Here at the beginning of the Trump presidency, events of the last few months, even those of the last few weeks, have inspired me to do something I truly thought I would never do again.
Write.
Having created so much content both for myself and others over the past twelve years I truly felt that after “penning” the book, Dissidently Speaking – Change the Words. Change the War. in early 2024 my writer’s cup had been drained and my thirst for sharing ideas had been satiated. To some extent, I still think that’s true. As I type in this moment, I feel no sense of revival, nor do I harbor any delusions that my voice is needed to contribute to the national dialogue.
But as Peter Falk’s great character, the ever-understating Lt. Columbo might have said, “there’s just a few things that are bothering me.” As a result, I render the following to the reader partly as a form of self-therapy and partly to see if I can’t do what it has become my want to do in my waning years and that is to perhaps raise a few questions a critical thinking mind may wish to contemplate.
It was what seems like minutes ago in this long and full life I’ve lived that I was absolutely certain about…well, about most everything. A is A my Objectivist background had taught me. I was convinced that I understood the truths about economy, history, religion, political society, and so on. At this stage, however, I feel a lot more like Socrates with his attributed famous saying, “all I know is that I know nothing.”
I do still believe in absolutes. I remain convinced that A is A. My problem seems to be in actually being able to find A.
Coinciding with my own elevated level of uncertainty has been a rise in the general populace of having certainty about almost everything. The cesspool of discourse that is social media is swimming with absolutist statements, personal and hateful condemnations, and the wild assertions of facts not in evidence. This is where reason has gone to die and where traditional skepticism (questions born of critical thought with suppressed emotion) has been supplanted by cynicism (questions absent critical thought and fueled by emotion) and further soured with fanciful declarations of conspiracies.
This saddens me, but I’ve been sad for a while. What has finally driven me back to my keyboard is the recent civil war within the universe of Trump supporters over H-1B Visas and who (if anybody) and how many (if any at all) should be allowed into the country. This issue has had a sort of cascading effect on me calling to mind questions I have not only about this issue, but also about the 2024 election and what it might mean and not mean, and about the general notions of American exceptionalism and America first, two phrases we use now almost as frequently as salt and pepper. My problem is that when I take those phrases in, I’m not really sure what I’m tasting.
Please then join as I empty my thoughts on a screen in an attempt to possibly locate A in the process.
H-1B or Not to Be:
For those who decided to indulge in the archaic traditions of family and friends over the holidays, you may have missed the firestorm that erupted over what is known as the H-1B Visa program. This where the United States permits a certain number of foreign workers into the country each year, ostensibly possessing particular skills that can benefit the American “greater good” or, as Rousseau may have phrased, serve the general will. There are certain requirements set for the program and applications/requests need to be submitted by both employer and prospective foreign citizen entrant. The cap on new entrants per year is 85,000.
The particulars of the program and historical trends are beyond my scope and easy to find on your own. At the heart of the ongoing fissure within the Trump supporter universe is whether or not there should be any foreign workers admitted. Supporters of the program like Trump DOGE leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy argue that the program is needed because the American educational system simply isn’t turning out enough brilliant and capable minds on its own. Musk went so far to post on un-social media that an opponent of the program should “F*** YOURSELF in the face” and that he would “go to war” over this.
He may need to. A significant number of Trump supporters took that slur, delivered to one, as having been delivered to all. This got collectively personal in a hurry.
Critics of H-1B make the point that we have had four straight years of uncontrolled illegal entry into this country and need to clean up that mess before we admit another single foreigner in for any reason (save for visiting the Statue of Liberty as a tourist, perhaps?). They further argue that Americans are perfectly capable of filling the necessary roles and perhaps all that is needed is better training. This position has its own sort of “high profile” extremists stirring things up over the tech-waves like Laura Loomer, someone with flamethrowing style quite different than my own, but who influences a large following.
There was a time when I would have been one of the absolutists in this ongoing trench warfare. What’s interesting is that at different times of my life, I would have been an absolutist on different sides. While in college, in the midst of my purest libertarian stage, I was for open borders and used to argue vehemently with my father as to why America had an obligation to let in anyone who wished to come and live “the American dream.” As recently as perhaps five years ago, I might well have been sporting a “Loomer for Rushmore” t shirt and chanting, “you go, girlfriend.”
