ABRIDGED VERSION

Slavery.  Unfortunately, not all of young America was founded on the strong Calvinist egalitarian ethic of the founding Puritan Fathers.  The Southern states had simply transmitted the older English feudal idea (rule over the multitudes by a small but very privileged landed aristocracy) to the colonies when they arrived here.  Yes, the South had fought alongside the more Calvinist New England and Middle Colonies against George's efforts to force them under his absolute rule.  But beyond that there were huge differences in the way the American North and the American South went at life. And that would soon become very problematic.

On a number of accounts Northern and Southern cultures were quite different.  But symbolically the difference eventually got boiled down to a single issue: slavery. It's not that the North suddenly decided that slavery was an absolute evil, likely to bring harsh judgment down on America by a God enraged at such treatment of fellow humans and thus in total violation of the principle of being a Light to the Nations.  It took a long time for Northerners to see slavery as such a dark, abnormal institution … because it really was not that abnormal as societies of the day were structured.  Slavery was an ancient and not uncommon social practice.

But it was embarrassing that England and France, not America, were showing the way out of this horrible treatment of fellow humans.

Nor were the Southerners so totally dedicated to the issue of slavery … not at first anyway.  Thus Washington had his slaves freed at his death (but not his wife's because he had no such property rights over her slaves).  Jefferson also saw the need to end the practice … though he got himself in such a financial mess that at his death, his slaves had to be sold rather than be freed to clear his estate of the huge debts that he had run up.

But different paths of social development, and just sensitive egos, step by step turned the slavery issue into an all-or-nothing rivalry between the two sections of the country.  America just simply was developing along two (and three if you add in the wild, wild West!) mutually hostile national lines.  And thus it came to war … horribly bloody civil war (1860s).

And where was God in this? Southern "reason" created the idea that God himself had ordained slavery, as Blacks could survive only under White governance … citing the curse upon the "Sons of Ham" as their Biblical basis for this belief.  That disregarded the entire message of the rest of the Bible, especially Jesus's gospel ministry.   But it worked sufficiently well for the Southern troops who went off to war to defend the South against "Northern aggression."

Civil War.  At the same time, the North went off to battle singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic:  "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord" … indicating that they were defending God's cause itself.

And interestingly, Lincoln in his second inaugural address (1865) devoted the entire second half of the speech explaining God's hand and his justice in the outworking of the war they had just been through.

Indeed, it seems that just as the Great Awakening of the 1700s was unleashed by God to prepare his chosen people to stand their ground against royal tyranny, the Second Great Awakening unleashed in the first half of the 1800s had been designed for the same purpose: to help Christian America be able emotionally and spiritually to do the job of ending slavery … as destructive to human life as that effort would be.   Defending the Light was never going to be easy.  But it needed to be done, no matter how big the obstacles that had to be overcome.

Another wandering … and Progressivism.  With the all-consuming issue of slavery finally resolved in 1865, America drifted off into a world of material self-preoccupation.  The industrial demands of the Civil War had changed the American socio-economic dynamic deeply … as the momentum of industrialism merely gathered strength – greatly so – during the remaining part of the 1800s and into the early 1900s.  The American industrial revolution had made some Americans very, very rich … at the same time that it drove landless young men to have to look to miserable service in the mines and manufacturing plants of those same wealthy individuals.

This simply was not acceptable in a society founded fundamentally on the Biblical basis of the equality of all Americans under God, under the law, and under any decent sense of social concern that Americans were expected to have for each other's welfare.  Consequently, by the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, a number of Americans decided to take whatever political action they could to correct this growing problem.  We call these people the "Progressivists."

Their Progressivism was not necessarily attempting to "reform" the constitutional basis of American society.  Progressivism saw itself as simply attempting adjustments in the way America's constitutional order was supposed to offer the same opportunities, rewards and duties of all of its citizens.

Of course Progressivism did intend to bring some amendments or "changes" to the U.S. Constitution itself.  Thus for instance the 19th Amendment (ratified in 1920) extended the right to vote to women as well as men.  But this was in no ways in violation of America's most fundamental social principle, the equality of all Americans.  In other words, this constitutional amendment did not change the American constitutional foundations … but merely took them a step further forward in meeting the goals of that same order.

However, the 16th and 17th Amendments (both ratified in early 1913), did constitute a rather deep altering of American society's constitutional order … though that was not recognized at the time.  The 16th Amendment gave the Washington government the right to tax American citizens directly … and the 17th Amendment took the selection of the U.S. Senators away from the state governments and gave that selection to the people themselves, thus "democratizing" the process.

This undercut greatly the intentions of the original framers of the Constitution to keep power divided and checked … so as not to let one part of the system begin to accumulate power … something that would then enable that part of the system to build up its power even more.

And it also conveyed the idea that the constitution was not quite as unchangeable as the framers tried to make it, remembering what happened to Rome once it got in the habit of constantly "reforming" its constitutional foundations.

Secular Humanism begins to challenge the Christian social-moral order.  People assumed at the time that there was something supposedly "Christian" in Progressivism. Certainly to socially sensitive Christians, what they saw taking place in their beloved country was very wrong … and needed reform – deep reform.  But ultimately, Progressivism as a social movement operated largely under its own moral logic … one that required no particular role for God himself in this matter.  Moral reasoning seemed to offer its own logic, its own rules, its own goals … without having to bring God into the picture.  Thus it was both "Christian" in identity and standards, and "Secular" or "Humanist" in actual performance.  And, by and large, that worked quite fine for most American Christians.

But as the early 20th century developed, Humanism was fast challenging Christianity quite directly as the moral foundation of American society.  Humanism claimed, in direct challenge to Christianity, that man's natural instincts were always to the good and that it was society and the way it was structured, not sinful human instinct, that was the problem.  Thus the more the people are brought directly into the nation's political dynamics, through democratic reform, the higher the society would rise.

In fact it was just such thinking that would soon lead Wilson to engage the nation in the very, very bloody struggle "to make the world safe for democracy."  While the horror of what was unleashed in this crusade for democracy ultimately shocked Wilson (and everyone else), it would not have shocked the framers of the original constitution who, on the basis of their understanding of both history and human nature itself, would not have been surprised that such a crusade ended the way it did.

Nationalism.  This points to the fact that there was yet another social dynamic developing in the "Christian West," virtually (like Humanism) a religion in itself:  Nationalism.  The spirit of nationalism was, by the second half of the 1800s and early 1900s, sweeping through the "Christian West" like a huge emotional hurricane.

Just as we saw America splitting between North and South over very distinct and ultimately opposing social identities (not just slavery, but the very different social orders defining the North and South), so in Christian Europe people were beginning to construct new and ultimately very strong personal and social identities.  And they were doing so on the basis of their particular linguistic makeup – a rising political dynamic rising from the language that the common people spoke at home.

Such linguistic affections, at least on the European continent, had never been a political issue previously … because the European ruling classes had taken on the French language to communicate with each other across the span of that continent.  On the other hand, the common people spoke all kinds of languages and dialects, mixed here and there across Europe.  And what the common people spoke had been, up until this point, of no particular concern to Europe's ruling classes.

But as the 1800s developed, political authority was being taken up step by step by the masses, the little people, the "democratic" community. And as these commoners did so, their lines of communication with each other – that is the language that they spoke locally – became a rallying point for them.  It was becoming of critical importance among increasingly self-aware political commoners in Europe to speak German, Italian, Russian, Swedish, Polish, Bulgarian, modern Greek, etc.  These linguistic legacies even got highly romanticized in story, poetry and song.

Likewise, even their Christian identities got absorbed into the national idea.  Or they just set the idea of Christianity and its importance aside … as they moved further down the nationalist road.

Thus it was that the European masses came to see their linguistic-ethnic birthright, their "nation" (from the Latin, natus meaning birth or birthright) as their all-defining, grandest, and noblest social good ... one that they were not only willing to devote their lives in service to, but even die for in its promotion and defense.

National imperialism.  But this growing nationalist urge was going to bump one such growing social group against other similar groups around it:  French against German, against Russian, against Turkish, against Italian, against English, etc. … especially when it came to the rising game of imperialism.  Great national glory was sought in the competition to grab and control territory abroad, first in Asia, then in Africa.

