriots and the internationalists, the free people and the socialists, is not over. Everything, truly everything, is at stake.