Today? Today I look at this in wonder. In particular with regard to Elon, I can’t imagine what he is thinking. I don’t mean about his position regarding the visa program (For the curious, my own position is that the program should be cleaned up, continued, and exclude any and all nationals hailing from hostile nations from participating). Sans profanitie, I think it can be perfectly rational to defend the program.
What bothers me about Elon is that he is set to play a major role inside of the Trump administration to curb waste and abuse in government and he has just wasted his credibility with perhaps millions of supporters owing to his abuse of them. Is the richest man in the world, the great innovator, the savior of Twitter, a fool? I think not. Then why? The most troubling thing about Elon’s remarks is that he made them on purpose. He actually thought this was a good idea. Since he isn’t a fool, this must mean he had a plan. We will speculate on that later.
On the side of wanting to eliminate the program, we actually have a number of differing, not necessarily incompatible reasons. Previously mentioned were the ideas that there really are enough Americans to do the work along with the argument that we have let so many illegals in already that we need to get that sorted before another soul is to enter. Yet another argument I find more challenging, not to refute, but to make, is as follows…
Many people are pointing out that the current program is filled with fraud. Musk, himself, has even recently acknowledged and said he is open to reforms. Because it is letting in people who do not truly meet the criteria, the argument goes that it must be disbanded altogether. Fair enough. I’m in. So long as those making the arguments agree that we need to eliminate immediately:
Social Security
Medicare
Medicaid
All student loan programs
The Defense Department
Etc.
While there are some folks in the above group that might well support eliminating all of those programs, I’m guessing it isn’t a majority. If you are going to make an argument that a program has waste and fraud, therefore it needs to be cancelled, then you have to be consistent. If you aren’t consistent, then there must be another reason or, you could be being consistent with an asterisk. Hold on to that thought for a couple of thousand words and we will come back to it.
Let’s move on. Because while it was this latest clan war over visas that inspired me to write, it is not really what I am writing about. It just provides useful context.
Travel way back in time to November 5, 2024. On that date, 77 million people, many of them here legally, voted for Donald Trump and made him the 47th President-elect of the United States. There was magic in the air. It was morning in America (or mourning for some, I suppose). Celebratory memes hit the cyberworld like confetti. There was a mandate. The “left” (no such thing-read Dissidently Speaking) had been defeated. America was going to be made great again. Q said, “trust the plan” and by golly here we were.
Less than 60 days later, and before Trump even took office, there was this fracture of unknown severity. How does that happen? It’s time to take a look at the election of 2024 and offer some thoughts, facts, and questions. We will come back to the questions raised in this section further on down the road.
The 2024 Election-As we were told in the Lion King, “look harder”:
I mentioned that on election night I had the opportunity, just an amazing opportunity, to attend the Trump gathering at the convention center in West Palm Beach. There is an almost indescribable sense of history one feels when they attend a sort of speaker event and where when the speaker walks out on stage he has just been elected President of the United States.
There was a long time delay between the announcement that Trump had won Pennsylvania, thereby sealing his victory, and when he actually walked out on stage a couple of hours later. During the interval, I heard some folks talking next to me and they were expressing awe and disbelief over the magnitude of Trump’s win. I heard one of them say, “This has to be one of the greatest landslides of all time?”
I politely inserted myself into the conversation and suggested that that wasn’t really quite the case. I did a quick Google search on my smartphone and showed them the largest Electoral College margins in history. This result was nowhere near the top. The folks I showed were genuinely surprised, one of them a contemporary of mine, said, “I never would have realized that.”
Here are some very simple facts regarding the 2024 election in terms of its “magnitude”: To begin, Trump received 49.8% of the popular vote (That is not a typo. He did not win a majority, only a plurality). If you go back over the last 12 Presidential elections, starting with 1980 and Reagan’s first win, Trump’s 2024 Electoral College margin of victory ranks eighth out of twelve. If you look at his margin of victory in the popular vote over the same time period, he ranks ninth. The only three worse victory margins were George Bush in 2000, Trump himself in 2016, and Bill Clinton in 1992 (that one is an outlier because of the third party candidacy of Ross Perot). In the two non-Clinton cases, both of the “winners” actually lost the popular vote.