But this was a game that left the latecomer Germany far behind in the competition for overseas empire (England and France got off to an earlier start in this game).  Consequently, Germany was very aggressive in the face of that national-imperial shortcoming.

Soon, just like the American Civil War, social "reason" had become white hot in its sense of offense in the growing competition involved in this international political game.  Troubles thus began to brew.

The "Great War" (World War One).  Finally in 1914 tempers exploded as Austro-Hungarians took on the Serbs, the Russians came to the aid of the Serbs, the Germans came to the aid of the Austro-Hungarians, the French came to the aid of the Russians, the British came to the aid of the French and Russians, and the Turks got pulled into the conflict on the side of the Germans.  It was now one group of nations against another group of nations … the goal being simply to kill as many of the national enemy as possible … in order to achieve glorious victory in this contest.

Then most amazingly, after several years of pointless slaughter in the trenches of Europe, President Wilson sent American soldiers to Europe in 1917 to join the action … to kill Germans – as many Germans as possible – because they were not as sufficiently "democratic" as the democracies Britain and France (actually far from true) … and now because of developments in Russia, that country as well (again, far, far from the truth).

And even though thousands of young Americans would die in the process, Wilson claimed that this would bring glory to America as the savior of democracy.  America's (imperialist) mission in the world was now to "make the world safe for democracy."

And where did God stand in this great Wilsonian "democratic" crusade?  Nowhere.  God was not consulted as to whether or not this was the role he wanted to see his covenant people take up.  And that was because Wilson, actually a pastor's son, had no particular interest in such a matter.  Wilson was undertaking this grand crusade for democracy because it stood supposedly on its own moral merits. Really?  Killing all those Germans … whose Berlin government was no less democratic than England's London government?  The man was delusional.

Needless to say, this wandering off on a new national course ended up in total disaster … for everyone involved, including Wilson himself.

The price of such a moral mistake was ultimately incalculable.

World War Two. Americans were pursuing no such ideological ideal in taking up the fight with Japan and Germany, twenty years later in the early-mid 1940s.  Americans simply found themselves at war – a very nasty war – because Japan and Germany believed that "democratic" America was a much-weakened society … and that they could bomb and attack America and force it under their control.

Americans, united strongly because of the rigors of the 1930s Depression and ready to sacrifice greatly to defend their nation, fought back … ultimately defeating the Germans and Japanese.

Truman – and America – going at post-war things the right way.  Then after having defeated both countries in 1945, rather than trying to bring down German and Japanese society in vengeful humiliation, America – under Truman's leadership – did everything possible to help these former enemies rebuild … rebuild as the Germans and Japanese themselves understood how they needed to do so.  This was Christianity in action … through such programs as the Marshall Plan.  True, America set some larger boundaries for both Germany and Japan (to make sure that they did not return to their former aggressive ways).  But mostly America just showed them an amazing amount of support. And former enemies became close national friends as a result.

America was able to approach matters this way because, under Truman's moral leadership, America chose to go at matters Christ's way, showing forgiveness – not vindictive "justice." In this way America demonstrated to Germany and Japan (and the world) the importance of going at life in a spirit of authentic love and peace (such as Lincoln intended to pursue at the end of the Civil War) that comes from a full reliance on God and his judgments, not man's self-serving judgments. This was a case of bringing to a former enemy God's peace … or Shalom, as the Jews call it. Indeed, Truman was not interested in enforcing the kind of heavy-handed "peace" that social justice crusaders (such as the post-Civil-War Radicals) typically like to impose on others.

This was Christian peace, the kind that permits a high degree of tolerance of our social differences – differences which in Christ we can easily learn to live above.  In fact, in Christ, we not only tolerate each other … we respect each other.  Thus most importantly, this was America serving God as his City on a Hill, his Light to the Nations.  And how was it exactly that the Americans themselves were able to follow Truman … and overcome their own personal hurts brought on by the war?  It came from the same revived Christian spirit that Americans had quietly turned to during the dark days of the Depression … when very little that man could do was helping the situation much (Roosevelt's New Deal had run out of steam by 1937).

No Great Awakening had taken place to bring this Christian moral-spiritual revival about.  It's just that members of this particular generation of Americans (quite properly referred to as the "Greatest Generation") found themselves personally and privately much more serious in spirit in the way they now went at things (including Roosevelt … during the days leading up to and during that horrible war).  They remembered that God was expecting bigger things of America – and always had done so – and they were now very willing to work with that.

Indeed, at this point – during the Cold War 1950s – when America was the primary defender of Western Civilization, Americans were great church-goers … very aware of America's place of greatness "under God" and him alone.  And that understanding reached strongly from the streets of America all the way up to Eisenhower's White House.

The battle for equality.  But there was a quite dark side to this American picture: the treatment of Southern Blacks … which had improved absolutely not a bit over the previous century.  And there to challenge America on this matter was Christian pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  He was a powerful voice in getting America to pay attention to the way Southern Blacks were excluded from the American political process.  He and his followers marched … and marched – ultimately all the way to the nation's capital in 1963.  He occupied no governmental position … but became an outstanding national leader – because he was recognized (certainly in the North at least) as representing the very best of what America stood for.

All King was asking for was the right of Blacks to live as equals in our American world. His goal was not to cripple the White community … only make sure that Blacks had the same rights as the Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the Greeks, etc. had once received to make their way upward, economically and socially into that "White" world. Fair enough.

But … welfare dependency.  However, President Johnson, with his new Great Society Program, went further – much further – in seeing that it was the government's job to create special socio-economic opportunities for the Blacks, by backing strongly the idea of state welfare and affirmative action for Blacks.  That sounded like a good idea … if you didn't look too closely at the social impact that this was bound to have.

First of all, just like the societies of Central America – where the people have always expected those that ruled over them to provide the economic payoff that society is supposed to offer – such a program ends up creating not the old American idea of personal initiative (self-government "from below") but instead the condition of what Latin American analysts term la dependencia … or the social situation in which the people are able to do very little on their own behalf, having become completely dependent on government welfare (elite-directed government "from above") ... actually a social-moral leftover from the earlier days of Spanish feudal society and government.

But this condition of heavy dependency on the generosity of the ruling state and its particular governmental agents encourages very little by way of the development of real economic assets (Central America is not known for its productivity).  Actual economic dynamics under those conditions function largely in the form of a governmental redistribution of any assets still located within society.  Assets of course quickly dry up when there is so little incentive to be productive … when the government takes the assets that entrepreneurs produce (or simply taxes them to the point where there is little payoff resulting from a person's investment of time and effort in a particular enterprise) … in order to reward others.  It's called "socialism."  And it doesn't work well for a society over the long run.

The tragic consequences were that this extensive governmental social intervention promoted by Johnson as the key feature of his "Great Society" program, became something of the American political fashion of the times ... at least for the Democratic Party. But tragically it worked in such a way that it helped break up the strong Black family … when "welfare" meant social payoff to unwed mothers … as long as no supporting male was found to be present and available to provide that support.

What this "welfare incentive" did to the Black male, and what that did to the Black family, was tragic.  The Black family (or for that matter, any family) was the one institution that had long helped people forward in life … providing children a critical amount of greatly-needed personal training and social wisdom – so a rising generation would be able to take on life's many challenges with some degree of success.  And now that very key institution of the family was being cut to pieces.

This was not just a matter of economics.  Multitudes of young Black males were now expected to grow up without the guidance of a father ... to teach them the rules of the game of life, its goals, its boundaries, its disciplines, its wisest expectations.  And young Black females were being raised without much knowledge of what to expect from proper male behavior, having had no loving fatherly example and thus no standard to make the best choices in building their own lives.

The welfare state offered no such personal counsel.  And the public schools were not well equipped to fill in the moral-spiritual void either.  Thus the "welfare state" produced a personal and thus also social tragedy of the worst kind.  Consequently, crime rates within Black communities rose to horrible heights … and the prisons filled up accordingly.

