We are right of center

The government and culture may believe otherwise, so we need to put them in their place.

Back before I did this Substack thing, I put up a quick little social media post, not really thinking about it being a bouncing-off point for a future essay. But this is what I said:

“A thought on this bright, sunny Saturday: America is a center-right nation that's had a center-left government for well more than a century.

We talk about how the parties are split all the time: the Trump populist/TEA Party coalition on the right against the "establishment" Republicans and the radical Indivisible regressive faction on the far left vs. the centrist DLC Democrats.

They've talked about a third party in the center for years but the reason it doesn't work is because they always eventually lean left when the people lean right. Maybe government isn't the solution?”

I had some good responses to the original post but I saw it tonight and decided I wanted to revise and extend my remarks.

There are things out there which draw Americans to the right politically: generally faith and family are the biggest two, although I suppose it could be argued that our capitalist system contributes in some way to the family aspect. Millions of Americans go to work each day, most as employees but some as entrepreneurs who run their own businesses. (Some do both via side hustles.) And while many employees are paid by the taxpayer as public-sector workers, the majority of breadwinners in the country depend on a system and an American market that has generally served us well for the last couple centuries.

However, there has been an explosion of those who make their living from the public sector over the last half-century, too. We don’t generally begrudge the teacher, cop, or soldier who is an employee of Uncle Sam, but there seems to also be a larger proportion of those who would eat out our substance in return for making more contorted rules for us to live by and scheming up new creative ways to take our money.

As an example, while teachers have also established a good reputation as a trustworthy occupation over the years, too many of them are throwing that goodwill away. Those are also the folks who are pulling us to the left insofar as family goes, thanks to the increasingly “woke” teaching staffs at the public schools. (In response to that, homeschooling is surging and private school enrollment is way up as well.) And if you really wanted to extend the left-leaning argument, it can be said that some rogue cops are also acting more as toll collectors for the state (aka “policing for profit”) thanks to overly stringent civil forfeiture laws. Just wait until we get all those new and armed IRS agents.

Normally, faith has been both a way to keep families together and serve as a refuge for conservatism. But church attendance in our nation has been on a long-term decline, and there are two camps out there to address why this is: one side seems to believe we have to make church into an entertaining concert and draw people to the Lord that way, while the other expresses a belief that more traditional services and messages are required, contending that there’s been an erosion of Biblical teaching which has led people astray. And they may be correct: broken families aren’t the strong bond that they were in previous times as secular culture moves beyond the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” of my youth to transgenderism, overdoses, and WAP.

Yet through all of that Americans persevere. While they are perhaps as divided as they’ve ever been politically, scratch the sheen off a middle-class working family and you’ll find that in their heart of hearts they believe the traditional American vision is the correct one: we believe in giving others a fair shake, we believe that family comes first, and most of all there’s still more of us who believe in God.

What we are up against, though, is a government and an elite that believes in a different vision: power over others for its own sake and that the golden rule is that “he who has the gold, rules.” Religion, they say, is for the bigoted rubes who live in flyover country. And elections aren’t going to stop them, although balloting does have the capability of slowing them down to enough of an extent that we may be able to begin turning the tables.

I’ve been a writer for going on 20 years now, and the approach with which I’ve written about politics is that of creating a generational sea change in political philosophy, returning to a point where liberty and the God-given rights protected by our Constitution reigned supreme once again in our land. We’ve always strived for a more perfect union, but the road we’re on runs to the left and it ends at tyranny.

But we can always turn the car around. That’s the beauty of our system.