Trump’s victory in November was certainly historic but only by definition. In order for it to become historic in terms of meaning, his term in office will have to be transformative and that transformation will have to sustain and expand well beyond his inevitable departure in January of 2029. To the extent that Trump has a “mandate” coming out of the election it is the one that every newly elected President carries; do a good job. To believe that he has some sort of broad-weeping national policy mandate is to ignore the mathematical results of the election. For those who want to point to the record number of votes he received, allow me to mention that the population of the United States in 1980 was 227 million compared to 340 million today. It is the percentage of the vote that matters.
One more small note I can’t resist. After the election a map of the United States circulated on social media showing all the red area that went for Trump and the miniscule blue portions that went for Harris. It was intended to show just what a landslide the election was for Trump in Crayola color. Two thoughts: One) look at the same map after a Reagan win. Two) those blue areas happen to be where millions of people live and most of the red area is vacant land.
I am not discounting Trump’s win, nor am I trying to understate how impressive it was. He did what Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t do. He came back (and like a bull moose). I’m simply attempting to qualify it.
Here are what I believe to be the key factors that contributed to Trump’s victory in 2024. I list them in no particular order as I do not believe most people can even rank them in order for themselves. It is quite difficult to objectively rank subjective sorts of concepts floating in your mind. You can know what matters but beyond that it’s hard to know what matters most.
Trumps keys to victory:
High prices impacting people’s quality of life and limiting them
Easily identifiable chaos and danger at our southern border that has poured into many American cities
Repeatedly being told that boys are not boys and girls are not girls
Kamala Harris is clearly one of the most simple-minded people ever to seek the Presidency
Since I wrote these in an order, but said that they were not in any particular order, allow me to address them out of order. Kamala Harris was an absolute embarrassment to the American Presidential race and just the very fact that someone of her low-level intelligence could get so close to being Commander in Chief is proof of just how dangerous a place in which our nation finds itself. It was already noted that this election wasn’t a blowout victory, but it never should have been close. Trump essentially ran against the village idiot.
The savagery of high prices, especially the spike in 2023, hurt the incumbent party as it has historically in election after election. James Carville’s famous, “It’s the economy, stupid” phrase rings loud and true yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is important to note that this is not a vote motivator driven by peoples’ intellectual pursuit of a new approach to macroeconomics. The typical voter understands virtually nothing about economics in general and even less about inflation in particular. Randomly survey a dining room filled with 200 patrons and see how many can explain the irrefutable equation of MV=PQ, set the over/under at 5, and bet the under. You will clean up.
Voters vote to change the party-in-power when economic conditions are bad (graduate level econ term). Republicans and Democrats have both been victims of this reflex over the course of history. 2024 was, in part, a reaffirmation of this principle and Trump was a beneficiary.
Now to turn our attention to the two more interesting of the four reasons. First there is the “boys will be boys and girls will be girls…or will they?” problem. Normal people concerned with everyday life and not obsessed with history, philosophy, and social movements have to be asking, “Where on earth did this come from?” Like virtually all other social movements, the answer is complex and involves a convergence, like electrical wiring running from many rooms in a house and ultimately coming together at a junction box. It is rare that you can pinpoint one single event that led to all others.
While that is the case with the transgender movement, there is an occurrence from the early 20th Century that we can point to as having played a major role in creating the climate that has made it possible. As is the case with other unfortunate occurrences in the early to mid-1900’s, it all started in Germany.
In the early 1930’s, there was a group of intellectuals who were frustrated that we were not progressing toward a true communist outcome quickly enough in the West. Karl Marx had predicted that the march to communism was essentially inevitable and would be driven by materialism, or in simpler terms, economics. The exploitation of labor by the owners of capital would lead to socialism, revolution, and ultimately a sort of utopia where people would live in harmony, each contributing the best of themselves to society. No more private property, no more envy, just utopia. Oh, and John Lennon music!