"Category thinking" (nationalism, tribalism, racism, sexism, etc.)  Secondly, a "revolution of rising expectations" took over as a very strong social force within the Black community, especially among the youth.  When economic and social expectations were not being met as quickly as had been expected, anger at the larger society became the end result.

And into this dynamic stepped the Black Panthers.  Unlike King, who sought to integrate the Blacks into the White world and its ways, the Black Panthers chose the path of separation from that larger American world … offering in place of integration a very militant anti-White racism as the emotional-spiritual path that they wanted to see the Black community take up.

This only made the situation even more disastrous for everyone involved … as is always the case with "category" thinking, whether nationalism, tribalism, sectarianism, classism, racism, sexism or any other "ism" that sets one group of people against another group of people.

As a Light to the Nations, God's expectation was that America would model compassion and love … rather than nasty infighting.  And the militant effort by one group to dominate another was definitely not supposed to be part of the program. God wanted unity within his Covenant Society.

But that seemingly was not going to happen … not by human design anyway.  Once again, similar to the agonizing years of the early-mid 1800s, social-ideological battle lines were beginning to be drawn up by the end of the 1960s.

The fundamentals of a growing dispute.  A big part of what made America so chaotic, as it left behind it the comparative serenity of the 1950s to enter the confusion and even violence of the 1960s, was a result of the way that the American worldview built strongly on Christian ideals and understanding was coming under very serious challenge from the world of Secular Humanism.

America's obvious grand success itself at that point had raised all kinds of debate, not only over the question of what it was that had brought the country to such stature as a global superpower … but now at this point how it was supposed to move forward socially, culturally, spiritually ... to take on some of the remaining social challenges the nation still faced.

The critical issue under debate was the question of whether it was solely human effort or whether it was Divine guidance that brought this success about.  And depending on the answer to that question, it raised the next question: what then were the next steps that America should be taking to protect, preserve and then advance America's very successful place in the world's scheme of things.  Whose chief responsibility for setting the direction and pace of America's continuing development was it: man or God?

The Supreme Court gets involved.  In a very important way, the U.S. Supreme Court took the first steps to resolve the debate.  Their main political agent to get the ball rolling was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose idea of civil liberty was to "free" Americans from the superstition of Christianity … gaining fame as just such a civil libertarian association all the way back to the 1920s when this organization supported the Darwinist worldview in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial.

Thus at first the ACLU got the Supreme Court to forbid prayer in the schooling of America's youth (1962).  Then with success in this enterprise, the organization moved to the matter of the Bible as America's primary moral foundation … getting the Supreme Court also to forbid the reading of the Bible as part of the shaping of the morals of America's youth (1963).  In both cases ACLU lawyers put forward the idea that these activities, prayer and Bible reading, violated the very terms of the First Amendment … and had no proper place in the public life of America.  And the Supreme Court justices were ideologically inclined to agree with them.

This was the first seriously successful step of the Humanists in their ongoing effort to replace Christian social foundations with the social foundations of Humanism.

And tragically, no one was able to block, or even slow up this development … as the fundamental order had no way of knowing what to do when the justices of the Supreme Court, that were supposed to be refereeing the game of national politics, decided to become themselves key players in the nation's political games … and players with no known restraints on their behavior once they got things going their way.

Thus in this same process, the Supreme Court, not Congress, was making itself the supreme source of America's fundamental laws, the constitutional order itself, on which American society was supposed to rest.  And still, to this day, no one knows how to bring the Supreme Court under restraint. Appointing "originalists" supposedly dedicated to moving the Court back to the position intended for it by the designers of the original Constitution is supposed to help in this regard.  But so much judicial power is very seductive even to those with the best of intentions … and thus it is very hard to stay a true "originalist" over the longer lifetime appointment of a Supreme Court justice.

A mechanical versus a mystical universe.  What was actually happening was the ACLU and Secular Humanists like them were attempting to do the same thing the 1930s Humanists had tried to do with their Humanist Manifesto: bring down the Christian worldview as fundamental in American life.  They intended to replace it with a much more "enlightened" Secular worldview … meaning the fundamental understanding that the world does not operate mystically – by the hand of some unseen god – but instead, mechanically. "Mystically" was a dynamic that clearly fell well beyond automatic (or mechanical) human control. "Mechanically" was not.  "Mechanically" invited human control. And by "mechanically," Secularists meant not only the physical world, not only the biological world, but also the social world of man as well.  Using human reason or "science" – not some appeal to a non-existent god – a proper mechanical process directed by those knowledgeable in such social science would take America all the way to a state of true Utopia.

Following out their materialist or mechanistic worldview, American intellectuals were increasingly determined to head down this road of Human Enlightenment, certain that with the "scientific" guidance they could offer society, America would continue to progress even further as a "Great Society."  And as the 1960s developed, this secular-scientific attitude took over not only the Supreme Court, it took over the Johnson White House.  And even more strangely, it took over much of the highly educated leadership of America's major denominations.  A general feeling was coming over America that the nation needed to be led by those of well-developed or "educated" reason, not by the untested personal faith and understanding of the American commoners (the group that Hillary Clinton would one day term as the "deplorables").

Humanists versus Darwinists.  However … a major problem that existed within this rising Secularist social camp was that they could not agree on exactly how human nature itself was to provide the necessary dynamic for such utopian progress.

The Humanists among them were quite Rousseauian in believing that man, freed from all existent social restraints (in other words, in undertaking deep social revolution overthrowing the "outdated" patterns of the past) would automatically, by man's very human nature, now come to utopian social greatness.  In short they wanted to go at life the same way the French once did under Robespierre, the Americans themselves had done under Wilson, the Russians had done under Lenin and Stalin, and the Chinese were at that time doing under Mao.  Tear the system down … and then watch the beauty of what consequently emerges most naturally.

It's amazing how the Humanists never gave up … despite all the historical examples that demonstrated very clearly that it is not the Bible that does not get things right, with its idea of "original sin" and the need for man to put himself under Divine guidance before he destroys himself and everything around him.  The Humanists, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, remained unfailingly willing to bring down everything around themselves … with the unyielding belief that utopia, not chaos, would then automatically (mechanically) result.

Then there were the Secular Darwinists, who took a very different view of human nature … seeing that life moved forward mechanically on the basis of the more powerful players in life taking control over the process … even if it meant having to knock the weaker players out of the game to bring that game to success.

Thus while the Humanists were all about natural human harmony as the driving force in life, the Darwinists were all about natural human dominance as the driving force in life.  Both were Secularists … both were actually allies in the effort to depose the Christian worldview ... but they were also very, very different in how they intended to take things after having eliminated the Christian worldview.

Basically what was happening in the 1960s was that the Humanists were taking the lead in bringing Christianity down … but the Darwinists, not the Humanists, were moving into the moral vacuum thus created in order to take over what happened next.

Observing "Watergate."  Of course I was as interested in American domestic politics as I was in matters of foreign diplomacy – and like the rest of America, found myself following the Watergate scandal focused on the Nixon presidency.  Very interestingly, my old friend Courtney had worked for Nixon as legal liaison between the Department of Defense and the White House, but had decided to come away from the D.C. political scene just prior to the 1972 election campaign.  By doing so he avoided getting caught up himself in that scandal!  Anyway, knowing Washington politics first-hand, I realized that I was looking at political interest rather than national law as being at the heart of the matter.  Nixon's huge electoral win in November of 1972 (based in part not only on his successful removal of American ground troops from Johnson's disaster in Vietnam but also his relaxing of Cold War tensions with his diplomatic openings to China and Russia) had stung the Democratic Party greatly. Nonetheless despite the huge loss in the presidential election, they still commanded a large majority in both houses of Congress.  Therefore I knew that Nixon would still have a hard time dealing with Congress.  I just had no idea of how much that would be the case!

