Category: World Events

Well, political primary season is here. Despite what it may seem, I don’t really like putting political posts on the blog, but sometimes I feel like it’s important to put information out there that doesn’t get much attention.

Here’s the bottom line up front: Primaries can be more important than general elections, so it’s very important that you study up on the candidates and participate in the process. It almost seems inevitable that we’re headed for a rematch on the Presidential ballot, but that’s only the most prominent part of a very large picture. It’s also important to consider the Representatives, Senators, and local officials you’re choosing to compete later in this cycle. If a district is solid red or solid blue, the November election is more or less a foregone conclusion. The actual decision point, where voter turnout matters, is going to be the primary election that selects which candidate subsequently appears in the general election. If you’re not voting in the primary, you’re really just letting someone else determine who gets into office. This is especially important for those of you that vote Democrat.

Here’s what I mean. The Democratic Party of today in almost no way resembles what it used to be. The values are different. Now it’s nonsensical and extreme. Don’t feel like you need to completely buy into what they’re putting into their national platform, which seems like it’s a contest to see who can be the craziest. Despite what you feel like you’ve been told, it’s perfectly acceptable to be a Democrat that wants secure borders. Even though the media doesn’t want you to think this way, it’s also totally fine to be a Pro-Life Democrat. Forget what the party platform says; I know there are plenty of Democratic voters out there that think “no, boys should not be able to compete in girls’ events by saying they’re girls.” They’ve become the party of sowing division, rather than unity. How is that good for Americans? What happened to this party? The state we’re in is a result of primaries selecting extremists whose views represent only a small percentage of the actual base. You didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left you during its leftward march. It’s up to you to take back your party.

While obviously there are problems on both sides of the aisle, the problems listed above are Democrat-owned. Republicans are trying to solve them but don’t have enough bipartisan support, either at the national level or at the local level (including school boards, in some cases). I’m not saying you have to vote Republican. Don’t worry, even if we find common ground on these few issues, there’s still plenty to distinguish the two parties!

If you’re not voting in the Democratic primary for candidates that are more centrist and less extremist, you’re probably going to find yourself stuck between voting for a Republican and voting for an extremist Democrat in November. Come November, there are a lot of people that vote only on the basis of whether the candidate has a “(D)” or an “(R)” next to their name and don’t know the actual positions of the candidate, and that’s dangerous.

There’s a lot of posturing politicians have to do with regard to taking hard-line stances against the opposing party when they’re in front of the cameras, and I understand that. Members of all parties are supposed to work together, though. They don’t have to be friends, they just have to work together. Right now the political atmosphere is one of tangible hatred, and that’s not going to get us to a better place than we are right now.

Do your homework. Find the primary candidates in your district’s election that align with your values and vote for them. Take back your party, and let’s hold our elected officials accountable.

Let’s pretend for a little bit that you and I are democratic strategists. Our chief goal is to retain control of the White House in November 2024.

Despite unprecedented legal problems for a presidential candidate, Donald Trump looks like he’s shaping up to once again be the Republican nominee. He’s so dominant in the polls, in fact, that he’s skipping debates and doesn’t appear to be suffering for it.

How confident are you that our horse can beat Trump in a rematch? This early in the election cycle, with polls tied in a statistical dead heat, we’re not confident at all. The incumbent normally has an advantage, and if the two are tied in the polls with more than a year to go before election day, it’s not looking good for Biden.

So what should we do? If you’re a democratic strategist working for Biden, your main focus is to try to fend off a primary challenge. Biden certainly has the advantage in being the nominee this coming cycle, but he has to demonstrate he’s still got enough spring in his step to handle the job. His gaffes have become more prominent in the news lately, and as ambitious potential candidates smell blood in the water, it’s going to get tougher to get the whole party to fall in line. The contenders most likely to pose a legitimate threat to his nomination need to be brought into the campaign or otherwise buy them off to prevent them from causing a problem.

What if, however, you’re not a democratic strategist working for Biden, but rather are focused on keeping the White House under democratic control with or without Biden? The media is starting to turn on Biden, his disapproval rating is at a record high, he’s dealing with a possible impeachment, and his son is nothing but a headache. It’s becoming impossible to conceal his cognitive decline. If we want to win, we’re going to have to get rid of Joe.

So what’s the play? Who do we have on the bench? Kamala’s a non-starter; she’s unelectable. Nancy Pelosi? No, if we want to attack Trump’s age, we can’t have someone older than him. Try Hillary again? I don’t think so. Governor Gavin Newsome of California? Maybe. There are a lot of unknowns there; that’s why we’re doing this Newsome/DeSantis debate soon, as a test run to see what kind of reaction he gets on the national stage. He’s from the far left wing and might be too radical to be a good presidential candidate, but we could be surprised. Biden’s so old and frail that anyone would look energetic by comparison. Let’s use this coming debate as a test to see what kind of traction he can get.