For these intellectuals, Marx had either missed something or things just were not moving fast enough. They wondered how they might speed the path to perfecting the human condition. They decided that the cultural component was missing from Marx’s vision and that it would be more effective to deconstruct conventional society by using the arts (Plato’s concern) to influence while at the same time tearing down all past conventions of philosophy and political theory.
And so was born the Frankfurt School. This is where we get the entire construct of Critical Theory about which you have heard so much in the past decade from its direct descendant Critical Race Theory. Before that, as a side note, we were given Critical Legal Theory.
Much has been written about the Frankfurt School, its migration to the United States at Columbia University, and its various academic “champions” over the past century. All of that is interesting and I encourage you to research on your own. For our purposes, it is sufficient to summarize everything about the Frankfurt School in one simple sentence:
Its goal was to vaporize societal absolutes.
Over the past nearly 100 years the ideas from Frankfurt have permeated our academic institutions and multiplied and divided like a viral plague. They have lived not just inside of academia, lest we forget that students (many of them) go on to graduate and not everyone becomes a professor. Some people go out and get other jobs. What has happened over time is that the academic notion started in Germany has infiltrated virtually every aspect of modern Western society.
To refer back to the opening of this essay, to a Frankfurt disciple, A is not A. What A actually is can only be contextual in the mind and experience of the person observing A. No absolutes.
We have seen the wearing away of “conventions” within our society for decades. For those who decry the move away from religious institutions and practices, they can blame at least in part the founders of the Frankfurt School. This brings us to the “boys aren’t boys” problem and the 2024 election.
There are two irrefutable facts regarding the human experience. The first is that all of us die. The second is that there are boys and girls. When the non-absolutism of the Frankfurt School finally reached one of the two irrefutables and tried to refute it, the average American heretofore asleep at the voting switch finally took notice. This has led to activism from otherwise docile parents all over the country in the last several years evidenced by increased school board involvement, lawsuits, and withdrawals from public education. Add to it the medical mutilation of minors, sometimes without parental consent, and Johnny being Janey lost all sense of frivolous novelty. Democrats leaned hard into the transgender movement in 2024 at the very instant regular citizens were pulling away. Score independent and crossover voters for Trump.
Now to the immigration piece. There is no question that to anyone who is not for pure open borders, or no borders at all, the last four years have been an unmitigated disaster. While the estimates of the number of people who have entered this country “illegally” (in quotes because while their entry was not strictly by the book, they were allowed to enter by the government) vary, it is safe to say that at least 10 million have so entered without any sort of proper screening and have been dispersed throughout this land that was our land according to the famous song some of us sang in elementary school. This has placed an enormous strain on social services and led to increases in crime in cities ranging from Los Angelas to Chicago.
I live in the greater Chicago area and the protests have been something to behold. As one might expect, these new folks have not been housed and sheltered in affluent areas; the NIMGC (Not in my Gold Coast) factor being very much in play. Instead, they have been housed in predominantly lower income, minority, neighborhoods. Community centers have been lost as shelters, hospital emergency rooms are full, and there is a general feeling of what about us being expressed by actual American citizens living in these neighborhoods. And, of course, there should be.
Fear, shock, and outrage drove people to the polls to vote for the only one of the two candidates who promised to do something about the problem. The other candidate literally helped to facilitate it. This explains a number of voters who voted for Trump who otherwise might not, would not, have.
But what about the Trump supporters who are hard core, would vote for him anyway, and care about the border?
Now we have wandered back to H-1B Visa and split within the Trump community. I think it is just as hard for a Trump supporter to say Elon Musk isn’t “one of them” when he spent a fortune to help elect him and reopened X to his followers as it is for Elon to tell them to go F*** themselves in the face.
It is time to take a look at two very commonly used phrases among Trump supporters and, to a great extent, by those we call “conservatives.” Those two phrases are American exceptionalism and America first. I’m not sure that those phrases are being used consistently not just between people, but even within any one single user.