What bothered me most was the way that the Democrats and the increasingly Liberal press corps were determined to connect the scandal of the Watergate break-in by zealous campaign workers (as I knew well campaign workers to be) by discovering a trail of evidence (or just speculative but fully newsworthy possibilities) that might potentially (and hopefully) lead all the way to the White House.  What was particularly frightening to me was the readiness of Congress and the press to use the frightful impeachment process to finally get rid of their "enemy in the White House."  The hypocrisy of "Chappaquiddick Ted" Kennedy (who had avoided all moral accountability in his involvement in the tragic death of a young political intern) leading this attack on Nixon from behind the scenes gave me the shivers.  I was well aware of how seedy Washington politics could get. But how Congress was going at the Watergate matter seemed to me to be very scary, with Congress's self-justified willingness to use the impeachment process as a fully partisan weapon in the Washington political playbook.

Impeachment was intended only to be used in the most horrible case of presidential misbehavior, something bordering on dictatorship or treason.  Congress had used this tool once before in an attempt to get rid of the man who replaced Lincoln as president when Lincoln was assassinated – and when his Vice-President (but now President) Johnson attempted simply to move the country on past the war and its material and spiritual ravages through the same process of "forgiveness," exactly as Lincoln himself had planned to do.

But Radicals dominating the post-Civil-War Congress wanted revenge, not forgiveness.  And the country thus would pay a huge price in failing to get the country (North and South) back together on a healthy basis.  And most tragically, Congress's crippling of Johnson's political leadership and throwing out the policy of forgiveness succeeded merely in stirring ever-deeper desire of Southern Whites for their own revenge against their hapless Black neighbors (whom these Northern agents of revenge soon abandoned anyway).

All of this was directed by a spirit of revenge, not reconciliation.  And that was exactly what I was feeling was coming out of Washington, now a full century later, with Congress's Watergate hearings.  This was not good.

Worse, I was deeply grieved by the move of Congress to undercut the powers of the "imperialist" White House by not only taking away a long-standing presidential power to curb out-of-control Congressional "pork-barrel" spending – but also by Congress's move to cut off not only further military support but also all financial support of the pro-American regime in South Vietnam.  Congress so badly wanted to undercut Nixon's considerable diplomatic achievement of bringing the Southeast Asian situation to a fairly favorable conclusion – favorable to America certainly ... and to all those young Americans who had already sacrificed so much to support a pro-American Saigon government.

Congress simply did not care what horrible chaos would result for the Vietnamese people themselves with their move to undercut the power structure that Nixon was trying to hold in place.  And worse, by doing so, Congress would also bring on even more horrifying chaos next door in Cambodia, where the murder of a million (or more) Cambodians by Khmer Rouge Marxist or Maoist "idealists" was made possible by this Congressional undercutting of the American-based political status quo that Nixon had been trying to maintain in that part of the world.

Tragically, it was so important to Congress (and the press) to "get Nixon" that nothing else seemed to matter.  Millions of people would lose their lives because of nothing more than personal political ambitions on the part of Americans in high places.

All of this made my natural cynicism as a political Realist even deeper and darker.

The advance against the Christian worldview continues. With America's original social-cultural-spiritual standards being brought down everywhere, this left open the contest for a replacement for those standards.  It was easy enough for the Humanists who had taken up the cause to "change" America. All they had to do was to oppose everything that had gone before.  But as to what was supposed to replace it, they had no clear idea on what to go with.  Supposedly mere human instinct would suffice. So … tear things down.  And let the "natural" arise in its place.

By 1973 the ACLU had moved the Supreme Court to put purely Secular standards in place of Biblical standards as the measure of what could and what could not be taught in the actual content of American education.

And what exactly were those Secular standards?  That remained to be seen … as America moved down the path of setting aside one after another of the Christian social standards that America previously long lived by.  Men had to step away from their traditional (actually rather universal) position as social leaders.  Sexuality was no longer focused on the uniting and building of American families … but was simply a matter of "free" pleasure – any way you wanted it.  Abortion was now widely available when such sexual behavior produced results (not surprisingly) that were not taken into consideration at the time of the pleasant activity.  And the state was increasingly putting itself in place of the family as the shaper of American society and culture … starting with the Black community.

Humanists were "freeing" America from all social restraints.  The only social practice they forbade was the attempt to continue to live by Christian standards.

And Christianity itself was clearly on the social decline … as the old American denominations (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, etc.) had begun a decline in membership since the mid-1960s, a decline that seemingly was not ever to be reversed.  With their own leadership tending to have rather Humanist tendencies themselves, these long-standing religious communities just did not know how to answer the social-moral-spiritual challenges placed before them.

When Reagan took over the presidency in 1981, he attempted to swing things back to the former ways in introducing – not once but twice (1984 and 1985) – a constitutional amendment allowing prayer in public institutions, including most importantly, public schools.  But despite polls that showed that 80% of Americans supported his amendment effort (but tragically, denominational leaders once again did not), he could not get Congress to come up with the 2/3rds vote needed to get things moving.

Then in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that the teaching that the universe was directed by the powers of a Creator rather than by the Darwinian evolutionary process was unconstitutional … because such "creationism" was religion rather than science (like Darwinism is supposed to be) … and anything religious was forbidden as content in American public education.  This was so ... because the Supreme Court said so.

More "Political Realism."  I watched in deep concern as President Bush (Jr.) decided to take his quest for justice against the al-Qaeda perpetrators and expand it as a new "Bush Doctrine," announcing how he intended to take down all supporters of such Islamic terrorist instincts, such as the Taliban, an extremely radical Muslim organization that had just terrorized Afghanistan into submission – and had offered their country as training territory for such terrorist organizations as al-Qaeda.

I was quite aware, however, that this huge expansion of our foreign policy goals would engage us in something much more than just dealing with the criminals of 9/11.  It would throw us into a cultural-moral quicksand of Afghanistan, something that potentially had all of the same features as our involvement in Vietnam.

I knew the Muslim world quite well (including Afghanistan itself personally).  For instance, although outrage was what registered with me (and virtually everyone else in the "Westernized" world) over 9/11, I was hardly surprised in seeing so much of the Muslim world actually cheering over the "success" of the al-Qaeda terrorists' actions.  I understood that almost every key "democratic" cultural value America stood for or symbolized (especially its emphasis on personal freedom for all), Islam stood adamantly opposed to.  Islam sees submission – from women and children all the way up to tribal leaders and kings – as what Allah required of the faithful ... not the "do your own thing" that America seems to represent as the ideal the world should live by.

I was quite aware that America was not likely to make much of an advance in Afghanistan (or even the rest of the Muslim world) trying to eradicate the Islamic mentality that saw heroism and divine reward in taking down the evil that America naturally represented in the thinking of the typical Muslim.

In any case, what Bush was proposing to do in the Middle East would easily pit us against most of the Muslim world – and merely strengthen the view of America by the growing Muslim world as indeed the "Great Satan."  Our former ally Pakistan was already pulling away from us.  And our NATO ally Turkey was beginning to show similar tendencies.

And Afghanistan was well known as the cemetery where proud Empires found their demise – Soviet Russia being the most recent example, an event that just took place right before the eyes of every living American adult.  What Bush was about to put America through in Afghanistan was destined only to end in a very expensive "nothingness" – just as it had for the Soviets.

Then to add further folly on top of Bush's Afghanistan folly, Bush got it in his head that he was called on (by God?) also to bring down Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.  What possessed him to add Iraq to American difficulties in the Middle East I could not fathom.  Saddam was a bastion of secularism – something of a resisting force against expansive Islam.  We had actually backed him extensively in his war against militantly Islamic Iran (Saddam's Iraq being the third largest recipient of American foreign aid at the time) and he had absolutely nothing to do with the events of 9/11.  But as time progressed, it became increasingly clear that Bush was totally intent on bring Saddam down, even when most of our natural allies backed away from us on this matter.  Bush thrashed around for excuses for attacking Iraq, and failed to come up with any convincing reasons – but went ahead anyway and ordered the destruction of the Saddam regime in Iraq.

What was Bush and his cabinet thinking?  Iraq was a multicultural collection of religious and ethnic groups that historically disliked each other intensely.  This mess of a society that Britain had thrown together several generations earlier – solely to benefit British oil interests in the region – was held together only by the dictatorial hand of Saddam.  If we took him out, we would have a huge mess to deal with in Iraq.  And "fixing" Iraq would end up being a task that would bring us no rewards in the Middle East even if we should, by some miracle, succeed.  In the end it would also worsen further our rapidly mounting national debt.  This was clearly a lose-lose endeavor.  What was the man thinking?

