Christocracy

STEPHEN BUTLER SAID:

“I think we would agree that one of our primary goals is historical development, establishing the righteousness of God on the earth.”

In a sense, but I suppose that’s bound up with one’s eschatology. In my opinion, I don’t think that, for the duration of the church age, either side will win a decisive battle. We’re not going to win the culture wars.

Both sides will win some and lose some. God will make sure that his people will win enough battles to say in the game. But I view it as a perennial battle rather than a dominant trend one way or the other. We make advances, but we experience setbacks. Each Christian generation will have to fight many of the same battles.

I think we should do whatever we can, but I don’t necessarily view that in progressive terms.

“Rudy vs Obama: You and I would vote for neither of them. Not a significant difference in historical development to warrant our votes.”

Actually, I do think there were significant differences on issues like counterterrorism, law and order, and economics.

Unfortunately, there was no significant difference on the social issues. And I put a premium on the social issues.

“McCain vs Obama: You would vote for McCain.”

Actually, I haven’t taken an explicit public position on that up until now, but the Palin pick did shift me off the fence. So I do expect to vote for the McCain/Palin ticket (which doesn’t erase all the policy differences I have with McCain).

“You perceive a significant difference in historical development to warrant our votes.”

Depends on what you mean by “historical developments,” which is a bit grandiose. I think more in terms of the survival of the Christian cause from one generation to the next.

“I perceive the problems of today to be too big for someone like McCain to be a lesser evil than Obama in any practical way. The state is raising 90% of our children to be God-haters. Not only are God-haters bad on a normative level, but they reek havoc on an everyday-practical level. The country is catastrophically not living within its means. Neither cutting taxes a little or raising taxes will make a splash. Yes I want someone like Ron Paul to say no to every single unconstitutional thing that comes his way, but my reason is not just because that would be ideal. I think that is the only way to see a possible turnaround in our historical development.”

Several issues:

i) I’m old enough to remember the containment policy we used during the Cold War. There can be a lot of value in containing a problem as much as possible.

Or, to take a current example, I don’t think the practical objective of counterterrorism is to defeat the jihadis, but rather, to cut the threat down to size. Keep it as manageable as possible. Buy us time, give us breathing space.

I don’t have a grand plan for victory. My goals are more modest. The enemy will keep up the pressure, so we need to keep up the counterpressure. They make a move, we make a countermove.

We don’t achieve checkmate, but we prevent them from checkmating us.

ii) There’s a sense in which the status quo is the status quo because enough voters like the status quo. We have something approaching a welfare state because enough voters like something approaching a welfare state.

I don’t like it, but there’s a reason why things are the way they are. That’s how a lot of people want it to be.

iii) As far as historical developments go, I don’t see things inevitably becoming as bad as they can be, then remaining that way.

As you know, liberal “solutions” simply make things worse. There comes a point at which the cumulative impact of dysfunctional liberal “solutions” is too onerous for the electorate to bear. They rebel.

Mind you, this doesn’t result in a wholesale turnaround. In a sense, it resets the same process further back, to repeat itself. It’s cyclical rather than linear.

iv) The liberal establishment is very insecure. I don’t mean by this that liberals are psychologically insecure, although that’s also the case. I mean the power base for the liberal establishment is quite precarious.

Liberal social policies are imposed from the top down. They don’t represent a groundswell of popular opinion.

As such, a lot of the cultural changes thrust upon us by the social engineers could revert to the status quo ante overnight.

Although many Americans aren’t Christian, many are also not liberal ideologues. Due to common grace and natural revelation, they do adhere to certain “traditional” values, and they only go along with the social engineers when they are forced to so by coercive legal sanctions.

v) As you know, the power base of the liberal establishment is centered in the media, judiciary, and academia. All three are threatened.

a) When I was a kid, three news networks along with a few big city newspapers dominated the media. With the advent of talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet, their grip has long since been broken.

b) The Internet is also undermining the public school franchise. What works at the college level (e.g. U. of Phoenix) can also work at the level of primary and secondary education. New books are now written and stored on computers. Old books are being scanned into databases. The homeschooling movement taps into this.

Who needs to go to school to get an education anymore? Sure, there will be a lot of institutional inertia and institutional resistance to the transition, but that generation will die off.

c) Judicial activism cuts both ways. If all you need is five votes to dictate public policy, that can just as well be five conservative votes. Anyone can game the same system.

In addition, it’s simply public passivity that puts up with a dictatorial court system. Judicial review is not a constitutional prerogative. And lower courts can be abolished by act of Congress.

Now, this is all hypothetical since no one of consequence is running on these issues. But if you had a popular, charismatic politician run on that platform, he could mobilize public opinion behind him and roll back decades of judicial activism.

McCain is not the man to do that, but my point is that it wouldn’t take all that much to make a very big difference. The liberal establishment represents a minority outlook. It lacks popular appeal. It doesn’t use persuasion. So it’s a house of cards—waiting for a puff of breath to blow it down.