How exactly are we “exceptional” and at what are we needing to be “first”?
American exceptionalism as a term has some interesting history and I encourage the reader to spend some time doing research on your own. I will whet your appetite by sharing that you will find pieces of its origins ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to the American communist movement in the early 20th Century. While origins of terms are interesting, terms do evolve, and it is today’s understanding with which I’m occupied.
I do not believe it overly simplistic to suggest that to the average citizen, American exceptionalism means that the United States is a wee-better, a cut above, the rest of the nations of the world. In terms of evidence, they will point to our historical military accomplishments, our powerful economy, and our charitable outreach around the globe. In so doing, they may gloss over, or completely disregard, Vietnam, our financial mismanagement triggering a world-wide depression in the 1930’s and another of lesser degree in the first decade of this century, and our various misadventures in foreign policy and intelligence service mishegas that have contributed to much pain and suffering since the end of WWII.
The standard answer to that sort of critique is, “So, we aren’t perfect. Find a nation that’s done better.” Agreed. In fact, I’d agree that when compared to other nations since our founding, America does seem to be exceptional. But why?
I don’t think there is a single shred of evidence that Americans as members of the human race are any better than anybody anywhere else in the world. We kill each other. We cheat each other. We exploit resources and seize treasures of our own people and those of other nations. We have helped run illegal guns, permitted the importation of everything from fentanyl to opiates, and entered into armed conflicts where we lost American military lives for simple political sport and the personal gain of leaders. We have even performed medical and biological experiments on our own citizens without their informed consent.
In terms of people within nations behaving badly, I’d argue we are about 280 yards off the tee, middle of the fairway. That said, despite all of our efforts to apply tarnish, something about America still shines. What that is, what makes us exceptional, is the system that our Founding Fathers designed.
Unless you want to subscribe to some ridiculous notion that Americans are somehow genetically superior to others (there have been suggestions of a special “explorer gene” that early Americans may have had disproportionately but there is just no significant evidence of anything relevant to “exceptionalism”), then it must be something external to our humanity that has led to such great achievement and a position of world prominence. I would suggest that is the system that was deliberately designed in an attempt to harness our best abilities and, at the same time, reign in our more harmful human tendencies.
Say what you like about the perceived differences between us and other Western nations. Is France “exceptional”? England? Germany? Most Americans, and likely way-most Trump-supporting Americans, I am guessing would argue no. But what if they each had our constitutional structure? To be sure, they are all countries with a set of rules that seem similar to ours, but they are not exactly like ours and they have not had them in place for over 200 years.
While it could be the subject of its own lengthy essay, and has generated millions of words of thought over centuries, I think it is fair to argue, as I do, that what makes America exceptional is its deliberately designed government architecture. Our Founders were able to start with a national version of John Locke’s tabula rasa, a blank slate, and they embraced the best of his and others’ ideas regarding Natural Law and representative government while paying attention to the abuses and corruptions of human nature that history had offered. They also drew upon their own firsthand experience and disputes with the English Crown that drove them to their radical response.
If you can except that our system is what has allowed for American exceptionalism to surface, then it follows that “America First” as a matter of political philosophy and public policy action must center around protecting the integrity and functionality of our Constitution as originally drafted and subsequently amended (amendments being every bit as much of our Constitution as is any original portion of content). That system has been being attacked and has been slowly eroding over a very long period of time.
There are a significant number of people in this country who:
Would like to repeal the 2nd Amendment
Believe that free speech is an outdated concept
Wish to abolish our federal republic structure and replace it with a purer democracy (movement to eliminate Electoral College)
Seek to alter the structure of the Supreme Court (technically not a Constitutional issue but intended to help dismantle it)
Continue to have states’ rights take the back seat to federal decrees through an expanded and abusive application of the Commerce Clause
See the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments as inconveniences that obstruct federal courts and law enforcement from properly punishing political dissidents
And so on.
Before the folks on team right get too eager to label those on team left as the villains for such Constitutional assaults, they would do well to remember that the runaway abuse of federal courts and law enforcement evidenced over the past several years is largely of their making. It has been a blind and belligerent support for “law & order” on the part of “conservatives” that has enabled this Stasi-like leviathan to grow. Physician, heal thyself.