If all else fails, we could pull Michelle Obama off the bench. She had a very high popularity rating, played well on high-profile stages, and doesn’t have a whole lot of negatives. It’d be a dream come true for progressives. The big question is: can she be convinced to run? You have to be both very ambitious and a glutton for punishment if you’ve already spent eight years in the White House and want to go back for more. The White House has a way of making you claustrophobic. She’s never held an elected position before, so she’d have to be paired with a running mate that knows the system and probably one that’s viewed as a bit more centrist. Maybe we can find a democratic governor or senator that fits the bill. If that’s the play to be made, we can’t keep a lid on it for much longer; the deadline to file for the earliest primaries is early in 2024, and we can’t parachute her in until after Joe announces he’s decided not to run, and he still needs some convincing.

To win we’ve got to win over the independents. We won them last time by having a COVID death counter on the news all the time, but that only worked because we were able to make COVID the issue everyone cared about. This time it’s the economy, and that’s a tougher sell. Joe’s been out pushing Bidenomics, but he’s not getting real far with it. People just don’t believe that they’re better off in this economy than they were three or four years ago, and that’s a problem. The southern border is a similar issue; we overplayed the sympathy angle and now even democratic mayors of big cities are tapping out. We can use both of these topics to our advantage to oust Joe; we can hang the economy around his neck, “evolve our thinking” about the immigration issue, and admit that we need a different approach, and that opens the door to bring in someone new.

We also need some new lever issues. We’ve been pushing the insurrection angle pretty hard, but it’s running out of steam. People are starting to realize that even though the insurrection happened in January 2021, we waited two years to pursue any charges, and the timing looks suspicious. The Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter movements have largely stalled, and we need something fresh. Though there’s corruption in both parties, one potential angle is make a big show of rooting out corruption, giving us the moral high ground. We’ll start with Senator Bob Menendez. He’ll put up a fight, but we have enough dirt that we can lean on him hard enough to make him go. By the time he’s gone, more information about Biden’s involvement in his son’s influence-peddling scheme will be public, and we can express regret as we show Joe the door, gravely announcing that there’s no room for corruption in the Oval Office and hoping to turn some independents from Trump in the process using this show of “walking the walk.”

See? It can be kind of fun to take an alternative perspective. I don’t know how much of this is true, but it’s useful to look at things through someone else’s eyes every now and then. If Biden and Trump end up being the two nominees again, I’ve got to think Biden will lose, even with Trump’s legal problems. Joe’s fading in the polls already. That’s why there will likely be efforts in the coming weeks and months to prevent both Trump and Biden from becoming the nominee.

Whoever you vote for in your state’s primary, don’t let someone else tell you how to vote. If you’re all in for Biden or Trump, vote for him. If you desperately want someone…anyone…other than one of those two guys, cast your vote for that person. It’s your vote, not someone else’s. Let your voice be heard.

When you’re a blogger, you’re always at least a little curious about which posts really resonate with readers. Unless someone says something to you, you never really know for sure. You can get insights into things like the number of people viewing the different pages on your blog. That’s about as good a proxy as you’re going to get, because you can use that metric to see what kind of posts are more popular than others. I can’t see things like the names of people that have viewed different pages, but I can see which posts get the most traffic.

It turns out that the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the odd politics of our nation (it’s easier for a minor to get a sex change than it is for them to get a tattoo, for example) generated significantly more hits than normal. While I fully intend for this blog’s main purpose to remain focused on pushing Christ-followers to use their lives as a living sacrifice and step into the role God’s designed for them, sometimes I also need to take my own advice and do what I’m good at, even if it’s not directly God-honoring.

Today I’d like to have another look at American politics, starting out with some of the basics and hopefully help translate a little of that into where we are today.

I try to stay away from party names like “Democrat” or “Republican,” and instead use the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” The reason is partly because people don’t often fit cleanly into one camp or the other and people don’t react objectively to labels, but mainly it’s because each party’s views can be so wide-ranging that you could squeeze multiple ideologies into each party. You’ll hear me refer to the political left (liberals/Democrats generally, but Socialists and Communists if you go further and further left) and political right (conservatives/Republicans here, but dictators if you go further right). Both sides seek prosperity or financial security, but they take very different approaches to get there.

Please understand that these are broad generalizations. Of course you can find exceptions to the things I say here, but by and large, these principles hold true. Let’s start with an abridged look at the two groups.

