Are We Winning?

 

Trump’s first week.  A flurry of actions, many of which I applaud.  Or, to put it more appropriately in the language of many of my friends: as long as the dictator – through executive orders – is doing stuff I like, everything is cool.

I won’t list everything Trump has done here – others have written very good summaries, much better than I could do.  And, of course, you all know what I consider the not good stuff.  Like I said regarding Trumps actions: many of which, not all of which, I applaud.

I have written before, a month before Trump’s election eight years ago:

For those who fear that some form of extreme fascism is coming to the United States, they need not fear Trump; the fear is in who (or what) comes next – win or lose for Trump.

So, Trump won in 2016.  But he lost (yeah, I know) in 2020.  What if 2024 is the “who (or what) comes next” part”?  He is acting like he is just that – very efficiently and quickly cranking out dozens of executive orders, halting certain expenditures, etc.  Again, much of which I applaud.

What’s not to like?

Angelo Codevilla wrote, in anticipation of the 2016 election:

We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation.

What if the 2024 Trump is something closer to, but not yet, its “ultimate manifestation”?  He is acting like it, and many on the right are cheering: we are winning!

The next year or so will be critical: does Trump change the fundamental direction on at least a couple of the dozen issues that threaten us.  For example, the budget deficit, or the pharma-industrial complex, or whatever.  I say “great.”

But someone will come after Trump.  On the one hand, the revolution won’t be complete.  Will JD Vance, or someone along those lines, be as effective as Trump.

Or, alternatively, what happens when the left gets a Trump of their own – one who has a flurry of executive orders, one who has all his or her ducks lined up to hit the ground running on day one.

Conclusion

Are we winning?  Or, to put it another way: have some things, at least, moved in a better direction?  I say, yes.  But it all comes down to the “how.”

We will get either an even more dictatorial president soon enough – whether on the right or on the left.  I will not consider that we are winning, either way.

But, given that I have no say in the matter, I know which evil is lessor. 

Epilogue

If you were Roman Catholic in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, you welcomed Franco.  No, you weren’t thrilled, but he was the lessor of two evils…and you had a chance to live, unlike if the communists and anarchists won.

Bible Believing Church

 

I used to cringe at this statement.  Let me explain, before coming to why I write “used to.”  It is a statement used by some Protestant churches, and, to my knowledge, only Protestant churches.  I would cringe because I took it as a slight against those churches that also embrace tradition (as if even the lowest of low protestant churches don’t hold to some tradition).  In other words: we believe the Bible, and only the Bible.  Sola Scriptura.

I didn’t like it.  Even the churches that embrace tradition (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, etc.) are “Bible believing.”  They are just Bible believing plus some other things.  But this was my frame of reference: the self-proclaimed Bible believing churches aren’t like those Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Now, what I am about to write – and that this is revelatory to me – is truly…stunning.  It turns out that a better way to understand the phrase – whether it is meant by all who use it or not – is not in the frame of contrasting against “Bible believing plus.”  Instead, to contrast against “Bible believing minus.”

The big “minus,” which is the obvious point for my being stunned, is on all points regarding embracing every woke concept.  We believe the Bible except what is says about a man and a woman, about marriage, about sexual relations, etc.  We believe the Bible except for the idea that God was purposeful in Creation.

Now, that many Protestant churches believe in the Bible “minus” has been obvious to me.  Yet I didn’t see this phrase “Bible believing” as an indictment of these.

Why now?  Why am I writing this now?  Here again, I have known for quite some time that not everyone who uses the words “Christian” or “God” or “sin” or “saved” mean the same thing as others or mean what it is the Bible teaches on these subjects.  For much of my life, I was just such a “Christian” – a Christian as long as Bible believing minus was acceptable.

This is what hit me like a two-by-four across the skull: being faced with this reality personally, intimately, and directly by people who use such words yet mean something else entirely…well, now I understand what “Bible believing” means in its best sense.

It is in contrast to such Christians: The Bible “minus” Christians.  Subtracting what God says from the definition of “Christian,” “God,” “sin,” and “saved.” 

It is a god, and a Christianity made in their own image.

Conclusion

Matthew 7: 21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven

Lloyd-Jones described these words as “…in many ways the most solemn and solemnizing words ever uttered in this world… How often, I wonder, have we considered them, or heard a sermon on them?”

As I noted at the time: The warning is one of avoiding self-deception and self-delusion.  It isn’t a warning simply of and for our teachers, but for ourselves.  It is emphasizing that nothing avails but true righteousness and true holiness.

This true righteousness and true holiness doesn’t come by picking and choosing what we want from the Bible.  God doesn’t change; His commandments do not change either. 

Treating the Symptom, not the Cause

 

What a brouhaha about H-1B visas within the MAGA movement.  I think prompted by a post from Vivek:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

There is more to it, but you get the idea.

Now, the culture he and Elon and the tech wizards that have joined MAGA (do they really care about what working class Americans care about) is the culture of STEM, and I agree fully that this is an important culture for an industrialized, division of labor economy.

Of course, it isn’t the most important cultural element.  I have written about this probably more than any other subject at this blog.  Call it a Christian culture that lives by the natural law ethic and legislates based on natural rights.  With such a culture as the foundation, excellence in STEM and every other field is secured.

I don’t intend to turn this post into a complete review of natural law and natural rights.  Suffice it to say, a natural law ethic places happiness as the highest value – happiness, or beatitudo, better understood as fulfillment through other-regarding action.  Call it love, and see the Golden Rule for a shorthand description of this: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Natural rights are different: these are the rights an individual has based on his humanity: a right to his life and to his justly acquired property.  Laws should be based on this and only this, what is described as the non-aggression principle.  I have in the past greatly simplified what this means: don’t hit first, don’t take my stuff.  Do either, and there ought to be a law against it.

So, that’s enough about the culture that actually matters if Vivek and Elon and these other wizards of Silicon Valley want capable employees.  In other words, Vivek is right – the issue isn’t an innate IQ deficit.  Yes, east Asians present a higher IQ, but it isn’t as if Americans of Western European descent lack in any measure of intelligence.

Vivek is dealing with a symptom: attributing the lack of Americans capable in STEM due to some cultural deficit in Americans.  But this isn’t the cause.  The underlying cause is the disdain for this Christian culture of natural law ethics and natural rights law.

This disdain has brought us to celebrate the idea that 2 + 2 = 4 is a social construct, that race or gender are more important factors in higher education than academic capability, that race or gender are more important factors than performance in hiring practices.

This disdain has brought us to develop entire university degrees in the most useless and inane fields, leading many who would be far better off learning a trade to instead fall into $100,000 or more of four-year debt only to work at Starbucks.

This disdain has even brought the STEM fields to ignore reality and focus on trivialities or worse.

Conclusion

Vivek and Elon want to work on the symptom, but this won’t fix any problem that matters to Americans.  Work on the cause (don’t even insert the idea of natural law into it): make education meaningful again.  This can be done simply enough: turn off the US government spigot that funds higher education stupidity in curriculums and today’s version of diversity in admissions.