America At 250—The Failure Of A Promise

Main Points:

• The promise of America since the Founding Fathers, has been the realization of a creedal-based “nation of nations,” with full enfranchisement for all, and equal rights under law.

• From its beginning that dream has had a nemesis, a subversive neo-Tory autocratic sentiment constantly trying to undermine democracy, the only vehicle through which freedom and justice can flourish.

• The Republican Party since the 1870s has been the greatest force undermining this potential, all but reversing the gains of the Civil Rights era now, with little hope of recovery.

• American Evangelicals, once a force for progress, have become since 1980, the biggest factor ensuring the victory of the Tories.

Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against it, and against the inhabitants of Pekod: waste and utterly destroy after them, saith the LORD, and do according to all that I have commanded thee.
-Jer 50:21

The word “Merathaim” is only found once in the Bible, and is not a country found among the table of nations in Genesis. But since it literally means “the land of double rebellion,” I think we can safely assume God is using a nickname here to describe Babylon.

And yet, other verses suggest this withering description of destruction in chapters 50 and 51 may not have been a stream of narrative given to Jeremiah referring to ancient Babylon, but one way into the future,¹ and that for a number of reasons I won’t go into here.

In my book American Babylon, American Antichrist I attempt to make the case that this is but one of many clues about a last-days entity, the identity of which unlocks all the other mysterious prophecies. Understanding that the United States is both the end times beast empire of Daniel 7:7 and the Great Babylon of Revelation 16-18 is this key.

It also perfectly describes what a paradoxical “Tower of Confusion” this country has been to the whole earth. I interpret this name to mean, “the land of good rebels in her beginning, and bad rebels in her death.”

So many scratch their heads wondering why the US isn’t front and center in the last days prophecies, seeing she’s such a consequential force in world history?

It’s because they don’t understand this paradox, and perhaps also because they just can’t see themselves as these bad rebels of our day. And in no group is this narcissistic blindness more evident than in my own people, as I argued it in the very first words I penned for this site.

Two Different Visions

Americans from their beginning as a political entity, have endlessly argued about whether the country was meant to be a republic or a democracy. That debate is roughly what shapes the gladiator death struggle of the Republicans and Democrats today.

But the term republic is a stand-in for a subversive, neo-Tory sentiment that fails or just refuses to see what the real Promise of America has been from its beginning—a creedal-based, brotherhood of man “nation of nations,” with full enfranchisement for all, and equal rights under law. Instead, it has backslid into an ethno-centric, oligarchical, neo-aristocracy led by a narcissistic would-be child-king.

That this is a tragedy and a lost opportunity is putting it mildly. But it is a reality, and a destruction I myself have had a front seat for all my life. Yet here is where we stand at this 250-year milestone.

The fact that the United States is the single longest-running form of government in world history now—237 years since the establishment of the Constitution—and about to be destroyed forever by a rump alliance of Evangelicals and a foreign country makes it even more tragic. But that’s a story for another day.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is declaring a Golden Age for America, magically so ever since the day he got back in power, even as he goes about to systematically destroy it for the sake of Israel and Russia. Yet still he keeps claiming he’s making the country great again. But it all just kind of begs the question. When and how was America ever great?

Maybe World War II and its immediate aftermath, but it surely hasn’t been our track record of copious violence, injustice and excess. The best thing this country ever had was its Founding Fathers, a generation by no means perfect, but they were a group of educated intellectuals and students of history who wanted to try something different. They reluctantly though bravely, conducted a War of Independence from the greatest power on earth at the time, and won by the grace of God.

It was not strictly a revolution as it’s often called, certainly not like the French Revolution that sought to tear Church and State down completely and rebuild everything from scratch. But such is the conceit of all true fist-pumping nihilist/dictators who don’t have the brains or humility to recognize what a flexible system we already have.

But it did have some revolutionary characteristics. They abolished all aristocratic titles for instance, while seeking to start something modern, something not rooted in Old World feudalism, aristocracy and monarchy.

This was due to the Enlightenment ideals they sought to enact, the bedrock eternal values which has always made us great, if we ever have been. This was the most progressive legacy they left. They got a ball rolling, even though they themselves may have only dimly seen what the full outplay of liberty could look like.

