There are many today who will concede that it's good for America but a recipe for failure at the polling booths. We call them Rinos for the most part but I am more and more coming to call them careerists who have analyzed the the landscape and concluded that the best way to further their careers is to enable the monster-system which fills their constituents' rice bowls even as these careerists loudly deplore the system. Most of them know as we do that this monster-system is hurtling toward a cliff and there will be nothing but broken rice bowls and bitter memories of liberty as the Republic pitches into the void. Nevertheless, they enable as they dissemble.
Ronald Reagan was able to lift men's vision to a higher ideal but also to a practical reality. He succeeded wonderfully at the polls although he was less successful in implementing a permanent restoration of the American dream.
There were many tricks exploited by Democrats, whom I choose to call leftists, which enable them to frustrate the very good policies outlined in your piece. At all costs, Democrats know they must change the subject from liberty and prosperity to other issues. What issues have they been successful with in diverting the electorate away from America's founding principles?
Above all, the left has exploited race as a way of changing the subject. In 2008 a perfect storm coalesced around Barack Obama and all of Reagan's vision was simply swept into irrelevancy by the charisma of the First Black President. We have analyzed ad nauseam on these threads how resort to racialism has enabled the left to shut down debate and proceed with its agenda. Never in American history, even considering reconstruction and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, has race played so potent but pernicious a role in American politics. We have put a tyrant in the most powerful position in the world and we are virtually impotent to check his depredations.
More generally, the left has invoked race to eliminate all rational analysis of its entitlements programs and it has afforded both the providers and the receivers of government largess a comfortable rationalization which permits that process to go unreformed even as the Republic approaches the cliff. So thoroughly successful has this Goebbels-like big lie concerning racism been invoked by the left that they reap 95% vote from African-Americans and appear on course to approach those numbers eventually among Hispanics and Muslims. The fact that unemployment is astronomical among African-Americans relative to white Americans has done nothing to shake the effectiveness of the left's exploitation of race among this demographic.
But it's not race alone that the left has exploited to mask its agenda. We see the pernicious game of identity politics being played out in feminism, homosexuality, and secularism, to identify just a few. An unwed mother of minor children goes to the polls utterly unconcerned about federal government's fiscal irresponsibility and the inevitability of a crash with its unavoidable consequences for her children. She goes to the polls believing that her children must be protected against their fathers, society, and capitalism by the very government which creates the threats to her children. She is diverted away from reality to a worldview which is utterly destructive of her own interests but she will vote that worldview, just as African-Americans will vote a worldview that virtually guarantees their misery.
If we are to repeat Ronald Reagan success at the polls we must find a way of restoring his vision which is another way of saying we must reintroduce into the consciousness of the electorate Ronald Reagan's worldview and prevent the Democrats from insinuating their diversions of race gender etc.. It is helpful but not decisive that we have the better view, we must also present it as compellingly as did Ronald Reagan.