And Cheney...it was he who answered the press some years earlier in explaining why Bush Sr., for whom he served as Secretary of Defense at the time of the Gulf War, had not gone into Iraq in pursuit of Saddam Hussein.  As he himself put things, it would not have been worth the price that it would have cost America to undertake to collapse and then have to rebuild Iraq.   In fact, it would amount to falling into a "quagmire," (his term).  So obviously Cheney understood quite well the deal at one time.  Why had he changed his tune?  Nothing had changed in the Iraqi dynamic.  Was it just to please the younger Bush?  If so, that would have amounted to a horrible betrayal of all political integrity.

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005).  Then in 2005, a school district in Pennsylvania made the critical error of inviting (a three-paragraph statement read at the beginning of the school year) its students merely to look beyond Darwinism and – on their own – check out the idea of "intelligent design."

The federal judge in the matter slapped a $1 million fine on the school district as a warning to all … to not ever again attempt such a brazen effort to widen the worldview beyond the Secular boundaries established by the Supreme Court.  In short, the federal courts made it very clear that the Christian worldview was over as a national idea.

America's economic "meltdown."  Bush had encouraged a grand "stimulation" of the American economy, in part through a lifting of some of the federal restrictions designed to block very risky banking practices, restrictions that reached back to the New Deal days of the early 1930s, restrictions which had put some necessary boundaries on economic activities, ones designed to avoid the development of another financial bubble, the kind that burst in 1929 and sent the country spinning into a deep and ongoing economic crisis of the 1930s Great Depression.

And now here we were, years later, believing that we no longer needed such refereeing of the financial game.  Without that refereeing however, we had put ourselves in another unsustainable bubble.  And the bubble finally burst ... starting with the home-mortgage banking system, with banks foolishly offering "subprime mortgages" to customers truly unable to meet the repayment requirements in paying off their bank loans – loans undertaken to purchase houses they truly could not afford.  And the banks knew that – but greedily wanted to increase their "assets" (money owed by people to a bank are considered the bank's "assets") in the race to be the biggest bank around.  The bubble finally burst as builders overbuilt homes in the frenzy of home-buying (supposedly people purchasing houses they could not afford before the price of housing reached even higher).  But now, new houses were beginning to sit there unsold.  So the builders had to start lowering their prices in order to find buyers.  Quickly this turned into a massive drop in the value of the American real estate market, causing financial panic as people found themselves holding financial obligations (mortgages) that were pricier than the rapidly declining market value of their homes.  Soon banks were ending up with homes that had been abandoned by the financially desperate homeowners.  Here also, no one was in a hurry to buy these homes from the banks, even when offered at much lower prices (tragically, lower than the amounts that banks themselves had originally invested in them in the form of those subprime mortgages offered to questionably qualified customers).

Now the banks began to fall into deep distress.  This in turn distressed greatly the country's stock markets and soon the major investment banks, insurance companies, and finally even manufacturers – such as General Motors and Chrysler, when hard hit consumers decided to hold off buying a new car.  Massive bankruptcy threatened the world of American capitalism.

Now Bush and the Republicans (who dominated Congress) had to come to the rescue of these huge corporations as they faced bankruptcy ... something the Republicans found extremely distasteful.  Billions of dollars would have to be issued by the government (and ultimately the American taxpayer) to rescue these "troubled assets."  Thus it was that the American financial picture looked completely depressing as Bush left office in January of 2009.

Obama takes command (2009).  For the Republicans, having been the party in power, the 2008 national elections were a grand disaster, both presidentially and congressionally.  A long-term Republican public servant and war hero, McCain, was easily defeated by a young man with virtually no serious public leadership experience and his only claim to fame being that he was a "minority" American – supposedly more in tune with the "hurt" Americans who were feeling very unhappy about things.

Obama offered the country "change."  And everybody certainly at this point wanted change.  But they probably had no idea that the "change" Obama had in mind was more than just economic recovery.  For very personal reasons of his own, he did not like the social structure of America such as he found it (and as it had been for centuries) and wanted it changed – changed deeply.

Having worked closely with the Black community, I understood well what it was that he had in mind.  Besides, he was a Democrat, and Democrats always loved to put into play social "improvements" ("Progressives" they termed themselves) dreamed up by social designers.  Obama fit that category perfectly.

Some of the larger world also recognized that same characteristic in the one now entering the White House, and in February of 2009, before Obama had been American president even for a month, the very Liberal Nobel committee of Norway decided to nominate Obama as the one to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later that year.  But he hadn't done a single thing yet!  Of course not.  It is not what he had done, but what it was what they expected that he would do that mattered.  He was the perfect candidate for their kind of "peace and social justice" action, a candidate certain to try to take the country down the road that they themselves found so dear.  And in this they were quite insightful.

I was worried, because I knew who exactly would end up being the "enemies" he would be wanting to take on in this battle he was planning to wage in order to bring about deep "change" in America.

All this was quickly confirmed in his two Supreme Court appointments, two unmarried women who would soon be passing judgment as to whether or not the idea of the all-important American family (the very foundation of America's strong grass-roots democracy) would follow the lines it always had, or whether "progressive change" would be brought to that matter as well.  In fact, in a mere five-to-four Supreme Court decision (including those two women in that tiny majority) the law formerly passed by a large majority of Congress and signed into law by the U.S. president making marriage strictly a matter between a man and a woman, was now set aside by the verdict of the Supreme Court.

Such traditional structuring was no longer considered vital in this supposedly very "free" social-cultural world.  This version of "freedom" that rising generations of younger Americans had been taught to love above all else was a "freedom" set against all of America's old social norms, ones that had brought America forward to great social strength, but ones which now they were taught to despise as "non-progressive" – even illegal, or at least "unconstitutional."

And as for the Supreme Court itself, it was another affirmation that America had fallen into the hands of unelected, irremovable "enlightened" government officials, ones posing as the protectors of a "democracy" in which the common people no longer had a say in the way their own society was to be shaped or directed.  The Supreme Court had forbidden their religious foundations (Biblical, prayerful Christianity) to be passed on in the schooling of new generations of post-"Vet" (post World War Two Veteran) Americans: the Boomers, Gen-Xers and more recently the Millennials. And now America's middle-class marriage had also been dismissed by the Supreme Court as being no longer important to America's health and strength ... all of this strictly in accordance with the ideological loyalties of the nine lawyers in black robes (or at least five of them anyway) sitting on the Supreme Court bench.  Wow!  What happened to democracy (government by the people themselves)?

Having studied social history so long, and so broadly – pretty much across the entire span of the various human cultures of the world, past as well as present – I was well aware of how this was going to play out in the long run ... or more particularly, how it was going to impact American society.  I also had already spent years working among struggling Black communities, where the once-strong family system – one that protected and sustained Black life during its hardest days – had more recently been undercut by the welfare programs offered to single Black mothers by political "progressives," programs that left multitudes of Black men socially powerless – and the Black world in a state of political dependency on governmental offerings ("Socialism"), thus generally unable by its own power to lift itself out of its social calamity.  And I knew also what else was coming in the political world: a turning up of the volume in blaming Whites for such Black troubles.  But I also knew that this was not likely to improve the situation for anyone, any more than it ever had.

So it was that I anticipated a new social "orthodoxy" that was going to be put in place by our new president and his "progressive" supporters.  I had a pretty good idea that it was simply going to reopen old social wounds – and in the end benefit no one in particular.  But symbols (as they always have) would prove to be satisfying emotional blankets thrown over the complexities of hard Reality, so I also knew how all of this was going to take shape as "political correctness," the kind that warmed human hearts (or conversely, in their misdirected simplicity, made those hearts angry enough to burn down whole neighborhoods) ... without providing any true social progress – material or spiritual.