In short, they had a vision of Heaven on earth, where the redeemed out of every nook and cranny of mankind live in brotherhood and harmony. Yet did they recognize the limits of human government to bring that about.

I see those values as eternal, moral and eminently practical, given the governmental choices available in a fallen world. I do not share the idiocy and utter dishonesty of MAGA world, tech bros and a long list of other people in our time flirting with a return to autocracy because “democracy doesn’t work,” after they’ve done everything in their power to make sure it doesn’t.

Revolutionary Enough Though

The vehicle for a highly-optimized society is democracy, because it is impossible to have a free society without it. Autocracies of any form always seek to build a wall of secrecy for everything they want to hide from the public. Only a society where the people have a say in their fate will ever have a hope of being free.

The Founders understood this, as well as the rationale behind their ideals. They understood that the Enlightenment was a secular version of the Reformation. Just as the Reformation moved the locus of authority from a Pope or Church tradition to the Bible, so the Enlightenment did the same for government by moving it from monarchy to a rule of law. They saw the opportunity to move the earth completely out of feudalism and into the modern world.

Thus, did they promulgate certain principles to this end. A rule of law and not of kings or the whims of men; the consent of the governed; separation of powers; checks and balances; three branches of government reflecting God’s three-fold role over His creation (Isa 33:22); due process; innocent till proven guilty; habeas corpus,² all men are created equal, equal justice for all under law, and on and on.

All in all, it was a system that deliberately spread the power amongst many different officials, governmental forms and agencies. It was not fit for perennially impatient and entitled men like spoiled royalty, or the Donald Trumps of the world.

Republicans unsurprisingly, have traditionally made a big deal about the claim that the United States is not a democracy, but a republic. Maybe they think this way because the Founding Fathers referred to building a republic in all their writings. They were enamored of representative government on one hand, and distrustful of the mob on the other, because so many Americans then, like now, were brutish and uncouth people. A self-governing republic was plenty revolutionary enough for them.

The Tory Trap

But a republic doesn’t tell you a lot because it just means “representative government.” How those representatives are determined made all the difference in the world. Were they to be appointed as part of a hierarchical model, or would they be voted in by a majority?

To be sure, their pool of enfranchised voters was small at first. You had to be a white male landowner. But from the beginning, this dilemma was there, and in time it mushroomed into the existential crisis we have in our time: Is the promise of America to be found in a destiny to become a completed democracy, or backslide into autocracy and the worst of human history—absolute power vested in a king or dictator?

Today, the United States has evolved into a Constitutional, democratic republic. That’s its political science dictionary definition incorporating all three elements. But from the beginning, this choice has been with us. Do we head toward democracy, or back towards an autocracy?

During the Revolution, there was a group that sided with the king known as the Tories. The closest thing to an heir they have today is the Republican Party, while the Democrats stand for more enfranchisement of all adults. Among the early Presidents, John Adams, number two, was closest to the Tories, while Thomas Jefferson was the forebear of the Democrats.

Adams made for a great Founding Father³ but he quickly became a tyrant as President. He actively prosecuted and jailed 10 to 14 newspaper editors under the deeply unpopular Alien and Sedition Act, because didn’t like what they wrote, including one who wrote mild criticism of him specifically (sound familiar?) When Jefferson won the next election, he let the law lapse and pardoned all the editors.

To this day, these two men represent two different trends in American history, because the spirit of the Tories lives on today. In the lead up to the Civil War to deal with the slavery issue, the Southern plantation owners were the Tories of their time.

They kept poor whites and blacks divided by telling the whites, “Well, at least you’re not black.” It’s not much more than that pathetic consolation prize of our time, “Well, you may be getting poorer all the time, but at least you get to own the libs and make them cry.”

The plantation owners party in those days was the Democrats, Dixiecrats as they came to be known. The Republican Party was virtually founded by Abraham Lincoln, and was the progressive party of the day. They championed abolition of slavery, black male suffrage, women’s rights, the land grant university system, infrastructure projects, the Constitutional rights of the individual (civil rights), independent wage earners (the working class), taxing high incomes during war time, and the like.

And Lincoln made no bones about where he stood on democracy. In his famous Gettysburg Address, he prayed that government “of the people, by the people, and for the people, would not perish from the earth.” That’s democracy, folks.

