Biden has made his peace with Bernie Sanders, and the Left, by releasing a 110 page policy document. If you are masochistic, or a lawyer or policy wonk, go here to read it. It is a mishmash of traditional New Deal, better living through larger government and big union, policies, combined with environmental extremism, anti-police and pro-criminal policies, etc. In short, a wish list for every Leftist pipe dream of the last few years. If this were implemented, and if the Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress I think most of it would be, if the Senate Democrats, as I am sure they would, do away with the filibuster, I believe it would simultaneously double the national debt while tanking the economy. The war on oil contained in the document would alone eliminate in a stroke some five million jobs. The anti-police policies would lead to a violent crime wave across the country. The Orwellian attempt to impose campus speech codes on the nation would lead to a much less free America.
Democrat administrations used to be restrained by filibusters and the saner members of their party. If they achieve power, both of these factors will be missing in 2021. This could lead to permanent damage to the country, and, possibly the dissolution of the Union and/or Civil War II. It would be ironic, and tragic, if Biden, the archetypal grifter, glad handing old school Democrat politician, ends up being the last President of These United States, the puppet of malign forces that have malice to spare for all their enemies, assuming, incorrectly, that their adversaries will be content to be ground beneath their heels forever. For anyone familiar with the great tragedy of our first civil war, the domestic hatreds unleashed currently are ominous. Time for us all to recall the ending of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:
Ominous times ahead for sure. During Lincoln’s time belief in God or a higher power was pervasive and the glue that held us together. This was the spiritual foundation for following Lincoln’s advice in his Second Inaugural Address. In our time that foundation has been gravely weakened.
Without a belief in God the destiny of the United States is clearly uncertain. Let us all pray for our country and for the re-election of Donald Trump.
Michael, I’ve read that America, in following Europe, essentially lost its faith in God by the late 19th/early 20th century. It’s just that the Depression and WWII brought back a brief form of religious devotion that delaying the inevitable. The intellectual elites were already following this trend well before this of course. And it wouldn’t make it into the Main Street level until well after the war. But it has been a long time coming.
Actually the decline in Faith is a product of the sixties in the US. Europe and America are too different animals when it comes to religious faith. What we are currently experiencing is a problem caused by ceding almost all of academia in the West to members of a cult. Contemporary Leftism is best understood as a religion, and a very intolerant one, than as a political movement.
It seems the decline in faith became mainstream in the 60s, at least in America. But it was already ‘secularizing’ itself for some time. Certainly traditional, orthodox Christianity was already being compromised by the late 19th century. The compromise with critical scholarship and many in more ruling classes abandoning the historical faith seemed well on its way to being put away for good before even the war, picking up steam afterwards. .
Church attendance was never higher as a percentage of the population than in the fifties. The Eighteenth was quite irreligious compared to the latter half of the Nineteenth Century which witnessed an intensification of the religious fervor of most Americans. Recall Thomas Jefferson’s erroneous prediction that the country would go unitarian in the Nineteenth Century. When it comes to America and religion, straight line progressions rarely pan out.
Oh, there was a boost here in the States from the Depression and the War and after. The fifties were hardly the Nazi state that the left portrays them as. As I said, those events slowed things down in America, as opposed to Europe. But already something had to have gone wrong, or it wouldn’t have dropped so quickly. The problems of the Sixties were already taking seed long before. And yes, we had some awakenings and revivals that kept America behind Europe’s plunging forth into secularism. But what was being taught and embraced, especially by the leadership, is the question. The Fundamentals were published from the Protestant side to deal with the growing number of leaders (and seminaries) that were warming up to the critical scholarship and post-orthodox treatment of the Faith as early as the late 19th, early 20th century. I’m no expert on the Catholic timeline, but it seems the Church was also struggling with the embrace or rejection of the new, post-revelatory approach to critical scholarship at about that time. People on the streets likely missed it, but the seeds were being planted. Hence the speed with which such robust church attendance in one decade saw the almost immediate abandonment of the same faith within a decade or so.