Guest Post, David Ferg
I’m happy to introduce to you, guest commentary from David Ferg. I hope you’ll appriciate his thoughts ~ Lee Jones
In every election, especially presidential elections, there are those who will make apocalyptic warnings saying a vote for candidate “X” or party “Y” will bring an end to our nation as we know it. Both the left and the right make these kinds of statements; this is normal and dates back to our founding. In 1800 as the Presidency changed from the Federalist John Adams to the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, there were people warning we would lose our recently won independence, yet we survived. Why? Because the political disagreements were not over what a free republic should look like, both parties valued individual liberty, instead the arguments could be classified as being over the ‘how to’ of governance. Both sides had the same general vision for the future, they just wanted to achieve it, or manage it, differently. The election of 1860 was different. After several decades of fighting over slavery, and as the conflicts were getting more violent, there were louder, more ominous warnings as the election approached. This time the warnings came true as several States seceded from the union and our bloodiest conflict ensued. Why was the outcome different? Because the political differences being fought over in the lead up to the 1860 election were not about how to govern, they were about the definition of who we were as a people and as a nation. Compromise between the competing visions of American had run out. Fortunately, for the vast majority of our history, the differences in our major political parties and the issues at stake have been of the ‘how to’ variety. Our arguments have been mostly over methods, not vision. But recently there are signs we are starting to argue over vision again and the competing ideologies may not have room for compromise.
In the lead up to the 2016 election we heard the familiar warnings and hyperbole about the end of our nation but something new was coming to the surface. The level of passion people expressed seemed to be at levels not seen in our lifetimes; there was a sense of life and death in the tone. The vitriol we leveled at each other was raw and constant. The other side was not just wrong, they were evil, and as you know, you don’t compromise with evil. At the time I thought the coarseness of our dialog on social media was a symptom of the security felt when shielded by a computer screen and I chalked it up to emotions snowballing. Over the next few years, the vitriol increased. The language of life and death struggles with evil continued to the point where families split apart, and people lost jobs. From the left there were constant accusations of hate, racism, and xenophobia leveled against anyone who expressed patriotism or pride in America, and I wondered why things once considered good were now be deemed wrong, or more accurately, evil. This is when I started to get the sense, we were a nation on divergent paths.
With the election of “the squad’, Bernie Sanders was no longer by himself. For the first time, a major political party was not shy about toying with, and advocating for, socialist ideas, something that would have been unheard of just 10 years ago. This led me to thinking the capitalist / communist argument was at the root of our growing disagreements. The evil inflicted by communist nations in the 20th century was now ancient history to the younger generations who had been taught the idealism of socialist utopias (as if any existed). The use of words like ‘oppression’ and ‘victims’ in the political dialogs seemed to support the theory, but it didn’t explain enough. There was something more going on.
That something more was, and is, the mainstreaming of Critical Theory and the Social Justice and Identity Politics movements it engendered. Critical Theory has its roots in grievance studies (a telling name) and is an oppressor / victim worldview similar to Marxism. Whereas traditional Marxism focuses on economic oppression, Critical Theory, in its several forms, sees the oppressor / victim paradigm in social structures based on race, gender, and a myriad of other classifications. It is a large topic for which there is not room in this article, so if you are not familiar with it, I would encourage you to do a little research to understand the language and motivations of those who espouse the Critical Theory worldview. One place I would point you is this article by authors James A. Lindsay and Mike Nayna found at AeroMagazine.com. The authors, in the course of making their argument about the religious overtones in the Social Justice movement, provide a sufficient overview of what it espouses and why its adherents are “life and death” passionate. Very briefly stated, through the lens of Critical Theory / Social Justice / Identity Politics people are not seen as individuals but as a representative of a group (think, tribalism). Your group (or groups) is your identity. For example, I am not Dave, who is white, I am white. Period. Thus, all the characteristics assigned to the group ‘white’ apply to me, and if my group is classified as an oppressor (as it is), I am automatically personally guilty of any sin assigned to my group with no path for redemption. Conversely, if I am in a group deemed a victim, I inherit a form of honor and authority, and the freedom from personal responsibility since my life choices were structured by the oppressor. As you can see, it is better to be a victim than an oppressor, so the race is on to get yourself identified with the right groups.