Where It All Started Going Wrong

When did it start to go wrong? When the Republican Party started turning its back on its original progressive vision, eventually becoming the party of Wall Street and betraying the only hope the American experiment ever had to realize its original promise. In other words, the democracy part of that hybrid form of government we have.

The party’s problem was there from the 1860s,⁴ but it really started to pick up steam by the 1870s, the start of the Gilded Age.⁵ That decade saw the rise of the Robber Barons like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie, so-called because their ruthless tactics, like erecting monopolies, price-fixing, and generally-unethical behavior.

In politics, they bribed politicians, crushed unions and suppressed the representation of the working class who made all that wealth possible. Corrupting the system was their aim, because since it’s the government’s job to make the rules, if you can cheat—skew them from the start—that’s what guarantees your “success.”⁶

The 1870s was thus a decade known as “the Nadir of American politics,” or “the Age of Cynicism,” marked by massive and open bribery, cronyism and corruption. By the 1880s, the US Senate was known as “the Millionaires Club,” as the Republicans began to abandon their anti-slavery/civil rights roots in favor of big business through high tariffs and tight credit policies.

Winner Take All

The “spoils system” also hit its peak at this time. Introduced in the 1830s by Andrew Jackson, “the Indian Killer” as he liked to be known, it was the idea that any incoming administration should have the right to “sack the city and fly upon the spoils,” just the kind of public trust-minded guy you want in charge. It’s no surprise that Donald Trump considers Andrew Jackson to be his main avatar.⁷

Eventually these Robber Barons decided they needed to buy up a political party outright, and that party was the Republicans. It eventuated in a virtual merger between the two in the 1896 election., when William McKinley defeated the Democrat and famous preacher William Jennings Bryan.⁸

But it wasn’t a time of total despair. True to the history of the United States, there were times of great progress and moments like this of great backsliding. Two acts of the time really helped this lamentable situation. The Pendleton Act of 1883 began to professionalize the federal civil service workforce, and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies.

Unfortunately, just as Ronald Reagan refused to enforce anti-trust legislation on the books, leading to the “greed is good,” acquisitions and mergers mania of the 1980s, so likewise little was done until Teddy Roosevelt became President in 1901. Roosevelt and his “Insurgents” represented a brief attempt by the Republican Party to recover their lost progressive roots.

While President, he broke up 44 corporate monopolies, and professionalized 60% of the federal work force, including the State Department. This trend was completed under FDR, and held steady until Donald Trump began to obliterate it as part of his disingenuous cleanup of the “Deep State,”⁹ so he can larder 8,000 senior civil servant positions with yes men to “the Boss.”

The New Deal Made Possible The Civil Rights Era

After that brief flirtation with reform, the Republican Party quickly returned to its old ways with policies that created the Roaring Twenties, leading directly to what was called for 15 years, “the Republican Great Depression.” And the only cure for it was FDR’s New Deal. But what a cure it was!

Franklin D. Roosevelt is generally considered to be the third greatest President in US history, only surpassed by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. And I’m not sure how many people nowadays understand why. FDR declared that the United States needed a Second American Revolution, this time not against “the political royalists,” but “the economic royalists.”

He recognized that for capitalism to work for everyone, most of the profits should go to the laboring class,¹⁰ both white and blue collar, who actually create the wealth; that it must be well-regulated to protect the public; and that there needed to be a modified socialism added to it, to provide things private companies could not or were not motivated to do.

For all these things and much more, Roosevelt was called a traitor to his class, a Communist, a socialist, un-American. The list went on and on. Sound familiar? And yet his New Deal proved to be wildly popular with the public. It was the first instance of an intentionally-created middle class in modern history.¹¹

Even more to the point, by priming the pump with a heavy corrective emphasis upon equity and equality, the New Deal paved the way for the Civil Rights movement of the 1940s to 70s. That era of the 1960s was the closest we’ve ever come to realizing the Promise of America that the Founding Fathers got started. When LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he said he was giving the South away to the Republicans for a generation.

He was too optimistic. With Nixon’s cynical Southern Strategy, and Ronald Reagan beginning his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi,¹² the Republicans and the Dixiecrats completely reversed roles. The party that once championed black slaves now became the party opposing school integration.

On top of that, since that 1980 election, the Republicans have been systematically dismantling the New Deal piece by piece, to the point where oligarchy and autocracy have nearly killed democracy itself.

