Independence Day and Blind Patriotism

Happy Independence Day!

But can we maybe rethink the blind patriotism?

It’s 4th of July, that time when American flags are flying high, patriotic songs are filling the airwaves, and fireworks are popping off all around town.

That means this is usually the post in which I’m supposed to join the flag-waving while singing Lee Greenwood’s I’m Proud to be an American. 

But I’m probably not going to do that today.

This year I feel a little more sober about my patriotism and while I don’t want to rain on your parade, I hope you will feel a little more sober too.

It’s not because I think patriotism is inherently bad. I don’t. And I certainly don’t want to be confused with some of these anti-American socialists who are running around accusing America of being systematically racist and telling white Western Europeans to hate themselves. Not at all. 

My reluctant enthusiasm comes from somewhere else. It runs much deeper than the inch-deep, mile-wide philosophy of post-modern activists and irrational critical theorists. 

But before you write me off as a disillusioned, pessimistic curmudgeon—which is sort of redundant and potentially true but technically irrelevant—know that I’m still glad I live in this country.

I’m still thankful for our hard-fought and rightly-deserved freedoms. I even think America is still somewhat exceptional amongst the nations of the world—and for many good reasons. 

Also, I’m an honorably discharged veteran. I was happy to serve our country, and did so as an airman from 1989-1993, Desert Shield and the close of the Cold War. I was even part of an ECM team that reprogrammed our B-52s to detect and interpret new threats as the Cold War ended and we turned our attention more specifically toward the Middle East. I was present as Russian diplomats walked our flightline to ensure we had dismantled our nuclear-armed B-52s as part of the SART (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). I knew then America wasn’t perfect but I was proud of the work we were doing and I’m proud to have served our country in the capacity that I did. 

But today, I’m not as proud of America as I used to be.

Truthfully, I’m mostly just sad, especially when I think of all the men and women who sacrificed their lives and limbs for a country most of them would hardly recognize, today. There are really only vestiges left of the values those Americans fought to protect. Much of what they fought against oversees has been introduced right here at home by politicians who might as well be spitting on their graves.

So let me get to the question that’s been bugging me, the question that has sobered my patriotism.

Aware that the English colonists of the 18^th century sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to secure a new nation built on principles of Natural Law and religious freedom, and the along the way, countless others have fought and died in various wars to preserve those principles, and the values those principles afforded humanity, is the current perversion of this nation that is called America worth dying for? 

I’m asking honestly, so go with me on this and let’s explore a few things.

I realize that the COVID-19 controversy is too close and too conspiratorial for some of my readers. I get it. But for this post, can we just agree to disagree on the severity of the virus itself, and on the moral responsibilities said severity may have or have not inferred on us as human beings?

And can we just talk about the government-mandated lockdowns and the overly-obvious politicizing of this “pandemic?” Can we consider the eerie way in which the Ministry of Truth (i.e., mainstream and social media) force-fed a single narrative to the public and shut down everyone who disagreed with its propaganda? 

And can we talk about all the gubernatorial chest-puffing? The way these State tyrants strutted and squawked about their emergency powers, one might have guessed Dana White was lining them up to fight in the next UFC. 

Many governors were indeed—by definition—tyrannical, arresting people who opened their businesses or failed to comply with their mask and social distancing mandates, then refusing to allow for any kind of redress of grievances because it was an emergency mandate and not a law. Said the powers that be, citizens don’t get due process when it comes to emergency powers. They get to obey.

Well, now that they’ve seen how effective their play worked, government officials on both sides of the aisle are talking about emergency powers being extended to include climate issues. This is a true story.

There is no stopping such nefarious government overreach, except for the people willing to lay down their comforts and luxuries and stand up to tyranny.

But further consider just how quickly and how easily so many Americans conceded their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the unconstitutional mandates of the State for fear of a virus in which the survival rate was more than 97% for the most vulnerable people groups and over 99% for the general populace.

Would that have happened in 1776 or in 1941? Given what we know of the men who spent the winter at Valley Forge and stormed the beaches of Normandy, I don’t think it would have. Are these the kinds of citizens that care more about right principles than comfort or life?

If the answer is no, then is this the kind of America we want to wave a flag for? Perhaps. But maybe not.

I feel like I need to say it again, just in case someone didn’t get it the first time. I’m not under any delusion that America was ever perfect or has ever had some past Golden Age. For all its virtues, America has never been faultless. She has many sins. But fundamentally, America stood for something then that it doesn’t stand for, today. And, the spirit of the Americans alive in this generation are actively manifesting that change I’m talking about. 

So let’s continue.

What do we do about the 62 million babies who have been legally ripped out of their mother’s wombs since 1973?

It’s genocide just as real as the one American soldiers sacrificed their lives and limbs to stop in Europe during WWII!

Plus, even after it was proven that government-funded Planned Parenthood was trafficking in human body parts, literally selling the babies they butchered, piecemeal, to the highest bidder, the American State attempted to prosecute the Center for Medical Progress on a misdemeanor (for illegally recording conversations with PP workers bragging about their butchery) instead of prosecuting the felonious murderers. 

That is unfathomable in any reasonable world! So should this make us Proud to be an American? Should I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today?

Of course, I could go on about a country that allows its mothers and daughters to fight its battles, conscripts their sons to protect the financial and political interests of big Pharma and Oil Magnates, whose courts legally disembowel the most fundamental institution in the history of humanity, marriage, and is now vigorously and emphatically pushing CRT as the new and only acceptably gospel of the State. But I’ll stop here.

This is all the stuff our forefathers warned us about. 

Remember when Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government they had given the people? He told them: “A Republic, if you can keep it!”

