The 2018 LITD Independence Day post

In recent years, when preparing to write this post, the question before me has been whether or not my rhetorical device of referring to this country as "post-America" is still applicable.

Believe me, I understand that there's no arguing with the perspective that, in myriad undeniably significant ways, no human beings have ever had it better than Americans have it on July 4, 2018. Cell phones, laser surgery, economic opportunity, declining crime rates and all that.

But there's also no denying the extremely poor state of the nation's spiritual health. Pick your arena for citing examples: entertainment, education, law, "journalism." A nation in good shape would not have elected either its current president nor his immediate predecessor.

The polarization gets worse by the day. Any attempt to construct a chart of the fracturing is nearly impossibly complex. The days when the Right consisted merely of an Establishment and a conservative movement seem like a quaint and distant memory. We now have the intrusion of the Trump phenomenon, which has, along with itself, splintered the conservative movement into numerous shards. On the Left, the New York House-seat Democrat primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over incumbent Joe Crowley crystallizes an even further leftward shift in a party that was already unrecognizably leftist when it catapulted an Alinskyite community organizer to its top rung in the previous decade.

Still, the forces of fealty to the Three Pillars of conservatism are not extinguished.

New to this site? Alright, Independence Day is as good a time as any for us to revisit the Three Pillars, so we're all on the same page. I'm not the first pundit to articulate them. In fact, the towering giant of our worldview, Ronald Reagan,  spoke of them.

But I've come up with my own formulation. I wanted to keep them devoid of shorthand. I was looking for ways to express them that would encompass any and all specific questions about the way human beings ought to organize themselves into livable societies, and I think I have.

They are as follows:

1.) Free-market economics, which begins with the premise that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period. No other party has any business being involved in that agreement - certainly not government.

2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. (Judeo-Christian morality, Greco-Roman model of representative democracy, the great scientific and artistic achievements.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. This plays itself out as our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.

Anyway, as I say, there is a swath of America that understands them and remains committed to seeing them upheld and implemented on the culture and policy levels. Despite the best efforts of the two other main groupings in post-America, that swath has not been extinguished.

In a post yesterday, I put that thusly:

It's interesting, isn't it? Trump lives rent-free inside the heads of enraged hard leftists, and those of us who, while applauding the good moves, particularly judicial appointments and deregulation, find him ideologically unmoored and loathsome on a character level, live rent-free inside the heads of the [Emerald] Robinson and [Kurt] Schlichter types.

Meanwhile, we just proceed according to our principles. To the two groups above - progressives and populists, for shorthand - our continued existence is something they dare not acknowledge.

This is encouraging particularly with regard to the understanding that the guidance provided by God's mighty hand is, as always, vital to this country continuing to exist in some recognizable form. Not many people do understand that anymore. But some do, and we're not going to be silenced or brainwashed.

Speaking of shorthand, here's a tidy way of putting that. There are still people in this country who will, upon reading aloud the Declaration of Independence, listening to the United States Marine Band rendition of the National Anthem, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic today, be unable to refrain from openly weeping and trembling. The love of human freedom and gratitude to God for giving it to us burns hot within them.

That's how we know all is not lost.

All is not lost. Even if only as an idea, tattered from battle, like the flag Francis Scott Key saw from his jail-cell window, the United States of America lives.

God, as always, is up to something great in human history.

Happy Independence Day.