Between these two accomplishments in less than half a century, the true American dream—a creedal-based, brotherhood of man nation of equal rights for all under law—has been killed by a neo-Tory oligarchy with a base stubbornly-insistent that this country should have a narrow ethno-centric identity hypocritically hostile to immigrants.

A small vignette of the difference between these two worlds could be illustrated by the New York Knicks recently winning the NBA Championship, of all things. The whole city of New York went nuts. High and low, rich and poor, people from every race and walk of life found joy in a common victory.

Yet how did Fox News cover it? Their cameras were intently focused on fringe groups who began to riot and tear things up, because that always happens around the world at sporting events, usually soccer. They had to reinforce their narrative that US cities are hellscapes of crime and a tidal wave of barbarian immigrants, while rural America, dirt poor and getting poorer, are the real Americans, the only good, God-fearing patriots out there.

Donald Trump, world-class delusionist and narcissist, is the end result of all these pseudo-noble “principles” Republicans—now the MAGA party of Trump—pretend to have. He by his brazenness has given them permission to say all the cynical things they have been thinking for generations, but didn’t have the bad taste to say.

But of course, we know all about him. This entire website, like the work of thousands around the world, is dedicated to exposing who and what he is.

What About The Democrats?

You may think I’m being super-partisan about my analysis of all this. I am, because I have come to agree with the academic Noam Chomsky, who has repeatedly stated that the Republican Party is the single most destructive force in the world today. Just its obstruction of measures that could save the human race from extinction alone give them this distinction.¹³

But what about the Democrats? Republicans make the Democrats look like choir boys in comparison. My biggest complaint about the Democratic Party (not the “Democrat Party” as Republicans love to flout against their wishes), is that they suffer from Battered Wife Syndrome at the hands of the brutal Republicans, with all their brow-beating¹⁴ and dirty tricks.

Between the Republicans and their evil twin Zionist Israel, Democrats have been clubbed like a baby seal, and don’t have the courage of their convictions like their progressive, neo-New Deal wing has. The fact that the progressives have their own extremists with neurotic sex-based and silly pronoun obsessions, is as nothing to the extremism of the Republicans. But that’s where America stands politically at this hour, 250 years later.

And Oh Yes, The Evangelicals

Yet, what analysis would be complete without the contribution of my people, the Evangelicals in all this? Donald Trump’s two election wins would not have been possible without them.

I don’t mean to over-simplify this, but I think my people suffer from a recurring case of doggy logic:

A. This is a dog; his name is Don. B. My name is Don. C. Therefore, I must be a dog.

A. The righteous in the Bible were always persecuted. B. People don’t like me or my religion, so I guess I’m being persecuted too. C. Therefore, “’The Culture” doesn’t “share our values”!

This is what sets up this combination of conceit and paranoia, that the rest of the world has no truth or morality at all, and we have nothing in common with them as human beings. “They’re all godless atheists or religious heretics who are bent on destroying our Constitutional republic,” yada, yada, yada. The assumption that everything of the current age you’re a part of is somehow inherently all bad, guarantees you’ll be both a victim and grievance-driven, and can never find any common ground or place of legitimate compromise, let alone effective witness.

This knee-jerk “conservatism” Evangelicals can’t seem to shake off, and doesn’t understand what a truly American conservative party would look like. It would stand for two things—the conservation of the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding Fathers, and a determination to conserve all the enormous progress that’s been made the last quarter of a millennium—economically, technologically, socially, and in every other way.

And to be sure, a democracy needs a conservative party to function properly. Liberalism and conservatism theoretically¹⁵ are two paradoxical approaches to life, like the two sides of your brain. The last truly conservative administration this country had in my opinion was the Eisenhower one, which refused to reverse the successes of the New Deal.¹⁶

The fact that Church people cannot or will not distinguish between these two models of American potential, there from the beginning, and figure out the right moral judgement according to the Bible, speaks volumes as to the actual spiritual state of things in our time (2 Pet 2:1-3; 2 Thess 2:11, etc). I find it dismaying but not at all surprising, given all the predictions found in the prophecies of the last days.