Socialist societies aim for uniformity with the stated goal of equal outcomes for all. To achieve this, the State inevitably (and historically) must force uniformity in all aspects of society, including thought (if you doubt that, read The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). A Critical Theory society, if one is allowed to be formed, is focused on power redistribution and reversing roles of the oppressor / victim groups; it is aimed at remaking society by tearing down structures built by the oppressor group that currently has the power and having the victim groups rebuild society’s structures, giving the victim group the power in society. These, and some others not mentioned in this essay, are the competing visions we are seeing in our politics.
America was founded on the principle of individual freedom. We were founded on the idea that we have rights that transcend our government, and that the government’s job is to protect those rights. We were founded on the ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, meaning we are free to choose our life path and to reap the rewards of our work. We were founded on the principle of free speech, which is necessary for free thought. We were founded on the principle of the free exercise of religion, allowing people to follow their conscience. We were founded on the idea of law and the principle of innocent until proven guilty – as an individual. We were founded as a republic that gives us a voice in how our society is to be structured, where all citizens have a say through representation. We were founded on ideas that had taken all of mankind’s history to develop. A nation built on freedom was not the norm throughout history; there were small scale starts here and there, but slowly over time the idea of freedom became unstoppable and we are the inheritors of that opportunity.
Have we lived up to these principles? Yes and no. The idea of America is just that, an idea, and we have been growing into our principles. We have fought for equalities and justice and have made our nation a better place, and it continues to improve. We have been slowed by crony capitalism, racial injustices, legal injustices, and other sins that are natural outgrowths of human nature. No societal structure fixes human nature, but our problems are solvable within the framework we have been given. Will we ever live up to the standards we have set for ourselves? No. What human society could? There will always be differences, always be conflicts, always be those who are unjust, and yet we grow, and that is the goal.
What we are seeing now in socialism and Critical Theory are movements that want to “burn it down” and redo America in another image since our first image was never perfected. There are those who are wanting to “fix” our problems by sacrificing our individual liberties – for the common good. There are those who are wanting to limit the rewards you can reap from your labor since they consider it better that all be equal than to give anyone the freedom to succeed or fail for fear there will be inequities. There are those who want to eliminate individualism and structure justice on group identity (does that sound like bigotry?), pitting oppressor tribes against victim tribes, and victim tribes against other victim tribes, with the obvious result being a society at each other’s throats and ‘canceling’ each other. There are those who want to fix social ills by limiting your speech (and thought) or religious freedoms in the name of uniformity or political correctness. There are those who simply want retribution against those they deem oppressors. Those advocating for a socialist America and those advocating for an America based on Critical Theory remedies have a lot in common, they both minimize the individual in favor of the collective, be it the worker class or your identity group. These are not visions of America I want, and these are not visions where common ground can be found with our founding principles. So it is true, we are no longer arguing over the ‘how to’ of government, we are arguing over the vision of America.
How can we not repeat the outcome of 1860? We must reignite the flame of freedom we were given at our founding through education and accountability. We must relearn the idea of America and see it as something worth fighting for, and we must teach it to our kids. Our schools have been teaching socialist and Critical Theory ideas for years and we must reverse the damage they have done and are doing. Then we must hold our politicians accountable to our ideals. There have been injustices in our society and that is why there are competing visions, injustice breeds discontent. We must demand equality, not retribution, not role reversal, but equality. We must demand our courts be free of politics. In an ideal world, we should never be able to tell a judge’s political views by their rulings. We must untangle the corporate / government web and wean ourselves off crony capitalism, so the playing field is fair. There are things we can do, but we must be willing to live by principle and not temporal benefits. Our politicians have learned we will vote for benefits so we must be willing to resist the temptations and vote on principle and hold both parties and the courts accountable to those principles. Our system of government has vested the power in the people. Let’s use that power to guide our politicians toward the idea of America. There are a lot of things that need corrected since some level of corruption has touched virtually every aspect of our government, but freedom is worth the effort. We just need to keep working toward our ideals and not change trains.
Our founders knew virtue was required to remain a free people. We have been given a great gift, now we need to step up and be those people or we could lose it. Our founding ideas are about freedom and individual liberty. It is the only vision of America in the current political marketplace that has freedom as its core; socialism and Critical Theory do not. Speak up for, work for, and vote for freedom. A free America is worth fighting for.
David Ferg
About: David Ferg is married with three children and five grandchildren. He holds a BS degree in Business Administration from Towson University and is an IT consultant by profession. David is an avid reader of non-fiction; history, science, politics, and theology being the most common topic.