America has lost her heart of liberty and she won’t find it in Washington
With the 2024 election fully underway, one thing remains clear: America has lost her heart of liberty, and neither Republicans nor Democrats in Washington will help her find it.
There’s been a lot of armchair quarterbacking by politicians and pundits in both parties about what happened on November 3, 2020. While many still cling to the Big Lie that the election was stolen, it was Trump’s failure to keep his promises that contributed to Biden’s victory — due in no small part to the Republican Party making Donald Trump their standard bearer.
However, the simple truth of the matter is that the 2020 presidential election was a losing proposition regardless of who won because voters were stuck with a choice between two pathetic candidates with similar policies and no desire to help America find her heart again.
Hopping aboard the Trump Train was entirely acceptable to the Mitch McConnells of the Republican Party because they decided long ago that their future didn’t belong to conservatives; it belonged to the far-left ideology they pretend to oppose every election season.
And if we’ve learned anything from the Republican Party over the past many years, it’s that elections have nothing to do with the supposed differences between Republicans and Democrats because there is no difference between the two. This is why we need to abandon party politics and return to the Constitution if America is ever to find her heart again and live in liberty.
Gary Barkalow (Founder of The Noble Heart) is an expert on how individuals can live the life they are created to live and how the keys to living that life are written on the human heart. In a blog post written in November 2012 entitled A Dangerous But Necessary Road, he shared the following thought:
I recently overheard a conversation between two men. One said, “The strong rule the weak. That’s how your God made the world.” The other responded, “God makes us strong only for a while, so that we can help each other.” To which the first man responded, “My God makes me strong so I can live my life.”
This conversation was in a movie I re-watched called First Knight, the King Arthur and Camelot story. The first and last man to be quoted was Malagant, the fallen knight from Arthur’s Round Table.
Malagant captured in a sentence the general belief of the era that we are living in – “My God makes me strong so I can live my life.” In a word this belief can be described as narcissism – and is defined as excessive self-admiration and self-centeredness. (Emphasis mine)
Though Barkalow was clearly addressing the heart of the individual, his words prompt this question: Could it be that America has surrendered to the Republican/Democrat duopoly because she has lost her heart and has become as narcissistic as the politicians in Washington they vote for?
The next part of Barkalow’s post answered this question:
Erwin McManus wrote in his book Stand Against the Wind, “When we are in love with ourselves, we are prone to listen only to what we want to hear. We become willing to trade insight for affirmation. We want to feel good about ourselves more than we want to become good.” (Emphasis mine)
Quite simply, America has fallen in love with herself. She has wandered so far from her heart — a heart of God-given liberty — that she no longer desires to hear what she needs to hear, but only what she wants to hear.
God didn’t give America the gift of liberty simply to provide a place for self-centered individuals to live their lives any way they choose. Instead, liberty was given to equip us to live as a nation filled with the desire and passion necessary to realize our calling to be the shining city upon a hill often spoken of often by Ronald Reagan but highlighted in his farewell address from the Oval Office on January 11, 1989. Here’s a snippet of that speech:
“And that’s about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be
city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.”
America has veered from the road that leads to liberty and has plummeted over the cliff of self-centeredness. The guard rails erected by the Founding Fathers to keep us on that road — the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence — have been destroyed under the misguided and selfish assumption that we are capable enough on our own to maneuver without them.
Going forward, America can get back on that road and find liberty again, but only if Republicans and Republicans in Washington acknowledge the damage they have done to her heart and admit the need for restoration. Liberty won’t be found by attempting to journey the narrow road without the guard rails necessary to avoid the crashing cliffs.
In 2024 and beyond, America needs conservatives willing to work on the road crew and rebuild the guardrails and safeguards because that’s the only way she will find her lost heart of liberty; she won’t find it in Washington from the Republicans and Democrats who tore them down in the first place.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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