Notes:

1. Or perhaps at least, something of a double fulfillment, not that uncommon in the Bible. ↩︎
2. A fundamental legal procedure that allows anyone detained by the government to challenge the legality of their imprisonment. ↩︎
3. When the Founding Fathers were reluctant to sign Jefferson’s Declaration on July 4, 1776, it was Adams who stood up and gave a stirring speech, turning the sentiment around. While they were active politicians, the two men were fierce rivals, but spent many years in correspondence with one another, discussing the issues of the day from a conservative and a liberal perspective. They both died on the same day, hundreds of miles apart, on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day of that signing. It’s miraculous signs like this that have caused many to conclude that God has always had a special mission for the United States. But of course, He had the same high hopes for Israel too, and we all know how that turned out. ↩︎
4. The seeds of this division was of course there from the beginning of the country; it didn’t start with the run up to the Civil War, but this is most or less where I want to pick the story up. ↩︎
5. Coined satirically by Mark Twain to refer to a time (ca. 1870-1890) when the cheap gold paint of Robber Baron excess was used to cover up all the graft and corruption underneath it. It’s the exact foreshadowing of the Trump era today. ↩︎
6. It was de Balzac who started a saying now streamlined as: “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” ↩︎
7. Jackson also widely departed from the professionalism of the Founding Fathers by his packing the government with loyalists rather than those who qualify on a basis of merit. ↩︎
8. Bryan among other things, was known as the lawyer defending Creationism in the famous Scope’s monkey trial in the 1920s. ↩︎
9. The “Deep State” was a 1990s Turkish word to describe a covert, extra-legal network of military, intelligence, and organized crime figures operating behind the scenes to control their elected government. It was borrowed by writer Mike Lofgren and popularized by Peter Dale Scott in his 2007 book, The Road To 9-11 to describe the American equivalent, anchored in the CIA. Leave it to Republican operatives like Steve Bannon to pervert the term into meaning “the Bureaucracy” which resists Donald Trump’s illegal demands. ↩︎
10. The Founding Fathers’ generation greatly distrusted corporations, given their experience with the British East India company especially, and how they dominated Parliament. For decades thereafter, corporations were strictly regulated by the states and were generally only allowed for major public projects, after which they were forced to dissolve and its assets sold off. Under no circumstances were they allowed to come anywhere near the political process. All that started to change with the rise of the Robber Barons who bought up the Republicans to skew everything into their favor. ↩︎
11. The other times were Ancient Rome, the height of Islamic civilizations, and during the Song Dynasty of China. And oh yes, the 14^th Century Black Plague, which killed off so many people that it greatly increased wages in Europe, leading to wealth accumulation apart from land. ↩︎
12. Philadelphia, Mississippi was the home of three Northern voter registration workers being murdered by local Ku Klux Klansmen in 1964. It directly led to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, followed the next year by the equally-landmark Voter’s Rights Act of 1965. Reagan by at least signing off on this strategy to kick off his campaign (probably the brainchild of Lee Atwater), wasn’t just sending out a racist dog whistle. It was a blaring siren. ↩︎
13. I was shocked when I heard the normally-aloof Chomsky tell this to Amy Goodman, but then he went about as usual to methodically explain what he meant. The Republicans, being a major party of the world’s only superpower, could make all the difference in the world when it comes to issues of enormous consequence to the whole planet, such as nuclear weapons proliferation, tearing up of nuclear treaties, denying climate change, championing highly-irresponsible wealth distribution models and the like. But they won’t. They’d rather be subject to pressure from ignorant shock jocks and the bullying of a life-long criminal than do the right thing. ↩︎
14. Ok, Democrats like to brow-beat too. All of America is like one big sit-com where everyone is constantly preaching at one another. ↩︎
15. Liberalism as a principle, not an ever-changing label depending on the moment, is characterized by a collective approach to social problems, creative ideas, idealism, a willingness to experiment, toleration of those you don’t agree with within a liberty paradigm, etc. Conservatism stands for the rights and power of the individual, frugality, prudence and caution in policy, realism, respect for tradition, etc. One is law, the other grace. Every day, every one of us makes decisions that are more or less liberal or conservative depending upon how we’re feeling, who we’re dealing with, how optimistic you’re feeling, etc. So please, let’s stop with all this pretense. ↩︎
16. This in spite of the fact that 20 years earlier, his own party was predicting Social Security et. al. would be an unpopular disaster. Eisenhower had the humility to admit they were wrong. ↩︎