Well, we have essentially lost it.

When is the last time you heard a mainstream media source use the word Republic?

Democracy—mob rule; two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner—is the new de facto regime, and it has been for nearly four decades.

America, as our founders anticipated it, is dead, but like a chicken that has had it’s head cut off, we don’t realize it yet.

We just keep running around flapping our flags and spurting blind patriotism on everything in our path not understanding we are about to be fried.

Grimace at my pessimism if you have to—I don’t blame you and I really do get it—but even “The Founders themselves predicted our decline if we could not sustain our moral character.” 

In an interview with Mercatornet about his book, America on Trial, Robert Reilly reminds us of a few of their warnings:

In 1776, Samuel Adams counseled that, “The diminution of publick Virtue is usually attended with that of publick Happiness, and the publick Liberty will not long survive the total Extinction of Morals.” He advised that, “If we are universally vicious and debauched in our manners, though the form of our Constitution carries the face of the most exalted freedom, we shall in reality be the most abject of slaves.”

His cousin John Adams agreed:

“We have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net.”

Charles Carroll cautioned:

“Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure… are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.”

Reilly finally laments, “Such remonstrations from the Founders are too numerous to count. As they predicted, we are in trouble because the virtue needed to sustain the Republic is fast disappearing, close to the point of irretrievability.”

So how did we get to here, to the point of irretrievably? I think Reilly says it best when he says, “We won the American Revolution but lost the sexual revolution.” 

We would do good to sit on that for a few moments.

A revolution means something has fundamentally changed. An old regime is gone and a new one has taken its place.

Of course, the sexual revolution of the 1960s wasn’t the first sexual “revolution” in history but it is the one that actually succeeded and most significantly changed the landscape of our country.

For example, there was a sexual revolution that took place during the Victorian era (c. 1870–1910) and during this period, it is said ‘morality lost its universal appeal,’ but even then it didn’t lead to the rise of our modern permissive society.

Says Reilly again, 

Just look around you. The misuse of sex has devastated our society. Once you consciously subvert the procreative power of sex by separating sex from diapers, there is a very slippery slope—more like a cliff, actually—down to the moral pigpen where sex is simply a form of degraded entertainment. You try to grab the pleasure from the act, while denying the thing toward which the act is essentially ordered by Nature. Thus, the flood of pornography, abortion, hooking up, the dissolution of the family, single parenthood, etc. The logic of the situation makes it very easy to see where this is going next—polygamy and polyandry. Anything goes in the sexual dystopia. The American Revolution was fought for freedom; the sexual revolution was fought to enslave people to their passions.

This then begs the question, how did our nation, founded on the principles of virtuous self-government, get to a place where we have enslaved ourselves to our passions?

I whole-heartedly agree with Reilly that it was largely due to the import of German Historicism at the end of the 19^th century. He explains, “German historicism was imported by the large numbers of American students who went to Germany for higher education in the latter half of the 19th century and by German professors who came [to America] to teach.”

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, Historicism is the belief “that history, together with philosophy and the other cultural sciences, provided a world view, a system of values.” Historicism is, at its essence, relativistic, doubting religion, natural law, or science for that matter, could provide any standard of valuation. In 1924, the Hungarian Sociologist, Karl Mannheim, asserted his own optimism for the philosophy that it might serve to bring order to the chaotic state of Germany at the time. Mannheim writes,

Historicism has developed into an intellectual force of extra-ordinary significance; it epitomizes our Weltanschauung. The Historicist principle not only organizes like an invisible hand, the work of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), but also permeates everyday thinking…For in everyday life too we apply concepts with Historicist overtones, for example, “capitalism,” “social movement,” “cultural process,” etc. These forces are grasped and understood as potentialities, constantly in flux, moving from some point in time to another; already on the level of everyday reflection, we seek to determine the position of our present within a temporal framework, to tell by the cosmic clock of history what time it is.

Contra Mannheim, Reilly again asserts that Historicism stands in opposition to the thinking of the American founders, has perverted our national values, and will ultimately lead to America’s suicide. He states, 

Historicism teaches that as historical circumstances change, so do the meanings of words, as well as of right and wrong. Everything goes with the flow. We are now in different times at a different place with different “truths.” There are no unchanging trans-historical truths rooted in the transcendent. Historicism erases the moral authority of Nature — taken as a reflection of God’s reason — of which the Declaration of Independence was an explicit expression, and replaces it with relativism. Once you get rid of Nature, as in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” there really are no standards against which to judge moral behavior or anything else. This way we can all become “authentic,” just being ourselves, according to ourselves, with no measure other than ourselves. We become trapped in narcissism and sink deeper into unreality. This is how societies commit suicide.

So here we are on our 245^th anniversary as a nation, trapped in narcissism and sinking deeper and deeper into unreality. Here we are 245 years after our nation’s birth, leaning lethargically over a precipice in the very act of committing national suicide. 

So, please forgive me if I don’t feel as enthusiastic this year about Independence Day. I still love our country. And, I’m not giving up on America, but I feel much more optimistic about pledging my allegiance to another kingdom, an eternal, righteous kingdom. I feel more more comfortable singing, I’m proud to be a Christian and in Christ I know I’m free. How could I forget the Christ who died and gave his righteousness to me.

But, if we ever get back to the place where the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God are once again the standards by which we as a nation judge moral behavior, and if we ever get back to the place where we as a nation are not consciously separating sex from diapers, and when we as a nation are no longer decrying public virtue as evil and vicious, then I’ll gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.

There’s no doubt I love this land. But with all America has become, I’m just having a difficult time singing God bless the U.S.A.!