Americans of all political persuasions would do well to remember that if they are feeling exceptional, they need to recognize and appreciate what makes them so. I would like to think that the reason for the relatively narrow win in November for Trump was at least a partial call for America to reembrace and revitalize its exceptional Constitution. I would like to think that. Sadly, for me, I remain skeptical at this moment.
So, what does the election of 2024 mean?
One last time, let’s go back to Elon and the H-1B Visa dispute. If the fracture within the Trump base over this is about whether or not Americans are exceptional enough to handle certain jobs or if we just need to keep all immigrants out of the country in order to put America first, then I would suggest the accent of the debate is on the wrong “si-LAH-bul” as my late mother would have (phonetically) said. H-1B Visas should be a quite dispassionate, almost side issue as a national policy matter. Basic questions: Should we let people in at all? If we let them in, what should the qualifications be? How many should we let in with the right qualifications? What sort of restrictions should we put in place? How will we monitor?
Six rational people with differing thoughts could settle this in an afternoon in a conference room with soft drinks and snacks. The fact that it has triggered such vitriolic exchanges signifies there is something else at work here. If there is division like this within the “troops”, what does it suggest about division within the country?
When you consider the American exceptionalism and America first notions discussed in the preceding section, here is from where I think the division within the Trump community comes. I believe that some people truly believe that Americans are themselves exceptional and as a result they need to be placed first. There is not an emphasis on the system being exceptional, there is an emphasis on the people within the system being exceptional. This is something that needs to get sorted over time if we ever hope to unify the country.
Perhaps Elon was trying to be deliberately outrageous in order to point out this wasn’t going to be easy? He might have wanted to help clarify what we are specifically talking about when we say we need to “secure our border.” Or, like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, maybe he just wanted to peck a fight? I hope for the former motive and I fear the latter.
In Dissidently Speaking I contend that Americans have become addicted to confrontation. I stand by that and won’t go further here because you can look to that book for the argument. I will say that there is nothing to suggest that the 2024 election has given the nation a collective white key tag. We still want to fight, even with those with whom we ostensibly agree.
I believe that what we saw in 2024 was a significant number of Americans who are not politically obsessed, who typically only vote in presidential election years, who do not study issues deeply, and who are generally superficial in the formation of their opinions, look around and say, “things don’t seem to be going very well”. They voted for something new, not overwhelmingly but decisively by definition.
It is also reasonable to surmise that the “no absolutes” boundary-pushing of the Frankfurt School may have finally found its own boundary. Like Jim Carry’s character in The Truman Show, it may have gotten to edge of its own artificial reality. There really are boys and girls. The walking back or outright cancelling of various DEI programs across the country, from government, to education, to the corporate world, shows a practical sort of retreat from a moral relativistic movement that is starting to see its own limitations.
We would be mistaken, however, in viewing that retreat from policy as being equated with a rejection of core beliefs. Just because somebody gives up on doing something doesn’t mean they have given up on believing in it. In fact, there really is no necessary or likely connection at all. Moreover, the cultural march toward communism isn’t completely halted just because it needs to retreat on one front. Only time will tell if the disciples of the Frankfurt School have been kneecapped or if they have simply had their hands slapped for reaching into the biological cookie jar.
A quote attributed to Vladimir Lenin goes, “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, continue. If you encounter steel, withdraw.” The Frankfurt School and its disciples have been probing Western Civilization with bayonets for a century. Mostly they have found mush. Finally, they may have hit steel and are withdrawing. Let’s see where next they probe.
In the meanwhile, remember how Marx had thought materialism would drive history toward communism? Here is a thought or two about that and what this election might or might not mean.
The United States today is often referred to as a “mixed economy”. That is a euphemistic phrase to denote a socialist setting that is not yet too freedom-inhibiting. The truth is that we live in a socialist country that follows the fascist model of socialism (see again, Dissidently Speaking). We have a powerful central government joined with large corporations that work well together on planning, managing, and overseeing economic, political, and social activity. On November 5, 2024, did Americans come out and vote overwhelmingly to change that?