The "Arab Spring" of 2011 – and the American response.  In the meantime, part of my political-social focus switched to the Middle East where I saw massive social explosion spread widely across the region. Youthful discontent was shaking the foundations of these societies. This upheaval began in Tunisia, growing out of a protest movement in reaction to the country's rising unemployment. Street protests eventually resulted in the departure of Tunisia's long-ruling president Ben Ali.

But this event and its "successful" result would inspire – and thus spread – such political action (the "revolution of rising expectations") to other Arab countries around the Middle East.  It seemed in early 2011 that young people were taking to the streets everywhere in the Arab world, in protest against social-economic conditions in their countries.

Actually, young people elsewhere seemed to want to get into the action and such youthful rebelliousness spread to other places such as Athens, Tokyo, Rome, London ... and even Wall Street in New York City! In Egypt, the rebellion dragged on as the young took over Tahrir Square in Cairo, bringing about the arrest of long-time Egyptian President Mubarak.  But even with his arrest the protests continued all the same.  In the meanwhile, the rebellion had also been taken up in Syria – as the pro-Assad and anti-Assad groups come out violently against each other (Syria is a very complex mixture of all sorts of sectarian groups, held together only by the firm hand of President Assad).  Something of a similar nature also came to Libya, where the pro-Gaddafi and anti-Gaddafi groups came out against each other, turning the country (like Syria) into something that was more a civil war than simply a "democratic" protest movement.

I was hoping (praying even) that Obama would not try to make himself the Savior of Democracy amidst all this turmoil – a rather typical approach that American leaders have repeatedly undertaken in response to international situations that they personally had absolutely no understanding of the dynamics involved – from President Woodrow Wilson, down to Lyndon Johnson, briefly Jimmy Carter (before we wised up and backed away from this tendency – although a bit too late for Iran's Shah), and Bush, Jr.

Actually, with respect to Libya, Obama proceeded somewhat cautiously, merely offering American air support for Europe's (in particular France's) intervention on the anti-Gaddafi side of the Libyan civil war – a disaster-waiting-to-happen for the West nonetheless.  Even my son Paul, off in Germany and Italy for the semester, while in Europe put together a study paper on the Libyan situation, recognizing the perils of getting involved in a Libyan civil war.  If my son Paul could figure this out, why could the leaders of NATO not do so?

Tragically, America itself would pay a big price for having helped sponsor this Libyan political disaster, when the next year the American ambassador to Libya and several other American officials were killed as a result of actions of Muslim radicals inspired by this breakdown of Libya's political order.

With respect to Syria, Obama's response turned out to be a major embarrassment to America and its president.  Obama threatened Assad, announcing most boldly that if Assad used weapons (chemical and biological) illegal under the rules of international law, Assad would be crossing a "Red Line" that Obama would ..., would ..., would ...  Actually Obama never explained what it exactly was that he would do.  And when Assad proceeded to use just such weapons to force rebellious provinces back under his authority, Obama ultimately did nothing – because he had failed to put America in a position to do anything constructive in Syria in the first place.

It then became even more embarrassing for Obama when Russian President Putin offered to come to America's "assistance" by stepping into the situation in order to bring Assad under some kind of reasonable control.  Actually what Putin ended up doing was making Russia very helpful in providing Assad much needed assistance in his effort to bring Syria back under his control.  And as for America, all the "or else" talk of Obama merely drove Assad away from America – and into Putin's arms.

At the same time, Obama began to direct aid in vital military supplies to one of the Syrian rebel groups, thus ensuring that the civil war in Syria would grow deeper and bloodier.  Soon thousands – then even millions – of Syrians began to flee to refugee camps outside of Syria, even flooding Europe (Germany alone took in millions of Syrian refugees driven to Europe to escape the ongoing carnage.)  And poor Turkey next door became swamped by Syrian (and Iraqi) refugees.

Into this mess stepped a group of Sunnis (Assad and his Alawi supporters were Shi'ites – the Sunnis' natural enemies) to set up a "Caliphate" (an "Islamic State" under Islam's ultimate ruler, the Caliph or "Successor" to Muhammad) in war-ravaged northeastern Syria ... reaching also into northwestern Iraq.  (Yes, sadly the civil war started with the dumping of Saddam was still going on years later in northwestern Iraq.) All this simply deepened the problems for Syria ... and much of the rest of the world.

A rising China.  Meanwhile, off on the other side of the globe, a China coming under the tightening grip of the country's president, Xi Jinping, was moving boldly to challenge the American-defended high-sea rights of the South China Sea.  Xi claimed that the sea was not in fact international high-seas but instead was very much a part of Chinese territory.  But this "Chinese" territory that he defined, literally ran right up to the shores of the other nations that bordered on the Sea, or depended on it for their economic livelihood: Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei (Malaysia) – and of course Taiwan, whose existence as a separate nation China did not recognize anyway.

Obama made a move to demonstrate America's policing rights in the high-seas of the South China sea by sending American ships to cruise those waters.  But Xi countered with an even bolder move: to start dredging the coral reefs to the west of the Philippines in order to produce a number of islands on which Chinese air and sea power could be based.

In 2016 the Permanent Court of Arbitration located in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled that China had no right to claim the sea as Chinese territory.  But of course China dismissed the ruling.  China is interested in real power, not legal ideas.  Thus it was that they had built up those islands as military positions from which to enforce their claim to territorial ownership.

Oh, how I was praying that Obama would order an American dredging and island-building of a similar nature in the same region, maybe only 50 miles distant from the Chinese bases, as a way of enforcing the high-sea rights of the other nations needing to pass that way to trade with much of the rest of the world.  Their economies depended on that in order for the South China Sea not to become "Chinese territory."

But ultimately, Obama did no such thing.  Employing real power was just not his thing.  He liked ideas better than action. In this, he reminded me a great deal of Thomas Jefferson (I was never a big Jefferson fan!).

The Federal Courts continue their assault on Christianity. Obama did not intend in any particular way to be anti-Christian in the deep "change" he wanted to put America through.  But inevitably his "change" by necessity found itself undercutting the last of the key social institutions supporting Christian America: the traditional American family.

He had to have known full well what would happen in appointing two particular individuals to the Supreme Court in 2009 and 2010 … especially in any certain challenge to the place that the traditional American family still held as the foundation of American society ... the last holdout against a total takeover by state authorities of American society, culture and even spiritual foundations.

Americans had seen that challenge coming their way … and with one of the biggest majorities ever, in 1996 Congress passed, and Clinton signed into law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  But now, in two steps to the goal (2013 and 2015) Obama's two female (also unmarried and childless) Supreme Court appointees tipped the balance in the Court's two decisions that declared DOMA to be unconstitutional ... in which five justices supported or affirmed those decisions – versus four justices opposing or dissenting in those two key decisions.

How so?  Indeed, the Court itself was highly divided (ideologically) over this matter.  At the same time, again by another 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that a California law (approved through a popular referendum) which refused to recognize the legal validity of homosexual marriages was unconstitutional.

But by this time, it was increasingly apparent that it was ideological politics, not legal principle, driving these decisions.  Indeed, the way the Court went at issues as fundamental to American society as DOMA – using its immense, virtually unlimited, power to decide such matters (and by the slimmest of majorities) – made the Supreme Court exactly that:  a solidly political institution.

This was something the original designers of the Constitution had not seen coming.  And thus they had set up a judicial court in the new Republic – with no known way to check the growth of such absolute "judicial" power within their new Republic.

Not surprising were the political battles in the Senate that occurred when it came time to approve or confirm the president's Supreme Court appointments.  That was because it was increasingly apparent that it was the Supreme Court, not Congress, that was at this point the creator and defender of America's all-defining fundamental laws and social norms.

America was ultimately not to be directed by the American people through their representatives in Congress, but by a tiny ruling elite that was accountable to no one but themselves once in power.

Tragically, this resembled much too closely the way the Roman military inserted itself as the people's savior into a dominant position in Roman political affairs, sadly ending Rome as a Republic ... putting Rome under imperial rule (rule from above rather than rule from below).  In the very same manner, America was losing ground to its political saviors "from above."  Actually, what was happening with the Supreme Court was not even the fiction of "democracy from above."  It was simply "enlightened" dictatorship.

