I listened to Alex Jones’s interview with Donald Trump last night. The Donald Trump I saw there bears little resemblance to the guy who was on stage in Houston last week, at least in mannerisms. He’s polite, he makes sense – and he’s a monster.
He wants to “make America great again.” He wants to make America rich (again?). Who could object to that?
He wants to “build up our military.” We already spend more on our military than almost the rest of the world combined. What’s to build up? But you go to an airport to get on a plane, and you see that even that military has failed to make us (feel) safe.
Certainly our politicians and diplomats are abject failures when it comes to enabling us to be a nation at peace. I heard precious little about diplomacy.
He wants to take ISIS’s oil. Using the military. (Have we heard that before?) What about the people whose land the oil is on? Well, “we” (meaning Exxon-Mobil) take it over using eminent domain.
What about property rights for the rest of us? Um, no. If the state needs it for “progress,” it goes to the state, and the state determines how (or if) the (former) owner gets compensated.
How will he deal with the deficit? “Waste, fraud, and abuse! Waste, fraud, and abuse!” This is an original idea? Isn’t it the mantra chanted by all fiscal conservative wannabes? Wasn’t it Reagan’s mantra? (Trump considers Reagan the best of the presidents since Lincoln.) Yet Reagan was the one who presided over the hockey-stick increase in federal deficit spending. I’m not reassured.
Now I consider Trump to be the least monstrous of the five leading candidates. He is no more militaristic than the others and seems to be less eager to go to war. With the exception of Cruz’s opposition to the ethanol subsidy, he is no less a foe of the welfare state. But he’s still a monster.
Look at the other federal government names that come to mind: Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Lindsey Graham, Harry Reid, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Janet Yellen, John Roberts. These are the people at the top. Would you want any of them to see their dreams for you come true? And we expect the entity beneath them to work for our good, or for the good of anyone not in the inner circle? Why would anyone want this behemoth to survive? Wouldn’t life be better without any of it?
If the federal government disappeared tomorrow, Pennsylvania, where I live, would still be one of the top economies in the world. To say nothing of Texas or Tennessee or California. We are paying the federal government to make us enemies of each other – tell me the Republicans and the Democrats on the street don’t hate each other – and enemies abroad for all of us. We need people to do that “for” us?
How would Pennsylvania deal with ISIS or Iran or Russia or Mexian immigrants, or Social Security or Medicare? I don’t know. But my guess is that we wouldn’t have to, at least not much more than Costa Rica or Panama or Cuba do. I suspect we would see some kind of confederations spring up. I don’t expect to see slavery reinstanted.
But I would suspect the Amish would continue to be the Amish, and other nonconformist groups to try to live out their visions. Not all will succeed, but that’s life.
The church might have the resources to start the schools, hospitals, and orphanages for which it was once famous and respected.
The Iowans might continue to produce ethanol. Fine: if I don’t have to subsidize the production or pay for it at the pump, it’s not my concern.
We might dissolve into squabbles between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, collectivists and individualists. Some of those squabbles might turn nasty. State police have proven to be as nasty as the feds in enforcing bad laws. But the distance between here and somewhere better could be reduced if there’s enough good neighborliness left among the little guys. And if there’s not, then there is literally no hope for the people, nation or no nation.
In the end, what will save the people – and it’s the people, not the abstraction represented by Old Glory, who are important – will be grace. Long term, it is the grace of God through Jesus. For this there is no substitute. Shorter term, however, it’s the common grace of voluntary service: we consider people and their property sacred, and we get ahead by meeting their felt needs with goods and services they are willing to pay for.
Some regions of what is now the US are more amenable to that mentality than others. It’s time for the church in those areas to realize that our nationalism is crippling our efforts to live it out, and we need to look for peaceful, God-honoring ways of demonstrating and providing an alternative. And praying that the behemoth dies peacefully, and soon. And we need to do all that decently and in order.