In his latest brilliant book, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering, the greatest skeptic of the 21st Century, Malcolm Gladwell, talks about overstories (in forest ecology, a term denoting the top layer covering a forest) and the role they play in shaping social group behaviors underneath. I would argue that the overstory for America is that people are generally socialist in their leanings.
If you disagree with that, would you argue that the typical American wants to abolish:
Medicare & Medicaid
Social Security
All college tuition assistance
Public education
Environmental regulations
Banking regulations
Healthcare regulation and subsidy
Welfare income redistribution
The list goes on.
Each of these kinds of programs are a form of socialism and all share a sort of economic connectivity; certainly more than a cultural one. This is a country where a significant percentage of its citizens are very economically dependent upon government. That is socialism and that is the transitional phase about which Marx wrote. To reverse this in the long term will require self-deprivation on the part of many millions in the short to intermediate term. Is this what just a fraction less than half of the country voted for in 2024?
Remember when I said earlier when mentioning that if you argued that the H-1B Visa program should be ended because of the waste and fraud then to be consistent you had to argue the same about other government programs? I also said that you might be able to argue against and for government waste at the same time and be consistent…but with an asterisk.
Here is the asterisk: It could be the case that if, as I contend, a majority of Americans are actually socialists to a large extent, they may only see a need to eliminate inefficient programs that benefit non-citizens but not the ones that benefit them. That would be consistent at least but would not reflect an idea of embracing American exceptionalism by protecting our founding principles. Is that what’s at work in this H-1B debate? I don’t know. I do know that the very fact that it’s a legitimate question suggests we might not yet be on the road to making America great again.
Our country was founded on ideas antithetical to socialism. While that term and concept were not en vogue then as they are now, the writings of Plato and Rousseau and others who helped to create those ideas were. Our Founders rejected them and chose instead a model of individual liberty and personal responsibility. That is what our Constitution tried to institutionalize.
And it is our Constitution that makes us exceptional as Americans.
I complete this essay on the day that Trump is sworn into office. My friends are ecstatic. Jubilant texts have been interrupting every keystroke. I welcome and love their enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is critical as it provides the impetus behind action. Many are also truly optimistic. I always warn against the “O” word as I see it as the sin that escaped the Pope’s seven deadly listing (Pride being the one that should have been omitted in its place). Optimism is nothing more than an irrational blind belief in success that ignores inconvenient realities and impediments. Enthusiasm for Trump’s upcoming term is proper and understandable. Optimism?
If we look at the last 26 presidential elections, we will find the score tied at 13-13. America’s choice for the oval office varies like the EKG chart for a patient with a reasonably normal sinus rhythm. Look at the Senate over the same 100-year span and you will find a similar pattern. The House has been different with it leaning more consistently Democrat over time. With that in mind, if we were to try to run a regression line through the data for Presidential elections, we would find a fairly flat line demonstrating not much of anything conclusive.
What data then should we measure? What really does matter?
I argue that over the last 100-plus years we have steadily been losing individual liberty, something I refer to as the “Liberty Timeline” (you guessed it; Dissidently Speaking). Input the data relating to individual freedom and run that regression equation. I think you will find it produces a clearly downward sloping line.
That is the curve we need to alter and as any mathematician knows, you cannot alter a curve with a single data point as is the 2024 election. If you really want to know what the 2024 election does mean, stick around for 2026…
…and 2028, and 2030, and 2032, and ….
Postscript, January 21, 2025
Last night, President Trump signed an extraordinary number of Executive Orders and repealed 78 of Joe Biden’s. As a matter of policy, I agree with essentially all of his actions, and am especially elated over the pardons and clemency granted to the J6 political prisoners.
That said, all of these actions have had to be taken at the executive level. In a nation that has rediscovered what makes America exceptional and has truly put America first, we wouldn’t need an executive cast in the role of king to do things that are right and consistent with those themes.
Just an aspirational thought. To write, perchance to dream.
Broaden your Communication today!
Dissidently Speaking: Change the Words, Change the War