Trump arrives on the scene.  The 2016 elections were coming up, and I was hoping so much that Dr. Ben Carson would be the nominee that Americans would have a chance to vote for as U.S. President.  I know that he had no political experience whatsoever.  But Obama's political experience upon entering the White House had not been all that great either.

To me, the president is one who sees, understands and inspires others.  I liked Carson's vision for America – not racial, not class-based, not Humanist or Secular like Obama's had been.  He was in fact a man with a very strong Christian vision before him, one that brought him American-style from tough circumstances growing up to true personal greatness, going at life the way all people should, by doing the hard work rather than standing around complaining about how others were holding you back.  He moved upward in life by studying hard, learning as much as possible about the challenges in front of him, and then taking on some hard decisions.  And he certainly was a strong team player, knowing how to draw the abilities of others to support a task they shared in common (success in the face of very difficult surgery).  And he inspired, rather than dominated those around him.  In this he rather reminded me of Dr. Martin Luther King, whom I respected greatly.

But most important, he knew how to work closely with God in the face of all the challenges that came his way.  He was a mighty man of God.  And America desperately needed a mighty man of God.

But sadly, he simply got "driven over" at the televised debates conducted by the Republican presidential candidates, and was largely ignored by a press which had no idea of how to measure Carson.  And the person that did the driving over of Carson was none other than the hotel and casino builder and TV host Donald Trump (also with no experience as a political office-holder either).

In many ways Trump was a very impressive individual.  Simply the way he ventured into a huge variety of investment challenges – not only hotels and casinos, but a sports team, ice rink in central New York City, and an airline, among other enterprises.  And most impressive of all was the way he came back from an economic catastrophe (huge risks come with such high-reaching entrepreneurship) that would have broken the will of most people – even other high-powered investors.  Trump was not a quitter.  In fact he loved challenges. And he seemed to take them on gladly, no matter what they seemed to be.  And gaining the White House was for Trump the ultimate challenge that he wanted to take on as the grandest of all Trump adventures.

Unfortunately he seemed to be lacking in the most important quality of all in a president: the ability to pull a divided people (such as Obama had left America) together so as to be able to move the nation as a truly unified people towards higher social goals.  Trump set out his own goals – and moved towards them personally.  He liked victories that he himself could carry off.

He certainly was able to bring his family along with him on these journeys.  But otherwise he tended, when presented with the world of "other," to instinctively knock others out of his way.  As he put things in the TV show he hosted, "You're Fired" – making these words the very identifier of that widely-watched program.

And indeed, the rapid turnover of his cabinet members and advisers would quickly come to move at a speed that was absolutely unprecedented in American history.  Inspiring loyalty in others was just not one of his great talents – a leadership talent however needed deeply at this point by the American people.

But his Democratic Party opponents did not help themselves any by jumping to the opportunity to find grounds to impeach Trump – even before he took office!  They were determined to reverse the unexpected results of the 2016 elections through immediate calls for impeachment.  But ultimately, thrashing around to find justifiable causes for impeachment made the Democrats look politically shallow.

Meanwhile, American youth have gone berserk, believing that plundering and burning town centers and demanding the dismantling of the police force is a noble cause, one that justifies such brutal behavior.  There seems to be no moral boundaries or sense of honest better and worse that apply in their collective reasoning.

And school teachers are encouraged to teach their pupils that their White parents are by all instinct ugly racists ... not realizing that America has not seen such racism as the teachers are promoting since the 1950s and 1960s when racism, particularly virulent in the American South, went in the opposite direction.  But changing directions of racism does not make racism any better.  It's ugly under all circumstances.  Worse ... seeing public authorities (educational and religious as well as state authorities) behind this development sends shivers up and down my spine.  It reminds me of the authoritarianism that Mao Zedong attempted in China, or Stalin in Russia, or Hitler in Germany ... or even American President Wilson in sending off hundreds of thousands of American young men to the slaughter-houses of the French trenches of World War One.  America is supposed to represent the sovereignty of the grassroots citizenry ... built heavily on the institution of the American family ... which the state is trying to undercut in order to insert its own authority ... in every area possible in American life.

The Republicans were hoping to reverse this "let-Washington-dictate-American-life" program.  But I've become increasingly alarmed by Trump ... and what he (even out of office) continues to do to the Republican Party in his effort to make himself some kind of political phenomenon all unto himself.  All of this reminds me more of Hitler than Reagan or Eisenhower (or even Truman and JFK).

In short ... I am hungry for some kind of truly great moral leadership to come before American society ... to help lead us out of the moral cesspool we have fallen into – thinking ourselves to be so "rational," so "progressive"– because we have so blindly wandered into untested waters.  Biden certainly has been a huge disappointment ... because he seems unable to think outside the Democratic Party's ideological box – which has only made America's moral-spiritual matters worse.

This is particularly tragic ... as it is quite clear that America is losing all ability to maintain itself morally and spiritually.  We have rejected all that the past has taught us about what works and what does not work, politically, economically, socially, intellectually, morally and spiritually!  We have rejected the past because today we consider ourselves to be so much more "enlightened" than those who went before us (those who helped bring our country to greatness).  But such a "progressive" understanding of life and its dynamics is total – and very dangerous – foolishness!

I am very aware that, at this point, only God can save America from social-moral self-destruction.  But even then, God's "Great Awakenings" that have previously shaken us out of our moral-spiritual stupidity have required specific human agents to carry such a spiritual awakening forward.

 So I continue to pray for just such personal leadership to finally make itself known to us today. We need it badly.

America's social divisions deepen even further under ongoing efforts as "reform."  With America's original social-cultural-spiritual standards being brought down everywhere, this has left open the contest for a replacement for those standards.  It has been easy enough for those who had taken up the cause to "change" America. All they had to do was to oppose everything that had gone before.  But as to what was supposed to replace it, they have shown America no clear idea on what then is intended precisely to replace the destroyed traditional social foundations … except to put more power in the hands of "enlightened" Washington authorities – and the members of the equally "enlightened" media and academic circles that support the Secular-Humanist domination by Washington.

It is important to remember how quickly a house can be burned to the ground … in comparison to the much, much greater time and expense involved in rebuilding it.  The same applies no less to a society.

Worse … like the French Revolution, a social vacuum created by revolution itself spawns a multitude of very rational, very picture-perfect or utopian ideas put forward by this group and that … none of them tested in the laboratory of reality … and none of them able to pull all the utopian Idealists together to form some kind of harmonious working group.  Thus as these reformers compete to have their own ideals take the lead, chaos rather than wise resolve to come up with ideas and ideals that they could all agree on have typically characterized this effort at "social progress."

Tragically, we are seeing this dynamic develop in America … as a result of the deep "change" that "reformers" have put America under.  And it has produced exactly the predicted chaos that always accompanies such action.

Thankfully, the social-political chaos that America has been caught up in has not reached the order of the French or Russian or Chinese revolutions where it required dictatorship (France and Russia) or a complete and disastrously belated backing off of the "reform" effort (China) to bring things back to order.  But it is headed in that direction.

Worse, America's political leadership has seemed to find big political profit in championing the cause of one or another of these competing social groups, not only making unity all the more difficult but in fact merely intensifying the mutual hostility overtaking the American peace.

And this political confusion and resulting chaos has not been just for a short season of disappointment … and anger.  It's as if these divisions, and the anger they encourage, were taking a rather permanent place in American politics.  This not only has a scary similarity to the loss of the Roman Republic, it looks tragically like America going through the early 1800s, step by step dividing ever deeper over the symbolic issue of slavery.  And we know what it took to finally bring that divisive issue to an end.

Obama, Trump and now Biden seem to have believed that it was better to support and encourage one side or the other of the divide, rather than find the higher ground where Americans could once again pull together, where something of a political "middle" could settle things down.

But that higher ground is never found in or through human reason.  A society has to go much higher than that to arrive at a grander level of social being.  And (some) Americans know that such higher ground is found only in the willingness of society to follow the One who made the rules of life:  God himself.

