To save liberty and our republic, we need more than party politics
Given the current state of runaway progressivism in America, turning to party politics to save liberty and our republic sounds more and more like a good idea, but party politics alone is not the answer.
The reality is that the more we carry the cause of truth and individual liberty (which are actually the same cause) into politics to save it, the more we’re actually jeopardizing it. Sure, we need to do all we can to preserve what little remains, but party politics alone will never get the job done.
For those on the “right” still voting faithfully along party lines, the fact that “their side” has abandoned the cause of liberty has been a bitter, if not impossible, pill to swallow because they’re simply unable to bring themselves to face the truth. Denial is one thing, but there’s also a growing influx of “conservatives” who don’t have any problem with collectivism whatsoever as long as it’s coming from a flag-waving Nationalist member of the party.
From a liberty perspective, party politics are more akin to quicksand or a tar pit than a soap box. And while it may appear to be an alluring, even seductive, option on the surface, the reality is that party politics is a trap where the cause of liberty and the defense of our republic goes to die a most certain death!
There are many reasons why this is true.
As is evident, almost everywhere you look, the body politic in America has become completely infused with what can only be described as a populist cult of zombie-like progressives carrying a collectivist mindset. How can one, a dozen, or even a thousand, politicians even begin to approach such a mass conditioning in the name of the “toxic individualism” that collectivism seeks to destroy, especially when you consider it’s been some 150 years in the making?
What I’m getting at is that today’s collectivist politics are simply a reflection of the people’s own populist, almost innate sense of progressive collectivism. And as you know, the reflection of a people can’t change until the people themselves change. We’re simply not going to see pro-individual liberty politics in America again until the people themselves regain a pro-individual liberty mindset.
This reality is something revolutionary collectivists figured out a long time ago, and they’ve been working at incrementally collectivizing the public mindset here for nearly a century and a half now; that’s a head start that’s not going to be easy to walk back.
On the other hand, what effect does electing a “conservative” or two on a local school board or in the legislature really have when it comes to countering the tectonic momentum of an overarching progressive collectivism, especially when you understand that most “conservatives” out there are just as conditioned as everybody else?
Another fundamental truth when exposing the incompatibility between party politics and the cause of truth and liberty is that party politics are both intrinsically and inherently pragmatic. Not the resourceful kind but the dialectal kind, forcing the immediate sacrifice of at least half of whatever truth, cause, or thesis you bring to the table every single time you bring it to the table.
Before you know it, the cause is gone, having been morphed into an unrecognizable, politically expedient compromise.
This is why human rights, redistributive justice, deficit spending, direct democracy, lockdowns, and even the Alinsky-styled tactic of confrontational politics have come to sound like good ideas despite being wholly progressive concepts instituted by collectivist revolutionaries intent on undermining both liberty and our republic.
It’s how and why groups like the TEA Party and the Freedom Caucus were so quickly dissolved into insignificance while the talking heads in the faux conservative media along with most of the American-right became synonymous with nationalism instead of defending America as it founded as the land of liberty.
As we witnessed on the January 6 insurrection in Washington, the stormtrooper “patriotism” of Nationalist Socialist is being widely mistaken as American patriotism and quite wrongly associated with the liberty of our founding. Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon, as we see in this video of a “Pro American Rally” held by the Nazi Party at Madison Square Garden in 1939 when 20,000 Americans gathered at Madison Square Garden to Sieg Heil in front of the Stars and Stripes:
True champions of truth and liberty need to know how to tell the difference between nationalist patriotism and true patriotism. Otherwise, they and their posterity will be lost forever to the progressive deception evident in both.
The more party politics as a whole is reduced to this paradigm, the more populist this collectivism becomes, and the more everything everywhere will be reformed and/or redefined. Nothing — not the Constitution, our right to life, our right to arms, or even liberty itself — can remain the same.
Most of us are far too busy to pay attention to the minutia of all the “evolutionary” social statics and dynamics at work, but those living in the world of party politics live and die by them. Wherever the prevailing political winds blow, so goes the politician, that is, if they want to keep their job.
So, regardless of how we define liberty, and despite all the lip service still given to “preserving” it, nearly everyone involved in party politics (politicians and pundits alike) has already made the transition because there simply isn’t any power (or ratings) left to be had by defending what’s essentially become the “dead dogma” of liberty.
Even though politicians promise to preserve liberty and the republic, they make these promises from their collectivist point of view. Therein lies the moral disconnect between defenders of liberty and defenders of politics — they’re speaking two different, diabolically opposed languages!
Defenders of party politics aren’t “lying” or “going back on their word” when they throw liberty and our republic under the bus; they’re doing exactly what they told us they would do. Preserving individual rights, liberty, and our Constitution in the context of collectivism is to kill them. We’re being duped by doublespeak.
This is not to say that we should be politically indifferent. Instead, we should continue to be politically active and have our voices heard. But we need to do so with the awareness that until we regain the mindset of a truly free people, it’s not going to change a single, solitary thing. Not our Constitution. Not our republic. Not our liberty.
The sooner we get started on this, the better, while those who know what true liberty is are still among us, and before our efforts are forced underground.
Joe Marshall was born and raised in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate NY. He is a married father of two grown sons, an outdoorsman, a landscape contractor, a former stock car owner and driver, a certified 4H firearms instructor, and a retired New York State corrections officer.
Joe is the author of the book, Last Call for Liberty