Left: Their view is that the people work for the government, which provides stability, services, financial safety nets, etc. for its citizens (and non-citizens, in our case). Social issues are generally the most important things our country has to figure out. Quality of life is a good thing, but the government doesn’t like when there are large disparities between the “haves” and the “have nots,” so the “haves” should pay higher and higher tax percentages the more money they make. The government will take care of you from cradle to grave in return for your loyalty in paying high taxes. Life is hard, people have extenuating circumstances; they can’t always make the most of their opportunities and they should look to the government as the solution to their problems.

Right: In this group’s view, the government works for the people, providing basic national services (federal highways, FAA and FCC rules, a strong military), but not taking more taxes than necessary and allowing local-level politics to sort out the details. The law of supply and demand plays a big part in our economy. If people are willing to pay for something, someone will come up with a better or cheaper way to provide it. Individual innovators and service providers in the private sector drive the economy and wealth creation, and the government provides only basic guidelines to make sure those efforts don’t go off the rails (as an example, think about the reasonable rules/precautions the government should pass regarding artificial intelligence right now). Ideally there should be plentiful job opportunities for everyone, and those that work hard are encouraged to go as far as their potential and drive enable them to go.

If you’re a conservative, you kind of have the political deck stacked against you. People in the two camps have very different outlooks, as you might expect. The “best minds” of left-leaning thinkers end up in government. The “best minds” of right-leaning thinkers end up in the private sector. Who, then, on the right, ends up in government? There are some good ones, sure, but often the ones that are really good decide that they can make a more lucrative living doing something other than government service, and they end up leaving public office. I wouldn’t go so far as to say our government’s Democrats are the Varsity team and Republicans are the Junior Varsity team, but it’s tough to come up with a better analogy. As a result, the country has steadily marched left, even though we’re a mostly center-right nation. Even beyond Senators and Congressional Representatives, the bench is much deeper for liberals. When liberals can’t get their legislative agenda passed, faceless regulators and unelected officials use different avenues to advance the goals of hard-left politicians. Businesses that are just trying to make a profit are impacted when their bottom line is affected by regulations that get too complicated to understand. They have to pay for the services of lawyers and compliance officers to make sure they’re doing everything legally, rather than spending that money on enhancing the quality of their product or otherwise investing in their business. (Trump cleared a lot of regulations and the economy leapt forward. Biden reinstituted a lot of them and that’s part of the reason our economic recovery is so slow. Some regulations were good ideas, others were not, but the more regulations you have, the harder it is to run a business.)

Conservatives often have the viewpoint that they shouldn’t interfere in other peoples’ lives because that’s not what they’d want to happen to them. Legislatively, liberals tend to benefit from that outlook because they don’t have the same qualms and conservatives don’t normally fight back until it’s too late. Conservatives figure that as long as politicians in Washington don’t do anything too crazy, it’ll all be fine in the end. Well, then those politicians go and do things conservatives aren’t comfortable with. That gets the conservatives to vote in the next election or two, but eventually they go back to their complacency and the cycle starts again. The result is that the country’s politics have steadily shifted leftward over the last hundred years (examples: Social Security and the New Deal, Medicare and Medicaid, the mandatory health insurance of the Affordable Care Act, today’s practice of using well-qualified mortgage applicants to pay extra fees to help support riskier borrowers, and the functional removal of America’s southern border). The political left “takes new ground” while the best that conservatives hope for is “stopping the liberal agenda.” Conservatives don’t usually take new ground. (Or if they do, it causes face-melting rage fests and riots among the left.)

Our country’s government was set up to have multiple political parties, so I wouldn’t want to see just one be completely dominant, even if it’s the one I tend to side with. It’s a little unfair to refer to the current Democratic Party as the actual Democratic Party. Over the last 20 years or so, the party has shifted far left very quickly, often to the extreme left. The Democratic platform has changed and now embraces extremism in almost every case. (Everyday middle-class Democrats who agree on almost all the Party’s main issues but disagree on one thing, like the issue of abortion, are shouted down and all but kicked out of the Party if they push their views, it seems.) People that have voted Democrat for decades out of principle maybe went along with this leftward migration, but are finding that their party traveled further left than they really agree with. Their options are to not vote, to vote Republican (which some of them will never do just on principle), or to vote for a third party. I’d argue that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party, but that the Democratic Party instead left them. They should get involved earlier, in the primaries, to try to reclaim their party and move it back toward the center, where the two sides can actually get some things done by working together.

There’s so much more to cover, but this is already getting longer than normal. No matter what side you’re on politically, please pray for our nation, that it would turn from evil and toward the Lord. Pray for revival in this land and for God to be glorified.

There’s a whole lot more, but I don’t know if you’d be interested to hear it. Want additional political posts? Want me to stay away from future political posts? Let me know. Leave a comment or use the “contact us” option to share your thoughts.