As we have seen, Biden talked the unity talk at his inauguration … but then immediately proceeded to his office to put into force the ideological agenda of merely one side of the American divide.  That certainly offered distinct advantages to that particular group … but not to the nation as a whole.  Quite the opposite.  Meanwhile, Trump is gathering forces on the sidelines, ready to resume the counter attack as soon as possible.

America's youth are brought into the contest.  Complements of the constant pressuring of America's youth to take the Humanist rather than the Christian path to adulthood, social standards have come to be treated by so many younger Americans as if they were the biggest threat to personal freedom imaginable.  They are even equated with "Fascism."

Unlike Christianity, Humanism sees no need to carefully regulate the development of rising generations of Americans (at least not along traditional lines anyway), because of the belief of Humanists that if the youth were truly left to simply trust their own instincts to make life choices as they developed, they would be certain to arrive at adulthood on a much healthier basis.  This has proven over and over again to be a very bad idea.

Society is group behavior … shaped into effective social action through training and discipline.  Without wise social instruction coming from the adult generation to its rising generation, the latter will never come to know how to "do adult" correctly. Society in its workings is very similar to the world of sports.  In any sporting event, there are very specific rules prescribing what the goals and rules of the game happen to be … and, if a team sport (as most are), what the guidelines happen to be which will help those players work together to meet those goals.

And – what Humanists fail to understand – these goals, rules and guidelines are not found in mere human instinct.  Quite the contrary. To create a truly effective or "winning" team, that team (or society) needs the vital training, discipline and support of a coach to bring the players to an understanding of what is expected of them as individual players working closely together to bring the team to victory.  There's no room for self-important prima donnas on a team that has a chance for such victory.  They must work together as a unit, guided by all the social norms and rules that govern how a game is played.

Indeed, involvement in sports is a very old way of getting youth to understand how the larger society they are about to enter actually works – what its expectations are, what its rules are, what its rewards happen to be – so that they do not get themselves in trouble as adults in falling afoul of society's rules and regulations. … and end up in prison – or worse.

Unfortunately, America is seeing way too much of the latter … as it advances ever deeper into Humanism.

America is in trouble … deep trouble.  And so are its Western friends.

America struggles forward as a continuing Christian Light to the Nations ... against growing Humanism.  In the early 1970s, when Nixon was pulling the last of the American troops out of Vietnam – and simply extending economic aid to help the pro-American Saigon government develop a viable social order (sort of a Marshall Plan for Vietnam) – Humanists in Congress got the bright idea that cutting off all such aid would "free up" the Vietnamese from American "imperialism."

Subsequently, with Nixon and Ford prevented from giving any kind of support to the Saigon government, we found ourselves having to make a cowardly escape from Vietnam when the social order we were "freeing up" came to collapse.  Then we got to watch our Vietnamese friends get butchered.  And soon we also got to watch in horror that same social breakdown extend itself next door to the "killing fields" of Cambodia.  In all of this, America was not being a Light to the Nations.

But thankfully we wised up a bit.  As the world's sole superpower in the 1980s and 1990s, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton demonstrated to the world a very Christian desire to support – not impose their worldview and political system on – the nations of the world … as these nations struggled to meet their own social challenges.  We supported, not dictated, Russia's and China's effort to move freely out into the larger world.

True, we did intervene in the crises of Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo. But in those instances, we simply policed the situation.  We did not attempt to "reform" anybody.  We kicked Iraq out of Kuwait and Serbia out of both Bosnia and Kosovo … to end Iraqi bullying and Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing.  Then we made no attempts to go further with the matter.  We had no interest in remaking our opponents along Idealist (Humanist/Darwinist) social-political lines. … that is, engage in "nation-building."

America's Humanism/Darwinism seems to take charge of America foreign policy as the country enters the 21st century.  The entry into the 21st century saw America apparently having learned nothing from the grand tragedy of Vietnam.  We clearly saw what happened with the takedown of the Diem regime in 1963 … which merely deepened the chaos in Vietnam … prompting Johnson then to send in a few more American troops, then more troops, then more troops, etc.

But this did not stop Bush Jr. from attempting to "free up" Iraq so that it could step forward as a new democracy in bringing down Saddam Hussein's government in that country. Unsurprisingly – and most tragically, – Bush's massive military effort (Shock and Awe) did not lead to a Humanist utopia for that country … but instead, horrible infighting.

And Bush's similar effort to undercut Afghanistan's Pashto tribesmen in their support of the Taliban did nothing but throw Afghanistan into ever-deeper chaos and violence. And how exactly was our effort to undercut Syria's President Assad such a "humanitarian" venture?  He was simply trying to hold a multi-ethnic country together in the face of Syria's fall into social disintegration. And the same held true for Gaddafi in Libya.

How would we have felt if France or Britain (or both) had decided that it was the "humanitarian" thing to do to undercut Lincoln in the same way we undercut Assad and Gaddafi … because Lincoln's effort to keep the Union together in one piece through military means was in violation of every precept that all Humanists find themselves living and dying for?  Thank God (literally) that the leaders of France and Britain did not decide to "go Humanist" on us in the 1860s.

What is truly amazing is how it seems always the case that "going Humanist" (undercutting social authority) ends up with the necessity of having to "go Darwinian" (restoring order by the use of domineering means).

What does it take to hold a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, multi-class society (as all societies at some point tend to be) in a state of peace ... where the streets are safe, homes are secure, and the people able to enjoy the simple prosperity that makes for human happiness?

Christianity has always had a powerful answer to that question:  let God direct, inspire, provide ... through similar actions that we sons and daughters of his do on his behalf. And God will prove very faithful to those who do so, providing them with the means to be so generous and supportive of others.  Indeed, America was originally set up to illustrate exactly that answer as the City on a Hill, a Light to the Nations.  And America has clearly succeeded marvelously when it went at things in this manner.  So why then are Humanism and Darwinism so set on bringing down the Christian worldview and the Christian constitutional foundations that have served both America itself and the surrounding world so well?

Somehow Humanism still feels the strong need to prove itself … against Christianity.  And Darwinism is totally scornful of Christianity.

Meanwhile, China has to be loving this … watching America, the leader of the "Free World," completely caught up in internal fratricide.  Presently, because of being so fully caught up in this political infighting, America is of no use to the world. Consequently, this has allowed Xi Jinping's China to move unopposed in inserting its dominating political influence here and there around the world – slowly but surely taking over the position of honor that America once used to occupy.

China is very much in the process of doing to the world what European nations did in their more aggressive days of the 1800s: secure their own global empires by taking control of all local economic and social (and thus political) dynamics in Africa and Asia.  China is busy at exactly that same thing. And in doing so China is extending its reach even beyond Asia and Africa … to Latin America.

And even Europe itself is finding that it is it having to choose between American leadership and Chinese leadership.  Indeed, Russia has signed on fully as a Chinese "associate." And so have other European nations, at least to the extent that they are now part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

Will America wake up one day to find itself surrounded, cut out of a highly pro-China universe … forced to accept whatever terms China is willing to extend to it by way of favors?

This is how international politics works … much the same way Europe was forced to proceed after World War Two, when the only hope it had of returning to any level of social ability was to accept American leadership – the only, and most horrible, alternative being Soviet Russian leadership.  American leadership was at least generous. Soviet Russian leadership was not.

Will Chinese leadership be so generous? But with no alternative power to challenge it (unless that somehow might eventually be India) … there is no reason for China to be generous. Look at its behavior in Tibet back in the aggressive days of Mao Zedong. Look at what it is doing today in the Xinjiang Province. Generosity is not what it is offering its neighboring Uyghurs.  And there's no reason it should.  China needs room to expand.  And Uyghur territory offers that possibility.

It's really no different than what Anglo-America did to the Cherokee, Sioux, Comanche, etc.  These tribes were disunited, used to fighting among themselves … rather than getting their act together to hold off Anglo expansion.  Thus nature ran its course. The strong and united overpowered the disunited and thus weak.

And so that is the reality that America – that indeed even Western Civilization itself – is faced with today.  We either rise to the challenge, defend ourselves – most importantly morally so that we can think straight politically – or become nothing more than pawns in a Chinese universe.